Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820

By Maya Stanfield-Mazzi

The book provides the first broad survey of church textiles of Spanish America and demonstrates that, while overlooked, textiles were a vital part of visual culture in the Catholic Church.

When Catholic churches were built in the New World in the sixteenth century, they were furnished with rich textiles known in Spanish as “church clothing.” These textile ornaments covered churches’ altars, stairs, floors, and walls. Vestments clothed priests and church attendants, and garments clothed statues of saints. The value attached to these textiles, their constant use, and their stunning visual qualities suggest that they played a much greater role in the creation of the Latin American Church than has been previously recognized. In Clothing the New World Church, Maya Stanfield-Mazzi provides the first comprehensive survey of church adornment with textiles, addressing how these works helped establish Christianity in Spanish America and expand it over four centuries. Including more than 180 photos, this book examines both imported and indigenous textiles used in the church, compiling works that are now scattered around the world and reconstructing their original contexts. Stanfield-Mazzi delves into the hybrid or mestizo qualities of these cloths and argues that when local weavers or embroiderers in the Americas created church textiles they did so consciously, with the understanding that they were creating a new church through their work.

The chapters are divided by textile type, including embroidery, featherwork, tapestry, painted cotton, and cotton lace. In the first chapter, on woven silk, we see how a “silk standard” was established on the basis of priestly preferences for this imported cloth. The second chapter explains how Spanish-style embroidery was introduced in the New World and mastered by local artisans. The following chapters show that, in select times and places, spectacular local textile types were adapted for the church, reflecting ancestral aesthetic and ideological patterns. Clothing the New World Church makes a significant contribution to the fields of textile studies, art history, Church history, and Latin American studies, and to interdisciplinary scholarship on material culture and indigenous agency in the New World.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780268108076

Maya Stanfield-Mazzi

Maya Stanfield-Mazzi is an associate professor of art history at the University of Florida. She is the author of Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christian Divine in the Colonial Andes.

Book preview

Clothing the New World Church

CLOTHING THE

NEW WORLD

CHURCH

Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820

MAYA STANFIELD-MAZZI

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Notre Dame Press

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950353

ISBN: 978-0-268-10805-2 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10808-3 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10807-6 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

For my mother and father,

who encouraged my love of textiles,

and for my daughter Petra Elena,

my observant companion on this journey.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

DIAGRAMS

MAP

FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A project on historical textiles requires the assistance of many people, especially those who safeguard such cloths, which if left in the open would quickly perish. I have relied on a multitude of caretakers to research this book, and it is them who I must thank first. Church collections were the natural starting point for my investigation, especially cabinets of textiles guarded in church sacristies. Carlos Zegarra and Father Eduardo Adelmann of the Prelatura de Sicuani near Cusco, Peru, facilitated my first visit to a sacristy and put me on the path for this book. Staff at the Archbishopric of Cusco allowed me to view works in the cathedral sacristy and the textile treasury of Cusco’s parish of San Cristóbal. Shorter visits to churches as far afield as Santiago de Pomata on Lake Titicaca, the cathedral of Zaragoza, Spain, and the church of La Jalca Grande in Chachapoyas expanded my knowledge of Spanish and Spanish American church textiles. Father Oscar Romero in La Jalca offered important oral history drawn from his ministry. In Spain, María Barrigón Montañés, on staff at the Palacio Nacional, enabled my visit to San Lorenzo de El Escorial to view the stunning Mexican feather miter in its sacristy. The cathedral of Lima holds a splendid collection of liturgical ornaments, to which I was allowed access by Director Fernando López Sánchez. The cathedral of Ayacucho also has a significant collection of vestments on display. The collection at the church of San Juan Bautista de Huaro, also near Cusco, was an important foundation for this study and is central to chapter 1. Father Carlos Silva of the parish of San Pedro Apóstol de Andahuaylillas and Meritxell Oms, director of Asociación Sempa–La Ruta del Barroco Andino, were crucial for my access to Huaro, and church guardian Luisa Naola Espino kindly facilitated my visits. Most recently, it was a pleasure to speak to church guardian Manuel Vasquez in the town of Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, about modern tapestry altar frontlets used there.

