Two Shrines of the Cristo Renovado: Religion and Peasant Politics in Late Colonial Mexico

By: William B. Taylor

Whether in apologetic literature or scholarship, the Virgin Mary appears to dominate Mexico’s devotional landscape, especially in the guise of Our Lady of Guadalupe. “Mexico can pride itself on the glorious title of `Marian land,'” wrote Father Rubén Vargas Ugarte in Historia del culto de María en Ibero-América y de sus imágenes y santuarios más celebrados, his monumental survey of the Virgin Mary in Latin America.¹ To Victor and Edith Turner, the Virgin of Guadalupe is Mexico’s “dominant symbol,” presiding over “the total symbolic system”—situated at the apex of pilgrimage routes and a hierarchy of shrines and images.² It is a surprise, then, to find a murmur of dissent in the last pages of Francisco Javier Lazcano’s 1760 celebratory biography of his fellow Jesuit and Marian devotee Juan Antonio de Oviedo. After praising Oviedo’s extensive revision and publication in 1755 of Francisco de Florencia’s forgotten manuscript Zodíaco mariano—the first survey of Marian shrines in Mexico—Lazcano remarked: May Heaven one day awaken a pen equal to that of Father Oviedo so that another great work of history worthy of the Christian World’s acclamation will describe in detail the prodigious crosses and miraculous images of Jesus Christ, Our Lord, that make this kingdom famous in innumerable magnificent shrines throughout its vast dioceses. This kingdom is no less favored by the Son of God, Jesus Christ, Our Lord, in his infinite mercy than by the most beloved Mother of a God who is her son.³	1
Frontispiece: Depiction of the Cristo Renovado de Ixmiquilpan/Cristo Renovado de Santa Teresa in the first edition of Alfonso Alberto de Velasco’s Exaltacion de la Divina Misericordia en la milagrosa renovacion de la soberana Imagen de Christo Señnor N. Crucificado que se venera en la Iglesia del Convento de San Ioseph de Carmelitas Descalzas de esta ciudad de México (Mexico, 1699).
I am not the one to write Lazcano’s imagined chronicle, but, like him, I have noticed that local and regional devotion to particular images of Christ often exceeded the popularity of celebrated images of the Virgin Mary during the colonial period, and I have wondered what drew devotees to them. (Of course, the two are often intimately related and complementary, as in the Madonna and Child, or Our Lady of Sorrows and the Crucifixion.) Of about 480 Mexican shrines to miraculous images that have attracted followers from beyond their immediate vicinity since the sixteenth century, 219 are dedicated to images of the Virgin Mary and 261 to images of Christ.⁴ True, the Christs are more likely than the Marys to have become famous during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but at least 156 of the shrines to images of Christ developed during the colonial period.⁵ Most of them were confined to district-wide or regional followings, but the Lord of Chalma, the Cristo Renovado de Santa Teresa, the Stone Cross of Querétaro, Guatemala’s Lord of Esquípulas, and a dozen others were more widely venerated.	2
Christocentric devotion in New Spain (the colonial administrative territory that encompassed modern Mexico plus much of Central America and the Spanish borderlands that are now part of the United States) was closely related to European practices at the time, and rooted in medieval traditions. It came to the fore in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with Catholic reforms following the Council of Trent’s promotion of the liturgy of the Eucharist, commemoration of Christ’s Passion during Holy Week, and the feasts of the Holy Cross and Corpus Christi. Two-thirds or more of the colonial Mexican Christ shrines were dedicated to crucifixes.⁶ As in Europe, some of these crucifixes famously showed signs of life—sweating, bleeding, and groaning—in ways that recalled Christ’s suffering, sacrifice, and promise of eternal life. Some images of Mary showed signs of life, too, but less often. In both Europe and Mexico, dilapidated images of Christ spontaneously restored themselves to fine condition, recalling Christ’s resurrection and the promise of eternal salvation of the soul, while Marian images were more often said to have remained in preternaturally fine condition when they should have decomposed or been damaged, in the spirit of Mary’s perpetual virginity.⁷	3
In short, in New Spain and the future Mexico, there was not just one dominant symbol presiding over a hierarchy of sacred places and images; nor did images of Mary overshadow all others. While the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe had become the most widely known object of faith in New Spain by the late eighteenth century, Tepeyac—the legendary site of the Virgin Mary’s apparitions to Juan Diego in 1531 and where her miraculous image appeared mysteriously on his cloak—was not much more appealing beyond its own vicinity before the mid-nineteenth century than were eight or nine shrines to other miraculous images, not to mention the hundreds of shrines to yet other images of Mary and Christ that were regarded as essential to the well-being of people living nearby. Little in the way of an interlocking system of pilgrimage routes ending at Tepeyac developed—even with the advent of railroads in the late nineteenth century, when great streams of visitors to the shrine began to arrive from distant places—and there were about as many shrines to miraculous images in 1900 as in 1700. With so many shrines and images in play, the subject reaches far beyond Our Lady of Guadalupe and a Wal-Mart-style history in which other shrines fell away in the face of the irresistible attraction and relentless promotion of one dominant symbol.⁸	4
A self-restoring crucifix in central Mexico that stirred interest in two separate shrines during the eighteenth century offers an opportunity to reach beyond the idea of a hierarchy of shrines and the claim that written records generated by colonial institutions yield little more than the intentions of colonial elites and the operation of those institutions. It enables us to study Christocentric devotion in particular places and to consider what Michel de Certeau called “the secondary production hidden in the process of utilization.”⁹ The story in this essay revolves around a loss later remembered by rural devotees in ways that made the place of the miracle of self-restoration more important than the relic itself. More broadly, it is about the politics of faith in two places through the direction and redirection of an official story, and about how historians might reckon with elusive questions of religion and the negotiation of colonial circumstances by Indian villagers. “Indian” here means the descendants of indigenous Americans, who recognized themselves by, among other names, this one that Spanish authorities applied to them, but the other India also has a place in my reckoning with the bi-local developments at hand, as readers will see in the last section of the essay.	5

Until recently, I knew the story of the Cristo Renovado only from various editions of a small book with a long title, Exaltacion de la Divina Misericordia en la milagrosa renovacion de la soberana Imagen de Christo Señor N. Crucificado, que se venera en la Iglesia del Convento de San Ioseph de Carmelitas Descalzas de esta ciudad de México. It amounts to the providential biography of a celebrated crucifix in Mexico City, presented in an omniscient narrator’s voice, published first in the late seventeenth century to encourage devotion and sanctify a struggling convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns founded a few years before the crucifix was brought to them. It is a story of God’s grace in the world from the pen of Dr. Alfonso Alberto de Velasco, a learned metropolitan priest who served as chaplain to these nuns—a finished, official story that might well be said to colonize knowledge and silence or marginalize other voices. By itself, Velasco’s text could not bring me close to devotees and other possible histories of the image. But now I have three clusters of eighteenth-century records and a sprinkling of other references that complicate Father Velasco’s seamless, linear story. The host Carmelite nuns remain offstage in both Velasco’s text and the administrative record of the shrine in Mexico City, and there is little to say about their devotion to the crucifix. This is not surprising. They did not directly administer the shrine, and with their emphasis on silent prayer, individual work, poverty, privacy, and the solitude of the cell, the reformed Carmelites called for an unusual measure of austerity and discipline, which kept these nuns largely out of the public record. Theirs eventually became the most prestigious convent in Mexico City, attracting local women from white, elite families to a particularly arduous, self-abnegating life, but even their assistance to the needy is little documented, and they seem to have escaped the kinds of troubles that could bring the activities of cloistered life into view for strangers.¹⁰	6
