The mulatta, the bishop, and dances in the Cathedral: race, music, and power relations in seventeenth-century Puerto Rico
Black Music Research Journal
Volume 26, Number 2 (Fall, 2006)
pages 137-164
Noel Allende-Goitía, Professor of Music
Universidad Interamericano de Puerto Rico, San Germán
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Cayetano Coll y Toste, a Puerto Rican physician and historian, wrote “Los bailes de la Catedral” (The Dances in the Cathedral). In it, Fray Francisco Padilla, bishop of Puerto Rico, writes to the king of Spain in 1691:
The fathers of the Dominican Friars have complained to me that the dances occurring during Christmas Eve in the Cathedral degenerate into an annoying noise toward the morning. Your Highness knows that in Peru we also have those dances; the practice comes from Spain, and it is important to proceed cautiously so as to avoid causing any harm to religious sentiment. On a large rug, six children [the choirboys, called seises] danced religious dances; they were dressed in white and crowned with flowers. Next to the altar was a musician, dressed in black, playing a harp. [After the priest dismissed the mass], two men dressed in black, with guitars, replaced the harpist at the side of the altar. Six young mulatto girls, around fifteen years old, took positions on the rug before the altar, dressed in white gauze, crowned with flowers, and holding tambourines in their right hands. The mulattas began to dance to the music of the guitars; their movements were correct, but a voluptuous and sensual air permeated the crowd there. When the dance and the villancicos ended, the audience applauded. At the end of the offering, the people gathered in different places inside the temple to dance fandanguillos con zapateados [stamping fandanguillos]. (Coil y Toste 1928, 175-178) (1)
Subsequently, according to Coll y Toste, the bishop issued an order forbidding the dance in the church.
Coll y Toste presents us with a vision of late seventeenth-century Puerto Rican social and cultural life through the eyes of an author who lived in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The bishop’s description clearly establishes the event’s importance both in terms of occasion and place: it is Christmas Eve, and we are in the cathedral. Obviously, the festivity, the liturgy, and the music and dances performed were of great significance for everyone there, including his eminence. Moreover, it shows clearly how Catholicism in general and popular religious fervor in particular had become part of everyday colonial life. The letter shows the bishop wielding his authority over what seems to him an inappropriate display of popular religious devotion and festive celebration. By pointing out that such practices were taking place, the document presents a clear indication of the general practice of such expressions not only in Puerto Rico but also in the Spanish territories of the Americas and in Spain itself. The narrative implicitly refers to the population’s composition as a mix of people of different classes and ethnic backgrounds. The letter also suggests that the ecclesiastical authorities had both a racialized and a gendered view of dance practices and bodily movements. Finally, the direct reference to sacred and popular musical practices points to the intersection of local habits and global influences.
All of this could be deduced from a close reading of Cayetano Coll y Toste’s narrative were it not for the fact that it is not based on an archival document. Music historians and cultural studies scholars in and outside Puerto Rico have treated this story as the description of an actual event, although no document corroborates the ritual described (Rosa-Nieves 1951; Munoz 1966, 23-26; Malavet Vega 1992, 114; Quintero Rivera 1998, 74; Mendoza de Arce 2001). However, in these postmodern times, the story may be considered an exercise in the use of the imaginary to grasp a construct of the real through a discursive complex. Cayetano Coll y Toste was not alone in what I have come to call an early postmodern endeavor. Along with sociologist and human rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois (1925) and anthropologist J. Eric S. Thompson (1965), he was trying to create a particular assemblage of the past by using the imagination as a vehicle for constructing historical memory. In other words, he placed verifiable facts in a fictional contest so as to create a feel of the times: Bishop Padilla–fact; dances in San Juan Cathedral by mulattoes and mulattas–fact; this particular event–not verifiable. For the purpose of this article, however, I will use the document as a map, or better yet, as a diorama through which I intend to understand a time and way of life about which, as George Duby put it, we historians can only dream (Duby and Lardreau 1988).
