Cañizares Esguerra, Jorge. Racial, religious, civic identity in Colonial America

doi:10.1093/alh/aji024 The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions,please e-mail: [email protected]

Racial, Religious, and Civic Creole Identity in Colonial Spanish America Jorge Caizares-Esguerra

Patrocinio de la Virgen de Guadalupe sobre el Reino deNueva Espaa (Auspices of Our Lady of Guadalupe over the King-dom of New Spain) (Fig. 1) is an eighteenth-century canvass by ananonymous Mexican painter that rather vividly captures Creole dis-courses in colonial Mexico. A garlanded Our Lady of Guadalupestands on top of a fountain from which four kneeling nobles, twoindigenous, two Hispanic, drink.

Fountains had long been associated with salvation and purityin Christian discourse.1 For example, in their 1596 Ghent altarpiece,Fountain of Life and Mercy, Gerard Horenbout (14671540) and hisson Lucas Horenbout (d. 1544) have the community of the piousdrink of a fountain whose source is the body of Christ (Fig. 2)2.Believers eucharistically partake of the blood of Christ, whosewounds refill the well. Some princes and clerics, including a tur-baned potentate and a tonsured friar, who stand for the Turks andLuther, respectively, turn their backs on the fountain as they gatherto worship Dame World. To reinforce the Counter-Reformationmessage, the Flemish Horenbouts have angels hovering over thepious and demons over the infidels and heretics.

The same theological and compositional principles organizethe Mexican painting, but the fountains spring is Our Lady ofGuadalupe and both natives and Hispanics kneel to drink from thewell. Using this virgin as the source of the fountain of life andmercy came naturally to those who thought of Our Lady of Guadalupeas an immaculate conception, for some of the imagery underlyingthe belief in the immaculate conception came from the Song ofSongs, one of the strangest books of the Old Testament. Accordingto Christian theology, the Song of Songs prefigures the mystery ofSt. Marys conception by describing a woman, the lover of God, as awalled garden (hortus conclusus) and a fountain (You are like aprivate garden, my treasure, my bride! You are like a spring that no

American Literary History 421

one can drink from, a fountain of my own [Song of Solomon4.12]).3 The most striking difference between the Mexican paintingand Horenbouts is that in the former no party turns its back on thefountain: both Indians and Europeans belong in the same commu-nity of the pious.

To further make his point, the anonymous Mexican authorplaces a bouquet on top of each pair of Indian and Hispanic royalty.This symmetrical distribution of flowers is fraught with meaning.As with the trope of two communities gathered around a fountain,one partaking of the body of Christ and the other refusing to do so,it was a common visual metaphor to have the tree of life andknowledge separate the community of the elected from the damned.4Take, for example, the case of Fall and Grace by Lucas Cranach(14721553) (Fig. 3).

In this engraving, two radically different narratives unfold onopposite sides of a tree: to the denuded side belongs the story of the

Fig. 1. Anonymous (eighteenth-century) Mara de Guadalupe como fuente de gracia sobre el imperio espaol. Museo Soumaya, Mexico D. F.

422 Racial, Religious, and Civic Creole Identity in Colonial Spanish America

Fig. 2. Gerard Horenbout and Lucas Horenbout. Fountain of Life and Mercy, 1596, Altarpiece. Ghent, Belgium. Copy-right IRPA-KIK, Brussels.

Fig. 3. Lucas Cranach the elder. Fall and Grace, engraving ca. 1530. British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings.


fall, hell, and the apocalypse, to the verdant one the story of deliver-ance and salvation brought about by Christs passion and resurrec-tion. In Cranachs composition, the Jews led by Moses fall in thebarren, postlapsarian world of sin and demons, whereas the Chris-tian community (one made of sheep and shepherds) belong in aworld of bounty and plenty. The Mexican painting under review,once again, does not exclude anyone from the Christian community,for both the Indian and Hispanic nobles kneel in equally verdantsides of the canvass.

I have chosen the painting Patrocinio de la Virgen de Guada-lupe sobre el Reino de Nueva Espaa to introduce this essay becauseit summarizes much of what I believe to be distinct about Creolediscourse in colonial Spanish America: Creoles saw their lands to beequally rooted in the indigenous and Hispanic pasts. In their imagi-nation, colonial Spanish American societies were kingdoms, ancienrgime societies made up of social estates and corporate privileges,with deep, ancient dynastic roots in both the New World and Spain.For heuristic purposes, I have divided this essay to coincide with thecompositional elements of the painting: Creoles and Indians; Creolesand religion, particularly Our Lady of Guadalupe; and Creoles andSpain. But before turning to my tripartite analysis, we need first toclarify who the Creoles were.