First, here is the view from Mexico City through Father Velasco’s story of the image, and a sketch of the devotion there during the colonial period. Known variously as the Señor de Santa Teresa, the Cristo Renovado de Ixmiquilpan, the Cristo de El Cardonal, or simply the Cristo Renovado, it is a nearly life-size crucifix that was removed to Mexico City in 1623 from the small mining community of Mapethé just north of El Cardonal in the western hills of modern Hidalgo State.¹¹ (See Map 1.) Velasco wrote in the 1680s that the crucifix had been brought to Mapethé by a Spanish miner in 1545 and was housed in a modest chapel, attracting more attention from hungry insects than from devotees. The image became so dilapidated that in 1615 the archbishop ordered it to be broken apart and buried with the next adult to die in the parish. For nearly six years thereafter, however, no one died, and mysterious groans and celestial music drifted from the chapel late at night. In 1621, the image began to perspire and twitch on the cross, and during a fierce storm it floated free and was restored to fine condition before becoming reattached. The image continued to show signs of life, occasionally opening its eyes, perspiring, and spurting blood. Marvelous healings of local people and an abundant crop of maize followed. Later that year, the archbishop ordered the image brought to Mexico City for safekeeping, because the miner’s chapel had virtually collapsed. Velasco mentioned that local Indians and Spaniards struggled against the removal of their now-prodigious image before it was taken to the capital, where it was received with great rejoicing.	7
Map 1: The Shrine of Mapethé and Surroundings
I know of just one earlier reference to the image and devotion. Gil González Dávila’s survey of the history of the Archdiocese of Mexico from a European perspective, published in Madrid in 1649, mentioned that the image sweated, trembled, and performed other miracles in 1621 and was moved to the Carmelite convent in Mexico City on orders of the archbishop, who wanted it rescued from its precarious location near the Chichimec frontier.¹² González Dávila did not mention the act of self-renovation that is central to Velasco’s story; nor did he mention the crumbling chapel. He offered the classic furta sacra (“holy theft”) story, familiar in medieval European hagiography, of relics rescued from danger or neglect and moved by their new owners to another location.¹³ The shrine of the Cristo Renovado in Mexico City apparently did not become important until the end of the seventeenth century; Fr. Isidro de la Asunción, the Spanish Carmelite inspector who resided in central Mexico from 1673 to 1678, did not mention it in the chapter on shrines of his Itinerario a Indias.¹⁴	8
The first version of Velasco’s account of the image, published in 1688 as Renovacion por si misma de la soberana imagen de Christo Señor Nuestro crvcificado, que llaman de Ytzimiquilpan (vulgarmente Ysmiquilpa, y Esmiquilpa): colocada en la iglesia del convento de San Joseph, de religiosas Carmelitas descalça desta imperial ciudad de Mexico. Narracion historica, qve la refiere, con fundamentos de hecho, y derecho, para que se declare por Milagrosa, y los demàs sucessos, reads like a digest of one of the extended legal reports called informaciones jurídicas that were prepared for episcopal courts in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico to evaluate cases for beatification of a holy person or recognition of a miraculous image.¹⁵ Composed for a campaign to establish the authenticity of miracles associated with the image, it bristles with testimony and references to various documents, witnesses, and experts, and is organized into a long series of numbered paragraphs rather than chapters that develop a story line. The year after Renovacion por si misma appeared, Archbishop Francisco Aguiar y Seixas examined a full set of depositions supporting the tradition of supernatural restoration and declared it to be an authentic miracle.¹⁶ It is not clear whether the archbishop fully supported Velasco’s dramatic extension of the origin story told by González Dávila, who may have garbled or radically simplified the tradition that reached him from Mexico.	9
With the archbishop’s official endorsement of a miraculous restoration and a buzz of public excitement after the image was believed to have brought relief to the city from an epidemic in 1697, the devotion took off. That year, Italian visitor Juan Gemelli Carreri called the chapel of the Cristo Renovado one of the Valley of Mexico’s three great shrines (among more than sixty celebrated miraculous images by my count). The first edition of Velasco’s apologetic book, revised for a general readership from his 1688 publication, appeared in 1699 along with a printed program of prayers and other devotions for an annual novena in the church of Santa Teresa. A second novena booklet appeared in 1715, followed in 1724 by a reprinting of Velasco’s 1699 text and a new book for devotees of the image by the Jesuit Domingo de Quiroga. Then in 1731, a lengthy sermon inspired by the image was delivered and published by one of the capital’s leading preachers, Manuel Folgar. In all, there have been twelve editions of Velasco’s devotional history, published without revisions to his text. They were printed in four clusters: 1699 and 1724; 1776, 1790, 1807, 1810, and 1820; 1845 and 1858; and facsimiles in 1945, 1951, and 1996. The silence between 1858 and the facsimile editions coincided with a long decline in popular and official interest in the image in Mexico City. The gaps in publication during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries seem to have less to do with declining interest than with the history of promotion by archiepiscopal authorities.¹⁷ Publications and descriptions of popular devotion to the Cristo Renovado were less conspicuous during the period of concerted official promotion of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the 1740s and 1750s, but chroniclers in the 1760s and 1770s continued to single out this crucifix as one of the great miraculous images favoring New Spain, and private bequests were accumulating.¹⁸ Between 1724 and 1776, there is ample evidence of growing devotion in Mexico City. Enthusiasm for the Cristo Renovado as a processional image and “celestial physician” (celestial médico) in times of illness seems to have taken firm hold during the great epidemic of 1737, when many thousands of people accompanied the image to Mexico City’s cathedral and crowded in for a novena of public prayers and masses.¹⁹ It would be taken in procession to the cathedral for novenas during other epidemics in 1761, 1779, 1784, 1797, and 1833.²⁰	10
Figure 1: Velasco’s written text was not revised in its various editions, but the prints of the Cristo Renovado that embellished them did change. The crucified Christ in the 1699 print (see Frontispiece) hangs heavy on the cross, with the ravaged torso accentuated and the figure blending into a busy, textured background set off by two lighted candles and other decorations. This 1807 print is very similar to the others that appeared in the editions after 1776. Here Christ’s body is less tortured and seems to float on the cross. The background is plainer and begins to recede.
Paintings of the celebrated crucifix made for devotees in Mexico City and the provincial city of Querétaro during the eighteenth century trace a similar pattern of promotion and devotion. Most were painted in Mexico City during the 1730s, when the Cristo Renovado was featured in penitential processions.²¹ At least three were done by José de Ibarra, an especially popular Mexico City painter of the time, and several found their way to Spain. One that advertised itself as having “touched the original” went to a Carmelite convent in Málaga, Spain, in the 1740s, attracting an ardent following among the nuns there. They eventually received from the Mexico City shrine two of the original nails from the cross of the Cristo Renovado in exchange for three gold-plated, diamond-studded replacements.²² These eighteenth-century paintings and publications kept the focus on the image and MexicoCity as especially favored by the original miracle of self-restoration, and devotional fervor to the Cristo Renovado intensified during times of crisis, as the surge of interest during epidemics suggests.	11
Figure 2: This 1820 print accentuates the figure of Christ and extends neoclassical motifs of dignified simplicity and Christ’s perfection in its large but spare fluted base, the unobtrusive background, and the refinement of the body. It is more about the figure of Christ, but less about his agony. If these differences are signs of changing religious sensibilities in Mexico City, there is little to suggest that devotees of the shrine at Mapethé were catching the new spirit.
