“HIDING BENEATH MARY’S SKIRT”

CATHOLICISM AND QUEST FOR TRANSETHNIC IDENTITIES

Michael Burns

HC 812: American Intellectual History

December 21, 2014

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When considering American history to be the living and transient story of

transnational identities and cultures, flowing over national boundaries to include the

Caribbean, South and Central America, new and intriguing concepts present themselves

that would not when only looking at American history as national narratives – the story

of the United States, the story of Mexico, and so on, individually. One of these new

concepts that presents itself is the range of dynamic and drastically different ways in

which three main groups interacted with each other – indigenous peoples that were

already living in the Americas, individuals of African descent brought as slaves, and the

Europeans who came to colonize or conquer. The past few centuries have demonstrated a

significant variety in the development of race and ethnic identity, and of the relations

between these three groups in different geographic areas. When looking to islands in the

Caribbean, one finds nations that have predominantly become ethnically dominated by

either the descendants of African slaves brought there to work on plantations – such as in

Haiti, or the descendants of Europeans and mixed race individuals – for example in Cuba.

In South and Central America, one finds the persistence of indigenous identities mixing

with the identities of Europeans – like in Mexico, and a great diversity of European,

indigenous and African ancestry – as seen in Brazil. Similarly, the United States and

Canada have their own ethnic diversity, with specific relationships between those groups.

In the United States there still exists a great tension between groups identifying as white

and non-white, and the African American civil rights movement is a characterizing facet

of United States history in the twentieth century. While concepts of “otherness” exist in

all areas of the Americas, there is something unique about the ethnic polarity of the

United States. “Native American Indians” in the United States exist culturally as a relic

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of the “cowboys and Indians” trope, and in reality their few descendants are confined

stereotypically to reservations or have assimilated and intermarried into mainstream

“American-ness.” The experience of people of color in the United States has been one of

systematic legislative oppression that, in some ways, persist into the twenty first century.

A racial divide is maintained where there is a clear lineal distinction between “white” and

“black.”

This has not been the case, at least not in the same capacity, in the rest of the

Americas. Why? There are no doubt countless reasons contributing to this phenomena.

The reasons for European arrival being a central one; clearly there would be a different

attitude and development of identity in places where Europeans came to work the land for

a profit (such as the Caribbean) and places where Europeans came to settle, to colonize –

like in the United States. Additionally, the patterns and methods of settlement used would

affect the defining of identity. Areas where land was gifted or assigned by parent

countries would likely develop differently than areas that were considered “ripe for the

taking” by European settlers. Another contributor is the cultural and social traditions

brought by the specific Europeans to the locations they would come to inhabit. The

reformed Christianity in the United States, specifically of England, was dissimilar to the

Roman Catholicism of the Spanish and Portuguese who broke ground in South and

Central America. It is this contribution, at least in part, which this work aims to

illuminate.

This work aims to examine the relationship between the specific Christianity

practiced by the European colonizers and the development of ethnic and racial identity in

the Americas. More specifically, the scope of this work is to suggest that Roman

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Catholicism, unreformed and still largely ritualistic, allowed for the development of

syncretic religions when it was combined with the traditional beliefs of indigenous and

African descended peoples. These syncretic religions did not have the capability or

tolerance to develop in as meaningful a way in the majority of the United States, largely

due to the reformed Christianity most prominent in the United States, which had already

had most of its more ritualistic and archetypal elements removed. Proceeding in a

geographic manner, this work will examine the development of voodoo1 in Haiti and

Santería in Cuba, the variety of syncretic religious practiced in Brazil, and in less detail,

the formation of Aztec Christianity in Mexico.

