Image found here via a correspondent.

My source for this image was a recent visitor to this blog, and her kind e-mail, which mentioned in passing that entering a convent was a way for young women of mixed race to obtain a more-secure place in colonial Spanish America, has prompted me to pick up a loose end from my more recent posts on the Virgen de Guadalupe.

The loosest of those ends (for me) was how the Church reconciled the Virgen de Guadalupe’s association with the Immaculate Conception with her depiction as a mestiza, especially given the Church’s active role in the policing of racial hierarchies. That question begins to get answered via María Elena Martínez’s excellent book Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Martínez notes that, whereas limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”) originated in Spain during the Reconquista as a way of determining not race but a genealogy of religious affiliation (those who could demonstrate that their families had been Christians for at least three generations (unless someone in their family had been a Muslim) were thus eligible for the higher government and Church posts–as an aside, this explains why Cabeza de Vaca refers to himself and his fellow castaways not as Spaniards but as Christians), over time in the Americas the term came to indicate racial distinctions.

The existence of the Indians were the cause of this change in the term’s meaning. They were regarded as pure, but:

Ambiguities in the purity status of native people [. . .] emanated from the very contradictions of Spanish colonialism, from a political ideology that on the one hand announced that they were untainted because they lacked Jewish, Muslim and heretical antecedents and had willingly accepted the faith, and on the other constantly iterated that they would revert to idolatry if left to their own devices and in the hands of misguided leaders. (214)

These contradictions led as well to a lack of consistency among the different religious orders regarding how to think through this question. The Franciscans, for example, didn’t regard indigenous descent that was sufficiently distant in one’s past as a hindrance to determining one’s purity (and, thus, access to sinecures in the Church and government). But the Spanish-born and those born of Spanish parents in Mexico (read: those traditionally the only ones eligible for such positions) obviously did not agree with less-strict understandings of purity (Martínez, 219).

Enter both the genre of casta paintings and the rising prominence of the Virgen of Guadalupe.

Casta paintings, as both I in this post, and Martínez assert, played a role in simultaneously defining and, intentionally or not, complicating discussions of racial boundaries during the 18th century as Spain sought to reassert its control over the colonies. Martínez pushes this further, though: “[T]he existence of multiple definitions of purity of blood, some religious, others more secular, helped fuel a creole patriotic defense of Spanish-Indian unions at a time of growing concern about mestizaje and its supposed degenerating potential” (228).

That defense received religious sanction in the cult of Guadalupe:

As the cult of Guadalupe reached its apogee, her image became part of an increasingly complex symbolism. Not only did her apparition to Juan Diego come to represent the promise of a renewed Christendom in Mexico and a kind of collective baptism of its disparate populations, but members of clergy incorporated it into a vision of New Spain as a product of two spiritually unsullied communities: one brought the Catholic faith; the other was redeemed by it. Within this vision, it was the latter community, the indigenous people, that at a symbolic level was the more important. The Virgin’s appearance on the hill of Tepeyac had accelerated the eradication of idolatry, thereby sacralizing both the land and its original inhabitants; she had made Mexico into the new Holy Land and the Indians her chosen people. (252)

Martínez then goes on to discuss the Mena painting, which you see here, and which she confirms as being the only known example of a casta painting that directly incorporates the iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as something like the apotheosis of both the celebration of New Spain’s racial diversity and the anxieties attendant upon that same diversity. It occurs to me, though, in looking again at the Sor María painting at the beginning of this post, that we could also read it as a casta painting over which the Virgen presides. Though her parents do not appear in the painting, María Antonia is pretty clearly of mixed race; moreover, it was during the mid-18th century that the Church began to admit mestiza women into convents–the same time, incidentally, that the Virgen de Guadalupe had been declared by the Pope to be a Patroness of the Americas. Perhaps for María Antonia, then, the Virgen was both a model of chastity and, on a more intimate level, one of validation–an exemplar of her own (ethnic) worthiness.

I can only register disbelief and incomprehension regarding this.

In the interest of getting through a bunch of books I’ve obtained through interlibrary loan, I’ve had to put aside my recent obsession with the Virgin of Guadalupe. Not to worry, though: in a few days I hope to have something of a summary post that picks up where this one and this one before it leave off.

At present, I’m reading up on Brazilian positivism as treated in João Cruz Costa’s A History of Ideas in Brazil: The Development of Philosophy in Brazil and the Evolution of National History (California, 1964). To be quite honest, up to the discussion of positivism, it’s been an intellectual snooze-fest: There are only so many ways Costa can say, over the course of the 80 or so pages devoted to chronicling the three centuries before the constitutional monarchy established in 1822 that gained Brazil its independence from Portugal, “Brazil had no history of ideas, and it’s mostly the Jesuits’ fault.” (Costa is no neutral chronicler of this history: he openly mocks some of his subjects, and either he personally is no fan of the Jesuits, or he just happens to have selected sources to cite that see the Jesuits more as a bane than a blessing on the colony’s early years; a little more about that later on. I’ll just say, regarding the allegedly pernicious effects of the Jesuits, that I don’t know enough to form an independent judgment about this issue.) Part of the problem, I think, is also due to a combination of Costa’s rather haphazard organization (which compels him to repeat himself) and a less-than-smooth translation. Now that I’m (finally) up to the section on positivism, it’s doing a better job of holding my interest, if only because it was the institutionalizing of positivist principles in education and governance that marks official Brazil’s first adoption of a coherent set of ideals on which to begin building itself as a nation.

[Just as a quick aside: Brazil is one of the few Latin American countries who gained its independence relatively peacefully rather than via a violent overthrow of the metropole. Good old Wikipedia has a quickie summary of these events. Anyway, as I read all this I found myself thinking about the U.S.'s experience during the last quarter of the 18th century and wondering if that transition to independence was as smooth as it was because it was, after all, a war based clearly on a set of principles regarding good governance. Brazil, by contrast, simply wanted to remain a sovereign nation once it had been declared as such--so far as I can tell, there was no grand philosophical ideal at stake. Indeed, as noted above, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was no such thing as a school of thought that was identifiably Brazilian.]

But I’m not writing this because Costa’s book is tedious going. Rather, it has some rather odd moments in it that I want to talk my way through and that perhaps someone out there might find interesting, or maybe even comment-worthy.

In the middle of his fairly brutal take on the Brazilian Romantic man of letters Domingo José Gonçalves de Magalhães and his “philosophy” (our author’s quotes), Costa quotes the following passage, from Os Fatos do Espírito Humano (1865):

It is not with eyes glued to the exterior world and with senses open and attentive to perceptual phenomena that the human soul will learn to understand its true nature, its attributes, and its destiny; it is only by withdrawing to the sanctuary of its conscience, by reflecting on its actions, that it will come to penetrate the metaphysics of the spiritual world, of which it is but one of the inhabitants who travel through this external world, forgetful at times of that native land (!) from whence it comes. (in Costa, 65; I cannot determine whether the exclamation point is Magalhães’ or Costa’s)

Costa holds this passage up to ridicule as pretty weak philosophical tea, but it also happens to strike me as analogous to Costa’s book’s stance thus far with regard to the relationship between Brazilian thought and Brazil itself. In Costa’s introduction, we’re told again and again that a country’s philosophy and its history and culture are inseparable, as here:

The interest which Brazilian intellectuals today show in reëxamination of our historic experience clearly indicates that a profound change in our way of considering national problems is taking place.