A second vital repository for this study has been museum collections. In Lima, Peru, I am especially grateful to the Pedro de Osma Museum, which under Director Annick Benavides allowed me to survey all of the textiles in its collection. The Museo de Arte de Lima, with its director, Natalia Majluf, and curator Ricardo Kusunoki, was supportive from the start. The Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera, with curator Isabel Collazos and registrar Giannina Bardales Aranibar, granted me access to a Chachapoyas cloth. The Museo de Artes y Tradiciones Populares del Instituto Riva-Agüero, with the assistance of Luis Repetto and Claudio Mendoza, also allowed me access to its Chachapoyas works. Director Iván Ghezzi Solís and staff at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia in Lima allowed me access to a very early church tapestry. In Cusco, Director Edith Mercado and Roxana Abrill of the Museo Inka were helpful. In Chachapoyas, the staff at the Museo Leymebamba was vital to my learning about not only Chachapoyas church cloths, but also the longer tradition of the region’s textiles. Key people have been Fundación Mallqui director Sonia Guillén, museum director Emperatriz Alvarado Vargas, conservator Royber Calderón Jáuregui, and Sebastián Tejedo Chuquipiondo. The Casa de la Cultura in the town of Leymebamba also offered insights, and the museum of La Jalca Grande, with the accompaniment of Cultural Minister Norma Ofelia Huaman, was a vital resource.

In Mexico, the Museo Franz Mayer, with its staff members Fabiola Barreiro and Karina Ruiz and additional help from Mayela Flores and Marta Turok, was a great asset. The Museo Nacional del Virreinato in Tepotzotlán (in the former Jesuit college of San Javier), with Director Sara Baz Sánchez, provided me vital access to various textile examples. The Museo Bello in Puebla, under Director Patricia Dominguez, conserves important embroidered works.

Most helpful in the United States has been the Textile Museum in Washington, DC, with its staff and research associates Ann Pollard Rowe, Tessa Lummis, Jordan Cao, and Rachel Shabica. Similarly helpful has been my work with the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Curators Jill D’Alessandro and Laura Camerlengo, conservator Anne Getts, and museum volunteers Barbara Arthur and Barbara Nitzburg offered me invaluable insights from which many of my conclusions were drawn. The Denver Museum of Art, with the help of Donna Pierce, Margaret Young-Sánchez, Alice Zrebiec, Julie Wilson Frick, and Jana Gottshalk, allowed me to examine elaborate embroidered works from Mexico. I thank that museum’s Alianza de las Artes Americanas for inviting me to speak on Andean tapestries, and during that visit I benefited from seeing the DMA’s exhibition Creative Crossroads: The Art of Tapestry. On the suggestion of Robin Gavin, Nicolasa Chavez and Carrie Hertz at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, granted me access to the remarkable Morley Trunk, a Louis Vuitton chest filled with vestments reportedly collected by Sylvanus Morley in Guatemala City. The Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society in Key West, Florida, especially its director, Melissa Kendrick, and registrar Dylan Kibler, welcomed me at the very beginning of this project.

In the United Kingdom, the Victoria and Albert Museum, especially curators Zorian Clayton and Hanne Faurby, as well as archivist Nicholas Smith, provided me firsthand access to Andean tapestries as well as Spanish embroideries and velvets, and the museum’s website has been an irreplaceable resource throughout this project. In Spain, the Museo de América in Madrid, with its director María Concepción Sáiz and curator Beatriz Robledo, also allowed me access to rare Peruvian works. The textile museum of the Catedral Primada Toledo, housed in the Colegio de Infantes, was an amazing resource with the assistance of Carlos Turrillo. In Canada, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia holds liturgical pieces from the Andes and is notable for its open storage of many textiles. I thank its director Anthony Shelton for the invitation to visit.

