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MEXICO MAGICO
TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY... A history of the Mexican people |
CHAPTER IV, The Forefathers - The Baroque Years (65th part continues...)
By Prof. German Estrada - October 2006 |
For all his rhetoric, Singüenza y Góngora did not worship the contemporary Indian. When the hungry Indians of Mexico City rioted and burned buildings in June 1692, Don Carlos experienced a metamorphosis. A brave man, he rescued his precious documents from the archives, which rioters and fires had threatened. Still, he felt no pity for the Indians, blaming them for the disturbances and, for good measure, the ones of 1537, and 1624. He believed they had no business living among Spaniards, urging that they be excluded from Mexico City, and located in barrios of their own, a remedy guaranteed to ensure peace and order. From then on, Don Carlos had little good to say about Indians, a prejudice amply revealed in his account of the native uprising and Spanish reconquest of New Mexico. He was, nonetheless, a precursor of creole nationality.
It remained for Francisco Javier Clavijero, a criollo from Veracruz and a Jesuit, to imbue that identity with life and meaning. In Mexico City he had taught at the Colegio de San Gregorio, in  whose fine library he stumbled upon accounts of the pre-Hispanic civilizations. Fascinated, he studied them and did field work. Clavijero was not alone, for the late eighteenth century witnessed a revival of curiosity in the ancient peoples. An interest in archeology led to the study of ruins; those at Palenque, for instance, were rediscovered and excavations begun.
Knowledge of the pre-Hispanic past persuaded Clavijero to reject the Enlightenment version of the Indian as a savage, noble or otherwise. To him, the “ancient Mexicans” had conceived wonders: laws, justice, government, education, the arts, and a Nahuatl language equal in quality to the European ones. They had welded together, in Clavijero’s opinion, a model to emulate. Exile from Spain in 1767, Clavijero wrote his famous Historia Antigua de México in Italy---to quote its author, “a history of Mexico written by a Mexican.”
Indians and Spaniards were heirs of wonderful legacies, Clavijero postulated; the blending of the races had yielded good results. Yet Clavijero was no radical; he was referring to the union of Spaniards and the women of the old Aztec nobility, between “blood untainted” and not “besotted and degraded by servitude.” Intolerant at heart, Clavijero revealed his prejudices by boasting of the “many light-skinned women” (blancas) in the New World. How much better off would New Spain be, pondered Clavijero, if Spaniards, instead of bringing women from Spain or importing Africans, had just gone to bed with the Indian nobility and, afterward, with the offspring of that union.
Trying to forge a nationality, the criollo of the Baroque Age took one more step. He invented a Virgen, although not an entirely new one, adopting, in reality, the Virgen de Guadalupe for his own. That usurpation began in 1648 when Miguel Sánchez, a criollo priest, published Imagen de la Virgen María de Dios de Guadalupe, which told of Juan Diego, the Indian before whom the Virgin appeared. Sánchez did not invent the history but took it from Indian tales circulated in New Spain. The Virgin, according to the Sánchez version, revealed herself to Diego on the hill of Tepeyac, declaring that she was the mother of God and asking that a temple be erected in her honor.
Not until she appeared five times, nevertheless, did the Virgin, speaking through Diego, manage to convince Bishop Juan de Zumárraga. On this last journey from Tepeyac to Mexico City, Diego carried the image of the Virgin stamped on his tunic and roses in its fold. When the Virgin, dark of skin like the Indian, confronted Juan Diego, she stood on a nopal (prickly cactus), a symbol of the ancient Mexicans.
The cult of the Virgin swept over New Spain, where temples were erected in her honor while pope and crown, believers in miracles, baptized her the patroness of the colony. By implication the popular cult carried a special meaning; the apparition of the Virgin conferred on New Spain’s church an autonomous status. Christianity had arrived not through the efforts of the friars but with the Mother of God. The Conquest occurred because God in his infinite wisdom chose New Spain for the appearance of the Virgin. The Conquest, therefore, had a higher purpose, beyond the mundane needs of the crown.
The story, as told by Sánchez, combined religious traditions of European origin with the mystical and idolatrous superstitions of Indian piety. Her worship united every ethnic group in New Spain, not the least the Indian, who, whatever the criollo may have wanted, held on to his “brown” Virgin.
New Spain, as the feats of the Virgen testified, had given birth to a distinct nationality. She became, eventually, the emblem of the patria criolla.
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Francisco Javier Clavijero
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The old church of the Virgen de Guadalupe
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The New Basílica de Guadalupe
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Nowadays in the new Basílica de Guadalupe
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In the next issue we’ll continue with Chapter V of this fascinating book, The Baroque Years.
Prof. Germán Estrada
E-mail: estradanav@yahoo.com
Source: From the book Triumphs and Tragedy, a History of the Mexican People by his author Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, and with his authorization. (W.W. Norton & Company. New York-London).
Prof. Germán Estrada is the author of the best selling book, México Mágico: Everything You Wanted To Know About... But Nobody Told You..." available in Puerto Vallarta at The Net House, Mail Boxes, Etc., Books, Books as well as directly from his website.
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