But where should we start in the attempt to reach an understanding of these problems? Naturally, from the rich fabric of our Portuguese background. It is there that we find some of the threads of the colorful design we have been embroidering during four centuries. But from there we must follow other, newer trails, because the meaning of our ideas is complex and not limited to its Portuguese ancestry, which, although of incomparable importance, is not the only influence on the vicissitudes of national thought.

* * *

In spite of the fact, however, that we are “a melting pot for conflicting elements,” a “mixture,” we can and should sound the depths of our nature, to coin a nautical phrase. To do this without attempting any synthesis which could be interpreted as a formula (a formula which, given the nature of things Brazilian, would in any event be imperfect and oversimplified), we must consider the facts provided by our past, the historic facts of a destiny covering four centuries. A consideration of these facts would have no value other than that of a simple enumeration. (6-7)

To be honest, I’m not really sure what Costa wants us to consider here. Intellectually, Brazilians are more than transplanted Portuguese; we need to acknowledge that in an intellectual history. So far, so good. But we need to ignore those other “threads of the colorful design” in order to discover an unalloyed Brazilian self? That, indeed, is exactly what we should do, according to a passage quoted by Costa from Mario de Andrade’s Aspectos da Literatura Brasileira, published in 1943, “In this disorder which is Brazil, [we are] forced to make a link between unrelated creative personalities and works, in the mistaken need to establish a unity which does not yet exist. . . . The time has not yet come when the Brazilian soul can be understood by any attempt at a synthetic vision” (in Costa 6). So, at least to the point that I’ve read, Costa has hewn very closely to European ideas (along with Portuguese resistance to them, especially those of the French Encyclopedists) and to the tension between Jesuit and secular (or, at least, less dogmatically-oriented) systems of education. He mentions the indigenous and African presences but says almost nothing about their possible shaping influences on Brazilian thought. In his chapter taking up the early years of Brazilian independence, he quotes a writer of the time who said that the Jesuits’ missions among the Indians were detrimental to more fully integrating Indians into the larger society–the Jesuits sought to reduce contact between their parishioners as much as possible by, among other things, not teaching them Portuguese. (That desire to isolate the Indians might possibly have to do with the colonists’ history of rounding up the Indians to sell them or have them work as slaves, a practice the Jesuits fiercely resisted–but I digress.) Elsewhere, Costa states quite directly in a couple of places that the presence of the Negro is the single most important historical fact about Brazil but so far has said nothing more. In fairness to Costa, I am presently stopped in my reading where Costa has just begun to discuss the Positivists’ plan, published in 1880, to abolish slavery and integrate former slaves into Brazilian society; it may be that in a little bit Costa will speak to this larger issue. We’ll see. But it’s pretty clear that the Positivists didn’t consult any slaves when developing this plan, and that fact gets at this book’s strangeness.

It is as though these three groups’ living near each other for three hundred years had no effect on Brazilian writers and thinkers, except in the literature of the 19th century–except that they did, and we acknowledge that, but we can’t say anything definitive about that/those effect(s), so we’re not going to say anything about it/them at all. Or something like that. After all, Brazil was only, at the time of the writing of A History of Ideas in Brazil, a mere 142 years old as an independent nation. It is as though Costa, at least, is in denial about that mixed-culture past’s bearing on Brazilian intellectual life, even as he notes in the introduction that said past matters and must be acknowledged . . . just not right now.

As of this point in my reading of this book, Brazil as a place remains as blank as ever, what with all the looking back at Europe its intellectuals are engaged in. What, after all, is there to see when one looks inland?

This all reminds me of an overarching theme in Darlene J. Sadlier’s Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present, a recently-published comprehensive cultural history that I read much of about a month ago. That theme is that, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the present, Brazil has served as something like a jungle-green screen against which fantasies and nightmares, not just those of Europeans but even those of native Brazilians (the vast majority of whom know almost nothing about their country beyond their immediate region), are projected. Just as one example from her book of how this works, Sadlier discusses the rise (and popularity) of Brazilian regionalist literature in the late-19th century as “[p]erhaps . . . a way for writers to circumvent the vastness and variety that made knowing or representing Brazil as a whole implausible” (315, n. 39). In Costa’s work, then, what is projected on that green screen is recycled European intellectual life, intact and unamalgamated. The fantasy is French philosophy, its apotheosis being the (literal) church of Positivism; the nightmare is Jesuit scholasticism.

Costa so far makes clear that Positivism’s emphasis on science and the rational was seen as a proper antidote to the Church’s celebration of the mystical (though Positivism’s worship of these things itself would become mystical in nature, something its adherents seemed not to recognize). Also, it was very French, which had the chief advantage of not being Portuguese. I find myself wondering if the Brazilian intelligentsia so fervently latched on to Positivism at least in part as a subconscious recognition that Brazil’s three distinct racial types, two of whom had been deliberately shoved to the periphery of the nation’s cultural and social life, would have to be integrated in some way into white society in order to form a genuinely healthy nation and, there no established philosophy articulating the relationship between citizen and government, Positivism seemed more likely to provide sound guidance in this than did other systems of thought.

There’s more to read.

More on this as soon as I get my hands on the book.

UPDATE: I’ll have a longer post on this book here later; in the meantime, here is a brief-ish review at my other blog.

As I noted via the timeline that Poole lays out regarding the documentable events regarding the Virgin, by the mid-1550s a chapel at Tepeyac had been established and contained in it an object that was the subject both of veneration and of concern on the part of some clergy, the Dominican order in particular. Poole also notes in his very valuable first chapter (which establishes the religious context in both Spain and, from 1521 (the fall of Tenochtitlan)-1531 (the year of the Virgin’s appearances to Juan Diego) that while there was a church hierarchy, in outlying parishes mendicants had a fair amount of autonomy and even authority granted them by their parishioners. Jaffary indirectly develops this further within her brief discussion of the cult of Guadalupe by noting “[t]he Counter-Reformation Catholic church’s vigorous promotion of the Cult of the Virgin Mary” as a means of policing female chastity, not only for purposes of morality but also, and especially later in the colonial period, for purposes of maintaining the divisions in New Spain’s racial hierarchy, and also noting that “[l]ocal cults devoted to dozens of other Marian figures flourished among both indigenous and Spanish communities throughout New Spain” (61). Poole hypothesizes that someone, most likely an Indian painter, made the image now venerated as miraculous; it is not difficult, therefore, to further hypothesize that an especially-charismatic priest encouraged its veneration, eventually gaining the ever-growing, initially-wary attention of the Church hierarchy.

As I say, none of this is difficult to imagine in and of itself. But from Jaffary’s book comes this firm reminder (apologies for the length:

Legal codes, church doctrine, and elite culture all worked to structure colonial Mexican society upon a rigid set of racial, economic, and gendered hierarchies. Initially only male peninsulares [people of Spanish descent born in Spain] could occupy the most elevated positions in the colonial bureaucracy, ecclesiastical institutions, and commercial networks. However, between the late sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries, increasing numbers of criollos, people of Spanish descent born in the New World, gained access to these positions. Criollos’ rising political and economic aspirations threatened both peninsulares and the Spanish crown. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, Spanish elites also grew wary of the demographic and economic expansion of the viceroyalty of New Spain’s racially mixed population. In response, the crown–with peninsulares’ support–adopted several measures to restrict access to power by criollos and castas, people of mixed racial ancestry. The 1776 Real Pragmática, a decree the energetic Bourbon king Charles III issued, represented the culmination of the state’s policy. The Pragmática attempted to legislate an end to marriages between people of differing economic and racial backgrounds by prohibiting individuals’ ability to select spouses without parental approval.