While, for brevity, this work will predominantly focus on the development of the

syncretic religions previously mentioned and generally not examine syncretic religions in

North America, some background in this area is necessary to understand the uniqueness

of their development. One notable, and prominent example, of syncretic religion is found

in the American city of New Orleans. In some ways, New Orleans is famous (or

infamous) for its voodoo history. Martha Ward, writing in Voodoo Queen: The Spirited

Lives of Marie Laveau, describes how, in the largely French Catholic city, Laveau, a

voodoo high priestess, was able to be “Catholic in the morning, voodoo by night.”2 She

herself was baptized in St. Louis Cathedral, as were her children. It was in the same

church that she was married, and confessed regularly. Her daughter remembered her as

being “pious” and “strengthening the allegiance of souls to the church.”3 But in the

1 There are a variety of spellings for the numerous spiritual practices considered to be “voodoo.” These

include voodoo, vodou, and vodun. This work uses the common American spelling of voodoo, but leaves

intact other variations when quoting sources. 2 Martha Ward, Voodoo Queen the Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau, (Jackson: University Press of

Mississippi, 2004), 22. 3 Ibid., 23.

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darkness of night, Marie Laveau would dance nude in woods with other voodoo

practitioners, speak to snakes, and invoke the saints to free hanging men from their

nooses and raise the dead. The prominence of voodoo in New Orleans was not, however,

reflective of the general proliferation of voodoo (or any other syncretic religions) in the

United States. Ron Davis, in American Vodou: Journey into a Hidden World addresses

this reality head on. “Hiding ‘beneath Mary’s skirts,’ a folk idiom for syncretization, may

have begun as camouflage, but in time the orisha showed their real faces. The resultant

Afro-Christian hybrids known as Santería, candomble, obeah, macumbe, Shango Baptist

and so on became strong evidence that, given the right socioeconomic conditions, voudou

could not only cloak itself within Christianity, it could dominate it. At least in the

Caribbean.”4 Davis continues on, suggesting that it was the strict rigidity of American

plantations that contributed to the demise of syncretic religions in North America. “In the

United States, African voudou was not syncretized, or hybridized, or even sanitized. It

was eradicated. The smaller, more closely controlled plantations of the American Bible

Belt never gave the orisha a chance to become saints or to create spirit world fusions like

those in Cuba or Haiti. Yoruba slaves forced to worship in an icon-hating Baptist Church

in Mississippi couldn’t praise Oshun by calling her the Blessed Virgin.”5 In contrast to

this passage, specifically to the notion that Yoruba slaves couldn’t praise Oshun under the

guise of Mary, it would seem that Marie Laveau was able to live her double life

specifically because of Catholicism – where devotion to icons was still the norm, and a

practitioner of African traditional religion could “hide beneath Mary’s skirt.”

4 Rod Davis, American Voudou Journey into a Hidden World. (Denton, Tex.: University of North Texas

Press, 1998), 134. 5 Ibid., 134.

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This connection between African traditional religion and Roman Catholicism

actually started before Africans reached the new world, as Nathaniel Samuel Murrell

documents in his seminal text on syncretic religions, Afro-Caribbean Religions: An

Introduction to Their Historical, Cultural and Sacred Traditions. “The foreign Christian

prince Afonso in 1510 saw the early establishment of Roman Catholicism as a state

religion. Catholic schools became standard for the Kongo, and the Europeanization of its

culture began with a centralized government patterned after and supported by Portuguese

colonial powers.”6 This standardization of Catholicism in the Kongo had a profound

effect on the people there, merging with their traditions and culture, and ultimately

influencing them in ways that affected their everyday life. Murrell continues to note that

“Christianity was intimately associated with the Kongo kingship and was based on

Catholic forms of worship.”7 What this indicates is that for many enslaved Africans,

Christianity, and specifically Catholicism, was not new to them upon their arrival in the

Americas. While many Africans would have had at least some experience with

missionaries, as Murrell documents, some might have actually been in Catholic schools.

This familiarity is one of the theories of creolization Murrell suggests when describing

the experience of African slaves. He writes that “several theories related to the

creolization of religion among enslaved Africans are proffered: (1) that the adoption of

Catholic saints’ names and characteristic features in Santería, Candomble, Vodou, and

Orisha was an intentional strategic mechanism on the part of early Afro-Caribbean

peoples to dupe their white oppressors into believing they were being Christians; (2) that

6 Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, Afro-Caribbean Religions an Introduction to Their Historical, Cultural, and

Sacred Traditions, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 22. 7 Ibid., 22.

