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Talking Through the Chest: Divination and Ventriloquism among African Slave Women in Seventeenth-Century Mexico*

2005; Routledge; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10609160500315276

1466-1802

Javier Villa-Flores,

Caribbean and African Literature and Culture

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes *.I would like to thank Paul Vanderwood, Andrew Fischer, María Eugenia de la Torre, BruceTyler, Emmanuel Akyeampong, and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera for comments on previous versions of this essay. Thanks also to Frederick Luciani and the CLAR anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. 1.1 See Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Ramo Inquisición (hereafter AGN Inq.), tomo 1508, exp. 1, fols. 1–13 (hereafter 1508.1, fols. 1–13). 2. This article is based on Inquisitorial proceedings involving the following slave diviners: The Angolans Esperanza, Isabel, and Catalina in Mexico City in 1629–30 (AGN Inq. 1508.1, fols. 1–13); the Congolese Margarita, in Mexico City and Tlalpujagua, Michoacán, 1630–39 (AGN Inq. 493.9, fols. 156–96v); Ana, of uncertain origin, in Mexico City, 1633 (AGN Inq. 373.20, fols. 170–71v); the Angolan Ana in Oaxtepec, Morelos, 1659–61 (AGN Inq. 458.34, fols. 368–424). I found a second part of this last case in the repositories of the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid ramo Inquisición (hereafter AHN Inq. Libro 1065, fols. 499–507). Although it is likely that similar cases remain buried in Mexican archives, a study of the index of the ramo Inquisición at the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City suggests that this phenomenon was not very common in New Spain. Since the Inquisitors rarely interrogated the slaves themselves and prosecuted instead their masters and other 'promoters' of the bondswomen's divinatory skills, this essay will offer only an oblique sense of their missing valuable voices based on information provided in denunciations, witnesses' reports, and the masters' own statements before the Holy Office. 3. In spite of this papal injunction, only the Inquisition had the authority to punish such crimes in practice. See Lea (1907 Lea, Henry Charles. 1907. History of the Inquisition of Spain, Vol. 4, New York: McMillan. [Google Scholar], 4:89). In his influential Tratado de las Supersticiones (first published in 1538), Pedro Ciruelo associated the knowledge of future or hidden things through divination to Satanic inspiration. See Ciruelo ([1628] 1986 Ciruelo, Pedro. [1628] 1986. Tratado de las supersticiones, Facsimile ed. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. [Google Scholar], 44–45). On the Christian rejection of divination in general see Graham (1913 Graham , E. P. 1913 . Divination . The Catholic Encyclopedia . edited by Charles G. Herbermann , Edward A. Pace , Conde B. Pallen , Thomas J. Shahan and John J. Wayne . 15 vols. New York : The Encyclopedia Press . [Google Scholar]). Divinatory practices were largely used in New Spain for healing purposes, see Quezada (1989 Quezada, Noemí. 1989. Enfermedad y maleficio: El curandero en el México colonial, Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. [Google Scholar], 67–71; 1991); and Aguirre ([1963] Aguirre Beltrán, Gonzalo. [1963] 1992. Medicina y magia: El proceso de aculturación en la estructura colonial, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. [Google Scholar] 1992, 176–79, passim). 4. In a letter dated 12 May 1615, the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in Madrid instructed the Mexican Holy Office to proceed against diviners. This same injunction was reiterated on 13 February 1617. See AGN Inq. Box 161.32, fol. 1. For a classical compendium of the condemned 'superstitions' of the time see Ciruelo ([1628] 1986 Ciruelo, Pedro. [1628] 1986. Tratado de las supersticiones, Facsimile ed. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. [Google Scholar]). Ciruelo discusses the divinatory arts on pages 47–51; see also Castañega ([1529] 1997 Castañega , Martín de. [1529] 1997 . Tratado de las supersticiones y hechicerías . Introductory essay and notes by Fabián Alejandro Champagne. Buenos Aires : Universidad de Buenos Aires . [Google Scholar]). Jesuit Martín del Río discusses ventriloquism as one of several arts of demonic divination in his famous Disqvisitionvm Magicarvm, 3 vols. ([1599] 1600 Río , Martín del. [1599] 1600 . Disquisitionum magicarum . 3 vols. Magvntiae : Ex Officina Typographica Ioannis Albini . [Google Scholar], 2:379–80). On superstition in Catholicism see O'Neal (1986 O'Neal, Mary R. 1986. "Superstition". In The encyclopedia of religion, Edited by: Eliade, Mircea. Vol. 14, 163–66. New York: Macmillan. [Google Scholar], 1987 O'Neal, Mary R. 1987. "Magical healing, love magic and the Inquisition in late sixteenth-century Modena". In Inquisition and society, Edited by: Haliczer, Stephen. London: Croom Helm. [Google Scholar]); Campagne (2002 Campagne, Fabián Alejandro. 