RE: Christian saints and colonial conquest

[Julio Fernández Baraibar <julfb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:
> NY Times, February 12, 2000
>
> When Armies of Conquest Marched In, So Did Saints
>
> By CHRIS HEDGES
>
snip
> Catholic saints, on the other hand, included martyrs, missionaries, nuns,
> aesthetic visionaries, mystics and Indians, blacks and mulattos, often
from
> humble backgrounds, who had visions or led pious lives. "There was more
> room in Catholic tradition for sacred biographies of women, as well as
men,
> for veneration of the humble and the powerful, the colonized races as well
> as Europeans," said Mr. Greer. "But this does not mean that when holding
up
> an image of a saint, such as Martín de Porres, a mulatto doorman for a
> monastery in colonial Peru, that other races were treated any more
equally.
> It was rather a validation of their humble status. It illustrated a
> different conception of what constituted achievement."
>
> "There is a way in which the colonized races, the Indians, blacks and
mixed
> races, are part of the vision in the Catholic colonies," he continued,
> contrasting them with the view of Protestant New Englanders. "They are
> considered socially inferior, but not, as in New England, excluded from
> view."
>
> Many indigenous people, especially given the persecution and forced
> conversions, found it prudent to fuse the imported Catholic saints with
> their own deities. Slowly, the transplants began to mutate. Native saints,
> even those imported from Europe, began to take on characteristics peculiar
> to the New World, and they were joined by a pantheon of new saints who
> legitimized the colonial process and embraced its peculiar elements
>
> "There were saints brought from the Old World who were conflated with
> indigenous deities," said Charlene Villaseñor Black, assistant professor
of
> art history at the University of New Mexico, who has just finished a book
> on St. Joseph, the patron saint of Mexico. "St. Joseph was conflated with
> the Aztec rain deity Tlaloc, and he ends up taking over some of the tasks
> of Tlaloc. He becomes associated with earthquakes, rain and fertility.
>
> The saint did not have these associations in the Old World. The Virgin
was,
> as well, conflated with Tonantzin, the major mother goddess figure of the
> Aztecs."

This is, in general, the very and deep difference between the societies that
the two colonizations created.
The spanish one created a society in which the indians were not extermined
in the way that it happened in the protestant settlements. Today the native
and original population of Latin America is the main part of the workers and
peasant classes, but they still exist. Possibly, IMHO, we can not say the
same in the anglosaxian America.

Julio FB