These will be more important for our student led class conversation on Monday. I don't mind if you turn in your written homework based on the Mission reading and we can discuss it a bit (questions 2 & 3). We'll postpone a deeper discussion of The Mission til everyone has seen the movie.
By the way, the "sections" are inserted here just to make it easier to refer to specific parts of the text during class discussion or in your writing.
1) In general terms, explain what happened on June 8, 1692? (Where, when, who, what?)
2) How did colonial officials respond to the crisis? Were they unified?
3) What cause did the representatives of colonial government attribute the outbreak of rioting? Does the author agree with the official explanation?
4) What alternate explanation might there be? (Section 2 discusses what other historians have said, but what about the author's view? This isn't really presented clearly in one concise paragraph - but look for references to the real cause.)
5) What is pulque and how did the Spanish view it?
6) The Spanish officials who analyzed the riots saved special venom for "pulquerias" (taverns). Discuss some of the specific problems they saw with this type of establishment. Does it shed light on the Spanish colonists world view in the late 17th century?
7) In the author's opinion why would the Indians have had a motive to bring up their drinking? Yet, how many of the riot participants who were brought to trial (89 total) brought up alcohol in their explanation of the day's events?
8) What do you think happened to Melchor de Leon (the author of the quote about the devil)? Don't worry about looking it up, just speculate. Now explain why you think that might have happened?
Colonial Latin American Historical Review, Vol. 14, Fall 2005, No. 4
“Because I Was Drunk and the Devil had Tricked Me”: Pulque, Pulquerías, and Violence in the Mexico City Uprising of 1692.
William F. Connell, p. 369
section 1
For several hours during the afternoon and early evening on Corpus Christi in 1692, a crowd of residents burned much of the urban core of Mexico City. During the summer that followed, viceregal and ecclesiastical authorities consciously constructed a political response to the disastrous uprising that exploited the commonly held stereotypes about native peoples and their alleged lack of control when under the influence of alcohol. The existing evidence produced by witnesses in their testimonies before the viceregal courts, however, contradicts the official narrative. Nevertheless, the story generated by viceregal and ecclesiastical officials remains far more influential, and shaped both contemporary and modern attempts to understand the uprising. Crafting an official story enabled those who stood to be blamed to strip away any implicit criticism of government policy. Instead, the revolt was cast as an aberrant event concocted by irrational natives who craved disorder when drunk.
If the story used by officials were correct, the trials should contain regular discussions of pulque (a mildly alcoholic drink made from the maguey)—and they do not. Interested officials in Mexico City, nevertheless, found that by blaming the uprising on pulque, they could affirm for the Crown and Council of the Indies that the kingdom and city were ably administered by capable representatives. What follows will demonstrate how natives understood the use of pulque and reveal how collusion among officials in response to the emergency of the uprising led them to invent an explanation that the evidence from the trials does not support.
Between 5 and 6 o’clock in the afternoon, well after the Corpus Christi processions on 8 June 1692, the main plaza of Mexico City erupted in violence. “Indigenous [men and women] and other peoples rose up together in tumult,” wielding stones, torches, and perhaps knives. The riotous mob, composed of thousands of people, filled the plaza and attacked the viceregal palace “pelting it with stones and smashing the windows.” When they met resistance from the palace guard, the crowd “set fire to the wooden front door and second-story balconies,” which opened into “the vicereine’s private chamber.”(1) The guards made futile efforts to settle the crowd but, even armed and ready to defend the palace, they could do nothing to stop what had begun. The emboldened crowd ruled the plaza once the guards barricaded themselves inside the palace. They attacked and destroyed the major civic symbols of power and commerce—the royal jail, audiencia and gallows, the viceregal palace, the ayuntamiento (city council building), and the flimsy wooden cajones, or stalls of the city’s principal market. According to the testimony of a Spanish alcalde de corte (first-instance ordinary judge) caught up in the midst of the mob, the crowd also looted the market, taking clothing, silver, and cash. One official reflected fatalistically two days later, stating that “the damage is irreparable, and even this morning the fire is still burning.” (2)
The uprsing ended, but not with a heroic defense of the city by the militia or any act of leadership on the part of urban officials. Chaos reigned as municipal officials shrank away from the danger, leaving the citizens of the city to fend for themselves while some among them vented their rage, controlling the plaza for as long as they chose. Some looted, lit fires, and committed acts of grave violence—usually against other participants or bystanders—from 5:30 to 10:00 in the evening. The viceregal government could muster no force to restore order once the fires began. Rather than risk their lives, most of the noble residents of the city as well as the officials (city, viceregal, and ecclesiastical) hid together in the solid stone buildings at the core of the city to wait out the disorder. On their own, participants eventually returned to their homes, hiding the goods with which they had absconded. The wounded made their way to hospitals or presumably to the care of those who might help them.
