Christmas or Easter

The rosary is a selective narrative of Christ’s life. The gospels described his birth, his deeds, and his death. The Joyful Mysteries focus on the first, the Sorrowful and the Glorious on the last. The Luminous Mysteries, which touch only a few events in the adult savior’s life, weren’t introduced until 2002 by John Paul II.

The popular imagination only seems able to embrace one ceremonial event a year. It’s either the birth, which dominates in this country today with Christmas, or it’s the death, which was reenacted in recent memory by the Penitentes.

When Franciscans first followed Hernan Cortés, the Aztecs were using music and dance in rituals that celebrated the December birth of Huitzilopochtli. Some agreed to be baptized after Pedro de Gante wrote religious songs in Nahuatl for a nativity in 1525. He said, they heard "the angels sing: Today the Redeemer of the Earth is born!"

Nativity customs spread so quickly among local communities, Dominicans and Jesuits adopted the Franciscans’ use of drama. The street theater that produced the first Christmas plays in Mexico City flourished. While it became less popular in the seventeenth century, fragments continued to be performed.

No doubt Miguel de Quintana learned to compose in the coloquio form when he was in school in Mexico City. The identity of the person who asked him to use his skill in Santa Cruz to create Christmas dramas is impossible to answer. If it were a friar, the most likely man, based on chronology, was Juan Mínguez, whose death in 1720 opened the Santa Cruz sanctuary to itinerants.

Mínguez was from the same social milieu in the capital as Quintana, and just a few years younger. Jim Norris didn’t know his age when he professed, but he was at least 15 when Quintana came north at age 22. The friar’s father was an artisan from Spain who lived in Mexico City. His mother’s father was a merchant from Parral. Quintana’s godfather, Agustín Flores Urrutia de Vergara, was a constable to the Inquisition. His wife’s grandfather had prospected for minerals around Parral.

The man who denounced Quintana, Manuel de Sopeña, was 21 years old in 1707 when Mínguez, was at least 29. All that’s known of his family was his father migrated from Vizcaya and married Francisca de Velarde in Mexico City. Like Mínguez, Sopeña entered the Franciscan order in Mexico City. The decade between their noviates coincided with the first years of the transition from the Hapsburgs whom the Franciscans supported and the Bourbons whom they were opposing in the War for Spanish Succession.

The identity of the person who asked Quintana to write a new coloquio in 1726 was hidden at the time to prevent criticisms directed at the author ricocheting onto the patron. However, everything suggests the person who asked was from an old family, probably one of his local in-laws. Four of his children married individuals whose parents lived in La Cañada before the revolt: the Martín Serranos, the Archuletas, and, through a feral line, the Gómez de Robledos. Two wed descendants of a man killed at San Domingo.

It’s not known if Sopeña was critical of Christmas plays in general or just of ones written by laymen. What is clear was that his censure of Quintana coincided with a transition in religious practices in Santa Cruz from those centered on Christmas to those centered on Easter week. As a penance, he demanded Quintana attend meetings of the Third Order meetings where, presumably, he was encouraging forms of self-inflicted pain like those mentioned in the post for 10 April 2016.

Sopeña wasn’t alone. Pedro Montaño arrived in Bernalillo in 1710. In 1729, before Quintana was denounced, he had the Inquisition prosecute Pedro Durán y Chaves for refusing confession, refusing to take ashes on Ash Wednesday, and making fun of processions. Chaves told natives listening to Montaño read to them that he had books "that weren’t so boring."

If one were to guess what book Chaves owned, one would suggest some version of The Golden Legend mentioned in the post for 1 May 2016. Its legends about Mary’s parents and Joseph were more interesting than the gospels, which took them as background dramatis personae necessary to the more important story of Christ’s ministry.

He was the son of Fernando de Chaves, whose senility was mentioned in the post for 7 April 2014. By this time, Angélico Chávez said, Pedro "was extremely ill and out of his senses." When he died, his family rejected the rights of this second wife and her children.

The shift from the joys of birth to the horrors of death was reinforced by the replacement of baptisms as the sacrament that determined one’s grace, with confession and atonement.

At the same time, friars were reinforcing their directions with sermons like the one recalled by Quintana that emphasized the hell that awaited the baptized if they didn’t conform.

In 1733, while Quintana’s case was waiting review by the Holy Office tribunal in Mexico City, Martín Hurtado and Pedro Alcántara García Jurado entered the Albuquerque church where Montaño was preaching and called him the "governor of Hell."

The first was the son of Andrés Hurtado, who had held the encomienda of Santa Ana. García Jurado’s father came from Mexico City as a child in 1693, and later married Hurtado’s daughter. At the time, Franciscans were criticizing the two for demanding people at Santa Ana work without pay.

The substitution of Easter rituals for Christmas ones may have occurred without controversy in Mexico City where few Roman Catholics may have had strong ties to older traditions and congregations were so large priests couldn’t monitor everyone. The individuals Sopeña and Montaño attacked in Nuevo México were ones whose families were here before the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Their religious views probably were more archaic than their peers in Mexico City because they had been isolated from changes that affected the capital for so long. The new generation of priests probably saw them being as recalcitrant as the pueblos that continued older practices, and thus deserving the same punishment.

Notes: Quintana said he was asked to write the last coloquio in 1726. The two men mentioned in the post for 10 July 2016 who were close to him were Mínguez, who was dead in 1726, and Juan de Tagle who probably died in early 1727. Norris didn’t know Mínguez’s age when he professed in 1694. The earliest age for acceptance by the order was 16.

The marriage alliances of Quintana’s children were described in the post for 19 June 2016. His description of a sermon appeared in the entry for 3 July 2016. Esquibel only hypothesized Quintana attended the cathedral school, partly based on the identity of his godfather. Street theater was discussed in the post for 26 June 2016.

Chávez, Angélico. Chávez: A Distinctive American Clan of New Mexico, 1989.

_____. Origins of New Mexico Families, 1992 revised edition.

Esquibel, José Antonio. "The People of the Camino Real: A Genealogical Appendix," in Christine Preston, Douglas Preston and José Antonio Esquibel, The Royal Road, 1998.

Greenleaf, Richard E. "The Inquisition in Eighteenth-Century New Mexico," New Mexico Historical Review 60:29-60:1985.

Norris, Jim. After "The Year Eighty," 2000; on Hurtado and García.

Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. Spanish Archives of New Mexico: Compiled and Chronologically Arranged, volume 2, 1914; on complaints between 6 April 1732 and 23 July 1733 by Ramón García Jurado against Diego Aries de Espinosa at Santa Ana.

Weckmann, Luis. The Medieval Heritage of Mexico, 1992; quotation from Gante’s 27 June 1529 letter to Franciscans in Flanders.