The years immediately before and during the War of Independence (1810–1821), when a new and grander chapel for the Cristo Renovado was under construction in the Carmelite church, represent the period of greatest official promotion, wealth, and popularity of this shrine after the 1690s. In April 1809, the image was taken to the cathedral for a novena to appeal for the safety of the king of Spain and the defeat of “French heretics”—apparently the first time the image had left the convent church of Santa Teresa except for penitential processions during epidemics. In his late 1810 diatribe against the insurrection led by Miguel Hidalgo and plea for “union and brotherhood” across New Spain’s regions and social classes, Agustín Pomposo Fernández de San Salvador invoked the “Cristo de Santa Teresa la Antigua” along with the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Virgin of Los Remedios as the symbols of national unity.²³ A wealthy confraternity dedicated to the Cristo Renovado was active at the shrine then, and in 1814 the shrine’s treasury boasted bequests and chaplaincies that produced about 20,000 pesos in annual interest.²⁴ This sum was augmented by the usual alms collections, and in 1813 a popular raffle was instituted (the “Lotería del Ssmo Cristo de Santa Teresa la Antigua”) during the final months of construction of the new chapel. The raffle netted the shrine 894 pesos on gross ticket sales of 2,340 pesos during its first thirty-two months.²⁵	12
Although the popularity of the raffle had run its course by 1823, the shrine’s stock of capital continued to produce a steady income,²⁶ and devotion peaked again during the cholera epidemic of 1833 with another procession and novena in the cathedral.²⁷ Carlos María Bustamante celebrated the image’s continuing power and popularity when he wrote in the early 1840s: “This surprising rejuvenation of the Lord of Santa Teresa not only has been a matter of belief by all Mexicans up to the present, but it has been confirmed in singular marvels, including its exalted protection in every public calamity, most recently in the terrible cholera epidemic, which began to recede as soon as the image was displayed in a magnificent procession.”²⁸	13
The new chapel collapsed in an earthquake in 1845, shattering the image. There was enough money in the shrine’s treasury and enough interest among devotees both to print updated editions of Velasco’s Exaltacion de la Divina Misericordia for promotional purposes in 1845 and 1858 and to rebuild the chapel and artfully remake the image. Perhaps the remade image was not perceived as “the same.” In any case, the Cristo Renovado de Santa Teresa never regained its old popularity after Mexico’s reform period in the 1850s and 1860s. During the Cristero War of the late 1920s, the church of Santa Teresa la Antigua was closed by the government, and the image was moved to the cathedral; later it was returned to the Carmelite nuns, who were then residing in San Angel on the outskirts of the Valley of Mexico. Today, few people in Mexico City, much less elsewhere, know about the miraculous image of the Cristo Renovado, and the nuns have not succeeded in reviving much interest in it. Their facsimile edition in 1996 of an early edition of Velasco’s book marking the 375th anniversary of the miracle of renovation attracted some antiquarian interest, but few new devotees.²⁹	14

What went on in the place where the great miracle of rejuvenation was said to have happened back in 1621? Had people there been telling themselves the miracle story that Velasco eventually published? Were they drawn to the shrine in Mexico City after the image was taken from them? Was Velasco’s text known to them? If so, how did they understand it? We may never know what stories local people told about the place and image during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the other hand, nothing yet known from the seventeenth century suggests that they organized pilgrimages to visit the lost image in Mexico City or honored the site of the miracle of renovation before Velasco’s devotional history appeared in 1699.	15
The chapel at Mapethé remained in ruins until the 1720s; then, soon after the second edition of Velasco’s book appeared, the situation changed. From the 1720s to the early 1800s, bursts of record making and building tell of considerable regional interest in the site. The 1728 license to rebuild the chapel noted that many people—identified as non-Indians as well as Indians—were visiting Mapethé as a place of miracles.³⁰ By the late 1730s, several Otomí Indian leaders from the district of Ixmiquilpan were vying for control over the project.³¹ At the center of this first dispute was Don Agustín Morales, an Otomícacique (hereditary leader) and painter by trade from El Cardonal, who was described by his followers as “the first founder” of the tradition. In the late 1720s, he reportedly crafted two crucifixes similar to the Cristo Renovado, started to build a church on the site of the original chapel, sponsored an annual novena there during Lent, and secured licenses from ecclesiastical and royal authorities to collect alms for the building project.	16
While no one denied that the shrine was Morales’s idea and that the first phase of construction was undertaken largely at his expense, by 1737 he was entangled in litigation over who should be in charge of the project and the site.³² He sought and received an order from the high court in Mexico City for the parish priest of El Cardonal and other colonial authorities and Indian governors throughout the area to recognize his authority—”quasi-possession,” the legal record calls it—and not to interfere with his collection of donations and management of the building project. But his authority at the sacred site was always in dispute. In 1739 and 1742, he petitioned for confirmation of his 1737 possession and an order for the officials of El Cardonal not to interfere with his collections and administration of the project. Then in 1743, he was imprisoned on orders of the priest and charged with stealing 300 pesos from the collection box. His principal alms collectors and fellow Indian notables Diego Joseph and Pedro Martín Bello seized his crucifixes and claimed to be the rightful administrators of the burgeoning devotion. Morales spent more than a year in jail until he rendered what were regarded as adequate accounts of the alms collections. Royal revenue agents and district governors got involved, accusing all the Indian leaders of embezzling funds and complaining that the shrine was creating a vagrancy problem and depriving them of tax revenue and labor for the mines of the El Cardonal district. The protracted litigation drew in dozens of witnesses who incidentally attested to a territory of devotees and conscripted construction workers that included various Otomí towns and hamlets in western Hidalgo. They testified that most devotees went to the holy site for the festivities Morales promoted during Lent, taking their village and family crucifixes with them, as if to charge them with sacred energy at the place of the miraculous renovation.	17
Bello served as mayordomo or administrator of the emerging shrine for two years, from 1746 to 1748. About a third of the construction was completed by the latter date, but the job was still far from done, and he, too, was brought down by accusations of withholding alms for his own use and not submitting full financial reports. Morales and his followers continued to lay claim to the project and gained a decisive legal victory over Bello and other rivals in 1748, as colonial officials pushed for completion of the shrine and regular administration by a parish priest and a single mayordomo. Bello spent that year and part of the next in jail while he and eight more self-styled “founders” of the shrine continued to appeal the verdict against his claim as rightful administrator. Morales and his followers responded with the usual vigor. The judges finally threw up their hands on December 20, 1748, and remitted the case to the archbishop’s court for further consideration. There Morales was quickly confirmed as the mayordomo. Morales recovered his crucifixes—the one described as “the green cross” was given a place of honor in the temporary shrine at Mapethé—and new alms collectors resumed their rounds. His triumph was short-lived, however. By the fall he had died, and the church was still unfinished.	18
This summary of bitter, costly legal claims and counterclaims barely touches on the complex, shifting webs of local interests and the factions behind them. Morales, Diego Joseph, and Bello were all Otomí leaders from the vicinity of El Cardonal,³³ but the collective leadership of El Cardonal opposed Morales in the early years of this dispute, then supported him later. His most consistent supporters seem to have been people identified as Indians from the large settlements of Tlazintla and Palma Gorda, near the district capital of Ixmiquilpan. The pastors and royal governors of El Cardonal and Ixmiquilpan were suspicious of any Indian administration of this district-wide project that shifted patronage and control of finances from their offices, yet they wanted it to go forward. At one time or another, they became allies or adversaries of the several Indian partisans, while struggling with each other over jurisdiction and administration of funds. District officials and the high court in Mexico City found the mounting record of disputes and shifting divisions among Indian leaders and settlements as tangled as the would-be historian does. As early as January 1744, the alcalde mayor (district governor) of Ixmiquilpan marveled at “the many orders and injunctions issued in this case, some in favor of Agustín Morales and others for Diego Joseph, … and the endless complaints of both parties.”³⁴ The Otomí side of the case seemed endless because it had less to do with clear-cut legal issues that could be resolved by compromise or the final authority of a colonial court than with unremitting tetchiness over subordination to authority outside the local community. Even the apparent local communities were dispersed and often fractious.	19
Situated several miles north of the settlement of El Cardonal, the unfinished shrine was described in late 1748 as very large—roughly 150 feet long and more than 50 feet high, with walls nearly 6 feet thick and a beautiful bell tower modeled on the cathedral in Mexico City. The structure was valued at just over 10,000 pesos, and it was estimated that two years and another 14,000 pesos would be needed to finish the job. But the way to a finished shrine and settled administrative and devotional practices still was not clear. In 1755, Archbishop Manuel Rubio y Salinas’s pastoral visit report sharply criticized the shrine’s administrators and alms collectors for not completing the building and for keeping inadequate records of “the copious donations that are collected daily.”³⁵ Yet another church official seemed convinced that the alms collectors were skimming money from the collection boxes.	20
This first wave of records has the hallmarks of a shrine and devotion in its early stages of development. Alms-collecting missions began then, and their purpose was to pay for construction of the first substantial church at the site. Construction was the center of activity, and weekly labor receipts for late 1748 and early 1749 show a crew of twelve Indian day laborers at work under the supervision of four skilled masons. Don Agustín Morales’s two crucifixes circulated with the alms collectors and were sometimes housed at the building site, but no particular image was yet regarded as the Señor de Mapethé. The principal feast day during the week before Palm Sunday does not seem to have been well established yet.³⁶	21
Velasco’s story of the miracle of renovation and the transfer of the image to Mexico City may well have become local knowledge in western Hidalgo at this time, with a selective, provocative twist. According to Salvador González, a mestizo from Ixmiquilpan who testified before the district governor in 1743, local people knew the story of the self-renovating crucifix “as it is described in the printed book about this astonishing portent.”³⁷ And in 1748, Indians from three communities in the district boldly asserted that the image in Mexico City ought to be returned to Mapethé once their church was completed³⁸—a possibility implied by Velasco, who had described how when the archbishop’s deputies came to take the image away, it grew heavy and began to bleed and blink its eyes. When local people resisted its removal, their parish priest promised them he would request the return of the image, “God willing, if it is not properly cared for in Mexico City,” but pointed out that “at present, we have no church; it is in ruins.”³⁹ At least some local devotees in the 1740s and later seem to have taken this passage from Velasco’s book to mean that if they built a fine church for the image, it would be returned.⁴⁰	22
The unfinished shrine became a parish seat in 1751, and its first pastor, Bachiller Antonio Fuentes de León, actively promoted the cult during his tenure of more than twenty years, enlarging and strengthening the building and furnishing it with fine altars and paintings. The present building has the gilded altars from Father Fuentes’s time—the main altar is dated 1765⁴¹—and an antique wooden crucifix about three feet high, known as the Señor de Mapethé (perhaps one of the portable images Morales made in the 1720s; more likely a later crucifix commissioned by the people of Palma Gorda). On the side walls hang an undated oil painting of the Cristo Renovado bringing rain after seven years of drought and a set of four paintings dated 1773 that depict the miraculous renovation of the image in 1621. The last painting in the set shows Father Fuentes in the posture of a devout donor. If I did not know about Agustín Morales, Diego Joseph, Pedro Martín Bello, and the others, it would be tempting to conclude that the shrine and devotions at Mapethé began with, and largely depended on, the efforts of the assiduous Father Fuentes. In word and image, Don Agustín and his rivals are absent from the material remains of the shrine at Mapethé. But they are there in deed.	23
