Resignification as Fourth Narrative: Power and the Colonial Religious Experience in Tula, Hidalgo

Abstract

Scholars have typically described colonial religious change in Mesoamerica in one of three major narrative frames: (1) the “spiritual warfare narrative”: a top-down imposition of Christianity; (2) the “core-veneer narrative”: a largely failed colonial project in which indigenous subjects retained many of their essential religious traits; or (3) the syncretism narrative: a passive, relatively equal blending of two originally coherent belief systems. These debates are, at their core, ideas about the way that power operates in early colonial situations, and each constitutes a narrative of power that is enabled, strengthened, challenged, and refined by empirical data. However, as I worked through the data I collected from two early Franciscan sites in Tula, Hidalgo in central Mexico (Figure 12.1), I found that existing narratives of religious change were inadequate to interpret the full extent of the transformations and continuities that I was observing. These data pointed toward a complex but unequal exchange: indigenous subjects clearly did not have full autonomy in early colonial Christian contexts, yet their diverse preexisting religious ontologies shaped the New World Church to a remarkable degree. This finding, though shared with many other researchers with similar topics (Graham 2011; Tavárez 2011; Wernke 2007), did not fit well with established narratives of colonial religious power. This was not an “ideal-type” problem: that is, the inherent mismatch between real-world data and inherently inadequate “ideal-type” models. Rather, there seemed to be a gap where a fourth narrative should be. Even so, the old “commonsense” narratives of religious change seemed to stubbornly persist despite ample data and careful refutations of existing models. Finding an interpretation of colonial power that articulated honestly with my data became my most challenging task. To contextualize the Tula case, I explain existing narratives of religious change in the region. I then contrast two forms of material culture from Tula – buildings and ceramics – that, at least superficially, appear to tell opposite