Two shrines of the Cristo Renovado: Religion and peasant politics in Late Colonial Mexico

American Historical Review

Volumn 110, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 945-974

  Taylor, William B ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33749874088     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.110.4.945     Document Type: Review

References (146)

1. Historia del culto de Maria en Ibero-América y de sus imágeries y santuarios mas celebrados, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1956), 2: 163.
2. Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York, 1978), 245.
3. Francisco Javier Lazcano, Vida exemplar y virtudes heroicas del venerable padre Juan Antonio de Oviedo de la Campania de Jesús (Mexico, 1760), 341.
4. These figures come from tabulating individual cases documented in various manuscript and printed sources, plus several compendiums, especially Francisco de Florencia and Antonio de Oviedo, Zodíaco mariano (Mexico, 1755);
5. Luis Mario Schneider, Cristos, santos y vtrgenes: Santuarios y devociones de México (Mexico, 1995);
6. and La ruta de los santuarios en México (Mexico, 1994), which identifies 89 Cristo shrines and 78 Marian shrines.
7. have no information about when 69 of the remaining 105 shrines began.
8. A total of 104 of 157, plus 21 miraculous crosses. This proportion holds true for more recent times, although since the early nineteenth century some images of the infant Jesus have gained a large and loyal following.
9. On the other hand, there were several striking transatlantic differences. In Spain, many miraculous images of Mary were discovered under unusual circumstances in caves, trees, or shallow burials and on hilltops, after the Christian recovery of an area from the Moors. In New Spain, it was mostly images of Christ that were discovered, and they were frequently of nature-formed in trees, marked on rocks, associated with the color green - as well as found in nature, and without the scent of holy war. These various associations point to Christ's resurrection and eternal life, but they are also signs of His active, protective presence on earth, a theme that may have been less common in Spain after the seventeenth century.
10. Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, chaps. 1 and 2 and Appendix A.
11. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), xiii.
12. New Spain's Carmelite nuns have been studied by Manuel Ramos Medina in Místicas y descalzas: Fundaciones femeninas carmelitas en la Nueva España (Mexico, 1997), See especially xxiii, 113-117, 197-198. Ramos Medina found only one wave of public record for this convent, In the mid-seventeenth century, the nuns appealed to Spain to be removed from the jurisdiction of secular ecclesiastical authorities and placed under the supervision of Carmelite prelates, 152-163.
13. The word "Mapethé" has no obvious sacred connotation in the Otomí language. Pedro Martín Godínez Salas translated it as "place of the mineral washing basins (deslavaderos)." Abandono y recuperatión de la tierra en Santuario de Mapethé, Hidalgo (Mexico, 1982), 53-54. Velasco's first publication about the Cristo Renovado reported that the image was known locally as "the Santo Cristo de Zimapán, del Cardonal, etc., and also as the Santo Cristo de las minas del Plomo pobre and de las minas de Guerrero, for its original owner,. . . but most commonly as the Santo Cristo de Yxmiquilpa, which is the headtown of the district."
14. Renovation par si misma . . . (Mexico, 1688), fol. 6v. These various names point to tensions between shared devotion and local proprietary claims discussed later in the essay.
15. Gil Gonzalez Dávila, Teatro eclesiástico de la Santa Iglesia de Mexico (Madrid, 1649-1655), 59. The image, he wrote, had sweated three times on February 17, 1621 - forty days before the death of King Philip III - and trembled on the cross five months later.
16. Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relies in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1978).
17. Itinerario a Indias (1673-1678) (Mexico, 1992), 103-109.
18. José Toribio Medina, the great nineteenth-century bibliographer and historian, identified the 1688 publication as "un informe historial jurídico" (a historical-juridical report) rather than a devotional history. La imprenta en Mexico (1539-1810), edición facsimilar, 8 vols, (Mexico, 1989), 3: 222-224. It may have circulated in manuscript a few years earlier, perhaps as early as 1684, when Archbishop Aguiar y Seixas blessed Mexico City's newly finished Carmelite church of Santa Teresa. In his preface-aprobación for Renovacion par si misma, Francisco de Florencia wrote that he had read Velasco's manuscript in 1685.
