Damas de La Vela Perpétua en México

THE CA THE CATH THOL OLIC IC CH CHUR URCH CH AND TH THE E LAD LA DIE IES S OF TH THE E VE VELA LA PE PERP RPET ETU UA: GEND GE NDER ER AN AND D DE DEV VOT OTIO IONA NAL L CH CHAN ANGE GE IN NIN NINETEE ETEENTH NTH-CE -CENTU NTUR RY MEX MEXICO ICO* A sto tock ck it item em in th the e rh rhe eto tori rica call ar arssen ena al of th the e Mex exic ica an le left ft is th the e Vel ela a Perpetua, a predominantly female lay organization whose central purp pu rpo ose is to ke keep ep vi vigi gill over th the e Bl Bles esssed Sac acra ram men entt fr from om mo morn rniing to night. The Spanish-language version of the satirical website Uncyclopedia, for example, called the recent (2000–12) regime ´ n Nac of the con conse serva rvati tiv ve pa party rty (P (Part artid ido o Ac Accio cio Nacion ional, al, here hereafte afterr PAN) ‘a sec ecu ular state directed by Catholics of the Vela 1 Perpetua’. Former president Felipe Caldero´n’s ‘ultra-conservative ti ve’’ wi wing ng of th the e PAN AN,, wr wrot ote e on one e bl blog ogge ger, r, is ‘w ‘wors orse e th than an th the e da daug ughhters te rs of th the e Vel ela a Perp erpet etua ua’. ’.2 An Anot othe herr la lamen mented ted tha thatt Ca Cald lder ero o´nwasa ‘worth ‘w orthy y rep repres resen enta tati tiv ve of hi hiss pa party rty,, th the e Vel ela a Perp erpet etua ua’, ’, in re refer ferenc ence e to th the e ad admi mini nist stra rati tion on’’s ca call ll fo forr sex sexua uall ab absti stinen nence ce an and d li limi mita tati tion onss on easy access to birth control.3 Even PAN supporters, worried that the th e pa party rty is pe perc rcei eive ved d as exc exces essi siv vel ely y att attent entiv ive e to Cat Catho holi lic c con concern cerns, s, hav ha ve in inv vok oked ed th the e Vel ela: a: le lead adin ing g up to th the e 20 2006 06 el elec ecti tion on,, on one e symp sy mpat athi hize zerr com compl plai aine ned d tha thatt th the e PAN st stil illl ha had d th the e au aura ra of a party pa rty ma made de up of ‘u ‘ult ltra ra-r -rea eact ctio iona nari ries es,, th the e la ladi dies es of th the e Vel ela a 4 Perpetua, and fanatics with bloody knees’. The Vela Perpetua is useful as a device to ridicule the Catholic right since it conjures up in one fell swoop extremism (an all-day vigil, every day) day),, futil futility ity (there is no social socially ly productive productive outcome of the vigil) and pious intolerance, all bound up with a helpfully * I would like to thank William B. Taylor, Mary Kay Vaughan, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Silvia Arrom, Kathyrn Kish Sklar, Paul Ramı´rez, Jessica Delgado, Vera Candiani, and the participants in the following seminars: the Miller History Center semi se mina narr at th the e Un Univ ivers ersit ity y of Ma Maryl rylan and, d, th the e Me Mexi xica can n Hi Hist story ory se semi mina narr at th the e Un Univ iver ersi sity ty of Chi Chicag cago, o, the Rel Religi igion on in the Ame Americ ricas as sem semina inarr at Pri Prince nceton ton Uni Unive versi rsity ty,, the Ber Berkel keley ey Latin Lat in Ame Americ rican an His History tory wor workin king g gro group, up, and the Lat Latin in Ame Americ rican an His Histor torian ianss of  Northern California (LAHNOCA) working group. 1 http://inciclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/P kia.com/wiki/PAN AN4. 5http://inciclopedia.wi 2 Rau´ l Rivera L., 29 June 2006, at 5http://kushku http://kushkush.wordpress sh.wordpress.com/about .com/about4. 3 Alfonso Maldonado, ‘Atolito con el dedo’, 22 Jan. 2007, at 5http://fraterlucis. blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/atolito-con-el-dedo.html 4. 4 Alberto Carbot, 15 Oct. 2005, at 5http://gentesur.com.mx/articulos.php?id_sec 1&id_art 295&id_ejemplar 494 (no longer available). ¼

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derogatory deroga tory im imag age e of fe femi mini nize zed d Ca Cath thol olic icis ism. m. It al also so con conve veys ys,, we well ll,, perp pe rpet etui uity ty.. Ev Every eryon one e in Me Mexi xico co ca can n sh shar are e th the e jo joke ke — wh whet ethe herr th the e laug la ught hter er is mo mock ckin ing, g, as in th the e ex exam ampl ples es ab abo ove ve,, or ge gent ntle le,, as in in,, ‘m ‘my y motther was a mem mo emb ber of the Vela Per erp pet etu ua and she used to ma mak ke me go wi with th he herr to mo mop p the the ch chur urch ch floo floor’ r’ — beca becaus use e th the e Vel Vela a is so familiar, famili ar, in the fulle fullest st sense of the the word: it it is an instituti institution on with a deep dee p ge genea nealo logy gy of de devo vout ut mot mothe hers, rs, gra grand ndmo moth thers ers an and d gre great at-5 grandmothers. In other words, there is a timeless quality to most people’s notion of the Vela. But in fact the Vela Perpetua has a surprisingly rich and complicated history. Founded in 1840, it did not acquire its present reputat repu tation ion unt until il much lat later. er.6 In it itss ea earl rly y yea ears rs th the e Vel ela a wa wass innovative, even radically so. This was especially the case in its implic imp licit it cha challe llenge nge to the Chu Church rch’’s rigi rigidly dly hie hierar rarchi chical cal gend gender er ideology: the constitution of the Vela Perpetua mandated that women,   and only women, were to serve as the officers of this mixe mi xedd-se sex x la lay y de devo voti tion onal al or orga gani niza zati tion on.. Th The e req requi uirem remen entt of  fema fe male le le lead ader ersh ship ip me mean antt so some meth thin ing g vi virtu rtual ally ly un unhe hear ard d of in Catholic lay societies: that women were in a position to ‘govern’ men.7 Wi With th so some me am ambi biva vale lence nce,, th the e ecc eccle lesi sias asti tica call hi hier erar arch chy y accepted this reversal of gender roles, since the Vela offered the Church an unexpected opportunity to rebuild urban lay associatio at ions ns at th the e gra grass ssro root otss le leve vell af after ter a per perio iod d of gra grave ve fin finan anci cial al lo loss sses es.. Women, with no ambivalence whatsoever, flocked to the Vela as a way to support the Church and to claim a kind of religious citi ci tize zens nshi hip p — gre great ater er eq equa uali lity ty an and d gre great ater er po powe werr wi with thin in th the e Church — that historically they had been denied. Since Sin ce there there is no pub publis lished hed schol scholarl arly y work on on any asp aspect ect of the history of the Vela Perpetua, one aim of this article is simply to 5

Here I pa Here para raph phra rase se th the e wo worrds an and d — I ho hope pe — co conv nvey ey th the e to tone ne of th the e di dire rect ctor or of th the e ˜ a Pera archiepisc archi episcopal opal archive archive in Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Licenciada Licenciada Glafi Glafira ra Magan Perales les,, as we dis dis-cussed my research over lunch in February 2007. 6 For ea earl rly y an anec ecdo dota tall ev evid iden ence ce of th the e Vel ela a Per erpe petu tua a as an ob obje ject ct of ri ridi dicu cule le,, no note te th the e following exchange, which took place during a 1928 congressional debate. Midspeech, Gonzalo N. Santos could not remember the first name of the nineteenthcent ce ntury ury co cons nserv ervat ativ ive e ge gene nera rall Ma´ rq rque uez; z; wh when en he wa wass rem emin ind ded th that at it wa wass Leonardo, another deputy responded, to laughter: ‘ ¡Gracias, compan˜ ero de la ‘‘V ‘Vela ela Perpetua’’! ’  Diario de los debates de la Asamblea de Representantes , XXXII Legislatura, i (1926–8), n. 61, Sesio´n de la Comisio´n Permanente del Congreso de la Unio´n, Mexico, 13 Feb. 1928. 7 A qualifier: it was virtually unheard of for Hispanic women to govern Hispanic men.. Mul men Mulatt atto o and ind indige igenou nouss con confra frater ternit nities ies we were re som somewh ewhat at mor more e flex flexibl ible e as reg regard ardss female authority authority..

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derogatory deroga tory im imag age e of fe femi mini nize zed d Ca Cath thol olic icis ism. m. It al also so con conve veys ys,, we well ll,, perp pe rpet etui uity ty.. Ev Every eryon one e in Me Mexi xico co ca can n sh shar are e th the e jo joke ke — wh whet ethe herr th the e laug la ught hter er is mo mock ckin ing, g, as in th the e ex exam ampl ples es ab abo ove ve,, or ge gent ntle le,, as in in,, ‘m ‘my y motther was a mem mo emb ber of the Vela Per erp pet etu ua and she used to ma mak ke me go wi with th he herr to mo mop p the the ch chur urch ch floo floor’ r’ — beca becaus use e th the e Vel Vela a is so familiar, famili ar, in the fulle fullest st sense of the the word: it it is an instituti institution on with a deep dee p ge genea nealo logy gy of de devo vout ut mot mothe hers, rs, gra grand ndmo moth thers ers an and d gre great at-5 grandmothers. In other words, there is a timeless quality to most people’s notion of the Vela. But in fact the Vela Perpetua has a surprisingly rich and complicated history. Founded in 1840, it did not acquire its present reputat repu tation ion unt until il much lat later. er.6 In it itss ea earl rly y yea ears rs th the e Vel ela a wa wass innovative, even radically so. This was especially the case in its implic imp licit it cha challe llenge nge to the Chu Church rch’’s rigi rigidly dly hie hierar rarchi chical cal gend gender er ideology: the constitution of the Vela Perpetua mandated that women,   and only women, were to serve as the officers of this mixe mi xedd-se sex x la lay y de devo voti tion onal al or orga gani niza zati tion on.. Th The e req requi uirem remen entt of  fema fe male le le lead ader ersh ship ip me mean antt so some meth thin ing g vi virtu rtual ally ly un unhe hear ard d of in Catholic lay societies: that women were in a position to ‘govern’ men.7 Wi With th so some me am ambi biva vale lence nce,, th the e ecc eccle lesi sias asti tica call hi hier erar arch chy y accepted this reversal of gender roles, since the Vela offered the Church an unexpected opportunity to rebuild urban lay associatio at ions ns at th the e gra grass ssro root otss le leve vell af after ter a per perio iod d of gra grave ve fin finan anci cial al lo loss sses es.. Women, with no ambivalence whatsoever, flocked to the Vela as a way to support the Church and to claim a kind of religious citi ci tize zens nshi hip p — gre great ater er eq equa uali lity ty an and d gre great ater er po powe werr wi with thin in th the e Church — that historically they had been denied. Since Sin ce there there is no pub publis lished hed schol scholarl arly y work on on any asp aspect ect of the history of the Vela Perpetua, one aim of this article is simply to 5

Here I pa Here para raph phra rase se th the e wo worrds an and d — I ho hope pe — co conv nvey ey th the e to tone ne of th the e di dire rect ctor or of th the e ˜ a Pera archiepisc archi episcopal opal archive archive in Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Licenciada Licenciada Glafi Glafira ra Magan Perales les,, as we dis dis-cussed my research over lunch in February 2007. 6 For ea earl rly y an anec ecdo dota tall ev evid iden ence ce of th the e Vel ela a Per erpe petu tua a as an ob obje ject ct of ri ridi dicu cule le,, no note te th the e following exchange, which took place during a 1928 congressional debate. Midspeech, Gonzalo N. Santos could not remember the first name of the nineteenthcent ce ntury ury co cons nserv ervat ativ ive e ge gene nera rall Ma´ rq rque uez; z; wh when en he wa wass rem emin ind ded th that at it wa wass Leonardo, another deputy responded, to laughter: ‘ ¡Gracias, compan˜ ero de la ‘‘V ‘Vela ela Perpetua’’! ’  Diario de los debates de la Asamblea de Representantes , XXXII Legislatura, i (1926–8), n. 61, Sesio´n de la Comisio´n Permanente del Congreso de la Unio´n, Mexico, 13 Feb. 1928. 7 A qualifier: it was virtually unheard of for Hispanic women to govern Hispanic men.. Mul men Mulatt atto o and ind indige igenou nouss con confra frater ternit nities ies we were re som somewh ewhat at mor more e flex flexibl ible e as reg regard ardss female authority authority..