I have also had recourse to private collections whose owners share a similar commitment to the preservation of church textiles. In Cusco, the textile gallery Josefina Olivera e Hijos allowed me to examine key works, and Pablo Olivera has become a trusted friend. In Puno, Peru, Rolando Colquehuanca allowed me to peruse his collection of festive attire. The Historical Textile Research Foundation in the United States offered access to its collections as well as research findings, including notable radiocarbon analyses. In Chachapoyas, Dolores Gutiérrez Atienza allowed me to view her stunning paño pintado. Aldo Barbosa Stern of the Barbosa-Stern Collection in Lima welcomed me to examine many paintings that represent textiles in churches.

I relied greatly on written documents for this book, since the surviving church textiles are an incomplete record of what originally existed during the colonial period. Church inventories and account books, while not completely transparent records of what was held in and purchased for churches, were valuable for reconstructing both church collections and individual pieces. The archives I consulted are listed in the bibliography, but I will note a few special ones here. The Archivo General de Indias in Seville holds a series of inventories, dated to 1560, of five Dominican churches along the western shores of Lake Titicaca. Those inventories were the initial seed for this project. Later I worked at the Archivo Arzobispal de Cusco, and I especially thank Graciela Romero Quispe for her assistance there. In Mexico City, the staff at the Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de México were extremely helpful, especially historian Marco Antonio Pérez Iturbe and paleographer Berenice Bravo Rubio. Finally, working in the little-visited Archivo Regional de Amazonas in Chachapoyas with the help of wise archivist Marino Lozada was a delight.

This project was made possible by the generous funding I have received from the University of Florida, especially the School of Art and Art History, the College of the Arts, the Honors Program, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment). In the budget office, Victoria Masters is always helpful and patient. While on a UF Faculty Enhancement Opportunity grant, I studied Quechua in Cusco at the Centro Tinku, with the wonderful yachachej Regina. I thank the center’s director, Jean-Jacques Decoster, for inviting me to present early findings in my research and for the chance to meet Bruce Mannheim. I also benefited greatly from a research fellowship at the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK. I thank Aristóteles Barcelos Neto for making me aware of the fellowship several years ago and for welcoming me when I arrived. I thoroughly enjoyed my conversations with center director Stephen Hooper, George Lau, and Fiona Savage, my spritely officemate. In Michoacán, Mexico, I thank Carlos Paredes and the group Kw’anískuyarhani de Estudiosos del Pueblo Purépecha for inviting me to present on my research in Pátzcuaro.