This article examines the racialized and gendered gaze of power displayed in ecclesiastical and official reports produced throughout the seventeenth century in Puerto Rico. The power of ecclesiastical and official discourse resided in its capacity to fix racial attributes and essentialist views of gender. First, I will expose the arguments on the negative views of black people in Puerto Rico as expressed by the official documents; second, I will show how the agency of the actual people deconstructs the ecclesiastical and official discourse. I will also explore Puerto Rican musical and popular religious practices of that century from a critical ethno-musicological perspective, what Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman (2000, 5) have termed “the racial imagination.” This imagination was obviously profiled by the Puerto Rican racial landscape during the seventeenth century. However, I will also argue that the racial imagination was objectified and reified in a discursive gaze that highlighted difference (Palmberg and Kirkegaard 2002; Agawu 2003). Everyday life on the island was filled with activities that uncovered the vital presence of black people, in general, and the conspicuous participation of black and mulatto women, in particular, as the bishop’s letter suggests. Consequently, the relations and interactions of these diverse human groups, as we will see, were constant sources of concern for government and church institutions.
The racial landscape in Puerto Rico during the seventeenth century was an inescapable feature for those in positions of power. Entries in the cathedral’s Chronicle by Diego Torres de la Vega in 1610, the bishop of Puerto Rico Don Fray Damian Lopez de Haro in 1644 (Fernandez Mendez 1957), in addition to Bishop Padilla’s remarks in 1686, demonstrate that blacks and mulattoes, and particularly black and mulatto women, were most often the focus of the authorities’ attention. They saw the mulatto as a defective product of a relationship between a white male and a black or mulatto female. Mulattoes were considered inferior to their Spanish fathers because of the presumed inferiority of their mothers: this was the gendering framework of the racial landscape. In the opinion of both the common people and the social elites, mulatto and black women were regarded either as always jealous, always vindictive lovers, possessed “by a spirit that talked to [them] from [their own] womb,” or moving “with a voluptuous and sensual air” (Munoz 1966, 25). Within that context, first, I will present a reading of the official documents that advanced a negative view of black people in Puerto Rico.
Second, I aim to present the life of blacks and mulattoes, the characterization of their life, not only as a living challenge to the letter of the discourse but as bodily data that inform perceptions of musical practices and beings who also colonized and defined the island’s everyday life during the seventeenth century.
The Long Tail of a Telling Tale
Puerto Rican cultural histories have usually approached the first three centuries of Spanish occupation (the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries) in two ways: first, as compact, undivided wholes and second, as unproblematized, peacefully lived social interaction, having as the only disruption the attacks of foreign armies. Eight works of cultural history stand as paradigmatic. Their approaches to Puerto Rico’s history during these centuries can be summarized in two main views.
The first group of these cultural histories–Antonio Salvador Pedreira’s Insularismo (Insularism) (1934), Tomas Blanco’s Prontuario historico de Puerto Rico (History Primer of Puerto Rico; 1935), Maria Teresa Babfn’s Panorama de la cultura puertorriquena (Puerto Rican Culture: A Panoramic View; 1958), and Eugenio Fernandez Méndez’s Historia cultural de Puerto Rico (Cultural History of Puerto Rico; 1970) (2)–treated issues of cultural agency and power relations as an overarching continuum, firmly establishing the idea that Puerto Rican identity was the product of a long miscegenation process, which reached its maturity at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But the core of their views was that this process took place without any significant events that exposed struggle in social power relations: Spanish and white Creole social and political power was considered uncontested, and blacks, mulattoes, mestizos, and white poor were considered passive agents.
