Marian shrine images are discussed in the preceding chapters mainly in terms of their place identities (Our Lady of Xuquila, etc.), but the advocations they depicted also informed how they were understood. For example, shrine images of Mary Immaculate such as La Purísima of Tecamachalco (Puebla) and Buctoz (Yucatán) continued to be identified by this advocation, and devotees of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Tepeyac often referred to her as “la Purísima.” Many images of the Blessed Mary were similar in pose and appearance so that an image of the Virgin might change advocation without much difficulty, but each advocation had a distinguishing feature, usually a symbol or setting, whether it was rosary beads, a candle, a scapular, a sword pointed at her heart, a crescent moon beneath her feet, or a backdrop of billowing clouds and cherubs or a fire-breathing monster. Different advocations traced different histories in New Spain, appealing to particular devotees and promoters, and being honored on different feast days that reminded devotees of the advocation's special attributes.

Advocations, then, are another dimension of the complex interplay of image and presence that often centered on a shrine image and sometimes defined it. Some advocations initially were associated with one of the religious orders – the Immaculate Conception with Franciscans; the Mater Dolorosa and Loreto with Jesuits; Our Lady of the Rosary with Dominicans – but became more widely known, promoted, and venerated. Others associated with an order, such as Our Lady of Carmen and the Carmelites or Our Lady of Mercy and the Mercedarians remained closely identified with that order and a more restricted audience. Some regional Spanish advocations in America preserved their peninsular identities in America; for example, the advocations of Pilar de Zaragoza, Aranzazú, Montserrat, and Covadonga appealed mainly to immigrant families from Aragón, the Basque provinces, Catalonia, and Asturias, respectively. But they could have other significance, too. Our Lady of Covadonga, for instance, was associated with the Dominicans as well as the Asturias homeland, and her role as divine warrior came to the fore in the eighteenth century as Spain's entanglements in European politics led to more international warfare. Another regional Spanish advocation, Our Lady of Cueva Santa, was less attached to immigrants from her home region of Valencia.

In 1960, the May 3 feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross was officially removed from the liturgical calendar in order to focus devotion to the Holy Cross on September 14, the day of the Exaltation of the Cross. But for many Mexicans this favorite feast day was a lifeline to well-being here and now and the promise of salvation hereafter. It was an essential practice, not a vestigial one. Communities all over Mexico, especially rural towns and villages, observe May 3, decorating their special crosses in public and private places, attending Mass, and celebrating with food, drink, fireworks, music, and dancing. Workers in the building trades were conspicuous dissenters in 1960; virtually every construction site in Mexico must have its protective cross, which is decorated and honored on May 3. To steer clear of a prolonged dispute over popular traditions of faith, Mexican bishops successfully appealed to Rome for May 3 to remain a major feast there.

May 3, then, is still widely celebrated in Mexico, as well as in El Salvador and various communities in Spain, as it was during the colonial period. References to outdoor festivities on May 3 abound in early church chronicles, cathedral chapter minutes, parish archives, and civil and religious regulations and court records, especially for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Valladolid (now Morelia, Michoacán), celebrations in 1629 included a mock battle of Moors and Christians that concluded with the Christians wresting the cross from the infidels. During the festivities that year, a stone cross on the house of one of the cathedral dignitaries was damaged, leading to an inquiry into possible sacrilegious intentions. This mixing of sacred and profane evidently was common, and a worry to authorities. May 3 processions with family and community crosses to hilltop Calvaries were also a common practice then. Mass was celebrated on the spot, followed by the usual festivities. Spirited gatherings mixing sorrow and joy in the presence of the cross were a concern of the Inquisition in March 1691 when it prohibited celebrations in the streets of Mexico City on the grounds that some crosses were placed in “indecent locations, and the celebrations with Mass, sermon, and processions were mixed up with farces, bullfights, and masquerades on the pretext of honoring the cross,” which “results in serious scandal in the Christian Republic.”

