Epidemics in Colonial Mexico

Portrayal of Epidemic Colonial Mexico

Although feels like it, Covid19 is not the first pandemic the world has ever known. Everyone has heard of the Black Death and Spanish Flu of 1917-8, but there were also major epidemics in the New World, far before any of us were born.

Epidemics and Population Collapse in Colonial Mexico

When the Spanish arrived in Mexico in 1619, its population is estimated to have been between 15-30 million.  One hundred years later, in 1620, it was less than two million.  The indigenous population had the Spanish to thank for this huge reduction in population.  The Spanish had superior firepower, but it was the smallpox that they had brought with them that facilitated their conquest of the native peoples.  It is estimated that 5-8 million people died in the smallpox epidemic.

Depiction of Smallpox Epidemic in Colonial Mexico

Smallpox was what is know as a Virgin Soil epidemic, referring to an imported pathogen to which a population has no natural immunity.  The indigenous people were devastated by smallpox, a disease to which the Spanish largely had immunity.  

Depiction of Cocoliztli Epidemic

Smallpox was not the only disease decimating the indigenous population in the early 
years.  A completely new disease appeared seemingly from nowhere mid-16th century. From 1545-76, there were a series of epidemics of a hemorrhagic fever that took 7-17 million lives. This disease was characterized by a high fever, headache and bleeding from the nose. Victims turned yellow from jaundice, and blood ran from their ears and noses. They had hallucinations and agonizing convulsions. They died in days. Aztecs called it the cocoliztli, meaning pestilence in the local Nahuatl language.

Colonial writers mention rodents and rodent-borne disease in relation to this epidemic.  But, a recent DNA study of victims' teeth suggest that a bacteria, salmonella enterica, (not the everyday kind of salmonella that causes food poisoning) may possibly have been the culprit.  

There is no certainty about where this pathogen originated. Some scientists judge it must have sprung up on its own in Mexico because the epidemics began in the highlands, away from the coastal areas with the greatest Spanish presence.  Others suggest that this bacteria was brought by the settlers or their livestock.  It is not possible, as with Smallpox, to absolutely implicate the Spanish in cocoliztli, although the possibility cannot be ruled-out. 

The most devastating years of the Cocoliztli epidemic were 1567-8 when more than two million people died.  The Spanish viceroy was forced to write off taxes and duties which were not possible to collect.  I rather doubt that this type of thing will be a part of the covid19 pandemic.

Colonial Mexico in the Continental United States: Where was Colonial Mexico?

Map of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (click to enlarge)

In colonial times, the Spanish controlled vast territories in the New World, extending from North America to South America and other areas in-between. During the colonial period the country that we now call Mexico was included in the territories that made up the Viceroyalty of New Spain.  The Spanish called the area that today is central and southern Mexico "New Spain" and since the Viceroyalty's capital was in Mexico City, the entire territory was also referred to as Mexico.  After its independence from Spain in 1821, it became known exclusively as Mexico.   New Spain and later Mexico, included vast areas that are within what is now the continental United States. These included parts of  Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, Florida, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Texas.    

New Mexico, a northern territory meant to serve as a buffer zone protecting the silver-rich northern areas of New Spain/Mexico from Indian incursion, remained a part of Mexico until 1858.  Texas was a part of New Spain and then Mexico from 1690-1836. Parts of Texas still retain a strong Mexican character and in the area around of San Antonio, there remains a chain of restored colonial-era Roman Catholic mission churches that are now a National Park. 

In future posts I  will be writing more about New Mexico,  which retains a very strong hispanic identity and the Spanish Missions of Texas.  In these areas, and others in the U.S.,  the boundary between Mexico and the United States remains lightly drawn.   

Mexican Christs: Cristos de Caña

Cathedral, Merida, Yucatan

Christ carried in Good Friday procession, Merida, Yucatan (Mary is visible behind)

In my last post, "Converting Christianity", I spoke of the transformation of Spanish Catholicism in its encounter with the indigenous faiths of Mexico.  The same occurred in the rest of Mesoamerica, as well and we will explore some of this in later posts.  This photo of the tortured Christ, which I saw carried in procession this past Good Friday in Merida is one of many such statues you will see in  the churches of Mexico.  They are made from corn in a process that I will describe and for this reason are known as Cristos de Caña, or Corn Christs. 

The one thing that all these statues have in common is that they are bloody, very bloody.
Take a look:

San Miguel Arcangel Church, Mani, Yucatan

San Juan Bautista Church, Coyoacan, MX

Santa Cruz, New Mexico

Figures like these need to be light-weight because they were and are frequently carried in religious processions.  A material that had been used in pre-Hispanic times was a kind of paper mache made of corn products.  The indigenous sculptors  actually held workshops to teach the process to the Christian priests and their workers.

