Michoacan and Eden: Vasco de Quiroga and the Evangelization of Western Mexico.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Michoacan and Eden: Vasco de Quiroga and the Evangelization of Western Mexico, by Bernardino Verastique. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

After Cortes conquered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, he turned westward toward the Purhepecha kingdom of Michoacan. In his new book, Bernardino Verastique examines the military and spiritual conquest of the area, in particular, the role of Vasco de Quiroga (1447/81565), the first bishop of Michoacan. One of the most controversial figures in colonial history, Vasco de Quiroga has been depicted as both a tyrant and a compassionate defender of native peoples, reflecting historians' disparate world views. By examining the subject from diverse disciplinary perspectives, Verastique presents a more accurate, better balanced view of Vasco and of the evangelization process, thereby contributing to a greater understanding of contemporary Mexican society.

Vasco de Quiroga attempted to organize the native people into congregaciones, each containing a hospital, where friars of the mendicant orders (those sworn to poverty) could teach them Christianity and Spanish culture. Drawing from the Judeo-Christian myth of Eden and Plato's notion of the republic, the bishop envisioned a Christian utopia predicated on the principles of simple living, religious observance, work, and education in the practical arts. His stated purpose was to diminish human misery, but his methods were often cruel and authoritarian, and the consequence of his project was to subject the Amerindians to exposure to devastating diseases.

While earlier investigators have tended to demonize either the Amerindians or the Spaniards, Venistique attempts to put prejudices aside and to explore the native and peninsular world views in place during colonization, thereby elucidating the cultural syncretism particular to Michoacan. The Purhepecha-Chichimec clans of Western Mexico adhered to a complex belief system, which was largely incompatible with the Spaniards'. The Purhepecha-Chichimec peoples conceived of the cosmos as a precarious place in which order and chaos, darkness and light were in constant tension. In their view, human beings evolved from this sacred dualism and share in the cosmic process. God was a "pantheistic monism wherein the divine principle is manifest in multiple but complementary forms." The Spanish Catholic colonizers saw the human condition as a search for godliness in a morally corrupt world. The cosmic struggle revolved...