Material culture presents a paradox. As John Glassie writes, it is “culture made material,” yet “culture is immaterial. Culture is pattern in mind, inward, invisible and shifting.” Material remains usually amount to scraps and tracks, or objects largely separated from their earlier contexts, their significance inferred more than established. Emily Dickinson recognized the problem in her untitled poem #344:

“Here though fled” is the story of most vernacular objects historians come across. It remains a problem for the study of early modern Catholic Europe and America even though recent art historians, anthropologists, and historians have applied their talents to the study of various religious images as material culture and self-definition. Sensuous religious practices in Catholic Christianity make the connections between images and devotion especially compelling, but insights into their production, promotion, and regulation have been easier to come by than understanding their audience and reception. There is no easy resolution of Glassie's paradox. In a 1989 book that turned European art history decisively toward the power of all kinds of images – how they were received and used, as well as made and promoted – and challenged the idea of a sea change in the sixteenth century from cult images to the cult of art, David Freedberg declared that “the history of art is subsumed by the history of images,” by the relationships between images and people in history. Freedberg called attention to images usually overlooked by art historians – especially shrine images and things associated with them that devotees took to be a living embodiment of what they represented and where they came from. But his inquiry into “the efficacy of pictures” slighted actual responses to and uses of those images in their places and times in favor of psychological theories about response.

What most distinguishes a shrine from other churches is that it is the object of pilgrimage; it draws people from beyond the immediate vicinity to a sacred place where devotees believe that God has shown His presence and special favor. But the meaning of pilgrimage and cognate terms in other languages is not as straightforward as “leaving home on a spiritual journey”; and even when scholars share an interest in large-scale journeys to a Christian sacred place, they have disagreed about what is going on. Beyond the many meanings of “pilgrimage” in our time, the ways people used the term hundreds of years ago also varied. And we rarely know exactly what pilgrims did and thought on their journeys.

Nearly all the colonial pilgrimages I can identify were short in duration and distance, directed to a nearby image shrine or other sacred place. They were not much like the great medieval and early modern Christian journeys of personal atonement along an established route of shrines leading to one of the great destinations – Compostela, Rome, or Jerusalem. From my early readings, including Victor Turner and the vast devotional literature for Our Lady of Guadalupe at Tepeyac, this was a surprise. Distant journeys of faith may have been a larger part of the story of pilgrimage in New Spain than I could document from the paper trail since ecclesiastical and civil authorities focused on regulating what went on at shrines more than on transit to and from them. On the other hand, colonial officials had good reasons to track long-distance commerce and what they regarded as vagrancy, and they did so without much attention to pilgrims.

After a few lines about the state of play in Christian pilgrimage studies and how the term pilgrimage is used, this chapter centers on how and why short journeys to sacred places were so important in the territory of New Spain until the mid-nineteenth century, and closes with an approach to further study. Again, sources and their uses are as much at issue as the patterns in sacred journeys over time that can be found in them.

Christian shrines – santuarios – in New Spain were privileged “places of God,” “renowned and miraculous,” that were acclaimed beyond the confines of the local community. Their standing as shrines originated in a “burst of divine presence,” and they remained popular over many years because people believed that extraordinary consolation and favors for the faithful were available there. These shrines typically displayed a statue or painting of Christ or the Virgin Mary that was associated with a founding miracle in which the figure was understood to have come to life in some fashion or suddenly became the site of amazing protection and other wonders. Whether it was in a cathedral, a fine temple, a modest chapel, or on an altar, the shrine was literally a vessel of sacred treasure and place of refuge, meant to welcome, honor, protect, and contain the divine presence that had shown favor there and might do so again as a “theater of a thousand more wonders.”

I have written essays and occasional pieces about various shrines, images associated with miracles, and sacred space in colonial Mexico, but working toward a more comprehensive historical account is a different challenge. What is the narrative line for such a subject, where high politics and warfare do not dominate, the secondary literature is sparse, and many particular places stand out? What is gained and lost in proposing patterns over time from the particulars? The chapters in Part I set out the main lines of change and continuity I noticed from the first years of Spanish colonization and Christian evangelization to the founding of most shrines in the seventeenth century and to their consolidation and expansion in the eighteenth century, pieced together from information about roughly 500 shrines and images. (See Map 1.1 for the location of image shrines discussed in the text.) They offer a perspective on change and a foundation for the later chapters, which turn to the material culture of devotion, miracles, pilgrimage, and some particular images and places in time that bend as much as they punctuate a history of how and why some shrine images came to be more widely known and why most of them remained popular.