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present that story, especially its early history in the small towns and an d ci citi ties es of th the e cen centr tral al-w -wes estern tern st stat ates es of Gu Guan anaj ajua uato to,, Mi Mich choa oaca ca´n and an d Jal aliisc sco o (a pa part rt of Me Mexi xico co kn know own n as th the e Ba Bajı jı´o) o),, wh wher ere e it ca caug ught ht on quickly and spread rapidly. 8 This I do in some detail, as the archives permit an unusually intimate glimpse into the origins, founding foundi ng and dayday-to-da to-day y functioning functioning of this new organi organizatio zation. n. A second aim is to deepen the remarkably thin scholarship that addr ad dres esse sess th the e qu ques esti tion on of wh whet ethe herr an and d ho how w th the e pr prac acti tice ce of  Catholicism at the parish level changed in the wake of the prolong lo nged ed wa wars rs fo forr Me Mexi xica can n in inde depe pend nden ence ce th that at be bega gan n in 18 1810 10..9 Any chan ch ange ge in Ca Cath thol olic ic de dev vot otio iona nali lism sm is a ma matt tter er of so some me si sign gnifi ifica canc nce e not only for religious history but also for political history, given the th e ex exte tent nt to wh whic ich h Me Mexi xica can n po poli liti tics cs wa wass sh shap aped ed by fie fierc rce e de deba bate tess over the proper role of the Catholic Church in the new nation. Fina Fi nall lly y, th the e art artic icle le is in inte tend nded ed to co cont ntri ribu bute te to th the e sc scho hola lars rshi hip p on the ‘feminization’ of both Catholicism and Protestantism in the West, especially where that scholarship intersects with broader histories of Catholic devotionalism and the gendering of politics and an d th the e pu publ blic ic sp sphe here re in th the e ni nine nete teen enth th ce cent ntury ury.. Th Thes ese e co cont ntri ribu bu-tions are spelled out in the conclusion. I BACKGROUND AND ORIGINS OF THE VELA PERPETUA

Urban confraternities in colonial Mexico The Th e pr pred edec eces esso sorr of la lay y as asso soci ciat atio ions ns li like ke th the e Vel ela a Per erpe petu tua a wa wass th the e urban cofradı´  (con onfr frat ater erni nity ty), ), wh whos ose e ce cent ntra rall pu purp rpos ose e wa wass to su suss´a   (c taiin de ta dev vot otiion to a pa part rtic icul ula ar sai aint nt or im imag age e of Ch Chri rist st or th the Vi Virg rgiin in the many churches in large towns and cities. 10 This involved 8

The onl only y wor work, k, whi which ch rem remain ainss unp unpubl ublish ished, ed, is Lu Luis is Mur Murill illo’ o’ss ‘Th ‘The e Po Polit litics ics of the Miraculous: Local Religious Practice in Porfirian Michoaca´ n, 1876–1910’ (Univ. of  California, San Diego Ph.D. thesis, 2002), ch. 4. 9 Willia Wil liam m B. Tay aylor lor,, ‘Sh ‘Shrin rines es and Marv Marvels els in the Wake of Mex Mexica ican n Ind Indepe epende ndence nce’, ’, in hi hiss   Shrine Shriness & Mir Miracu aculou louss Ima Images ges:: Rel Religiou igiouss Lif Lifee in Mex Mexico ico bef before ore the Re Refo forma rma (Albuquer (Albu querque, que, 2010) 2010);; Terry Rugel Rugeley ey,,   Of Won onde ders rs an and d Wi Wise se Me Men: n: Re Reli ligio gion n an and  d  Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800–1876  (Austin, 2001). 10 ´as   s  were commonly referred to as ‘ cofradı´  ´as   s de espa Urban  cofradı´  a a espan n˜oles ’ to distin´as   s de indios’. Indigenous  cofradı´  ´as   s shared some characterguish them from the ‘ cofradı´  a a isti is tics cs wi with th th the e ur urba ban n or ‘S ‘Spa pani nish sh’’ ve vers rsio ion, n, bu butt fu func ncti tion oned ed di diff ffer eren entl tly y in li ligh ghtt of th the e fac factt that they were usually closely associated with the single church in a given village and mapped closely onto the latter’s political hierarchies. Their economic bases also differed, generally consisting of cattle and sometimes ranches, rather than the urban ´as   s. On Mexican urban property and loan capital that supported most urban  cofradı´  a (cont. on p. 200)

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mainta main tain inin ing g th the e ch chap apel el or al alta tarr de dedi dica cate ted d to th the e ob obje ject ct of de devo voti tion on throughout the year, and at least once a year organizing a ‘function ti on’, ’, ty typi pica call lly y a sp speci ecial al ma mass ss,, pr proc ocess essio ion n an and d fies fiesta ta..11 The ´as   s  in these important public disexpenses incurred by the  cofradı´  a play pl ayss of pi piety ety co coul uld d be si sign gnifi ifica cant nt:: th they ey fr freq equen uentl tly y in incl clud uded ed invited invi ted preach preachers, ers, firewor fireworks, ks, candle candles, s, music musicians, ians, singers, adornment of the processional processional route, bullfi bullfights, ghts, and elabo elaborate rate refresh´as   s wer ment me nts. s. In ad addi diti tion on,, al alll cofradı´  ere e de dedi dica cate ted d to th thei eirr me memb mber ers’ s’ a good deaths, which occasioned more expense, such as a yearly anniversary mass to pray for all dead  cofrades and transporting of  the th e Ho Host st to th the e ho home mess of th the e mo mori rib bun und. d. Mo More reo ove verr, a lar arge ge su subs bset et of urban  cofradı´  ´as a   s  (estimated by one historian to be about twothirds) also operated as mutual aid/burial societies, and these inv in vol olve ved d ad addi diti tion onal al exp expens ense e — th they ey gua guara rant nteed eed mem membe bers rs a coffin, a shroud, burial in the churchyard, and a one-off cash ´as  s payment to survivors.12 To fund these many activities,  cofradı´  a often came to depend not only on members’ fees and alms but also al so on re rent ntal al an and d in inte tere rest st in inco come me fr from om be bequ ques ests ts an and d do dona nati tion onss of  ´as   s re real re al pr prop opert erty y, an and d mo most st cofradı´  requ quir ired ed no nott ju just st a tr trea easu sure rer, r, bu butt a (n. 10 cont.)

´as   s, see Nicole von Germeten,  Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social  cofradı´  a ´as  s  Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (Gainesville, 2002); Alicia Bazarte Martı´nez, Las cofradı´  a (Mexico o Cit City y, 198 1989); 9); Jua Juan n Jos Jose e´ ´ xico, de esp espan an ˜ ole oless en la ciu ciudad dad de Me´  xico, 1526– 1526–1860  1860   (Mexic Pescador,   De bau bautiz tizado adoss a fiel fieles es dif difunt untos: os: fam famili ilia a y men mental talida idade dess en una parro parroqui quia a ´ xico,   (Mexico City, 1992); Francis Joseph urbana. Santa Catarina de Me´  xico, 1568–1820  (Mexico Brooks Bro oks,, ‘P ‘Pari arish sh and Cofradı´a Eighteenth eenth-Cen -Century tury Mexico Mexico’’ (Prin (Princeton ceton Univ Univ.. Ph.D Ph.D.. ´a in Eight thesis, thesi s, 1976) 1976);; Clara Garcı´a Ayluardo, ‘Ceremonia y cofradı´a: la Ciudad de Me´ xico ´ cticas durante el siglo XVIII’, in Rosa Marı´a Meyer Cosı´o (ed.),  Identidad y pra´  cticas de los ´ xico, (Mexic xico o Cit City, y, 199 1999); 9); D. A. Bra Bradin ding, g, Church  grupos  gr upos de poder en Me´  xico, siglo sigloss XVII– XVII–XIX  XIX (Me ´ n, (Cambridge ridge,, 1994) 1994),, and Sta State te in Bou Bourbo rbon n Me Mexic xico: o: The Dio Dioce cese se of Mic Michoa hoaca ca´  n, 1749– 1749–1810  1810 (Camb ch.. 7; Br ch Bria ian n La Lark rkin in,, ‘C ‘Con onfr frat ater erni niti ties es an and d Co Comm mmun unit ity: y: Th The e De Decl clin ine e of th the e Co Comm mmun unal al Quest for Salvation in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City’, in Martin Austin Nesvig (ed.), Loc (Albuq buquer uerque que,, 200 2006); 6); Ros Rosa a Mar Marı´ıa Ma Mart rtı´ıne nezz de Local al Re Religi ligion on in Col Coloni onial al Me Mexic xicoo (Al Codes, ‘Cofradı´as y capellanı´as en el pensamiento ilustrado de la administracio´ n ´ pez-C borbo´ nic nica, a, 176 1760–1 0–180 808’, 8’, in Mar Marı´ıa de dell Pi Pila larr Ma Mart rtı´ıne nezz Lo pez-Cano, ano, Gisel Gisela a Von Wobeser and Juan Guillermo Mun˜ oz Correa (eds.),   Cofradı´as, ´as, capellanı´as ´as y obras ´as   s en la Ame´  ´ rica  (Mexico City, 1998).  pı´  a rica colonial  (Mexico 11 ´as   s  also participated in processions and fiestas organized to mark civic–  Cofradı´  a religious occasions, such as the birth of a royal personage or the transfer of nuns to a new convent: Linda A. Curcio-Nagy,   The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity  (Albuquerque, 2004). 12 Rugeley,  Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast  74,, ba base sed d on hi hiss co coun untt fo forr ‘I ‘Inf nform orme e qu que e pr pres esen ento to el Ar Arzo zobi bisp spad ado o de  Mexico, 74 Me´ xic xico, o, sob sobre re las cof cofrad radı´ıas y he herm rman anda dade dess de la lass ig igle lesi sias as y ca capi pill llas as de Nu Nuev eva a Espan˜ a’: Archivo Ar chivo General Ge neral de la Nacio´ n, Mexico City (hereafter AGN), ‘Cofradı´as’, vol. 18, exp. 7, 257–311.

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also a business manager to handle their complicated financial affairs.13 They also developed a rather elaborate system of selfgovernment, with as many as twenty-four officers selected in sometimes highly contested elections; indeed, the prestige of      office was one of the ways social hierarchies in the cofradı´a urban context were maintained.14 By the mid eighteenth century, many of these functions of the cofradı´a   s  had come to be seen as incompatible with the new sensibilities of the enlightened era, and beginning in the 1760s they came under attack from both the Spanish State and the Church.   -sponsored rituals, fiestas Reformers disapproved of the  cofradı´a and processions, which they saw as wasteful, vice-ridden, and characterized by ‘uproar [and] puerile ostentation’.15 Instead, they favoured a more sedate and private devotional style — in Pamela Voekel’s words, they wished to create a ‘new piety’, or, as Brian Larkin puts it, to ‘redefine the balance in Catholic practice between ritual action and pious contemplation in favor of the latter’.16 Furthermore, reformers wanted to purify the Church by 13

To clarify, most  licensed cofradı´as  required a business manager. O’Hara found   s  in late eighteenth-century Mexico City than were identified in many more  cofradı´a   census on which Rugeley based his count: Matthew D. the 1793 colony-wide cofradı´a O’Hara, A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749–1857  (Durham, NC, 2010), esp. ch. 4. 14 Bazarte Martı´nez’s  Las cofradı´a   s de espan˜oles en la ciudad de Me´ xico  is especially    membership. strong on the social rewards of  cofradı´a 15 The words of Bishop Fray Antonio de San Miguel of Michoaca´n, quoted in D. A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867  (Cambridge, 1991), 495. 16 Pamela Voekel,   Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham, NC, 2002); Brian R. Larkin,  The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City  (Albuquerque, 2010), 8. Other discussions of clerical and state efforts to modernize pious practices include D. A. Brading, ‘Tridentine Catholicism and Enlightened Despotism in Bourbon Mexico’,  Jl Latin  Amer. Studies, xv (1983), 11; Brading, Church and State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoaca´ n, ch. 8; Brian Conal Belanger, ‘Secularization and the Laity in Colonial Mexico: Quere´taro, 1598–1821’ (Tulane Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1990); Margaret Chowning, ‘Convent Reform, Catholic Reform, and Bourbon Reform in Eighteenth-Century New Spain: The View from the Nunnery’,  Hispanic Amer. Hist. Rev., lxxxv (2005), 1; O’Hara, Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico. On reforms of the Mexican church more generally, see N. M. Farriss, Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 1759–1821: The Crisis of Ecclesiastical Privilege (London, 1968); Oscar Mazı´n Go´mez,  Entre dos majestades: el obispo y la Iglesia del Gran Michoaca´ n ante las reformas borbo´ nicas, 1758–1772  (Zamora, 1987); William B. Taylor,  Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico  (Stanford, 1996); Luisa Zahino Pen˜afort, Iglesia y sociedad en Mexico, 1765–1800: tradicio´ n , reforma y reacciones (Mexico City, 1996); Juvenal Jaramillo Magan ˜ a, Hacia una iglesia beligerante: la gestio´ n episcopal de Fray Antonio de San Miguel en Michoaca´ n, 1784–1804. Los proyectos (cont. on p. 202)

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reducing its involvement in worldly activities like managing prop  s did both, they erty and making loans; since a majority of cofradı´a were early targets of state efforts to force church institutions to divest themselves of their real estate.17 Reformers also called for devotionalism to be centred on the parish, which was for them the appropriate locus of community piety (as opposed to the churches of the regular orders), and on the sacraments (as opposed to a saint or image). The well-trained and dedicated parish priest, they argued, could guide and where necessary   ’s officers, whose prestige was linked to the rein in the  cofradı´a   -sponsored celebrations. In sum, the flamboyance of   cofradı´a   s, as wealthy, property-owning, prestige-granting, inadcofradı´a equately supervised purveyors of baroque piety at its most disquieting, were key targets of reforms articulated and implemented by both Church and State.18 Direct precedent    s   and the efforts of both These features of the urban   cofradı´a Crown and Church to reform them are relatively well known. What is not well known is that with few exceptions, the mixed  s   in the eighteenth century (and almost all sex urban   cofradı´a   s, whether urban or rural, had both male and female memcofradı´a bers) comprised fairly large female majorities. This characteristic is not obvious from the paintings and descriptions of processions,   s, since the or from the legal records concerning urban  cofradı´a leaders in the processions and the officers who acted on behalf    s were always men. But my research has established of the cofradı´a    and members’ that regardless of region, decade, type of   cofradı´a (n. 16 cont.)

ilustrados y las defensas cano´ nicas (Zamora, 1996); Carlos Herrejo´n Peredo, Del sermo´ n   ico: Me´ xico, 1760–1834  (Zamora, 2003). There is a larger literature on al discurso cı´v State and Catholic reformism in eighteenth-century Spain. 17 Debates over the forced sale of church property began in the mid eighteenth century, but legislation was not forthcoming until provoked by fiscal crisis. On the forced sale of church property in Spain as of 1798, see Richard Herr, Rural Change and  Royal Finances in Spain at the End of the Old Regime (Berkeley, 1989), esp. ch. 3. On the forced sale of cofradı´a   property in Mexico beginning in 1804, see Gisela von Wobeser, Dominacio´ n colonial: la consolidacio´ n de vales reales en Nueva Espan ˜ a, 1804–1812 (Mexico City, 2003), 154 and 228. 18   in For more on the Mexican reforms, see Brooks, ‘Parish and   Cofradı´a Eighteenth-Century Mexico’; for a shorter summary, see Brading,  Church and State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoaca ´ n. On their conception and implementation in Spain, see William Callahan, ‘Confraternities and Brotherhoods in Spain, 1500–  1800’, Confraternitas, xii (2001), 17.