1. Criollos

The self-styled Criollos or Creoles were local elites who pre-sided over racially mixed colonial societies of Indians, blacks,Spaniards, and castas (mixed bloods). Creoles felt entitled to ruleover these racially and culturally heterogeneous societies, as part ofa loosely held Catholic composite monarchy whose center wasback in Madrid. By and large they succeeded in their efforts toobtain autonomy vis--vis Spain, but their rule over these localkingdoms was always precarious and negotiated. AlthoughPeninsular newcomers, including representatives of the sprawlinglay and religious bureaucracies that the crown created in SpanishAmerica, were usually marshaled into serving Creole interestseither through bribes or marriage, Creoles felt voiceless and dis-criminated against. To be sure, they were right to complain. Back inSpain, the Indies were seen as corrupting, degenerating environ-ments: frontier societies where one could get rich but sorely lackingin sophistication and culture. Upon arrival in the Indies, Peninsularesfelt naturally entitled to hold political, religious, and economicpower, and Creoles resented such pretensions.


Creole patriotism originated in the late sixteenth and early sev-enteenth centuries as the American-born descendants of Spanishconquistadors complained that the crown was turning its back on itsoriginal commitment to foster a class of grandees in the New World.As the monarchy phased out the grants of Indian tribute and laborgiven to the conquistadors (encomiendas) in the most economicallydynamic areas of Mexico and Peru, Creoles lost the right to becomea privileged landed nobility surrounded by communities of Indianretainers. All over Spanish America, Creoles articulated a somewhatmisleading view of themselves as dispossessed nobles outcompetedby ravenous, transient, Peninsular upstarts. Creoles then turned tothe Catholic church, whose branches (the ecclesiastical establish-ment or secular church, as well as some of the religious orders)they gradually came to dominate. During the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries, ensconced in universities, cathedral chapters, nun-neries, and parishes, Creoles in greater Peru and Mexico producedcountless patriotic sermons and treatises that praised the wealth oftheir ecclesiastical establishments as well as their own learning andpiety, including that of the many saints the church canonizedorfailed toin the Indies.5

The Creole project was aimed at establishing an orderly politycomposed of hierarchical social orders in nested subordination.Spanish America was indeed a society built on corporate privilegesand social estates that overlapped with additional racial hierarchies.Although castas grew in the interstices of the original three-tier sys-tem of Spaniards, Indians, and Africans and, therefore, blurred thecolonial boundaries of class and race, Spanish America was a soci-ety obsessed with identifying and enforcing racial hierarchies.6

A case could well be made that Creole patriotism took on dif-ferent aspects in different periods and geographical regions accord-ing to historical contingencies and local political circumstances. Yetmy own effort in this article is to identify aspects of the Creoleproject that remained constant across time and regions. This, then, isa study of a discourse (in Foucaults terms) that first surfaced in theearly seventeenth century and flourished well into the eighteenthcentury, particularly in viceroyalties such as Mexico and Peru withlarge Amerindian populations (an analysis of Creole discourse inareas with large Afro-American populations is, to my knowledge,yet to be offered).

2. Creole and Indians

How could an ancien rgime society where social and racialestates overlapped produce a painting like Patrocinio de la Virgen


de Guadalupe sobre el Reino de Nueva Espaa, in which both Indi-ans and Hispanic nobilities are held to be equal participants in theideal Christian commonwealth? The answer lies precisely in thevery nature of the ancien rgime the Creole elites envisioned. Cre-oles saw themselves as the product of the biological, racial amal-gamation of Indian and Spanish elites that took place during the firstyears of colonization.

Clerical writers considered the miscegenation of Spaniards andIndians appropriate only when it brought elites together. The initialcolonial sexual embrace of Indian elites and Spanish conquerorswas, therefore, welcomed and praised. The type of vulgar misce-genation that brought later commoners of different races togetherwas another matter. The vulgar mestizaje was seen as a threat to theexistence of idealized hierarchical polities. Mestizos were consis-tently portrayed as evil, out-of-control individuals responsible forbringing sinful lifestyles, including a culture of lies and deception,into Indian communities that the clergy sought to keep unsoiled.7

