196 UNIT 2 COLONIAL MESOAMERICA
willing to support and cooperate with local rulers who showed themselves to be devo-
tees of Christian worship. Those who failed to accept Christianity soon found them-
selves passed over in favor of young men from the friars’ schools, who knew how to
read and write and could speak some Spanish. Some of these upstarts were not even
born into noble rank! Within a generation, the indigenous nobility had been brought
into the Church, and the common people tended to follow the example of their
leaders.
Some scholars have suggested that Mesoamericans were relieved to give up the
more bloody aspects of their religion, such as human sacrifice, and to turn from
their cruel gods to the compassionate figures of Christ and the saints. There may be
some truth in this view, but it is difficult to assess how much of a factor this was. For
one thing, human sacrifice had been most closely associated with the cult of war,
which became obsolete as Spanish rule turned traditional enemies into peaceful
neighbors. Many of the old gods had been relatively benevolent providers of water,
food, health, and children. The relationship between the native communities and
their new Christian patron saints retained, and still retains today, a contractual char-
acter, according to which the community provides service in exchange for the saint’s
protection and support: No reward is bestowed without adequate payment.
But we can say one thing with more certainty. As the native people became more
and more impoverished and oppressed, the Christian teachings that made a virtue
of poverty and promised an easier existence after death became meaningful to peo-
ple whose ancestors had never thought in those terms. Indian Christianity developed
into a religion of the poor, and the words with which Jesus of Nazareth had chal-
lenged the status quo of an earlier colonial regime became readily available tools of
protest.
Similarly, the Virgin Mary’s compassionate, entirely benign, maternal character
was new to native religion but struck a chord among people who desperately needed
a friend in high places, someone to present their case in heaven just as lawyers did in
the colonial courts to which people took their earthly disputes. Devotion to her also
allowed people to perpetuate some degree of the gender complementarity and nature-
based symbolism (light, flowers, birds) that had characterized their earlier religion (for
the Mesoamerican view on women, see Chapter 12). One advocation of the Virgin,
Our Lady of Guadalupe, developed during the colonial period into a principal de-
votional focus. The colonial history of this devotion is outlined in Box 5.1.
The missionary friars, though at first thrilled at the Indians’ enthusiastic recep-
tion of Christian worship, soon were disillusioned by what they perceived as a su-
perficial conversion. To them, all Indian worship was either Christian or pagan; either
the Indians had truly converted, or they remained in thrall to the Devil. They did not
understand that the Indians could be perfectly sincere in their devotion to Christ and
yet continue to mingle with their Christian practices elements that the friars con-
sidered to be idolatrous. Nor did they understand the extent to which Christian de-
votions took on indigenous characteristics when translated across cultures, just as
native practices labeled as pagan took on new meanings when redirected toward
Christian figures. They did not understand that native spirituality was closely linked