To make the material  the corn husk was opened and the pith removed. A framework was made of  dried maize leaves fastened together and then covered with a mixture of corn pith paste and a sticky substance from orchid bulbs. After it was dry, a fine layer of the paste was spread over it and modeled. The red color used in the blood came from insects that fed on the fruit of the sacred (to the Aztecs) nopal cactus.

The materials that form these Christs were full of symbolism and significance for the indigenous.  Corn had been an Aztec god and maize was a sacred life-giving food. In these Corn Christs the two symbol systems, Christian and indigenous, are merged creating something that is completely new.  In their own unique way, they are a god within a god.

There has been much scholarly speculation as to why these figures are universally so bloody. True, there had been precedents in bloody Passion-week Spanish figures of Christ.  But, for the meso-american indigenous, the bloodiness had a different meaning and this is the point of view espoused by Jennifer Scheper Hughes.  If we think back to their religious practices, a lot of blood was involved because of the sacrificial tradition.  The Aztec priests are described as having been blood-covered from head to toe.  When you consider that one of the ways Jesus was described in scripture was as the "Great High Priest", it would make sense for those trying to "sell" the indigenous converts on Christ to make these Christs resemble the Aztec priests of old.  In the Aztec tradition, blood had meant power and the bloodiness of these figures is something the indigenous would have immediately understood and revered.  Remember, part of the conversion effort was to convince the indigenous that the new god was more powerful than the old ones and the bloodiness of the Christ figures is believed to have been a part of this initial effort. 

You may have noticed that in one of the photos, the Christ is lying in a glass casket.  This is a specific representation of Christ, Santo Entierro, that you will see in every Mexican church.  It is Christ, but a very particular representation of Him with a very specific use during Holy Week. We will explore this in my next post.

Location, location, location: Churches on top of Pyramids

Nuestra Senora de los Remedios, Cholula, Puebla

This church (first built in 1594-1666) appears to be sitting on top of the crest of a hill and this is both true and not true.  It actually is built on top of a grown-over, immense Pre-Hispanic pyramid,  which was excavated beginning in 1931. Today, visitors can walk through the extensive tunnel system of the pyramid, which was built over the course of 11 centuries (300 BC-900 CE).  

True, at the time of the conquest, this pyramid-temple complex had been abandoned, was overgrown with vegetation and looked like a hill.  Yet, according to my guide in Cholula, even at that time, there were stories going around about the presence of the pyramid within the hill.  Why would the Spanish chose this place, on top of a pagan structure, to locate the church of the very important Virgen de los Remedios (Virgin of the Remedies), an historically significant,  miracle-working image of the Virgin that had come from Spain?

 As we shall later see, there were very good reasons for putting a church on top of a pre-Hispanic holy site and that this was a basic principle of Colonial Mexican church location. Take a look at the following photo:

San Antonio de Padua, Izamal, Yucatan

                                 

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As you can see, this church complex was built well above street level, in fact, on the foundation of an old pyramid.  It was common practice to re-use many of the stones from the old structure. Re-using the stones was a both a practical matter as well as having additional significance as will be discussed later.  Below, you will see one of these re-used stones with a Mayan glyph in the steps leading up to the convent complex.  

Stone in Izamal staircase showing Mayan Glyph

The Cathedral in Mexico City (Catedral Metropolitana de la Asuncion de Maria)
was built on the grounds of the Templo Mayor, one of the main Aztec temples in 
Tenochtitlan their capital, now known as Mexico City.

Mexico City Cathedral seen from the Templo Mayor ruins

The geology of the Yucatan peninsula was very different than that of Central Mexico.
In the Yucatan the ground was limestone and there were many cenotes, pond-like bodies of water formed by the collapse of the limestone, as well as caves.  These were both considered holy sites, places of communication with the realm of the gods. The friars built shrines on the edges of these cenotes.

Cenote in Yucatan

In any case, the same principles were operating whether the new Christian building was put  either directly on or close to an indigenous holy site, as with the cenotes: 

• It demonstrated continuity between the power of the old religion and the new
• The power of the old religion, by the proximity, was absorbed into the new
• pre-Hispanic buildings were often only partly torn-down and their materials re-used for the church
• The sanctity of the old site was preserved

As we have seen in this post and the previous one, "From Pyramid to Church",  there was a great deal of intuitive spiritual psychology that went into  the church architecture of Colonial Mexico as well as that of the rest of the Colonial Latin American world.  All of the churches are fascinating just on the level of the way they look, but understanding more of what went into them makes the experience of seeing and being in them even more exciting. 

