Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

In Hall of Mirrors, Laura Lewis aims to depict the institutionalization of caste hierarchies in colonial New Spain in order to highlight its inherent contradictions. Ostensibly (and legally), New Spain’s society was separated into two groups—Indians and Spaniards. Africans and all racially mixed peoples (primarily castas) were clustered with the Spaniards, who enjoyed authority over everyone. Of course, that was the ideal. The reality was that colonial blacks, natives, and Spaniards had their own distinct perceptions and uses of power.Lewis selects witchcraft as the instrument to explore the functioning of caste and its paradox of power. Here witchcraft is taken to mean some sort of diabolical activity. It is the province of Indians and appears to include most forms of hechicería, magic, and nahualism. The notion of witchcraft itself hearkens back to the Spaniards’ Judeo-Christian background, and they were quick to blame untoward events on the devil. Never fully comprehending traditional culture, they attributed the Indians’ practice of witchcraft to otherwise inexplicable occurrences. Whether Indians considered themselves witches is not certain. It is known that native specialists were well versed in the various therapeutic and toxic properties of North American flora and fauna, they used these substances when called upon, and they had been mediating the supernatural long before the arrival of the Spaniards and Africans.In the colonial era, supernatural specialists were most often called upon to cast or counteract spells, perform divinations, and concoct love potions of one kind or another. Hall of Mirrors is dense with examples of Indians’ expertise in witchcraft. It is particularly relevant that Indians were not subject to prosecution by the Holy Office of the Inquisition; by default, they may well have been the only members of colonial society safely able to engage in witchcraft.But Indians were just one aspect of the caste structure: blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos were essential to the mutual articulation of power between Spaniards and natives. Indeed, the real subject of the book is caste itself, which was determined by lineage and the vagaries of culture. With caste as leitmotiv, Lewis finds a great divide in societal structure and practice, which then frames her discussion. On one extreme one finds what she refers to as sanctioned behavior, which favored Spaniards, subordinated natives, and preferenced castas as go-betweens who extended Spanish influence. On the other extreme was the unsanctioned behavior of Indians and their facility with witchcraft. In this circumstance, castas affiliated with natives and ultimately compromised Spanish authority. But power was reciprocal and anyone’s prerogative.Thus Lewis finds individuals in all social groups who made recourse to witchcraft to gain power over someone else, whether it was to attract a lover or recover stray cattle. The means by which the goal was accomplished entailed engaging casta intermediaries who sided with one group or the other to promote their advantage. She also highlights the stereotypes: Indians and their incapacidad, their passivity and femininity, their proclivity to the subversive; blacks and blackness were associated with bellicosity, violence, and the devil itself. Men tended to form pacts with the devil, and women were inclined to diabolic service. The product is a colonial litany of pejorative labels for just about everyone, if it can be said that casta categories were as sharply defined and rigid as indicated. The caste hierarchy served to keep each group in place, and judging by the continuity of patterned activities, it surely worked.The supreme value of Hall of Mirrors, though, rests in its array of examples that afford a rich, textured view of life in and around Mexico City. It concerns primarily ordinary people and their relationships, their apparent concern about love, sex, and vitality, abuse, personal and material loss, Catholicism, and so many other things. These stories are a welcome complement to an already very interesting book.