The second group situates the island’s social history within the overall history of the Caribbean basin and the African diaspora. Arturo Morales Carrion’s book Puerto Rico and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean (1952), (3) written from a political history perspective, brought Puerto Rico’s history into alignment with that of the rest of the Caribbean. His work stresses the idea that the island’s and the Caribbean’s political and historical processes underwent concomitant development. The work of Jose Luis Gonzalez in The Four-Storied Country (1993) (4) represented a truly new perspective in Puerto Rican historiography. His work cut through the heart of the established national discourse when he declared that, “throughout the first three centuries of our post-Columbian history, Puerto Rican popular culture, which was essentially Afro-Antillean in character, defined us as just another Caribbean population” (11). The work of Arcadio Diaz Quinones, El almuerzo en la hierba (The Picnic; 1982), and of Angel G. Quintero Rivera, Virgenes, magos y escapularios (Virgins, the Three Kings, and Scapulars; 1998) brought Gonzalez’s perspective–essentially, race as a determinant of cultural identity–forward to the point at which it began to play a central part in Puerto Rico’s historiography. Quintero Rivera and Diaz Quinones pushed Gonzalez’s perspective further by insisting that race was not just a component of the already established national discourse, but that race had defined the human relationships experienced by thousands during the country’s history and therefore that it is central to an understanding of Puerto Rico’s social processes. Surprisingly, however, the view of the first group, which linked the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries as one undivided continuum and as the spring of Puerto Rico’s present national identity, remained unchallenged.
Concerning the present topic, Pedreira and Blanco would have seen the events recounted by the bishop in 1691, as narrated by Cayetano Coll y Toste, as evidence of Puerto Rico’s problematic history of miscegenation and yet still as proof that, even so early in its history, Puerto Rico’s cultural practices were firmly established within the parameters of Western civilization. Babin and Fernandez Mendez, in the 1950s and 1970s, would have placed those activities within a long string of events and influences that grafted Puerto Rico’s “well-defined Spanish profile” to some of the many elements that present Puerto Rico’s current and always-evolving national character. It is with Gonzalez’s “storied country” view that Bishop Padilla’s narration can be turned into a historical problem.
Understanding race, gender, and class relations as relations of power, I argue, brings to the forefront of our historical imagination a Puerto Rico that seems farther away from our conceptualization of everyday life than its actual temporal distance. Can we imagine dances in the cathedral, people being entertained in the church by the dancing choirboys and young mulatta girls, music and the sounds of villancicos and fandanguillos zapateados filling the open space of the church’s interior? What did the bishop’s concern about the open presence of African-derived and -influenced practices of late seventeenth-century Puerto Rico religious and public life really mean? The consequences of such problematization, from Diaz Quinonez and Quintero Rivera’s perspective, are debatable: How can we explain such a turn of events; how can we trace the change from such a strong African presence in the social and cultural life of seventeenth-century Puerto Rico to the mid-nineteenth-century view of a whiter Puerto Rico shown in Manuel Alonso’s book El gibaro (The Jibaro; [1842] 1968), for example? Furthermore, can we continue treating these three centuries as a distinctive historical unit and the everyday life lived by the humanity that inhabited the island as the unchanged essence from which sprang the country’s present identity?
This line of questioning delineates the sections of this article. First, I will explore aspects of the lives of the slaves, free blacks, and mulattoes in Puerto Rican society as described by church and government documents and present them as examples of how social struggle and political positioning in Puerto Rico’s insular and regional history correspond to similar and simultaneous processes of negotiated racial identity. Second, I will read the same documents to show how the view of “the other” manifests worldviews and ideographic perceptions of those who want to implement their own sets of social and moral values. Third, by taking a closer look at the musical practices mentioned in Bishop Padilla’s letter and comparing them to contemporary musical practices in the Spanish Americas and in Spain, I will show not only how the creation and development of musical practices follow the nuances of human social relations but also how they are used by humans as tactics in a process of negotiating social and personal positioning.
The Everyday Life of Difference: The Color Line and the Gender Divide
One of the more salient features of the documentation describing the lives of blacks and mulattoes in the Spanish Americas is the insistence on difference. Coil y Toste uses Bishop Padilla, as a representative of the church, to delineate a discursive depiction of the dances in the cathedral that makes a clear distinction between the dance of the seises (choirboys) and that of the mulatta girls. Coll y Toste knew that the actual Bishop Padilla was a white Creole from Lima, Peru, familiar with the popular religious practices on both sides of the Atlantic. So, in the story, he introduced another consideration: that ecclesiastical and civil authorities should be careful in how they handle situations such as the one described because the same practices are found both in Peru and Spain. The choirboys’ performance is described as a “religious dance”; as for the girls, “their movements were correct, but a voluptuous and sensual air infiltrated the crowd there.” For both Coll y Toste and the ecclesiastical moral imagination of the seventeenth century, the problem was not the dance; the problem was the difference created by their bodies.
