In a story about cooking and chocolate comes this little ditty.
A native fowl cooked with native chillies and seeds, enhanced with ingredients from the Old World (spices, nuts and dried fruit), was a dish deliberately constructed to reinforce the message that the prosperity and survival of
New Spain required a more subtle approach than a policy of subjugation and exploitation by the conquerors. Clear-headed Jesuit realpolitik had placed a Christian church over every native holy place or shrine, smoothly incorporating the blood, incense and sacrificial slaughter of one cult into the other.The welcoming banquet in Puebla did the same, with a recipe which might have been a way of acknowledging the complex racial mix of New Spain, each with their own cuisine. Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz experienced this as a child on her grandfather’s hacienda on the slopes of Popocapetel; the cookery notebooks attributed to her reflect this, as do the villancicos she wrote us-ing African dialects and rhythms, and the Nahuatl language, setting them to popular tunes to attract a congregation from the city’s underclass to Mexico City’s churches and convents.
Link (here)
2 comments:
Well, that is more than a little simplistic. As you may know the Patronato gave the King of Spain all power over and responsibility for the church in the New World. As he did not want competition for lands from the church the monastic communities were prevented from entering the New World and only four orders were permitted--Franciscans, Dominicans, Mercedarians and eventually the Jesuits when they were founded sometime later in the 16th Century. While the Dominicans and Mercedarians tended to be more urban, both the Franciscans and Jesuits developed large scale agricultural/industrial compounds for native peoples. The Jesuits called theirs reducciones and the Franciscans, missions. But, they were largely the same. Of course there were also the diocesan clergy, as well.
Somehow the Mercedarians lost the vocations wars and have almost disappeared from history. I have always wanted to find out what happened to them. Let me know if you know.
Anyway, the Spanish carefully kept the various orders in tension and competition with each other so that none would become too powerful. Virtually every colonial city has the central plaza with the Cathedral and equidistant from each corner of the plaza some diagonal block away were the churches of the four orders.
So, New Spain was far from a simply Jesuit world.
I myself am very much a Jesuit product with degrees from Boston College (undergrad philo) and the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley (M.Div.). Without doubt they are the most adept in the field of spiritual direction. I owe them greatly for that.
I am not and never have been a Jesuit. But, I am saddened with the decline in the Catholic character of my alma mater which was in obvious crisis when I was there 20 years ago.
I am glad that you are promoting the best of the Ignatian tradition. We dare not lose it from the Church. We need to pray for the Society.
Amen
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