The hold of miracles on the imagination and devotional practices of Catholic Christians is at the heart of the history of shrines, “prodigious” images, and divine presence in the early modern period. But miracles are an elusive subject, perhaps especially for New Spain. Colonial-era writings confidently regarded them as acts of God that defy natural laws, but obviously historians can know with any certainty only that people have believed such events happened and might happen again. Even for belief the record usually is terse, and miracles are a moving target: accepted knowledge of the laws of nature, standards of verification, and mainstream thought about diabolism changed, rendering some events once considered miracles curiosities of nature or demonic deceptions. Nevertheless, there are some constants in official and popular expectations for miracles, especially that many of the colonial accounts echoed miracles worked by Christ and treated in the Gospels as parables of salvation: sight for the blind, hearing and voice for the deaf and mute, healthy limbs for the lame, sudden healing of the mortally ill, resuscitations of the recently deceased, escapes from mortal danger on land and sea, and exorcisms. The healings, exorcisms, calming of waters, multiplication of loaves and fishes, and the rest relieved pain, suffering, and want in this world, but they also stood for something more glorious – spiritual purification and enlightenment, a good death, and the prospect of a soul's salvation. As Jesus said when he healed the blind man in John 9, “I am the light of the world.” Often the depiction of miraculous images of Christ and the Blessed Mary conveyed this transcendent meaning. Take the radiance surrounding the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe or, on the cover of this book, José de Páez's painted “portrait” of the miraculous Christ of Ixmiquilpan (ca. 1770), bathed from above in a heavenly light that focuses the viewer's attention squarely on the figure and sacrifice.

Within this shared understanding, there were bound to be disagreements and reservations. Priests knew to teach the salvific promise of Christ's miracles, while parishioners were more likely to think first of pressing problems in the here and now.

Since Christianity's early years the mystique of divine presence has found expression in sacred things. Beyond the ever-present portability of the consecrated Host, relics come to mind immediately, especially the remains of saints. As Annabel Wharton puts it, the bodies and possessions of saints offer “reassurance that the past retains its authority … A relic is a sign of previous power, real or imagined. It promises to put that power back to work.” Why popular cults and pilgrimages celebrating bone relics did not become more important in New Spain even though thousands of certified remains of saints were brought from Europe is something of a mystery, given the veneration of ancestors and the importance attached to their remains and living presence by precolonial and colonial Mesoamericans, as well as Spaniards’ interest in ancestry and recognized relics. Native Mesoamericans would seem to have been predisposed to see Christian relics as numinous things since the bones of totemic ancestors were regarded as sources of regeneration, protection, and legitimacy, if not as the very bones of the gods. Guilhem Olivier's study of sacred bundles containing bones of the ancestors appearing in precolonial and early colonial depictions of processions and migrations suggests that bones as relics were handled in a manner that would have made Christian relics comprehensible and compelling. As Olivier puts it, these sacred bundles served as “the memory constituting the cohesion of their collective identity at the boundary between the founding myths and the specific migration history of each group.” But few Christian bone relics were made readily available for public adoration, and none was promoted or spontaneously arose as a pilgrimage site. The Third Synod of prelates meeting in 1585 put it bluntly: “[D]o not expose relics of the saints to public veneration.” Granted, colonial laws often bowed to customary practices, and officials learned to make their peace with popular enthusiasms, but bone relics were not often available to the American public in the way images were. Things of the saints and saintly were always treasured, but during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they ceded pride of place as relics to images in the material culture of divine immanence.