Everyday religious practices reflected that divergence. A letter by Bishop Nicolas Ramos in 1594 recounts to the peninsular Spanish authorities his experience with what he called negros brujos (black witches) (Huerga 1988). He reported to the king that he heard of the existence of a group of black men and women witches. This document summarizes what kind of difference the people of African ancestry embodied for the Spanish state and its subjects. It establishes a direct reference between being black and being a witch by the discursive device of interlocking two words–negros (blacks) and witches–so that their function as nouns and adjectives are reciprocal. As blacks, it was a given that their humanity was of an inferior quality. Furthermore, as witches, their souls were lost. They were considered witches not because of the intrinsic value of the ceremonies they were seen practicing. The accusation of being witches was based on what the ecclesiastic authorities considered they were doing: they worshiped “the devil in the form of a male goat, and, every night, in front of Him, relinquishing God, the Virgin Mary and the Holy Church’s sacraments” (Huerga 1988, 148; Coll y Toste 1928, 163-165). To the bishop, they had put themselves outside the realm of Christianity. The difference went beyond the bodily manifestation of their alleged inferiority: just by being blacks, they were considered inferiors, but as witches, for the church, their immortal souls were beyond the grasp of salvation.
The most significant indicator of difference, however, was gender. In official records, black women drew a particular kind of attention by being localized objects of desire. Bishop Ramos’s letter goes on to mention how the owners of the female slaves challenged his decision to expel their slaves. The gendered turn of the narrative at this point is interesting. The discourse brings together all the representatives of the political and social elite. The interests of the church, state, and slave owners meet at the center of the colonial raison d’etre: slaveholding and its existence as a class and racial meeting place. What do we see? We see white slave owners appealing the bishop’s decision to expel three black women from the island, and the bishop arguing that precisely “during the process of appealing their verdict of exile, three of them, who had given word not to reoffend, reverted to this kind of behavior” (Huerga 1988, 149).
Church officials throughout the seventeenth century chronicled “this kind of behavior” by black and mulatto women. By 1610, Diego de Torres y Vargas, the San Juan Cathedral’s chronicler, reported: “At the time of Governor Gabriel Roxas, it was said that a black woman had a spirit that talked from her womb; [she was] taken to the church [and] an exorcism was performed, and [the spirit] called itself Pedro Lorenza. And to everything that was asked, the spirit answered, speaking of things not present and unseen.” According to his account, this was not the only case reported. The negras (black women), Torres y Vargas continues, said that “in their homeland [such spirits] enter their womb in an animal-like form, and it is passed down from one woman to the other like an inheritance” (Fernandez Mendez 1957, 203; Coll y Toste 1928, 167-169). The church saw these women’s bodies as problematic. They were not only the object of desire of unseen forces and beings; they also had to deal with more worldly relations.
Besides being the site of contested views of social values, the women’s bodies also were a battleground on which church and state functionaries elucidated worldviews and political and social projects. The intermingling of black and mulatto women with members of the colony’s military garrison led to confrontations between the bishops and the governors throughout the seventeenth century (Cuesta de Mendoza 1948, 100), such as the disagreement in 1674 between Governor Gaspar de Artega and Bishop Francisco Escanuelas. The governor and the military post’s commander-in-chief did not want the soldiers bound by legal or ecclesiastic duties, namely, marriage. Thus, Governor Arteaga would dismiss a soldier who married a local woman. Facing this, soldiers just lived with their partners. The church’s representative found living out of wedlock unacceptable; not only were they living in mortal sin, but they were also bringing bastard children into this world. Both the governor and the bishop concurred that the quality of the women was problematic; however, the bishop argued that the sacred sacrament of marriage superseded the blemish caused by an unequal marriage:
The governor might argue that the Spanish [soldier] is punished in order to avert a marriage between a Spaniard and a mulatta, and thus having children of lesser quality. How is it, Your Highness, that while men living out of wedlock for more than twenty years with a black or a mulatto woman, having bastard children, not obeying God and his church, are considered good, noble, and honorable Spaniards, they are considered to be in disgrace if they get married? (Lopez Canto 1975, 37)
Furthermore, when the bishops energetically protested the slave owners’ practice of reproducing the slaves by what the church considered procreation out of wedlock, the church authorities chose public humiliation as a punishment–not for the slave owners but for “this kind of women,” referring to the black and mulatto women.