The second long wave of written records, from 1783 to 1795, mainly concerned the Zimapán area north of Mapethé. It establishes that interest in the shrine remained strong after Father Fuentes died, and spread to the north and west, mainly among Otomí people.⁴² By then, the fifth Friday of Lent, just before Palm Sunday, had become the day for the annual gathering of crucifixes from throughout the region. Participants spoke of this event as ancient practice—”de tiempo inmemorial”—as if it had always been so.⁴³ By then, one or more images displayed at the shrine were recognized as the Lord of Mapethé, although not without some controversy. Many Indians were making the one-day walk from the district of Zimapán,⁴⁴ where the most productive silver mines in the region were located at that time. Indians of Zimapán, many of them transient or recently settled, reportedly left their work in the mines to visit the shrine at least once a year, confessed and took communion at Mapethé rather than at home, and sometimes hid from the local tax collector and the labor bosses when they returned. The royal officials of Zimapán were not about to lose their grip on Indian labor and local taxes without a contest in the courtroom. The result is an ample record of sharp dispute over this thirteen-year period and more testimony about the shrine.	24
If the conflicts of the 1740s involving the shrine at Mapethé crosscut local society in more directions than I can describe in a few pages, those of the 1780s and early 1790s are even more complex and less localized. Three kinds of conflict appear in this new documentation: (1) between Indians of the Zimapán area and their alcalde mayor (Spanish governor) and parish priest over fees, taxes, and where their political loyalties belonged; (2) between Zimapán’s Indian governors and the Indian mayordomo who organized the annual nine-day pilgrimage to Mapethé over the collection of expense money;⁴⁵ and (3) between the alcalde mayor and parish priest of Ixmiquilpan on one side and the alcalde mayor and parish priest of Zimapán on the other over how and where Indians of the district of Zimapán should spend their money and receive communion. Despite the divisions, when it came time for the annual journey to Mapethé with the local crucifixes, the various Otomí rivals seem to have joined in, including the Indian governors who had complained about the mayordomo. Nor did higher colonial authorities interfere. Perhaps because devotees could show that they were not gone long and did not engage in unruly activity, the litigation of the 1790s did not lead to orders from the archbishop or the viceroy to suspend the processions or discourage the devotion in other ways.⁴⁶ This tacit acceptance is surprising, since official policy at the time discouraged most alms collections and large Indian gatherings, and district officials were concerned about “Indians” in El Cardonal harboring suspicions that “the Spaniards” meant to destroy them.⁴⁷ Mexico City authorities may not have interfered with the Mapethé shrine because they did not want to chance disturbances over devotional practices in a place uncomfortably close to the Sierra de Tututepec, where an Indian millenarian movement during the 1760s was still well remembered. The appeal of the Mapethé shrine does not seem to have grown much in the late eighteenth century, but it would not have been easy to suppress if colonial authorities had been inclined to try. When the alcalde mayor of Zimapán did forbid the annual visit to Mapethé in 1792 (before the dispute was appealed to Mexico City), local people ignored his order and went to the shrine anyway.⁴⁸	25
The third wave of political drama and record making, lasting for most of nine years, followed the creation of a town at the shrine, known as Pueblo Nuevo (El Santuario on modern maps). About two hundred people, most of them Otomí Indians, had taken up residence near the shrine by 1776, but the community was not formally constituted as a town until a viceregal decree to that effect was issued in 1795. The establishment of a formal town meant that the headtown of El Cardonal lost jurisdiction, and in this case also population and labor service, because most of the residents of Pueblo Nuevo came from its Guigui and Cardonalito barrios (a Spanish term for neighborhood, here applied to dispersed extended-family settlements, which were the common Otomí residential pattern in the area). The most contentious and enduring issue, however, was land rights. El Cardonal ceded the new settlement its townsite, a square about 550 yards on a side, but the access its residents would have to farmlands, pastures, and woodlands was unresolved. Most of the original two hundred settlers in 1776 had ancestral lands nearby; many of the roughly four hundred inhabitants in 1804 did not.⁴⁹ From 1799 to 1804, the people of Pueblo Nuevo were in constant, sometimes violent disputes over woodlands with neighboring rancheros and the Otomí town of Orizaba.⁵⁰	26
A separate, indirectly related dispute came to a head at the time of these land struggles.⁵¹ In late 1799, Palma Gorda, a subordinate settlement of Orizaba in the parish of Ixmiquilpan (the parish seat and district headtown for Pueblo Nuevo was the smaller El Cardonal), complained to the alcalde mayor of Ixmiquilpan and to the archbishop’s court in Mexico City that a crucifix donated by their community, which had long occupied the place of honor on the main altar of the shrine, had been replaced with a new image belonging to Pueblo Nuevo. The attorney for Pueblo Nuevo responded that malcontents from Ixmiquilpan with unspecified ulterior motives were behind this complaint. A flurry of charges and countercharges followed, leaving the archbishop’s legal adviser to make sense in April 1800 of “the confusing writings of the Indians of Palma Gorda,” and to separate fact from fulmination. After three years of dispute, the archbishop’s adviser counted heads and recognized that the old image was “an object of particular devotion, visited by people from throughout the area.” He recommended that the old image be restored to the main altar, and it was.⁵²	27
The original image of the Cristo Renovado was never repatriated from Mexico City, but a report on resources and conditions in the district in 1792 remarked on the well-furnished church at Mapethé, ready to welcome the original image, as promised in Velasco’s account, “when the famous dispute over where it belongs is resolved.”⁵³ Even in the 1860s, the animated Cristo Renovado was vividly recalled by a local chronicler, who assured his readers that sighs, groans, sobs, and the tolling of phantom bells could still be heard at Mapethé.⁵⁴ Popular devotion to the Cristo Renovado hardly exists in Mexico City today, while the shrine at Mapethé continues to attract a regional following—thanks in part to Velasco’s sunlit account of providential beginnings for what he represented as a major urban shrine. But there is not a straight-line, happily-ever-after story of growth and Otomí or Indian solidarity for the rural Mapethé shrine, either. We have the eighteenth-century records that carry the history of the Cristo Renovado beyond Velasco’s Mexico City story because of perennial struggles in the district of Ixmiquilpan and Zimapán, most of them struggles among Otomí groups. The main celebration at the shrine still falls on the fifth Friday of Lent, but it is overshadowed by the crowds and commerce on the same day in the nearby town of El Arenal, where another miracle-working crucifix is honored—perhaps one of those that paid its respects at Mapethé in the eighteenth century.	28
The history of the miraculous Cristo Renovado connects a remote rural place to the capital city without establishing a pilgrimage route or authority and subordination between them. Many other local histories in Mexico bear comparison to it. Some shrines were more popular than others, but there were no great pilgrimage routes through a landscape of secondary shrines such as those to Rome or Compostela. Before the great organized pilgrimages to Tepeyac began in the late nineteenth century, large numbers of devotees of all social ranks were going to several hundred shrines all over Mexico. They still go. Most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century visitors to shrines did not travel far or linger over the journey as a prolonged penitential quest, and many who revered a renowned image never visited its shrine. Even as popular devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe flowered in the eighteenth century, most visitors to Tepeyac were locals, and most devotees of the Virgin of Guadalupe would have encountered her only in a regional chapel or over the altar in their parish church. Except perhaps in the Valley of Mexico, the growth of guadalupanismo was not a zero-sum game, as home altars crowded with different images suggest. Mapethé is an unusual case of furta sacra, but in shifting the story away from distant travels, Marian devotion, official chroniclers, and a hierarchy of shrines, it strikes the dominant chord.	29

I have framed this presentation of the Cristo Renovado around two shrines with different historical trajectories that can suggest how Indian subjects might interrupt and refashion the logic of a printed text produced in Mexico City from a metropolitan viewpoint and the logic of the wider social order to meet their expectations and circumstances. Here local knowledge seems to have taken its cue from Velasco’s book, but made the place where a moldering crucifix was said to have restored itself to fine condition more important than the absent relic.⁵⁵ These two histories of one Cristo Renovado are more than self-contained stories running on parallel tracks. In the eighteenth century, they converged most immediately for colonial authorities in Mexico City, Ixmiquilpan, and El Cardonal who presided over the long-running litigation and administrative affairs of the Mapethé shrine. But they also converge in the history of growing Christocentric devotion in Spain and Spanish America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.	30
Most of the important Spanish and Mexican shrines to miraculous images of Christ originated early in the seventeenth century, and some of them—especially in Mexico—attracted even greater interest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This trajectory of formation and growth, punctuated by ebbs and flows of interest, was also true of many Marian shrines in Europe and Mexico. William Christian and others find that the new importance of image shrines in Spain and much of western Europe from the sixteenth century is related to declining interest in relics and sacred sites in the countryside.⁵⁶ The Mexican case was bound to be somewhat different. Saints’ relics were never as important in the Americas. America had few saints of its own before John Paul II’s papacy, and minor European saints’ relics were imported but rarely caught on as objects of popular devotion.⁵⁷ To the extent that the interest in miraculous images in Mexico was orchestrated by church leaders during the seventeenth century, it has less to do with deflecting attention from relics than with muffling stories of apparitions reported by Indian neophytes, stories that sixteenth-century Franciscans in particular had encouraged and celebrated in their American chronicles.⁵⁸ The growing importance of urban sites of marvels and image shrines was shared with Europe, but without overshadowing the countryside. The found or animated images of Christ in Mexico during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were mostly reported from rural places and small settlements.	31
To approach the emergence of the Mapethé shrine in the eighteenth century as more than a local story in isolation calls especially for attention to the nature and reach of Otomí devotion to this Cristo Renovado and the cross as a sacred symbol. The shrine’s reach was not limited to the immediate vicinity of Mapethé or the district of Ixmiquilpan, where it was centered.⁵⁹ The parish priest based at Mapethé in 1793 testified that the annual fiesta and procession of crucifixes during Lent was sponsored by the Indian pueblos of Jacala, Zimapán, Yxtatlaxco, and Tepejí (del Río), as well as Ixmiquilpan. These places form a band through western Hidalgo approximately thirty miles long from north to south, none of them more than a two-day walk from the shrine. This was the main catchment area of visitors. A larger territory of interest in the shrine can be traced in the reports submitted by alms collectors in 1748 and 1749. This area of donors reached farther west, into southern Querétaro and Guanajuato. Collectors reported in from San Juan del Río and La Cañada near the city of Querétaro, from Irapuato (Guanajuato), from settlements around Hacienda Saus near Silao (Guanajuato), and from the city of Guanajuato and vicinity. Each of them was sending back to the shrine the substantial sum of twenty to eighty silver pesos every month or six weeks. (See Maps 1 and 2.)	32
Map 2: The Reach of Otomí Alms Collectors for the Cristo Renovado.