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 s social status, membership in eighteenth-century urban  cofradı´a 19 averaged roughly 60 per cent female and 40 per cent male. The explanations for the large female component in eighteenth-century Mexican confraternities are complex, ambiguous and beyond the scope of this article, but the female majorities are relevant here because of their probable role in shaping the creation of a new lay association that was a direct predecessor of the Vela Perpetua. The Real Congregacio´n del Alumbrado y Vela Continua del Santı´simo Sacramento was founded in Madrid in 1789 when two members of the court of Charles IV — aware, they said, of King Charles and Queen Luisa’s particular dedication to the Blessed Sacrament — decided to establish a congregation to formalize perpetual all-day vigils over the Blessed Sacrament in ´ n had roots in the the royal chapel.20 The Real Congregacio Catholic reform movement described earlier. In fact, in the eyes of reformers, it was an ideal new institution, a ‘modern’ confraternity.21 It was sacramental, it was parish-based, it was propertyless, and it was self-supporting in its simple financial structure. Furthermore, the kind of piety its members expressed in their simple vigils was also ‘modern’, in the sense that it was quiet, tasteful, and oriented to pious contemplation, not to ritual activities or showy processions through the streets. 22 The king was so 19

Full statistics and some explanation for female domination of the cofradı´a   s can be found in my ‘La femenizacio´n de lapiedad enMe´xico: ge´nero y piedad en las cofradı´as de espan˜oles. Tendencias coloniales y pos-coloniales en los arzobispados de Me´xico, Michoaca´n, y Guadalajara’, in Brian Connaughton (ed.), Religio´n, identidad, y polı´tica   en Me´ xico en la e´ poca de la independencia (Mexico City, 2010). Since publication of that work, I have collected new data from the archives of the bishoprics of Durango and Oaxaca, but it does not affect these ratios significantly. 20 ´ n del Santı´simo, 1876’, Archivo Histo´rico ‘Tezontepec, El Sr. Cura sobre Velacio del Arzobispado de Me´xico, Mexico City (hereafter AHAMex), Base Siglo XIX, caja 106, exp. 20. This document presents the most complete history of the Vela. The original documents and many of the written exchanges can be found in ‘El Exmo y Illmo S. Arzobispo sobre alumbrado perenne del Smo. 1793’: AGN, Bienes Nacionales, leg. 851, exp. 17. 21 The definition of a ‘modern’ confraternity, as given by the reformist archbishop Francisco de Lorenzana, is paraphrased by Belanger in ‘Secularization and the Laity in Colonial Mexico: Quere´taro’, 96: ‘one devoted to the Santı´simo Sacramento or Animas, closely tied to the parish and providing financial support for the curate . . . dedicated to the support of sacramental functions and the visitation of the sick . . . and suffrage to the episcopacy, closely supervised and less wasteful . . . a way to draw the laity away from the idea of one central church and toward fealty for a new local parish’. See also Larkin,   Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City, 151. 22 Larkin mentions a 1793 sermon almost certainly delivered on the occasion of the founding of the Real Congregacio´ n in Mexico City (though he does not identify it by (cont. on p. 204)

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´ n that he proclaimed that it should pleased with the Congregacio be extended to all parishes in his kingdoms. The Spanish version of the Real Congregacio´n had a bloated list of fifty-one officers, all men.23 But the archbishop of Mexico, to whom the project was presented in 1791, argued from the beginning that in Mexico both male and female officers were needed, ‘so that zeal and devotion should be excited among the Women, and so that there should be officers of their sex who attend to this and to the increase in the size of the Congregacio´n’.24 Apparently the Crown questioned the inclusion of female officers, because a later document signed by the archbishop defended his decision, reassuring the royal officials that the women would have no power to meet or in any way involve themselves in the governance of the Congregacio´n, and therefore their inclusion constituted not a ‘substantial’ but rather a ‘minor’ alteration to the Spanish version ´ n’s constitution — one that had been made, the of the Congregacio archbishop continued, in light of the ‘circumstances of this Country’.25 Unfortunately, he did not specify what he meant by this phrase, but he may well have been referring to the prominent   s, both as members (as role played by women in Mexican  cofradı´a my research shows) and as alms collectors for and patrons of     activities.26 cofradı´a ´ n began its daily vigils in the Mexico City The Real Congregacio church of San Sebastia´n in March 1793, and we know that it was (n. 22 cont.)

name), in which the preacher ‘warned his listeners that . . . purely external piety failed to serve and honor God’: Larkin, Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City, 164–5. 23 ´ n y aumento de oficiales de la Junta Primitiva’: AGN, Bienes ‘Nominacio Nacionales, leg. 851, exp. 17. Around half were members of the titled nobility. 24 ‘Consulta del Provisor’: AGN, Bienes Nacionales, leg. 851, exp. 17. The number of female officers was half that of the male officers. 25 Archbishop Nun˜ez de Haro to Viceroy Marque´s de Branciforte, 19 Sep. 1794: AGN, Bienes Nacionales, leg. 851, exp. 17. 26 Evidence of female patronage and participation, as seen in alms collection lists, can be found everywhere, but an especially large number of such lists was preserved in Oaxaca: see Benjamin T. Smith,  The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Religion, Society, and Politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750–1962  (Albuquerque, 2012). Women also played important roles in more informal religious organizations, though this is perhaps particularly true of indigenous women: see Paul Ramı´rez, ‘Between Pestiferous Textiles, Torn Families, and Bourbon Health Policy: The Tumulto and Smallpox Epidemic of Teotitla´n del Valle,Mexico, 1796–1797’(unpublishedm.s.); Paul Ramı´rezandWilliamB. Taylor, ‘Out of Tlatelolco’s Ruins: Patronage, Devotion, and Natural Disaster at the Shrine of  Our Lady of the Angels, 1745–1781’, Hispanic Amer. Hist. Rev., xciii (2013), 33; Smith, Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Religion, Society, and Politics in the Mixteca Baja .

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still functioning as late as 1812. 27 We do not know how many other churches followed the king’s instructions to found a Real Congregacio´n, but I have identified one other in Mexico (in the cathedral of Durango), and it is almost certain that the Congregacio´n was established in at least a few others, since the ladies who formed the Vela in 1840 made a vague reference to their project as ‘imitating’ the vigil before the Blessed Sacrament as it was ‘practised in other cities’.28 Might we suppose from the experience of the Real Congregacio´n that in the 1790s women were on a path to becoming non  s? Certainly the archhonorary officers in mixed-gender  cofradı´a bishop recognized the importance of women’s religious energy and commitment when he insisted that the Mexican version of the Real Congregacio´n have female officers, however subordinate and powerless. But the ideological impediments to women ‘governing’ men (as shown by the archbishop’s careful reassurances that the presence of the Real Congregacio´n’s female officers was intended simply to encourage other women to join, not that they should lead) were probably too powerful to permit such a radical innovation, barring catastrophe.  s The financial and leadership crisis of Bajı´o  cofradı´a In 1810, catastrophe struck. The paralysis of the economy during the Wars for Independence (1810–21) was devastating, and the end of the most intense period of fighting in 1817 did not bring much relief.29 Depressed conditions continued into the 1830s, especially in the Bajı´o, where a sophisticated and diverse economy 27

There is an oblique reference to the Real Congregacio´n in Juan Bautista Dı´az Calvillo, Noticias para la historia de Nuestra Sen˜ora de los Remedios desde el an˜o de 1808, hasta el corriente de 1812 (Mexico City, 1812): a vigil before the image of the Virgin de los Remedios was described as ‘an imitation of the one that the congregacio´n del santı´simo sacramento carries out’. 28 ´ n de la Congregacio´n del Alumbrado y Vela ‘Morelia, 1840. Sobre ereccio Continua del Santı´simo Sacramento en la Parroquia de San Miguel Allende’: Archivo Histo´rico del Arzobispado de Michoaca´n (hereafter AHAMich), Diocesano, Gobierno, Parroquias, Informes, caja 237, exp. 134. 29 During the wars, desperate  cofradı´a   s  tried both borrowing and selling property.    borrowing are contained in Gobierno, Archivo Histo´ rico Many examples of  cofradı´a del Arzobispado de Guadalajara (hereafter AHAG), caja 15 (1809–15). Sales of silver, damask and utensils include: Huerta to Promotor Fiscal, 1 Jun. 1814: AHAG,   s, caja 15, exp. 1814; ‘La Cofradı´a del Rosario pide licensia . . . Gobierno,  Cofradı´a Morelia, 1833’: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Solicitudes, caja 839, exp. 13; ‘Jose´ Marı´a Contreras y Miguel Valdespino piden permiso . . . Morelia, 1847’: AHAMich, Diocesano, Justicia, Procesos Legales, Cofradı´as, caja 689, exp. 44.

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of large and small farms, textile factories, cattle ranches and other commercial enterprises was dependent on the now stagnant silver-mining economy, also based in the Bajı´o.30 The post-1810 depression greatly reduced the income of the   s. Members fell into arrears on fee payments, alms were cofradı´a hard to come by, debtors were unable to service their debts, and tenants failed to pay their rent (especially when roofs leaked or adobe walls collapsed due to long-standing maintenance problems).31 The account books of the Cofradı´a del Divinı´simo Sen˜or Sacramentado in Piedragorda (Guanajuato) tell a typical story. In 1832, the pessimistic parish priest summarized the situation of the   : the income allocated to support its principal functions of  cofradı´a Holy Week, the Ascension and Corpus Christi, he wrote, was entirely insufficient, and likely to remain so. Interest on three outstanding loans had not been paid for over twenty-five years; interest on three others had been paid only intermittently; and   ’s urban property was in ruins and produced no rent. the  cofradı´a In sum, the report concluded, ‘this confraternity only counts as income 160 pesos a year, with which it must cover necessary expenses of at least 600 pesos’.32 The cholera epidemic of 1833 made   s’ situation even worse. Epidemics had always been hard the cofradı´a   s  because of their obligations to provide ‘good deaths’ on  cofradı´a 30

The insurgency depressed the economy of Mexico in general, but the collapse of  the silver economy exacerbated its effects in the Bajı´o. See Brian R. Hamnett, Roots of  Insurgency: Mexican Regions, 1750–1824   (Cambridge, 1986); Margaret Chowning, Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico: Michoaca ´n from the Late Colony to the Revolution   (Stanford, 1999); John Tutino, ‘The Revolution in Mexican Independence: Insurgency and the Renegotiation of Property, Production, and Patriarchy in the Bajı´o, 1800–1855’,  Hispanic Amer. Hist. Rev., lxxviii (1998), 367; Marta Eugenia Garcı´a Ugarte, Hacendados y rancheros queretanos, 1780–1920 (Mexico City, 1992); D. A. Brading,  Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajı´o, Leon, 1700–    1860   (Cambridge, 1978); Sergio Valerio Ulloa,   Historia rural jalisciense: economı´a   agrı´c  ola e innovacio´ n tecnolo´ gica durante el siglo XIX  (Guadalajara, 2003). 31 In the diocese of Michoaca´n, non-payment of interest was so common that, beginning in 1823, some branches of the Church forgave interest that had not been paid since 1810 and reduced mortgage rates for borrowers who were, as we have learned to call them post-2008, ‘under water’. Margaret Chowning, ‘The Management of Church Property in Michoaca´n, Mexico, 1810–1856: Economic Motivations and Political Implications’,  Jl Latin Amer. Studies , xxii (1990), 459. On the broader effects of non-payment of ecclesiastical interest, see Francisco J. Cervantes Bello, ‘La piedad en la catedral angelopolitana: capellanı´as, aniversarios y misas, 1830–1840’, in Manuel Ramos Medina (ed.), Memoria del I coloquio historia de la iglesia en el siglo XIX  (Mexico City, 1997). 32 ‘Notisia que el Cura de Piedragorda remite a la Sria del gob Diocesano de las cofradı´as legalmente erectas en la Parroquia de su cargo, segun orden de 1832, y sus rendimientos’: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Constituciones, caja 818, exp. 9.

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for their members and pay out benefits to their survivors — and of  course costs went up when a disproportionate number of members died.33 Now, despite widespread reluctance on the part of members  s and officers to sell off income-producing property, many  cofradı´a were forced to sell houses, inns and parcels of land. The available records do not permit us to measure with any precision the effect of these financial problems on membership levels in the confraternities. But they do allow us to ask whether or not the gender balance changed after 1810.34 Indeed it did, tipping even further in the direction of female majorities, a trend that held throughout the country and not just in the Bajı´o. In Morelia in 1840, for example, the Archicofradı´a de Nuestra Sen˜ora de la Merced had 771 female members (82 per cent of the total membership of 836); in the same year the Archicofradı´a del Rosario had 525 members, of whom 435 (83 per cent) were women; and the ˜ ora del Tra´nsito had fifty-four male Cofradı´a de Nuestra Sen members and 133 female members (71 per cent female).35 Of  the fifty-five members of the Cofradı´a del Santı´simo Sacramento in Aguascalientes who joined after 1815, forty (73 per cent) were women.36 The elite Cofradı´a de la Concordia del Sr. S. Jose´ in Mexico City had 182 female members and forty-one male mem   had bers in 1813. In the 1750s female membership of this cofradı´a 33

   stability even before the extra burden of the On how epidemics strained  cofradı´a independence wars, see Susan Schroeder, ‘Jesuits, Nahuas, and the Good Death Society in Mexico City, 1718–1767’,  Hispanic Amer. Hist. Rev. , lxxx (2000), 43. 34 Neither patentes (certificates of membership) nor account books are good sources for studying changing membership levels. In the former case, the size of each bundle of   patentes  in the archives is a function of the archival habits and length of career of the treasurer, not the absolute number of deaths (much less the absolute number of joiners). Account books reflect the particular territories covered by collectors over a limited span of years,makingthem an excellent snapshot of a neighbourhood, but limiting their usefulness for gauging overall levels of membership. Membership lists may theoretically give us some insight into change over time, but there were very few cases in    before and after 1810. All which I was able to compare lists within a single  cofradı´a three of these sources, however, can be used to generate gender ratios, since they typically include hundreds of names of members, which are almost always easy to identify as men or women. 35 ‘Lista de los actuales cofrades en la Archicofradı´a de N.S. de la Merced, 1840’: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Informes, caja 834, exp. 51; ‘Lista de los cofrades de esta Archicofradı´a del Santı´simo Rosario’: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Informes, caja 834, exp. 53; ‘Lista nominal en donde constan los hermanos de esta cofradı´a de N.S. del Transito’: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Informes, caja 834, exp. 53. 36 Cuentas de la Cofradı´a del Santı´simo Sacramento, Aguascalientes, 1815–50: AHAG, Gobierno, Cofradı´as, caja 15 (1809–15), exp. 1815.