The body of the slave was the site of a power struggle among rival sets of values and social projects between “the Priest” and “the Knights,” as George Duby (1982) put it. Marriage was the sacrament through which the church, as an institution, enforced its power to deem sexual intercourse legitimate only within wedlock. This view interfered with the slave owner’s notion of ownership: slaves were considered property, which could be disposed of in any fashion by the owner. Seven years into the eighteenth century, Bishop Pedro de la Concepcion Urtiaga summarized the intermingling of spiritual and temporal concerns in such a power struggle, accusing the slave owners of “exposing [slave women] to prostitution by having children with them to increase the slave population” (Bermejo 1962, 46). Bishop Urtiaga’s action was part of a sixty-year process of placing the slave women’s bodies not only at the center of the problem but also as the issue’s raison d’etre. From 1647 to 1712, by order of the bishop’s office, any slave and mulatto woman “pregnant out of wedlock who has died during labor will be disposed of without the rites and ceremonies of the church, [and] her body will be carried in a casket with one bare foot outside it,” as a sign of her doing (46). In a letter to the king, dated August 13, 1711, Don Francisco Danio, governor of Puerto Rico, complained about this type of punishment and reported the case of Juana Maria, parda libre (free mulatto), punished in the same way a year earlier (46).
Bishop Fray Francisco Padilla’s fictional letter of 1691 thus presents a racial and gendered view that mirrors the social contingencies of the seventeenth century document’s discursive gaze. Blacks and mulatto slaves, especially women, drew the church’s attention when their presence brought those differences into public display, differences that, I would argue, the power structure wanted to regard as marginal and interstitial.
Puerto Rico shared these social dynamics with the rest of Spanish America. In 1623, the authorities in Havana, Cuba, banned free, married black and mulatto women from dances performed in public festivities, “like in Corpus [Christi] days and other solemnities,” alleging that they had previously been forced to do so (Konetzke 1958-1962, 2:278). Spain issued civil and ecclesiastic regulations urging local authorities to police free and slave blacks and mulattoes to see that they were properly dressed in public, to issue night curfews, and to make them “diligently avoid the sins that the slave women commit” (1:587, 1:589, 1:798). Both their presence and their appearance in public were subject to governmental regulation. For instance, in what is Mexico today was an order “[t]hat any black woman or mulatta, free or slave, cannot not wear any jewels of gold or silver, nor pearls, or silk from Castilla” (1:182).
The concern over the public display of personal status and pride was not only a matter of class jealousy on the part of some Spaniards but also a matter of state security. In his 1648 book The English-American, His Travail by Sea and Land: or, A New Survey of the West-Indies, Thomas Gage, an English Dominican monk who spent a number of years in Mexico and Central America, wrote, concerning the clothing worn by black and mulatto women in Mexico City: “Most of these [black and mulatto women] are or have been slaves, though love has set them loose at liberty, to inslave souls to sinne and Satan. And there are so many of this kind both men and women grown to a height of pride and vanity, that many times, the Spaniards have feared they would rise up and mutiny against them” (quoted in Brown 1988, 18). According to this logic, public display of personal pride could lead to a collective sense of selfhood that would threaten the social and political establishment.