19. Antonio de Robles, Diario de sucesos notables (1665-1703). 3 vols. (Mexico. 1946), 2: 72.
20. The publication history of Velasco's text during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries more often points toward promotion. The 1724 edition was sponsored by the nuns of the Santa Teresa la Antigua convent - "a devoción de la madre priora y religiosas" - for whom the image had been brought to Mexico City in the first place. The 1996 facsimile edition of Velasco also resulted from the desire of the Discalced Carmelite nuns of Mexico City to promote the devotion. Writing in 1997, Manuel Ramos Medina observed that "very few know its history in spite of the efforts of the nuns to promote the devotion. Recently these Carmelites commemorated the 375th anniversary of the renovation of the Christ of Ixmiquilpan and reprinted Velasco's book." Mlsticas y descalzas, 136.
21. Francisco de Ajofrín, Diario del viaje que hizo a la América en el siglo XVlll el P. Fray Francisco de Ajofrín, 2 vols. (1764; repr., Mexico, 1964), 1: 106;
22. Agustín Francisco Esquivel y Vargas, El fénix del amor (1764; repr., Zamora, 1990), 109;
23. Francisco Javier Alegre, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en Nueva España, 3 vols. (ca. 1767; repr., Mexico, 1841-1842), 2: 125-128;
24. Lazcano, Vida exemplar, 341;
25. Juan de Viera, Compendiosa narración de la ciudad de México (1777) (Mexico, 1952), 56. Archivo General de la Nation, Mexico (hereafter AGN) Bienes Nacionales 1210, exp. 7, dotación de novena by Dona Maria Teresa de Borja: a 2,000 pesos lien on a house in Mexico City.
26. Gaceta de México, April 28, 1737, reported a great procession to the cathedral for prayers to restore the city to health.
27. Gaceta de México, November 29, 1797, note appended to an article on the 1797 procession to the cathedral.
28. Cayetano Cabrera y Quintero, Escudo de armas de México . . . (Mexico. 1746), 450-456.
29. On other paintings of the Cristo Renovado, especially those by Ibarra, see Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, "José de Ibarra," in Donna Pierce, Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, and Clara Bargellini, eds., Painting a New World; Mexican Art and Life, 1521-1821 (Denver, Colo., 2004), 201-202.
30. Memoria Cristiano-política sobre lo mucho que la Nueva España debe ferner de su desunión en partidos, y las grandes ventajas que puede esperar de su union y confraternidad (Mexico, 1810). Ignacio Carrillo y Pérez, the late-colonial hagiographer of miraculous images in the Valley of Mexico, wrote book-length devotional texts about four shrines: Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Los Remedios, Our Lady of Los Angeles, and the Cristo Renovado. Only the first two were published, in 1797 and 1808.
31. AGN Bienes Nacionales 1864, exp. 34; AGN Bienes Nacionales 800, exp. 12.
32. AGN Bienes Nacionales 423, exp. 19; AGN Bienes Nacionales 466, exp. 20.
33. AGN Bienes Nacionales 466, exp. 20, 1823 report of the shrine's treasurer.
34. See Odita al contemplar que desaparece de la Metropolitana de México . . . (Mexico, 1833), on the occasion of the Cristo Renovado's return from the cathedral to the Santa Teresa convent church
35. and Carlos María Bustamante's México religiose: Procesión del Señor de Santa Teresa de México a la iglesia catedral con motive de la cholera morbus (Mexico, 1833).
36. Quoted in Alegre, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús, 2: 128.
37. The only photograph of the Cristo Renovado de Santa Teresa published recently treats it as an art object rather than a devotional image. Elisa Vargas Lugo et al., Parabola novohispana: Cristo en el arte virreinal (Mexico, 2000).
38. AGN Tierras 2155, exp. 5.
39. AGN Civil 1384, exp. 11; AGN Civil 2292, exp. 4. The alcaldía mayor district of Ixmiquilpan encompassed the two parishes of Ixmiquilpan and El Cardonal and the Indian headtowns of Ixmiquilpan, El Cardonal, Orizaba, and Tlazintla and their outliers, People known historically as Otomies usually identify themselves today as Ñähñu.
40. The following discussion of developments in 1737-1748 is based on AGN Tierras 2155, exp, 5, and AGN Tierras 2904, exp. 2.
41. AGN Tierras 2155, exp. 5. In April 1744, both Morales and Diego Joseph were identified as indios principales (Indian nobles) of El Cardonal.
