518 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
The cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe is but one of the thousands of “encounter
themes” in postcontact Mesoamerican religion that bear elements that are syncretic.
By syncretic,we refer to the nature of ideas, deities, and practices that derive from
historically distinct traditions but become reinterpreted and transformed in situa-
tions of cultural encounter. It is extremely difficult to learn with any certainty just how
these myriad syncretic forms took shape in Mesoamerica. The reasons for caution are
several.
The process of encounter between Christianity and Mesoamerican spirituality in-
volved hundreds of variants of religious belief and practice, and this pluralism no
doubt characterized all types of actors in the American crucible. These variants de-
rived not only from different religious orders and different statuses of individuals in
the socioeconomic hierarchy of Spain, but also from different personal biographies.
The same muddiness and subjectivity undoubtedly characterized the religious views
of Indians who encountered the Europeans. These subjects of Christian evangelism
were, in origin, highly diverse: aristocrats and slaves, peasant farmers and traders,
artisans and priests, all with different attitudes and loyalties toward former state re-
ligions, if any, in their respective roots. Indeed, they often carried no loyalty what-
soever to a former “great tradition.” To expect, therefore, an easily isolable new
phenomenon (that is, the “new Mesoamerican Christianity”) is wishful thinking. At
best, we can hope for an enlightened dialogue about the subjective expectations and
responses of the different types of actors in the encounter in relation to those of the
others.
Where have these concerns about the concept of religious syncretism taken us?
It is to the recognition that an understanding of the transformed religious order of
Mesoamerica in the wake of the conquest is exceedingly complex. The region was,
in the first place, a sophisticated and cosmopolitan scene. Mesoamerica, at the time
of contact, was the seat of dozens of state theocracies, the Aztec empire being only
one of these. All of these ideological power centers constituted “great traditions,” in
Robert Redfield’s sense of the term, signifying that they represented the official ide-
ological canon of the ruling elite and the associated priesthood that controlled the
destinies of millions of people of diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds who were
forced to live as economic tributaries and dependencies of the urban administrative
centers. However, the local village cultures that constituted the peasant peripheries
of the theocratic states were themselves bearers of religious customs and beliefs that
reflected their own local experiences of memory and practice. These local religions
expressed what Redfield has called “little traditions” in the sense that they continued
to practice highly local spiritual activities even as they had to adapt to larger state de-
mands in terms of their public ceremonial life. Thus, in addition to maintaining
obligatory cult affiliations that emanated from the urban centers, precontact
Mesoamericans also engaged in local shamanic, ancestral, and agricultural cult
practices.
It is therefore reasonable to expect that when the Spanish missionary state de-
capitated and destroyed the major public foci of pre-Columbian religious practice,
and obliged local elites to become lay catechists—or, at the least, local sponsors—of