The state and the church looked closely at public festivities and “other solemnities” in which blacks and mulatto slaves participated. Mayors and city authorities were directly involved not only in regulating the events but also in coordinating the participation of blacks, mulattoes, and Indians. A direct reference to the participation of young mulattas in dances for such a celebration can be found in the Actas del Cabildo de Caracas (Municipal Records of Caracas) of 1619. Provision was made for municipal officials–regidores Diego de Villanueva and Blas de Benavides–“to present a dance by young mulattas” (Acosta Saignes 1967, 202). The regulations of such activities for young black and mulatto women were twofold: the civil authorities controlled their organization, and the church controlled their celebration. Four years before the fictional story of the young mullattas, in 1687, the Synod gathered in the city of Santiago de Le6n de Caracas (now Venezuela) and expressed its disapproval of these dances. One of its constitutions stipulated that “dances by mulattas [be] banned during [Corpus Christi and other festivities’] processions” (Banos y Sotomayor [1687] 1982, 279). The discursive specificity of these documents at best seems arbitrary for its insistence on particulars. While everyday life could have evaded the letter of the law, the spirit of the law in its discursive gaze was clear in its desire to completely control the body and its daily performance.
“Tener la sarten por el mango … y el mango tambien” (To hold the frying pan by the handle … and the handle too) (5)
In Cayetano Coll y Toste’s story, one of the underlying concerns in Bishop Padilla’s letter to the king was the exercise of censorship. When we read in the fictional letter, “Your Highness knows that in Peru we have it also [dancing in the church]; the practice comes from Spain, and it is important to proceed cautiously to avoid any harm to the religious sentiment,” it not only refers to the actual historical point of origin and direction of the spread of such manifestations of popular religiosity, it also alludes to the tactical exercise of control. Social control, as Coll y Toste put it in Bishop Padilla’s voice, should “proceed cautiously” because its exercise should “avoid any harm” to its legitimacy, in this case, “to the religious sentiment.” Following this note of caution is a detailed description of three events that occurred in the cathedral that caught the bishop’s attention: first, the dance of the seises (choirboys); second, the dance of the six young mulattas; and third, the people who “gathered in different places inside the temple to dance fandanguillos con zapateados” (stamping fandanguillos). Of these expressions of religious sentiment, the bishop found the dance of the young mulattas the most singular because “their movements were correct, but a voluptuous and sensual air permeated the crowd there.” Consequently, in Bishop Padilla’s discursive gaze, social control not only has had to “proceed cautiously” but also, as we will see later, thoroughly. For civil and religious authorities, social control and the exercise of power had to account for place, body, and time, as well as for sentiment, movement, and moral imagination.
Using Coll y Toste’s story as guide for reading actual events, we find an instance of both the broad range of social controls and the exercise of power implied within the fifth and sixth constitutions of the Synod of Santiago, celebrated in Cuba in 1681. Like other synods, it regulated the comings and goings of common people, especially blacks and mulattoes; for instance, “That during Holy Thursday, Negroes, men and women, and other people do not do soliciting and selling of edible things at the church and cemetery’s entrance, or in the streets while a procession is passing” (Garcia de Palacios [1681] 1982, 13). Furthermore, synodal constitutions projected an expansionist desire for social control by explicitly enumerating the conditions, sites, and circumstances in which a particular incident could or could not happen. Constitution no. 6 is an excellent example. It was written to keep “indecent dances out of churches and houses”:
Being forbidden [these] clumsy and dishonest dances…. That any persons of any stage and quality do not perform, nor by day or night, such dances in their houses, or any other’s house, not permitting them in their own homes, sugar mills [ingenios], country houses [estancias], ranches [hatos], stockyards [corrales], or any place of our bishopric, and less in our churches, cemeteries, or their offices, nor in temples or chapels during festivities and wakes, without a pretext or any excuse. In the same way, we prohibit the performance of dances by women during the processions, and especially during the festivities of the Corpus. That, if there have to be any dances, let it be by men, being honest dances and the performers decently dressed, as required by the prominence of such festivity. (14)
The church not only projected its gaze of power over people’s lives through the regimentation of the calendar–exerting control over time cycles–but also by relentlessly colonizing people’s moral imagination.