42. AGN Tierras 2155, exp. 5, fol. 92.
43. Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de Mexico (hereafter AHAM), Rubio y Salinas pastoral visit book, fols. 101v-106v, February 11, 1755.
44. Archbishop Rubio y Salinas refers to "la semana de San Läzaro" festivities in his 1755 pastoral visit report.
45. Relaciones geográficas del Arzobispado de México, 1743, ed. Francisco de Solano, prepared and transcribed by Catalina Romero, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1988), 1: 69.
46. The three communities were Tlazintla, Palma Gorda, and Ixmiquilpan. AGN Civil 1384, exp. 11, fol. 50r.
47. Exaltacion (1790 ed.), 33. According to Velasco, when porters attempted to take the crucifix toward Mexico City, "2,000" local Indians and some Spaniards seized the image and took it to Ixmiquilpan. Healings and other signs of Christ's presence in the image happened there before it was eventually removed to Mexico City. No one in 1748 seems to have threatened a similar mass action for the return of the image.
48. AGN Civil 1384, exp. 11, fols. 50-53; Velasco, Exaltacion (1790 ed.), 33-35.
49. Danes y promesas: 500 años de arte ofrenda (exvotos mexicanos) (Mexico, 1996), 96
50. AGN Civil 1111, exps. 1, 12, and "991."
51. AGN Civil 1111, exp. 12.
52. One witness testified that the trip from the town of Zimapán to Mapethé took about five hours. AGN Civil 1111, exp. "991."
53. The mayordomo had his two processional crucifixes confiscated and was charged with collecting money without a license to defray expenses, including the rental of outfits for those who went armed as Roman soldiers. Even ceremonial arming of Indians was controversial in this region. While the Indian governors and councilmen nominally chose the mayordomo annually, one mayordomo served throughout this period, while governors and councilmen came and went. He may well have become an especially powerful figure in the community.
54. The parish priest at the shrine and the mayordomos of Zimapán assured authorities in Mexico City that the Indians had behaved decorously. AGN Civil 1111, exp. "991"; AGN Civil 1111, exp. 1.
55. For example, Bancroft Library, uncatalogued 2002 acquisition, "Afio de 1802, criminal contra los indios del Cardonal por tumultuarios." According to Antonio Fonseca's report of March 4,1802, after five Indian laborers perished when the wall of a reservoir they were rebuilding caved in on them, the rumor spread that Spaniards wanted to kill Indians. In 1799, the archbishop did ban a larger procession of cristos in the city of Querétaro on Maundy Thursday involving as many as 8,000 Indians from neighboring communities. AGN Arzobispos y Obispos 2, fols. 308-315. In 1803, the archbishop also banned the Corpus Christi festivities in San Pedro de la Canada, near the city of Querétaro, because of "abominable excesses." But in general he found Querétaro a pious place. AHAM L10B/32 fol. 44r (1803 pastoral visit).
56. So reported the parish priest of El Cardonal, Lic. Felipe de la Bárzena. He wrote that Indians came that year from Zimapán and throughout the district of El Cardonal. AGN Civil 1111, exp. "991."
57. AGN Indios 70, exp. 259, reported ninety-seven tributaries in 1804. Using a multiplying factor of four inhabitants per tributary, the population would have been about 388.
58. AGN Tierras 2152, exp. 6; AGN Indios 70, exps. 180 and 259. In the 1740s, the headtown of Orizaba with its subordinate settlements registered 945 Otomí families and 80 non-Indian families nearby, or about 4,000 people in all. José Antonio de Villaseñor y Sánchez, Theatro Americana (Mexico, 1746), chap. 32. El Cardonal and its outliers were said to have 215 Otomí families and 73 non-Indian families at the time. The third important Indian town and outliers in the district of Ixmiquilpan was Tlazintla, with 945 Otomí families and 50 non-Indian families.
59. The two sets of disputes pitting the people of Pueblo Nuevo against their Otomí neighbors were interlocking, at least in terms of political alliances. The people of Palma Gorda belonged to the town of Orizaba and were described as close allies. Both of these adversaries of the new pueblo belonged to the parish of Ixmiquilpan rather than El Cardonal, though all were under the spiritual direction of Augustinian pastors.
