Few myths in Mexican religious history have more staying power than the sixteenth-century Christianisation of the indigenous by the mendicant friars. Indeed, the enterprise achieved the unlikely feat of impressing not only Catholic historians, with their providentialist conversion narratives, but the Church's liberal critics, for whom the mission was an instructively Catholic repudiation of the ultramontane Church, a sackcloth-and-ashes vision of what a spiritual, disinterested clergy should look like. Ryan Crewe's splendidly revisionist book offers a cogent rereading of this parable that begins with its monuments and a deceptively simple question: why did defeated native communities raise up the massive stone structures, some three hundred religious fortresses in barely half a century, that dot Mexico's central plateau? Was it a case of new religious conviction and exemplary ecclesiastical zeal? Or something else?
Crewe's answer is that indigenous agency and territoriality were the central drivers. When natives built churches, he argues, they rebuilt themselves politically. Consequently, the classical missionary dramatis personae (Motolinia, Pedro de Gante, Vasco de Quiroga) have only walk-on parts. Yet whole chapters are devoted to indigenous elites (pilpitin), fiscales (churchwarden-readers), choristers and labourers. The main church-building dynamic, Crewe argues, was a tenacious indigenous civism (‘micropatriotism’, p. 56) coupled with a pragmatic desire among indigenous elites to integrate their polities favourably into the colonial regime. At times, therefore, building churches was a way to reboot indigenous city-states (altepeme) as mendicant parishes (doctrinas); frequently, however, church-building reflected efforts by indigenous suburbs (calpolli, catholicised as visitas) to escape altepeme tutelage by acquiring doctrina status. Thus the missionary Church became indigenised, a forum for the radial, hub-versus-spoke tensions of indigenous polities (p. 101), or what Crewe at one point calls a ‘new teocalli’ (p. 160), not a Cholula-esque weight capping off an indigenous past. These struggles, the book shows in its closing sections, were tremendously complicated by the mendicant orders’ own turf wars and, from the 1550s, the secularisation of some doctrinas.
The book's thesis is explored in eight compact, deeply researched chapters, their manuscript findings gleaned, especially, from Seville's AGI and Mexico City's AGN. Chapter i (‘The burning temple’) charts the development of the Mexican indigenous urbs and the honing of Spain's mission strategy during the reconquista and in West Africa. Chapter ii describes the conversion process, arguing that this was deeply rooted in Mesoamerican political practice (p. 52). Yet colonial violence was never far away. Indeed, we learn that conversion, which implied Spanish recognition of altepemes’ status and protection from the exactions of secular colonists, was policed by native acolytes under Franciscan tutelage (niños de monasterio, pp. 73–7). These carried out what Crewe provocatively calls a ‘dirty war,’ persecuting internal dissidents. Thus indigenous people ‘chose’ the friars (p. 85), but out of political necessity.
Chapter iii, meanwhile, shows how the Church was built politically, through hundreds of bespoke alliances between religious orders and indigenous polities who competed to be parish centres (doctrinas) not satellites (visitas). Competition was fierce; indeed, by nucleating their jurisdictions the friars were unknowingly ‘picking winners’ in a city-state lottery, here destroying equilibrated polities, there perpetuating historic grudges between altepeme (pp. 101–6). In view of these stakes, indigenous churches were super-jealous of their prerogatives; hence their teopantlaca (‘church people’) enforced church attendance and cultic observances as fiscales, topiles (staff-carrying constables), and choristers (pp. 111–25). Chapter iv explores the mission's political economy, showing that the friars were by no means all impoverished Motolinias; indeed, many enriched themselves through native taxation systems, prompting complaints from visitas (p. 148). Chapter v shows how the centralising claims of indigenous doctrinas were monumentalised in the blockhouse monasteries of Mexico's highlands, restoring, as Crewe puts it, ‘the indigenous urbs – the political-religious center – within a Spanish colonial context’ (p. 174). In this construction history, Crewe tells us, there were histories of winning and losing city-states, ‘a contested social history of labor and class’ (p. 182).
The fascinating final chapters describe sixteenth-century secularisation, not as ecclesial maturation (the original idea) but as an extremely violent factional process. As covetous secular clergy tried to overrun the doctrinas, many of which were undermanned or staffed by novices, regulars resisted by pursuing their occupancy claims via the audiencia, making alliances with indigenous factions, or performing ‘ceremonies of possession’ before indigenous notaries and witnesses (pp. 200–8). If indigenous Catholics supported the friars, this was often because they understood that secularisation implied a change of fiscal regime and liturgy. Yet significant numbers of visitas with secessionist aims sought secularisation in the 1560s (pp. 218, 223). The title of the tragic closing chapter (‘Hecatomb’), evoking the decline of church-building under demographic collapse, tells its own story.
As this brief sketch shows, this is a book of discrete microhistories that work well cumulatively to substantiate the central, indigenous agency thesis. Of course, the book is not beyond reproach: one would like to know more, perhaps, about how things played out in more peripheral regions ringing the Valley of Mexico, such as Oaxaca's Mixteca or the Puebla Sierra, where the city-state was itself less consolidated. Another lingering question is what a ‘bicultural’ monastery (p. 171) looked and felt like in terms of religious practice and affect. Indeed, because of its strong emphasis on mundane politics, the book is comfortable establishing a paralellism between the indigenous and Hispanic churches (the ‘two missions’, p. 3). For the same reason, it does not anguish over degrees of religious hybridity; rather, the author is critical of the New Philology's continuity thesis (pp. 6, 53). Yet this can make native Catholicism at times seem performative, when these were, in the final analysis, places of cult, whether new or old. What were the religious semantics of church-building? How did the indigenous exercise religious agency, for instance when discerning between congregations bidding for their support? Perhaps answering these questions would have required a different kind of book; as it is, this is a fine one.