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the integration of Catholic hagiography into African religions was really a conversion

strategy, on the part of the Church, to win converts; (3) that the phenomenon was a

natural symbiosis of ATRs8 with Catholicism because of the church’s theology; and (4)

that Africans’ familiarity with Christianity, on the continent of Africa, made it easy and

natural for them to synthesize their religions with Catholic hagiography.”9 Whether

deliberate on the part of the slaves or on the part of the church, it proved a double edge

sword for individuals of African descent. “The constant fear of slave revolts resulted in

subsequent regulations in 1758 and 1777 to impose limitations on the movements of

slaves, ban drumming and dancing, and proscribe their assembly. Slaves were prohibited

from meeting without a Catholic priest in attendance and from gathering near their

master’s home or in remote places.”10 The fear and concern expressed by these

regulations on the part of Europeans expose the racial and ethnic roots of the role of

syncretic religions to enslaved Africans. Syncretic religions served an important role for

these disenfranchised individuals- it was a means to appease their European masters

while still holding onto their traditional religious beliefs, it was a way to maintain a sense

of community in a system of slavery that frequently separated biological families, and

was a way to facilitate a method of belonging to societies in which they were regarded as

the “other.”

Haiti provides one of the most compelling examples of people of African descent

using syncretic religion, enabled by Catholicism, to assert and affirm their identity as

8 African Traditional Religions 9 Murrell, 7. 10 Ibid., 62.

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both Haitians and Africans. Murrell shares an amusing anecdote about the religiosity of

Haiti:

Versions of an incredulous and comical, but popular, folklore claim that Haitians

were “100 percent Catholics and 90 percent vodouisants,” 1 or 15 percent Protestants,

“95 percent Catholic and 150 percent Voodoo.” None of the cynical hyperboles could

have ever been true of Haiti in the past, and Christianity has become the religion of

choice for most Haitians in the twenty-first century. The myth, however, points to

Vodou’s prevalence in the history of Haiti and the dominance of Christianity in the

land of Dambala (Danbala). Historically, the country has clung to the traditions of

two worlds: the world of Western Roman Catholic religiosity (and more recently

Protestant Christianity) and the world of African traditional religion (ATR),

amalgamating several different traditions into one religion called Vodou.11

Voodoo itself is very much a combination of Catholic ideas and rituals with traditional

African religious ideas. In Conjure in African American Society, Jeffery Anderson

discusses the specifics ideas that connected Catholicism and African beliefs together to

form voodoo. He writes how “for example, Papa Lébat, one of the chief Voodoo deities,

was identical to the Catholic St. Peter. Likewise, St. Michael, the archangel, was the same

as the Voodoo Magnian, another name for Blanc Dani, who was known for his serpentine

form and his power over storms.”12 Davis also writes about the overlapping of the

Catholic saints with African gods, stating “linking their deities (arrayed in a pantheon

more than accidentally similar to Roman and Greek systems) to Catholic saints, slaves

11 Murrell, 57. 12 Jeffrey E. Anderson, Conjure in African American Society. Louisiana Pbk. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana

State University Press, 2007), 34.

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could pretend to pray to St. Barbara, for example, while really delivering their wishes to

the vo-du thunder god, Songo (Anglicized as Shango; or Chango in Spanish), whose

symbolic African colors of red and white and favored weapon, the double-headed axe,

exactly matched the trappings of the Catholic ringer.”13 Over time, the two separate

systems blended into one, a duality that allowed practitioners to affirm a Catholic identity

but still hold onto their traditional African beliefs. Anderson writes that “Over time the

rationale for the practice of hiding gods under the names of saints disappeared, and for all

intents and purposes the gods and saints became the same. Adherents considered

themselves Catholics, while continuing to serve the old gods.”14

He continues to support the theory suggested in this work, that the success of these

syncretic religions was specific to areas that were colonized by Catholic Europeans. He

writes that “unlike Latin Catholicism, English Protestantism had no saints, making it

more difficult for blacks to preserve their old pantheon under new names.”15 When

Haitian voodoo came to the United States, it was even more necessary for people of

African descent to use Catholicism to hide the practice of worshipping traditional African

deities. This something that Anderson mentions as well, writing that “Voodoo and related

religions, which the ruling class feared as witchcraft and a potential source of revolution.