According to this discourse, there was not clear demarcationbetween Creoles and early colonial Indian elites. Creoles foundinspiration in the ancient Indian rulers, sages in the art of statecraft,whom they saw as their ancestors.8 This discourse had deep rootsin the sixteenth century. Take, for example, the case of the epicHistoria de la Nueva Mxico (History of New Mexico) (1610) bythe captain-poet Gaspar Prez de Villagr (15551620). Historiawas part of a spate of epics written in the late sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries in the Iberian empire to celebrate the deeds ofmodern Argonauts, the multinational bands of marauding soldierswho through sheer chivalric prowess brought the New World underthe rule of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. Historia, typical ofthe genre, lionizes Juan de Oate (15491624), whose 1596 expedi-tion finally allowed the Spanish empire to settle the lands of thePueblo Indians. The crusading logic underlying the early-modernEuropean colonial expansion is cast in this and other epics intoVirgilian and Homeric idioms. Oate appears engaged in a greatstruggle against Satan, a tyrannous lord who had enjoyed absolutesovereignty over the Indians of New Mexico. God, to be sure, sideswith Oate in his efforts to oust the devil. In the process Oateslaughters hundreds of Indians, Lucifers allies.9 In Prez de Vil-lagrs eyes, Mexico was a society threatened not only by Satansfrontier Indians but also by the demonic envy of upstart Peninsularauthorities. Prez de Villagr describes in detail, for example, howthe new viceroy Gaspar de Ziga y Acevedo (15601606), count ofMonterey, sought to replace Oate as the leader of the expeditionwith one of his own minions. The ancien rgime logic of this Creolediscourse is reinforced in the poem when Prez de Villagr blames a


century of failures in the colonization of New Mexico on the effem-inate nature of the new Peninsular arrivals. Unlike the original lineof conquistadors who never allowed the harrowing trials of the fron-tier to intimidate them, the new arrivals were easily cowed, return-ing to the Spanish urban centers as soon as they encountered the firstdifficulty. These newcomers had polluted blood; they most likelywere effeminate conversors.10 Oates old Christian blood and thushis willingness to countenance hardships were responsible for therecent Spanish triumphs in the northern frontiers. Yet what is remark-able about this epic is that Prez de Villagr presents Oate as noblemestizo, a proud great-grandson of Moctezuma.11 In Prez deVillagrs epic, the crusading knight Oate appears as typical of theCreole noble elites, rooted both in old Christian-hidalgo and Aztecblood.

Oates split identity continued unabated among Creolesthroughout the colonial period. Doris Ladd has shown that numer-ous Spanish and Creole grandees in eighteenth-century Mexicoboasted their mestizo heritage. The Counts of Moctezuma, Javier,and Guara, the Duke of Granada in Spain, and such titled grandeesof New Spain as the Aguayo, Alamo, Jaral, Miravalle, Salinas,Salvatierra, Santa Rosa, Santiago, Valle Oploca, and Valle de Orizabaall claimed descent from precolonial Aztec rulers. The Count ofSantiago decorated his mansion in Mexico City with Aztec motifs.12Patrocinio de la Virgen de Guadalupe reinforces this message, forin this visual narrative Christian Mexico belongs both to Indianand Spanish nobles. Both populations are equally entitled to theliberating message embodied in the miraculous appearance of OurLady of Guadalupe.

Creoles constantly called to task the colonial order for havingallowed their ancestors, the indigenous elites Spaniards encounteredeverywhere, to disappear. As the colonial order matured, theIndian communities looked socially undifferentiated. Althoughsome indigenous elites adapted to the new colonial conditions, takingup Castilian names and becoming the new caretakers of Christiantemples and saints, the rich tapestry of social hierarchies that hadcharacterized past Indian polities underwent considerable simplifi-cation.13 For most observers of the mature colonial order, Indiancommunities looked like homogenous collectives of wretched com-moners. From this perspective, the Creole clerical project appearedas one of restoration, a return to simpler times in which virtuousIndian nobles had embraced the teachings of the Church.

But at the same time that Creoles claimed Indians as their bio-logical ancestors, they (particularly the religious clergy) alsoderided Indians as innately inferior children to protect or (particu-larly the settlers) as brutes to exploit. Those seeking to understand


representations of the Indian in colonial Spanish America cannothelp but be puzzled. Creole representations are deeply ambivalent,often oscillating between images of respect and outright racism.14Strict hierarchical views of society allowed the Creole clergy to rep-resent the Indian as both wretched and the creator of great ancientpolities.

Many Creole authors, for example, argued that forced labor sys-tems and forms of Baroque worship were the only institutions thatdrew Indians out of their indolence to engage in market transactions,and that great Aztec and Inca rulers such as Manco Capac had longrealized this. Manco Capac, they argued, had, for example, devisedinstitutions such as the mita and public floggings to make Indian com-moners work. Such practices, Creoles claimed, had made the Incasprosperous and civilized.15 Authors such as Jos Hiplito Unanue(17551833), one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment in theViceroyalty of Peru, argued that the natives were indolent and lazy bynature and recommended the use of therapeutic floggings. Unanuemaintained that an excess of sensitivity rendered the Indians melan-cholic and paralyzed them before the sublime landscapes of theAndean Mountains. Not surprisingly, Unanue lionized the Inca. Heclaimed that the Inca rulers had long known about the innate constitu-tion of the Indians and had created the appropriate institutions offorced labor and therapeutic floggings. Unanue recommended that theauthorities follow Incan insights to build a great, civilized societydespite the melancholic and lazy character of the Indians.16