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been around 60 per cent; now it stood at 82 per cent.37 A sample of  160 patentes for the Cofradı´a del Tra´nsito in Durango indicates that 84 per cent of the people who joined between 1810 and 1850 were women; in 1800 membership had stood at 63 per cent female.38 Although women’s membership increased relative to men’s in all cofradı´as, the elite ones — which I define as those in which more than half of their members took the honorific ‘don’ or ‘don˜a’ —  became particularly skewed in favour of women. Whereas before   s had almost identical female majo1810 elite and non-elite cofradı´a rities of 61 per cent, in the post-1810 period women comprised an average of 74 per cent in sixteen elite confraternities, while in nine non-elite confraternities they comprised 67 per cent.39 It seems clear that men were abandoning and/or failing to join   s   throughout Mexico. But if feminization of the the   cofradı´a   s   was happening everywhere, there was nonetheless a cofradı´a regional dimension to this process. Outside the Bajı´o — at least in the dioceses of Mexico, Oaxaca, Durango and Yucata´n — the   s  seems by the mid 1830s and financial situation of the   cofradı´a early 1840s to have stabilized, and, perhaps as a result, male leadership continued to be the order of the day.40 In other words, women constituted large majorities, larger than during the colo  s  to form an nial period, but enough men stuck with the  cofradı´a officer corps. In the harder-hit Bajı´o, however, a significant   s   had passed beyond the number of prominent urban   cofradı´a point at which stabilization was possible. Many had at least partially ceased to operate, only intermittently sponsoring annual functions; the leadership groups rarely met; and most of their resources were channelled towards paying the death benefits of  the diminishing number of members. Leadership, formerly a 37

‘Libro tercero en que se escriven los hermanos de la Concordia del Sr S. Joseph fundada en la capilla del venerable orden 3ro de penitencia de NPS Agustin de Mexico’: AGN, Templos y Conventos, leg. 315, exp. 7. 38 ‘Libro en el que constaran todos los Yndividuos que se alistaren en esta cofradı´a del Transito de NS, fundada con autoridad Real en el convento Hospital Rl de San Cosme y San Damian de la Ciudad de Durango, y lo que cada uno diere por su asiento’: Archivo Historico del Arzobispado de Durango (hereafter AHAD), consulted at New Mexico State University on microfilm, roll 519, frames 587–618; roll 520, frames 100–23; roll 521, frames 426–898. 39   s  that lack good data The average was 71 per cent female in five other  cofradı´a regarding social status. 40 This conclusion is based on my research in the diocesan archives of Mexico City, Oaxaca and Durango. For the diocese of Yucata´n, I rely on Rugeley,  Of Wonders and  Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico .

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privilege, had become a burden. In an extreme but telling case, the officers of the Archicofradı´a de la Santı´sima Trinidad in Taca´mbaro, in an attempt to save money, took upon themselves the work of sacristans and servants, which one deputy, Francisco ´ vila, found embarrassing and ‘not appropriate to my station’. A When the others tried to expel him for failing to perform his duties, he lost his temper, pounded the table and shouted, ‘For the love of God, the Blessed Virgin and all the saints, am I to allow this absurdity to destroy my family’s reputation?’41 In San Miguel de Allende, where the Vela Perpetua was founded, several for  s  were reduced to ‘mayordomı´a   s’ (that is, merly wealthy   cofradı´a their annual functions were managed by the  mayordomo  but the group itself was disbanded) while others, there and elsewhere,   s  (simple pious works) (that is, their were converted to  obras pı´a remaining funds were to be used only for spiritual obligations such as anniversary masses).42 From the point of view of beleaguered and overworked priests,   s were obviously worrying. the weaknesses of the colonial cofradı´a Because of their built-in expenses (for yearly celebrations and members’ death benefits), their financial problems were intractable. But without bringing the finances under control, retention of both male and female members (but especially male officers) was difficult, and in the case of men was complicated by the emergence of new civic and secular associations that offered them   membership and leadership some of the same rewards as cofradı´a (namely, prestige, sociability and power).43 To make matters   s   were attempting to remain viable in an worse, the   cofradı´a ´ vila to Provisor, 7 July 1832: AHAMich, Diocesano, Justicia, Francisco A Correspondencia, Provisor, caja 655 (1829–35), exp. 121. 42  Jose´ Alejandro Quesada to Licenciado D. Jose´ Maria Arizaga, Srio del Gobierno Diocesano, 12 Feb. 1845: AHAMich, Diocesano, Justicia, Procesos Legales,   s  de San Cofradı´as, caja 689, exp. 41; ‘Sobre que se declaren obras pı´as las  cofradı´a Miguel Allende excepto las de la Purı´sima y San Pedro . . . 1852’: AHAMich, Diocesano, Justicia, Procesos Legales, Cofradı´as, caja 690, exp. 49; Director of the Cofradı´a del Rosario to Bishop Portugal, 1839: AHAMich, Diocesano, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Solicitudes, caja 839, exp. 23. 43 Carlos A. Forment,  Democracy in Latin America, 1760–1900 , 2 vols. (Chicago, 2003), i,  Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru , identifies over 400 civic and economic associations that were established in Mexico between 1826 and 1856, almost all of which excluded women. Other important works on the masculinization of the Mexican public sphere include Erika Pani, ‘‘‘Ciudadana y muy ciudadana’’? Women and the State in Independent Mexico, 1810–30’,  Gender and History, xviii (2006), 5; Silvia M. Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857  (Stanford, 1985); Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico  (New York, 1989), ch. 4. 41

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unfriendly ideological and cultural context. Most were propertyowning in an era in which church ownership of property was ever more sharply under attack; furthermore, they were oriented towards collective and public devotional practices (fiestas and processions) at a time when a more ‘modern’ (interior, austere and individual) religious culture — promoted for decades by reformers within the Church itself — was being embraced by many elite and middle class Catholics across the political spectrum.44 Although priests may have complained about their celebratory excesses and their tendency to evade clerical control,   s  had been key organizers of the kinds of public displays cofradı´a of piety that had kept the Church at the centre of the community.   members on the Church and They focused the loyalties of cofradı´a structured a relationship between laity and priest. Their decline left a void. II FOUNDING OF THE VELA PERPETUA

The first town to come up with an institutional innovation that   s   was the Bajı´o city of San addressed the crisis of the   cofradı´a Miguel de Allende (Guanajuato). San Miguel was typical of the many smallish Hispanic towns that dominated the landscape of  44

More traditional practices seem to have remained popular among rural and indigenous populations. On the ways in which ‘modern’ elements of Catholic practice or doctrine were selectively embraced by both liberals and conservatives, see O’Hara,   y  Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico ; Brian Connaughton,  Ideologı´a sociedad en Guadalajara, 1788–1853  (Mexico City, 1992); Pamela Voekel, ‘Liberal Religion: The Schism of 1861’, in Martin Austin Nesvig (ed.),  Religious Culture in  Modern Mexico   (Lanham, 2007); Brian Connaughton, ‘Conjuring the Body Politic from the Corpus Mysticum: The Post-Independent Pursuit of Public Opinion in Mexico, 1821–1854’,  The Americas , lv (1999), 459; Gustavo Santilla´n, ‘La secularizacio´n de las creencias: discusiones sobre tolerancia religiosa en Mexico, 1821–1827’, in Alvaro Matute, Evelia Trejo and Brian Connaughton (eds.), Estado, iglesia y sociedad  en Mexico, siglo XIX (Mexico City, 1995); Enrique Marroquı´n, ‘La genesis del estado liberal, 1824–1835’, and Luis Ramos, ‘Ascenso liberal: intervencio´n francesa. ´ n del estado mexicano, 1840–1876’, both in Marı´a Alicia Puente Consolidacio Lutteroth (ed.),   Hacia una historia mı´n   ima de la iglesia en Me´ xico   (Mexico City, 1993); Rube´n Ruiz Guerra, ‘Los dilemas de la conciencia: Juan Bautista Morales y su defensa liberal de la iglesia’, and Jean-Pierre Bastian, ‘La lucha por la modernidad religiosa y la secularizacio´n de la cultura en Me´xico durante el siglo XIX’, both in Medina (ed.), Memoria del I coloquio historia de la iglesia en el siglo XIX ; Pablo Mijangos ´ s Munguı´a and the y Gonza´lez, ‘The Lawyer of the Church: Bishop Clemente de Jesu Ecclesiastical Response to the Liberal Revolution in Mexico, 1810–1868’ (Univ. Texas at Austin Ph.D. thesis, 2009).

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the Bajı´o: it was closely connected to the silver economy, and over the years silver wealth had funded the construction of churches   s.45 and convents, as well as the establishment of many   cofradı´a Among these pious Bajı´o towns, San Miguel had a particular   s   per capita than any reputation for piety, with more   cofradı´a other town in the bishopric of Michoaca´n.46 But as we have seen, many of them were dysfunctional by mid century. As the San Miguel priest, Jose´   Alejandro Quesada, wrote: ‘In happier times this city abounded in residents who were as devout as they   s  that manifested were wealthy, and they formed various  cofradı´a their piety. The Revolution of 1810 caused them to lose much of  their fortunes and now, with the passage of time, the situation is very different . . .’47 The town was particularly ripe for a solution to this ‘situation’. In April 1840, a petition signed by thirty-two ladies of San Miguel was sent to their parish priest, Licenciado D. Jose´ Manuel Ferna´ndez. It began: ‘We who sign below desire to promote in this City the cult of Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament with a continuous Vigil . . .’48 What the ladies proposed was deceptively simple. Thirty-one sen˜ oras would be dubbed ‘cabezas de   ’. Each cabeza would be responsible for one day of the month, dı´a and would sign up two people to keep vigil over the consecrated host for every half hour, beginning at 6 a.m. and continuing until 6 p.m. (In other words, each of the thirty-one   cabezas   had to recruit forty-eight people to fill her day.) The   cabezas   would elect a   hermana mayor   and a treasurer (and, later, most Velas added a secretary). Men could join; they would hold vigil on Holy Thursday. All vigil-sitters would pay half a real 45

For more on San Miguel and on the differences between the patterns of settlement and urbanization in the Bajı´o and in the more indigenous parts of Mexico, see  John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajı´o  and Spanish North  America  (Durham, NC, 2011). 46 On the piety of San Miguel, see Tutino, ibid.; Francisco de la Maza, San Miguel de  Allende  (Mexico City, 1939), 58; Margaret Chowning,  Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled  History of a Mexican Convent, 1752–1863  (New York, 2005). On the number of confraternities in Michoaca´n, see Brading,   Church and State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoaca´ n, 135. 47  Jose´ Alejandro Quesada to Licenciado D. Jose´ Maria Arizaga, Srio del Gobierno Diocesano, 12 Feb. 1845: AHAMich, Diocesano, Justicia, Procesos Legales, Cofradı´as, caja 689, exp. 41. 48 ´ n de la Congregacio´n del Alumbrado y Vela ‘Morelia, 1840. Sobre ereccio Continua del Santı´simo Sacramento en la Parroquia de San Miguel Allende’: AHAMich, Diocesano, Gobierno, Parroquias, Informes, caja 237, exp. 134.

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(one-sixteenth of a peso) every time they sat. These simple rules were set out in straightforward fashion. The petition shrewdly made a vague reference to a precedent for an organized vigil before the Blessed Sacrament, almost certainly the old Real Congregacio´n, with its male leadership and female auxiliary arm. No fuss was made of the most extraordinary thing about the proposal — the radical concept of active, exclusively female officers who would govern male vigil-sitters. When the ladies’ petition reached the offices of the bishop, no one knew quite what to do. The first to see it was the bishop’s chief  legal advisor ( promotor fiscal ), who tepidly applauded the idea before passing the petition on to the bishop. 49 Ordinarily, the bishop would simply have approved the recommendation of his  promotor , but on this occasion he asked another advisor, his  provisor , to have a look at it. This official was clearly ambivalent, and we can guess why. On the one hand, the Vela’s constitution came squarely up against the venerable principle of gender hierarchy in   s in particular: despite the loss church institutions, and in cofradı´a of so many men and despite the presence of large female majo  s  simply did not elect female officers. On the other rities,  cofradı´a hand, the priest of San Miguel was  a long-standing and trusted servant of the Church; and the ladies who had signed the petition were  socially prominent and undeniably pious. The new organization  did , after all (the petition was careful to point out), adopt the practices of an established organization, presumably the Real Congregacio´n, and, like it, had qualities that made it attractive to ´ mez de liberal churchmen (one of whom, Juan Cayetano Go Portugal, was the presiding bishop): it venerated the Blessed Sacrament, the object of parish devotion that enlightened clerics most approved of, and it embraced a quiet, personal and internalized devotional style. It tapped the energies of women whose   s  had demonstrated their comcontinuing loyalty to the  cofradı´a mitment to the Church and to lay associations, but gave them a much more appropriate vehicle through which to channel those energies. It promised to bring as many as 1,500 people a month into parish churches outside of the mass, to establish a presence in

49

Promotor Fiscal (Licenciado Pelagio Antonio de Lavastida) to Bishop Portugal, 8 May 1840: AHAMich, Diocesano, Gobierno, Parroquias, Informes, caja 237, exp. 134.

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the church every hour of the day, and to do so without the need for overworked priests to cajole or organize. The provisor could not decide. Why not, he must have thought, buy some time by sending the petition to the civil authorities? Hence his decision: ‘Notwithstanding the opinion of the Promotor ’, he wrote, contradicting that advisor’s positive recommendation, ‘the Recopilacio´n de Indias as well as . . . the Nueva   s  . . . can be Recopilacio´n make it clear that before any  Cofradı´a founded, no matter how pious the purpose . . . they must be approved by the Civil Authority’.50 In this way the   provisor  passed the buck to the Department of Guanajuato, requiring the ladies of San Miguel to re-submit their request to the governor. They did so. The governor, apparently also torn, decided to appoint a special departmental   junta   to discuss the case. Finally, the matter was decided when the   junta   evaluated the Vela petition positively. Their reasoning went thus: both the priest and the prefect, ‘individuals who inspire our confidence’, approved; the Vela did not mix the spiritual with the political or civil; it did not threaten to ‘disturb the peace’; and the idea of a congregation dedicated to perpetual vigil had precedent.51 And so the Vela Perpetua, in its modern, female-led form, was born. This complicated set of delays and the confusion on the part of  the church hierarchy make it clear that the Vela was recognized as different to anything that had come before. But once it was approved, the San Miguel Vela became a model for the future. The administrative run-around was never repeated. When, after a ´ n, dozen or so Velas had been founded in the diocese of Michoaca they spread to that of Guadalajara in July 1843, the prior approval of the bishop of Michoaca´n smoothed the path for the bishop of  Guadalajara. Eventually, when in 1848 Sen˜ora Salvadora Garcı´a de Vara proposed the first Vela Perpetua for the sagrario of Mexico City Cathedral, she made a point of stating that she had modelled her constitution on that of the Vela in Guanajuato — which had in turn been modelled on the San Miguel Vela. 52 The path to the 50

Provisor y Vicario General (Licenciado Mariano Rivas) to Bishop Portugal, 23 May 1840: AHAMich, Diocesano, Gobierno, Parroquias, Informes, caja 237, exp. 134. 51  Junta Departamental to Bishop Portugal, 27 Jun. 1840: AHAMich, Diocesano, Gobierno, Parroquias, Informes, caja 237, exp. 134. 52 ‘Sobre que se establezca la Vela Perpetua en el Sagrario. 1848’: AHAMex, Base Siglo XIX, caja 77, exp. 12.

