Religion and the Secular

Historical and Colonial Formations

Timothy Fitzgerald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317490999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Religion has dominated colonialism since the 16th century. 'Religion and the Secular' critically examines how religion has been used to subject indigenous concepts to the needs of colonial powers. Essays present the colonial relationship from the perspective of colonized cultures - including Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, India, Japan, South Africa and Canada - and colonizing powers, namely England, Germany and the United States. The volume offers a historical and ethnographical analysis of the relationship between the sacred and the secular, examining religion in relation to politics, economics and civil power.

1
Dialectics of conversion: Las Casas and Maya colonial Congregación¹

Anna Blume

Introduction

The fifteenth-century arrival of Europeans along the coast and eventually inland into the American continents is mostly known to us through the writings of Europeans. This essay begins by recounting the story of one extraordinary Spaniard, Bartolomé de las Casas, an early colonist turned radical advocate of the Indians. Our sources are mostly his extensive autobiographical writings. Biographical or autobiographical narratives have a logic of their own that often seamlessly move into written histories. What we know directly from the Indians, they have written, so to speak, into the land or have left in the form of images that remain as ciphers for us to read. Writing the histories of these kinds of historical phenomena demands a different kind of looking and writing, an enthnohistorical approach through which we combine archeology, art history, oral stories and the markings of the land itself. Therefore, the second half of this essay shifts in tone, method and perspective, so that we may read land and decipher images in an attempt to write a dialectical history. Our focus will be on congregación: one of the strategies the Spanish adopted to convert Indians of the New World to Christianity. The origin of congregación begins with the thoughts of Las Casas, which he minutely records in written accounts. When it is implemented, however, conversion itself is fractured and redefined by the indigenous population it was meant to transform.

Part I. Story Leading to a Plan: Narrative – Biography²

In 1538, forty years after he had arrived in the New World, Bartolomé de las Casas finally won the right to attempt peacefully the conversion of Indians. When he first arrived in 1498, a member of Columbus’s third voyage, he was a twenty-four-year-old educated entrepreneur curious and ready to begin the life of a Spanish gentlemen in the newly dominated colonies. He arrived on the island of Hispaniola (Dominican Republic) when Spanish conquistadores were infiltrating the neighbouring island of Cuba. In the village of Caonao in the central fertile provenance of Camaguey, Las Casas witnessed the everyday life of the indigenous people who were then brutally and treacherously massacred by his land-hungry unrestrained Spanish companions. This experience fundamentally changed his perceptions of both the Spanish and Indians and challenged him to find another way towards Spanish colonial rule.

After witnessing the Caonao massacre of 1514, Las Casas refused to accept a repartimiento (gift of land and Indian slaves from the Spanish crown) in Cuba and instead returned to Spain to plead his case before King Ferdinand and Cardinal Ximenes, two of the most powerful arbitrators in the affairs of the New World. Both king and cardinal were openly concerned by his report and in 1516 named Las Casas “Protector of the Indies”, empowering him to impose sanctions on colonists in the New World who perpetrated such acts as the massacre at Caonao. Las Casas, however, went beyond condemning violent conquest to speak out against the repartimiento system itself, claiming that the natives of the New World could be peacefully converted to Christianity, and thus become rightful citizens of the growing Spanish empire.

Armed with his new title, Protector of the Indies, Las Casas returned in 1516 to Hispaniola for the second of what would be eleven voyages between the New World and Spain. In these early years, his plan to end the repartimiento system was a complete failure in practice. Neither the church nor the loose political infrastructure of the newly forming colonies had sufficient power over the acts of conquistadores or colonists; nor were they in agreement on the parameters that should govern Spanish treatment of Indians. Were Indians human? Could they be Christianized? Should they be enslaved? These were questions that remained unanswered deep into the sixteenth century.

Unable to stop the repartimiento system, Las Casas shifted his strategy. For the next six years he would plead for a portion of the New World in which he could carry out an experiment of peaceful conversion. If this experiment were to be successful he could offer it up as a blueprint to be followed in new territories in the Americas being explored and colonized each year. Like Plato before him, attempting to realize the Republic on the coast of Sicily, Las Casas desperately wanted to prove that, far away from economic ambitions and violence, a new kind of society could form.

One of the obstacles to his plan was that Spanish colonists did not want to be labourers in the New World. If they were to make this voyage and leave the comforts and familiarity of the Old World behind, the least they expected was to become finceros in the New World: landowners and entrepreneurs, a kind of new gentry. So who was to do the labour if the Indians were not to be enslaved and their land appropriated?

