Indigenous Miracles

Indigenous Miracles is part of the ongoing stream of scholarship that examines indigenous experiences of colonialism by using native-language records along with more familiar Spanish-language genres. The book intersects as well with studies of Nahua religiosity and the significance within the indigenous world of the Catholic Church, its clergy, and its belief systems. Most of the author’s examples come from Chalco and Amecameca, as well as the indigenous municipalities of Mexico City, San Juan Tenochtitlan, and Santiago Tlatelolco. Edward Osowski concentrates on the very late colonial period, from 1760 to 1810. This was a time of mounting pressures on the integrity of Nahua communities in central New Spain, many linked to reformist policies of the governments of two Bourbon viceroys, Bucareli and Revillagigedo. Through deft analysis of primary records, many written in Nahuatl, the author is able to show that a sense of indigenous “ownership” of the local church (including its physical plant, its rituals, and its sacred symbols) remained strong right to the end of the Spanish era. At the same time, the author is less interested in matters of faith and belief per se than in the ways indigenous leaders and other Nahuas used religious rituals and symbols to bolster their political clout as well as the autonomy of their self-governing corporate entities. In this way, local governing elites maintained their traditional roles as intermediaries between their altepetl (the traditional Nahua city-province) and the ever-encroaching Hispanic world.A series of case studies examines such things as the significance for Nahuas of the Sacromonte shrine and its miraculous image of Christ in Amecameca, emphasizing how such indigenous authors as Chimalpahin viewed and manipulated this pilgrimage center for their own aims and benefits. Subsequent case studies analyze the sociopolitical importance of miraculous images, not only Amecameca’s Christ, but also wondrous images of Saint Mary in indigenous Mexico City. The Nahuas embraced the miracles associated with them as primordial symbols of the authority of altepetl leaders and of the community itself. The author’s particular examples and analysis support other scholars’ conclusions about the significance of sacred symbols, miracles, and memories in the assertion of various kinds of colonial indigenous legitimacy.Osowski makes his most original scholarly contributions when he takes up several subjects that have received very little sustained attention, such as the phenomenon of what he calls Nahua “traveling alms collectors.” These were men and women who transported their locally potent, miraculous images around central New Spain (often covering remarkable distances), soliciting donations to support the maintenance of their cults back home, activities most often organized by indigenous elite men (but occasionally by elite women). The author perceptively argues that when these alms collectors found willing donors in far-flung communities — places that undoubtedly had their own locally potent images and sites — micropatriotically cherished miraculous images or shrines were caught up in the emergence of a shared belief system showing “signs of a protonational Mesoamerican culture” that was no longer purely “local” (p. 99). Alms collecting was controversial as far as ecclesiastical and civil authorities were concerned. The Juzgado General de los Indios, for example, sought to limit and control alms collecting, particularly by women. The author treats us to a fascinating case study of the Nahua noblewoman doña Ana Ventura Gómez, who ran afoul of these efforts in the 1790s. Her story, and those of many other less celebrated women and men raise important issues of gender, both as it operated in Spanish minds and in the interior culture of the Nahuas, adding to our knowledge of how Nahua gender complementarity and patriarchy butted up against each other in the very late colonial era.As the book nears its end, the author leads the reader into the colorful ritual celebrations of Corpus Christi and Semana Santa in Mexico City, where indigenous municipalities controlled construction of triumphal arches erected in the capital’s streets, while groups of indigenous men dressed as Roman centurions and as soldiers (armados) accompanied the crucifix or guarded representations of Christ’s tomb. Here indigenous voices speak eloquently about what the author calls a “shared seasonal multiethnic popular culture” (p. 163). But behind these activities during Semana Santa lay a much more serious and increasingly controversial enterprise in which the Nahua town councils of San Juan Tenochtitlan and Santiago Tlatelolco asserted their political clout by organizing the participation of numerous subject communities. The late colonial Bourbon era saw many conflicts between these indigenous leaders and Mexico City’s Spanish ayunta-miento (town council), the Juzgado de Indios, the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and even viceroys over just how much control was proper and appropriate. Elsewhere, authorities were equally concerned about the possible impropriety that might result in the Chalco-Amecameca area, for example, where Spaniards as well as indigenous people presented Spanish-language passion plays (translations of earlier Nahuatl-language didactic dramas), allowing the author to discuss the subject of religious theater. (However, he should have consulted one or more volumes of the series Nahuatl Theater, the most up-to-date scholarship on the subject.) The discovery of older Nahuatl-language dramas and their translation seems to parallel similar criollo appropriation of things indigenous to craft an authentic “Mexican” past that made their proto-nation unique and comparable to Europe.Indigenous Miracles is a complex study, yet it is accessibly written by an author with an impressive ability to synthesize and interpret a broad range of archival sources, both Nahuatl and Spanish. This allows him to make a major interpretive contribution through his intriguing examination of the political side of indigenous miracles and rituals and of the late colonial survival of a self-conscious and very Christian Nahua society

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