The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas by Jennifer Scheper Hughes

Author:Jennifer Scheper Hughes [Hughes, Jennifer Scheper]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Mexico, Missions, REL015000 Religion / Christianity / History, Christian Ministry, Latin America, history, Christianity
ISBN: 9781479802555
Google: L2wDEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2021-08-03T23:51:32.618746+00:00

Colony as Abject Matter: A Landscape in Ruin

One of the purposes of this book is to probe the forms of ruination that lie at the origins of New World Christianity. In the mortandad, both missionaries and Indigenous Mexicans were very much preoccupied with ruin, or “ruyna” as it often appears in the historical record. Both communities used the language of ruin to fix attention on the degraded condition of the land and people suffering under the mortandad. Ruin also became one of the most potent metaphors for the crisis facing the church after the mortandad. Analytically connected to illness, decay, and ephemerality, the category of ruin governed missionaries’ affective attachment to that which the colonial order destroyed and appropriated.

For Spanish missionaries writing about the mortandad, ruins were “ghost signs,” ever-present reminders of the vast populations that had once existed: “psychic triggers sited in physical landscape.”75 After completing the final leg of his visitación, Archbishop Moya offered his summary observations. His report mourns the contrast between the most recent demographic devastation in cocoliztli and the great ruins of the Aztecs that he saw on his journey, ruins that evoked the large population that once thrived in Mexico: “Returning from the provinces of Huasteca and Pánuco, I considered their abbreviated populations [their populations cut short] as well as their ancient sites that are evidence of the great multitude of people that once existed here in the time of their paganism. It gave me great pain [lástima] to see the superb ruins alongside the notable diminution of the population who suffer great affliction and misery.”76 In colonial perceptions, the ruined population was echoed in the material ruins of their civilization, still everywhere visible at this moment in history. Ruins haunted the present, ubiquitous reminders of peoples and civilization now “lost.” The material traces of Aztec civilization became one of the interpretive frames for the mortandad. Indeed, in one version of his handwritten report, Moya conflated “population” and “ruin” in a slip of the pen that he corrected by strikethrough: “It is the saddest and most painful thing to see the superb populations ruins and notable diminishment of the ancient populations of the indios that one now sees when walking through that land. The few indios that remain suffer great trials.”77 Moya here reiterates the link between walking and seeing the ruined land.

The lingering presence of pre-Invasion architecture was a powerful feature of the colonial Mexican landscape and played upon the missionary imagination. The missionaries were never successful in removing the evidence of the Nahua sacred from the landscape of Mexico, even as the destruction of sacred sites was one of the foundational rites of the colonial church. The temples and palaces were constructed to last centuries—and they persisted through the long colonial period in various states of wholeness, destruction, and decline. The vocabulary of “ruin” was used by the Spanish to encompass them all, even when those structures remained very nearly intact. They used it even for those that remained religiously activated for local believers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.