Catholic confraternities were perhaps the most successful European institutional implants in colonial Mexico (and, indeed, colonial Latin America) in terms of their social reach. According to Laura Dierksmeier, in Mexico City alone “more than 300 indigenous confraternities” were reported to be operating before the end of the sixteenth century, and most colonial Mexican villages, whatever their ethnic composition, would eventually boast a confraternity (11–12). Scholarship on Mexican confraternities has recently flourished; however, most of that scholarship deals with the late colonial period. Dierksmeier remedies this historiographical neglect with a book about the early history of confraternities created by colonial Mexico's largest missionary order, the Franciscans.
The book's first chapter summarizes scholarship on the European models for Mexico's confraternities. European confraternities emerged in the late Middle Ages and in certain regions, including Spain, soon became almost ubiquitous features of social life. These confraternities served purposes of mutual aid as well as religious devotion at a time when people felt little need to distinguish between secular and spiritual affairs. They were also charitable institutions, their practice informed by passages from the Bible and from canonical writers (St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas) who stressed the Christian duty of mercy toward the poor and the weak. Chapter 2 sets out the strategies the Franciscans adopted in their American missionary activities. Unlike other religious orders, and particularly their archrivals, the Dominicans, Franciscan missionaries were eager to win indigenous converts quickly and in great numbers, even if that meant baptizing people with a poor understanding of Christian doctrine. In their guidelines for the formation of confraternities, the Franciscan stressed the duty of charity more than did other religious orders, whose stress was more exclusively on acts of religious devotion. They also stressed the importance of inclusivity: according to Franciscan instructions from 1589, confraternities were to be open to people “of any state, condition, or dignity” (50).
The book's remaining four chapters are about the day-to-day practices of Franciscan confraternities in colonial Mexico. Or more accurately, they are about the regulations that were supposed to govern the day-to-day practices of Franciscan confraternities and that form the bulk of Dierksmeier's sources. Most of those regulations appear to come from urban confraternities, and to what extent they informed those confraternities’ actual operations—or to what extent they guided the operations of confraternities operating in colonial Mexico's vast rural hinterland—is not a question the book examines. What the book does do is offer captivating insights into how the Franciscans imagined that confraternities might translate an exalted spiritual vision into concrete behaviors and institutional arrangements. Most important, Franciscan confraternities aimed to make use of the voluntary labor of their members in order to organize religious processions, offer care and material assistance (including the redaction of last wills) for the sick and dying, and, in some instances, operate hospitals that “[i]n today's terminology . . . could be characterized as rehabilitation centers, physical therapy clinics, soup kitchens, asylum centers, homeless shelters, safe houses, chapels, hostels, and surgery clinics” (125). Most confraternities were also imagined as egalitarian and even, in today's language, as democratic spaces. In them, the poor would mingle with the better off and each member could vote and stand for office in elections for leadership positions.
Dierksmeier's overall argument is that the success of Franciscan confraternities in what was, to Franciscan missionaries, the “New World” was a result of the room for agency those confraternities provided for their members, including indigenous people. Franciscan confraternities, Dierksmeier writes, “encouraged indigenous self-governance within Catholic spheres” and “built social structures where the poor were not only the recipients of assistance but also, through their voluntary participation, providers of community care” (165). This concise and clearly written book thus gives us an important account of the operating manuals for a sphere of religious life that was remarkably inclusive and largely self-governed.