The travels and settlement sites of Otomí people may hold a key to this greater spiritual geography of the Mapethé shrine and growing devotion to images of Christ in Hidalgo and the Bajío. Before Spanish colonization, Otomí-speakers occupied much of modern Querétaro and Hidalgo, with pockets of settlement and migration reaching into San Luis Potosí, Michoacán, Guanajuato, México, Puebla, and Tlaxcala. Unlike the Tlaxcalans or the Tenocha-Mexica, precolonial Otomíes did not constitute a proper “kingdom,” and their most important center, Xilotepec (in Hidalgo), was not an urban capital like Tenochtitlan or Tlaxcala. Rather, Otomíes evidently had many smaller, scattered pockets of settlement and authority, mirroring the organization of their local communities, in which most people lived dispersed in extended family clusters. Beyond modern Hidalgo’s Mezquital Valley, their ancestral lands were high, dry, and stony, and during the colonial period they could rarely make a living from maize farming and horticulture the way their ancestors may have done, and as other groups in central Mexico continued to do. In addition to farming and gathering food, family members had long made charcoal and produced pulque (fermented juice of a native agave plant) and pottery vessels in which to carry it to consumers. Other Otomíes were recruited by more organized states—including, later, the Spanish colonial regime—as warriors and laborers.⁶⁰	33
Even as the population of Otomíes shrank during the colonial period, they were becoming more widely distributed in modern Hidalgo, Querétaro, and Guanajuato. Both Otomíes and non-Indians began to herd sheep in the sixteenth century, which contributed to this dispersion and reinforced the old pattern of scattered settlements of extended families. While communities associated with the shrine at Mapethé were located mainly in the hotter, drier northern portion of the Mezquital Valley, where ranching did not predominate, the new pastoralism undermined traditional agriculture throughout Hidalgo, as the farmland was reduced to small pockets of irrigated fields by overgrazing, erosion, and lower water tables.⁶¹ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some Otomí groups also were resettled in townships near Spanish settlements or on frontier missions intended as buffers against hostile “Chichimecs.” In the eighteenth century, more Otomíes migrated for work within this core territory—especially to the colonial mines, haciendas, and towns of Guanajuato and Querétaro as day laborers, or to Zimapán and other mining settlements of northern Hidalgo. Aggressive expansion of non-Indian ranches made the growing numbers of landless Otomíes more vulnerable to coercive labor practices, contributed to this late colonial migration, and strained labor relations in the mines of Zimapán and El Cardonal.⁶²	34
Otomíes also began to spill beyond old limits of settlement in the early colonial missions of the Sierra Gorda—the “land of war” with hostile “Chichimecs” in northern Hidalgo, Querétaro, and San Luis Potosí. Zimapán itself had once been one of these frontier missions, but in 1703 its Dominican mission of Santa María de los Dolores was moved deeper into the Sierra Gorda in order to isolate and overcome Indians then in rebellion. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, the mountains of the Sierra Gorda and eastern Hidalgo were volatile areas of “Chichimec” (and sometimes Otomí) resistance, of military expeditions during the 1740s, of secularization of missions from the 1740s to the 1770s, and of millenarian uprisings at Xicháu in 1768 and the Sierra de Tututepec in 1769.⁶³	35
Colonial Otomí Christianity drew on local traditions and organization in ways that emphasized the cross and Christ crucified. Early chroniclers mentioned the Otomíes’ unusual attachment to festivals of the cross; and the practice of bringing local saints and crosses to great processions of the cross in Querétaro, Chalma, and San Miguel Allende, among other places, was established before the end of the colonial period.⁶⁴ Otomíes from Querétaro and Hidalgo were drawn to the famous miracle-working stone cross of the Franciscans in the city of Querétaro, and to the Christ of Chalma, near Malinalco in the Estado de México. At both sites, they took part in great processions of portable crosses brought from their home communities.⁶⁵ Miraculous crosses, sometimes green in color (suggesting both fertility and life everlasting), abounded in Otomí communities. Following a brief rebellion of Otomí people in the district of Amanalco, Hidalgo, against their parish priest in 1792, the archbishop of Mexico ordered Indians in the area to turn over to the parish priest all the crosses that dotted the hilltops and other places “in order to give them proper veneration and avoid superstitions, abuses, inappropriate observances, and perhaps worse.”⁶⁶ An unusual number of Otomí men were baptized with the name of the cross (such as “Juan de la Cruz”), and the many stone sanctuaries that served as Otomí family chapels in rural Hidalgo from the late colonial period and the nineteenth century had special associations with the cross, ancestors, and shamanic healing. Although most of the family chapels in the northern Mezquital Valley have been put to other uses or neglected in recent years, many are still active in mountain communities of Querétaro and Hidalgo. Even if the family has a patron saint, his or her image usually cedes center stage to a cross or crucifix. Other, smaller crosses are found there, too, along with objects for healing and fertility ceremonies that one would not find in the parish church.⁶⁷	36
Otomí veneration of the cross amounted to more than the crucified Christ as a distant, terrifying symbol of suffering and punishment or as the embodiment of their own suffering under Spanish and Mexican rule.⁶⁸ Their colonial Franciscan and Augustinian mentors presented the cross as a symbol of life, both temporal and eternal, and protection against Satan’s wiles; and Otomí attachment to stories of self-renovating crucifixes may well stem from an Augustinian predilection.⁶⁹ Local meanings are especially associated with protection, propitiation, fertility, veneration of ancestors, and sacred movement in the outdoors. In the script of a play about Emperor Constantine’s veneration of the cross, composed in Otomí in 1714 for Indians of Santa Cruz Cozcaquauhatlauhticpac, Tlaxcala, the cross is presented as the tree of life and protector. In this play, Constantine comes to discover the true faith in the sign of the cross; and the cross, in turn, is treated as a gift from God with which to conquer his enemies. This is the familiar story of his conversion and providential conquests as a Christian emperor, but the play ends with a local, protective twist. All the actors kneel before the cross, and Constantine’s mother, Saint Helene, speaks at length about the “adorable cross, truly the tree of life,” saying, “the land is blessed by the divine cross.”⁷⁰	37
Recent ethnographic accounts add suggestively to the colonial-period record of Otomí understandings of the cross and other local practices that colonial authorities regarded as superstitions (or worse) and rarely recorded. Studies of Otomí rituals and family chapels suggest that crosses have been so prominent because they carry a bundle of meanings for social and personal well-being. The numerous crosses inside Otomí family chapels have especially to do with ancestor veneration. The principal cross on the altar represents “the first common ancestor,” and smaller crosses represent the souls of other ancestors.⁷¹ Inside these sanctuaries, images of the patron saints also are placed, along with paper cutouts representing other divine beings in nature that are used by local shamans in curing and fertility ceremonies.⁷²	38
Otomí oral traditions and prayers place the cross and Christ crucified at the center of their cultural landscape as a protective, healing gift from God and the promise of renewal and continuity, including personal redemption.⁷³ Prayers invoke the souls of ancestors and the cross in the same breath: “May they help us and accompany us.” The cross as “master of life, master of health” is invoked for “a good path, my good entryway.”⁷⁴ When in danger, make a cross with your fingers and say, “Cruz, cruz, cruz, que se vaya el Diablo y venga Jesáus” (“Cross, cross, cross, may Jesus come and banish the Devil”).⁷⁵ But crosses, especially household crosses, can be “bad.” In the spirit of Emile Durkheim’s notion of “contagiousness of the sacred,” they are invested with harmful as well as beneficent powers and need to be approached properly and propitiated so that they do not spill out in undesirable ways.⁷⁶	39
The placement and movement of crosses throughout the landscape—near caves, rock outcroppings, and springs, on hilltops, and especially along pathways and at thresholds—is a longstanding practice.⁷⁷ In Huizquilucan on the edge of the Valley of Mexico, H. R. Harvey found that crosses on hilltops are taken to embody the Otomí rain divinity, or in one case Makata, the Otomí divine essence and lord of the mountains. The cross associated with Makata is carried in procession through much of the district during early May, at the time of the feast of the Holy Cross. Otomíes from Chimalpa el Grande, Tlaxcala, evidently regard their shrine on the summit of Cerro de la Malinche as the birthplace of the Lord of Chalma, who departed long ago for his cave near Malinalco in the Estado de México.⁷⁸	40