* * *

In medieval and early modern Iberia, Christians proscribed Spanish women from having sexual contact with the Peninsula’s Moorish and Jewish populations. . . . Spaniards transferred this ancient insistence on female sexual purity to the Indies, where they created a new set of prohibitions against the comingling of Spanish Christians with Indians, Africans, and castas. In Spain limipieza de sangre (cleanliness of the blood) had denoted purity from the taint of Jewish lineage. In the New World the phrase described those who claimed they were unpolluted by Indian or African ancestry. (6, 7; all italics are the author’s)

Never mind that by 1776, mestizaje as a fact of the colony’s life was already well established–and that, moreover, Guadalupe was deployed by at least some artists as an implicit endorsement of that fact, as the Luis de Mena painting at the beginning of this post indicates. The Virgin of Guadalupe would have been enlisted in this policing role, especially given that she was determined by the Church to be a manifestation of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. But the question I have is, how (if at all) was this interpretation of Guadalupe reconciled with her appearance as a mestiza–the earthly manifestation of which would have been legally and coded as extra-legal, and which, as I just mentioned, the Church was expected to help enforce? It may be that the Church’s long tradition of Black Madonnas helped elide these difficulties; but, again, it would seem that to explicitly identify Guadalupe as a mestiza–as a member of a less-than-favored casta category–would create some sort of tension among legal, theological and cultural codes in New Spain. Whether the silence of the sources I’ve so far looked at is an approving or an awkward one, I know not. Or perhaps, as Poole concludes regarding the hundred-year gap between the given date for the Virgin’s appearances to Juan Diego and the first direct written mention of the story of those appearances, the silence indicates that there was simply no problem to address.

What follows is an attempt to articulate my sense of the above, subject to change as I learn more (and learn how to say better what I’m trying to say): As was historically the case of the offspring of miscegenous relationships not legally or culturally sanctioned, the Virgin of Guadalupe can be read as representing an excess; her signification is beyond the full control of either Church or state. It is not that, as a sign, she is indeterminate or arbitrary; it is that she signifies both one of those institutions’ determined meanings and, simultaneously, something that would appear to run counter to those meanings. She is at once an affirmation of order (though not necessarily one sanctioned by the entity deploying her as an enforcement of that order) and the critique of established order. She is, in other words, apocalyptic, in both that word’s meanings: she reveals a new order that necessarily requires the destruction of the old–which is, of course, what this book project is intent on arguing with regard to consensual interracial relationships.

The recent reading: Stafford Poole, C. M., Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797. I am about done with my Virgen de Guadalupe kick, my reader(s) will probably be pleased to learn. For those who want a thorough, Occam’s Razor-based examination of the historical record regarding the apparitions and the accompanying tradition, though, Poole’s book is definitely the place to start. It could use an update, seeing since its publication some additional documents concerning Juan Diego emerged during the process leading to his canonization. But it remains extremely valuable, especially for such things as providing the ecclesiastical context in both Spain and Mexico during the colonial era and the vagaries of Nahuatl poetry (chief among them, the fact that Nahuatl was a spoken and written language vital to aiding in the conversion and education of indigenous peoples up till almost the end of the colonial era). Here’s the thumbnail summary of Poole’s conclusions:

From 1531 (the year the apparitions are said to have occurred) till the 1550s, no written records of any sort exist which refer to Juan Diego or the apparitions;

beginning in the 1550s, there begin to appear references–not all of them positive–to a chapel (ermita) at Tepeyac (the hill in present-day Mexico City where the Virgin is said to have appeared) and the veneration of an object or objects there;

by 1615 (the year of the Samuel Stradanus engraving above), a pictoral tradition depicting miracles attributed to the Virgin had arisen, thus indicating the existence of an oral tradition that had given rise to them;

in 1648, there suddenly appeared (re Poole) the first narratives regarding Juan Diego and the apparitions and the miracle of the image on his ayate, accompanied by the admission of no prior written records of these narratives but that they had been perpetuated via the memory of those whose relatives or familiars had known Juan Diego;

from 1650 on, the Virgin was vigorously promoted as a sign that God had shown His favor on Mexico and, thus, on criollos (those of Spanish blood born in Mexico), and less-vigorously promoted as a means of evangelizing to the Indians.

As to the veracity of the story and image as currently-received tradition has it, Poole is careful to say that the currently-existing historical records–their words and, as importantly, their silences–don’t support that tradition . . . which is not the same thing as saying that they are untrue. Still, Poole’s incredulity that something as momentous as the apparitions and the miraculous image would go completely unmentioned in Church documents for over 100 years speaks for itself. As to the Virgin’s image’s link to casta paintings, which I speculated on here, Poole doesn’t address either those paintings or even, for that matter, the Virgin’s mestiza appearance. Still, in his thorough examining of sermons that establish a link between the Virgin and the affirmation of crilloismo, Poole helps provide tangential independent confirmation of that connection.

Speaking of casta paintings . . . I also had a look at Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life 1521-1821. It contains some examples of these paintings, one of which is the first image you see in this earlier post of mine. From its discussion of that painting, written by Ilona Katzew:

Tobacco and chocolate [depicted in the painting] were staples of the New World. Featuring these typical American products in paintings whose subject was miscegenation–believed to be especially widespread in the New World–offered a highly mediated view of life in New Spain, one that casts the colony as the producers of goods and people. (245)

Yes. And add to this Katzew’s observation elsewhere that the enactment of the mid-18th century Bourbon Reforms, among other things, sought to insist more firmly on rules based on New Spain’s racial hierarchy (casta paintings would begin to be numbered accordingly); yet, in this painting and in others depicting all but the very lowest castas, the families would be shown as prosperous and anything but the moral degenerates that the casta system implicitly claimed the less-than-pure were. The casta paintings thus became, in this argument, somewhat akin to Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter: they honored the letter of the law but violated its spirit. They, along with the Virgen de Guadalupe in a parallel course (which is to say, these traditions seem not, or only rarely, to intersect), came to be manifestations of criollo pride rather than its official inferiority relative to Spain.

There is more to say about this.

Current reading: George Washington Cable, Strange True Tales of Louisiana (1888, 1889). Over at good old Blog Meridian, I recently posted on the potential dark side of literary regionalism, of which Cable is definitely a part, but it seems to me that he himself doesn’t fall prey to that dark side, either here or in The Grandissimes. Strange Tales is a collection of (so far) linked stories that Cable claims are based on actual memoirs and diaries that have come into his possession about life in antebellum New Orleans and southern Louisiana plantation life. Let’s just say I have my doubts about those claims, but that does nothing to lessen their interest for me. [UPDATE: Via this article (.pdf), I've learned that Cable indeed did use a combination of actual letters and diaries, along with contemporary newspaper accounts, to produce these stories. But the collection has, overall, a unified feel not unlike Faulkner's Go Down, Moses.] And let’s just say as well that I think Edna Ferber read this book fairly attentively, but that that and other matters will have to wait for a fuller airing later on.