In 1518, in response to these questions of labour and land, Las Casas came up with his first specific pragmatic plan that was endorsed by Charles V, the young king of Spain, soon to become Holy Roman Emperor. This plan included the selection and transport of fifty Spanish colonists who were given financial incentives and Africans as slaves to begin a community that would include the indigenous Indians as neighbours and collaborators in the formation of a colony in Cumaná, a region on the north-east coast of Venezuela.³ These fifty colonists, Las Casas’s private knights, so to speak, were to be dressed in white with large red embroidered crosses to signal to the indigenous population that they were different from the earlier wave of colonists that had been so violent and ruthless. With a rich agricultural base and access to pearl fishing on its coast, Cumaná was to potentially provide this brave new world of Spaniards, African slaves and Indians with the economic self-sufficiency they would need to be successful and live in harmony.

When the Cumaná experiment ended in disaster in 1522, due in part to the naivety of the plan and the unabated greed of the colonists, Las Casas returned to Hispaniola dejected and defeated. In 1530, after eight years of seclusion in a Dominican monastery, Las Casas, now an ordained monk, returned to his lifelong struggle as Protector of the Indies, a struggle he would continue until his death thirty-six years later. It was during this next period that he would begin to use writing as a tool to document and influence the colonization process.⁴ His first published work of 1535, after this long period of seclusion, was De Unico Vocationis Modo Omnium Infidelium ad Veram Religionem [The Only Way to Call the Unfaithful to the One True Religion]. Here he clearly articulated his theory that the only way to convert anyone to the Christian faith, and to do this as a Christian, was to convert them through peaceful persuasion.

In 1538, three years after the publication of De Unico, Las Casas would finally have his opportunity to successfully implement this theory in highland Guatemala. He had arrived in Guatemala on his way to Peru to stem the already notorious violent conquests lead by Francisco Pizarro. While there he heard about a mountainous area called Tezulutlán, known to the Spanish as La Tierra de Guerra (Land of War), being the region where the Quiché Maya had been most resistant and difficult to subdue.⁵ The warring resolve of the Maya combined with the steep mountain passes temporarily insulated this region from some of the worst, often repeated, abuses of the notorious Pedro de Alvarado. Alvarado had been a lieutenant under Hernán Cortés in the conquest of Mexico. Shortly afterwards, in 1524, he and his brother Jorge de Alvarado were given troops including Spanish soldiers and over 5,000 Nahua soldiers from Quauhquechollan to continue the conquest into southern Mexico and Guatemala, where he was eventually made governor.⁶ When no gold was found in these regions, Perdro left the remainder of the offensive in Guatemala to his brother Jorge, and went to Peru. It was during these years that Las Casas first arrived in Guatemala.

Tezulutlán was thus an extraordinary region where the Maya maintained much of their pre-conquest lives separated from the direct effects of colonization by the very terrain they inhabited. On 2 May 1537, Alonzo Maldonado, the temporary governor of Guatemala, granted Las Casas sole jurisdiction over this region for a five-year period. During that time no other colonists, conquistadores or Spaniards of any kind, other than the governor himself, would be allowed in Tezulutlán. This gave Las Casas the opportunity to introduce Christianity through a new method devoid of the physical violence or overt economic motives that had characterized contact up to this point. This experiment in Tezulutlán was to be fundamentally different from his attempt fifteen years earlier at Cumaná. Unlike Cumaná, with its easily accessible pearl fishing, Tezulutlán was isolated from the colonizing process, and, furthermore, Las Casas was seeking to engage directly with the indigenous Maya to transform them into a Christianized colony of Indians devoid of other Spaniards other than the Dominican monks who travelled with him.

With exclusive access to Tezulutlán, what specific strategies would Las Casas and his monks devise to Christianize and colonize the Quiché-speaking Maya inhabitants of the region? Maya merchants, who began trading European goods, such as scissors, mirrors and bells, were the primary liaisons between the Domenicans and the Maya of these mountainous regions of highland Guatemala. Knowing this, Las Casas and his monks, Luis Cancér, Pedro de Angulo and Rodrigo de Ladrada, decided to send along with these material goods a modified version of the central themes of Christian belief. They first wrote the story of Christ into coplas (rhyming Spanish couplets), and then translated these couplets into the Quiché language. Over a three-month period they taught the Quiché translation of the Passion of Christ to the Maya merchants, and set it to music using the indigenous drum and flute of the Guatemalan highlands.