Little is known about Otomíes’ role as carriers of enthusiasm for particular crucifixes and other images during the colonial period. The shrine of the Christ of Chalma, near Malinalco, Estado de México, which may have attracted more devotees from distant places than any other late colonial shrine to an image of Christ, was a favorite destination of scattered Otomí communities. Juan Carlos Ruiz Guadalajara recently described a dense web of devotion to the black Christ of Salamanca (state of Guanajuato) and at least three other renowned crucifixes that connected Otomíes residing in towns and cities of the Bajío during the eighteenth century.⁷⁹ And Otomí fiestas to the Holy Cross often end with a group of local people traveling with their portable crosses and saints to a major shrine such as that of the Lord of Chalma, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos. But Otomí devotion to sacred images is less about interest in a few distant images of Christ or the Virgin than about veneration of favorite local images, usually of Christ. The travels of these images and of people to their shrines were meant to broadcast sacred energy from its dwelling places as well as to concentrate it there. Judging by the recent circulation of images and their devotees in the districts of Ixmiquilpan and El Cardonal, these travels could have served as a diplomatic counterweight to highly localized affiliations—promoting alliances and political peace among neighboring communities. Especially the more celebrated images of neighboring communities are invited to the feast day celebrations of other communities and received with a great show of respect. The host community is expected to reciprocate by sending its own miracle-working images to the neighbors’ celebrations.⁸⁰	41
The Mapethé shrine acquired a place in the wider webs of dispersed Otomí settlement, migration, and portable devotion during the eighteenth century. The spiritual territory of this shrine reached west from its home districts of Ixmiquilpan, Zimapán, Alfajayucan, and Tepejí in a distinctive pattern: the main sites of alms collection during the 1740s were located along a route south and west from Ixmiquilpan into the Bajío—through southern Querétaro, then north to the mines of Guanajuato, where some groups of Otomí people had lived for many generations and others had recently settled as mineworkers and ranch hands.⁸¹ What did this larger area of donations mean for a history of affiliation that centered on the Mapethé shrine? There is little to go on. The alms records do not establish whether the contributors had ever visited the shrine or would do so in the future, but the court records that document the processions at Mapethé in the late eighteenth century mention no participants from outside the primary catchment area. Unless the traveling collectors were gifted salesmen, able to persuade strangers to the story of the Cristo Renovado that they should support a new source of divine protection, we should assume that Otomí contacts throughout the area had already established a reservoir of interest.⁸²	42

Thinking about these developments at Mapethé and Mexico City in terms of how power worked and how people’s actions reiterate and change their situations brought to mind a generation of South Asian writings on colonialism that have intrigued me since I first read Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism nearly twenty years ago. Students of Latin American history have lately been drawn especially to the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective for its attention to human intentionality, the politics of concerted resistance to elites by peasants and other marginalized people, and a healthy skepticism about Western modernity and its forms of knowledge.⁸³ I have found the writings of this group good to think with as they have unfolded since the early 1980s, but the guiding concepts in them have not provided a model for understanding the complexities of Spanish American colonialism, at least not in Mexico. While Ranajit Guha does not claim to speak for the group, and some of his colleagues no longer share his exclusive enthusiasm for the political or categories of dominance and subordination, domination and collaboration, domination and resistance, and other sharp distinctions, his emphasis on violent resistance, the fragmentary, and “the contribution made by the people on their own [sic], that is independently of the elite,” remain fundamental to the approach: the people united as freestanding agents versus the elite.⁸⁴ And the subaltern studies scholarship has been inclined to leave aside the religious faith—beliefs and practices—of peasant actors either as false consciousness or as beside the point of their politics.⁸⁵	43
Devotion and politics at Mapethé in the eighteenth century do bring to mind disruptive “fragments” of subaltern activity—unquiet episodes of faith and affiliation that reworked Father Velasco’s official story of a sacred treasure rescued from danger and neglect at the periphery followed by steady growth in popularity and marvelous benefits for devotees under the watchful eyes of the proper authorities in its new, central location. But these episodes of struggle, separation, and growing faith were not so clearly a rejection of the colonizers’ logic and authority as a subaltern studies perspective might imagine, with its twofold emphasis on resistance and collaboration.	44
Nandy, a noted political psychologist and public intellectual, has attracted less attention from historians—no doubt his sharp criticism of historians’ truth claims has something to do with this⁸⁶—but he has a way of thinking about colonial experience that comes closer to the overlapping lines and connections in the episodes at Mapethé. Or so it seems to a Latin Americanist in search of a more synoptic approach to “Indians” under colonial rule in Mesoamerica (the area of densely settled precolonial state societies in modern central and southern Mexico and the Central American highlands). By “synoptic approach,” I mean keeping in mind and under study as many of the actors, dimensions, and primary sources of an episode or structure as I can manage, without claiming that there will be a sum total, a Braudelian histoire totale, or very definite conclusions. I still find great merit in the aim of early Annales historians—going back to Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre—to combine material, documentary, and theoretical approaches to the past. By reckoning with many contexts, relationships, and sources, one can hope to recognize which were salient in a particular situation, but context does not have to mean wholeness.⁸⁷	45
Nandy writes of “counter-players,” “non-players,” and “players.”⁸⁸ These are gross, heuristic categories—no individual or group is simply one of them, once and for all. Players in one situation may be non-players or counter-players in another. Players are not always compliant collaborators, and being a non-player does not just mean deflecting colonial domination. In particular circumstances, players may be as rebellious as counter-players or as remote from particular colonial demands and truth claims as non-players. Yet even while blurring at the edges, these categories point toward patterned tendencies in different colonial histories that reach beyond the resistance and collaboration pairing of subaltern studies.⁸⁹ Counter-players—the focus of much attention by subaltern studies scholars—reject the logic and authority of the colonizers and confront them openly, violently. Nandy regards colonial India’s counter-players as heroic losers, comparatively few in number and soon eliminated.⁹⁰ Non-players—who are Nandy’s favorite subjects—do not adopt the colonizers’ logic, either, but they succeed, as de Certeau put it, in “subvert[ing] from within the colonizers’ ‘success’ in imposing their own culture.”⁹¹ They use the colonizers’ laws and truth claims instrumentally, resist them nonviolently, or succeed in bypassing them rather than making a frontal assault. Mohandas Gandhi is only the most famous of the non-players who made a place for themselves at the margins of colonial thought in ways that allowed them to “resist the loving embrace of the West’s dominant self,” as Nandy puts it, and in the long run to succeed in outlasting, if not colonizing, the colonizers.⁹² Nandy’s non-players range beyond his particular interest in intellectuals and political leaders to, among others, Indian cricket players and their audiences, who reinvented a sport in ways that became only incidentally British.⁹³ In this sense—and in contrast to counter-playing—becoming westernized is a way of being Indian. Finally, players learn the logic of the colonial regime and its institutions and live within this logic, language, and authority more than non-players and counter-players do. Like non-players, they are survivors, but they live by colonial rules and values as much as with them, sometimes turning them to advantage for local, often personal, interests.	46
Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of “heretical discourse” sets out the counter-player position more specifically: exploiting “the possibility of changing the social world … by counterpoising a paradoxical pre-vision, a utopia, a project or programme, to the ordinary vision [here, colonial vision] which apprehends the social world as a natural world.”⁹⁴ Colonial authorities of New Spain feared a contagion of heretical discourse and Indian uprisings in places near the edges of settled colonial life such as western Hidalgo (occasionally for good reason), but if Velasco’s book and promotion of the shrine in Mexico City represent the “ordinary vision,” the founding of Mapethé’s shrine and the activities of its devotees show little opposing “pre-vision.” The counter-playing possibilities in Mapethé as a telluric site that recharged visiting crosses with sacred, protective energy remained latent except in intermittent calls for the return of the miraculous image from Mexico City. Devotees of the Cristo Renovado in western Hidalgo did not publicly proclaim a break with the ordinary order or set themselves on a collision course with the colonial church. In their way, they remained loyal, accountable Catholics, fulfilling prescribed Christian duties and respecting the authority of priests.⁹⁵ Otomíes as counter-players fought in 1811 near Ixmiquilpan, El Cardonal, and Alfajayucan behind insurgent leader Julián Villagrán during the early years of Mexico’s war of independence, and did not come to terms with royalist authorities until 1814 or 1815. Who they were and where they came from is not certain, but judging by their negotiations with the royalists, their prevision was local—the right to bear arms and govern their own communities—and some proceeded to fight against insurgents in 1816.⁹⁶	47