The practice of identifying gods with saints grew stronger once the blacks arrived in

America, where they made up a smaller percentage of the total population, allowing

whites to keep a much closer watch over them.” 16 People of African descent were also

limited by religious differences in North America. Areas where voodoo could be

13 Davis, 8. 14 Anderson, 34. 15 Ibid., 34. 16 Ibid., 34.

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practiced were limited to areas that had a large Catholic presence, as the removal of

adoration to the saints in Protestantism made it less viable in areas where that was the

prominent religion. Upon coming to North America, voodoo adapted further, adding not

just symbolism in the saints, but also impacting the nature of the rituals used. This

passage describes the changes to the structure of the altar used in voodoo rituals once it

came to North America:

Europe contributed more than just words to voodoo. In the Latin cultural area Roman

Catholicism deeply affected the shape of hoodoo rituals. Charles D. Warner gave an

account of a Voodoo ceremony that clearly demonstrated the impact of European

Christianity. The most notable feature of the room in which the ritual took place was

an altar surmounted by a statuette of the Virgin Mary and candles, all explicitly

Catholic symbols. While altars were common in Africa, black Louisianians

abandoned their traditional forms, which often took the shapes of the deities

worshiped through their use, in favor of the rectangular one of Catholicism. Saint

images, like the one seen by Warner, indicated the god/saint being honored by the

offerings, effectively occupying the gap in African practice created by the changed

shape of the altars.17

This further demonstrates the ways in which people of African descent were able to coopt

Catholic rituals and symbolism to maintain their traditional African beliefs in secret.

Through these means – the unification of Yoruba deities with Catholic saints, the

adoption of Catholic ritual in voodoo practice, and the ability of enslaved Africans to

17 Anderson, 59.

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gather under the guise of Catholic worship – people of color in Haiti were able to assert

an identity that was both African and uniquely Haitian.

A similar phenomenon is evident in Cuba with the development of Santería.

Murrell provides an overview of the religion, which, while having its own unique

characteristics, was another syncretic religion combining elements of Catholicism and

Yoruba African tradition. “Santería, also called regla de ocha and Lucumi, is the most

dominant African-based religion brought to colonial Cuba, emerging on the island as a

spiritual force that spread among Cuban exiles in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and the United

States. It evolved as a system of spiritual communication containing beliefs and practices

associated with the worship and veneration of African orishas in Cuba and in Puerto

Rico’s creole African and Spanish cultures; there it blended with Catholic Christianity

and native traditions in ways that allowed Santería to keep its religious system intact.”18

Similar to Haitian voodoo, which would eventually spread to the Louisiana and other

parts of South and Central America, Santería was a Cuban export that would eventually

make its way to other parts of the Americas. In this way, the syncretic religions of the

Caribbean not only impacted the national identity of the island on which they were

developed, but also created safe spaces for enslaved Africans in the more Protestant

United States. Murrell again documents this necessity, calling Santería “The product of a

needed sacred space that Afro-Cubans created as a refuge in the storm of enslavement,

Santería was a way to find meaning in, and a divine reality that could answer the

contradictions and miseries of, a slave society and life’s hopelessness among oppressed

18 Murrell, 96.

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peoples of African descent.”19 These ascriptions apply equally well to the syncretic

development of voodoo as well as the African and indigenous religious identities that

emerged out of Mexico and Brazil.

The religious tenants of Santería are similar to voodoo but not identical. Both

Anderson and Murrell discuss the main ideas found in Santería in some detail. They

revolve primarily around the idea of power and divine communication. Murrell writes

that “among believers, regla de ocha is a religion of ashe (power) that enhances

communication between humans and the divine for empowering the powerless in order to

assuage the problems and contradictions of everyday life. It employs sacred space and

symbolic signifying, as well as belief in supernatural powers, the potency of rituals, spirit

mediation, divination, herbal healing, and human agency as vehicles of spiritual,

psychological, and physical wholeness.”20 That is not to suggest that Santería is without

deities, which, similar to voodoo, it has its own pantheon, mostly derived from Yoruba.