As part of their effort to defend themselves from European-Peninsular contempt, Creoles were literally forced to devise a theoryof the racialized body. Creole colonists responded to disparagingEuropean views of the climate and constellations of Spanish Americaas threatening and degenerating by suggesting that there wereracially innate body types which changed only slightly under newenvironmental influences, thus rejecting long-held theories of tem-peraments and complexions (according to which European bodiesbecame Indian ones under the climate and stars of the NewWorld). Their new version of ancient astrological and medical theo-ries allowed some intellectuals to claim that the natives were raciallydifferent from them. These intellectuals, however, did not give upthe notion of environmental influences altogether. They claimed thatclimate still had some effect on innate body types. Whereas the con-stellations of America caused the Indians to grow even weaker andmore stupid, they argued, the same constellations had helpedimprove the European stock. Creoles in America were stronger andsmarter than their Spanish forefathers.

Racism toward Indian commoners notwithstanding, Creoles lion-ized the accomplishments and grandeur of past Indian civilizations


such as the Incas and the Aztecs. Spanish American Creolesexcluded the great Indian rulers of the past, their own ancestors,from the generalization of the Indians as degenerate or lazy. In thisancien rgime colonial society, Indians came to inhabit the sameniche that peasants had long occupied in the imagination of theEuropean elites, that is, as an altogether different race. In Europeanmedieval discourse, the racialization of the bodies of commonershad helped justify the subordinate status of a variety of groups. Thediscourse of social estates, for example, contemplated immensebodily and mental differences between peasants and nobles. It wasthe operation of similar principles in colonial Spanish America thatallowed authors to lionize Manco Capac while claiming most con-temporary natives to be inferior. When Creoles demeaned the Indiansthey had only commoners in mind.17

Creole intellectuals claimed for themselves a monopoly overthe interpretation of the Indian past, devising a form of patrioticepistemology that sought to call into question the reliability offoreign authors and travelers and of local mestizos and Indiancommoners. The discourse of patriotic epistemology validatedthe historical knowledge produced only by learned clericalobservers (most of whom were Creoles, but not exclusively so)and by precolonial and sixteenth-century Indian nobles. ClericalCreole writers sought to make careful distinctions betweensources produced by reliable precolonial and early colonial indig-enous elites and those produced later by unreliable commoners.The discourse of patriotic epistemology also privileged theknowledge and credibility of the representatives of the church.Since Indian nobles were considered to be almost an extinct spe-cies, the responsibility of all credible reporting on natural andethnographic phenomena in the Indies fell now on the representa-tives of the church. Their alleged intimacy with the land and theindigenous communities supposedly rendered them impervious todeception and misrepresentation.

In the discourse of patriotic epistemology, the foreign observerappeared as nemesis of the learned clerical witness. Foreign travel-ers were presented as helpless victims of time and Indian cunning.Travelers paid only short visits to the lands they studied and were,therefore, incapable of discovering natural and human behavior thatescaped the norm. They also lacked the time and inclination todevelop lasting attachment to communities and were incapable ofpenetrating beneath the surface of local social phenomena. Travelerswere at the mercy of communities that gulled foreigners and laughedat their expense. Moreover, since travelers did not know the Indianlanguages, they were forced to rely on translators and secondhandinterpretations.


3. Creoles, Prefigurations, and Saints

As Creoles used historiography and race to hold foreigners andIndian and mestizo commoners at bay, they turned to religion forsigns of a providential destiny. Creoles in Mexico found in the mira-cle of Our Lady of Guadalupe precisely this sign.

The story of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe to JuanDiego, an Indian commoner, is well known. In 1531 at the small hillof Tepeyac, the Virgin appeared several times to a Nahua com-moner, and every time she did so the Virgin asked Diego to go seethe archbishop to build her a chapel. The prince of the church, to besure, did not believe the blessed Indian, who, therefore, returnedtwice empty-handed to the Virgin. Finally, the Virgin ordered Diegoto collect some flowers in his cape (tilma). When Diego visited thewary bishop for the third time, he unfolded his cape and, to every-bodys surprise, the image of the Virgin appeared printed on it.According to tradition, after this miracle, the authorities built achapel to house Diegos cape and sponsored the cult of Our Lady ofGuadalupe. A small chapel was built near the base of the hill wherean ancient Aztec goddess, Tonatzin, had long been worshipped. Atfirst, Franciscan missionaries, influenced by iconoclastic, Erasmiantendencies, did not promote the cult, but after the Council of Trent(154563) and the onset of the Catholic Reformation, the localecclesiastical authorities enthusiastically integrated veneration ofthe Virgin into Mexican devotional practice. When the Virgin suc-cessfully controlled the waters during the flood of Mexico City in1629, the cult began to spread rapidly among the Creoles.