De Certeau had something like Nandy’s non-players in mind when he referred to Mesoamerican Indians under Spanish colonial rule in his study of the practice of everyday life: Submissive, and even consenting to their subjection, the Indians nevertheless often made of the situations, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept. They were other within the very colonization that outwardly assimilated them; their use of the dominant social order deflected its power, which they lacked the means to challenge; they escaped it without leaving it.⁹⁷Mapethé’s shrine to the miracle of the absent, self-restoring crucifix and the annual convention of crosses brought by pilgrims from much of western Hidalgo who did not make pilgrimages to the image in Mexico City does express “something in daily life that is marginal to the discourse of the dominant rationality,” as de Certeau and Jesús Martín Barbero would understand it.⁹⁸ Mapethé was not conceived or accepted by its founders or later devotees as a satellite of the shrine in Mexico City; nor did they accept Velasco’s furta sacra story that the sacred energy contained in the miracle resided only in the image, any more than Indians laboring in the mines of Zimapán heeded the objections of their employers or the injunction by the district governor not to abandon their work when it was time to visit Mapethé.⁹⁹ The visitors from Zimapán apparently thought of their trip to Mapethé during Lent not as a pilgrimage to a fixed destination, but as participation in what they called “the procession of crucifixes,”¹⁰⁰ sanctifying movement in which they entered a landscape of their own making, a little heaven on earth in the vicinity of the shrine.	48
But there is also more to this story than local or Otomí solidarity. Otomí devotees of the Cristo Renovado miracle were non-players and perhaps sometimes counter-players, but they were always players, too. The non-player features and counter-player possibilities were continually crosscut by personal, factional, and intercommunity rivalries pursued for more than seventy years in every colonial court available, the higher the better. Asking how the devotees of Mapethé could be both players and non-players is a way to recognize that “embracing the fragment,” as subaltern studies scholars have recommended, may mean reaching beyond the idea of freestanding, autonomous subjects in colonial histories to how and why they acted as colonial subjects.¹⁰¹ The case for keeping subaltern “fragments” and the imagination of the state in view at the same time is even more compelling for Mesoamerican Indians than for South Asians. While they were still the numerical majority at the end of the eighteenth century, the four million or so Mesoamerican Indians were far fewer in number and occupied a smaller territory than rural South Asians; and they had a more extensive, arguably deeper, experience of European colonial institutions and culture, however intermittent and attenuated it may have been.	49
Sherry Ortner expressed the challenge of writing more synoptic histories with multiple agencies under colonialism as “a problematic of the dynamics of power …: processes of legitimation, `residence’ and resistance, contestation, accommodation; relations between elites and commoners, bosses and workers, … colonial authorities and colonial subjects.”¹⁰² On the Otomí side, devotees of the Cristo Renovado understood themselves in various terms—as members or allies of competing extended families, as men and women with gendered duties and loyalties, as residents of a dispersed settlement within a township, as fellow devotees, and as Catholics and subjects of the Spanish king under the sign of the cross. Most also knew themselves to be Otomíes, an identity that may well have become stronger in a colonial setting that marginalized their communities economically yet established routes of migration that put them in touch with far-flung relatives and Otomí speakers. And they knew themselves as “Indians” when they fulfilled Indian duties and made use of Indian prerogatives in their repeated dealings with state authorities, miners, priests, and ranchers. But recognizing themselves as Otomíes and Indians under colonial law did not translate into a strong sense of common cause with Indian strangers except for a time in the early years of Mexico’s independence struggle. Even then, the distinctive subaltern logic they defended was local and evidently not attached to the miraculous Cristo Renovado. The eighteenth-century devotees of Mapethé did not propose to replace the colonial regime or withdraw from its authority and patronage. On the contrary, their struggles from within the Spanish colonial state expressed both their local affiliations and categories of corporate (more than individual) enfranchisement fostered by colonial laws and institutions. Their resistance to outside authority was likely to be directed at a rival faction or leader in or near the local community, at employers, at landlords, or, less often, at the parish priest, the district governor, and Spanish colonialism. The more popular the shrine of Mapethé became and the more its leaders prospered, the more they were checked by district authorities of the crown and the local interests and suspicions of their neighbors.	50
I am indebted to Inga Clendinnen, Brian Connaughton, Susan Deans-Smith, Walter Hauser, Nancy Mann, Kenneth Mills, Leslie Peirce, Yuri Slezkine, Allen Wells, and Wen-hsin Yeh for their good advice and encouragement; to the AHR‘s anonymous readers; to Karen Melvin and José Refugio de la Torre Curiel for timely references; to Darin Jensen and Christine Eduok for the maps; and to Jack von Euw and Susan Snyder of the Bancroft Library and Michael Hironymous of the Benson Collection at the University of Texas at Austin for help with the images. William B. Taylor is Muriel McKevitt Sonne Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (1972), Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (1979), and Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Late Colonial Mexico (1996), all published by Stanford University Press. His current research concerns place-making, sacred movement, sacred things, and shrines to miraculous images in Mexico and western Europe since the sixteenth century. Notes¹Historia del culto de María en Ibero-América y de sus imágenes y santuarios más 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 Compañía 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); Luis Mario Schneider, Cristos, santos y vírgenes: Santuarios y devociones de México (Mexico, 1995); and La ruta de los santuarios en México (Mexico, 1994), which identifies 89 Cristo shrines and 78 Marian shrines.⁵ I have no information about when 69 of the remaining 105 shrines began.⁶ 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.⁷ 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.⁸ Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, chaps. 1 and 2 and Appendix A.⁹ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), xiii.¹⁰ 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, 152–163.¹¹ 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 recuperación 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.” Renovacion por si misma … (Mexico, 1688), fol. 6v. These various names point to tensions between shared devotion and local proprietary claims discussed later in the essay.¹² Gil González Dávila, Teatro eclesiástico de la Santa Iglesia de México (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.¹³ Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1978).¹⁴Itinerario a Indias (1673–1678) (Mexico, 1992), 103–109.¹⁵ 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 México (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 por si misma, Francisco de Florencia wrote that he had read Velasco’s manuscript in 1685.¹⁶ Antonio de Robles, Diario de sucesos notables (1665–1703), 3 vols. (Mexico, 1946), 2: 72.¹⁷ 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.” Místicas y descalzas, 136.¹⁸ Francisco de Ajofrín, Diario del viaje que hizo a la América en el siglo XVIII el P. Fray Francisco de Ajofrín, 2 vols. (1764; repr., Mexico, 1964), 1: 106; Agustín Francisco Esquivel y Vargas, El fénix del amor (1764; repr., Zamora, 1990), 109; Francisco Javier Alegre, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en Nueva España, 3 vols. (ca. 1767; repr., Mexico, 1841–1842), 2: 125–128; Lazcano, Vida exemplar, 341; Juan de Viera, Compendiosa narración de la ciudad de México (1777) (Mexico, 1952), 56. Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico (hereafter AGN) Bienes Nacionales 1210, exp. 7, dotación de novena by Doña María Teresa de Borja: a 2,000 pesos lien on a house in Mexico City.¹⁹Gaceta de México, April 28, 1737, reported a great procession to the cathedral for prayers to restore the city to health.²⁰Gaceta de México, November 29, 1797, note appended to an article on the 1797 procession to the cathedral.²¹ Cayetano Cabrera y Quintero, Escudo de armas de México… (Mexico, 1746), 450–456.²² 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), 201–202.²³Memoria Cristiano-política sobre lo mucho que la Nueva España debe temer de su desunión en partidos, y las grandes ventajas que puede esperar de su unión 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 1808.²⁴ AGN Bienes Nacionales 1864, exp. 34; AGN Bienes Nacionales 800, exp. 12.²⁵ AGN Bienes Nacionales 423, exp. 19; AGN Bienes Nacionales 466, exp. 20.²⁶ AGN Bienes Nacionales 466, exp. 20, 1823 report of the shrine’s treasurer.