60. AGN Bienes Nacionales 1047, exp. 13.
61. Lourdes M. Romero Navarrete and Felipe I. Echenique March, eds., Relaciones geográficas de 1792 (Mexico, 1995), 43.
62. Pío Sáenz, "El misterio del Cardonal oculto en la milagrosa renobación acaesida en ese pueblo . . . (1865)," University of Texas at Austin, Benson Library, G85.
63. Another case of the location of a departed crucifix being venerated in the El Cardonal area - the cross of El Maye - is mentioned by Jesús Saunas Pedraza in H. Russell Bernard and Jesús Saunas Pedraza, Native Ethnography: A Mexican Indian Describes His Culture (Newbury Park, Calif., 1989), 549.
64. William A. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, N.J., 1981), 123-124.
65. Use of relics for healing - often said by clerical authors to be ineffectual - appears in miracle stories recounted by Francisco Javier Alegre (1729-1788) in Historia de la Compañía de Jesús, 2: 8, 42-44, 75-76. He and other chroniclers of the orders in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New Spain mentioned the clothing and bones of especially venerable predecessors as if they were relics.
66. For example, Gerónimo de Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica Indiana, Cien de México ed., 2 vols. (Mexico, 1997), 2: chaps. 24-26:
67. Juan de Torquemada. Monarquía Indiana, 6th ed., 3 vols. (Mexico, 1986), 3: 179, 200, 243-250;
68. and The Oroz Codex, trans. and ed. Angélico Chávez (Washington D.C., 1972), 98, 162-164, 168, 187-192, 216-217, 248-252, 255-256, 268-269, 302-306.
69. People from the town of Alfaxayuca, southwest of Ixmiquilpan, seem to have had an especially strong association with Mapethé. They regularly sent alms, and they supplied much of the stone for construction of the church in the 1740s, in addition to participating in the annual processions.
70. On Otomí settlement patterns and their diffuse, archipelago-like distribution in central and north-central Mexico, see Leonardo Manrique C., "The Otomí," in Robert Wauchope, general ed., Handbook of Middle American Indians, 16 vols., vol. 8: Ethnology, pt. II (Austin, Tex., 1969), 682-724;
71. Victor W. Padelford, "Otomí House Types as a Reflection of Acculturation," in H. Russell Bernard, ed., Los Otomíes: Papers from the Ixmiquilpan Field School (Pullman, Wash., 1969), 49-54;
72. and Lourdes Mondragón, Patricia Fournier-García, and Nahúm Noguera, "Arqueología histórica y etnoarqueología de la comunidad alfarera Otomí de Santa María del Pino, México," in Janine L. Gasco and Greg C. Smith, eds., Approaches to the Historical Archaeology of Mexico, Central and South America (Los Angeles, 1997), 17-28.
73. Elinor Melville,A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (New York, 1994)
74. and "Cultural Persistence and Environmental Change: The Otomí of the Valle del Mezquital, Mexico," in William Balée, ed., Advances in Historical Ecology (New York, 1998), 334-348. In spite of the great changes on the land, the district of Ixmiquilpan, which encompassed most of the communities of the northern Mezquital Valley, was reported to have produced 3,000 fanegas of maize and 1,000 fanegas of wheat in 1792, although the area around El Cardonal was "arid and saline, good only for mesquite and piñon pine." This area was dotted with twenty-two lead mines and "diferentes pueblecillos de indios." Two-thirds of the 17,000 inhabitants of the district at the time were said to be Indians.
75. Romero Navarrete and Echenique March, Relaciones geográficas de 1792, 112-113.
76. Manrique, "The Otomí," 682-685. Otomí migration to Zimapán in the eighteenth century was related to the periodic surges in mining activity, but it was not just the product of a free labor market. When the Conde de Regla invested in Zimapán mines in 1768, he received permission to "employ press-gangs who rounded up laborers and forced them to work in the mines. One of these men met his end as a victim of workers' rage."
77. Edith Boorstein Couturier, The Silver King: The Remarkable Life of the Conde de Regla in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 2003), 153. The district of Zimapán in the late sixteenth century was described as "a land of few people," with no more than 400 "barbarous" Indians speaking Chichimeca and Otomí. The population of the three Indian pueblos in the vicinity had been increasing by resettlements since Spanish colonization.