Many other researchers have helped me with this project along the way, and I regret that I cannot name all of them. I especially thank Emily Engel for initiating a writing exchange with me during my sabbatical year. Emily’s support kept me on track, and her insights improved my manuscript greatly. I also thank Emily Floyd, Jamie Forde, Ximena Gomez, Aaron Hyman, Santiago Muñoz, and Leslie Todd, who shared precious archival nuggets with me. Julia Montoya, whom I met in 2013 at the 6th Annual International Conference on Amerindian Textiles, organized by Sophie Desrosiers and Paz Núñez-Regueiro, shared her photograph of an important Andean tapestry fragment in Brussels. Blenda Femenias shared photographs of tapestries from her fieldwork in the Colca Canyon of Peru. Carrie Brezine offered insights on the textiles found at the archaeological site of Magdalena de Cao Viejo on Peru’s north coast. Architectural historian Violeta Paliza Flores is a trusted friend and confidante, as are Ana Pino Jordán and Sara Acevedo. Elizabeth Kuon Arce welcomed me into her home and library in Cusco, and I thank her for many wonderful conversations. My exchanges with Patricia Victorio Cánovas and Mónica Solórzano in Lima encouraged me greatly, and their recent work on embroideries and tapestries from Peru (respectively) has been foundational for my research. At the Conference on Amerindian Textiles mentioned above, I learned a great deal from Cristophe Moulherat in the workshop he led on fiber identification. In Madrid, Ana Roquero was extremely generous in sharing her research on textile dyes. Other friends and scholars whose help I am grateful for include Regan Garner, Julia McHugh, Margarita Vargas-Betancourt, Ananda Cohen Aponte, Lori Boornazian Diel, Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez, Eleanor Laughlin, Angélica Afanador-Pujol, Ricardo Aguilar, Alessandra Russo, Alessia Frassani, Nancy Rosoff, Sabena Kull, Cristina Cruz Gonzalez, and Jaret Daniels. I thank my supportive colleagues in the art history department at the University of Florida, including Kaira Cabañas, Derek Burdette, Melissa Hyde, Ashley Jones, Guolong Lai, Robin Poynor, Elizabeth Ross, and Rachel Silveri, as well as School of Art and Art History directors Richard Heipp, Maria Rogal, and Lynn Tomaszewski. In Chachapoyas I relied especially on Manuel Cabañas López and Alejandro Alvarado Santillán, who opened the doors to the region for me with the assistance of the Municipalidad de Chachapoyas. Other key individuals there include Lloyser Tejada Brillado, Teodoro Tauma Caman (the mayor of the town of Pedro Ruiz), Angel Gupio, Peter Lerche, Luis Bonifaz, Hans Reina, and Francisco Leyser Rojas Muñoz.

The art creators themselves deserve mention: photographers and textile artists of today. It has been a gift to work with Raúl Montero, whose photographs of the Huaro vestments grace this book. Daniel Giannoni and Yutaka Yoshii also provided key photographs. Lucas Palomino taught me about contemporary tapestry weaving in Ayacucho and allowed me to practice on a loom he built. Master embroiderers Eulogia Mendoza, José Alejandro de Santa Cruz (Alex), and Fredy Medina shared information about contemporary embroidery in Cusco. I learned about Indian kalamkari (painting on cotton with natural dyes) from artist Lavanya Mani. Additional photographs came with further assistance from the Museo Pedro de Osma’s director Pedro Pablo Olayza and registrar Javier Chuquiray. Other suppliers of photographs are listed in the figure captions, and I thank all of the museum staff members who helped with those. My brother Dylan Stanfield created the wonderful illustrations of textile types. Lauren Walter, María Paula Varela, and Mark Hodge helped me with image permissions.

Finally, I am grateful to Eli Bortz at the University of Notre Dame Press for being interested in this over the transom project from the beginning. I also thank managing editor Matthew Dowd and copyeditor Kellie M. Hultgren for her careful attention to my manuscript and many suggestions for improvement.

It is with much humility that I thank all of the above, as well as the many helpful drivers, museum security staff, and others whose names I did not record. I hope these acknowledgments show that the preservation of Spanish America’s textile legacy is a massive humanist project that requires much dedication and continued support, but is fruitful in the lives of many.

Introduction

A painting from seventeenth-century Peru expresses the Catholic belief that masses for the dead can free souls from purgatory (figure I.1a). It does so by illustrating on the left a contemporary mass (fig. I.1b), thus communicating to viewers the possibility of accessing the salvific sacrament themselves. To the right appears a group of souls in limbo, shown as nude figures nearly engulfed in flames. They clasp their hands together and weep, begging for salvation. At center-left appears the earthly scene of a priest and his attendants (deacon and subdeacon) in the process of celebrating mass at a church altar. At the far left is shown the more otherworldly, or at least anachronistic, figure of Saint Gregory, who as pope (590–604) was believed to have fixed the form of the Roman Mass.¹ While lifting the lid of a box likely meant to hold a missal, or authorized prayer guide, Gregory looks skyward to the ultimate purpose of the liturgical ceremony, which is to provide souls entrance to heaven. In the clouds an angel guides a prayerful soul, depicted as a nude, white-skinned youth, toward salvation.

