Geneses of Devotion: The Miracle of the Virgin of Chiquinquirá and Its Ecclesiastical Investigation, New Granada, 1586–88

The historiography of colonial Spanish America has long centered on the riches and romance of New Spain and Peru, tending to overlook regions more peripheral to those viceregal heartlands. One of these peripheral regions was the New Kingdom of Granada, which comprised the territory of modern Colombia and parts of Venezuela, and about which relatively little has been written. New Granada had its own Spanish conquistadors, who stumbled into the eastern highlands of the northern Andes in 1537, and took up residence in the fertile altiplanos among indigenous peoples collectively called the Muisca. Along with the conquistadors came priests, and so the Muisca, like the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Peru, were introduced to Spanish Catholicism through an evangelization that also has been little traversed by historical interpreters. Examination of archival sources in Bogotá and Tunja shows that, over time, highly uneven processes of religious change began to develop, processes that have much to contribute not only to our understanding of the religious and cultural history of this region, but also to a far broader historiography of the early modern world. A point of entry to religious change is a miracle which occurred on December 26, 1586, in a small Indian village outside the Spanish city of Tunja. This was a miracle of transformation, witnessed and sworn to by both Spanish and Muisca in an official investigation conducted by Luís Zapata de Cárdenas, the Archbishop of Bogotá. The miracle marks the genesis of devotion to the Virgin of Chiquinquirá, today the venerated patron saint of Colombia. Here, I will discuss the miracle story and the ecclesiastical investigation which followed, considering how contemporary interpretations of the transformation of a sacred painting in New Granada adds to our understanding of the localized re-imaginings of religion, and the purposes and processes of conversion.