78. "Relación de las minas de Zimapán," in Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, ed., Papeles de Nueva España, 7 vols. (Madrid, 1905), 6:3. In 1743, there were said to be 6,249 Indians and 200 families of non-Indians (perhaps 800 individuals); by 1779, the non-Indian population had grown to 2,584 Spaniards, 1,113 mestizos, and 326 mulattos.
79. Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (Cambridge, 1973), 70-71. An 1803 population count for the parish of Zimapán included 1,397 Indian families (6,992 individuals), 244 mestizo and mulatto families (889 individuals), and 387 Spanish families (1,533 individuals). AGN Bienes Nacionales 388, exp. 19. I have not been able to establish the extent to which Indians from other places mixed with Otomfes in this area.
80. Felipe Castro Gutiérrez, "Resistencia étnica y mesianismo en Xichú, 1769," in Sierra Gorda: Pasado y presente. Coloquio en homenaje a Lino Gómez Canedo (Querétaro, 1994), 127-136;
81. J. Jesús Solls de la Torre, Barbaras y ermitanos: Chichimecas y agustinos en la Sierra Gorda, sighs XVI, XVII, y XVIII (S.L.P., Hidalgo, y Querétaro) (Querétaro, 1983);
82. Margarita Velasco Mireles, ed., La Sierra Gorda: Documentas para su historia, 2 vols. (Mexico, 1996-1997), 1: 345-346.
83. Sources cited in Justino Fernández, Danzas de los coucheras en San Miguel de Allende (Mexico, 1941), 33-41.
84. José Díaz de la Vega, "Memorias de México: Memorias piadosas de la nación yndiana," Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, M-M 240, pt. 3
85. attributed the spread of devotion to the stone cross of Querétaro to Otomíes and Tlaxcalans. For examples of visits to Chalma, see AGN Civil 2059, exp. 4, 1817, and Juan Carlos Ruiz Guadalajara, "Un teatro eclesiástico novohispano: La Congregación de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores (De altar criollo a altar de la patria)" (master's thesis, El Colegio de Michoacán, 1999), 379.
86. AHAM L10B, fol. 107.
87. On early chroniclers, see Fernández, Danzas de los concheros, 37-41.
88. On the distinctive and numerous Otomí household chapels, see Mondragón, Fournier-García and Noguera, "Arqueología histórica y etnoarqueología," 25-27 (thirty-six in the small community of Pino Suárez, Hidalgo, alone);
89. Heidi Chemín Bässler, Las capillas oratorio atomíes de San Miguel Tolimán (Querétaro, 1993);
90. Alan R. Sandstrom, Traditional Curing and Crop Fertility Rituals among Otomí Indians of the Sierra de Puebla, Mexico: The López Manuscripts (Bloomington, Ind., 1981);
91. James W. Dow, "Sierra Otomí Religious Symbolism: Mankind Responding to the Natural World," in Douglas Sharon, ed., Mesas and Cosmologies In Mesoamerica (San Diego, Całif., 2003). 28;
92. and Jacques Galinier, The World Below: Body and Cosmos in Otomí Ritual, trans. Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott (Boulder, Colo., 2004). For an example of the naming pattern, see the population records of 1793 for Indians in the district of El Cardonal, which registered many "de la Cruz" men. AGN Bienes Nationales 818, exp. 8.
93. Christian, Local Religion, 206-208,
94. describes the distant, terrifying symbol for early modern Spain. Richard Nebel sums up a familiar view of the meaning of Christ figures in Indian Mexico that emphasizes Marian devotion: "Traditional Catholicism centered on devotion to Jesus Christ as a self-sacrificing man of sorrows . . . In this conception, the Indio sees the suffering figure of Christ as a reflection of his own tragic past and present. He seeks consolation and refuge in his mother, the Virgin Mary, and above all in the Virgin of Guadalupe." Nebel, "The Cult of Santa Maria Tonantzin, Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico," in Benjamin Kedar and R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, eds., Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land (New York, 1998), 255. For a very different view of the meaning of Christ's suffering to colonial Indians,
95. see Miles Richardson, Being-in-Christ and Putting Death in Its Place: An Anthropologist's Account of Christian Performance in Spanish America and the American South (Baton Rouge, La., 2003).
