Christian Texts for Aztecs

A quick glance at Christian Texts for Aztecs reveals an unmistakable air de famille with City, Temple, Stage, Jaimes Lara’s previous book. The similarities are physical (format, design, lavish illustrations), thematic, and deliberate, as the author has conceived of these two works as a diptych of sorts. Calling attention to the complementary nature of the two works, however, also invites a comparison that makes more apparent the flaws of this handsomely produced volume, ultimately lessening the effect of the whole.However controversial its claims, Lara’s City, Temple, Stage made a strong case for reconsidering sixteenth-century Mexican religious architecture as inspired by a set of simple yet powerful Christian ideas, at the center of which was the notion of the holy city traversing space and time until the fulfillment of history. Whereas that book dealt with the making of sacred space in the newly discovered territories of New Spain, Christian Texts for Aztecs focuses on the script, actions, symbols, and props that made the sacred come alive. Although this new work includes periodic references to the liturgical texts used by the friars working among the Mexican Indians, its subject matter, more accurately conveyed by the subtitle, remains the world of images and motifs born out of the contact between European and Nahua culture that became an essential part of Mexican Catholicism.Reconstructing what Christian worship might have looked like and meant for converted Mexican Indians is an ambitious task. However, the sheer scope of the enterprise has not deterred the author, who in systematic, if uneven, fashion covers vast ground in chapters devoted to preaching, the administration of the sacraments, devotional processions, the celebration of Corpus Christi, and liturgical toys. Although Lara acknowledges the impossibility of constructing a historical narrative to account for the varied artistic solutions found by friars working in different geographical areas at different points in time, his account centers largely on the efforts by sixteenth-century missionaries to convert the Indian population. Hence the periodic references to Diego Valadés’s Rhetorica Christiana (1579), whose engravings accompany the discussion of each new topic throughout the book.Significant portions of the study recount the activities of the first generations of missionaries and the strategies deployed to make Christianity intelligible to the Mexican Indians. On the subject, the author has for the most part limited himself to follow both standard and more recent scholarship, sometimes to the point of paraphrase. As for interpretation, Lara proposes to view the evangelization of New Spain as a process of substitution of culturally bound root metaphors. This rather general premise allows him to present a wide array of visual evidence to show how the incorporation of motifs and indigenous elements in Christian art and liturgy found in colonial Mexico were, more often than not, the product of careful selection by the missionaries. The final and most engaging chapter, which deals in detail with the visual correspondences between Nahua and Christian notions of sacrifice as revealed in the popular devotion to the heart of Jesus Christ, offers the best illustration of his approach.There is something puzzling about a book that delves into the repertoire of Nahua metaphors yet at times subscribes to the view (also present among some sixteenth-century missionaries) that the Nahuas were literal minded. This may very well be a quibble, but since cross-cultural translation of both texts and images is at the very center of the author’s inquiry, one wishes that this very process of translation had been discussed in greater detail. As it stands, the explanation behind how the religious imagery came about that served as backdrop for the ritual life of the Mexican Indians responds very closely to what a number of scholars of religious missions and contemporary Christian missionaries refer to as enculturation. In this sense, Christian Texts for Aztecs stands as an illustration of enculturation as manifested in the sphere of religious art. Art historians may dispute the pertinence of sweeping, or programmatic, interpretations that, forged outside their discipline, leave aside current theoretical and methodological questions about artistic production in colonial contexts. The extensive and thorough bibliography dispels any doubts about Lara’s familiarity with current scholarship on colonial art; the problem lies in his somewhat indiscriminate use of works conceived from very different perspectives and assumptions not easy to reconcile. A good example is the very notion of enculturation, which, while favored in some circles inside and outside academe, is far from being embraced by ethnohistorians.Works of synthesis serve many purposes, since periodic critical examination of existing scholarship may reveal insights, fatal flaws, or open new questions. They can also bring a welcome sense of order to what may otherwise look like an unmanageable sea of information and competing interpretations. At times, Christian Texts for Aztecs approaches this latter category, yet it does so reluctantly and in uncomfortable ways as it strives to present itself as more independent from its sources than it actually is. Concerning books, however, questions about labels should not take precedence over those about usefulness. In this regard, what makes Christian Texts for Aztecs useful in spite of its shortcomings is that Lara proves himself a very engaging guide when it comes to directing the reader’s attention to the visual legacy of Mexican Christianity so richly captured in its images

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Literature · Liturgy · Theology · Worship · Architecture · History · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy