Symbol of Political Alliance or Hegemonic Tyranny? The Cross and the Conquest of Mexico

The image of the cross was a significant symbol in colonial Mexico where indigenous religions and Spanish Catholicism blended to create uniquely fused traditions.  As an important religious and cosmic image among the Spaniards and Native peoples, the cross played an important role as a syncretic device both politically and culturally from the sixteenth century forward.  The cross became a symbol of political and/or martial unification between Natives and Spaniards from their first interactions.  From the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, Spaniards erected crosses as a sign of their political dominance.  Some Natives chose to accept this sign and fight for it, like Hernán Cortés’ indigenous allies, specifically the Tlaxcala.  In areas where the Spanish erected the cross by force, some Natives sought to remove the image through open revolt, such as the Maya Insurrection of 1546-1547 when Natives tried to destroy not only Spaniards, but also every vestige of Christianity, particularly the cross. 

The liminality of the colonial period produced a new people, a fusion of Spaniard and Native, their collective experience, specifically in relation to the cross, aided in the unification of different peoples making this novel enterprise possible.  What effectively happened in the colonial period was a transitioning of multiple indigenous people-groups with foreign influence from a divergent nonentity into a more politically, linguistically, and, what is more important for this study, religiously unified body.  That is not to say that variances of colloquial language and culture did not exist nor that post-colonial times were any less climactic or transitional: but that the resulting people of Mexico in the early nineteenth century was neither fully Spanish nor indigenous but somewhere in between and that this in part relates to the cross image as a powerful symbol of political alliance and Hispanic hegemony.