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´ n’s Vela Perpetua that had begun with the Real Congregacio founding in 1793 in Mexico City came full circle. In telling this story I have referred to actions taken by the priest and the ladies of San Miguel as though they occurred in concert. We do not and cannot know for certain who first conceived the idea of the female-led Vela Perpetua, or, in the case of the many new Velas that were founded over the next decade, who, in any given town, first suggested that a Vela after the San Miguel model should be founded. Ferna´ndez, the parish priest in San Miguel, had presented the Vela as the ladies’ idea. When he forwarded their petition to the bishop’s office, he appended this message: ‘Persuaded by the justice of this petition and happily inspired by it, I confess that it fills me with edification and I judge that it would be scandalous not to foment it or to refuse to cooperate’.53 The pleased-but-surprised tone of the priest’s comment suggested, or was meant to suggest, that the ladies were out ahead of him. The priest in remote Tepic, in contrast, wrote that he had ‘convoked a sufficient number of Sen˜oras’ to form a Vela in December 1843, implying that the founding of the Vela was his idea, and this impression is strengthened by the fact that he had some trouble keeping the officers from resigning (one of the few cases where there was not great initial enthusiasm for the Vela Perpetua).54 In Pa´tzcuaro, the priest designated himself organizer: ‘Desiring to promote the cult of the Santı´simo Sacramento . . . I have endeavoured to excite the zeal of the leading ladies of that city to establish the Congregation called the Alumbrado y Vela Perpetua del Santı´simo’.55 Further examples of both approaches abound: the priests in La Barca and Tlasasalca seem to have been the instigators, while the ladies of Lagos took the lead. 56 It was the cura of Zinape´cuaro who in 1847 petitioned the ecclesiastical 53

Licenciado Jose´   Manuel Ferna´ndez to Bishop Portugal, 16 Apr. 1840: AHAMich, Diocesano, Gobierno, Parroquias, Informes, caja 237, exp. 134. 54 Rafael Homobono Taver to Bishop Aranda, 16 Dec. 1843: AHAG, Gobierno, Parroquias, Tepic, caja 3 (1841–54), exp. 1843; Andre´s Gonzalez to Bishop Aranda: AHAG, Gobierno, Parroquias, Tepic, caja 3 (1841–54), exp. 1845. 55 Domingo Marı´a Montero de Espinosa to Sr. Provisor y Vicario Gral, 29 Apr. 1842: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Gastos, caja 829, exp. 7. 56 ‘Sobre que se establezca la Vela Perpetua [en] La Barca’: AHAG, Gobierno, Parroquias, La Barca 1819–54, caja 2, exp. 1843–6; ‘Sobre . . . la Vela Perpetua [en] Lagos’: AHAG, Gobierno, Parroquias, Lagos, caja 3 (1842–9), exp. 1843; ‘Solicitud del Parroco de Tlasasalca sobre establecimeinto de la Vela Perpetua al Smo Sacramento en su parroquia, 1856’: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Fundaciones, caja 829, exp. 14.

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authorities to establish a Vela there, while in Yuririapu´ ndaro the priest wrote that ‘varias Sen˜oras principales’ of the town planned to solicit the foundation of a Vela; and in Zinaparo, Tinguindı´n and Jungapeo, too, petitions were presented as a result of the ‘desire of the populace’ that a Vela be established in their towns.57 In Mexico City, as we have seen, one woman was personally responsible for obtaining the permission of the priest, ecclesiastical authorities and civil authorities, and the priest of  the Sagrario, Manuel Ignacio de la Orta, went along with it (‘In this era when impious men heedlessly vilify the Sacrament . . . far from opposing such a laudable proposal, I am very agreeable’).58 But, in all of these cases, we should be careful not to read the language of the documents as transparent. A priest who claimed to be the organizer of the Vela might think it unseemly to cede the power of agency to his (female) parishioners, even if they were the driving force, while a priest who assigned agency to the ladies might have felt that it was important to preserve the idea that lay organizations were the product of lay organizing, even if it was he who quietly promoted the Vela. Perhaps the most important point is that there was collaboration between priests and the upper- and middle-class ladies who overwhelmingly comprised the leadership of the early Velas. In other words, we gain little by trying to put too fine a point on the question of agency. It does not matter much whether or not the ladies came up with the idea themselves, or whether the priest put the idea in their heads. The one thing that does   seem important is that the church hierarchy was not involved.59 This was not an association or set of practices introduced by bishops and upper-echelon clergy that they hoped would 57

Vicente Reyes (cura Zinape´cuaro) to Provisor, 1847: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Informes, caja 835, exp. 89; ‘Sobre fundacion de la Vela Perpetua en la Parroquia de Tinguindin, 1854’: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Informes, caja 835, exp. 89; ‘Varias sen˜ oras prales [de Yuririapu´ndaro] . . . 1847’: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Informes, caja 835, exp. 89; ‘Deseando varios vecinos del pueblo de Jungapeo . . . 1853’: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as,Fundaciones, caja829, exp. 11;Jose´ Noguera Cura de Tlasasalca to Provisor: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Fundaciones, caja 829, exp. 11. 58 ‘Sobre que se establezca la Vela Perpetua en el Sagrario, 1848’: AHAMex, Base Siglo XIX, caja 77, exp. 12. 59 Though Bishop Pedro Espinosa of Guadalajara used his first pastoral letter to encourage the founding of Velas in every parish, by the time Espinosa took over the bishopric in 1854, there were already dozens in existence. See Espinosa,  Nos el Dr. D. Pedro Espinosa, por la gracia de Dios y de la Santa Sede Apostolica Obispo de Guadalajara (Guadalajara, 1854), 8–9.

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funnel down to the parish level, as had been the case with the new pious practices (simple funerals, individual prayer) promoted by the reforming bishops of the eighteenth century. Both the priests and the ladies of the parish stood to gain from their new collaboration. From the priests’ point of view, the Vela brought enthusiasm and energy to parish organizations, and, as we will see, it provided a new source of much-needed funds. From the ladies’ point of view, the Vela Perpetua offered opportunities to deepen their faith by contemplating the miracle of the Eucharist outside of the mass. Vigil-sitters, unlike participants in the mass, could think of themselves as ‘visiting’ Jesus, keeping him company when the church (especially in small provincial towns) might otherwise be empty, and thinking of him as a friend.60 There was also, however, the clubbiness of the frequent meetings, the snob appeal of the company of other elite and middle-class women, the social interaction that was part of the rather daunting task of organizing an all-day, every-day vigil, the challenge of good management and professional record-keeping, the pride that came from funding parish projects, and the pleasing sense of self-importance that arose from being given the responsibility to protect and accompany the Blessed Sacrament on a daily basis, an honour previously entrusted only to men and only on special occasions. (This complex mix of faith, sociability and the opportunity for women to exercise their talents and ambitions also characterized many women’s motivations for entering convents, as many students of female monasticism have attested.) By 1858, at least ninety-three Velas had been founded in the many small Hispanic cities and towns that were the dominant forms of settlement in the dioceses of Michoaca´n and Guadalajara 60

´ n, The chaplain of the cathedral of Durango, in support of the Real Congregacio observed that vigils allowed Jesus to be ‘mas acompan˜ ado’, and in 1873 a new devotion was founded explicitly to accompany the Blessed Sacrament during siesta time, when  Jesus would otherwise be alone. Chaplain of Durango Cathedral to Sr. D. Jose´ Merlo, 12 Aug. 1793: AHAD, roll 183, frames 543–5; ‘El Capella´n de la encarnacio´n sobre que la Asociacio´n del Santı´simo . . . se agregue a la de Santa Clara, 1884’: AHAMex, caja 163, exp. 47 (this document includes the reglamento of the 1873 ‘Guardia del Santı´simo’). The nature of the relationship between Jesus and the vigil-sitters is emphasized in a devotional tract specifically approved for members of the Vela Perpetua, in which it was suggested that vigil-sitters meditate on a poem entitled ‘La amistad de Jesu´ s Sacramentado’ (The Friendship of Jesus in the Eucharist): Miguel Marı´a Zavala,  El tiempo precioso, o´   sea, modo de emplear mas provechosamente la media hora que esta´ n delante de Nuestro Sr. Jesucristo Sacramentado, las personas que  pertenecen a la Vela Perpetua  (Quere´taro,1868).

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(about one-third of the towns where Velas were founded had populations of less than six thousand and almost all of them had fewer than twenty thousand inhabitants). There was simply   s  for the enthusino precedent in the history of Mexican  cofradı´a asm with which the Velas were received or the rapidity with which they proliferated. III THE VELA PERPETUA IN OPERATION

How did the key innovation of the Vela — its female leadership —  work in practice? As we have seen, the Velas   required  that their officers and the cabezas were women.61 The original San Miguel regulation had specifically permitted men to join, but limited their participation as   veladores  (vigil-sitters) to Holy Thursday. Later Velas in Michoaca´n, however, had both male and female   and the daily veladores, under the governance of the cabezas de dı´a hermana mayor . The two-by-two pairs were never mixed, and it became quite common for men to serve as veladores from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.: this was welcomed by the women as a way to extend the devotion into the evening hours. Most of the Velas did not record the names of all the people who signed up to sit vigil (they were   ), but in required only to record the names of the  cabezas de dı´a 1843 the Vela in Morelia did so, and the list of approximately 1,350 people included some 960 women and 390 men (about the same percentage of women as was the average for the post˜ a Josefa Jua´rez, for example, had   s: 71 per cent). Don 1810 cofradı´a signed up thirty-five women and eleven men to fill the hours for which she was responsible on Day One of every month. 62 It is striking how easily the men who became members of the Vela Perpetua appear to have accepted female leadership. I have not turned up a single complaint by male   veladores  against the women who governed them, and I have found several cases in 61

In one case the constitution appears to have been misinterpreted: in 1847 in Cotija, Michoaca´n, twenty-one  sen˜oras  and ten  sen˜ores  were listed as  cabezas de dı´a  , and they elected a man, Jose´ Marı´a Oseguerra, as treasurer: ‘Cotija, 1847. Alumbrado y Vela perpetua del Santı´simo Sacramento’: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Informes, caja 835, exp. 89. 62 ‘Licenciado Manuel Tiburcio Orozco, Canonigo, Provisor y Vicario Gral interino, por el Sr. D. Juan C. Portugal, aprobacio´n de la fundacio´n del alumbrado y vela perpetua en honor del SS en varias parroquias de este obispado . . . 29 July 1843’: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Asociaciones, caja 817, exp. 1.

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which men seem to have gone out of their way to express not just acceptance, but admiration for their female leaders. In San Diego del Bizcocho (Guanajuato), for example, an 1853 complaint against the priest (for charging too much for his services) was signed by eight men who identified themselves as members of  the Vela Perpetua. It read: Ever since this holy devotion was established in this place . . . it has been embraced by all of the parishioners with the greatest enthusiasm, and people of both sexes enlisted with great passion and good will . . . The Sen˜ora who is in charge of the funds employs and distributes them with complete dedication to the devotion. 63

The Michoaca´n model of a single, mixed-sex Vela with female officers, however, continued to make some clerics nervous, as it had when the San Miguel foundation was originally proposed. Though ecclesiastical authorities had tolerated the upending of  the principle of gender hierarchy that was implicit in the constitutional structure of the Michoaca´n Vela, four years later, in the town of Lagos in the bishopric of Guadalajara, the first separate Vela for men was founded, creating a constitutional model that avoided what one priest in Mexico City (writing about a later female-dominated organization) called the ‘very improper and very inconvenient’ spectacle of women governing men.64 Over time in the bishopric of Guadalajara, the separate ‘Velas de Sen˜oras’ and ‘Velas de Sen˜ores’ model came to dominate, and it was increasingly adopted in Michoaca´n as well.65 The Vela de Sen˜oras remained the more central institution, since its obligation was to hold vigil during the hours that the church was open, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. The Vela de Sen˜ ores operated as a kind of  men’s auxiliary, extending the vigil from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., as the 63

‘Queja de algunos vecinos de San Diego del Biscocho contra el Parroco D. Esiquio Degollado. 1853’: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Subserie, Fundaciones, caja 829, exp. 11. 64 ´ n del reglamento de la Asociacio´ndelaSma ‘D. Manuel Monsuri sobre aprobacio Virgen de los Dolores, Agosto 1887’: AHAMex, Base Labastida, caja 189, exp. 24. 65 Though less of a challenge to the gender hierarchies so embedded in Catholic doctrine and practice than the early Michoaca´n Velas, the creation of separate men’s and women’s Velas represented almost as much of a break with colonial tradition.   s  that were single sex by constitution were relatively uncommon in Mexico in Cofradı´a the late colonial period. The principle of gender inclusiveness was reiterated in Michoaca´n just ten years before the first Vela was founded: an 1829 circular insisted that all   s shouldbeopento‘ambossexos’,aswellasallcastes(‘calidades’). ‘Constituciones cofradı´a Generales para todas las Cofradı´as del Obispado de Michoaca´n . . . 1829’: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Constituciones/Consultas/Correspondencia, caja 818, exp. 6.

