Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  There are not above fifty churches and chapels, cloisters and nunneries, and parish churches in [Mexico] city, but those that are there are the fairest that ever my eyes beheld. The roofs and beams in many of them are all daubed with gold. Many altars have sundry marble pillars, and others are decorated with brazil-wood stays standing one above another with tabernacles for several saints richly wrought with golden colors, so that twenty thousand ducats is a common price of many of them. These cause admiration in the common sort of people, and admiration brings on daily adoration. . . . All the copes, canopies, hangings, altar cloths, candlesticks, jewels belonging to the saints, and crowns of gold and silver, and tabernacles of gold and crystal to carry about their sacrament in procession would mount to the worth of a reasonable mine of silver, and would be a rich prey for any nation that could make better use of wealth and riches. I will not speak much of the lives of the friars and nuns of that city, but only that there they enjoy more liberty than in parts of Europe and that surely the scandals committed by them do cry up to Heaven for vengeance, judgment, and destruction.

  It is a lesson in how one man’s sanctuary can be another’s temple of the profane. Even when both worship the same god.

  Indeed, the effort to build a cathedral that was mightier, more richly adorned than the Incas’ Coricancha or the Aztecs’ Huei Teocalli, inflicted far more demands on Spanish resources and Indian endurance than any project undertaken in the Anglo-American colonies. Tithing was compulsory, often punishing, put in place by Alexander VI’s papal bull as early as 1501 precisely for the maintenance of the Church in the Indies. Anything grown on American soil as well as anything mined from it would henceforward be taxed, its proceeds assigned “for all time” to the “Church of the Catholic Kings.” Supplemented by fees demanded for baptisms, communions, weddings, funerals, and special blessings, the coffers were always full, ensuring ever grander processions and richly embroidered chasubles. So wealthy, in fact, did the colonial clergy become, that by the nineteenth century, when revolutionaries stormed the palaces to seek independence from Spain, almost half of all property in Mexico City belonged to the Church. In Caracas, when Simón Bolívar inherited the wealth that would make him rich enough to fund the liberation of six republics, it was from an uncle priest, who had died and left a fortune in lay properties. In Lima, enterprising clergy had so much money to spare that the Peruvian Church became a muscular bank, the major supplier of credit to citizens of the viceroyalty.

  Landowners as well as merchants—miners as well as farmers—relied on ecclesiastical institutions for loans, sometimes surrendering their properties as collateral. Donning the cassock became such a tried-and-true avenue to riches that Pope Gregory XIII issued a complaint, scolding Franciscans in silver-boom Mexico and Peru for doffing their robes and returning to Spain as fatcat aristocrats, having labored more to “enrich themselves than to mind the salvation of their flocks.” But individual priests were not alone in material ambitions. Their organizations, too, were profiting mightily from the labors of evangelization. By the end of the eighteenth century, it became all too obvious to the Crown that the colonial Church had accumulated a massive amount of lucre. When the Jesuits were stripped of their missions, banished from the Americas and disbanded in disgrace, the Society of Jesus was the most affluent property owner in the colonies, owning more than four hundred successful haciendas throughout the continent and controlling great swaths of arable land.

  In the course of three centuries of colonial rule, the Church had grown skilled at glorifying itself and lining its pockets, but it had also accomplished considerable good. Even as Las Casas was persuading the courts in Spain to classify Indians as miserabiles—a legal designation that demanded the Crown’s protection—the Church established a General Indian Court meant to hear out any Indian who felt he had been wronged. At least its intention was just, whether or not its decisions were ever followed. The Church also constructed and oversaw hospitals, missions, and schools, essentially working alone to provide these services. As conquistadors focused on what they might extract, the Church looked about to see what it might leave behind. At first, it was the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians who undertook the education of the impoverished indigenous masses. Eventually the Jesuits—perhaps the greatest single educational force in the New World—established a network of schools and colleges that would serve white Creoles throughout Spanish America.