At first sight, it would appear that the Creoles embraced thecult because the image was a narrative that successfully integratedthe natives, the ancestors of the Creoles, into Marian, Spanish ritu-als. This, of course, is misleading, for Diego was a commoner, notone of the many heirs of Moctezuma, whom the Creoles mostenjoyed claiming as their own. The question remains: Why did theCreoles choose this particular Marian image as their own, as the coatof arms, as it were, of their Mexican kingdom?

The ethnically integrating force of the story of the miraclehad little to do with the newfound favor the image enjoyed amongseventeenth-century Creoles. As Francisco de la Masa and DavidBrading have clearly demonstrated, the key to understanding theCreole devotion needs to be found in a tradition of biblical interpre-tation that identified the woman in St. John of Patmoss Book ofRevelations to be a prefiguration of Our Lady of Guadalupe.18Indeed, it was a well-established tradition within the church to claimthat St. Johns vision of a pregnant woman clad by the sun and starsand threatened by a multiheaded dragon was actually a reference to


the Virgin Mary. In the Book of Revelation 12.35, God takes thenewborn to his side, protects the woman by airlifting her into thedesert, and sends the archangel Michael to oust the dragon and hisSatanic armies from heaven. In Christian art and theology, it becamecommon to claim that St. John had sought to capture in the figure ofthe woman both the mysteries of the Virgins immaculate concep-tion and the image of a persecuted yet nurturing and providentialChristian church. It is not surprising, therefore, that the image ofOur Lady of Guadalupe, a typical image of the immaculate concep-tion, was read by Creole theologians as a fulfillment of the womanof the apocalypse.19

More significant for understanding Creole sensibilities, how-ever, was that the local theologians used the image to claim forMexico a cosmic, central role in universal history. The cleric MiguelSnchez (15941671), for example, wrote in 1648 an epochal trea-tise on Creole consciousness. He claimed that St. John of Patmossvision of a woman clad in stars battling the dragon prefigured theconquest and colonization of the New World, in general, and ofMexico, in particular. Every detail both in the woman of the Book ofRevelations and in the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe supportedthis thesis, Snchez maintained.

According to Snchez, the angel holding the Virgin up in theimage was the archangel Michael, who had ousted the dragon fromheaven in the Book of Revelation. The dragon itself represented thesovereignty the devil had long enjoyed in the New World prior tothe arrival of the Christian warriors. Partaking of a notion first madepopular by the writings of the Jesuit Jos de Acosta (15401600)and the Franciscan Juan de Torquemada (15571664), Snchezargued that the Aztecs had been Satans elect. Satan had sought toimitate in the New World not only the institutions and sacraments ofthe church but also the Bibles historical narrative. At the timeSnchez wrote his treatise, it was typical for Creole scholars toargue that the history of the Aztecs was the inverted mirror image ofthat of the Israelites. Satan, it was argued, had led the Aztecs in anexodus into a Promised Land. Like the Israelites, the Aztecs hadendured hardship and persecution upon arrival in Canaan. Also likethe Israelites, the Aztecs had managed to come from under Canaaniterule to create a monarchy. And like the Israelites who were fore-warned by the Prophets and witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem,the Aztecs had also seen signs warning them of the impending endof their kingdom and of the destruction of their city.

This satanic narrative of the history of Mexico allowedSnchez to claim the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe as the mostcomplete fulfillment of St. John of Patmoss vision of the woman ofthe apocalypse. Out of all the images of the immaculate conception


in Christendom, that of Our Lady of Guadalupe was the most signif-icant and important (Sanchez 20409). Snchez offered interpreta-tions of every detail of the painting. The moon underneath theVirgin represented the power of the Virgin over the waters (22324);the Virgin eclipsing the sun stood for a New World whose torridzone was temperate and inhabitable (219); the 12 sun rays surround-ing her head signified Corts and the conquistadors who haddefeated the dragon (168); and the stars on the Virgins shawl werethe 46 good angels who had fought Satans army (Snchez usedcabala to calculate the number of good angels) (22627). Snchezsinterpretation inaugurated a literature of exegesis that took on clearmillenarian and messianic tones, a literature in which contemporaryMexicans appeared as Gods new elected people. In the imaginationof Creole scholars, Mexico became the place where the Pope and thecrown would eventually retreat, ousted from Europe by the forces ofevil.20

The idea of Manifest Destiny has often been attributed toBritish American Creoles, but Mexican Creoles first coined the trope.Through prefigurative readings of the Bible, Creoles gave their his-tory and institutions cosmic significance. Prefiguration was a keyhistoriographical resource in the intellectual toolkit of the Creoles,allowing them to demonstrate that, far from being merely develop-ments at the margins of the Catholic world, events in their homelandsheld extraordinary universal import. After all, crucial episodes of theconfrontation between good and evil described by St. John of Patmosin the book of the apocalypse were taking place in Mexico.