According to Anderson, it “includes a variety of gods, primarily derived from the Yoruba

pantheon. As in Africa, these are arranged in a hierarchical order. At the top presides

Olodumare, the remote creator of the universe, roughly equivalent to the Christian God.

Below Olodumare are the orishas, each of which has an equivalent Catholic saint. Next in

rank are ancestral spirits, collectively known as eguns. Further down the spiritual

hierarchy are humans, plants and animals, and nonliving things. All life, including

Olodumare, is filled with Ashe, an absolute spiritual force.”21 Priests in Santería are

called babalawos, and their primary role in Cuban society was to provide divination

19 Murrell, 96. 20 Ibid, 96. 21 Anderson, 145.

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services as well as to provide spiritual diagnosis and healing for sicknesses. Some

examples of divination in Cuban Santería include the use of “opeles” and kola nuts. An

opele is “a long chain to which tortoiseshell discs are attached at regular intervals”22

which is “lowered onto a flat surface by practitioners, who hold onto the chains at their

center.”23 The patterns displayed by tortoiseshell are then read for meaning, in the same

way that the babalawos would divine meaning from the layout of the kola nuts after

throwing them onto the ground. Anderson describes a specific example of the way that

healing magic functioned in Santería saying “a young woman consulted a babalawo who

divined that she had an ovarian cyst. He recommended that the woman visit a doctor, take

a special herbal bath, and make a sacrifice to Oshun, the god of rivers, fresh water, and

erotic love. The woman most likely obtained her magical bath materials from a botanica,

Santería’s equivalent of a conjure shop. In addition to herbal baths, botanicas sell statues

of saints, candles, oils, and other goods.”24

This scenario shows very clearly the background that Santería has in traditional

African religion, but it is notable that it became practiced by both Cubans of Spanish and

indigenous descent as well as those of African descent. Tracey Hucks, writing in

Religions of the Americas: Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious

Nationalism documents the tensions this caused as people of African descent eventually

began to contest the European elements of Santería. At one point she describes an

interaction between Black Nationalist Nana Oseijeman Adefunmi and a Cuban Santería

practitioner name Cristobal Oliana, where this tension is demonstrated. “Oliana exposed

22 Anderson, 145. 23 Ibid., 145. 24 Ibid., 145.

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Adefunmi to an interpretation of Santería that he understood from his immediate Cuban

cultural context. For Oliana, this included Roman Catholic iconography and saints;

Adefunmi, however, who wanted to emphasize the African in the religion, challenged the

Roman Catholic presence as a European colonial imposition upon the religion.”25

Adefunmi discusses his reaction and objection to these elements himself, expressing

concern at the Catholicism of Santería and its European origination:

“Chris Oliana knew about Santo. He told me I should get a statue of St. Barbara. But,

of course, at that time I was deeply involved in the Nationalist Movement of the 60’s.

So the mention of a thing called Santo which, of course, translated into English means

saint, [and for us] who are raised in the Protestant religion and have no knowledge of

Catholicism, to tell you that you must get a statue of St. Barbara, a saint, means that

you are going to become a Catholic. So quite naturally I objected to this and refused

to get involved with it and told him: “No, I’m interested in African [religion].” But he

says: well, it is African! I say: “How can it be African and you want me to get a statue

of St. Barbara? This is not an African name. This is not an African saint. And from

the picture you showed me, this certainly is not an African lady. This is not an

African god. This is a white woman!” And I refused to get involved with it. Finally,

he explained to me: This is just called Santo. This is a Spanish name. It’s got an

African name. The African name is Ocha, he explained. And all of the ceremony in it

is all purely African.”26

25 Tracey E. Hucks, Religions of the Americas: Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious

Nationalism. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012), 79. 26 Ibid., 79

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This passage illustrates strongly the connection between race and religion in the

Americas, and provides further evidence of the role of syncretic religion in the

development of identity among people of African descent especially.