Like their colleagues in Cuba, bishops in Puerto Rico had to deal with their share of dances in the cathedral and during solemn festivities. Contrary to Coil y Toste’s legend, the real Bishop Padilla, in 1686, clashed with a group of mulattoes who wanted to dance before the main altar. As part of the Corpus Christi festivities, they had danced inside the cathedral before the main altar, and “the day after the Corpus, the High Mass finished, when the procession was ready to depart, the said mulattoes wanted to dance again” (Huerga 1989, 202-204). (6) Theater director Myrna Casas notes that these kinds of events were common in seventeenth-century Puerto Rico. As early as 1604, the church’s authorities on the island were actively censoring any type of popular religious expression: dances, comedies, and secular performances (Casas 1974, 13). Moreover, as the church pushed to impose its own views and control popular religious expression, the civil authorities strove to oppose the church’s power and bring forward their own. Bishop Padilla banned the 1686 mulattoes dance but not without opposition from the cabildo (municipal government). The cabildo managed to overrule the bishop’s ban through a petition to the king (Lopez Canto 1975, 75).
The Synodal Constitutions of 1647, held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, present a window into the church’s stance in the mid-seventeenth-century on social control and moral imagination. The ecclesiastical authorities who gathered in Puerto Rico under the leadership of Bishop Damian Lopez de Haro were concerned with the uniform acceptance of the authority and faith of the Catholic Church, a concern that reflected their knowledge of the population’s diverse composition. The presence of Africans and natives “and other adults ignorant of the Christian doctrine” was a constant reminder to church officials of the unfinished conquest (Lopez de Haro 1986, 24). The uneven knowledge of Catholicism and of the “Castillian language” throughout the effectively occupied territories caused them apprehension (39). (7) Their unease concerning blacks and natives was based on the church’s ignorance of these people’s cultural practices. The synod advised ecclesiastical and civil authorities about blacks’ and natives’ gatherings and their performative practices during what were considered suspicious meetings: parties, burial ceremonies, and any activity resembling a ritual (40, 42, 47, 48, 49). (8)
The synodal constitutions considered in particular activities that took place at night. In 1594, Bishop Nicolas Ramos noted that the activities of the black witches occurred “every night.” Moreover, both civil and ecclesiastical authorities set curfews for female servants, particularly mulatta and black slaves (Konetzke 1958-1962, 2:589; Garcia de Palacios [1681] 1982, 15-16). Their masters were warned not to allow them to run errands or to send them on errands after sundown. In its admonition to the clergy concerning their behavior, the 1647 synod advised priests not to participate or to play “music on the street at night,” and to avoid “hanging around or playing musical instruments in such groups, or playing such musics” (Lopez de Haro 1986, 61). If the synodal constitutions can be used to gauge the perceptions of the church’s policy makers, we can infer some things about Puerto Rico’s everyday life: first, the lower clergy, in the church’s opinion, were too deeply involved in the people’s secular and religious practices; second, what was actually occurring in the city was evidence of the clergy’s failure as moral enforcers. But music on the streets at night and members of the clergy “playing musical instruments in such groups, or playing such musics,” were not the church’s main concerns.
The liturgical calendar was a framework for the island’s cultural life. In seventeenth-century Puerto Rico, Christmas, Three Kings Day, Corpus Christi, and the Feast of Saint John the Baptist, along with others commemorations and festivities, formed the core of the celebrations at which the islanders displayed their religiosity. Popular religious fervor and its public display were codified in the synodal constitutions at best as the absence of ecclesiastical authority. Church authorities saw the racial composition of the population, its dispersion, and the lack of discipline and commitment from the lower clergy and landowners to practice and enforce the church’s norms as impediments to the existence of prosperous and moral parishioners. Owners of blacks or Indian slaves were expected to take care of their slaves’ and servants’ spiritual lives (Lopez de Haro 1986, 22). Blacks, mulattoes, and Indians were constantly viewed with suspicion, regarding not only the depth of their faith as Christians but also their essential humanity. (9) Therefore, the church viewed the form and substance of the celebratory acts performed in celebrations and festivities within the liturgical calendar as objects needing its constant scrutiny.
