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Cofradia: The Penitentes of New Mexico
| Article
# : |
10172 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1986 |
6,398 Words |
| Author
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Thomas J. Steele
A member of the Jesuit Order since 1951, Fr. Thomas Steele
holds graduate degrees in English, philosophy, and theology
from St. Louis University and a doctorate in English from the
University of New Mexico. In real life he is a professor of
English at Regis College, Denver. In his less lucid moments he
thinks at various times that he is a golfer, a painter, or a
cowboy. |
Like an ocean wave riding up the slope of a beach and gradually coming to a halt, its power expended, so the wave of Spanish colonization, about a century after it had exploded from a Spain that had just defeated the Moors, slowed and stilled in the high mountains of northern New Mexico. This farthest edge of the ragged rim of Christendom, a couple of thousand miles from the viceroy's palace in the City of Mexico, finally rested in a land of both natural and cultural beauty.
Those lovely mountains were already the home of civilized Indians, the Pueblos. For centuries they had tilled their fields, dug their acequias (irrigation systems), built their homes, fired their pottery, danced their dances, and carved their kachinas (dolls). But, like that dying wave which finally expended the power built thousands of miles away on the far shores of a great ocean, the Spanish experience in New Mexico held a great, strange, and terrible beauty all its own.
To some degree, this exotic condition arose from the meeting of the two cultures. It was not, as may be thought, that the Hispanics and the Indians synthesized their cultures into a third thing, a new culture born of the previous two. Rather, exactly the opposite, the recalcitrance of the Pueblos to acculturate seems to have heightened Spanish self-definition. The meeting of these two cultures fascinated and enticed such figures of world and national culture as D.H. Lawrence, Marsden Hartley, Willa Cather, and Georgia O'Keeffe. In the rich cultural soup of these primitive and folk peoples, the Brotherhood of Our Father Jesus the Nazarene - the Penitentes - stands out as a particularly dramatic feature. But the brotherhood was, and is, truly akin to the prevailing religion and culture of the Hispanics of New Mexico.
To understand and relish the phenomenon known as the Cofradia, the brotherhood or confraternity, it is necessary to explore some of the region's unique and little-known history.
The colony was founded in 1598, when even Jamestown was only a conjectural policy of Queen Elizabeth's England. Its story had begun more than a half-century earlier when survivors of an ill-fated expedition limped into Culiacan, on the Gulf of California. They brought with them second- and third-hand tales of cities of gold. These were instantly identified with the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, founded by seven bishops and their flocks who had sailed away to the west during the Moorish invasions centuries
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