The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico

After the conquest of Mexico, colonial authorities attempted to enforce Christian beliefs among indigenous peoples―a project they envisioned as spiritual warfare. The Invisible War assesses this immense but dislocated project by examining all known efforts in Central Mexico to obliterate native devotions of Mesoamerican origin between the 1530s and the late eighteenth century. The author's innovative interpretation of these efforts is punctuated by three events: the creation of an Inquisition tribunal in Mexico in 1571; the native rebellion of Tehuantepec in 1660; and the emergence of eerily modern strategies for isolating idolaters, teaching Spanish to natives, and obtaining medical proof of sorcery from the 1720s onwards. Rather than depicting native devotions solely from the viewpoint of their colonial codifiers, this book rescues indigenous perspectives on their own beliefs. This is achieved by an analysis of previously unknown or rare ritual texts that circulated in secrecy in Nahua and Zapotec communities through an astute appropriation of European literacy. Tavárez contends that native responses gave rise to a colonial archipelago of faith in which local cosmologies merged insights from Mesoamerican and European beliefs. In the end, idolatry eradication inspired distinct reactions: while Nahua responses focused on epistemological dissent against Christianity, Zapotec strategies privileged confrontations in defense of native cosmologies.

History

Tavárez, David

Americas

Stanford University Press

After the conquest of Mexico, colonial authorities attempted to enforce Christian beliefs among indigenous peoples—a project they envisioned as spiritual warfare. The Invisible War assesses this immense but dislocated project by examining all known efforts in Central Mexico to obliterate native devotions of Mesoamerican origin between the 1530s and the late eighteenth century.The author's innovative interpretation of these efforts is punctuated by three events: the creation of an Inquisition tribunal in Mexico in 1571; the native rebellion of Tehuantepec in 1660; and the emergence of eerily modern strategies for isolating idolaters, teaching Spanish to natives, and obtaining medical proof of sorcery from the 1720s onwards. Rather than depicting native devotions solely from the viewpoint of their colonial codifiers, this book rescues indigenous perspectives on their own beliefs. This is achieved by an analysis of previously unknown or rare ritual texts that circulated in secrecy in Nahua and Zapotec communities through an astute appropriation of European literacy. Tavárez contends that native responses gave rise to a colonial archipelago of faith in which local cosmologies merged insights from Mesoamerican and European beliefs. In the end, idolatry eradication inspired distinct reactions: while Nahua responses focused on epistemological dissent against Christianity, Zapotec strategies privileged confrontations in defense of native cosmologies.

Painted Words presents a facsimile, decipherment, and analysis of a seventeenth-century pictographic catechism from colonial Mexico, preserved as Fonds Mexicain 399 at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Works in this genre present the Catholic catechism in pictures that were read sign by sign as aids to memorization and oral performance. They have long been understood as a product of the experimental techniques of early evangelization, but this study shows that they are better understood as indigenous expressions of devotional knowledge.
In addition to inventive pictography to recount the catechism, this manuscript features Nahuatl texts that focus on don Pedro Moteuczoma, son of the Mexica ruler Moteuczoma the Younger, and his home, San Sebastián Atzaqualco. Other glosses identify figures drawn within the manuscript as Nahua and Spanish historical personages, as if the catechism had been repurposed as a dynastic record. The end of the document displays a series of Nahua and Spanish heraldic devices.
These combined pictorial and alphabetic expressions form a spectacular example of how colonial pictographers created innovative text genres, through which they reimagined pre-Columbian writing and early evangelization―and ultimately articulated newly emerging assertions of indigenous identity and memorialized native history.

Painted Words: Nahua Catholicism, Politics, and Memory in the Atzaqualco Pictorial Catechism (Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology Studies Series)

Boone, Elizabeth Hill

Burkhart, Louise M.

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

Review\nThis is a superb study of both the Indigenous secret republics of letters and their Indigenous rivals. It is also a brilliant analysis of Zapotec divinatory colonial practices. -- Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin, author of How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World\nThis book introduces participants in a 'republic of letters' in the Zapotec language who, in the 1600s, created something new through their combination of ancestral knowledge and new knowledge from the Spanish realm. With its focus on actors outside the colonial political hierarchy, the book gives extraordinary insight into the lives of residents of colonial Indigenous towns that were locally administered, often only lightly overseen from distant political and religious centers. David Tavárez's understanding of Zapotec history and cultural achievement is without parallel. The analysis of Zapotec literacy as 'anti-colonial discourses' contributes to an important global reconsideration of Indigenous lives under colonial power. -- Rosemary Joyce, University of California at Berkeley, author of Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology\nRethinking Zapotec Time makes several significant contributions. It is a major synthesis of documentary evidence from the Zapotec mantic and ritual manuals that is both revisionist and encyclopedic. David Tavárez's work has succeeded in mining the manuals' content to understand local historical processes and to link them as part of a longue durée in the production of knowledge by Zapotec peoples that goes back more than a thousand years. The book also sheds new light on highly debated issues concerning Mesoamerican calendrics and synchronology with European time, as well as oncontested interpretations of obscure passages in the Codex Borgia and other divinatory manuscripts. -- Javier Urcid, Brandeis University, co-author of The Lords of Lambityeco: Political Evolution in the Valley of Oaxaca during the Xoo Phase\nRooted in the exceptional linguistic skills and erudition of David Tavárez, this study of Zapotec-language calendric texts and ritual songs not only explains the workings of northern Zapotec pre-Hispanic and early colonial timekeeping, it reveals the multifaceted intellectual traditions of colonial indigenous ritual specialists. They fostered intense communal efforts to maintain sacred beliefs and local practices, sometimes leading to dissent within communities and suppressive efforts from Catholic officials. Nonetheless, the Zapotec sacred survived-transformed in some ways-until today, a story Tavárez brilliantly details. 
-- Susan Kellogg, University of Houston, co-editor of Género y Arqueología en Mesoamérica: Homenaje a Rosemary A. Joyce\nIn 1702, after the brutal suppression of a Zapotec revolt, the bishop of Oaxaca proclaimed an amnesty for idolatry in exchange for collective confessions. To evade conflict, Northern Zapotec communities denounced ritual specialists and surrendered sacred songs and 102 divinatory manuals, which preserve cosmological accounts, exchanges with divine beings, and protocols of pre-Columbian origin that strongly resemble sections of the Codex Borgia. These texts were sent to Spain as evidence of failed Dominican evangelization efforts, and there they remained, in oblivion, until the 1960s. 
In this book, David Tavárez dives deep into this formidable archive of ritual and divinatory manuals, the largest calendar corpus in the colonial Americas, and emerges with a rich understanding of Indigenous social and cultural history, Mesoamerican theories of cosmos and time, and Zapotec ancestor worship. Drawing on his knowledge of Zapotec and Nahuatl, two decades of archival research, and a decade of fieldwork, Tavárez dissects Mesoamerican calendars as well as Native resistance and accommodation to the colonial conquest of time, while also addressing entan

Rethinking Zapotec Time: Cosmology, Ritual, and Resistance in Colonial Mexico

University of Texas Press

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Books by Tavárez, David

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tavárez, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico

The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico

Painted Words: Nahua Catholicism, Politics, and Memory in the Atzaqualco Pictorial Catechism (Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology Studies Series)

Rethinking Zapotec Time: Cosmology, Ritual, and Resistance in Colonial Mexico