The Mexican baroque (Part II)

Last week, I began to talk with Helena Iara about the Mexican Baroque, hoping that reciting Sor Juana's "First Dream" would help her get to sleep.  In fact, I was so successful that she and I didn't have the chance to complete the conversation and get to the part that actually has to do with babies; she was so entranced by the phrase "me corazón deshecho entre tus manos" that she fell right asleep.

So a couple of afternoons ago, I sat with her in the hammock in the afternoon sun, seeing if I could find something in my favorite Mexican poetess and philosopher that might appeal to a baby girl -- or more accurately, an interest in Sor Juana that I could project onto what might be interesting to a baby girl.  So we talked about a text that has gotten short shrift in Sor Juana scholarship, the Carta Atenagórica, one of the most unexpected and revolutionary theological texts I've read.

I'd already told Helena Iara something about the portuguese Jesuit theologian Antônio Vieira, weeks ago when I tried to draw a stretched parallel between Amazonian philosophy and a babies longing for constant new perspectives on the world.  Vieira, the leader of many of the Portuguese missionaries, worked hard to replace this Amerindian way of thought with Christianity.  I'm not sure whether this history of imperialist theology was behind Sor Juana's decision to attack Vieira, but she certainly chose as her target a thinker much loved by the church hierarchy, and she must have known it would get her into trouble.

Vieira's Sermon on the Holy Spirit, in which he tried to establish what was the greatest fineza, or virtue, of God, had made quite an impact in Mexico.  He listed all of God's virtues and, using a method reminiscent of St. Thomas Aquinas, tried to establish which was the greatest virtue.  Truth is, I don't remember much of the Sermon, beyond that it struck me as conventional and boring, so I mostly talked with Helena about Sor Juana's extremely unconventional and unorthodox response.  God's greatest virtue, she argued, is to do nothing.  For by doing nothing, God forces human beings to act, and shows us how powerful ad capable we are.

Even today, such an argument sounds heretical, but in 17th century Mexico, it was also revolutionary.  The Spanish colonial system rested on the co-dependence of patron and client, where each person or group won its recognition and social position from his patron above him, while the patrons depended on their clients for food, wealth, and military power.  God stood at the very top of this pyramid of patronage, guaranteeing the power and position of kings and priests.

Sor Juana based he argument on what she saw as good child-rearing: often, parents have to do nothing, so that their children can become autonomous adults.  If their parents always do everything for their kids, the children will always be passive, robbed of the agency and protagonism that makes us human.  By putting this argument on a theological plane, she showed that traditional theology and politics had turned humans into passive babies, incapable of independent thought and action.  It was a powerful critique of both church and state.  Though most current studies of Sor Juana focus on the fact that the archbishop of Mexico prohibited her from writing more theology because she was a woman, the content of her thought was just as dangerous as its author's gender.

I don't know many babies.  Before Helena was born, I had never liked being around them.  It seems, however, that they are, in fact, much less passive than the clients in a patron-client system.  Their agency is mediated trough their eyes, their screams, their cooing, and their loosely controlled movements but they still have desire, which clientelism robbed from just about everyone under Spanish colonial rule.  What Sor Juana condemned was not being a baby, but being treated as a baby, and how it turned people into something that wasn't even human at all.