Aztlán and Arcadia

Religion, Ethnicity, and the Creation of Place

Roberto Ramón Lint Sagarena

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479882366
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

In thewake of the Mexican-American War, competing narratives of religious conquestand re-conquest were employed by Anglo American and ethnic Mexican Californiansto make sense of their place in North America. These “invented traditions” hada profound impact on North American religious and ethnic relations, serving tobring elements of Catholic history within the Protestant fold of the UnitedStates’ national history as well as playing an integral role in the emergenceof the early Chicano/a movement. Many Protestant AngloAmericans understood their settlement in the far Southwest as following in thefootsteps of the colonial project begun by Catholic Spanish missionaries. Incontrast, Californios —Mexican-Americans and Chicana/os—stresseddeep connections to a pre-Columbian past over to their own Spanish heritage.Thus, as Anglo Americans fashioned themselves as the spiritual heirs to theSpanish frontier, many ethnic Mexicans came to see themselves as the spiritualheirs to a southwestern Aztec homeland.

1

Conquest and Legacy

Conciudadanos unidos podemos salvar a nuestra patria en sus necesidades. Pero si por desgracia nos dividimos, seremos victimas de cualqier enemigo que despondra de nuestras vidas y de nuestras fortunas. Unamosnos pues y aseguramos integro el territorio nacional, a cuya defensa estare siempre con vosotros cuanto como ciudadano y amigo. (Fellow citizens, together we can save our homeland in its time of need. But if lamentably we divide ourselves, we will be victims of whichever enemy takes charge of our lives and fortunes. Let us unite then and assure the integrity of the nation’s territories, at whose defense I will always be with you all both as citizen and as friend.)
—Governor Pio Pico, “Carta a los Ciudadanos,” August 31, 1845

A simple-minded and an indolent people passed their days upon this fruitful soil and beneath these sunny skies, seemingly, as if waiting the fulfillment of that great destiny which providence had marked out for the land, under the auspices of a new chosen people. What a change has followed! The good geni of the lamp could not in a like period of time have wrought a more wondrous result.
—Willard B. Farwell, “Oration delivered before the society of California pioneers at the celebration of their 8th anniversary of the admission of the state of California into the Union. San Francisco, Alta Job Office,” 1859

[A]ccording to the traditions of the Mexicans, the progenitors of the Aztecs and others entered the country from the direction of California, thereby indirectly connecting that people with the ancient inhabitants of the States.
—William Gleeson, History of the Catholic Church in California, 1872

Aztecas Criollos and American Conquistadors

The Mexican-American War (1846–48), through which the United States acquired roughly a third of its national territory, was a war of conquest, and wars of conquest act as quickening agents on social change. They add urgency to the redefinition of social and geographic identities as both the vanquished and the conqueror confront the task of inventing traditions that re-create order from disrupted conventions. Because new social orders are built on historical narratives that claim continuity with a sustaining past, who is counted as an ancestor in these invented traditions matters a great deal.¹

After the war, both sides contended with radically transformed national geographies and weakened federal governments. Far from uniting either country, the conflict widened political divisions and precipitated civil wars in both nations. Americans faced the further problem of formulating a history that could explain their presence in territories acquired through military action without calling into question the legitimacy of American rule. Concomitantly, ethnic Mexicans remaining in the annexed territories were challenged to define themselves and their heritage in the face of tremendous loss and rapid cultural change.

In various ways, both Americans and Mexicans made claims of historical and cultural continuity with Latin America’s earliest Indigenous and colonial pasts in making sense of their postwar present. As this final leap in the United States’ continental expansion took place shortly after the fall of Spain’s empire in the Americas, many Americans saw their country as eclipsing colonial Spain but following in its imperial footsteps, a vision supported by the acquisition of Florida from Spain, the premises of the Monroe Doctrine, the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, and the occupation of Mexico. For Mexicans, on the other hand, the recent struggle for independence from Spain (1810–21) had bequeathed an indigenista understanding of the essential character of the new nation, one that looked to the Indigenous past for that which was uniquely Mexican.²

This dominant form of Mexican nationalism was a product of the centuries-long colonial experience. Criollos (people of Spanish descent born in the Americas) were ranked lower socially than Iberian-born Peninsulares though they had a common ancestry. Resentments against this colonial arraignment as well as a desire for far-reaching historical roots on their home continent led Criollos to articulate a history that privileged the Indigenous past. Although colonial indigenistas would glorify pre-Columbian Indigenous peoples, they were not seeking to restore, or even necessarily celebrate, living contemporary Indigenous cultures. Instead, they were creating a past for themselves in the Americas that was altogether separate from their Iberian heritage.