[God] has not favored any other nation in such a way (Nonfecit taliter omni nationi) was the motto that ever since the late sev-enteenth century accompanied most illustrations and narratives ofthe miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is in this context that weneed to understand other aspects of Creole piety. As hagiographiesof local pious men and women multiplied over the course of thecolonial period, Creoles lobbied hard in Rome to have many of theirown canonized. Given the extraordinary amount of silver flowingfrom Mexico and Peru, Creoles often succeeded.21

4. Creoles within the Spanish Composite Monarchy

The composition in Patrocinio de la Virgen de Guadalupe sobreel Reino de Nueva Espaa of Hispanic princes kneeling alongsideIndian nobles, both partaking eucharistically of the image of Our Ladyof Guadalupe, bears striking resemblance to earlier seventeenth-century images that sought to present America and Spain asequal members of a common Iberian commonwealth (Fig. 4).


As can be seen in the frontispiece to Juan de Solrzano yPereiras 1629 study of the laws of the Indies, Disputationem Indi-arum iure, Philip IV (r. 162165) comes across as a mighty rulertrampling over the very lord of the seas, Neptune, whose powerextends to the very margins of the sky and the ocean (subdivitOceanu sceptris et margine coeali clausit opes). Philip IVs empire,however, is equally made up of an armored, knightly Hispania anda scantily clad supine America. This message of equalitybetween America and Hispania in the universal Spanish Catholicmonarchy also comes across in the frontispiece to Antonio deSoliss Historia de la conquista de Mexico (1684). In the illustratedintroduction to this early-modern bestseller, Charles II (r. 16651700) appears presiding over a supine, naked, reborn out of fire(renascetur) Mexico and a fully clad, renovated (renovabitur)Hispania. The motto utraque unum (out of two, one) and the twospheres united by a single crown in the frontispiece reinforce themessage of unity and partnership.

This symbolic message of parity within the empire was onefully embraced by the Creoles. As we have already seen, Creolesaspired for their local polities to the status of kingdoms within thelarger Spanish composite monarchy. Despite the effort of the crownback in Madrid to curtail these autonomous impulses in the NewWorld, the monarchy by and large failed. The chronic dependencyof the crown on silver and resources from America gave Creolesleverage, and all centralizing efforts from the metropolis floundered.

Fig. 4. Left: Juan de Solrzano y Pereira. Disputationem Indiarum iure (Madrid, 1629). Right: Antonio de Solis. Historia de la conquista de Mxico (Madrid, 1684). The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.


Even after the Seven Years War (175663), when the relativelynew Bourbon monarchy decided to launch an aggressive program ofreform, including taking control of the colonies away from Creoleinterests, these efforts proved futile. In fact, these efforts actuallymanaged to exacerbate tensions, heighten patriotic consciousness,and unravel traditional mechanisms of imperial legitimation (byundermining the power of clerical bureaucracies, the glue that keptthe sprawling and ramshackle empire together).22

Despite repeated statements to the contrary, from its inceptionthe Spanish empire was highly decentralized, built from the bottomup, not the other way around.23 The unit upon which the empire wasbuilt was the city council. Both the empire and Creole consciousnesswere built on the back of municipios and vecinos.24

Vecinos were the citizens of the early-modern Spanishworld: bearers of rights (access to common land) but also burdenedwith duties (taxation and service in the militia and municipality). Itfell ultimately on municipal local authorities, not the crown, to elu-cidate who was a vecino. Vecinos were those who had demon-strated through actions and religious compliance (Catholicism;homeownership; marrying into local families, living in town longerthan 10 years) that they wanted to belong in a community, usually atown or a city. Foreigners (outsiders to the original community)could become vecinos only if they demonstrated enough love andcommitment to the new community where they now happened toreside.

