“BIG-OLD LONG LIPS, BIG-OLD JAR NOSE”: ANCIENT MESOAMERICAN MONSTERS AND CLOWNS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CHRISTIANITY IN EARLY COLONIAL MEXICO

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Ben Leeming
Keyword(s):  
New Spain ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Transgressive Behavior

Abstract During the early Colonial period, Native writers, working under the aegis of mendicant friars, composed Christian texts in the Nahuatl language as part of the Roman Catholic Church's efforts to indoctrinate the Indigenous population of New Spain. Yet these Native “ghost-writers” were far from passive participants in the translation of Christianity. Numerous studies since the 1980s have demonstrated how Native writers exerted influence on the presentation of Christianity, in effect “indigenizing” the message and allowing for the persistence of essential elements of the Mesoamerican worldview. This article focuses on descriptions of demons and sinners drawn from Nahuatl-Christian texts and argues that Native writers drew on an ancient Mesoamerican repertoire of imagery involving physical deformity and transgressive behavior (the “monster-clown complex”). In pre-contact times, such imagery was associated with specific figures, including Olmec dwarfs, Maya “fat men,” and comic performers attached to the Mexica royal court. In each of these figures, both physical deformity and humor rendered them powerful, liminal beings often referred to as ritual clowns. By drawing upon this “monster-clown complex,” Native writers transformed what were intended to be terrifying motivators of conversion into something very different: morally neutral, supernaturally powerful, and ultimately essential members of the Mesoamerican sacred realm.

Inquisitor as Physician: Friars, Inquisitors, Women, and Medical Knowledge in Early Colonial New Spain (1530–1650)

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 582-604
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Holler
Keyword(s):  
Medical Practice ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Religious Involvement ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
European Origin ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Medical Theory ◽  
Medical Traditions ◽  
Medical Regime

Abstract New Spain was the site not only of one of the largest-scale missionary enterprises in Christian history, but also of a prolonged encounter among diverse medical traditions of Mesoamerican, African, and European origin in which male missionaries were central. Given the paucity of licensed physicians in the colony, religious involvement in medical practice remained significant throughout the colonial period. This paper considers the confluence of religion and medicine in the encounters that friars and inquisitors had with women, arguing that in these encounters, missionaries and inquisitors participated in the translation, circulation, and creation of medical knowledge and positioned themselves as both theological and medical authorities, as proponents and translators of Galenic medical theory, and as “confessor-physicians” rather than “confessor-judges.” Women thus played a crucial interlocutory role in the articulation of a colonial religio-medical regime whose primary framers were not physicians, but clergymen.

Innocent Infants or Abusive Patriarchs? Spousal Homicides, the Punishment of Indians and the Law in Colonial Mexico, 1740s–1820s

2006 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 793-828 ◽  
Author(s):  
VICTOR M. URIBE-URAN
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Complex Combination ◽  
The Law ◽  
Legal Mechanism ◽  
Judicial Treatment

This article examines numerous spousal homicides occurring all over New Spain (colonial Mexico) during the last seven decades of the colonial period. After killing their spouses, sometimes in an extremely brutal manner, a considerable number of the defendants managed to get away with little more than a slap on the wrist. I argue here that this was not due to the fact that written laws were dead letters. After examining general patterns of spousal homicides, I focus on the legal treatment and punishment afforded to indigenous criminals, several of who were drunk at the time of their crimes. Being an ‘Indian’ or committing a crime while drunk – both characteristics of many defendants in the records – were treated as a mitigating circumstance under law and led to the acquittal of several of the accused. Royal graces, an important legal mechanism, also played a significant role in easing the severity of the treatment of these and other domestic criminals. The judicial treatment of spousal murders thus did not reflect a considerable gap between law and practice at the time. Punishment derived from a complex combination of socio-cultural factors and longstanding legal prescriptions, doctrines and traditions.

The Codex Mexicanus: Time, Religion, History, and Health in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

2016 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori Boornazian Diel
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
New Name ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Aztec Empire ◽  
Conquest Of Mexico

About 60 years after the Spanish invasion and conquest of Mexico, a group of Nahua intellectuals gathered in Tenochtitlan. On the very site of the heart of the Aztec empire stood a city of a new name: Mexico City, capital of New Spain. There the Nahuas set about compiling an extensive book of miscellanea, now known as the Codex Mexicanus. Owned by the Bibliothèque National de France, the codex includes records pertaining to the Christian and Aztec calendars, European medical astrology, a genealogy of the Tenochca royal house, and the annals of preconquest and early colonial Mexico City, among other intriguing topics.

Afro-Mexican Slave Labor in the Obrajes de Paños of New Spain, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

2003 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank T. Proctor
Keyword(s):  
Labor Force ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Textile Mill ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Woolen Textile

On April 5, 1723, Juan Joseph de Porras, a mulatto slave laboring in an obraje de paños (woolen textile mill) near Mexico City, appeared before the Holy Office of the Inquisition for blasphemy. According to the testimony of six slaves, including Porras’ wife, while his co-workers prepared to bed down for the night in the obraje Porras had blasphemed over a beating he had received from the mayordomo (overseer) earlier in the day. Señor Pedregal, the owner of the obraje, testified that Porras was one of nearly thirty workers, all Afro-Mexican slaves or convicts, who lived and labored in his obraje without the freedom to leave.The case against Juan Joseph de Porras and dozens of others like it in the Mexican archives raise important questions, not only about the makeup of the colonial obraje labor force, but also about the importance of Afro-Mexican slavery in the middle of the colonial period. Was the Pedregal labor force, composed entirely of slaves and convicts, the exception or the rule within obrajes of New Spain? If it was not exceptional, how important were slaves to that obraje and others like it? What exactly was the demographic makeup of the obraje labor force in the middle of the colonial period? And, how might the answers to those questions change our understanding of the histories of labor and slavery in colonial Mexico?

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