This combination of African and European was also prevalent in Brazil, which

developed not only syncretic African religions, but also indigenous influenced versions of

Christianity. The incredibly story of African healer Domingos Alvares’s global

“adventure,” told by James Sweet in Domingos Alvares, African Healing and the

Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, shows the ways in which Catholic beliefs and

rituals and Dahomian beliefs from Africa combined to create identity for enslaved

Africans. Sweet demonstrates the connection between rituals of the Portuguese Catholics

and African practitioners of Sakpata. The ritual of baptism was one such overlap, and

“the choreography of Catholic baptism and indoctrination would have appeared strikingly

similar to the rituals conducted in the initiation of new members into vodun communities

in Naogon.”27 Part of this was the training and knowledge required to be “baptized” into

either faith, but there was also a connection in language. For Portuguese Catholics, the

language of ritual was not Portuguese but rather Latin. Similarly, for practitioners of

Sakpata, “an ancient form of Yoruba”28 was used in rituals rather than the common

tongue of the people. Sweet continues to explore these connections, suggesting another

connection in the notion of washing away sins. “The second ritual similarity between

Catholic baptism and vodun initiation related to the symbolic washing away of sin.

Baptismal water was resonant of palm oil, water, alcohol, and salt anointed on the heads

27 James H. Sweet, Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World.

Kindle ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), location 1067. 28 Ibid., 1067

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of Sakpata initiates to ritually cleanse them and invoke the vodun.”29 These examples

demonstrate again the use of Catholicism and its rituals to provide an opportunity for the

practice of traditional African religions in the shadow of European slavery, as well as a

venue for enslaved Africans to promulgate their own culture and affirm a new, post-

slavery identity.

While less prominent than the syncretism of Catholic and African beliefs, the

combination of indigenous religious culture and traditions was also present in the

formation of transnational identities. This is demonstrated in Brazil, as well as in Mexico.

Euclides da Cunha discusses the religious beliefs in the backlands of Brazil as one such

example of this syncretism in Backlands: The Canudos Campaign. He writes that “it is

not a stretch to describe mestizo religion as miscegenation of beliefs. These include the

anthropomorphism of the savage, the animism of the African, and the emotional makeup

of the superior race during the period of discovery and colonization.”30 The ethnocentric

and racist bias of this remark aside, it demonstrates the immense clash of the three groups

referred to earlier in this work – European, African and indigenous – and the ways in

which their meetings shaped and created new identities specific to the Americas. Da

Cunha provides some specific examples of the ways in which these three belief systems

combine to create the “mestizo” religious identity:

“These include the chilling legends of the wily and mischievous caapora dashing

across the plains on the back of a fiendish caitetú on mysterious moonlit nights;

the devilish sací, a scarlet cap on its head, attacking the straggling traveler on an

29 Sweet, 1067. 30 Euclides Da Cunha, and Elizabeth Lowe, Backlands: The Canudos Campaign, (New York: Penguin

Books, 2010 location 2505.

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ill-omened Friday night; werewolves and headless she-donkeys wandering in the

night; the snares of the evil one, the devil, tragic emissary of celestial displeasure;

the prayers to Saint Campeiro, saint of the plains, canonized in partibus, for whom

candles are lit in the fields to ask for his help in retrieving lost objects; the

kabbalistic rites for curing animals and their fevers; the visions, fantastical

apparitions, and bizarre prophecies of deranged messiahs; and the pious

pilgrimages, missions, and penances—all easily explained manifestations of a

complex religious mix.”31

Though without the African influence, one finds the syncretic relationship

between Catholic and indigenous beliefs strongly present in Mexico as well. Similar to

the notion set forth by Murrell earlier in this work (that there was an element of

deliberateness on the part of Catholics to allow the formation of these syncretic religions

among enslaved Africans) it seems likely that this was also the case in Mexico. Regina

Marchi expounds on how this was the case in her intriguing work on the Mexican holiday

of “Dia de los Muertos,” Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States: Day of

the Dead in the USA : The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon.

She suggests that “Across the global Catholic diaspora, the aboriginal practices of native

populations have historically been tolerated by Catholic missionaries to facilitate

conversion to Christianity.”32 Specifically relating to the holiday she writes most about,

she suggests that “when missionaries in Latin America could not eradicate Indigenous

rituals for honoring the dead, they instead relocated them to correspond with the Roman

31 Cunha, 2495. 32 Regina M. Marchi, Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States: Day of the Dead in the USA:

The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University

Press, 2009), 12.