The first organized attempt to restore order came well after the plaza had cleared and continued through the early morning hours the next day. Though in the opening moments of the conflict individual palace guards had apparently attempted to maintain order by drawing their swords and lashing out against a sea of angry, stone-wielding residents, these vain efforts seemed only to have made matters worse. (3) A small number of city leaders saw and apparently attempted to stop the violence—including notably don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, don Juan de Velasco (the conde de Santiago), and don Antonio de Deza y Ulloa—but to no effect. (4) Despite what these witnesses claimed to have done, they mostly moved carefully through an earsplitting din to find safety. The danger posed by the uprising was real for everyone in its midst. Deza y Ulloa, a treasury official (Contador Oficial de la Real Hacienda), sustained a serious wound when a large rock struck him in the back as he made his way through the plaza. (5)
The conde de Santiago organized the main defensive force of the city—the militia—hours after the uprising had subsided naturally. In his testimony, militia captain don Domingo Montaño described the uprising as though it had still been in progress as he ventured out with fifty-three armed horsemen just before midnight. he claimed that his efforts and those of the conde de Santiago, prevented further outbreaks of violence and stifled a second wave of attacks, (6) although no evidence indicates that anyone in the city had plans for a new assault. Indeed, though city officials seemed to think that a full-scale revolution was underway, they were mistaken. What they did find, however, were solemn ceremonies, like the one at the church of San Francisco on the plaza of Santiago Tlatelolco at four in the morning on 9 June, described in the testimony of Deza y Ulloa, who rode with the militia despite his injury. The clergymen, presiding over an early funerary mass for some of those who had been killed during the tumult, rebuked the horseman for charging in to the massive church on horseback in the middle of the service.(7)
The1692 uprising has received only modest attention from scholars considering the scale of destruction and size of the viceregal response.(8) This profound, tragic, and terrible even has left behind a large corpus of materials that provide insight into the political, social, and cultural worlds of Mexico City from multiple points of view. The uprising itself, “the most important in the history of the [Spanish] American kingdoms,” destroyed wealth, buildings, and city records, and left more than two hundred casualties (by conservative estimates) in its aftermath. More than a dozen suspected participants and looters received capital sentences in one of the largest displays of judicial violence in the history of Spanish America.(9) In their responses, viceregal officials laid the groundwork for modern understandings of the uprising by offering solutions that focused on three problems: indigenous people allegedly abusing pulque. . ., an insufficient corn supply, and the uprooting of indigenous groups from their communities who had thus lost their “natural pacifism.”(10) Officials, ostensibly to correct these problems, banned pulque and banished indigenous peoples to their pueblos of origin, suggesting the riot was an indigenous uprising. The viceroy and his ministers worked diligently to provide an adequate corn supply after the uprising, which suggests that they believed a lack of corn must have motivated the urban poor.(11)
To accept the official explanation of viceregal officials assumes that the Viceroy and his able investigators understood what motivated these particular people on this particular day to rise up and burn the plaza. Many observers offered explanations in the summer of 1692 that, for political reasons, ignored the motivations. The uprising probably spiraled out of control mostly because of an incompetent initial response; the threat to their own political futures motivated office holders and investigators to identify problems for which they could supply solutions. As a result, seventeenth century observers could not provide a proper account that credibly implicated those responsible for the escalation of violence nor could they identify a leader or a direct cause. The lack of a credible “smoking gun” in the documentary evidence made it possible for the authorities to explain the uprising in ultimately self-serving ways.
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section 2
Much of the early writing on the uprising insisted that this was a “corn riot,” but recent scholarship has moved away from the one-dimensional hunger–driven uprising and gravitated toward more substantial policy issues. Current studies take advantage of the trial testimony to explain the event as the manifestation of a larger political problem. The viceroy, don Gaspar de Sandoval Silva y Mendoza (ruled 1688-1696), the conde de Galve, and his ministers failed politically by deliberately choosing not to control the price of corn and thus caused privation for which the urban poor sought redress. Violence broke out only after the elaborate, expensive, and ultimately imperfect, system of grain distribution “faltered” in the days immediately preceding the uprising. Rioters, however, lost their cohesion and focus and became looters, destroying the promise of social revolution.
