Gods on boats

The Columbian Exchange transformed societies all over the globe. The exchange was a system in which plants, animals, people, and diseases were sent across oceans. But when people sailed across oceans, they carried more than biological cargo. They brought their gods with them too.

Millions of people made the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. Many were forced. Many others came as colonizers seeking to force their way of life on those they encountered. But this wasn’t a one-way cultural exchange. Religious syncretism is when different belief systems blend to create something new. In this article, we’ll explore one example: the Spanish conversion of Mexico City’s indigenous people. How did Christianity change Mexico City? How did Mexico City change Christianity?

Layers of belief in Mexico City

Below is a picture of the Plaza del Zócalo in Mexico City. That big church is the Metropolitan Cathedral, a center of Mexican Catholicism. But this square was once also the center of the Aztec religion. Just across the street from the Cathedral lies the ruins of Templo Mayor, the most important temple in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán. This one area in Mexico City has served as a center of Aztec belief, Catholicism, and Mexican nationalism. For centuries, the ruins of an indigenous temple lay buried below a Catholic cathedral. Though it seems like Christianity simply paved over indigenous religion, the real story is more complex.

Strategies of conversion

The Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortés, sacked Tenochtitlán in 1521. Cortés tore up the city’s temples and pyramids and renamed it Mexico City. Historians often describe the motivations of the Spanish conquistadors as “Gold, God, and Glory.” They wanted to win treasure, spread Christianity, and bring glory to themselves and the Spanish Empire. Let’s focus on the second “G”—God.

The pope is the leader of the Catholic religion. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries he played a large role in European politics. The Spanish received the pope’s support for colonial expansion by promising to convert indigenous Americans to Catholicism. Spanish efforts to convert launched a process of conquest, resistance, and negotiation that would last for centuries.

Soon after Cortés defeated the Aztecs, Catholic missionaries arrived in Mexico. Missionaries are people who travel to foreign places to promote their religion and try to convert people to it. The Spanish worried that people would use indigenous religious symbols to organize revolts. Thus, Spaniards burned the temples, symbols, and books of the Aztec and other indigenous peoples. Often, when they tore down a temple, Spanish missionaries built a Catholic church over its ruins, using the stones of ruined pyramids.

The early years of the Spanish conquest were brutal. The Spanish also forced people into slavery, tore families apart, and killed those who resisted. This started a cycle of indigenous resistance and Spanish violence. Indigenous peoples also watched millions in their communities die from European diseases that their immune systems were not prepared to fight. The Spanish, who had stronger immunities to the diseases they brought, had a lower mortality rate. This led many indigenous people to question the protection provided by their gods. Some were motivated to convert willingly.

Furthermore, Spanish missionaries’ subtle methods were often more effective than the brutal actions of the conquistadors. For example, in Mexico City, missionaries took the sons of Aztec nobility from their families. The religious leaders moved the Aztec boys to new Christian schools, where they were taught the Catholic religion and obedience to colonial authority.

Indigenous strategies

The conversion of the Americas often gets called a “religious conquest.” But conversion was more than conquest and resistance. It was also a negotiation that blended elements of both religions. Some indigenous people were more open to Catholicism because they saw similarities with their Aztec religion. For example, each had a strong priestly class with a ranking system, and shared similar symbols and rituals. Just like the Spaniards, the Aztecs forced new gods on conquered peoples as a political tool. So, societies in Mesoamerica understood the concept of adopting the gods of their conquerors. Also, indigenous people often did not totally abandon their old rituals and gods. Thus, Catholic missionaries, to their frustration, often found images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, his mother, alongside statues of Aztec and other indigenous gods. As you’ll see later in this article, evidence of syncretism can still be observed in modern Mexico.

Some indigenous people converted because they wanted the protection of priests against the cruelty of conquistadors. One of the best known was the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas. He convinced the Spanish king to ban the enslavement and abuse of indigenous peoples. For many other indigenous people, conversion was an opportunity. Becoming Christians gave indigenous people a better position in colonial society. Regardless of the motivations, conversion was not a simple act of acceptance or rejection.

Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

Perhaps the most important examples of religious syncretism in Mexico City is the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. According to later accounts, in 1531, an indigenous man named Juan Diego was on the Hill of Tepeyac, on the north side of Mexico City. He claimed to witness visions of the Virgin Mary, who spoke in the indigenous language Nahuatl. Juan Diego claimed she directed him to build a church, and that her image miraculously appeared on his cloak. Juan Diego convinced the Catholic clergy to build a shrine and church, which they dedicated to “the Virgin of Guadalupe.” By the seventeenth century, the shrine was a popular pilgrimage site. The image of the Lady of Guadalupe emerged as an important symbol of belief, especially for indigenous converts to Christianity, who saw her as their protector.

Some historians argue that this story was a Spanish conversion strategy to justify the building of a Catholic church on the ruins of a shrine to the Aztec mother goddess, Tonantzin, also a protector. Other historians claim that this tradition is the result of syncretism between the worship of the indigenous Tonantzin and the black Virgin of Guadalupe of Extremadura.¹ Eventually, the holiness for these two religious images blended into one.

Whatever the truth, the Catholic Church embraced the story of Juan Diego and the vision as the popularity of the virgin soared among both Spanish and indigenous communities. Eventually, the Catholic Church named Guadalupe the patron of the Americas. The original small chapel has expanded into a modern massive basilica, or church. The Lady of Guadalupe also became a symbol of Mexican nationalism. Revolutionaries carried her image into battle during the Mexican War of Independence in 1810 and again during the Mexican Revolution in 1910. The Basilica is visited by 20 million people each year. That’s more than visit the Vatican in Rome, where the pope lives.

The Lady of Guadalupe is an example of the complicated negotiation between indigenous belief and colonial conversion. This place served as a pilgrimage destination for centuries before the Spanish arrived, and it remains so centuries later. The Spanish destroyed a shrine to an Aztec mother goddess and replaced it with a shrine to the mother of Jesus. In images, she is portrayed in a European style but with dark skin. She stands on a moon, wreathed by the sun—important elements in the Aztec religion. Indigenous converts adopted the Lady of Guadalupe as their protector, and some still call her Tonantzin. They might have been praying to a different figure, but they were praying for the same reasons and at the same site as their ancestors. And three centuries later, Guadalupe remained a symbol of Mexican unity.

Blending religions

As indigenous communities converted, beliefs and rituals blended. Catholic missionaries appropriated (re-used for their own purposes) indigenous symbols, and converts brought old practices to the new religion. Indigenous festivities fell on the same days as Catholic holy days. The Catholic practice of confession merged with similar indigenous rituals. Indigenous symbols were incorporated into Christian crosses. The sacrificial basins once used to collect blood during human sacrifices were repurposed for Christian baptisms. And, as Catholic tradition was translated into Nahuatl, the languages of faith blended.

Religious syncretism created a new Catholic culture in Mexico. In 2020, Mexico is the second-largest Catholic nation on Earth, behind only Brazil. Latin America is home to 425 million of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics. The current Catholic Pope, Francis, was born in Argentina. And every year, millions of Catholics make the pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, to pray at a site that once held a shrine to the Aztec goddess Tonantzin.

1 This refers to the statue and shrine featuring a dark-skinned Virgin Mary figure at a monastery in Extremadura, Spain. The shine has been a pilgrimage site since the fourteenth century.