2002. Homo catholicus. homo superstitiosus. El discurso antisupersticioso en la España de los siglos XV a XVIII, Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires. [Google Scholar]); Behar (1987 Behar, Ruth. 1987. 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In a strict sense, slave women were outside the system of marriage exchange for they were incapable of transmitting their husband's names as wives: 'Slaves,' writes Donna Haraway, 'were unpositioned, unfixed, in a system of names; they were, specifically, unlocated and so disposable' (1991 Haraway, Donna. 1991. "'Gender' for a Marxist dictionary: The sexual politics of a word". In Simians, cyborgs, and women, Edited by: Haraway, D. New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar], 146). Moreover, since marriage to the slaves of other masters represented the possibility of losing their services, many slaveholders strongly objected to these liaisons. As a result, slave women frequently gave birth out of wedlock, a fact that reinforced the widespread belief that women of the lower echelons in general did not comply with the Christian ideals of virginity. See Seed (1988 Seed, Patricia. 1988. To love, honor, and obey in colonial Mexico. Conflicts over marriage choice, 1574–1821, Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Google Scholar], 58, 83). Of course, as Seed and others have also shown, some pious masters allowed and even encouraged their slaves to get married. Parish records show that bondswomen tended to marry mostly black slave males. See Love (1971 Love, Edgar F. 1971. Marriage patterns of persons of African descent in a colonial Mexico City parish. Hispanic American Historical Review, 51(1): 79–91. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]); Carroll (1973 Carroll, Patrick J. 1973. Estudio sociodemográfico de personas de sangre negra en Jalapa, 1791. Historia Mexicana, 23(1): 111–25. [Google Scholar]). 7. The fact that masters made sexual advances to slave women hardly proves that they recognized their womanhood for, as Fox-Genovese forcefully writes, 'as a slave woman and her master confronted each other, the trappings of gender slipped away. The woman faced him alone. She looked on naked power' (1988, 374). Granted, some slave women obtained privileges by engaging in sexual unions with whites, but as Barbara Bush has pointed out, such relations also represented a 'natural extension' of the power of the white master (1996, 194). On rape of slave women see, inter alia, Gautier (1985 Gautier, Arlette. 1985. Les Soeurs de Solitude: La condition feminine dans l'esclavage aux Antilles du XVIIE au XIXE siècle, Paris: Éditions Caribéennes. [Google Scholar], 160–62); Hünefeldt (1994 Hünefeldt, Chrstine. 1994. Paying the price of freedom: Family and labor among Lima's slaves, 1800–1854, Berkeley: University of California. [Google Scholar], 21, 131, 156, 190); Beckles (1999 Beckles, Hilary McD. 1999. Centering woman: Gender discourses in Caribbean slave society, Kingston, , Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers. [Google Scholar], 23). 8. Punishment for slave women did not differ significantly from that of their male counterparts. See Davison (1966); Love (1967 Love , Edgar F. 1967 . 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To lose one's soul: Blasphemy and slavery in New Spain, 1596–1660. Hispanic American Historical Review, 82(3): 435–68. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 11. For general remarks about this kind of divination among slaves, see Aguirre ([1963] 1992, 177–78); Palmer (1975 Palmer, Colin A. 1975. "Religion and magic in Mexican slave society". In Race and slavery in the Western Hemisphere, Edited by: Engelman, Stanley and Genovese, Eugene D. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]); and Alberro (1988 Alberro, Solange. 1988. Inquisition et société au Mexique, 1571–1700, Mexico City: Centre d'Etudes Mexicaines et Centramericaines. [Google Scholar], 64, 147). My use of the term 'tactics' is indebted to Michel de Certeau's Practices of Everyday Life, in which he defines them as practices resulting more from cunning improvisation than calculation. Fragmentary and fragile in kind, tactics are opportunities seized 'on the wing' by disenfranchised and oppressed people to achieve practical kinds of power (1984 Certeau Michel de Practice of everyday life Translated by Steven Rendall University of California Press Berkeley 1984 [Google Scholar], xix). 12. I take my cue here from Erving Goffman, who used the term 'management of impressions' to refer to 'the attributes that are required of a performer for the work of successfully staging a character'—in this case of a ventriloquist diviner (1959 Goffman, Erving. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books. [Google Scholar], 208, passim); on 'self-fashioning' see Stephen Greenblatt's seminal discussion (1980 Greenblatt, Stephen. 