The Christian ethos and message was thus packaged along with other European goods for the isolated Maya of Tezulutlán to consider at their own pace on their own terms. One of the Maya rulers from around the lake of Atitlán was particularly taken by these verses and the description of the monks by the travelling Maya merchants. These monks were distinctly different from other Spaniards, and this Christian story and mention of new gods, sung in their own Quiché language, made such an impression that the Maya ruler sent his own son back to Santiago de Guatemala with the merchants to meet Las Casas and the other Dominicans. With this began a new kind of contact, one that moved along trade lines and involved the slower process of language, translation and the space for curiosity. After a short visit with Las Casas and his monks, the ruler’s son returned to Atitlán with the Dominican monk Luis Cancér who spoke the Quiché language. After several months of living in this Maya region Cancér had Christianized the ruler to such an extent that when Las Casas himself arrived there in October of 1537 they baptized him Don Juan and together oversaw the construction of a Christian church.

The experience with Don Juan emboldened Las Casas in the next phase of conversion that would take place in the Maya town called Rabinal, and this is where congregación⁷ in the New World begins, in actuality. In Rabinal, Las Casas and the Dominicans introduced the Passion of Christ through the Quiché couplets set to music. They then expanded on this strategy to include medieval passion plays of the basic stories of the Old and New Testaments, to be performed by Maya inhabitants of Rabinal in the Quiché language.⁸ After introducing this new set of religious stories, Las Casas persuaded the ruler of Rabinal, Don Juan, to move his people from the various mountaintop regions into a consolidated valley, where they built a Catholic church where one still stands today. Although they continued to work many of their agricultural fields, known as milpas, in the mountains they did move their homes around the newly constructed church. This city plan, medieval in its format, and classical in origin, provided Las Casas with two simultaneous and inextricably intertwined “successes”. He was able to demonstrate that the Maya, and indigenous people of the Americas, could be peacefully converted into Christians (at least apparently so), and he could congregate them into small city units that would be monitored and taxed within the new expanding territories and logic of colonial Spain. We know this from the foundations of the city of Rabinal itself. This happened. We also know this from the extensive histories written by the Spanish about this moment, especially from Remesal’s Historia general de las Indias (1620). What we do not know from these sources are the many inner stories of Don Juan and the Maya of Rabinal. What appeared to Las Casas and the Spanish as peaceful conversion has left its mark in the land where the Maya today still respond to the weight of this encounter.

The concept of congregación had been written into the Laws of Burgos of 1512, the earliest laws intended to structure the colonization of the New World; it would be later written and codified to the New Laws of 1542. As a lived strategy it began here in 1537 with the Maya of Rabinal, Las Casas and his monks, and would remain into the twenty-first century as the underpinnings of postcolonial life in highland Guatemala. What had been called the “Land of War” by Spanish soldiers would, by 1620, be renamed Verapaz (True Peace) by the Dominicans.⁹

What took place between 1537 and 1538 would become on several levels a blueprint for the colonization of indigenous peoples of the Americas under Spanish rule. This would include diverse territories and peoples from Mexico and the Caribbean south to the tip of Brazil. The plan and its implementation were a performance of sorts, orchestrated by Las Casas with his now forty years of experience in the Americas. It was a plan devised to convert systematically indigenous people, religiously and economically, through city planning as an alternative to the chaotic and brutal warfare that had marked the first half century of the Spanish invasion into the New World.

Part II. Colonial Debates and Books: History – Text

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Dialectics of conversion: Las Casas and Maya colonial Congregación
• 2 A higher ground: the secular knowledge of objects of religious devotion
• 3 Secularizing the land: the impact of the Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act on indigenous understandings of land
• 4 The formative process of State Shinto in relation to the Westernization of Japan: the concept of 'religion' and 'Shinto'
• 5 Religious and secular in the Vietnam War: the emergence of highland ethno-nationalism
• 6 Colonialism all the way down? Religion and the secular in early modern writing on south India
• 7 Understanding politics through performance in colonial and postcolonial India
• 8 Real and imagined: imperial inventions of religion in colonial southern Africa
• 9 Religion in modern Islamic thought and practice
• 10 Rudolf Otto, cultural colonialism and the 'discovery' of the holy
• 11 Encompassing Religion, privatized religions and the invention of modern politics
• 12 Colonialism and the myth of religious violence
• Index