Dating back to Pope Gregory I's edict to St. Augustine of Canturbury and other missionaries in England in A.D. 601, the Christian church adopted a strategy of remarking or appropriating existing sacred spaces, symbols and events in the lands whose peoples they were trying to convert. In Ireland, for example, the Celtic New Year celebration of Samhain was appropriated into the Christian chuch and became the cluster of holidays including All Hallows Eve, All Saints' Day, and All Soul's Day.Spanish missionaries employed this strategy during the conquest of Latin America by building chuches and cities directly on the ruins of indigenous temples and cities, as in Mexico City (formerly Tenochtitlan) and Cuzco in Peru. Similarly, geographic locations that bore religious significance in pre-conquest times were systematically re-marked with Christian myths, symbols, and churches.
For example, in Oaxaca, Mexico, the Spanish built churches immediately adjacent to the religious complex of Mitla, now a prominent archaeological site, and the ancient tree at Tule, an important Mixtec sacred object (see images).
Near Mexico City, the Spanish strove to Christianize the worship of the Virgen de Guadalupe at Tepeyacac hill, a sacred site of the Mexica mother-goddess Tonancin. The cult of the Virgen de Guadalupe grew so popular that her cult came to symbolize Mestizo nationalism, and she became the patron-saint of Mexico.
The concepts of surrogation and geneology of performance, used by Joseph Roach (see bibliography) in studying the relations between memory and performance, assist in situating historically this practice of re-signification in the New World.
This site was created by Melinda Rothouse
December, 2000.