96. Jaime Cuadriello, "Tierra de prodigios: La Ventura como destino," in Los pinceles de la historia: El origen del reino de la Nueva Espana, 1680-1750 (Mexico, 1999), 219. Another self-renovating cross in an Augustinian doctrina of the vicinity is the Señor de Tzinguilucan, said to have rejuvenated itself in 1651 and grown in 1712.
97. Hector H. Schenone, Iconografia del arte colonial: Jesucristo (Buenos Aires, 1992), 328. From November 1780 to November 1781, collections at this shrine were 3,001 pesos 3 reales - a considerable sum. AGN Bienes Nacionales legajo 535, exp. 24.
98. Bancroft Library, M-M 474:1, "Coloquio de la invención de la Santa Cruz por la virtuosa Santa Elena," 1859 copy of a 1714 text by Br. D. Manuel de los Santos y Salazar.
99. Chemín Bässler, Capillas oratorio, 91-95;
100. Sandstrom, Traditional Curing, 19.
101. "There are literally scores of different figurines cut, corresponding to the large number of crops grown by the Otomí. Usually the seed figures are kept throughout the year in a wooden box which is placed on the altar of an oratorio [family chapel] . . . Once a year they are removed and used in a ceremony dedicated to crop increase after which they are returned to the box. Throughout the year small offerings are placed in front of the box in the hope of influencing crop yield." Sandstrom, Traditional Curing, 19.
102. Bernard and Salinas Pedraza, Native Ethnography, 548.
103. Yolanda Lastra de Suárez, Unidad y diversidad de la lengua: Relatas otomíes (Mexico, 2001). 221-223.
104. Margarita de la Vega Lázaro, Crónica otomí del Eatudo de México: Narrativa oral traditional (Toluca, 1998), 48-53.
105. Chemín Bässler, Capillas oratorio, 122;
106. Galinier, The World Below, 121-122.
107. Bernard and Salinas Pedraza, Native Ethnography, 548.
108. It used to be taken to all the old shrines on nearby peaks, which now have their own crosses. H. R. Harvey, "Pilgrimage and Shrine: Religious Practices among the Otomí of Huixquilucan, Mexico," in N. Ross Crumrine and Alan Morinis, eds., Pilgrimage in Latin America (New York, 1991), 91-107;
109. Angel Maria Garibay, Supervivencias de cultura intelectual precolombina entre los Otomíes de Huizquilucan (Mexico, 1957), 13-17.
110. Ruiz Guadalajara, Un teatro eclesiásticu novohispano. 398-413. The other three images are the Señor del Socorro, the Señor del Calvario, and the Señor del Hospital.
111. Bernard and Salinas Pedraza, Native Ethnography, 275, 458, 520, 527, 552.
112. Major Otomí settlements and political centers were located in Hidalgo at Xilotepec, Ixmiquilpan, and Meztitlán, but Otomíes apparently were less concentrated in one area and more migratory than other major indigenous groups of central Mexico before and especially after the beginning of Spanish rule. See Gerhard, Historical Geography of New Spain, 383-386 and 224-226. By the eighteenth century, there were new or larger pockets of Otomíes in the neighboring states of the Estado de México and Querétaro, in the Bajío, and north into San Luis Potosí, with smaller concentrations in eastern Michoacán, northern Puebla, and Tlaxcala. When tens of thousands of people migrated to the Bajío toward the end of the eighteenth century, these pockets of settlement served as stepping-stones of communication and support for Otomíes seeking employment in the mines and rural estates.
113. Otomí ethnogenesis since the sixteenth century and its political implications and possible relationship to sacred sites and images of Christ remain unstudied. Melville ("Cultural Persistence") and Galinier (The World Below) both posit historical re-creation of Otomí traditions from their knowledge of the ethnographic present, but do so without direct documentation and from different perspectives. Melville sees Otomí ethnogenesis during the colonial period as a result of the Otomíes' growing marginalization by the wider society; Galinier sees it more as an act of will - reacting against the encroachment of colonialism and modernity.
114. For example, Florencia Mallon, "The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: A Perspective from Latin American History," AHR 99, no. 5 (December 1994): 1491-1515;
115. Sinclair Thomson, We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency (Madison, Wis., 2002);
116. Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Changes to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (Durham, N.C., 2003);
117. and Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero, eds., After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas (Durham, N.C., 2003).