  As splintered as the orders were, a set Catholic curriculum ensured a uniformity of thought—a programmed catechism, a coherent belief system—which the Crown and the Inquisition found convenient. For centuries, a Catholic education seemed the only thing the increasingly sprawling colonial system had in common. Eventually Bolívar would claim that a single faith and a single language, conditions of a grueling conquest, had turned out to be Latin America’s best hope: two shared traits that suggested the potential for a solid and powerful union, an opportunity for South America to unite and create a mighty bulwark against the world. It was a brief salute to the good that Spain had wrought in the midst of all the bad. The solidarity he envisioned, however, would never come to pass. Although the Christianizing campaign, as messy and uneven as it was, had exerted its consolidating effects, it could not compete with the strict separation that Spain had demanded of its colonies. The mother country had proved masterful at keeping its territories isolated, ignorant, and suspicious of one another, although faith had made them one.

  None of this is to say that the Church didn’t commit egregious injustices—both by bishops and orders—against the very people they were pledged to “civilize.” The Church had two faces, good and bad, and too often the good had a habit of looking the other way when brutalities were committed in the name of evangelization. The Franciscans imposed harsh corporal punishments on any Indian who was late to religion lessons, giving the transgressor five sharp blows on the back with a spiked stick. Well into the eighteenth century, they maintained stocks and jails for natives who didn’t comply with their rules or practices. Presidios and missions employed armed soldiers as guards, an association that would prove tricky as priests became identified with the strong arm of conquest. But priests themselves were often to blame for these associations. In their uncontrollable zeal to purge old faiths and install the new, missionaries destroyed much of pre-Columbian culture, consigning a large share of indigenous learning to the dustbin of history.

  Often they were simply swept away by the violence of the times. Frustrated by the fierce opposition of the Chichimecas in Mexico, some friars joined the demand for a full-scale war of extermination—guerra a fuego y a sangre—to purge the landscape of belligerent Indians and facilitate a wholesale appropriation of Indian territories. In the late sixteenth century, the head of the Franciscan order in Yucatán, Diego de Landa, outraged by evidence that the Mayans were still secretly worshiping their idols, unleashed a host of atrocities. Thousands of Indians were subjected to la estrapada or la garrucha: hanged by their wrists with irons strapped to their legs, one of the Inquisition’s most dreaded tortures. Needless to say, hundreds died. Landa then called for five thousand Mayan statues and an abundance of precious books to be dragged into the main plaza and pounded to rubble or burned to ash to teach the Indians once and for all that their history was abhorrent; their only salvation, the cross. One might argue that it is unfair for us to pass judgment on sixteenth-century barbarities from the vantage of present-day sensibilities, except for one glaring fact: the Church, then as now, hewed to the basic theological principle that faith had to be accepted freely. New World friars had lost sight of that principle. That, along with the slave raids, violent incursions, reductions, exploitations, diseases, wholesale rapes—all the grievances associated with conquistadors—tended to turn natives away from Christianity. As one humble Mexican put it: I don’t want to go to heaven if there are Spaniards there.

  To be sure, there were churchmen who labored notably to preserve the Indian culture and its past—the Franciscans
Bernardino de Sahagún and Motolinía, for instance, or the Dominican Las Casas—priests who held the firm conviction that in order to convert people, one must know and understand their ways. Anglo-America never produced a single defender of the American Indian comparable to those Spaniards. Likewise, the Las Casas–Sepúlveda debate in Valladolid, which strove to establish whether the indigenous were fully human, was remarkable for having happened at all—much less having been called for by a king. In the history of the world, there is nothing to equal that impassioned deliberation.

