Indians, Epidemics, and Colonial Mexico’s Theater of Death

Thousands of Mexico’s Indians succumbed to pestilence in 1575, 1576, and 1577. The entire kingdom suffered unusual weather during those years; Mexico City reported excessive heat and drought while other areas experienced early intense rains. The Indians, however, were the primary victims of disease. Mass graves substituted for church sepulchers and priests blessed entire fields of dead. In response, Viceroy don Martín Enríquez de Almanza summoned the capital’s medical and spiritual experts, convening doctors to explain the nature of the illness destroying the Indians and ordering that they produce a report on remedies, particularly bleeding, for circulation among specialists in the afflicted regions. He encouraged clerics to administer the sacraments in Indian communities and urged Spaniards to assist doctors and friars by visiting indigenous neighborhoods and distributing food among the ill and bed ridden.

This combined use of medical and spiritual approaches to illness and death among Indians predominated in colonial Mexico. European doctors and barbers and indigenous healers all responded to sickness, sometimes offering overlapping remedies. Friars, priests, and charitable lay folk also regularly attended to the ill. This paper explores epidemics in central Mexico and the prescriptions that colonial officials made for Indians confronting death. While officials supported medical care for indigenous invalids, when death became imminent, spiritual concerns prevailed. Indigenous good death manuals advocated ritualized deathbed meditations and prayers in the presence of family and friends. Elaborate ceremonies performed on the deaths of kings and queens exemplified solemn piety for indigenous onlookers. Friary iconography made Christ’s death a lesson for dying Indians. This theater of death – the many and varied public examples and rituals of good Catholic death – highlighted the importance of spiritual preparation for dying and provided colonial Mexico’s Indians with tools for understanding and approaching the transition from this world to the afterlife.