I’ve just finished rereading Lillian Smith’s 1944 novel, Strange Fruit, a novel that, though still in print, I suspect not many people read today. That’s a shame, really. Given its title’s origin (the Billie Holiday song), its setting (early Depression-era rural southern Georgia), its chief subject (an interracial relationship between a white man and a black woman) and the time of its publication–not to mention the fact that it was banned in some places when published–Strange Fruit is brave in ways that better-known Southern novels whose big subject is racism finally aren’t (To Kill a Mockingbird, good as it is (and happy 50th anniversary, by the way), comes to mind here). Which, after all, is braver for a Southern novelist in the pre-Civil Rights Act South to do: to show us as we’d like to think of ourselves as being, or to show us as most of us in fact are–and why we are the way we are?

The novel’s central story is an affair between Tracy Deen, the ne’er-do-well son of a respectable and well-off white family, and Nonnie Anderson, a college-educated black woman working as a maid for another white family. If you know the Billie Holiday song, you already know, more or less, where this story is headed: Nonnie becomes pregnant by Tracy; Tracy, who seems to love Nonnie yet already seems to know that a future with her will remain at best a clandestine one, and already under immense passive-aggressive pressure to marry the nice white girl across the street, breaks off his relationship with Nonnie and seeks to find a black man to marry her so the baby will have a father; that man, named Henry, a black boyhood friend of Tracy’s who is now the Deens’ house servant, brags on his upcoming marriage in earshot of Nonnie’s older brother, Ed; Ed puts two and two together, lies in wait for Tracy along the path he (Tracy) takes that runs from the colored to the white side of town, and shoots Tracy, killing him; his family and a family friend help him leave town; a few hours later, Henry and his girlfriend will come across Tracy’s body and attempt to hide it, but other people in Colored Town see this; once Tracy’s body is found, word gets out about Henry’s having been seen moving the body; despite the strong suspicion among the more-respectable white members of the community that Henry isn’t guilty, and their attempts to stop it, Henry is lynched and then burned.

However, though the above is the novel’s central narrative, it’d not be inaccurate to say that the novel’s main character is Maxwell, Georgia, the town it’s set in. We learn about its industries (agriculture and lumber) and their accompanying labor problems (farmers are having troubles finding (black) workers to work the fields because up North are better (and better-paying) opportunities; at the mills, there’s rumbling about unionizing the workers); about how religion is regarded by various cross-sections of the town (a revival happens to be in town during the “now” of the novel); and about how blacks who served during the first world war and/or have gone to college are (in the minds of whites) quietly but firmly insisting–through the mere fact of their presence in town–on an opening-up of economic opportunity for blacks.

We also learn that Jim Crow is Maxwell’s de facto mayor and, in the wake of Tracy’s murder and Henry’s lynching, varying degrees of complicity (ranging from participating in the lynching to disapproving but staying out of the way) work to keep that mayor in power. As Tom Harris, the owner of the town’s lumber mill and thus one of its most prominent citizens, puts it (via the 3rd-person narrator), “Maxwell’s a good town, a quiet town, good place to bring your children up in–and he had brought up nine. Except for Saturday nights, a few razor fights, a dead nigger now and then, nothing violent ever happened in Maxwell. Things still went on in the southwest of the county that had no business going on. Niggers disappeared out on Bill Talley’s place too often–dropped plumb out of sight–but you didn’t have proof, and there was seldom much talk about it” (300). The part about Bill Talley is especially telling: it’s not that black people are disappearing–it’s that they’re disappearing too often that disturbs Harris. And yet the novel is at pains to show that Harris is among the most sympathetic to the plight of black people in the town: he attempts to hide Henry from the mob searching for him; and when the mob finds Henry, Harris tries to stop the lynching.

Given a novel like this, then, it isn’t surprising that Strange Fruit lacks a figure analogous to To Kill a Mockingbird‘s Atticus Finch. Finch stands as our proxy in Harper Lee’s novel; we can vicariously stand with him as he defends Tom Robinson, giving voice to what we know is right yet may be too afraid to say out loud. Instead, what we get in Strange Fruit is, for the most part and at best, a resigned acceptance of the status quo. The two lovers at the novel’s heart aren’t especially sympathetic: much as Tracy Deen resists being defined by the town’s definitions of Success and Respectability, he succumbs to them and in so doing rejects Nonnie; and as for Nonnie, her sister Bess characterizes her accurately as not being especially clear-eyed when it comes to seeing that there’s no future worthy of her where Tracy is concerned–or Maxwell, either, for that matter. Sam, a black doctor who clearly has the respect of the African-American community there, commands our respect as well, but only up to a point–after all, after Ed shoots Tracy, it’s Sam who drives him to Macon to hop a train back to New York and then to Washington, D.C., where Ed lives. Of the novel’s white characters, Prentiss Reid, the newspaper editor, widely known to hold radical political and religious views, writes about the lynching but pulls his punches by writing that, yes, lynching is an unpleasant business but the North is not without its own race problems; Harris, as we see above, does not approve of lynching but, because his business employs some of the very men responsible for the lynching, feels he do no more than what he had done to try to stop this particular one. Harris’s children, Charlie and Harriett, are much more vocal in their opposition to the town’s endemic racism, but Charlie notes that in order to hang on to his ideas about how to fight against Maxwell’s mindset, he would have to leave.

But leaving Maxwell, one gets the feeling, is difficult to do. A frequent motif in the novel is the evocations of roads and paths that connect otherwise discrete parts of the town to each other but which, it seems, never lead away from town. Those with the ability and/or inclination to leave are a definite minority; those who remain loathe or resent, with varying degrees of intensity, the members of those whose race they are not . . . in large measure because they recognize that without them, they could not survive–at least, not in the world as they had configured for themselves. It’s a miscegenous relationship, but a mandated one: whites are just as trapped in it (though, to be sure, in different ways) as blacks are. So, even as we recognize and applaud Charlie’s clear-headedness as he tells first his father and then his sister that he hates how blacks are treated in Maxwell, it’s hard not to feel some despair for the town if Charlie either leaves town to preserve his current thinking or stays in town and gradually loses his convictions.

I’ve already gone on enough. Strange Fruit, I think, is well worth your time, especially when read against To Kill a Mockingbird–and just so no one misunderstands me, I do very much like and respect Mockingbird. But Smith’s novel investigates racism’s essential irrationality, something which, in the mid-century South, was an important task–especially since the prevailing argument in favor of Jim Crow at that time was that system’s insistence on its rationality. More on that, by way of a discussion of Thomas Dixon Jr.‘s novel The Sins of the Father, in a future post.

As part of my research for the book project, the other day I revisited this post‘s accompanying image, and some further reading–especially in reading the historical record supporting the authenticity of the story and, more directly, here–I was reminded, in a different way this time, of the contested nature of just about everything regarding the story of the Virgin’s appearance to Juan Diego, from the very earliest days of that story (she appeared to the Indian Juan Diego in 1531). Some (much?) of that argument, we find between the lines, was driven by rivalries among bishops and their respective orders (which I first speculated on here). Thus, it makes sense that we also have overt written and visual assertions of Juan Diego‘s worthiness as a way of asserting the truth of the Virgin’s appearance to him on the hill of Tepeyac; hence, in the frieze over the east entrance of the old basilica dedicated to the Virgin, Juan Diego’s accompanying hat and staff, which mark him iconographically not only as a shepherd but also as someone making a pilgrimage to a shrine, and the beaver in the foreground (a symbol of chastity in medieval bestiaries).