Vecinos were the foundation of the larger national communityand became naturales when they faced the authorities of the king-dom to which they belonged. At this level, the crown wielded morepower, for vecinos as naturales had to wear the hat of vassals. Thecrown often sought to transform foreigners into naturales by fiat,thus favoring merchants and other powerful types, to the chagrin ofmost locals. Yet it was communal consensus and abidance by strictcultural norms that ultimately determined who could be naturales.Through this mechanism, municipal identities became enlargedwhen projected onto the larger canvass of the local kingdoms.Creoles saw themselves as naturales of their own local kingdomsand cast Peninsulares as foreigners incapable of loving and caringfor the local communities.

It was in the language of vecindad and naturaleza that the ideo-logical struggles of the so-called Wars of Independence (181024)were fought. Creoles sought to include Indians, mestizos and blacksas naturales of creolized Spanish American kingdoms, part of alarger Spanish commonwealth. Fearful of being outnumbered and oflosing control of the commonwealth, Peninsulares balked andsought to limit the franchise. After having struggled mightily to


continue to be part of the empire for centuries, Creoles finally real-ized that the only way to have their own kingdoms was by declaringindependence.25 The new nations were born weak and fragmented,like the empire that came before, because they were also patchworksmade up of cities and towns whose vecinos were competing overlarger territorial spoils.26

Notes

1. See Naomi Miller, Paradise Regained: Medieval Garden Fountains, in Medi-eval Gardens, edited by Elizabeth B. MacDougall (1983), 13553 and SimonSchama, Landscape and Memory (1995), part 2.

2. In Landscape and Memory, Schama identifies the author of this painting asGerard Horenbout, whose years of life indicate that he could have only begun thepiece (288). The altar might have been completed by Lucas. The triptych for thealtar, it seems, was put together in 1596, for one can clearly see the date written onthe frame. Yet the painting also has at the base of the fountain the inscriptionLU. Horenbault fe. (Luc Horenbault fecit Made by Luc Horenbault?). On thesetwo painters, see Lorne Campbell and Susan Foister, Gerard, Lucas, and SusanHorenbout, Burlington Magazine (1986), 71927.

3. On the Virgin Mary and the Song of Solomon, see Marina Warner, Alone of AllHer Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), ch. 16. On Mary as gar-den and fountain, see Brian E. Daley, The Closed Garden and Sealed Fountain:Song of Songs 4:12 in the Late Medieval Iconography of Mary, in MacDougall,Medieval Gardens, 2353.

4. See Schama, Landscape and Memory, 22126.

5. On Creole patriotism, see David Brading, The First America: The SpanishMonarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 14921867 (1991); AntonioRubial Garca, Una monarqua criolla: la provincia augustiniana de Mexico en elsiglo VII (1990); Bernard Lavall, Las promesas ambiguas: Criollismo colonial enlos Andes (1993); Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcatl et Guadalupe: La formation de laconscience nationale au Mexique (1974); Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialismand the Political Imagination (1990), chs. 45; and John Leddy Phelan, Neo-Aztecism in the Eighteenth Century and the Genesis of Mexican Nationalism, Cul-ture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, edited by Stanley Diamond (1960).

6. See Magnus Morner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (1967);Jonathan Irvine Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 16101670(1975); Patricia Seed, Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753, HispanicAmerican Historical Review 62 (1982): 569606; David Cahill, Colour by Num-bers: Racial and Ethnic Categories in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 15321824, Journalof Latin American Studies 26 (1994): 32546.

7. On the threat and characterization of mestizos, see R. Douglas Cope, The Lim-its of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 16601720(1994), ch. 1.

After having struggled mightily to continue to be part of the empire for centuries, Creoles finally realized that the only way to have their own kingdom was by declaring indepen-dence. The new nations were born weak and fragmented, like the empire that came before them, because they were also patchworks made up of cities and towns whose vecinos were competing over larger territorial spoils.


8. See Jos Joaqun Granados y Glvez, Tardes Americanas (1778), 22930. Seealso Carlos Siguenza y Gngora, Theatro de virtudes polticas que constituyen a unprncipe advertidas en los monarchas antiguos del mexicano imperio, facsimile1780 ed. (1986)

9. See, e.g., Prez de Villagrs dedication to Philip III, in which Prez de Vil-lagr sees the kings role as providential, promoting the expansion of the Catholicfaith against the kingdom of the devil: para ensalzamineto de Nuestra F cathol-ica, y extirpacin de los graves errors, y vil idolatria, que el demonio nuestro capi-tal enemigo, siembra y derrama, por estas y otras Regiones (n. pag.).

10. See Prez de Villagr canto 4, verses 1521. The following verse is typical ofVillagrs sensibilities:

Sola una terrible falta hallo, Christianissimo Rey en vuestras Indias, Y es que estan muy pobladas, y ocupadas, De gente vil, manchada, y sospechasa (canto 4, verse 20).

(I only find one fault, oh most Christian of kings, about your Indies. And it is thatthey are populated and occupied by vile people: stained and suspect [conversas]).

