Transcendent Giveaways. Possession, Bequeathing and Private Display of Religious Images in Nineteenth-Century Rural Mexico

As early as the sixteenth century, indigenous people in New Spain started bequeathing imágenes, a blanket term for representations of catholic saints (Lockhart, 1992). This practice continued throughout the Colonial period and, as this presentation will demonstrate, it kept as an important practice well into nineteenth-century Mexico as seen in various testaments. These personal goods were neither valuable from an economic perspective nor were “productive assets.” Their value was symbolic; although they were more than decorative or sentimental. They were linked to specific spaces of the house complex called santocallis or oratorios, “prayer rooms” (Pizzigoni, 2012), which attest to their hidden, non-evident value and meaning. The imagenes considered in this presentation were known as images de lienzo, which were paintings of popular saints painted either on canvas or on tin plates of various sizes. Although testaments are sources rather silent about the pictographic aspect of religious paintings, they contain a wealth of other information that is useful to understand these objects as ethnographic and religious documents. The goal of this presentation is to investigate the private contexts of display and use of popular religious paintings as a way to understand the larger social context of indigenized religious iconography.