Anyway, that and the fact of the Virgin’s appearance as a mestiza to an indigenous person–that is, she appears, in effect, as always already of mixed ethnicity–made me wonder about linkages, whether direct or thematic, between depictions of the Virgin and the genre of casta painting that arose in Mexico and, to a lesser extent, in Peru during the colonial era. Those paintings are not merely secular in content, they are quite literally domestic: often their settings are the interiors of houses, or they show a family out for a promenade; some standardized depictions of castes show physical violence occurring between the spouses, their child attempting to intervene. So, off to Wichita State University’s library I went yesterday, and in one of the books I looked at I ran across the Luis de Mena painting you see at the top of this post. As it turns out, this same image also appears in Ilona Katzew’s excellent book on the subject; I own this book, but I didn’t remember seeing it in there and so didn’t bother to look again before last night. (Man: the things I tell you people.)

In a way, it’s my forgetting this image that really prompts this post.

Casta paintings that also include images of the Virgin apparently are not very common: this is the only such example in Katzew’s book, and I know I’ve not seen any others like this. At one level, that near-absence of juxtapositions is to be expected: The Virgin is, of course, the embodiment of chastity, while the most direct message of the casta paintings is, ahem, the consequences of the procreative act; moreover, though interracial marriages were officially permitted in Mexico, some, as I discussed in this post, were more approved-of than others were with regard to the social standing of the children of that marriage–more approved-of because of the matter of their racial purity. These were clearly not sacred but secular matters, as regarded the rules governing the painting guilds and their permitted subjects; to directly link the Virgin to such paintings would cross not only legal bounds but also those of propriety. I can be forgiven for not having remembered Mena’s painting, then: it’s something of an anomaly within this genre.

Katzew herself doesn’t spend too much time on Mena’s painting, either. She briefly discusses it within the context of a book by Juan Manuel de San Vicente, a book published in 1768 whose purpose was to extol New Spain’s virtues and whose language Katzew describes as an example of “creole discourses of pride” (193)–even though San Vicente was a Spaniard. This book

ends majestically with a discussion of the Virgin of Guadalupe, of whom he quotes the famous verse from Psalm 147 (20): “Non fecit taliter omni nationi” (He has not done the like for any other nation), pointing to the honor that God bestowed on Mexico by having the Virgin appear in that country. The Virgin of Guadalupe also features prominently in Mena’s casta painting along with the fruits of the land, the city’s famous retreats [shown in the upper-right corner], and the Virgin’s sanctuary [in the upper-left corner], allowing us to see how the work might have been interpreted by contemporary audiences. (194)

Katzew, as is typical of her book, doesn’t go into those interpretations. But, especially when compared to other casta paintings, it becomes pretty clear that Mena wants to insist on a more benign interpretation of these different castas by placing their depiction within a context in which Mexico’s other virtues are submitted for our admiration. The castas occupy the middle two registers of the painting; they are framed, below, by a depiction of native fruits and vegetables (it is no accident that the costumes of the figures in the casta paintings are in the same colors as the produce–as if to suggest that these many-hued people are likewise the fruit of the same Mexican soil) and, above, by the Virgin, her basilica and Ixtacalco, a popular place to visit on the southeast of the capital known for its canals. The painting’s overall message is that of exuberant variety that is clearly and distinctly Mexican, a variety, moreover, presided over approvingly by the Virgin herself.

But as soon as I saw Mena’s painting, I was immediately reminded of the painting below, which I saw for the first time when the Mrs. and I went on our Mexico City trip back in the fall of 2008:

Anon., Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de México, Patrona de la Nueva España. 18th cen. Museo de la Basilica de Guadalupe, Mexico City. Image found here.

(Apologies, by the way, for the poor quality of the image. For details I describe below, I’m working from a picture in a small booklet I bought at the museum.)

The Museum caters to a niche audience, obviously, but if you’ve read this far and ever find yourself in Mexico City with a few extra hours to spare at the basilica, it’s well worth the 30 peso admission fee to visit. Fortunately for the Mrs. and me, it wasn’t too crowded the day we went because when I saw this painting, I couldn’t help but stare and stare at it.

In remembering this painting, it suddenly occurred to me that it bears some compositional similarities to the standard casta painting: we have a male and female of different races (here, the female figure on the left symbolizes Europe; the male figure, dressed in indigenous garb, represents the Americas. (The male figure, by the way, is speaking the same verse from Psalm 140 that Katzew reports San Vicente as quoting regarding the Virgin’s appearance.) But other images in the painting seem to argue for the Virgin’s distinctive Mexican-ness. Directly below the angel who is directly under the Virgin’s feet (the angel, by the way, is part of her traditional depiction–it’s on the framed cloth with the miraculous image that hangs over the altar in the new basilica), we see two small scenes depicting, on the left, the Virgin’s final appearance to Juan Diego and, on the right, Juan Diego showing the bishop his ayate with the Virgin’s image on it. But those two scenes rest on the outspread wings of an eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus, which itself is emerging from a body of water: the Aztecs’ sign from the gods to build their city on that place and, now, the emblem in the center of the Mexican flag.

Clearly, this painting functions as more than an image honoring the Virgin or as one depicting particular scenes from the story of her appearances to Juan Diego. It contains, in the allegorical figures of Europe and the Americas, themselves explicitly female and male, “parents” for the Virgin–whose respective races would account for the Virgin’s mestiza appearance, were this a typical casta painting. Moreover, her placement over the eagle on the cactus seems both to locate her in a very specific place and to explicitly associate her appearance with that earlier tradition (pagan though it was) of miraculous signs to the people in the Valle de Anahuac.

But no matter the truth of the Virgin’s origins, no religious syncretism is at work here: The Conquest was by now two centuries past for both Mena and the anonymous painter of the painting I have been discussing. San Vicente, whom I quoted above, introduced his work on Mexico by celebrating the Aztec emperors who preceded Cortés’ arrival, “because it is one of the circumstances that truly makes this city great, for having as its children (although heathen) eleven so great and illustrious emperors.” Katzew goes on to comment, “In other words, Mexico’s precolonial past is deployed to legitimize the uniqueness of the country and to set the stage for the remainder of his description [of the country]” (194). The latter half of 18th century was a time among Mexicans of growing pride of place and of culture, and the Virgin was most definitely included in that pride, so much so that in 1746 she would be declared the patroness of New Spain by the archbishop. What is at work in this painting is an allegorizing of the Virgin’s cultural parentage, and that her parentage is a miscegenated one. To see a painting of the Virgin from this time borrowing the basic form of the casta paintings is certainly startling from the point of view of religion and of veneration, but from that of culture, specifically Mexican culture, it makes perfect sense. But even more importantly, the Church’s official embracing of the Virgin as New Spain’s patroness implicitly validated the mixed-race populations who venerated her.

