522 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
Religious organization below the occasionally present parish priest (usually a
Spaniard or mestizo) and the trusted continuing lay assistants (sacristans and choir
masters) consisted of sodalities of local people who were designated—sometimes on
a continuing and sometimes on a rotating basis—to sponsor and maintain images of
saints, to care for their accoutrements and clothing, and to be responsible for pay-
ing for annual festivals in their honor. These cult-maintenance groups had been en-
couraged by the Church in medieval Spain and became even more popular with the
Church authorities during the Counter-Reformation as a means of maintaining ap-
proved forms of local community devotion. The system was vigorously encouraged
in Mesoamerica as well. Typically, the leaders would bear titles such as mayordomo
(“steward”) and alférez(“standard bearer”). They received honor and prestige for
their contributions to community life and for their sponsorship of particular saints
who were identified as being special patrons and protectors of local health, pros-
perity, and well-being. These cults also contributed significantly to the maintenance
of highly local identities and loyalties, a situation that the Crown favored because it
kept Indians separate from creole and mestizo populations and also discouraged the
formation of pan-Indian political solidarity against colonial authorities.
Thus, the civil-religious hierarchies gave the appearance of relative homogene-
ity throughout colonial Mesoamerica, which was, of course, in part their adminis-
trative rationale. Indians could be taxed, baptized, indoctrinated, and conscripted for
forced labor and other services through an efficient and a uniform local authority
system: efficient, precisely because it was in the hands of Indian petty officials who
had something to gain from compliance. The other side of the coin, of course, was
that religious events and festivals could be conceived and staged, mingling themes
from precontact beliefs and practices, with relative autonomy from Crown and
Church authorities. If the cults to the saints—ubiquitous in the Colonial period as
they are today—served the purpose of mobilizing individual communities in corpo-
rate celebration of approved icons, they also functioned to maintain the new forms
of Indian Christianity as highly distinct from one another and from creole and mes-
tizo beliefs and practices. Even today in many Mesoamerican villages that have mixed
ladino (mestizo) and Indian populations, the annual liturgical cycle is staged and un-
derstood by both parties to be a parallel and separate, not unified, event.
These organizational factors help to account for the amazing mosaic of local ex-
pressions of Indian Christianity that evolved in the Colonial era and continue into
our time. The emphasis on public celebration also allows us to understand how eas-
ily nonpublic beliefs and practices might continue to express significant pre-
Columbian content and ideas, since the fields, homes, gardens, and pastures were not
the preferred foci for staging the Christian liturgical cycles. It is thus the case that
highly localized precontact rituals and practices associated with the individual life
cycle, family, and domestic life could, with relative ease and impunity, persist and
successfully coexist with the more prescribed content of public devotion. This cir-
cumstance helps to account for the persistence of hundreds of forms of shamanic cur-
ing and divination practices in the Modern era. Agricultural and fertility rituals,
along with related beliefs and practices associated with ancestors and rain, wind, and