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male members of the Velas had done in Michoaca´n, though there they had done so under the leadership of women, not as a separate organization. The functioning of the Velas in the diocese of Guadalajara allows us to compare the popularity and the organizational effectiveness of the separate Velas for men and women. As they had in Michoaca´n, women clamoured to join. Although only two women were required to fill each shift, in Lagos in the 1840s four or five women at a time were keeping vigil, giving rise to anxiety that all five would not earn the indulgences that were automatically granted to the two mandatory   veladoras.   (Complaining that the women had refused to listen to him, the priest requested that the bishop reassure them that everyone who sat vigil would earn the indulgence.)66 The Vela in the city of Guadalajara also attracted more  veladoras  than were required by its constitution, and on top of their monthly fees, members of this Vela seem almost to have competed with each other to contribute items, ranging from the expensive to the modest, to adorn the chapel where the Blessed Sacrament was displayed.67 The inventory that was passed from one treasurer to the next in 1850 went on for several pages, with careful annotations of what each member had given and how much it was worth. The items included numerous candelabra, a 250-peso rug brought from Mexico City, ornamented wooden chests and tables, a German clock that was in constant need of repair, crystal vases, numerous altar cloths and embroidered linens, and many arrangements of artificial flowers.68 Several of the women’s Velas were singled out for praise by the bishop for their efficient organization. Of the Guadalajara Vela, for example, Bishop Diego de Aranda wrote: ‘The efficacy in the management of [the society’s] interests and the orderly presentation of documents that support the account books . . . reflect the 66

AHAG, Gobierno, Parroquias, Lagos, caja 3 (1842–9), exp. 1844. ‘Libro en que se lleva la cuenta de las limosnas colectadas para el culto Divino en la Cofradı´a de la Vela Continua del Santissimo Sacramento de la Yglecia de la Universidad de Guadalajara, y de su imbercion, desde 1 de julio de 1843’: AHAG, Gobierno, Cofradı´as, Vela Perpetua (1843–1907). 68 ‘Inventario general de entrega que hago de las cosas pertenecientes a la vela del Santissimo Sacramento en representacion de la Sra. mi Madre Da. Maria Ygnacia Ortiz de Alba, ya difunta, Hermana Mayor que fue de dicha vela’; ‘Vela Perpetua en la Universidad, julio de 1843’: AHAG, Gobierno, Cofradı´as, Vela Perpetua, caja 1 (1843–1907), exp. 1850. 67

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splendid education and piety that characterize not only the Hermana Mayor and Treasurer, but also all of the ladies that form that society’.69 Of the treasurer of the San Juan de los Lagos Vela de Sen˜oras, his secretary gushed: ‘The Bishop gives thanks to Sen˜ora Don˜a Marı´a Aleja Jimenes de Castro for the exactitude, fidelity, order, and good management with which this devotion . . . has been conserved’.70 The Velas de Sen˜ores, by contrast, were constantly in danger of  collapse. They had persistent staffing troubles. The lists of  cabezas  that the priest was supposed to turn over to the bishopric sometimes left half or more of the days of the month blank. Their collections, while expected to be smaller than those of the Sen˜oras since they had (and needed) many fewer participants, were frequently disappointing. Much more often than the women’s groups, their accounts were described during pastoral visits as poorly prepared, and they were much more likely to be characterized by the priest as decaida  — in decay. Sometimes the bishop contrasted the men’s groups to the women’s in an apparent effort to shame the men into action. The women’s group in Arandas was managed with great care, the bishop commented, but the men’s group lacked  cabezas  for some days of the month, and sometimes collected as little as 2 reales, either because the veladore s did not show up or because no one kept track of the funds.71 The women of Aguascalientes presented accounts that showed a surplus of 452 pesos, reflecting the ‘well-formed and ˜ a Ygnacia duly documented’ accounts produced by Don Olavarrieta; Archbishop Pedro Loza sent the men’s account book back to the treasurer to clean it up. 72 The men’s groups ˜ oras in any were usually founded later than the Velas de Sen given parish, often by just a few months but sometimes by years, suggesting some foot-dragging. Often the priest did double duty as the president and treasurer of the Vela de Sen˜ores, perhaps a sign that the men of the parish were less committed to taking on leadership roles than the women. In Zapotla´n 69

‘Vela Perpetua en la Universidad, julio de 1843. Libro en que se lleva la cuenta de las limosnas . . .’: AHAG, Gobierno, Cofradı´as, Vela Perpetua, caja 1 (1843–1907), exp. 1850. 70 San Juan de los Lagos: AHAG, Visitas Pastorales, Guadalajara, caja 9 (1841–8). 71 Arandas: AHAG, Visitas Pastorales, Guadalajara, caja 9 (1841–8), exp. 1846. 72 Aguascalientes, visita por el Ilmo arzobispado Pedro Loza: AHAG, Visitas Pastorales, caja 10 (1871).

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el Grande in 1873, for example, the bishop scolded the priest for not presenting the accounts of the Vela de Sen˜ores, ‘nor did the cura give a reason for this, despite the fact that he . . . has been [acting as treasurer] since who knows when and has been receiving the alms of the   veladores, as apparently there is neither a Hermano Mayor nor a treasurer’.73 So, the Velas de Sen˜ores tended to flounder. Over time most men’s groups stayed on the books, and some were reasonably successful, but they were almost invariably eclipsed by the women’s Velas. As the Velas increasingly became an integral feature of the pious landscape in the centre-west, inevitably some of the women who led them came into conflict with the parish priests, who felt they had a right to exercise more control than the ladies were willing to concede. Usually the disputes concerned money. The generally well-educated women who led the Velas were determined to protect their autonomy in the distribution of funds. But the more these funds grew, the more the priests were tempted to try to dictate their use. Rafael Herrera, the priest of San Diego del Bizcocho, asked the Vela to pay for the sacristan and to increase the Vela’s contribution to the mass to 4 pesos, in light of the fact that it had accumulated so much money. The ladies responded, ‘[Our] treasury is not your store’, accusing him of abusing his power and of interfering in their elections. Though after several testy exchanges he eventually wrote that he ‘desire[d] to put an end to disputes with women’, he could not resist remarking that if  he had in fact interfered in the last elections, ‘Don˜a Florentina Garate would never have been elected Hermana Mayor’.74 In 1850 the priest of Jaral, Jose´  de Jesu´s Robledo, was locked in a similar battle with the  hermana mayor : The administration of this institution has passed from the hands of the priest to the hands of a woman, who functions as an arbiter of and superior to the priest. She is the one who ordains and disposes whatever she judges to be convenient to the Vela . . . She has bought some items for the cult, but these are only to be used when she allows it, or if I beg and plead, so that the Host . . . is subject to the will of the Sen˜ora. In verbal conferences and in two letters I have reproached her for her absolutism, telling her that she

73

Zapotla´n el Grande, visita por el Ilmo Sor. Aranda: AHAG, Visitas Pastorales, caja 10 (1871), libro 3. 74 Rafael Herrera to Sras Cabezas de Dia, 22 Aug. 1863: AHAMich, Parroquial, Disciplinar, Cofradı´as, Informes/Patentes, caja 836, exp. 124.

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has been put in charge of the veladoras, but she has not been put in charge of the Church. 75

In another case, this time involving the socially prominent ladies of the Pa´tzcuaro Vela, the  hermana mayor , Don˜a Marı´a de la Luz Sierra, threatened to resign over the issue of who controlled the funds of the Vela. She argued her case in a lengthy and well˜ o. The ‘disinterested crafted letter to the priest, Victoriano Trevin and politic manner’ with which Trevin˜ o’s predecessor had promoted the Vela, she wrote, had allowed it not only to cover its costs but also to undertake the ambitious work of rebuilding the church, ‘rescuing it from its miserable and abandoned state and transforming it into the beautiful building we see today’. But now Trevin˜o, who had previously offended the ladies of the Vela by calling them ‘impertinent old women’, wanted to dictate which projects the Vela would pay for. He demanded that instead of  paying for the repair of the roof of the sacristy, the Vela should finance repairs on the roof of the baptistry. As the ladies saw it, the sacristy roof repair would prevent a large part of the wall of the church from falling into ruin, whereas the baptistry roof repair ‘only serves to protect a corridor that is of little use other than as a place for you to drink your chocolate and distract your imagination with the agreeable vistas that the location presents’. ‘I do not consider myself capable of sustaining a harmonious relationship with you’, Don˜a Luz wrote, ‘and so I have decided to relieve myself of the task of leading the Vela in order to perform the other tasks that by reason of my sex are indispensable’. Trevin˜ o backed down.76 Priests and lay leaders often clashed over issues of autonomy   s  were in part (indeed, the late colonial reforms of the  cofradı´a intended to re-establish control over lay organizations), but the disputes between priests and officers of the Vela had an unmistakably gendered quality, reminiscent of contests between ecclesiastical authorities and convent officers — defiant, educated women in leadership positions who had a certain class confidence. In my research on a convent rebellion in eighteenth-century Mexico, for example, the epithets directed by the authorities at the nun who 75

 Jose´ de Jesu´s Robledo to Sr. Provisor Jaral, 10 Oct. 1850: AHAMich, Justicia, Procesos Legales, Cofradı´as, caja 690, exp. 47. 76 Victoriano Trevin˜o to Sra. Hermana Mayor de la Vela Perpetua, 3 Sep. 1850; Da. Marı´a de la Luz Sierra to Victoriano Trevin ˜ o, 5 Sep. 1850: AHAMich, Diocesano,  Justicia, Procesos Legales, Cofradı´as, caja 690, exp. 47.

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led the dissident faction (despot ,   caudillo) were similar to those used against the Vela ladies.77 But female leadership in the Vela Perpetua opened up a much broader terrain than the cloistered world of the convent, on which complicated relationships between priests and elite women could play out. IV THE VELA PERPETUA AND ITS PROGENY AFTER 1875

New Velas continued to be founded after the consolidation of liberal rule in the 1870s, but they were now part of an increasingly top-down process in which bishops, looking to rebuild grassroots support for the Church after pro-Catholic conservatives had twice been defeated in war, promoted simple lay associations like the Vela that did not run afoul of liberal legislation against property  s. During his   visitas  in the 1870s, for example, holding  cofradı´a Guadalajara’s archbishop Pedro Loza strongly encouraged every priest whose parish did not already have a Vela to establish one as soon as possible.78 When he next visited in the early 1880s, Velas de ˜ oras, and sometimes Velas de Sen˜ores as well, had been estabSen lished in twenty-three of the twenty-seven parishes. In Michoaca´n, an 1896 parish questionnaire shows that fifty-four of the sixty-four reporting parishes had a Vela Perpetua. This ubiquity in Michoaca´n and Guadalajara is not surprising given the Vela’s early history there, but this was also the period during which the Vela became a national institution. A parish census from the 1890s shows it to have been one of the most common pious associations in the archbishopric of Mexico.79 It was less widespread in Oaxaca, where a similar questionnaire in 1896 registered seven Velas out of  thirty-one responding parishes, but most of the larger Hispanic towns in that strongly indigenous archbishopric did have a Vela.80 By the mid 1880s there were also Velas in a number of  77

Chowning,  Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent ; see in particular Bishop Sa´nchez de Tagle to Licenciado Agustı´n de Aguera, 16 Feb. 1770: AHAMich, Diocesano, Gobierno, Religiosas, Capuchinas, caja 209, exp. 23. 78 Visita por el Ilmo arzobispado Pedro Loza: AHAG, Visitas Pastorales, caja 10 (1871). 79 Bundles of parish questionnaires: AHAMex, cajas 103, 105, 108, 159, 160. 80 Multiple questionnaires located in the Archivo Histo´ rico del Arzobispado de Oaxaca (Oaxaca City) (hereafter AHAO), Diocesano, Gobierno, Parroquias, cajas 747 and 748. I thank Edward Wright-Rios for sharing his detailed notes on this questionnaire, on which I base my count.

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northern towns and cities, including Hermosillo, Guaymas, Matamoros, Monterrey and Saltillo.81 However, by the turn of the century, in the towns and cities where the Vela had first taken hold, it was no longer the only association that channelled female religious energies. In La Piedad, Michoaca´n, for example, in the early twentieth century the Vela Perpetua, established in 1846, was still very strong (the Vela de Sen˜ores had 1,060 associates and the Vela de Sen˜oras 4,119), but there were also sixteen other Catholic associations, eight of them all-female and eight that were mixed but dominated by women.82 Unlike the Vela, many of these had charitable or political purposes alongside their devotional functions: helping the sick or poor, teaching the catechism, sponsoring Catholic newspapers, and supporting adult education.83 The Damas Cato´licas, for example, which was founded in 1912, not only provided multiple social services but also formed an integral part of the Liga Nacional de la Defensa de la Religio´n, the umbrella group that went head to head with the anticlerical revolutionary governments in the 1920s and 1930s. Most ladies did not give up their membership of the Vela Perpetua, but they seem 81

My assumption that the Vela spread beyond the archbishoprics whose archives I ´ n, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, Mexico and Durango) is based on have consulted (Michoaca scattered library collections of devotionals, rulebooks, etc., including the following: Discurso leido en la Capilla del Santo Cristo [de Saltillo] a las . . . hermandades del Sagrado Corazo´ n y de la Vela Perpetua . . . y dema´ s asociaciones piadosas, el 10 de octubre de 1884 (Monterrey, 1884); Devocio´n que practican las hermanas de la Vela Perpetua de la ciudad  de Guaymas (Guaymas, 1874); Reglamento de la Vela Perpetua de Hermosillo (Guaymas, 1874). 82 Census of pious associations in La Piedad, 1904: AHAMich, Diocesano, Gobierno, Parroquias, Visitas, caja 286, exp. 41. 83 The earliest of the charitable associations was the ladies’ branch of the Association of St Vincent de Paul, which made its first appearance in the diocese of  Michoaca´n in the late 1840s. The Ladies of Charity followed in the 1860s. See Silvia ´ lica en el siglo XIX: las asociaciones de voluntarios de San M. Arrom, ‘Filantropı´a cato   y accio´ n solidaria en Vicente de Paul’, in Jorge Villalobos Grzywobica (ed.), Filantropı´a la historia de Me´xico (Mexico City, 2010); Silvia Marina Arrom, ‘Mexican Laywomen Spearhead a Catholic Revival: The Ladies of Charity, 1863–1910’, in Nesvig (ed.), Religious Culture in Modern Mexico.   On the Damas, see Laura O’Dogherty, ‘Restaurarlo todo en Cristo: Unio´ n de Damas Cato´licas, 1920–26’,  Estudios de Hist.  Mod. y Contemp. de Me´ xico, xiv (1991), 129; Patience Schell, ‘An Honorable Avocation for Ladies: The Work of the Mexico City Unio´ n de Damas Cato´licas Mexicanas, 1912–1926’,   Jl Women’s Hist., x (1999), 78. See, also, on politically minded Mexican women’s groups, Kristina A. Boylan, ‘The Feminine ‘‘Apostolate in Society’’ versus the Mexican State: The Union Femenina Cato´ lica Mexicana, 1929–1940’, in Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power (eds.),   Right Wing Women:  From Conser vatives to Extremists Around the World   (New York, 2002).