The 1647 San Juan Synod addressed these issues from a variety of standpoints: first, the case of the state of the saints figures in churches and chapels; second, how church property and clergymen were involved in public demonstrations of popular religiosity; and third, the nature of and participants in dances, comedies, and games that were incorporated into church celebrations and festivities. Constitution no. 107 was straightforward: church and chapel officials should take care of the saint figures. They were to pay attention to the integrity of each statue, so that parishioners praying to a saint could have no doubt as to the saint’s identity. The intention was to ensure that “[t]he images of Our Lady are not to be used to set rituals, or any other novelty, inventions that the women, not with the best [or] holiest ends, invent” (Lopez de Haro 1986, 94). Given the population’s composition in terms of class structure and origins, the constitutions explicitly stated what the authorities wanted to avoid: the use of known saints’ images within the belief system of an autonomous Christian-based syncretic vernacular religion.
One instance of the church’s thoroughness in policing popular forms of worship comes in the description that appears in Constitution no. 77, of an instance of popular religious expression involving church property: “We have been informed that in some of the Islands of this Bishopric, if a big thunder and rain storms occurs, the Priest, persuaded by the people, unveils the Sacred Sacrament, and also takes it outside the temple, and places it before the tempest with great irreverence and inconvenience” (73). The constitution first gives an example of a current practice and then sets the rules for what should happen; the mechanisms of control were explicit. The authors of Constitution no. 77 started by criticizing priests for going along with what the people asked of them; they ended by stating that the goal was that “the Priests and Clergymen could bring the Sacred Sacrament outside the temple under their own custody, … [and then, they ought to be the one calling] the people for convocation [at church]” (73).
Control over the tools of worship accompanied control over the performative aspect of worship. If liturgy, as a formalized act of religious representation, was seen as a place for control, celebrations and festivities were seen as dynamic, fluid activities plagued with contingencies. Constitution no. 78 merits quoting in its entirety because it presents an instance of how church’s officials tried to cover every possible variable:
Whereas, in order to rejoice and solemnize the grand Corpus Christi’s festivities and other celebrations that our Mother the Church annually celebrates, there is a tradition of creating and performing comedies and liturgical dramas. We allow and tolerate such customs, provided that such religious dramas and comedies, celebrated on such days when the Sacred Sacrament is present, would be of religious content, previewed and authorized by us, or [by the] Overseer, or Vicar. Those sacred representations are not to be interspersed with entremeses [theatrical interludes], dances, or any other thing touching on any genre of lewdness, not allowing them inside the churches. (73-74)
In the 1647 records, we have found the codified form of Cayetano Coll y Toste’s fictional cautionary note of the 1691 story. The synodal constitution maps a winding and uneven path along which to deploy strategies of control. Celebrations, festivities, customs, and traditions are presented as forces that only the church can control by previewing, allowing or tolerating, and authorizing comedies, allegorical religious dramas, and other customs in which popular expressions maneuvered against the church’s intention of keeping secular visions away from the celebrations and keeping them away from the cathedrals.
The intrinsic power of performative representations is their elusive nature vis-a-vis external control. The synodal constitutions’ insistence on specifics points to a way of looking at a society in which subjects kept in marginal positions have already developed not only local views of individual and collective selfhood but also strategies for performing their agency. The intended control extended not only to the obvious, “the grand Corpus Christi’s festivities and other celebrations that our Mother the Church annually celebrates,” but also to publicly presented performances. The clergy was advised not to participate in “comedies, sacred plays, dances, parties, musics, festivities, masquerades, or dress as humarracho (a devil-like costumed character) (10) even if they took place during Corpus Christi or other Church solemnities” (62, 69). These activities were not supposed to receive financial support from the local civil institutions nor from the Cofradias (church brotherhoods) (91). The liturgical calendar enumerated the formalized practice and performance of institutionalized religious observances; however, the coculture of the slaves, free blacks and mulattoes, and poor white Spaniards found its way into the most outward expression of religious expressions, showing their malleability and capacity to channel their own worldviews.
Of Motets and Villancicos, or the Multivoiced…
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