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Catholic liturgical dates of November 1 and 2.”33 By commandeering indigenous beliefs

instead of eradicating them, Catholic missionaries were able to both proselytize and live

with the native people’s they encountered. While it was likely not the intention, this form

of tolerance for indigenous beliefs had the unique side effect of creating new religious

identities tied inextricably to notions of ethnicity. Octavio Paz writes about these in The

Labyrinth of Solitude, and in one section presents and analyzes a quote from a Mexican

“Catholic.” The quote, while specific to Mexico, provides brilliant insight as an example

of the way syncretic religions established unique American identities – the beliefs that

Juan Perez Jolote is explaining are not just “Catholic and indigenous,” they are uniquely

Mexican.

“This is Senor San Manuel here in this coffin; he is also called Senor San

Salvador or Senor San Mateo; he watches over the people and the animals. We

pray to him to watch over us at home, on the road, in the fields. This other figure

on the cross is also Senor San Mateo; he is showing us how he died on the cross,

to teach us respect… Before San Manuel was born, the sun was as cold as the

moon and the pukujes34 who ate people, lived on the earth. The sun began to grow

warm after the birth of the Child-God, Senor San Salvador, who is the son of the

virgin.”35

This passage perfectly expresses the way in which Aztecs, Maya, Mixtecs, Aymara,

Quechua, and other aboriginal beliefs36 combined with Catholicism to create Mexican

33 Marchi, 12. 34 A “pukuj” is the animal spirit of a warlock, what we would call in English a witch’s familiar or daemon. 35 Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude; The Other Mexico; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude; Mexico

and the United States; The Philanthropic Ogre, (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 107. 36 Marchi, 12.

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identities. These identities practice a religion where they can both “pray to Jesus, Mary,

and the saints for protection, while also seeking help from traditional curanderos who

employ indigenous practices of communicating with the spirit world.”37

In Mexico, like in the other areas examined, elements of Catholicism that were

not present in reformed Christianity allowed these syncretic religions to develop. It

allowed for the development and practice of syncretic religions like voodoo in Haiti,

Santeria in Cuba, and the various belief systems in Brazil and Mexico. While these belief

systems did sometimes spread to North America, they were not able to achieve the

significance that they did in the Caribbean, South and Central America. In those areas

they contributed the establishment of new, “transethnic” identities – identities which were

a complementary amalgamation of indigenous, African and European ideas. In the

Atlantic world outside of North America, those identities worked to break down lines and

borders, to mix skin colors and conceptions of origin in new ways – ways that did happen

as demonstrably in North America. In the United States, many of those lines and borders

remained solid, the skin colors remained on separate palates. Philip Jenkins writes about

the way voodoo, as an example, was received in the United States in his book Mystics

and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History. Much of the American (in

the sense of the United States) understanding of these syncretic religions came after the

fact, first through the writing of occult writer William Seabrook, who published his work

on voodoo The Magic Island in 1929. Jenkins suggests that Seabrook “shape(d)

American perceptions of witchcraft, Satanism, and parapsychology, as well as voodoo.

He introduced the mass American audience to such technical terms as the papaloi and

37 Marchi, 12.

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mamaloi and the houmfort, and his book introduced the word ‘zombie’ to the English

language.”38 To the overwhelmingly Protestant United States, without the context of

Catholic ritual and tradition, Seabrook’s work only further solidified the labelling of

African and indigenous as “other,” whereas in predominantly Catholic countries like

Mexico, Brazil, Haiti and Cuba, Europeans had been able to tolerate, relate to, and in

some ways merge their own beliefs with traditional African and indigenous beliefs.

While there are no doubt many factors contributing to differences in the development of

ethnic and racial identities in the Americas, the understanding of the development of

syncretic religions would suggest that Catholicism allowed for a significantly difference

establishment of identity than reformed Christianity in the United States did.

38 Philip Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History, (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2000), 114.

Burns 20

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