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to have transferred much of their energies and ambitions to organizations that were taking a more active role in shaping Catholic politics, society and morality.84 Besides their social and political activism, the other defining feature of these descendants of the Vela was that they participated fully in the renewed public visibility of the Mexican Church, a trend which began in the 1890s. After decades of state-induced circumspection, the convents quietly reopened; the Church reacquired much of its property and wealth, thinly disguised as the property of individual priests; the archbishops blessed state projects; and the State actively created a space for the Church to operate.85 The streets leading to the cathedral in the diocesan capital of Morelia were shut down for four weeks during the pilgrimages in the month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (June), with not just municipal acquiescence but enthusiasm. Entire passenger trains were taken over and schools and other public buildings housed pilgrims (the vast majority of them women) during the nationwide pilgrimage to the Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City.86 In this context, the Vela’s quiet, modest performance of  piety inside the churches may have seemed old-fashioned, just as its lack of a social project stamped it as not being at the cutting edge of Catholic social action. As the anticlerical left began to flex its muscles in the first decade of the twentieth century, it was this version of the Vela Perpetua — no longer the most active or vibrant of the female-led lay associations, narrow by comparison 84

On the continued vigour and centrality of the Vela Perpetua in the smaller towns, see Murillo, ‘Politics of the Miraculous: Local Religious Practice in Porfirian Michoaca´n’, ch. 4, which gives an excellent picture of the role the Vela played in the church and town of Charo (Michoaca´n) in the late nineteenth century. 85 Chowning, Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent , epilogue;  Jose´ Roberto Jua´rez,  Reclaiming Church Wealth: The Recovery of Church Property after  Expropriation in the Archdiocese of Guadalajara, 1860–1911   (Albuquerque, 2004); Edward Wright-Rios,  Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934   (Durham, NC, 2009); Karl Schmitt, ‘The Dı´az Conciliation Policy on State and Local Levels, 1876–1911’,  Hispanic Amer. Hist. Rev. , xl (1960), 513; Mark Overmyer-Vela´zquez, Visions of the Emerald City: Modernity, Tradition, and  the Formation of Porfirian Oaxaca, Mexico  (Durham, NC, 2006). 86 See the detailed descriptions in the  boletines eclesia´ sticos  of the archdioceses of  both Michoaca´n and Guadalajara for the groups’ march assignments, beginning in 1902. On the gender composition of the pilgrimages to Mexico City, see ‘Lista de los feligreses que fueronen peregrinacio´nalaBası´lica Metropolitana 2 Junio’: AHAMich, Diocesano, Gobierno, Parroquias, Informes, caja 61 (1900–14), exp. 3; ´ n a la Bası´lica de Guadalupe en 1895’: AHAMich, Diocesano, ‘Peregrinacio Gobierno, Parroquias, Visitas, caja 286 (1837–97), exp. 39.

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to them in its continued devotion to the vigil — that was available to mock devotees of what critics wished to portray as a narrow, conservative and feminized Church.

V CONCLUSION

In a recent article that carries his extensive research on colonial devotionalism into the first half of the nineteenth century, William B. Taylor makes a powerful, archivally based, where-possible-quantified case for a post-independence increase in pilgrimages to shrines throughout Mexico.87 Taylor sees this as evidence of both the continuity of faith (against an older secularization narrative) and the continuity of certain kinds of religious beliefs (especially the belief that divinity inhered in the physicality of the miraculous images). The most important change he detects after 1810 is the laicization of religious practices, as the loss of clerical personnel compromised the Church’s ability to direct and control the practice of faith, and laypeople increasingly began to take the veneration of sacred images into their own hands. Although both the laypeople who are Taylor’s main subjects (the predominantly rural and indigenous visitors to shrines, of  both sexes) and the mode of their devotionalism (the occasional, collective act of pilgrimage) are obviously quite different from those of the Vela (with its mainly female, urban, Hispanic participants and its tightly scheduled acts of individual prayer and meditation), there are nonetheless some interesting parallels between these two changing versions of Catholic devotionalism in nineteenth-century Mexico. Most obviously, the rapid spread of the Vela, like the increase in visits to shrines, helps to undermine any all-encompassing secularization narrative. The Vela also represents a kind of laicization. The founding ladies did not reject or ignore the need for ecclesiastical sanction, but their actions clearly demonstrated lay initiative, lay creativity, and the breaking of traditional gendered boundaries with regard to laywomen’s leadership of lay associations. This last point, I have argued, represented a major disjuncture between the colonial period and the mid nineteenth century, as the Church not only allowed 87

Taylor, ‘Shrines and Marvels in the Wake of Mexican Independence’.

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laywomen to lead new mixed-sex institutions, but, after initial misgivings, actually encouraged them. Clearly there is much room for further research on nineteenthcentury Mexican devotionalism, but at this point it appears that while certain dichotomies (unstructured, bureaucratic; baroque, reformed; traditional, modern; rural, urban; indigenous, Hispanic; male, female) are helpful for an appreciation of the extent to which the Vela was innovative, the most compelling way to put my work and Taylor’s in conversation with each other is to see the Vela as adding exciting new elements to the existing repertoire of religious practices: new ways to grow closer to God, new pious associations, new practitioners and new leaders. The operative word is ‘adding’. It is important not to leap from the novelty of the Vela to the conclusion that religious modernity in Mexico was some kind of zero-sum game, that ‘traditional’ practices such as those embraced by Taylor’s shrine visitors were being displaced by new practices like those of the Vela.88 However tempting it may be to see parish ladies as the vanguard of religious modernity, taking over where the top-down reformist project of the eighteenth-century bishops left off, ‘modernization’ in religion, as in other dimensions of nineteenthcentury life, is a concept that must be used quite carefully and with close attention to context. In accounting for the emergence of new pious associations in the Bajı´o and new roles for women in this process, I have drawn particular attention to the financial and leadership crisis of the   s  in that region in the decades after the outbreak colonial  cofradı´a of the Wars for Independence in 1810. This is a strongly Mexicocentric interpretation of nineteenth-century devotional history and women’s roles in the Church. But women also became more prominent in both Catholic and Protestant churches elsewhere in the Western world in the nineteenth century. How should we take these other Western stories into account here? 88

On this point, Robert Orsi argues that we must find ways at a theoretical level to escape the antitheses offered by liberal historiography where religion is concerned: Robert A. Orsi, ‘Abundant History: Marian Apparitions as Alternative Modernity’, Historically Speaking: Bull. Hist. Soc. , ix (2008), 12. The handful of studies on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular religion in Mexico suggest that ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ elements continued to cross-fertilize religious practices. See, for example, Wright-Rios,  Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca; Paul Vanderwood, The Power of God against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century  (Stanford, 1998).

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Does the history of the Vela Perpetua in Mexico have anything to add to them? There is an unruly literature on what is variously known as the ‘feminization’ of the Church(es), the ‘feminization’ of religion, and the ‘feminization’ of piety in the nineteenth century.89 Some scholars have meant by ‘feminization’ the softening of religious language and even theology.90 Others have analyzed the discursive ‘feminization’ of the Church at the hands of anticlerical liberals.91 A third approach — and the one most compatible with this article — is to focus mostly on women as increasingly active and visible participants in church institutions. 92 But with the 89

On the ‘definitional fuzziness’ of the term ‘feminization of religion’, see Caroline Ford, ‘Religion and Popular Culture in Europe’,  Jl Mod. Hist. , lxv (1993), 152. For objections to the term, see Ann Braude, ‘Women’s History Is   American Religious History’, in David G. Hackett (ed.),  Religion and American Culture: A Reader  (New York, 1995); David S. Reynolds, ‘The Feminization Controversy: Sexual Stereotypes and the Parodoxes of Piety in Nineteenth-Century America’,  New Eng. Quart. , liii (1980), 96. See also the useful historiographical appendix in Karin E. Gedge, Without  Benefit of Clergy: Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (New York, 2003); David F. Holland, ‘A Mixed Construction of Subversion and Conversion: The Complicated Lives and Times of Religious Women in America’, Gender and History, xxii (2010), 189; Janet Moore Lindman, ‘Women, Gender, and Religion in the Early Americas’,  Hist. Compass, viii (2010), 197. 90 Ann Douglas,  The Feminization of American Culture  (New York, 1977); Mark C. Carnes,  Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America  (New Haven, 1989); Cecilia Morgan,   Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Languages of Religion and  Politics in Upper Canada, 1791–1850  (Toronto, 1996). 91 Michael B. Gross,  The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany  (Ann Arbor, 2005). 92 Yves-Marie Hilaire,  Une chre´ tiente´  au XIX  sie`cle? La vie religieuse des populations du dioce`se d’Arras, 1840–1914  (Villeneuve-d’Ascq, 1977); Ge´rard Cholvy and YvesMarie Hilaire, Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine, 3 vols. (Toulouse, 1985), i, 1800–1880 ; Yvonne Turin, Femmes et religieuses au XIX  sie`cle: le fe´ minisme ‘en religion’  (Paris, 1989); Claude Langlois, Le Catholicisme au fe´minin: les congre´gations franc¸aises a` supe´ rieure ge´ ne´ r ale au XIX  sie`cle (Paris, 1984); Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia  (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), esp. chs. 17, 18, 19; Caroline Ford,  Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France  (Ithaca, 2005); Marina Caffiero, ‘From the Late Baroque Mystical Explosion to the Social Apostolate, 1650–1850’, and Lucetta Scaraffia, ‘‘‘Christianity Has Liberated Her and Placed Her Alongside Man in the Family’’: From 1850 to 1988 (Mulieris Dignitatem)’, both in Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (eds.),   Women and   Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present  (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Mary Peckham Magray,  The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900 (New York, 1998); Harry S. Stout and Catherine A. Brekus, ‘Declension, Gender, and the ‘‘New Religious History’’ ’, in Philip R. VanderMeer and Robert P. Swierenga (eds.), Belief and Behavior: Essays in the  New Religious History  (New Brunswick, 1991); Mary P. Ryan,  Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865  (Cambridge, 1981). On the beginnings of this trend in eighteenth-century churches, see Michel Vovelle, Pie´ te´  e

e

e

(cont. on p. 229)

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exception of the studies on nuns (whose numbers increased throughout Catholic Europe in the nineteenth century) and some of the more quantitatively oriented studies within the third approach, most of the scholarly treatments of ‘feminization’ are not centred squarely on that theme; rather, they take up the question of women in the Church in the course of pursuing a different research agenda. To appreciate what the Vela can add to our understanding of the ‘feminization’ of the Western Church, it makes sense to look at the institution from the perspective of three better-developed literatures: the nineteenth-century ‘devotional revolution’ in the Catholic world; the masculinization of the public sphere in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the West as a whole; and the growing importance of women in letters, the professions, religion and politics as the century progressed. The ‘devotional revolution’ in the nineteenth-century Catholic world is a difficult-to-date phenomenon, characterized by the increasingly rapid spread over the course of the century of popular and accessible extra-liturgical devotions, such as venerating the Sacred Heart of Jesus, reciting the Rosary, wearing the Miraculous Medal, and pilgrimaging to approved shrines such as Lourdes.93 Although the concept of devotional revolution, as (n. 92 cont.)

baroque et de´ christianisation en Provence au XVIII  sie`cle   (Paris, 1978); Philip T. Hoffman,   Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789   (New Haven, 1984); Stout and Brekus, ‘Declension, Gender, and the ‘‘New Religious History’’’; Richard D. Shiels, ‘The Feminization of American Congregationalism, 1730–1835’,  Amer. Quart., xxxiii (1981), 46. 93 Thephrase is from Emmet Larkin, ‘The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–  1875’,  Amer. Hist. Rev. , lxxvii (1972), 625. Historians who have studied devotional change in the nineteenth century largely within the devotional revolution framework include: Ralph Gibson,  A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914  (London, 1989); Ann Taves, The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-NineteenthCentury America (Notre Dame, 1986); Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience:  A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, 1985); Brian P. Clarke, Piety and Nationalism: Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895   (Montreal, 1993). Others who are less reliant on this framework, but who also highlight devotional changes in the second half of the century, include Ruth Harris,  Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age   (London, 1999); William A. Christian, Jr., Person and God in a Spanish Valley (New York, 1972);  Jonathan Sperber,   Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany  (Princeton, 1984); Raymond Grew, ‘Liberty and the Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, in Richard Helmstadter (ed.),   Freedom and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, 1997); William J. Callahan,  Church, Politics, and Society in Spain, 1750–1874 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984); Thomas A. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in e

(cont. on p. 230)

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part of a broader story of Catholic resistance to modernity, has often been gendered in the literature — the ‘muscular’ Catholicism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is depicted as giving way to a Catholicism that was ‘sugary’, ‘saccharine’, and ‘riddled with emotionalism and sentimentalism’ —  this labelling does not, of course, make for a rigorous analysis of  religious change in the nineteenth century. Rather, it is an effort on the part of these authors to highlight what they see as politically motivated pandering on the part of the Church to the (feminized) masses.94 Instead, the primary feature of the devotional revolution literature that connects it to the scholarship on feminization is that women were particularly drawn to these new devotions. The explanations that have been given for this attraction are essentially threefold. First, it is argued, women liked the new devotions because they evoked maternal emotions (devotion to the Sacred Heart, for example, played on the wounded heart as a symbol of both love and suffering). Second, the new devotions were more demonstrative than meditative, and they were easy to (n. 93 cont.)