118. In his foreword to After Spanish Rule, xiv-xv, Shahid Amin, a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective, invites Latin Americanist readers to go light on subaltern studies theory.
119. For a recent interview with Guha about the legacy of his work, see "Writing History," Biblio: A Review of Books, November-December 2003, 10-12.
120. It is quite similar to his early position paper "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India," in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi, 1982), 1-4.
121. In Vinay Lal's view, "secular Indian intellectuals indubitably have an immense difficulty in accepting religious faith as a valid category of knowledge." "Subaltern Studies and Its Critics: Debates over Indian History," History & Theory 40 (2001): 147.
122. Recently, Dipesh Chakrabarty, a subaltern studies founder, has recognized that religious convictions need a place in more encompassing, less categorical subaltern histories because peasant politics are not pursued only in modern, secular terms. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, 2002), chaps. 1-2. How Chakrabarty and others will bring religion into subaltern historiography and the politics of difference is not yet clear.
123. Nandy questions Western rationality and what he regards as the tyranny of historical consciousness; his interests have inclined more toward biography and leadership than subaltern episodes. See his The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi, 1983), 45, 48, 59-60, 62;
124. Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion (London, 2002);
125. and "History's Forgotten Doubles," History & Theory 34 (1995): 44: "History basically keeps open only one option - that of bringing the ahistoricals into history."
126. See Louis O. Mink, "The Autonomy of Historical Understanding," History & Theory 5 (1966): 24-47 (especially 42).
127. Intimate Enemy, xiii-xv.
128. These categories concern people living with, if not altogether within, colonial settings. Two other possibilities for native peoples in Mesoamerica and the Andes were flight from colonial rule and the kind of totalizing victimization that Serge Gruzinski posits had occurred by the end of the sixteenth century. Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th-18th Centuries (Cambridge, 1993).
129. Nandy speaks of Indian counter-players as "ornamental dissenters." Intimate Enemy, xiv.
130. The Practice of Everyday Life, xii.
131. Intimate Enemy, xiv.
132. The Too of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games (New York, 2000).
133. Language and Symbolic Power, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 129.
134. Mapuches in Chile, "Chichimecs" of north-central Mexico, Mayas in Yucatan for a time in the sixteenth century, and the followers of the New Savior of Tututepec, Hidalgo, in 1769 come to mind as counter-players and counter-playing subjects. Richard Trexler highlights counter-playing aspects of the history of the once Indian, later lower-class mestizo passion play of Iztapalapa on the edge of the Valley of Mexico, in Reliving Golgotha: The Passion Play of Iztupulapa (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
135. John Tutino, "Buscando independencias populares: Conflicto social e insurgencia agraria en el Mezquital mexicano, 1800-1815," in Marta Terán and Jose Antonio Serrano Ortega, eds., Las guerras da independent-la en la América Española (Zamora, 2002), 295-321;
136. William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, Calif., 1996), 461.
137. The Practice of Everyday Life, xii. Emphasis in original.
138. Jesús Martín Barbero, Communication, Culture, and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations, trans. Elizabeth Fox and Robert A. White (London, 1993), 82.
139. One stream of recent scholarship in colonial Mesoamerican studies has a largely non-player interpretation (which might well not accept "subaltern" as an appropriate term for Nahua, Mixtec, and Maya colonial subjects): James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif., 1992);
140. Matthew Restall, The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550-1850 (Stanford, Calif., 1997);
141. and Kevin Terraciano, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: N̄udzahui History, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif., 2001).
142. AGN Civil 1111, exp. "991," petition to the Audiencia in 1793.
143. Chakrabarty acknowledges the link when he writes, "We live in societies structured by the state" and "the subaltern who abjures the imagination of the state does not exist in a pure form in real life." Habitations of Modernity, 34, 35.
144. In Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000), Chakrabarty takes up players, but they are mainly male, middle-class, and Hindu. He has been criticized for not attending to lower-caste peasants and urban workers as players.
145. See the review by Gyanendra Pandey in Journal of World History 13 (Fall 2002): 504-506.
146. Sherry B. Ortner, "Practice, Power, and the Past," Journal of Social Archaeology .1 (2001): 272, 275.