From Pyramid to Church

The landscape of Mexico had always been a sacred one, dotted with the pyramids and temples of its inhabitants.  The ruins we have left to see are magnificent tributes to cultures that once thrived and that live on in the unique Christianity that evolved from the encounter between the indigenous beliefs and the Spanish Catholic church.  I would like to point out that the ruins were originally all vibrantly painted (as were the ruins of Greece and Rome). They were not the white/gray color that we now see. There are some books available that through transparencies show their very different original appearance.

Uxmal, Yucatan 

After the Conquest, the landscape was refurbished with conventos (churches plus living quarters for the friars) and churches springing up in large numbers in Central Mexico as well as in the Yucatan.  These convent/churches tended to be mammoth structures and were home to the friars who were  evangelizing the indigenous, as well as being worship spaces.  The very first one of these I visited was St. Nicolas de Tolentino in Actopan.

St. Nicolas de Tolentino, Actopan, MX

The first time I saw this convent,  my jaw dropped.  It loomed massive, stony and imposing in front of me,  It’s vertical stone walls crowned with jagged parapets, standing next to it I felt dwarfed.  These "fortress churches" were huge, overwhelming structures and as  we shall learn shortly, this effect was not lost on their audience.

Seen below is San Bernardino de Siena, in Coyoacan near Mexico City, one of my favorite conventos which has an elegant and beautifully restored interior.

San Bernardino de Siena, Xochimilco, MX

   

In the Yucatan, the early convents were similarly large, but tended to be different in style largely because of the needs of the different physical environment and kinds of building materials that were available.   Here are two of my favorites.  Directly below is San Antonio de Padua in Izamal, Yucatan.  This convento has the largest enclosed atrium (patio or courtyard) in the Americas and for this reason has been dubbed "the Vatican of the Yucatan".

San Miguel Arcangel, Mani Yucatan

It was here in Mani, in 1562, that the infamous Bishop Diego de Landa ordered the burning of all the Mayan codices (books).  Only three fully-authenticated Mayan codices survive and all are now located in Europe.  Notice the horseshoe-shaped opening to the left of the entrance. This is the "Indian Chapel", an out-door chapel where religious services were held
at first for the indigenous, newly acquainted with the church, and not yet used to worshipping in an indoor space.

The question remains why these buildings resembled huge fortresses.  It was not for protection of the friars who lived and worked there; this was not an area with any ongoing physical threat.  By the time that they were constructed, at least in Central Mexico, the conquest had been finalized.  True, some of their mammoth scale was functional- there were large numbers of indigenous to be evangelized and space was needed.  But there was an even more important reason.  These new buildings, symbolic of the new religion, had to compete with the structures of the old religion.  They had to be every bit as impressive and monumental as the temples and pyramids, the Templo Mayors, the Chichenitzas that spoke religious power to the indigenous.  These were people from  complex and ancient religious traditions. If the Christian god, the god who had defeated the old gods was indeed the most powerful, he needed an impressive house. The architectural marvels that the Spanish built, as we shall see with much indigenous assistance, were exactly this. 

The Friars: Peace Corps 16th century style

Parade during Festival of St. Michael the Archangel (San Miguel d'Allende, 2010)

Friars from the religious orders followed the Conquistadors wherever they went,  beginning

in 1500 with the island of Santo Domingo (Hispaniola).  In 1524 twelve Franciscan friars

called the "twelve apostles of New Spain" (to mirror Jesus' twelve apostles) arrived in Mexico to serve as the spiritual arm of the Conquest.  The message in the photo above is clear: the friar is showing disapproval of the indigenous ritual of sacrifice.  This ritual, odious to us and to the Europeans who observed it five centuries ago, was actually a deep part of the cosmic and religious systems of many of the meso-american peoples.  Within their beliefs it was necessary for the continuation of life and was highly ritualized and regulated and not a  wanton blood-thirst and slaughter. 

These first Franciscans were idealists, utopians.  In the indigenous they saw fresh soil for a Christianity that was pure and unstained by worldly concerns the way it had become in Europe.  Trying to understand these new discovered peoples within a biblical context  (as you recall this was the only context available in the 16th century), some conjectured the  indigenous were a tribe of lost Jews.  In the idealistic hopes of these early Franciscans, they strove to create a new Jerusalem, an Indian Jerusalem.   They faced enormous hardships in this new unsettled land and came at enormous cost to personal comfort and safety and, in general, they were good men who truly believed in what they were doing.   Some, such as Bernardino de Sahagun and Bartolome de las Casas, became champions of the indigenous and their protectors against the abuses of the Spanish settlers, whose aims were often less than spiritual.