The most strident indigenistas were liberal Criollo clergy with a strong missionary interest in Indigenous cultures. However, these early chroniclers of New Spain made sense of the Indigenous past through the lenses of classical European history and Christian theology. Throughout the three centuries of Spanish colonial rule, a large register of influential priests portrayed pre-Columbian Aztec culture as an equivalent classical antiquity of Mexican history, regularly comparing the Aztec empire to those of the Greeks and Romans—often quite favorably.³ Aztec rulers were seen as inspiring figures who personified classic virtues, pre-Columbian Indigenous governance was often cast in the same light as the Athenian senate, and, by the late nineteenth century the quest for a national art would come to embrace a classicist visual vocabulary in the portrayal of Indigenous figures.⁴

However, even as they romanticized Mexico’s pre-Columbian past, indigenista clergy commonly understood Indigenous religions as corruptions of Christianity. Many clerics argued that a literal interpretation of scripture made it necessary for at least one of the apostles to have evangelized the Americas centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards, reasoning that if Jesus had sent his apostles to preach the gospel throughout the world, then surely God would not have allowed the peoples of the Americas to remain ignorant of Christianity. This argument supported the popular idea that the Americas had originally been evangelized by the apostle Saint Thomas, who was believed to be known to Indigenous peoples as the god Quetzalcoatl, the same deity identified with Hernán Cortés at the time of his arrival.

Other evidence seen as pointing to an early evangelization included a cross motif that regularly appears in Aztec and Mayan art, a common myth of a great flood that destroyed the Earth, and shared ritual practices that included confession, fasting, and the tonsure of priests. Indigenous religions could thus be understood as a continuation, albeit corrupt, of an early Christianity. This Christian genealogy provided Mexicans of all racial, ethnic, and social backgrounds with a powerful claim of a religious connection to the far Indigenous past and thus to the continent.

Iberian Christianity and pre-Columbian religions were symbolically linked by the clergy shortly after the initial conquest of Tenochtitlán though the cultus of the Virgin of Guadalupe. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this Marian devotion to the development of modern Mexican identity, from the national to the individual level. The pious legend of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe recounts a series of apparitions of Mary to an Aztec/Mexica neophyte named Juan Diego in 1531 at Tepeyac hill, in the Valley of Mexico. This immensely popular apparition narrative tells us that a young woman surrounded by light appeared to Juan as he was en route to attend mass. Speaking in Náhuatl (the language of the Aztec/Mexica), she revealed herself as Mary and requested that a temple be built at the site so that she could be with her beloved people. As directed, Juan Diego presented himself to the clergy and conveyed Mary’s request. Initially, he was rebuffed by a skeptical bishop (Juan de Zumráraga) who required proof of the apparition. Then Mary appeared to him again and promised a sign that would convince the bishop. She instructed him to gather out-of-season flowers atop Tepeyac and carry them in his tilma (cloak) back to the bishop. Upon the delivery of the flowers, his tilma unfurled and revealed the miraculous image of Guadalupe as powerful visual evidence, thereby convincing the bishop and establishing her cultus.⁵

While Guadalupan devotion was criticized by some Franciscans as functioning as a cover for the continuation of Indigenous religions, the cultus grew rapidly and flowered in the nineteenth century as it provided the religious emblem for Mexican independence and nationalism. The popularity of the devotion stemmed from its ability to provide Criollos with an American (as opposed to European) Marian apparition and Indigenous peoples with cultural continuity, as Tepeyac had been a significant Aztec/Mexica religious site. Moreover, the tilma image of Guadalupe is racially ambiguous and has been the object of multivalent interpretation as depicting a Criolla, Aztec, or Mestiza woman, encouraging pious people from all three groups to see her as a mirror of themselves, as a mediatrix, and ultimately as an emblem of their admixture.

The significance of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to the idea of an early indigenous Christianity was most radically expressed by the priest Servando Teresa de Mier, a central figure in the development of Mexican nationalism and a leading voice among those calling for Mexican independence from Spain. On December 12, 1794, the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mier gave a remarkable sermon condemning the popular understanding of the apparition’s pious legend. He claimed that the Virgin did not appear to Juan Diego in 1532 as was generally believed. Rather, she had appeared much earlier to Saint Thomas, and the miraculous cloth image actually belonged to Thomas, not to Juan Diego. Mier told stunned clergy that just as Thomas was known as Quetzalcoatl, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the mother of God, was also known to the Aztec/Mexica as a number of goddesses: Teotenantzin, Tonacayona, Coyolxauhqui, and Coatlique.⁶ His radically indigenista sermon conjoined the celebration of the classic pre-Columbian past and assertion of Christian origins for Aztec/Mexica religion.