1980. Renaissance self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Chicago: Chicago University Press. [Google Scholar]). 13. The theological debate around the apparitional voice of Saul is aptly summarized in Connor (2000 Connor, Steven. 2000. Dumbstruck: A cultural history of ventriloquism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 75–101). The most important texts of this discussion have been collected by Simonnetti (1989 Simonnetti, Manlio. 1989. La Maga di Endor, Florence: Nardini. [Google Scholar]). See also Muggleton (1724 Muggleton, Lodowick. 1724. A true interpretation of the Witch of Endor, London: Printed by Subscription. [Google Scholar]); Lathrop (1806 Lathrop, Joseph. 1806. Illustrations and reflections of the story of the Saul's consulting the Witch of Endor, Springfield, Mass.: Henry Brewer. [Google Scholar]). For a sympathetic discussion of the Witch of Endor as a female figure in antiquity, see Brown (1992 Brown, Cheryl Anne. 1992. No longer be silent. First century Jewish portraits of Biblical women. Studies in pseudo-Philo's Biblical antiquities and Josephus's Jewish antiquities, Louisville: Westminster and John Knox Press. [Google Scholar], 181–205). Samuel's episode was also a classical point of reference for early modern discussions on the nature of ghosts and specters. See for instance Gerhardi (1634 Gerhardi, Johan Ernest. 1634. Spectrum Endoreum, 3d ed, Jena: Literis Johannis Nisii. [Google Scholar].) 14. See Deut. 18:11; 2 Kings 21:6; 2 Chr. 33:6; Lev. 19:31; 20:6; Isa. 8:19; 29:4; see also Muggleton (1724, 22). 15. Peek (1991b Peek, Philip M. 1991b. "Introduction: The study of divination, present and past". In African divination systems: Ways of knowing, Edited by: Peek, Philip M. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [Google Scholar], 196); Turner (1975 Turner, Victor M. 1975. Revelation and divination in Ndembu ritual, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 23). On the 'social excommunication' of slaves see Orlando Patterson's classic discussion (1982 Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and social death: A comparative study, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]). 16. Depending on their place of birth and degree of acculturation slaves were classified as bozales (non acculturated Africans), ladinos (Christianized Africans), criollos (American-born slaves) in colonial Latin America. For a discussion of the different ethnic groups that arrived in Mexico as a result of the slave trade, see Aguirre (1989 Aguirre Beltrán, Gonzalo. 1989. La población negra en México: Estudio ethnohistórico, 3d ed, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. [Google Scholar]). Bastide analyses the variegated arts of divination of African origin practiced in America (1968 Bastide Roger La divination chez les Afro-américaines La divination Caquot André Leibovici Marcel 2 vols Presses Universitaires Françaises Paris 1968 [Google Scholar]). 17. On this aspect of African divinatory practices see, inter alia, Mendonsa (1982 Mendonsa, Eugene L. 1982. The politics of divination: A processual view of reactions to illness and deviance among the Sisala of northern Ghana, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar], 83–89). 18. While the first term was used in allusion to the ecstatic priestess who acted as Apollo's mouthpiece at the oracle of Delphi, the second referred to the exalted and inspired state in which the slaves purportedly delivered their messages. See Corominas (1961 Corominas, Joan. 1961. Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, Madrid: Gredos. [Google Scholar], 267). 19. To the extent that ventriloquist diviners not only revealed the past but also foretold the future, their insights should be considered as both retrospective and mantic. Victor W. Turner discusses the differences of these two kinds of divination (1975, 209). 20. While Margarita in Mexico City used to cross herself, Ana in Oaxtepec started her séances by asking her customers to say, 'praised be the Holy Sacrament (alabado sea el Santísimo).' See, AGN 493.9, fols. 156–96v; AGN Inq. 458.54, fols. 368–424. 21. According to one witness of Tlalpujagua in 1630, the slave Margarita 'spoke through one side with a thin, unintelligible voice' (AGN Inq. 493.9) Lucía, the slave of Francisco de Esquivel, stated in 1630 that Margarita 'said like whistling some unintelligible words.' In Antequera, a neighbor stated that Andrea, slave of Don Luis de Quezada, 'talked like a hoarse dummy, not pronouncing very well.' See Aguirre ([1963] 1992, 307). In comparing the voice of the slave ventriloquist to a dummy (títere), this witness probably had in mind a ventriloquist act that probably resembled contemporary performances of 'voice-throwers.' Unfortunately, I was not able to locate evidence of such performances in colonial Mexico or early modern Spain. 