  But Spain’s mission frontier system, in which priests were the vanguard, was itself an invasion, meant to disrupt, transform, force natives from the godless fringes and into the orbit of Christianity. The intent may have been subtle persuasion, but the result was to turn the indigenous world upside down. The arrival of men in robes—unarmed trailblazers who ventured where others feared to tread—was a harbinger of the servitude that would follow, the loss of the old, a forced acceptance of the new. Unlike the British colonization of North America, in which pioneers pushed into territories, settled, and evicted the Indians by violent force, the Spanish did the reverse: they pushed in, settled, and absorbed the Indians. They reduced them, baptized them, reproduced with them. Mostly this worked. Sometimes it didn’t. In what is now Chile, the Araucanian Indians were so defiant in their rejection of the colonists that the missionaries cautiously stepped aside while a bloody war lasting generations raged on, eventually producing a lucrative slave trade for Spain.

  As religious orders pressed into the interior of the Americas, indoctrination became a calculated process. Along with evangelizing the masses, the Church struggled to do what a colonial government in all its greed and corruption could not: shape and advance the culture, tend to the welfare of the people. It was because of priests that Mexico had a printing press in 1539, and because of them that universities would crop up one after another to serve the children of whites—in Lima, Mexico City, La Plata, Santo Domingo, Bogotá—bastions of orthodoxy that strove to mirror the exuberant intellectual culture of the madre patria. In time, and although they differed wildly in approach, the mendicants succeeded in bringing more and more Indians into the fold precisely because they offered these services. Franciscans, seeped in millenarian and apocalyptic visions, hurried from village to village, baptizing hordes of Mexicans at a time, dispensing with the time-consuming business of teaching the rudiments of catechism. Dominicans, heritors of a great intellectual tradition, were the first evangelizers of Peru and the first to teach the natives Spanish, although they stopped short after a few basics and refused to teach them too much. The thinking was that a truly educated Indian would be at odds with the racial subjugation necessary to drive a burgeoning slave economy. Jesuits, on the other hand, taught natives all they knew, from Latin, to Bach, to astronomy. They founded prestigious schools in the urban centers, focusing on the children of the powerful; and then radiated into far corners of jungle to teach all the rest, building worlds unto themselves, proving themselves far better governors than their masters.

  ACHIEVING UTOPIA

  All monks have achieved is rank robbery and oppression, enriching themselves on the sweat and agony of Indians.

  —Tupac Inca Yupanqui, 1783

  At first, as priests proliferated through highlands and low, spreading Christ’s word and warning the natives about the perils of worshiping false gods, the Indians suspected that they were demons. These were surely the pishtacos of Quechua lore, the kharisiri of Aymara legend: evil, white goblins that roamed the land, rendering the fat of their victims and using it for baptismal oil. The Indians had watched, horrified, as Spanish soldiers rummaged through fields of battle, searching for enemy dead and carving off chunks of body fat to apply to their own bleeding wounds. The practice was common enough in an age when priest-surgeons in the Old World used warm oil to speed healing, but from there, the rumors multiplied. This was a race of white foreigners, well equipped, charismatic, powerful—with silver tongues and fancy promises—but they needed the fat of Indians to make their church bells ring, their wheels spin, their cannons fire.

  Much about the Spanish priests seemed foreign, otherworldly, downright peculiar. The high priests of the indigenous, for all their power and remove, had led normal lives with wives and children. Their worship of sun, rain, earth—abiding realities of life—seemed sensible, practical. But these strange, pale apparitions who pledged themselves to celibacy and worshiped a ruined prophet nailed to a wooden cross seemed bizarre, laughable. How could a celibate priest be a fully realized man if he had never attained personhood through the procreative power of sex, the most natural law there was? How could a tribe in long robes and shaved crowns aim to teach about matters of the spirit if its members were so naive about life itself?

  Xavier Albó, joining the Jesuits centuries later, would encounter the same suspicions in rural Bolivia and Ecuador. Many was the time a giggling child would run up, boldly pull up his skirt, and shout, “Dentro de este padrecito hay un hombre!”—“There’s a man inside this little priest!” A male in a robe seemed so alien; a gangly white male wandering the remote villages, more so. He made special efforts to ingratiate himself to the whispering señoras in the markets, the laborers shuffling home from the mines. He knew the history. He understood what it meant to be approached and preached to by a stranger from Spain. He would explain that, in truth, he was Catalan—an outsider like them, with a culture and language quite distinct from the Spanish. His listeners nodded and smiled politely. Eventually he began to call himself Bolivian. In time, he would shed his black cassock altogether.