Many aspects of Catholic Church doctrine and history are evident in this painting. Considering that this is a painting created for a small parish church in colonial Peru, we might see its communication of Catholic tenets and its illustration of a proper performance of the liturgy as somewhat new and necessary for the church’s indigenous parishioners. Part and parcel of the liturgical performance is the fact that Pope Gregory, the priest, and the deacons are all shown wearing multiple garments of church ceremony, and the church’s altar is also copiously dressed. In all, at least twenty distinct textile items are represented. These items, shown here in their ideal, most decent state according to Church dictates, are indices of an overlooked fact: after Spain’s establishment of Catholicism in the region now known as Latin America, churches throughout the region were shrouded in cloth. Woven mats covered their floors, fine rugs lay before their altars, and a variety of cloths of different shapes and sizes covered the altars themselves. Curtains and canopies hung behind altars, and when possible, textiles draped church walls. As churches became populated with statuary depicting Christian saints, the statues were also clothed in fabric. Church officials—priests, deacons, and acolytes—wore fine cloth vestments, especially in order to celebrate the central sacrament of Mass. Surviving account books and inventories of colonial Spanish American churches show that textiles were among the most numerous and costly features of church interiors. The modest earnings of parish churches, year after year, were spent on the necessities of wax, wine, soap, oil, and incense. Anything left over was spent on church clothing, and often priests and parishioners donated large sums to purchase cloth items seen to be lacking. It is thus not an understatement to say that cloth was the single most important material and visual feature of Catholic church interiors in Spanish America. Here I will tell the story of this cloth, in ways that illuminate its role in creating and maintaining the Spanish American church.

(a)

(b)

Figure I.1. Mass for the Dead and Souls in Purgatory, in whole (a) and detail of left side (b), Peru, late seventeenth century. Oil on canvas. Church of San Pablo de Cacha, Department of Cusco, Peru. Photograph © Rodrigo Rodrich Portugal.

The impetus for this study was not the fact that cloth was present in great quantities in colonial churches—any scholar of the colonial period will have noticed this when perusing parish records of the type found in church archives. Nor was it the fact that this cloth was highly valued and that the great majority of it was imported, made of silk spun in Europe and China or linen grown and processed in the Old World. These points are interesting in themselves, for they speak to the colonial regime of value and to the effects of early modern economic globalization in the New World. But the motivation for this book was a more elusive fact—also found in archival documents but easily overlooked—that Amerindians were closely involved in the manufacture and maintenance of these cloths. Indigenous people cut, sewed, dyed, embroidered, painted, patched, and washed imported church textiles so they could be used and worn throughout the ritual year. Pieces were constructed of new cloth, but damaged works were often refurbished and altered to be reused. Most intriguingly, native people adapted their own textile materials and techniques to the demands of church patronage. We thus discover that Mexican featherworkers used the plumes of Mesoamerican birds to create shimmering priestly vestments. We learn that Peruvian weavers used camelid (primarily vicuña and alpaca) wool to weave tapestries that fronted altars throughout the southern Andes. Dye-painting on cotton cloth was adapted to adorn churches in northwestern South America, and American cotton was used to create lace for church articles throughout the New World. In myriad ways these cloths’ contexts of creation, their materials, the techniques by which they were created, and their final visual features make them hybrid manifestations of the New World church. This church with a lowercase c was a spiritual community that, while directed by the institutional Church headquartered in Rome, included potentially all members of Spanish American society: men, women, and children of multiple ethnic backgrounds.

This study will delve into the hybrid or mestizo qualities of church cloths, uncovering the fascinating ways in which their makers united worlds and created objects that were spiritually meaningful on American soil. In this sense I follow a great amount of previous scholarship on fine art media such as painting and architecture.² Yet this book is also a wider analysis of the transformative power of cloth, in the Renaissance and toward the present. Scholarship has sufficiently proven the importance of the textile industry for transforming the economies of early modern Europe and by doing so has shown us what globalization first looked like.³ Art history has more recently joined the fray, considering the worldwide trade in textiles and its broad visual impact.⁴ But there has yet to be a sustained consideration of the role of cloth within the massively expansive Catholic Church, which within the span of three centuries transformed the ritual and spiritual lives of a majority of the inhabitants of Central and South America.

