This fascinating collection explores early Mexico's emotional landscape, looking at how emotions were manifested, channeled, and manipulated within the ideational framework of colonialism. The editors divide the anthology into two parts: the first treats emotions at a personal level, the second the role of institutions and officials in shaping emotional culture. The sections share certain themes, notably the important roles of Church and state in establishing standards and assumptions that, though modified over time, created a framework within which colonial Mexicans “experienced, evaluated, and expressed their emotions” in a number of distinct and often overlapping “emotional communities” (7).
In chapters by Jacqueline Holler and Linda Curcio-Nagy, the Catholic Church emerges as the primary arbiter of Mexicans' emotional worlds. Sorrow was humanity's natural state, and Holler locates sadness, a fixed state and, critically, a “religious condition,” squarely at the core of Mexican society (27). But sorrow could slide into melancholy, a more persistent condition linked to demonic possession, to which women were thought more susceptible. Happiness, conversely, was ephemeral, more a “temporary—and not always trusted—antidote to the overall valorization of sadness” (34). Curcio-Nagy explores the tensions between the Church and popular culture manifested in competing visions of love and desire—the first more proscriptive and confining, the second more open and indulgent. Passion was anathema in the first, essential in the second. Colonial Mexicans toggled between the two, but with the knowledge that the Church offered forgiveness and grace to those who confessed their sin.
While control is a subtext in both Holler's and Curcio-Nagy's chapters, it is central to the chapters by Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Alejandro Cañeque, and Andrew B. Fisher. Lipsett-Rivera looks at jealousy, finding that both men and women experienced and responded physically to jealousy, often through face cutting. Both men and women acted out of fear of loss of control or sustenance, but women were far more likely to be acted upon—even jealous women attacked other women, not their wayward partners. Cañeque explores the “asymmetrical and unequal nature of emotions” (94) in political relations, arguing that Spanish political thinkers drew on “classical antiquity's understanding of the role played by certain emotions in the political community” (115). Mutual love between ruler and ruled was essential, but so too was an element of fear on the part of the ruled: a ruler had to achieve a balance between love and fear, to control his passions so that the unruly passions of the common people could themselves be controlled.
Cañeque chooses four moments of rupture—the 1562 Ávila-Cortés conspiracy, the 1624 revolt that deposed the viceroy, the 1660 Tehuantepec Indian rebellion, and the 1692 Mexico City riot—to demonstrate how political theory matched practice. Fisher explores self-control at the local level in the tierra caliente of Western Mexico, examining the “emotive performances” of two factions, one involving secular authorities and their supporters, and the other led by the parish priest and his Indian parishioners in the multiethnic town of Axochitlán during the early 1790s. Fisher pairs the official inquest of the deposing of the town's assistant justice with correspondence between the investigating magistrate and the intendant, revealing the emotional turmoil that lay behind the official mask of composure. In the official's account of villagers' responses to his presence, we see, obliquely, their mimicry of relations of dominance and subjugation.
The institutional manipulation of emotions provides the thematic link among the anthology's final three chapters. Frances Ramos explores elites' efforts to cultivate civic pride among Puebla residents through the myth of the city's angelic founding and the celebration of its patron saint the Archangel Michael. Javier Villa-Flores analyzes the intersection of Bourbon tax policy and emotional malleability in the promotion of the Royal Lottery, arguing that the lottery offered excitement and suspense as well as the chance to demonstrate pity and compassion for the poor, beneficiaries of at least some of the revenues. Matthew O'Hara looks at Catholic sermonists' efforts to address congregants' anxiety in the politically tumultuous final years of the colony, finding in their sermons that “fear, uncertainty, and despair interacted in surprising ways with confidence, trust, and hope” (202).
This remarkable collection showcases the work of several young scholars who are forging new ways of thinking about colonial Mexican social relations. It is a fine addition to colonial studies, and it promises to be useful both in the classroom and as a stimulus to further scholarship.