The political significance of these claims was revolutionary. By arguing for a Christian America that predated the arrival of the Spanish, Mier and other indigenistas were doing away with the single most important juridical justification for the Spanish conquest: the conversion of Indigenous peoples to Christianity. Mier maintained that if the conquistadors had recognized Aztec religion as having its roots in Christianity, the conquest could have been peaceful. Hence, through their violence, the Spaniards had sinned deeply against the very religion that they professed. Indigenistas thus made use of their claims about Indigenous religious belief to rhetorically undermine the legitimacy of Spanish colonial rule and strengthen their claims of connection to a pre-Columbian heritage all at once. In this indigenista schema, what tied Criollos to Mexico and allowed them to make its past their own was a religious connection with pre-Columbian Indigenous Christians.

The idea that a call for Mexican independence was a justified response to the fundamental injustice of the conquest not only was articulated in books and sermons but also became a mobilizing political theme. The fathers of Mexican independence, priests Miguel Hidalgo and Jose Maria Morelos, both regularly portrayed revolution as an indigenous reconquest or reconquista of Mexico. Hidalgo famously took up a banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe as the standard for the Mexican cause, forever linking her image to the Mexican nation. As he and other nationalists rejected the colonial designation of “New Spain,” they adopted the Náhuatl term Anáhuac that originally referred to the valley of Mexico and the Aztec empire, using it to speak of all of Mexico. In 1813, Morelos convened the first Mexican congress, el Congreso de Anáhuac, at Chilpancingo, Guerrero, and asserted national independence from Spain. Connecting that declaration of Mexican independence to the Aztec/Mexica past, he solemnly pronounced to his fellow revolutionaries that nearly 300 years after the fall of Tenochtitlán, “We are about to re-establish the Mexican Empire.”⁷

During the course of the wars for independence, Hidalgo and Morelos were both executed, and conservative Criollos with less enthusiasm for the Indigenous past carried the early independence movement forward. Still, indigenismo remained a powerful cultural idiom for the new nation. In the years before the war with the United States, the celebration of this nationalist heritage was carried from the nation’s center to its farthest periphery.

In the far northern frontier, the indigenista spirit found expression as Mexican territorial governments were formed to replace Spanish colonial governance. In Alta California, the newly appointed Governor Jose Maria de Echeandia, fresh from central Mexico, attempted to link this northernmost region with the nation’s Aztec patrimony. On July 7, 1827, Echeandia and the governing deputation he had assembled approved a plan to change the name of Alta California to that of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma. This renamed territory was to be given a coat of arms that would display “an olive and an oak tree on its sides and containing in its center the figure of a plumed Indian with bow and quiver crossing the straits of Anian.”⁸ The image of the crossing of the strait suggested that while the region was peripheral to the Valley of Mexico today, it was the site of the original passage of Indigenous peoples into the Americas and, as such, an important part of the nation’s Indigenous heritage. By becoming an originary site of the Aztec/Mexica past, the formerly Spanish territory of California could become Mexican.

The deputation’s plan was sent to Mexico City for approval, but there is no record of a response from the central Mexican government, nor is there evidence that the plan was greeted with any enthusiasm by the general population of California. By the end of Echeandia’s brief tenure in 1831, residents of California had developed their own discrete regional identity as Californios, complicating their identity as Mexicans.⁹ Less than twenty years later they would face even greater challenges to their identity as they experienced invasion and subjugation by Americans.

In their transformation of Mexico’s North into the American Southwest, many Americans became very aware that owning place requires owning history. During the first three decades after the war, Americans cultivated an understanding of the Southwest that would eventually cohere into a powerful historical mythology connecting an idealized past to the American present. While this history was revolutionary in its adoption of Catholic Spanish colonizers as American forebears, it developed organically from the existing cultural rhetoric with which many Americans had made sense of the war with Mexico.

Prior to the war, the legacy of the Black Legend (a tradition of anti–Spanish Catholic propaganda dating back to the Reformation), resentments against large-scale Irish Catholic immigration, and simmering tensions within Protestant culture made the mid–nineteenth century a time of strong anti-Catholic prejudice in the United States. Yet, these prejudices coexisted with a “religiously nostalgic” undercurrent of Protestant enthusiasm for medieval Catholic history that only grew as the century went on.¹⁰ While the contemporary presence of poor Catholic immigrants and the alleged machinations of “Romanism” were disparaged and considered threatening to American democracy, the imagined nobility and simplicity of the Catholic Middle Ages were seen as a romantic antithesis to the ills of modernity and industrialization.¹¹

Ironically, this enthusiasm led ninete...