UC Davis

Abstract

While the subject of native Christianization has been studied in many ways, scholars of early Mexico have seldom read the interaction between Amerindian devotions and Christianity as popular religion. My dissertation explores the rise and development of what I call “Mexican popular religion”—the fragmented bond between native devotional practices and Catholic decorum in early Mexico. I argue that this contentious coexistence generated a continuum of religious conflict from the period following the Spanish conquest to the mid seventeenth century. By exploring four facets of this religious association, the present study underscores two overarching themes. First, persecution unwittingly heightened the perceived efficacy of native pre-Columbian religion and maintained its widespread following. Second, religious conflict influenced the formal policy changes regarding the Christian welfare of Indians and thereby altered the Church’s conversion enterprise in New Spain. By the mid seventeenth century, Mexican popular religion formed a long process fraught with difference, unsuspecting contradictions, and unintended outcomes.This dissertation advances a specific paradigm of popular religion for early Mexico. Mexican popular religion describes the relationship between native ancestral devotions and Catholicism that unfolded in an ad hoc manner. Far from isolated camps, their respective actors traversed and reshaped the institutional boundaries set by Catholic decorum. The present framework, therefore, uncouples conventional binary models of popular religion by deconstructing the mediated exchanges, disputes, and pragmatic adaptations that took place within a shared religious space. Its findings suggest that religious conflict served as a mechanism of change rather than a byproduct of native Christianization in early Mexico.