Friars' "Job Description"

The photo taken in a church in Campeche, Yucatan,  shows salvation from eternal damnation, the central religious concern of the time. ( Note that a bishop is included among those in the flames, indicating that Hell is inclusive.)  Mary, the Queen of Heaven is lifting souls from the flames.  The job of the friars was to save their indigenous charges from damnation by teaching them the Gospel and leading them to Jesus. This was a job, as we shall see, that turned out to be more difficult than they had imagined.

Within the values  of their times, which I have described more fully in my previous post, "The Mind-set of the Spanish Conquest", the friars believed they were doing the absolutely best thing one could do for another human being, despite how we may perceive their actions within a contemporary framework.   In their day and age, there was no abstract concept of "human rights", everything was bound up with religion.  Within this context, a human's most important and most basic right was the salvation of his/her soul and, given this,  the most altruistic thing the friars knew to do for the indigenous was to offer them this right through the word of Jesus.   In the new and untamed lands, the friars did this at considerable personal risk and sacrifice.   All this has led Prof. Samuel Y. Edgerton to compare them to the Peace Corps volunteers, and this really is a good way to understand their essential mission.  Like the Peace Corps, they wanted to better mankind and save the world and they attempted to do this, as they understood it, with the spiritual tools at their disposal.  

Mindset of the Spanish Conquest

Medieval " Wikipedia": The Bible

Imagine a world without Google, Wikipedia, encyclopedias, libraries, in fact without books and those only for the tiny educated elite.  There you have it- a world with just one legitimate source of knowledge, the Bible.  Everything that was known or could be known was contained in this one book and anything new that came up had to be understood in terms of it. This is the medieval mind-set, the way that people thought at the time of Columbus' journeys and the Spanish Conquest of the New World that followed. There were some like Copernicus and Galileo who were independent thinkers, but they were branded as heretics by the Church.

This was not a time that accorded equal status to all religions. Christianity to them was the crown of God's plan for mankind and the apocalyptic views prevalent at the time stated that all mankind must be converted to Christianity before the second coming of Christ and the end-times when all would be set right in the reign of Jesus the messiah.  The Spanish had been successful in this venture on their own peninsula in the reconquista and with the final expulsion of the Jews in 1492.  Completely ridding the land of Muslims was a work in process.  It is no wonder that with the discovery of new unconverted peoples in the Americas that they passionately pursued their policy of spiritual conquest. As they understood it, it was their holy mission. 

Unknown to most of us are the apocalyptic writings of Christopher Columbus, The Book of Prophecies, written after his third voyage. In it he justified his voyages in terms of the role they played in fulfilling pre-conditions for the second coming of Christ, including the spreading of Christianity throughout the world and the finding of the Garden of Eden in the Americas. This is not the Columbus most of us encountered in grade school who "discovered America".  This is the Columbus driven by the religious ideology of his time. Remember, his ships all had crosses on the sails and this was not for "X marks the spot".  They were the symbols of the faith that drove his world. 

Understanding the mindset of the times, it is easier to be less judgmental about the Conquistadors and their religious arm, the Franciscan, Dominican, Augustinian and other friars (men in the religious orders) who accompanied them.  They were doing what they believed was the correct thing- saving the world. This is the imperative they were fulfilling even if we, centuries later, disagree with their methods.  

The Spanish Conquest: the good, the bad and the beautiful

Cortes and Company

Recently I taught an introductory course on Colonial Latin American Art and Architecture to a group of adults.  At the onset, one of the class members stated that she could not forgive the  Spanish.  She was angry at them for their  treatment of the indigenous peoples during the Conquest of the Americas. I had to come up with something quickly or that was the end of the class I had planned.  We could have spent the entire session expanding upon the cruelty heaped by the Spanish upon those they subjugated- not only the American Indigenous but the Jews and Muslims in their own country.  The truth was that the Spanish had a passionate sense of their own mission in Christianizing the world they knew, but those were different times with a different mind-set than ours. We will be exploring this in my next post.

My rapid response to her was this.  While it was true that Spanish colonialization was often a cruel process, it was important to see beyond that to the resulting alchemy of the blending of Spanish aims with the resistance of the Indians.  A magnificent material culture- art, architecture and customs- was born from the pain of the indigenous- the subjugated Aztecs, Mayas, Incas and others- all the people who suffered under the yoke of the Spanish, but who in turn also changed the culture of their captors resulting in an entirely new order.

The history of art tells us that there is a universal link between art and pain.  The colonial Mexican world is almost a laboratory for seeing this link.  From the brokenness of the indigenous peoples, from the attempted destruction of their pyramids, temples, their religion and culture something totally unique was born- something completely unlike anything before.  That was Colonial Latin American world with it's magnificent churches, sculpture, paintings, and celebrations. These are the equal of anything you can see in Europe and even more interesting because you can so clearly see their roots, the imprint of the suffering that went into them and the triumph that emerged.