In a later post, I want to address at greater length something I said in this post–in particular, this:

Whatever happened in December of 1531 and the weeks and months following–whether miracle or fraud or some now-irrecoverable combination of the two–the Church lost control over the meaning of the Virgin and the resulting manner of her veneration in the instant that she appeared to an Indian as a mestiza. Which, of course, is tantamount to saying that it thus never had control over her. Such is her power in Mexico and throughout Hispanic America: that everyone knows this; all the Church can do is acknowledge it and appear to grant it official sanction as it is able via such means as papal visits and the move to canonize Juan Diego.

Note: Over at my other blog, I have two brief posts on Mohicans, here and here; this one comes out of that context, but it’s not crucial to have read them before you read this one.

The frustrating (and fascinating) thing about reading The Last of the Mohicans (1826) is that, for all its insufferable didaticism it can be difficult to know whether and to what extent certain of its more intriguing textual moments are intentional. This difficulty, I would assume, is owing to what Richard Poirier succinctly describes (77) as Cooper’s lack of stylistic defensiveness. One quick example is Cooper’s rendering of Natty Bumppo’s speaking the word nature as “natur”: Apart from seeking to signify how his character is pronouncing the word, might Cooper also intend something of a more metaphysical or existential quality as regards his protagonist’s nature? I don’t know, and there is likely no way to know for sure. I mention all this because some conclusions that follow will be more speculative than interpretive; to that end, I’ll also make reference to another book, ostensibly very different from Mohicans, to provide a little support for those speculations.

Mohicans is here because of its influence on 19th-century Latin American writers who saw themselves (and their people) in the years after independence with much the same task ahead of them that Cooper’s characters face: the establishing of a new nation, and the extent to which people will shape the land, or the land them. But Mohicans is interesting to me as well because of the presence of Cora Munro, the older of Colonel Munro’s two daughters. The colonel tells Major Duncan Heyward of Cora’s origins–significantly, after the colonel assumes Heyward is interested in marrying Cora and Heyward rather awkwardly says he is not, that his interests lie with Alice, Cora’s younger, fairer, half-sister:

[Munro says, "In the West Indies,] it was my lot to form a connexion with one who in time became my wife, and the mother of Cora. She was the daughter of a gentleman of those isles, by a lady, whose misfortune it was, if you will,” said the old man, proudly, “to be descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class, who are so basely enslaved to administer to the wants of a luxurious people! Ay, sir, that is a curse entailed on Scotland, by her unnatural union with a foreign and trading people. But could I find a man among them, who would dare to reflect on my child, he should feel the weight of a father’s anger! Ha! Major Heyward, you are yourself born at the south, where the unfortunate beings are considered of a race inferior to your own. . . . [a]nd you cast it on my child as a reproach! You scorn to mingle the blood of the Heywards, with one so degraded–lovely and virtuous though she be?” fiercely demanded the jealous parent.

“Heaven protect me from a prejudice so unworthy of my reason!” returned Duncan, at the same time conscious of such a feeling, and that as deeply rooted as if it had been engrafted in his nature. “The sweetness, the beauty, the witchery of your younger daughter, Colonel Munro, might explain my motives, without imputing to me this injustice.” (151)

Heyward thus smooths things over with his future father-in-law, though not without a twinge of conscience as he feels compelled to lie to him even as he confronts a truth about himself. To his credit, up to this point in the novel he had been partial to Alice before being told of Cora’s ancestry; but now, as we see above, he has information that legitimizes to himself his not choosing Cora, even as he denies that his thinking tends in the same direction as that of the South. Heyward also provides here in miniature one of the novel’s chief themes: the tension between Reason and Nature as the deciding factor in determining our attitudes regarding race. As Heyward makes explicit in the passage above, the then-PC thing to say is that racism is antithetical to reason; yet the impulse toward racist (and racialist) attitudes seems “engrafted in . . . nature.” (Just as an aside, Thomas Dixon, in his novel The Sins of the Father (1912), will have his hero Dan Norton argue just the opposite: that racialism is a completely rational notion, and his adulterous affair with the mulatto woman Cleo is the result of his succumbing to what he characterizes as a failure of reason to control his baser impulses.)

I’ve not yet finished reading Mohicans, but thus far Cora, whose racial background satisfies the most essential prerequisites of the Tragic Mulatto–that she be darker-haired and -complected owing to some infinitesimal trace of black blood in her; that that trace render her unfit as a marriage partner–she is no tragic figure. That is most likely because she already knows the details of her parentage and, as a result, is (with the possible exception of the Chingachgook and his son Uncas) the most comfortable in her racial skin. That comfort, moreover, seems to give her a strength that Alice utterly lacks. It may also be, in part, why the attention the men show Cora is of a sort for which the best descriptor is “sexual.” In the most explicit expression of that attention, when the duplicitous Huron Magua (to whom Cooper also gives the French name Le Renard Subtil, just in case the reader needs a further marker of his duplicitous nature–there’s that word again) leeringly proposes to Cora in chapter XI that she become his wife, Cora more than holds her own. The fair-skinned and blonde Alice is also beautiful, but she is much more childlike and naïve; the attention she tends to attract is more paternalistic. It’s thus very odd to see Heyward describe Alice in the passage quoted above as possessing “witchery.” If witchery it is, it is Glinda-Good-Witch-of-the-North witchery.

Cora will not survive the end of Mohicans. As Doris Sommer argues in Foundational Fiction‘s discussion of the novel’s influence on Argentinian writer Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo,

[Cora's tragedy] is announced by the fact that she is the product of a leaky grid of blood. Her blood was so rich that it “seemed ready to burst its bounds” [11 in the Modern Library edition]. It stains her; makes her literally uncategorizable, that is, an epistemological error. . . . Cooper introduces these anomalous figures [Bumppo as well as Cora] as if to pledge that America can be original by providing the space for differences, variations, and crossings. But then he recoils from them, as if they were misfits, monsters. If Hawk-eye seems redeemable inside the grid of a classical reading because, unlike the gauchos, he is a man without a cross, he is finally as doomed as they are by Cooper’s obsessive social neatness. Hawk-eye disturbs the ideal hierarchies that Sarmiento and his Cooper have in mind, because neither birth nor language can measure his worth. (58-59)

Sommer’s reading here is another way of stating the terms of that tension between Reason and Nature that I mentioned earlier regarding a society’s attitudes about race. Whatever the truth of Sommer’s claim of Cooper’s “obsessive social neatness,” though, I’d argue that within the text–or more precisely, within Cooper’s characters–that debate is far from resolved, much less resolved neatly. The extent to which Cooper is actually aware of all this messiness–for which, after all, he as the author bears some responsibility–is a question Sommer, given how she characterizes Cooper seems not even to see as a question. This question of whether writers who create racially- and culturally-miscegenated characters are fully aware of how they destabilize narrative is an important one for this project.