  The priest as party to conquest was very much on Xavier’s mind as he finished his First Studies, the requisite years of Jesuit training before he committed himself fully to a specialization. An invader was not what he had ever intended to be. Growing up in the chaos of a rancorous civil war, in a world in which fathers and grandfathers were murdered for random passions, he had been given God’s light; he simply wanted to pass it on. He was discovering now that he cared less about proselytizing than about the hand he might proffer, the work he might do to offset the stunning neglect that was all too evident around him. He had not imagined that the indigenous themselves—their language, their traditions, their fully formed spiritual dispositions—would captivate him as they had. The most humble, the stone poor—the miserabiles—had become his teachers. It was to them that he wanted to dedicate his work in these fields of the Lord. The cities might be full of rich, up-and-coming Latin Americans, as he had learned in La Paz and now in Quito—the economically viable, the healthy, the educated 20 percent—but he was sure that it was the rural indios and their progeny, clinging to an ancestral past, keeping alive their daily rituals and beliefs, who held the fate of Latin America in their hands.

  In these reflections, Xavier was little different from Jesuits who had created missions five hundred years before in what are now the borderlands between Paraguay and Brazil. As a newly minted order, trying to define its role in those wilds, the Jesuits had applied themselves to the welfare of those for whom Spaniards had little use: the Guaraní, who had fled slavery by penetrating deeper and deeper into the forests. Building an all-Guaraní army to defend their flock from Portuguese raiders and colonial bosses, the Jesuits began a long tradition of outmaneuvering governors and bishops, and doing things their own way. Jesuit reductions were largely humane enterprises, communities in which men of the cloth immersed themselves in tribal cultures, respectful of traditions they might not wholly understand. And they were profitable. Some observers in Europe went so far as to say that in the remote forests of an unfriendly continent, the Jesuits were achieving Utopia.

  * * *

  Xavier might as well have been living in the jungle of Madidi for all he heard about Cuba and the fateful revolution that promised to shape the Latin American future. Even as Castro and Guevara huddled in the pine-studded forests of Cuba’s Sierra Cristal, awaiting the opportune moment to invade H
avana, Xavier was doing fieldwork in Bolivia, learning all he could about the peculiarities of an ancient language. Quechua presented surprising subtleties, seemingly endless variations. Shaking the fleas from his blanket and moving from one village to another, he was determined to record a linguistic system that had never been documented adequately before. The most revolutionary thing on his mind was hardly the Marxist idea—the Spanish Civil War had cured him of that—but the pronunciations of ka and kha, a distinction that could make him a credible speaker or a ridiculous laughingstock. He listened to an older, more seasoned priest articulate the glottal and velar distinctions between those two consonants until his dentures fell out, prompting Xavier to quip that this was a pronunciation he couldn’t possibly replicate.

  He wandered into whorehouses unwittingly, seeing “señoras” gather on balconies, thinking it a convenient enough signal to chat. He went about meticulously recording the differences between northern and southern inflections. One day, in order to capture what sounded like an elegant accent, he interviewed a sweet, old woman, who turned out to be the mother of the interior minister, and so was arrested on suspicion of espionage. In short, he was documenting a culture as well as a language. He became a census taker so as to widen his contacts: knocking on doors, sitting on stones, conferring with mothers about children, fathers about aspirations, children about play. He scoured the countryside in a sputtering old motorcycle, his cassock fluttering in the wind. He was seeing Latin America as few outsiders did, and he was learning what it meant to be Andean, a mountain people, stubbornly marginal, living in a universe apart from the rich and powerful. He continued this work throughout his tenure as a novitiate, and he continued the fieldwork in Bolivia even as he was earning a doctorate in sociolinguistics at Cornell University in the United States.