 Nineteenth-Century France (New Brunswick, 1983); Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (Oxford, 1995); David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany   (New York, 1994); Patricia London˜ o  , 1850–1930  Vega,  Religion, Society and Culture in Colombia: Antioquia and Medellı´n (Oxford, 2002); Elizabeth W. Kiddy,   Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in  Minas Gerais, Brazil   (University Park, 2007); Ralph Della Cava,  Miracle at Joaseiro (New York, 1970). 94 ‘Muscular’ is used by Dolan in   American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present , 232; Braude, ‘Women’s History  Is  American Religious History’, 173; and Reynolds, ‘Feminization Controversy: Sexual Stereotypes and the Parodoxes of Piety’, 99, presumably borrowing the term from the late nineteenthcentury ‘muscular Christianity’ movement, which positively associated Christianity, manhood and sports. ‘Sugary’, ‘saccharine’, and ‘riddled with emotionalism and sentimentalism’ are used by, respectively, Callahan, Church, Politics, and Society in Spain, 276; Gibson,  Social History of French Catholicism , 182; and Dolan,  American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present , 231. Besides the scholars of  devotional change listed above, other historians who detect a rupture between ‘liberal’ Catholicism and ‘ultramontane’ Catholicism include: Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett,  Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750  (New York, 2003); Austen Ivereigh (ed.), The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival: Studies in  Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America  (London, 2000), editor’s intro.; Dolan,  American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present ; John T. McGreevy,  Catholicism and American Freedom: A History   (New York, 2003); Jon Gjerde,  Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America , ed. S. Deborah Kang (Cambridge, 2012). While all three of the books on the US emphasize the intellectual tradition of liberal or republican Catholicism, McGreevy, at 29, writes that ‘the division between liberal and ultramontane Catholics was never as clear in the US as in France and Germany’.

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practise: no priest was needed, it was not necessary to be literate, and they did not impose a great time commitment — making them appropriate for women. Third, the emphasis of the devotions on God’s love and an intimate relationship with Jesus and Mary was especially appealing to women, as set against the harsher, more distant and judgmental (masculine) God of punishments and threats.95 What does the Vela Perpetua add to the picture drawn in this literature? Despite its strong female profile, its large number of  active participants, the relative ease with which its activities could be performed, its demonstrative or performative elements (the constant display of piety on the part of pairs of  veladores, all day and into the night), and its embracing of a close and companionable relationship with Jesus, the Vela fails to conform to the outlines of the ‘devotional revolution’ narrative in several important ways. First, the Vela’s social origins and primary participants were not the stereotypically poor and illiterate women who are associated with the devotional revolution. Second, its foundation in 1840 pre-dates most of the cases of devotional change in the literature, and it certainly pre-dates the papacy of Pius IX, who is closely associated with the promotion of the new devotions. Third, its origins were local (an alliance of women and parish priests), not papal or episcopal.96 The history of the Vela Perpetua, then, warns us against a too-facile association of nineteenth-century devotional changes with papal assertiveness and lay passivity, and against seeing devotional change as the popular manifestation of the doctrinal aggressiveness that was embedded in the proclamation of the doctrine of Immaculate Conception (1854), the Syllabus of Errors (1864), and the declaration of  95

See, especially, Taves,   Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid Nineteenth-Century America , but see also Gibson,   Social History of French Catholicism, and Dolan,  American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present . Although the nineteenth is the quintessential century of ‘feminization’, the emphasis on a loving God, as Taves observes, came to prominence in the eighteenth century with the teachings of Alphonsus de Liguori. Thinking of Jesus as an intimate ‘friend’ rather than a judge also began to take hold among Protestants (for example John Wesley) in the eighteenth century: Ted A. Campbell, The Religion of the Heart: A Study of European Religious Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Columbia, 1991). 96 Not until 1870 were the indulgences granted to the Real Congregacio´ n traced back to papal briefs and connected to the contemporary Vela Perpetua: Sumario de las indulgenias concedidas a los congregantes de la Vela Perpetua del Santisimo Sacramento [en la] Parroquia de S. Sebastian  (Mexico City, 1870).

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papal infallibility (1870). 97 Further, since the Vela arose alongside other devotional changes in Mexico that also fail to fit neatly into the social profile of the ‘devotional revolution’ (notably the increase in visits to shrines documented by Taylor), the Mexican case in general supports the idea that the concept of religious modernization (from which the idea of devotional revolution derives, the ‘revolution’ being one way for the Church to resist modernization) 98 is freighted with more baggage than it can easily handle. In contrast to the literature on devotionalism and devotional revolution, which has not employed gender frameworks with much rigour, studies of changes in the public sphere in the nineteenth century — the second body of scholarship that is in natural conversation with the feminization literature — have been quite attentive to gender. The story of these changes is told differently for every part of the Western world, but the outline is roughly similar. It begins with the enlargement of the masculine public sphere in the eighteenth century — with the proliferation of civic associations, scientific societies, Masonic lodges, taverns and inns, social clubs, cafe´ culture, and newspapers — and picks up steam with the development of republican discourses that defined citizenship around military service and electoral politics. These discourses relegated women, ideologically at least, to a separate, domestic sphere. At the same time, republicanism and liberalism also marginalized the Church by withdrawing state protections for it, with disestablishment either a reality or a serious threat almost everywhere. The responsibility for defending Christian values, still deemed important by most people (even in France, where the de-christianization movement seems to have sunk the deepest roots), was thus shifted from the state to the family — and to women. This freed men up to pursue the messy, newly 97

Heimann and Komonchak also de-emphasize the role of the papacy in promoting the new devotions: Mary Heimann, ‘Devotional Stereotypes in English Catholicism, 1850–1914’, in Frank Tallett and Nicholas Atkin (eds.),  Catholicism in Britain and   France since 1789    (London, 1996); J. A. Komonchak, ‘Modernity and the Construction of Roman Catholicism’,  Cristianismo nella storia , xviii (1997), 353. 98 Komonchak argues this explicitly in ‘Modernity and the Construction of Roman Catholicism’. Some authors emphasize the ways in which the Church used ‘modern’ tools (the press, railroads, schools) to revitalize itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, without arguing that it was using them for anything other than resisting these ideologies. See the articles in Ivereigh (ed.),   Politics of Religion in an Age of  Revival: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America.

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competitive avenues of political, social and economic advancement opened up by the spread of the market economy, the democratization of politics, and the continued widening of the masculine public sphere.99 The feminization of the Church(es) and of the day-to-day practice of religion, then, is seen as a byproduct of the actions of men, who either left the Church or (more commonly) embraced a new division of religious labour in which responsibility for instilling religious values and supporting the churches and church institutions was turned over to their wives, mothers and spinster aunts.100 Many historians, failing to work 99

The historians of Europe and the US who address the masculinization of the public sphere and its connection to political and economic changes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are too numerous to list. Key works include: Joan B. Landes,  Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution  (Ithaca, 1988); Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall,  Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850   (London, 1987); Nancy F. Cott,   The Bonds of  Womanhood: ‘Woman’s Sphere’ in New England, 1780–1835   (New Haven, 1977); Linda K. Kerber,   Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary  America  (Chapel Hill, 1980). The historians who link these processes to religious change are fewer, though still more than I can list here. For France, the seminal work is Olwen Hufton, ‘The Reconstruction of a Church, 1796–1801’, in Gwynne Lewis and Colin Lucas (eds.),   Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Regional Social  History, 1794–1815   (Cambridge, 1983). See also Suzanne Desan,   Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France   (Ithaca, 1990); Ford,  Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France ; Grew, ‘Liberty and the Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Europe’; Paul Seeley, ‘‘‘O Sainte Mere’’: Liberalism and the Socialization of Catholic Men in Nineteenth-Century France’,  Jl   Mod. Hist., lxx (1998), 862; Bonnie G. Smith,   Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century   (Princeton, 1981); Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class ; Stout and Brekus, ‘Declension, Gender, and the ‘‘New Religious History’’ ’; Morgan,   Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered  Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada; Barbara Welter, ‘The Feminization of American Religion, 1800–1860’, in Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner (eds.),  Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women (New York, 1974); Gail Bederman, ‘‘‘The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough’’: The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911–1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-Class Protestantism’,  Amer. Quart., xli (1989), 432; Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America, 1600–1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions  (London, 1999); Terry D. Bilhartz, ‘Sex and the Second Great Awakening: The Feminization of American Religion Reconsidered’, in VanderMeer and Swierenga (eds.),  Belief and Behavior: Essays in the New Religious History; Brian Clarke, ‘The Parish and the Hearth: Women’s Confraternities and the Devotional Revolution among the Irish Catholics of Toronto, 1850–85’, in Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz (eds.),  Creed and Culture: The Place of EnglishSpeaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930  (Montreal, 1993). 100 For an interesting twist on this story, emphasizing the ways in which women who socialized their sons into Catholicism often succeeded, producing a Catholic male bourgeoisie by the later part of the century, see Seeley, ‘ ‘‘O Sainte Mere’’: Liberalism and the Socialization of Catholic Men in Nineteenth-Century France’.

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up much interest in the women who were left behind after this feminization by subtraction, have told this as a story of secularization or even declension.101 In some ways I have made a similar argument for what happened in Mexico. Elite and middle-class men drifted away from impoverished church organizations that could no longer provide them with prestige, social connections or material benefits, and into new civic associations that could. They may or may not have rejected Catholicism — most probably did not — but they did in effect hand over to women the lion’s share of responsibility for keeping the churches full and the faith tended to at the community level.102 My emphasis, however, has been on what happened after  men subtracted themselves. Following Braude, I argue that the Vela Perpetua reveals the importance of paying close attention to the various ways in which both women and the Church responded and adjusted — sometimes in a defensive and reactionary way, but sometimes with imagination, flexibility and creativity — to male abandonment of the institutions and practices they had once proudly led. The feminization of the Church, in short, is not what was left when men found more self-advancing or more modern associations to join; rather, it is an important story in its own right. Finally, a third literature relevant to the question of feminization deals with the ways in which women, having been relegated to the domestic sphere in the early republican era, were beginning by mid century to enter the public sphere in new and powerful ways. This literature tends to see the feminization of the Church as a subset of the feminization of public life — that is, as part of the process by which women, benefiting in particular from greater educational opportunities, became more vocal and visible, moving into multiple public spaces, including the Church, and cashing in on the moral authority that had been assigned to them earlier. Where the increasingly public relationship between 101

Important critics of this declensionist narrative and the way it diminishes the historical significance of women include Braude, ‘Women’s History Is   American Religious History’; and Stout and Brekus, ‘Declension, Gender, and the ‘‘New Religious History’’’. 102 For Mexico, Voekel, ‘Liberal Religion: The Schism of 1861’ and Voekel,  Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modern Mexico  are persuasive on the subject of  continued religiosity on the part of ‘anti-clerical’ liberals. Regarding France, the point has frequently been made that anti-clericalism did not necessarily mean a rejection of  Catholicism.

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women and the Church is concerned, the story has been told very well for the Protestant women of the United States, where historians have emphasized women’s alliances with male clergy to launch reform movements such as temperance or abolition.103 For Catholic women, however, stereotypes associated with the devotional revolution literature — that women who acted in defence of the Church were compliant pawns of the priests, either nuns or wives whose primary contribution was to nag their husbands over the dinner table to defend the Church —  have stood in the way of appreciating the ways in which women used their religious leadership as a springboard to enter the public sphere more broadly.104 The Vela’s history helps us overcome those stereotypes. It shows, to my knowledge for the first time, provincial Catholic women in the middle of the nineteenth century forming and leading mixed-sex pious associations — not just heading charitable organizations, for which female leadership was imaginable, but   -like associations, which had always ‘governing’ men in   cofradı´a been led by men in the past. It thus opens up for analysis a range of  103

For the US, see Kathryn Kish Sklar,  Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, 1973); Daniel S. Wright, ‘The First of Causes to our Sex’: The  Female Moral Reform Movement in the Antebellum Northeast, 1834–1848  (New York, 2006); Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘‘‘The Throne of my Heart’’: Religion, Oratory, and Transatlantic Community in Angelina Grimke´’s Launching of Women’s Rights, 1828–1838’, in Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (eds.),   Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation  (New Haven, 2007); Mary Ryan, ‘A Woman’s Awakening: Evangelical Religion and the Families of Utica, New York, 1800–1840’,  Amer. Quart., xxx (1978), 602; Jane Rendall,  The Origins of   Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France, and the United States, 1780–1860  (Basingstoke, 1985); Barbara Leslie Epstein,   The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America   (Middletown, 1980); Anne M. Boylan,  The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797–1840  (Chapel Hill, 2002); T. Gregory Garvey,  Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum  America  (Athens, Ga., 2006). 104 Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 57, 153, is particularly insistent that women were ‘under the thumb of the cure´’, and ‘would accept male authority, in a way that men would not’. Exceptions are Hufton, ‘Reconstruction of a Church’, and Desan,   Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary  France, who see Catholic women as taking on influential public roles during and in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, acting where men wouldn’t in public defence of the church. But they also see female leadership and female public religious roles as fading relatively quickly and failing to establish an enduring base for female leadership in religious matters. Other exceptions are Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century , and Margaret Lavinia Anderson,   Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial  Germany  (Princeton, 2000), which credit Catholic women with leadership roles in the Church, but for a later time period.

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actors and processes that has largely been hidden from view, and allows us to think of the Vela Perpetua as a possible incubator for women’s entry into public life. The experience of lay leadership, including learning how to confront and bargain with bossy priests, seems likely to have emboldened Catholic women to enter not just parish politics, but national politics. We know that as early as the late 1840s Mexican women were intervening in political debates concerning the Church (especially in petition drives protesting freedom of religion) not just as residents of a town or city, but as female residents of a town or city (‘las sen˜oras de Morelia’, ‘las sen˜oras de Guadalajara’).105 In this light, the implied dichotomy in the European and US literature between Catholic women who were docile and in thrall to the priest, and reforming women who stormed onto the political stage in alliance with Protestant ministers, seems exaggerated. It also militates against subsuming the feminization of the Church into the broader feminization of public life. A too-wide lens may cause us to lose focus on an important element of women’s public lives in the nineteenth century: that when they penetrated the public sphere, they did so as Catholic women who had been not just politicized but also socialized into politics by the earlier expansion of their role in the Church. The history of the Vela Perpetua, in sum, encourages us to look more closely at the ways in which women actively helped the Catholic Church craft survival and revival in a difficult century, and at the ways in which the Church came to accept its need for this help. The Church did not set out to entrust its lay associations to women, nor did women take on these leadership roles in the expectation that they would be able to translate the skills they gained and the responsibilities they shouldered into political action, even a kind of citizenship. But that is what happened. Much of the scholarship that touches on the ‘feminization’ of  the Church does so in a way that lacks analytical rigour at best, and at worst is dismissive of the importance of studying Catholic 105

See the multiple petitions penned by women in the period 1849–56 arguing against religious freedom in Mexico, in Antonio Martı´nez Ba´ez,  Representaciones sobre la tolerancia religiosa  (Mexico City, 1959). There were also protests by women against the expulsion of bishops in the 1850s and 1860s, against the expropriation of  clerical property, against the liberal prohibition on accompanying the Host to the houses of the moribund, and against the closing of the convents, all cited in Voekel, ‘Liberal Religion: The Schism of 1861’.