Despite her passion, Cora exhibits a calmness: she clearly knows herself. Nowhere, thus far in the novel, does she wrestle with questions of her identity. As readers know, though, Natty Bumppo obsessively makes claims as to his “natur,” the most familiar assertion being that he is a man whose blood bears no cross. His mantra-like iteration, once we get over the impulse to mock it, becomes curious. No one in the novel questions that he is white; it is no secret that he was born of white parents but raised by Indians. Yet, if we may indulge in a bit of psychoanalysis, that constant iteration would seem to indicate that Bumppo feels a barely-subconscious anxiety about his background. Even as he expresses what can only be termed pride in his knowledge of the woods and the ways of Indians, it is as though he worries reflexively that in the eyes of other whites the very fact that he has this knowledge (or, alternately, a lack of knowledge that other whites “should” have) marks him as different in some essential way from other whites. To take only one example of this, when he initially does not properly read the tracks left by the Narraganset Bay horses that Cora and Alice are riding–a breed of horse that Cooper had earlier provided information on via a footnote for his readers’ benefit–Bumppo feels compelled to explain why he had failed: “[T]hough I am a man who has the full blood of the whites, my judgment in deer and beaver is greater than in beasts of burthen. Major Effington has many noble chargers, but I have never seen one travel after such a sideling gait!” (113) Bumppo apparently fears that someone might interpret his ignorance of one breed of horse, fairly uncommon though it is, as a sign that he is somehow less than white–hence his felt need to say that he has “the full blood of the whites.”

At the beginning of this post, I wondered whether, by rendering Bumppo’s pronunciation of the word as “natur,” Cooper might want to suggest something more existential about his protagonist: that he at some level feels some lack in his nature that puts him at risk of being alienated from the people with whom he claims a racial kinship. It’s here that I would like to engage in a bit more speculation: that the key to Bumppo’s anxiety is suggested by a pun, which may or may not be intentional on Cooper’s part, in Bumppo’s saying that his “blood bears no cross”: that is, that while Bumppo believes in God and “Providence,” it would be a mistake to identify him as a Christian–at least, as that term is understood by the other whites in the novel. At a time when religious affiliation, a community’s being held together and affirming its members via a shared faith in God–and, more precisely, a shared expression of that faith via theology and doctrine–was an accepted part of communal life and was fully embraced by almost everyone, it is not too excessive to suggest the possibility that Bumppo’s spiritual estrangement from his fellows compels him to affirm his kinship via his consanguinity–his “natur”–all the while fearing that even consanguinity might not be sufficient.

In a heated exchange with David Gamut, a psalmodist who, along with Cora and Alice, has just been rescued from their Huron captors, Bumppo reveals that while he believes the death of the Hurons he had just killed was “fore-ordered,” Bumppo makes abundantly clear that he does not share Gamut’s belief in the Puritan doctrine of foreordination, that, as Gamut puts it, “He that is to be saved will be saved, and he that is predestined to be damned will be damned!” Bumppo rejects this on the grounds that one actually has to bear witness to what befalls a person before one can say what his/her fate is. But what would be most unsettling to the sort of Christian that Gamut apparently is Bumppo’s explicit rejection of the authority of any printed book as providing the grounds for making claims about one’s salvation or damnation:

“Book! what have such as I, who am a warrior of the wilderness, though a man without a cross, to do with books! I never read but in one, and the words that are written there are too simple and too plain to need much schooling[. . . . ] ‘Tis open before your eyes, [. . .] and he who owns it is not a niggard of its use. I have heard it said, that there are men who read in books, to convince themselves there is a God! I know not but man may so deform his works in the settlements, as to leave that which is so clear in the wilderness, a matter of doubt among traders and priests. If any such there be, and he will follow me from sun to sun, through the windings of the forest, he shall see enough to teach him that he is a fool, and that the greatest of his folly lies in striving to rise to the level of one he can never be equal, be it in goodness, or be it in power.” (109)

Yet, firm as he is in his direct rejection of the truth claims made by Christians on behalf of the Bible, it is not as though Bumppo lives without doubts. In a later scene that can only be described as poignant, Natty engages Col. Heyward in a conversation about the nature of heaven as they return to the ruins of the fort named William Henry. The exchange is so remarkable that it is worth quoting at length:

“Speaking of spirits, major, are you of opinion that the heaven of a red-skin, and of us whites, will be one and the same?”

“No doubt–no doubt. [. . . ]

“For my own part,” continued Hawk-eye, [. . .] “I believe that paradise is ordained for happiness and that men will be indulged in it according to their dispositions and gifts. I therefore judge, that a red-skin is not far from the truth, when he believes he is to find them glorious hunting grounds of which his traditions tell; nor, for that matter, do I think it would be any disparagement to a man without a cross, to pass his time–“

“You hear [that noise] again!” interrupted Duncan.

“Ay, ay; when food is scarce, and when food is plenty, a wolf grows bold,” said the unmoved scout. [. . .] But, concerning the life that is to come, major. I have heard preachers say, in the settlements, that heaven was a place of rest. Now men’s minds differ as to their ideas of enjoyment. For myself, and I say it with reverence to the ordering of Providence, it would be no great indulgence to be kept shut up in those mansions of which they preach, having a natural longing for motion and the chase.“

Duncan [. . .] answered, with more attention to the subject which the humor of the scout had chosen for discussion, by saying–

“It is difficult to account for the feelings that may attend the last great change.”

“It would be a change indeed, for a man who has passed his days in the open air,” returned the single-minded scout; “and who has so often broken his fast on the head waters of the Hudson, to sleep within the sound of the roaring Mohawk! But it is a comfort to know we serve a merciful Master, though we do it each after his fashion, and with great tracts of wilderness atween us[.]” (184-185, italics added)

Bumppo makes as clear as he can without actually saying it that if heaven is indeed as he has heard it described “in the settlements” (read: a white race’s heaven), it would go against his “natural longing for motion and the chase.” Nor, moreover, does Bumppo feel it would be any “disparagement” of his nature–it would not be beneath him as a white man–”to pass his time–” and he does not finish his thought, but we can fill in the blank easily enough.

It is here that we see the clearest sign of Natty’s divided self, his “natur.” He wants his fellows to be certain they see only his whiteness, but what if it happens that, upon his death, God sees only his whiteness as well and assigns him a mansion in opposition to Bumppo’s particular “disposition and gifts”–which, as he says, run counter to those of most of the fellow members of his race? To be sure, Bumppo’s anxiety also rises in part from his deference to empirical evidence as the final arbiter of what is and is not so and the lack of empirical evidence in this world regarding the exact nature of the next. The best he can do, given this circumstance, is all that any believer can do: affirm his faith in “a merciful Master” who will recognize that we serve Him “each after his fashion.” This affirmation, this hope, is doubly crucial for Bumppo in view of his earlier rejection of the authority of the Bible in shedding light on precisely this matter.

By way of underscoring the importance of this anxiety, I would like to bring into the discussion a very different text whose protagonist, like Bumppo, becomes culturally estranged from his fellows: The Naufragios (translated as Castaways (first author-approved edition published in 1555) of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Castaways is Núñez’s recounting of the failed Pánfilo de Narváez expedition to establish a colony and find riches in what is now the Florida panhandle and Núñez’s journey with four other men (all the other members of the 600-man expedition are killed or die from storms, disease, Indian attacks, and even cannibalism) from Galveston Island to the Pacific coast of Mexico: a journey of eight years’ duration. Though the book contains almost no moments of introspection on Núñez’s part, the reader can easily note his gradual transformation from a man of no little authority (he was the expedition’s treasurer) who thought nothing of, for example, engaging in the common Spanish practice of kidnapping indigenous people to serve as translators, to a man who, quite literally owing his and his few remaining companions’ lives to the mercy of the Indians they meet over the last few years, becomes the Indians’ advocate when the Spaniards who rescue the travellers want their help in capturing and enslaving the Indians. It is also almost the only source of information we have regarding many of the the now-lost indigenous peoples of the Gulf Coast of Texas and the northern Mexican interior.