The real and metaphorical powers of cloth are wide reaching. When considered as an enveloping, covering object, cloth’s ability to transform is remarkable. Consider only the effect of a fine tablecloth draped over a temporary foldout table. If we link cloth to the spread of the Church, an imperialist metaphor would be a silk damask rippling across the Americas, obscuring past cultures, albeit with great sensual appeal. But the fact of the matter is that this cloth was not continuous or all encompassing. Instead, European cloth came to coexist with the diverse textile traditions already flourishing in the Americas, many with deep connections to religious belief and practice. Scholarship on dress and indigenous identity has shown how important locally significant garments are to the formulation and maintenance of native cultures, and we must keep this in mind to understand native peoples’ engagement with, and creation of, church textiles.⁵

Perhaps cloth’s deep connections to being rely on its phenomenological purchase. Cloth is understood to be vital to existence and identity, for who has not felt the ways it touches the body? It weighs or chafes. It also rustles, muffles, shrouds, and warms. And that is only the finished cloth—the processes of creating cloth are also terrain for cultural metaphors that bring us back to hybridity. Woven cloth in its most simple form consists of warp and weft threads placed perpendicular to each other (diagram I.1). Although these threads are opposed to each other, when the weft threads alternately pass over and under the warp threads, a whole cloth is created, uniting the opposing forces and using their tension to its benefit. We thus have a metaphor of cultural traditions coexisting and coming together to create something new.

Many cloths have borders and fields, and these parts of cloth are given cultural significance. Which is more important: a border because it confines and frames a field, or the larger field, being only embellished by the border and given ample space to display a pattern or figures?⁶ The coexistence of ranked elements within a textile would seem to suggest social relationships and relative values applied to sectors of societies such as, for example, the European and indigenous members of colonial society.⁷ Similar in nature to questions about border versus field are figure and ground relationships, especially perplexing in woven textiles where both the figures and the ground make up part of an interwoven structure. How are we to read textiles that do not have a clear figure and ground? Is there the possibility of alternate readings, where the supposed ground becomes the figure? In the case of medieval Europe, Michel Pastoureau has shown that striped textiles came to have arresting (and generally negative) connotations because their figures and grounds were not clearly distinguished.⁸ It is important to question the relative values applied to these different aspects of textiles’ compositions, being sure to read them in all possible ways.

DIAGRAM I.1. Plain weave structure. Drawing by Dylan Stanfield.

The contiguous nature of woven textiles makes patterning, or the regular repetition of motifs, a naturally predominant feature. Worldwide, previously unrelated textile traditions display similar sorts of patterning, yet often with divergent associations.⁹ In sixteenth-century Spain, for example, a pattern of connected diamonds or ovals was known as little almonds, while in the Andes a similar pattern is called eyes, or holes for planting.¹⁰ Despite these culturally specific meanings, in a Christian European way of looking at art, patterns were thought to be a relatively innocuous way of occupying space—they did not offend or suggest idolatry, especially when devoid of representational figures.¹¹ A space was thus opened for local textile makers to use patterns that were culturally significant to them and may have had meanings other than those expected in the church setting.

Beyond woven cloth, many church textiles were adorned by way of superstructural techniques such as embroidery, appliqué, and painting. These techniques are relatively easy to learn and afford a certain freedom of choice in comparison to preplanned loom weavings. Tailoring also became a common trade for Amerindians, even though the tailoring of cloth was not common practice in the pre-Columbian Americas. Tailoring implies the power to cut down, modify, unite, and even radically transform existing pieces of fabric. The textile creators addressed in this book were designers who fabricated their own works based on tradition and existing models, infusing them with individual creative elements.