²⁷ 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, and Carlos María Bustamante’s México religioso: Procesión del Señor de Santa Teresa de México a la iglesia catedral con motivo de la cholera morbus (Mexico, 1833).²⁸ Quoted in Alegre, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús, 2: 128.²⁹ 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., Parábola novohispana: Cristo en el arte virreinal (Mexico, 2000).³⁰ AGN Tierras 2155, exp. 5.³¹ 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 Otomíes usually identify themselves today as Ñähñu.³² The following discussion of developments in 1737–1748 is based on AGN Tierras 2155, exp. 5, and AGN Tierras 2904, exp. 2.³³ AGN Tierras 2155, exp. 5. In April 1744, both Morales and Diego Joseph were identified as indios principales (Indian nobles) of El Cardonal.³⁴ AGN Tierras 2155, exp. 5, fol. 92.³⁵ Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de México (hereafter AHAM), Rubio y Salinas pastoral visit book, fols. 101v–106v, February 11, 1755.³⁶ Archbishop Rubio y Salinas refers to “la semana de San Lázaro” festivities in his 1755 pastoral visit report.³⁷Relaciones geográficas del Arzobispado de México, 1743, ed. Francisco de Solano, prepared and transcribed by Catalina Romero, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1988), 1: 69.³⁸ The three communities were Tlazintla, Palma Gorda, and Ixmiquilpan. AGN Civil 1384, exp. 11, fol. 50r.³⁹Exaltacion (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.⁴⁰ AGN Civil 1384, exp. 11, fols. 50–53; Velasco, Exaltacion (1790 ed.), 33–35.⁴¹Dones y promesas: 500 años de arte ofrenda (exvotos mexicanos) (Mexico, 1996), 96.⁴² AGN Civil 1111, exps. 1, 12, and “991.”⁴³ AGN Civil 1111, exp. 12.⁴⁴ One witness testified that the trip from the town of Zimapán to Mapethé took about five hours. AGN Civil 1111, exp. “991.”⁴⁵ 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.⁴⁶ 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. 1.⁴⁷ For example, Bancroft Library, uncatalogued 2002 acquisition, “Año 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 Cañada, 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).⁴⁸ 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.”⁴⁹ 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 388.⁵⁰ 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 Americano (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.⁵¹ 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.⁵² AGN Bienes Nacionales 1047, exp. 13.⁵³ Lourdes M. Romero Navarrete and Felipe I. Echenique March, eds., Relaciones geográficas de 1792 (Mexico, 1995), 43.⁵⁴ Pío Sáenz, “El misterio del Cardonal oculto en la milagrosa renobación acaesida en ese pueblo … (1865),” University of Texas at Austin, Benson Library, G85.⁵⁵ 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 Salinas Pedraza in H. Russell Bernard and Jesús Salinas Pedraza, Native Ethnography: A Mexican Indian Describes His Culture (Newbury Park, Calif., 1989), 549.⁵⁶ William A. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, N.J., 1981), 123–124.⁵⁷ 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.⁵⁸ For example, Gerónimo de Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana, Cien de México ed., 2 vols. (Mexico, 1997), 2: chaps. 24–26; Juan de Torquemada, Monarquía Indiana, 6th ed., 3 vols. (Mexico, 1986), 3: 179, 200, 243–250; 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, 302–306.⁵⁹ 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.⁶⁰ 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; 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; 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), 17–28.⁶¹ Elinor Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (New York, 1994) 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. Romero Navarrete and Echenique March, Relaciones geográficas de 1792, 112–113.⁶² 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.” 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. “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. 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 Otomíes in this area.⁶³ 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; J. Jesús Solís de la Torre, Bárbaros y ermitaños: Chichimecas y agustinos en la Sierra Gorda, siglos XVI, XVII, y XVIII (S.L.P., Hidalgo, y Querétaro) (Querétaro, 1983); Margarita Velasco Mireles, ed., La Sierra Gorda: Documentos para su historia, 2 vols. (Mexico, 1996–1997), 1: 345–346.⁶⁴ Sources cited in Justino Fernández, Danzas de los concheros en San Miguel de Allende (Mexico, 1941), 33–41.⁶⁵ 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, 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), 379.⁶⁶ AHAM L10B, fol. 107.⁶⁷ On early chroniclers, see Fernández, Danzas de los concheros, 37–41. 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); Heidi Chemín Bässler, Las capillas oratorio otomíes de San Miguel Tolimán (Querétaro, 1993); Alan R. Sandstrom, Traditional Curing and Crop Fertility Rituals among Otomí Indians of the Sierra de Puebla, Mexico: The López Manuscripts (Bloomington, Ind., 1981); James W. Dow, “Sierra Otomí Religious Symbolism: Mankind Responding to the Natural World,” in Douglas Sharon, ed., Mesas and Cosmologies in Mesoamerica (San Diego, Calif., 2003), 28; 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 Nacionales 818, exp. 8.⁶⁸ Christian, Local Religion, 206–208, 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, 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).⁶⁹ Jaime Cuadriello, “Tierra de prodigios: La ventura como destino,” in Los pinceles de la historia: El origen del reino de la Nueva España, 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. Hector H. Schenone, Iconografía 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. 24.⁷⁰ 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.⁷¹ Chemín Bässler, Capillas oratorio, 91–95; Sandstrom, Traditional Curing, 19.⁷² “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, 19.⁷³ Bernard and Salinas Pedraza, Native Ethnography, 548.⁷⁴ Yolanda Lastra de Suárez, Unidad y diversidad de la lengua: Relatos otomíes (Mexico, 2001), 221–223.⁷⁵ Margarita de la Vega Lázaro, Crónica otomí del Estado de México: Narrativa oral tradicional (Toluca, 1998), 48–53.⁷⁶ Chemín Bässler, Capillas oratorio, 122; Galinier, The World Below, 121–122.⁷⁷ Bernard and Salinas Pedraza, Native Ethnography, 548.⁷⁸ 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; Angel María Garibay, Supervivencias de cultura intelectual precolombina entre los Otomíes de Huizquilucan (Mexico, 1957), 13–17.⁷⁹ Ruiz Guadalajara, Un teatro eclesiástico novohispano, 398–413. The other three images are the Señor del Socorro, the Señor del Calvario, and the Señor del Hospital.⁸⁰ Bernard and Salinas Pedraza, Native Ethnography, 275, 458, 520, 527, 552.⁸¹ 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.⁸² 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.⁸³ 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; Sinclair Thomson, We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency (Madison, Wis., 2002); Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Changes to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (Durham, N.C., 2003); and Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero, eds., After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas (Durham, N.C., 2003). 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.⁸⁴ 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. 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), 1–4.⁸⁵ 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. 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.⁸⁶ 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; Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion (London, 2002); and “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” History & Theory 34 (1995): 44: “History basically keeps open only one option—that of bringing the ahistoricals into history.”⁸⁷ See Louis O. Mink, “The Autonomy of Historical Understanding,” History & Theory 5 (1966): 24–47 (especially 42).⁸⁸Intimate Enemy, xiii–xv.⁸⁹ 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).⁹⁰ Nandy speaks of Indian counter-players as “ornamental dissenters.” Intimate Enemy, xiv.⁹¹The Practice of Everyday Life, xii.⁹²Intimate Enemy, xiv.⁹³The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games (New York, 2000).⁹⁴Language and Symbolic Power, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 129.⁹⁵ Mapuches in Chile, “Chichimecs” of north-central Mexico, Mayas in Yucatán 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 Iztapalapa (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).⁹⁶ John Tutino, “Buscando independencias populares: Conflicto social e insurgencia agraria en el Mezquital mexicano, 1800–1815,” in Marta Terán and José Antonio Serrano Ortega, eds., Las guerras de independencia en la América Española (Zamora, 2002), 295–321; William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, Calif., 1996), 461.⁹⁷The Practice of Everyday Life, xii. Emphasis in original.⁹⁸ Jesús Martín Barbero, Communication, Culture, and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations, trans. Elizabeth Fox and Robert A. White (London, 1993), 82.⁹⁹ 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); Matthew Restall, The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550–1850 (Stanford, Calif., 1997); and Kevin Terraciano, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: ñudzahui History, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif., 2001).¹⁰⁰ AGN Civil 1111, exp. “991,” petition to the Audiencia in 1793.¹⁰¹ 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. 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. See the review by Gyanendra Pandey in Journal of World History 13 (Fall 2002): 504–506.¹⁰² Sherry B. Ortner, “Practice, Power, and the Past,” Journal of Social Archaeology 1 (2001): 272, 275.

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