Regarding the (possible) similarity I see between the Naufragios and Cooper’s novel: Núñez is of course writing his narrative after the fact, so some structuring of the book has occurred, and that is something to keep in mind regarding what follows. Towards the end of the narrative, Núñez describes his evangelizing of the Indians. Of his success, he writes, “[W]e found them in such a disposition to believe, that if there had been a language in which we could have understood each other perfectly we would have left them all Christians” (105). It is in the next chapter that the Spaniards first hear of the predations of other Spaniards on Indian villages. Núñez and his men tell the Indians that they want to meet these Spaniards in part to stop them from their raiding. What is interesting, though, is that in both the Spanish original and in the translation, Núñez refers to them not as Spaniards but as “Christians.” To be sure, this is a common practice in the chronicles of the time; surely, though, Núñez must have sensed–or hoped–that King Charles V, to whom the Naufragios is officially addressed, would grasp the sad irony of Núñez’s effective witnessing to the Indians and his demonstration of their amenability to conversion to Christianity, only to see reported, literally on the very next page, men labeled as “Christians” whose behavior runs completely counter to the examples of Christian charity set by Núñez.

The eventual meeting between these completely-naked, weatherbeaten castaways, their indigenous companions and the armed, armored and mounted “Christians” is probably the oddest moment in all the chronicles: Núñez argues, in Spanish, that the Indians not be enslaved and/but with the Indians, in the broken pidgen of indigenous words and gestures that he’s acquired, that he and his companions really are Spaniards, too–which the Indians don’t believe; meanwhile, the Spaniards, using an indigenous language, try to discredit the castaways and insist that the Indians should ignore them and listen to the “Christians” instead. Beneath the strangeness, though, I suspect that Núñez feels something like the same estrangement that Bumppo feels from the very people with whom he insists he belongs, their shared faith forming the basis for that insistence (though it may also be the case, given Spain’s particular historical moment, that self-identification by religion was, ipso facto, tantamount to self-identification by race). If he does not yet feel that estrangement but only confusion as his rescuers soon become his captors–he is imprisoned and eventually sent in chains to Mexico City, where he’ll begin to write this narrative–we can guess that he will eventually: After he is freed from jail, he is chosen to be the governor of a colony in Paraguay, but will be removed from his post two year afterward for being perceived to be more favorably disposed toward the indigenous people there than toward the colonists.

I am afraid I will have to sketch out this conclusion, at least for now. The essence of what I want to say here is that in each text what is assumed to finally, essentially–and ideally–define our relationship with our fellows but instead proves to be a source of irresolvable tension for these narratives’ respective protagonists is not race but religion. In Bumppo’s case, the combination of a different belief system and his almost-stated preference for the Indians’ conception of heaven over that preached about in the settlements are his sources of anxiety, which gets voiced in the punning statement that he is “a man without a cross.” Meanwhile, Núñez bears witness to and serves the Indians as a model of Christian charity, only to run afoul of his own countrymen who also claim to be Christians even as they enslave the Indians and pillage their villages. It’s due to this enormous contradiction that Núñez cannot persuade the Indians that he is one of these other men; nor can he persuade the “Christians” to cease their predations on the Indians–in fact, he will be imprisoned because of his perceived disloyalty to their authority. Each man becomes, or fears he is, culturally bifurcated: what I want to call New World men. More about what I mean by that in my next post.

From Sandra Messinger Cypess’ La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth, as part of a discussion of Rosario Castellanos’ essay, “Once Again Sor Juana”:

Veneration of the Virgin [of Guadalupe] transcends pure religiosity and has become equated with a sense of unselfish motherhood and postitive national identity. La Malinche, at the opposite pole, embodies both negative national identity and sexuality in its most irrational form, a sexuality without regard to moral laws or cultural values. (6-7)

Reading this reminded me–and made me rethink–my initial assumption about the frieze’s purpose in placing a beaver, an animal associated among some in the medieval Church with chastity¹, in this scene depicting the Virgin’s appearance to Juan Diego. Here is a bit of what I wrote in that earlier post:

Most of us are familiar with Renaissance-era depictions of animals or objects along with saints (think of Peter often shown with a set of keys, in reference to Matthew 16:19). What’s intriguing here is the application of this principle to a depiction of Juan Diego. It speaks to the apparent need to assert or remind the visitor of his virtue and, thus, of his worthiness to receive a visitation from the Virgin. It causes me to wonder if certain visitors were considered to need this reminder more than others did (even in the decades immediately following the apparitions, elements within the Church questioned the veracity of the story). And as for what indigenous people made of the beaver . . . As of this writing, I have not been able to find what if any significance beavers held for the Aztecs, but somehow I doubt that chastity figures into their thinking.

It occurs to me now, in light of my more recent reading (not to mention a recollection of Gruzinski’s The Mestizo Mind), that this frieze’s message may be directed less at a Spanish or even an Indian audience than to a third one: a mestizo audience coming to terms with its origins as a new people.

The passage from the Messinger Cypess book presents what has been the standard reading of La Malinche’s meaning in Mexican culture since the post-Independence days of the 19th century. But, while Messinger Cypess will go on to say that the early Spanish accounts of La Malinche paint her in a favorable light, she is silent on the question of how she was regarded among the early mestizo population of those early decades. Quite possibly among the Indians and mestizos of these early post-Conquest decades, there was emerging a mestizo narrative of la Malinche-as-betrayer/whore and her son by Cortés–the synedochic 1st mestizo–as damned, the embodiment of a culture’s Original Sin. It may be that no direct record of this alternate narrative exists, but we do know that the early priests were indeed cognizant of and, in some cases, sensitive to such matters as, significantly, mestizos–not Indians–would perceive such things.

If, then, there was already present at the very least an oral narrative that read the union of Cortés and La Malinche as emblematic of unpoliced sexuality and the betrayal of a nation in the very act of its creation, it is indeed possible to read this frieze as presenting something like an alternate First Parents narrative whose dynamic is, not coincidentally, also the exact opposite of that other narrative. The encounter between Juan Diego and the Virgin is devoid of all sexuality, as signified not only by the Virgin herself but also the presence of the beaver–and the claim that Juan Diego and his wife had taken vows of chastity after hearing a sermon preached on that virtue (by the way: Cortés was married at the time La Malinche became his mistress; moreover, when Cortés’ wife came to Mexico to be with her husband, she soon died under mysterious circumstances). Even so, the Virgin appears to Juan Diego simultaneously as the Mother of God and as a mestiza–that is, as the immaculately-conceived offspring of her appearance to Juan Diego.

The essence of the above–that the Virgin of Guadalupe occupies a position in the Mexican cultural psyche directly opposite that of La Malinche–is no new claim. What seems to be distinctive about what I’m saying here is that this frieze (clearly a deliberate feature of this building’s 1531-1709 construction) may serve as an indication that that dynamic may have appeared, or was anticipated, much earlier than is usually recognized. Moreover, this frieze seems to be doing more than conveying the essence of one narrative; it also may be offering up an implicit commentary on another narrative, one whose embrace may have been understood, even at that very early time, to be debilitating, if not actually destructive.
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¹Over at my other blog, my long-time Internet-acquaintance Raminagrobis, who knows a lot more about bestiaries than I do, offers some competing meanings of beavers here.