So, as this is a study of the power of cloth, it becomes a study of the agency of clothworkers in the Americas. Women were almost completely barred from participating in the church hierarchy, and indigenous men only gained the right to ordination in the eighteenth century.¹² But these people were often involved as church textile creators. However small, this involvement may have given them a measure of power within the church that tempered priestly power, held largely in the hands of Spanish or Creole men (of European descent but born in the colony). Armed with the power of cloth, these artisans created works that would have spoken to parishioners in ways that went beyond language. The question of language is indeed key, since the majority of Catholic services were conducted in Latin and sermons were most often in Spanish, a language that most Amerindians only spoke secondarily, if at all.

We are limited by not knowing the names of our artisans, since textile works were rarely signed and the surviving documents do not tend to record the names of their makers. Indeed, we are working under a different, early modern definition of an artist that respected artists as craftspeople but did not view them as individual geniuses who should attain name recognition.¹³ It was much more common for the names of patrons and donors to be recorded, and occasionally we learn the gender and ethnic identity of an artist. But most often we are presented with anonymous craftspeople (more than one of whom could have worked on a single piece), known less as artists or artisans than by craft-specific terms such as tailor or silkworker. In large part we must judge their identities based on the products they created.¹⁴

In Europe early modern guilds protected male textile workers and further valorized their trade. Women were highly involved in the crafts, since a strict division between public and private space had not yet developed and relegated women to the home. But as guilds developed, women were restricted from participation and thus were accorded secondary status.¹⁵ In Spanish America’s colonial labor economy, formalized guilds were relatively rare outside the viceregal capitals of Mexico City and Lima. While native artisans were quickly put to work in the colonial setting, they were often supervised by European émigrés or Creoles.¹⁶ However, the colonial system did introduce an important distinction that encouraged and protected the work of indigenous artists, including makers of fine cloth. These workers were recognized as skilled artisans (embroiderers, featherworkers, weavers, etc.) called oficiales and were thus exempted from offering labor tribute to the Spanish government.

It does not appear that native women could attain this status, however, and the details of their participation in the creation of church textiles are somewhat obscure. On one hand, we know that native women were important agents of textile production in pre-Hispanic times, and they continued with their traditional labors (such as spinning) to some extent. On the other hand, the Spanish American church was so patriarchal that it is difficult to imagine women receiving direct commissions for church textiles. Nevertheless, in keeping with European patterns, the church celebrated female piety and reserved a place of honor for women who created church ornaments.¹⁷ We thus find references to European and Creole women who embroidered church ornaments.¹⁸ Spanish, Creole, and mestizo women also appear to have practiced lacemaking, while native women innovated techniques such as drawn work that could be used for church textiles.

It is thus possible to consider textile workers as important agents in colonial society, particularly as intermediaries between multiple forces: European and native textile traditions, priests and patrons, and the secular and sacred branches of colonial society.¹⁹ For example, in 1778 the priest of the town of Huanoquite, near Cusco, Peru, received a donation of fabric for a processional banner from the local cacique, or indigenous leader. The finished banner, which was commissioned from a tailor, was to be bordered with golden ribbon and had a coat of arms embroidered on it in gold thread.²⁰ A banner surviving in Lima gives us a general idea of what it may have looked like, though it features Christian imagery instead of a coat of arms (fig. I.2). While the cacique of Huanoquite donated the cloth and likely was allowed to carry the banner in processions (since presumably it bore his family’s coat of arms), the priest paid the tailor to confect the piece. Apart from considering the roles of the cacique and priest as they came to shared purpose, we can think of the tailor as the facilitator of a delicate and important cultural interchange, materialized in the cloth of church ritual.

For the purposes of this study I will usually sidestep the issue of whether to call our craftspeople artisans or artists, on the basis of the fact that the distinction in terms postdates the period of this study.²¹ I prefer to use tailor, weaver, embroiderer, and other terms we know were in use at the time. We can also search for local and native ways of esteeming the crafts