11. See 3* recto and verso (cancin pindrica by L.. Trib. de Toledo). Toledopresents Oa as nephew of the governor of New Galicia, Christobal de Oa, grand-son of Moctezuma. See also 27 recto (canto sexto).

12. See Doris M. Ladd, The Mexican Nobility at Independence 17801826(1976), 21, 235n28.

13. On continuity and change among indigenous elites in central Mexico andYucatn, see James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest (1994), ch. 4 andNancy M. Farriss, Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise ofSurvival (1984), 96103,16468, 17492, and 22755.

14. See William B. Taylor, . . . de corazn pequeo y nimo apocado: Concep-tos de los curas prrocos sobre los indios en la Nueva Espaa del siglo XVII, Rel-aciones 39 (1989): 567. See also Charles Walker, The Patriotic Society:Discussions and Omissions about Indians in the Peruvian War of Independence,The Americas 55 (1998): 27598.

15. See Caracter, usos y costumbres de los Indios, tributos que pagan al sober-ano, metodo de su cobranza y estado de ramo y reflexiones de los repartimientosantiguos y modernos, MS 119, folios 18089, Coleccin Malaspina, Archivo delMuseo Naval, Madrid.

16. See Jorge Caizares-Esguerra, La Utopa de Hiplito Unanue: comercio, nat-uraleza y religin en el Per, Saberes andinos. Ciencia y tecnologa en Bolivia,Ecuador y Per, edited by Marcos Cueto (1995), 91108.

17. See Jorge Caizares-Esguerra, New World New Stars: Indian and CreoleBodies in Colonial Spanish America, 16001650. American Historical Review104 (1999): 3368 and Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (1999).Compare these views of the racialized body in the New World with those explored


by Joyce Chaplin in British America in Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, andScience on the Anglo-American Frontier, 15001676 (2001).

18. The literature on Our Lady of Guadalupe is immense; I have relied on the well-known works of David Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image andProcess (2001); Francisco de la Maza, El guadalupanismo mexicano (1953, reprint1984); Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcatl et Guadalupe: La formation de la consciencenationale au Mexique (1974); and Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe (1995).

19. See Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex (1976), chs. 16 and 17 and SuzanneL. Stratton, The Immaculate Conception in Spanish Art (1994).

20. See, e.g., the sermons by Francisco Xavier Carranza, La transmigracin de laiglesia a Guadalupe: Sermn que el 12 de diciembre de 1748 aos predic en eltemplo de N.S. de Guadalupe de la ciudad de Santiago de Queretaro (1749) andJoseph Mariano Gregorio de Elizalde Ita Parra, Gloria de Mexico en la mayor exal-tacin y manifestacin de la mayor gloria de Maria Santissima Seora Nuestra ensu triunphante assumpcin a los cielos en cuyo mysterio se venera titular de la Sta.Iglesia Metropolitana de dicha ciudad: Sermn panegyrico en el da 15 de agostode 1743 (1744), 18, 2930.

21. See Kathleen Ann Myers, Redeemer of America: Rosa de Lima (15861617),The Dynamics of Identity, and Canonization, Colonial Saints. Discovering theHolly in the Americas, edited by Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinoff (2003) and JosFlores Araoz, Ramn Mujica Pinilla, Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, and Pedro GuibovichPrez, Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo (1995).

22. See William Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners inEighteenth-Century Mexico (1998).

23. See Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 14921763(2003).

24. The following two paragraphs are based entirely on the work of TamarHerzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain andSpanish America (2003).

25. See Jaime E. Rodrguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (1998).

26. See Hilda Sabato, On Political Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century LatinAmerica, American Historical Review 106 (2001), 12901315.

Works Cited

Cranach, Lucas. Fall and Grace. BritishMuseum, London.

Horenbout, Gerard, and LucasHorenbout. Fountain of Life and Mercy.1596.

Patrocinio de la Virgen de Guadalupesobre el Reino de Nueva Espaa.Museo Soumaya, Mexico City.

Prez de Villagr, Gaspar. Historia dela Nueva Mxico. Mexico : Imprentadel Museo Nacional, 1900.


Snchez, Miguel. Imagen de la VirgenMara Madre de Dios de Guadalupe.1648. Reproduced in Testimonioshistricos guadalupanos pp. 152-281.Ernesto de la Torre Villar y RamiroNavarro de Anda, eds. Mexico, 1982.

Solis, Antonio de. Historia de la con-quista de Mxico. Madrid, 1684.

Solrzano y Pereira, Juan de. Dispu-tationem Indiarum iure. Madrid,1629.

Cañizares Esguerra, Jorge. Racial, religious, civic identity in Colonial America

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