The historiography of Christianity in the Americas often reflects an Anglo-Protestant bias that, besides glossing over the colonial encounters of the 15th and 16th centuries, situates European missionaries and institutions as the primary agents of evangelization. Jennifer Scheper Hughes’ The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas offers a counter-history that centers the 1576 epidemic in Mexico, the mortandad (epidemic), and highlights the role Indigenous communities played in preserving a form of Christianity that was directly antagonistic to Spanish dispossession. Hughes contends that “Mexican Christianity as we know it today is not primarily the creation of Spanish missionaries, but rather of Indigenous Catholic survivors of the mortandad” (6). This thesis is sustained through an insightful investigation into the affective regimes of the ecclesia ex mortuis (the church of the dead) that emerged as the mortandad, cocoliztli (pestilence) in Nahuatl, spread disease and death throughout colonial Mexico.
In chapter 1, Hughes describes the role of medicine in mediating the relationship between Indigenous communities and priests. The Indigenous body became the locus theologicus (site of theological reflection) for Catholic missionaries seeking to incorporate the New World population into the Christian church. But the dialectic of the sickly Indio (Indigenous person) and the attendant priest was also critical in the production of the colonial relation: “Tending to the physical needs of the ill created webs of affective connection: powerful emotions that affirmed the friars’ sense of particular spiritual and social jurisdiction over Indigenous bodies and lives” (57). This complication of medicinal practices reveals the extent to which Christian commitment to physical care for the ill was easily attached to the structures of colonial dominance.
Chapter 2 turns to the representation of the colonial body as a corpus coloniae mysticum (the mystical body of the colony). Hughes traces the genealogy of this mystical body (corpus mysticum), first as Eucharistic sacrament in Europe, and then as the representation of the colony and its Indigenous members as the broken body of Christ in need of mending. The practice of bloodletting, meant to heal both body and spirit during the mortandad, turned the incision of Indigenous flesh into a sacrament that could extend Christian citizenship to the inhabitants of the so-called New World. But incorporation into Christendom was also predicated on exclusion from the Eucharist and the political and economic life of the colony. The ruse of inclusion, Hughes observes, is what distinguishes the Spanish evangelizing mission from that of other imperial nations. While the British pursued a strategy closer to genocide against Indigenous nations in the North Atlantic, Spanish friars sought to convert and include the Indios even as they consistently denied them the most important Catholic sacrament.
Chapters 3 and 4 explore the production and struggle over colonial space after the cataclysm of the mortandad. Hughes analyzes the visitaciones (pastoral visitations) of Archbishop Pedro Moya de Contreras in chapter 3 in order to interrogate the role of ritual walking in the consolidation of Christian territoriality. Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau, Hughes underscores that the function of walking through the post-epidemic necroscape to survey the dioceses buttressed dispossession. As Hughes observes, “Moya’s camino physically captured and encompassed the Valley of Mexico as a sovereign Christian territory when that control was thrown into jeopardy by the mortandad” (124). In other words, the circumambulation of the corpus coloniae mysticum served to chart the extent of the disaster and to devise a plan for a more complete territorialization of Spanish Catholicism.
Hughes’ engagement with the Map of Teozacoalco in chapter 4 identifies the cartographic representation of colonial Mexico as a Christian charter predating the Plymouth settlement and the arrival of Protestantism in the Americas. For Hughes, the Indigenous-authored mapas (maps) of the Relaciones geográficas (“Geographical Reports” ”), drafted in 1577-1586, functioned like covenants, “articulating a particular vision for an Indigenous Christian future anchored in the present and tied to ancestral traditions brought forward from the past” (140). The locus of the Map of Teozacoalco was the altepetl (city-state), Indigenous political communities that varied in size, which reveals how the adoption of Christianity was deployed to guard the sovereignty of ethnic polities. While Indigenous agency is highlighted throughout the entire text, this final chapter underscores how different cartographic elements in Native maps, like roads and churches, served to project a future where the altepemeh (plural of altepetl) and other Indigenous assemblages would not only be sustained, but also thrive. Hughes’ reading of the Indigenous-authored mapas as charters is one of the most innovative and important contributions of her volume.
While Hughes does delve into themes related to political economy, it would have been interesting to see these connected to recent work on capitalism and necroeconomics during the colonial encounters of the 15th and 16th centuries. Hughes analyzes numerous colonial documents that reflect on the mortandad, but the wider political economy of death constitutive of the chain of production is left relatively unexplored even in discussions of labor like those found in the final chapter.
The Church of the Dead is a stunning work that offers a powerful counter-history of Christianity in the Americas. Hughes’ engagement with the colonial archive re-contextualizes Spanish evangelization in the late 16th century by centering the mortandad and the way Indigenous communities projected sovereignty even in the midst of death. Rather than being passive vessels for the Christian message, Hughes convincingly argues that Christianity may not have survived without the sacred labor of Native communities. Similarly, her attention to the spatial dimension of imperial domination and subaltern resistance through extensive cartographic analysis points to future areas of research for scholars working at the intersection of the history of Christianity, Religions of North America, and Indigenous studies.
Joshua Mendez is an interfield PhD student in Cultural Studies and Religion at Claremont Graduate University.
Joshua Mendez
Date Of Review:
March 14, 2023