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section 3
Such studies rely heavily on the evidence of the trials to raise questions about the viceregal and the ecclesiastical understanding of the riots. However, the trials were carried out within a climate in which the viceregal government failed to respond to a serious challenge; these trials were hastily constituted and rushed through under tremendous pressure to find villains to punish. When examined in light of the trials, arguments in the official discourse about indigenous abuse of pulque do not find significant support. The trials also reveal how viceregal officials and the clergy came together, coordinating their responses with only a hint of dissent from a small group that did not cooperate. Collectively disguising their identities under the title, “the most loyal vassals of your majesty,” dissenters were conspicuous because they stood alone, separate from, and perhaps drowned out by, the many other official voices. The very act of seeking anonymity, furthermore, suggests a climate hostile to what might be called “whistle-blowing” and indicates that this group feared retribution for expressing opinions contrary to the official line.(17)
Viceregal and ecclesiastical officials understood that the very legitimacy of secular Spanish rule in the Americas rested upon the notion that the Crown represented justice and “good government,”(18) and had a vested interest in in controlling the story as it made its way across the Atlantic….Viceregal officials rejected the possibility that a massive government failure had precipitated a violent, politically motivated attack by the urban poor.(19) Such an admission would have made them culpable. Identifying pulque as a scapegoat, a convenient vice regularly employed by colonial officials, helped them to shift responsibility for the uprising to native peoples and away from themselves.
Rebellions in New Spain usually sought redress for local problems and often lacked a coherent plan, ideology, or group of leaders.(20) Yet, paradoxically, they also constituted a form of political discourse that germinated in communities in response to specific stimuli, usually to “restore a customary equilibrium.”(21) The uprising of 1692 in Mexico City seems to resonate well with this theoretical generalization. The communities of Mexico City perceived a failure in their government and responded through violent protest. The alternate explanatory discourse generated by viceregal and ecclesiastical officials served to remove any rational or legitimate basis from the actions of the urban poor. Stereotypes about natives and pulque thus served officials who could not find leaders to interrogate.
The viceroy turned to pulque in his first attempt to explain the events of 8 June to the Council of the Indies. In a letter written just three weeks after the event, he discussed the lack of corn and the general malaise caused by shortages.(22) The uprising itself, however, according to Viceroy Galve, occurred on this particular day because of a strange mixture of circumstances. The festival of Corpus Christi brought many people from small towns and villages who came to celebrate in the festival atmosphere.(23) The distribution and heavy consumption of pulque occasioned by the holiday, however, made the real difference. Galve argued that “men of letters and experience conclude that general drunkenness among the common people that resulted from the abundance of the drink pulque” enabled a few disaffected individuals to sway the inebriated crowd. Thus, even after discussing the shortage of corn and the possibility that the upcoming crop in December would fail to alleviate the crisis, he reduced the complexity of this event to the simple straightforward, and direct explanation that natives, deprived of their reason by pulque, caused the outbreak of violence.(24)
Explanations generated by viceregal officials supported the statements made by Viceroy Galve. Testimony given on 15 July 1692 by one ayuntamiento officer explained how the abuse of pulque by indigenous peoples caused the riot:
Even though the land has not experienced the customary abundance of other years [of the corn and wheat crops] there is little double that the drink pulque gives rise in them [the natives] drunkenness which precipitates violence and public sin of grave measure against our divine majesty for which they merit punishment.(25)
This statement reflects yet another simplification of the riot’s cause. It also downplays the privation among the abject poor whose suffering increased as the food supply dwindled, rather, ungrateful and irresponsible indigenous peoples rioted because of the vices, weakness, and inability to resist pulque.
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section 4
Seventeenth century intellectual and great critic of indigenous use of pulque, don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora sought to systematically undermine any possible rationale suggested by the urban poor in his description of the event.(26) He questioned the veracity of the story that emerged in trial testimony that, just before the violence erupted, an indigenous woman had been killed in the public granary by the corregidor (a local official - a mayor). Furthermore, he cynically argued that indigenous women who sold tortillas benefited from the conditions that ostensibly provoked the riot, earning more because of the high price of corn.(27) Don Antonio Fernández de Jubera, an attendant of the viceroy who passed the evening of 8 June, hunkered down in a well-fortified building . . ., described his experienced in a friendly interview with the court. Purposefully, he also stripped away potential motivation from those who rioted. He witnessed the early moments of the uprising and remarked that when he entered the plaza he found “wickedness committed by natives without motive or cause of any kind.”(28)
In the months following the uprising, ecclesiastic officials of the city also made clear arguments that native abuse of pulque caused them to riot. On 30 June, Viceroy Galve amplified the power of ecclesiastical authorities to enforce moral order in the city. They oversaw the prohibition of pulque and monitored the movement of natives who had been ordered to return to their pueblos of origin. This reducción attempted also to relocate indigenous peoples living in the center of the city to the peripheral barrios.(29) Clergy who commented on the riot agreed with the viceroy and identified pulquerías- the taverns that served cheap drinks to the working poor-as the principle culprit in the outbreak of the riot.(30)