This study of sacred images, shrines, and devotion in New Spain began with two puzzles about Mexico's celebrated Virgin of Guadalupe. First, by the late colonial period Guadalupe seemed to be known and revered almost everywhere yet drew few long-distance pilgrims to the shrine at Tepeyac and its precious matrix image; and, second, devotion to Guadalupe continued to grow and prosper when other image shrines are thought to have been in decline, shadowed by early signs of modernization and creeping disenchantment. It became clear to me that these puzzles and the history of devotion to this image and shrine more broadly could best be addressed as part of a larger story of European Catholic Christianity becoming an American religion in which hundreds of celebrated image shrines with followings beyond their immediate vicinity flowed into a deep river of devotion. Finding that few of those shrines declined during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led beyond the Virgin of Guadalupe to other questions. How and when did the many shrines develop? Why have so many of them lasted so long? How did devotion to them spread? How did some become more prominent than others? Who were the devotees and what did a particular shrine mean to visitors and to devotees who sought the divine presence through a celebrated image without going to its shrine? How were such images received and used? Who shaped and managed the business and culture of devotion to them?

Reckoning with the disparate record of hundreds of image shrines and related matters of spiritual landscape, material culture, popular devotion, miracles, relics, different advocations, and the economy and politics of the miraculous tends to silence the would-be oracle in me. Local histories of miraculous images converged and overlapped, but they rarely interlocked like pieces of a vast jigsaw puzzle or links in a chain; too many of the places and people involved are too fleetingly glimpsed to be certain how they came together, if at all; detecting something new is not proof that it was transformative at the time; and rules in human affairs have their exceptions.

It would not be surprising to find that image shrines in New Spain declined during the eighteenth century, as they did in much of Catholic Europe, diminished by Enlightenment skepticism and individualism, government intervention to maximize tax revenue, minimize administrative costs, promote devotional sobriety and private soul searching, and a campaign to moderate costly and provocative public exuberance. In a way this would seem to have happened. Fewer new shrines and confraternities were established in the eighteenth century than during the long seventeenth century; some reputedly miraculous images and incipient shrines were suppressed; restrictions on alms collecting for local devotions of all kinds, including shrine images, were put forward by the 1790s; and priests who spoke of miracles increasingly felt obliged to assure authorities that they were not naïve seekers of supernatural signs. But decline, disenchantment, and rise of the spiritually “buffered self” pale in comparison to the many signs of vitality, official encouragement, mounting wealth, and popularity of image shrines, or the frequent news of miracles in the late colonial period.

The impact of Spain and Europe on the history of image shrines in America was felt directly but not uniformly during the eighteenth century, and not always in expected ways. Confessional crusades that pitted Protestants against Catholics had declined by 1700, replaced by the challenges of a growing conviction among educated classes that the universe was governed by natural laws more than by the omnipresent hand and will of God. But Spanish Bourbon administrators endorsed a paler version of the continental Enlightenment that did not question the existence of God as creator and mover of the universe or tolerate unfettered critical thinking. Their reforms were more instrumental, designed to apply secular, scientific procedures to policy and administration in order to strengthen the monarchy, spur material progress, maximize revenues, and burnish a mystique of absolutist order and royal benevolence without banishing the divine from human affairs. Catholicism remained the official religion of the Spanish kingdoms, although ecclesiastical authority was challenged in various ways. Royal administrators and regalist bishops were inclined to try to limit the priesthood to spiritual matters narrowly defined and to favor a less showy, more restrained public piety.

Catholic Christianity and its imagery broke in on Mesoamerica suddenly in the 1520s and has been a pivot point of living and dying there ever since. But there is no simple story of an early formative stage and late decline in the history of Christian image shrines in New Spain. They began in the sixteenth century, haltingly; and with many shrines eventually scattered over a vast, broken terrain, local histories of Christian practice were bound to depart from models and prescriptions in Rome, Madrid, Mexico City, or less remote capitals and style centers. The weight of the European past and present in the development of Christianity and religious practices in New Spain was great, and diffusion from Catholic Europe lends some coherence to the history of image shrines, whether following European trends or working against them. But Europe, too, is a moving target, neither uniform nor fixed and finished in its religious culture. What, then, can be said with some confidence about the impact of European beliefs and practices on the development of those shrines? What changed where and when?

This chapter tracks their early development, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most image shrines and the full range of their distinguishing features took shape later than might be expected, mainly during a “long” seventeenth century from the 1580s to the 1720s that amounted to the formative period. Chapter 2 continues into the eighteenth century, suggesting that the late colonial period was less a time of decline for shrines and enchantment than one of consolidation and growth. (See Map 1.1 for the image shrines discussed in the text.) The substantial, if gradual, developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lead to consideration of long-term continuities from precolonial times on in the second part of Chapter 2, and the leading role of Marian and Christocentric shrines and images in Chapters 3 and 4.