22. According to the same author, 'the ventriloquist produced this effect with slowly released breath and a curved tongue position which forces most of the sound back into the larynx and into the facial mask or nasal passages' (Davis 1998 Davis , C. B. 1998 . Reading the ventriloquist's lips: The performance genre behind the metaphor . The Drama Review 42 (4) : 133 – 56 . [Google Scholar], 138). 23. On the language of divination as highly stylized see Werbner (1973 Werbner, Richard P. 1973. The superabundance of understanding: Kalanga rhetoric and domestic divination. American Anthropologist, 75(5): 1414–40. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 1414); on the 'cryptic potency' of divinatory speech see Fernandez (1988 Fernandez, James W. 1988. "Afterword". In African divination systems: Ways of knowing, Edited by: Peek, Philip M. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [Google Scholar], 217), and Shaw (1991 Shaw, Rosalind. 1991. "Splitting truths from darkness". In African divination systems: Ways of knowing, Edited by: Peek, Philip M. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [Google Scholar], 139–40). 24. For an analysis of such challenges to the diviners' interpretations, see Werbner (1973 Werbner, Richard P. 1973. The superabundance of understanding: Kalanga rhetoric and domestic divination. American Anthropologist, 75(5): 1414–40. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 1429). 25. Summoned by the Holy Office on 5 November 1636, Margarita even declared to have crafted her answers to please her clients (conforme al gusto de quien la pregunta). See AGN Inq. 493.9, fol. 192v. See also, Evans-Pritchard (1937 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1937. Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande, Oxford: The Clarendon Press. [Google Scholar], 173); Lienhardt (1961 Lienhardt, G. 1961. Divinity and experience: The religion of the Dinka, Oxford: The Clarendon Press. [Google Scholar], 69); Bascom (1969 Bascom, William R. 1969. Ifa divination: Communication between gods and men in West Africa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [Google Scholar], 69). 26. Following the Diccionario de Autoridades, Nora Reyes Costilla Reyes Costilla, Nora and Martín González de la, Vara. 2001. El demonio entre los marginales: la población negra y el pacto con el demonio en el norte de Nueva España, siglos XVII y XVIII. Colonial Latin American Historical Review, 10(2): 199–221. [Google Scholar] and Martín González de la Vara indicate that the pact was considered to be either explicit or implicit depending on the existence or not of a formal agreement with Satan (2001, 209). See also Alberghini (1671 Alberghini , Johannes 1671 . Manuale qualificatorum sancíae Inquistiouis . Zaragoza : Agustin Vargas . [Google Scholar], 54–57). 27. Medina Rico's ambivalence was symptomatic of a growing tendency among Inquisitors and theologians to minimize and even dismiss cases of supposed diabolism. Indeed, as the seventeenth century neared its end, Christian writers and authorities increasingly lost interest in detecting the presence of the devil through 'pacts,' visions, trances, and possessions in New Spain as was blatantly clear in their dismissal of a famous case of possession in a convent of Querétaro in 1691. This notwithstanding, as several scholars have pointed out, popular belief in the diabolic arts persisted as an important element of spiritual life of ordinary Christians in colonial Mexico and well into the national period. See Behar (1987 Behar, Ruth. 1987. Sex and sin, witchcraft and the devil in late-colonial Mexico. American Ethnologist, 14: 34–54. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]); Cervantes (1991 Cervantes , Fernando 1991 . The devils of Querétaro: Scepticism and credulity in late seventeenth-century Mexico . Past and Present 130 : 51 – 69 . [Google Scholar]; 1994 Cervantes, Fernando. 1994. 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[Google Scholar]); and Reinhardt who uses ventriloquism 'as a metaphor for the practice of speaking for slaves' among antebellum abolitionists (2002 Reinhardt, Mark. 2002. Who speaks for Margaret Garner? Slavery, silence, and the politics of ventriloquism. Critical Inquiry, 29(1): 81–119. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 84, note 9). Largely unaccounted for in these works is the fact that their use of ventriloquism as a metaphor to express mistrust of mimetic and sociopolitical representation is uncritically building upon a long Christian tradition of demonizing ventriloquist performers and regarding with suspicion their voicing skills. See Davis (1998 Davis , C. B. 1998 . Reading the ventriloquist's lips: The performance genre behind the metaphor . The Drama Review 42 (4) : 133 – 56 . [Google Scholar], 133); Schmidt (1998 Schmidt, Leigh Eric. 1998. From demon possession to magic show: Ventriloquism, religion, and the Englightenment. Church History, 67(2): 274–304. 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