Church officials argued in the wake of the riot that the abuse of pulque had a detrimental effect on the health of indigenous peoples and those of mixed racial heritage (castas), causing them to behave in socially inappropriate ways. To make this case, they drew on themes developed over the course of nearly two centuries. Indigenous peoples, according to the accounts of the clergy, often walked in the streets naked because they had pawned their clothing in the pulquerías.(31) The jeers and laughter from bystanders did not affect them in their inebriated state. Indigenous men under the influence of pulque allegedly exhibited criminal behavior more often. Echoing civic paternalism that classified indigenous peoples as children in the eyes of the law, ecclesiastical elites also perceived indigenous peoples as placid, peace-loving people who, under the influence of alcohol, became unruly and uncontrollable.(32)
Pulquerías allegedly became places where small-time thieves could “fence” stolen goods in exchange for cash or credit at the bar, providing both an incentive to steal and a ready market for stolen goods.(33) Robberies, assaults, and homicides, the clergy argued, increased as a result of the abuse of pulque. Natives who frequented pulquerías regularly committed sins of the flesh, including mortal sins like sodomy and incest. Visitors to pulquerías sought out illicit affairs with women, sometimes even committing rapes in their drunken rampages.(34) The indigenous peoples and others among the urban poor, according to these clerical accounts, felt no shame because alcohol numbed their senses and removed their sense of dignity.(35)
Church officials who wrote tracts regarding native drunkenness imagined a simpler time when indigenous peoples had self-respect, behaved, did not abuse pulque, dressed in fine clothing, and used their money to express their faith through good works for the church. They contrasted this imaginary past with contemporary indigenous peoples who “walked naked and scorned in the city, neglected to care for their children and wives and had lost their desire to work.”(36) Even when indigenous peoples did work, their wages went straight to pulque and not to support their families, the critics argued, suggesting that beyond denying women and children monetary support, it also caused women to flee their drunken husbands who were prone to beat them. Pulque made indigenous peoples less productive. (37 38)
The clergy argued that the social environment of pulquerías broke down the perceivd “natural” animosities among ethnicities, or, as they called them, “naciones.” Afro-Mexicans, chinos, Mestizos, and indigenous peoples—traditionally natural enemies in the eyes of Spaniards—came together in solidarity in pulquerías. (39) Furthermore, all manner of “vagabonds” frequented these establishments. In the words of one cleric, in the pulquerías the patrons “come together to drink, and in so doing become friends and brothers.” (40) Group identity was forged making pulquerias dangerous places where those so inclined could foster sedition. Thus, the clergy concluded, these pulquerias provided the ideal environment for the urban poor to hatch the plot of 8 June 1692.
The bishop of Antequera, in his post-riot comments, took these arguments beyond the role of pulquerías and placed the blame squarely on native drunkenness. He drew on Saint Augustine to connect the riotous behavior of the indigenous and the abuse of alcohol. His letter universally blamed riots, brawls, quarrels, assaults without cause, the breakup of homes, and the inability to reason, on those who “call the tavern their home and whose only desire and active pursuit is to toss back a drink.” (43) Others followed his lead, suggesting that pulque facilitated the corruption of the soul, and thus make it easier for the devil to make pacts with indigenous peoples. (44) These arguments guided the thinking of the of the ecclesiastical hierarchy...
After the smoldering flames had been extinguished and the rioters had spent their fury, city leaders must have been thankful to have survived the uprising that many in Mexico City had feared for more than a century. (45) Initially, it seemed, judicial officials cared most about finding those responsible. The audiencia and a military tribunal (the Auditor General de la Guerra) initiated criminal prosecutions.
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section 5
The official discourse articulated by viceregal and ecclesiastic officials on native abuse of pulque as a major cause of the riot does not fare well when examined in light of the criminal trials. Of the eighty-nine defendents who faced criminal charges in the summer of 1692, only ten mentioned pulque or pulquerías in their statements. (47) This is particularly striking because inebriation could serve as a mitigating circumstance in the Spanish judicial system by making unclear the premeditation of the defendant’s actions. (48) By this logic, defendants had an incentive to claim drunkenness had caused them to participate. In addition, as the viceroy pointed out, the festival of Corpus Christi brought great revelry to the city and presumably more than the normal supply of pulque as well. (49) These two factors made it likely that many witnesses would have mentioned pulque in their testimonies and all the more striking that few did.
The first trial involved Melchor de León, an indigenous choir singer in the chapel of Monserrate, who mentioned pulque in his deposition before a court scribe. He claimed that he arrived in the plaza highly intoxicated the afternoon of the uprising. Wandering towards his home, he claimed the noise (a howling roar) drew him to the plaza. He explained that he did not understand the commotion he found. In his disoriented state, he unwittingly became involved in the riot. He stated:
I was drunk, and I saw that many natives were climbing up to the balconies [of the royal palace] and because I was drunk and the devil had tricked me, I climbed up too and they [the palace guards] apprehended me.(50)
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