Suchergebnisse

In the year 1732, the citizens of Puebla de los Ángeles, the second city of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, were in a state of anxiousness. The cathedral's southern belfry had finally been completed and all that remained was to place the bell in the tower. But the doña María was too heavy. Unable to complete this colossal task, the Poblanos retired to their homes in dismay. The following morning, the sound of the doña María announcing early mass convinced everyone that Puebla's namesakes – the angels – had swept down from their heavenly abode and lifted the bell into place as the city slept. The pious story of the hanging of the doña María serves not only to underscore Puebla's eighteenth-century status as the second most important city in New Spain, but also effaces the efforts of countless indigenous tributaries who participated in the city's construction. In reality, it was not the angels who lifted the bell into the cathedral belfry, but rather the industrious and very human indios from neighboring Cholula. Obliged to provide indios de servicio (day laborers) to Puebla, the Cholulteca had manufactured a ramp, raising the enormous doña María into place using a complicated system of ropes and pulleys. The native Cholulteca had, in fact, been intimately involved in the new Spanish city since Puebla's founders broke ground on land taken from Cholula's jurisdiction. Within twenty years, the Cholulteca had settled into their own barrio outside the city's traza (downtown), a neighborhood known alternately as el barrio de Santiago Cholultecapan and el barrio de Santiago de los Cholultecas. This paper examines the barrio's sixteenth century development, the naming of its indigenous leaders by Puebla's cabildo (municipal government), and its relationship to both the Spanish city and its home community in nearby Cholula. Developing along the banks of the Rio San Francisco where Cholulteca laborers had strategically settled on the road leading to Cholula, the location was officially recognized in 1550. The satellite community quickly became known for the richness of its maguey fields and particularly for the quality of its pulque. The barrio also established superior workshops of sculptors, especially of Santiago images, and by 1790 had earned a reputation for its quality butchers and masons. Why of the numerous indigenous barrios in Puebla was Santiago Cholultecapan so successful? I suggest that Cholula's proximity to Puebla and its long history as a successful agricultural center and marketplace contributed to the barrio's flourishing and booming industries. Unlike other indios in Puebla, the Santiago indios enjoyed the protection of their indigenous leaders from nearby Cholula, for if the Poblanos mistreated them they could take recourse in their home cabildo. Had Cholula and Puebla not been jointly governed from 1531 to 1538, nor shared boundaries, this neighborhood would not have developed into such an important site. Today it exists still, seven blocks southeast of the Puebla cathedral, where in 1732, the industrious Cholulteca raised the enormous doña Mará to her current resting place in the southern belfry.

This dissertation examines the political and spiritual implications of the Franciscan presence in sixteenth-century Cholollan, renamed San Pedro Cholula by the Spaniards, reading the friars' evangelizing project in light of the Order's foundational missionary mandate, its millenarian tendencies, its 1517 Reform, and its desire to replenish the numbers of faithful leaving the Church with the advent of Protestantism. Based on printed Franciscan chronicles and materials from municipal, judicial, notarial, state, and national archives in Mexico and Spain, this project provides the first detailed study of the Franciscan appropriation of this Mesoamerican sacred site. Because the Sons of St. Francis were the only Order in colonial Cholula, their efforts resulted in a very particular Franciscan charism more than a general early modern Mediterranean Catholicism. The Franciscan establishment in Cholollan officially began in late 1528 or early 1529 with the arrival of guardian fray Alonso Xu�rez. Given its centuries-old sacred legacy, its identity as a site of spiritual and thus political legitimation, and its numerous teocalli, or indigenous temples, the polity would prove irresistible to the Franciscans. Because of the elaborate daily and seasonal rituals performed by the native Cholulteca, as well as the similarities between certain Nahua rites and Catholic sacraments, the friars believed they had discovered a people perfectly poised to receive and internalize Christianity. Re-naming the altepetl San Pedro Cholula after St. Peter, the first Pope, the mendicants harkened back to Rome and the days of the Primitive Church, when Christianity existed in its purest form. Indeed, the friars believed that Cholula would become a "new Rome" in New Spain, a spiritual center across the Atlantic from which they would launch their evangelization of central Mexico. Ironically, Franciscan efforts to re-imagine Cholula's past into a Catholic present ensured the continuity of its centuries-old spiritual and political dominance in the region - rivaling even the recently-founded Spanish city of Puebla - albeit as a Nahua-Christian city.

Immigrants arrive in the U.S. with better than average health which declines over time. Access to clinical preventive services can prevent or delay some of that decline. This analysis documents barriers in access to preventive services for recent Mexican immigrants, longer-term Mexican immigrants, and U.S. born adults of Mexican. Contrary to political debates about Mexican immigrants overusing health services, the analysis finds that immigrants in the U.S. for less than 10 years were the least likely to receive preventive care services, even after adjusting for other predictors. Longer-term immigrants were more similar to U.S.-born Mexican Americans in preventive service use rates, who in turn had lower rates than U.S.-born non-Latino whites. Demographics, socioeconomic status and other resources attenuated but did not eliminate all inequities. Among Mexican immigrants, monolingual Spanish speaking immigrants were least likely to have had appropriate preventive services. The persistent gap in preventive service use across all subgroups of adults of Mexican origin suggests potential structural barriers to receiving appropriate care.