Sixteenth-Century Beginnings: European Roots and Branches

Scholarship about nearly all aspects of religion in New Spain has centered on the sixteenth century rather than taking in the full sweep of the colonial period. Lines of interpretation have varied but the effect has been to treat the early years of colonization as formative for religion in the same ways that colonial institutions, imperial practices, economic activities, and labor systems were largely established then.

Few images of saints other than the Blessed Mary became widely renowned as miraculous in New Spain. Of course, virtually every saint – and some exemplary Christians not destined for sainthood – had followers, and every image of a saint might take on the aura of immanence since miraculous power was by definition an attribute of sainthood. A few shrines and images of saints did gain fame beyond the local community, and even an obscure saint like San Félix Papa could become the outstanding divine protector of an important town. But only the colonial shrine of San Miguel del Milagro in Tlaxcala gained a regional following comparable to Marian shrines like Zapopan, Xuquila, Izamal, and El Pueblito; and it fell short of the reach of the great shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe at Tepeyac, the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception at San Juan de los Lagos, the Christ of Chalma, and the Christ of Esquipulas.

How and when the saints and their images became widely known and venerated during the colonial period is not altogether clear. While emphasizing that “no other aspect of Christian belief and ritual had a remotely comparable impact on the broad range of [Nahua] activity” in central Mexico during the colonial period, James Lockhart suggests that the saints only gradually “seeped” into Nahuas’ devotions, mainly through the influence of Spanish lay settlers beginning in the late sixteenth century. However, European influences by and large favored earlier promotion and enthusiasm for saints despite some constraints in the first generations of colonization. Devotional reforms of the time, both before and after the Council of Trent decrees (1546–1563), tended to promote episcopal and papal authority and universal features of the faith at the expense of the local and eccentric, inevitably affecting the cult of saints, which was so important to Christian devotion in Europe during the late Middle Ages. The calendar of saints was pruned back by the reformers, and no new saints were recognized between 1523 and 1588, but the cult of saints and their images still flourished within a more restricted, hierarchical order that featured canonized heroes of the New Testament and the leading religious orders, and early Christian martyrs.

By the turn of the seventeenth century, Catholic institutions, beliefs, and practices were ingrained features of everyday life and ceremonial occasions in New Spain, as imperial authorities and evangelizers intended. Christianity provided an increasingly diverse populace with an outlook on life and practices that complemented, but proved more durable than, the hierarchy of colonial political offices and administrators. A lasting sense of enchantment, of divine immanence in the present, was part of what most people shared as New World Catholics, along with a hunger for epiphanies in daily life and personal salvation. A great many shrines would come to feed this hunger as long-lived sites of shared devotion and contestation across social groups in many places. Shrines were understood to be havens of divine protection and sources of well-being – “Little heavens on earth,” Francisco de Florencia called them – but this was not the sunlit enchantment of the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Satan was immanent, too. For Spaniards in America, he and his demon minions were fully present, deceiving the native population into idolatry and corrupting the ignorant, gullible, and devious of all classes, at every turn. Native Mesoamericans’ monistic views of divine power and presence as simultaneously nurturing and destructive could lead them to propitiate Satan as well as Christ and the saints, for the superhuman powers attributed to him by Catholic pastors and local adepts. And people labeled “castas,” often without a secure place in the social and legal order, were especially likely to be suspected of pacts with the devil and overrepresented for that reason in the Inquisition's investigations into satanic worship. Not surprisingly, exorcisms remained a familiar feature of Catholic practice throughout the colonial period.

The hold of miracles on the imagination settled on sacred things, especially images of Christ and the Virgin Mary, and the patina of time usually added to their store of wonder. Through age, use, and reputation, they were rooted in local time that transcended chronology in the marks of loving devotion by untold numbers of forebears, legendary origins in a distant past, and miracles both remote and recent. Catholicism's ways of expressing faith in an incarnate God were wellsprings of the charisma of shrine images and sites, valorizing intense feelings of contrition and love and embracing the power and uses of things.