The Santo Niño de Atocha is not in fact a saint, but rather an image of the child Christ that has developed its own extensive following in Spain, Latin America, and the southwestern United States. To chart the development of its cult is to embark on an investigation into the powerful coaction of local faith and symbolic imagery. The Santo Niño has its roots in Spanish colonial imagery, and, in the way of many traditional Catholic images, was brought to the New World in order to inculcate Spanish values. However, its meteoric rise in popularity during the 18th and 19th centuries occurred alongside the local effort to create a unique Mexican identity in the late colonial and early national period (1750-1850). The story of the Santo Niño embodies the extremely variable nature of images in the context of popular devotion, and its reinvention from colonial icon to a symbol of local faith, with its own regional mystic history, represents the continuous effort by Mexican families to create new ways of relating to the sacred in a changing political and cultural landscape.
There are several aspects of the history of the Santo Niño that warrant its further examination in the context of this course, and I have been guided in my investigation by the following questions:
♣ How does the changing nature of popular faith in the 18th and 19th centuries reflect a continuation of the themes we have been examining, regarding the active role of images in personal religious engagement?
♣ What are the factors—political, historical (Catholic/colonial vs. local), social, and/or economic—that led to the development of this cult? In other words, how does religious veneration in this case reflect social, political, and demographic conditions?
♣ How can we benefit from close examination of the popular devotion to an image that over the centuries has been an animate and participatory protagonist in shaping local and regional history and social self-identity?
While the image of the Santo Niño de Atocha has probably been in Zacatecas since the mid 16th century, its early history is fairly obscure, with none of the individual attention that characterizes its more recent adoration. The Holy Child was originally attached to a statue of Our Lady of Atocha, an image promoted by the Dominicans and probably brought by that order to Zacatecas when they founded a monastery in 1604. The earliest reference to the image’s local veneration comes from the 1664 inventory of Lorenzo Ruiz Tostado, a miner in Zacatecas, which lists a private chapel in Tostado’s mining estate, where there was “a statue of Our Lady of Atocha with a silver crown” (Pescador 69). The image of her child is first identified in a letter written by Bizente de Medina, the mayordomo of a local confraternity created to venerate the Santo Cristo de los Plateros (also known as the Señor de los Plateros), to the bishop of Guadalajara. Attached to the letter, in which de Medina requested a permit to build a chapel honoring the Señor de los Plateros, was an inventory of the images under the brotherhood’s custody, one of which was an image of Our Lady of Atocha with her child.
A parish was subsequently created in which the Señor de los Plateros, a local crucifix with a miraculous reputation, was the principal religious icon. In many ways, the devotion to the Señor de los Plateros reflects an early model of the local relationship to Catholic devotional images, characteristic of the mid- to late-colonial period, that acts as a counterpoint to the homegrown version of local faith that would later produce the cult of the Santo Niño. The confraternity represented by de Medina was typical of the period. Headed by the regional Spanish elites, many such organizations existed in Mexico, promoting the miraculous reputations of their own devotional images and providing social frameworks meant to engage immigrant families from the same regions in Spain. These confraternities embodied a continuation of the Spanish effort to culture Iberian Catholicism in the New World, with the aim of appearing as local social benefactors, as well as religious leaders in the vein of traditional Spanish devotions, by promoting specific images within their region that nonetheless originated in Spain or were created in the style of Spanish images. While secondary to the Señor de los Plateros, the image of Our Lady of Atocha and her child were popular among Spanish colonials, and the statue of the Holy Child during this period was a clear signal of Iberian Catholic traditions and the colonial project; the Santo Niño de Atocha was then dressed in the royal fashion, with a crown, globe and scepter.
This image of the Santo Niño, as well as its role in local religious life, underwent a profound change in the following century. By the 19th century, the social leadership of the local Spanish elites was in decline, and the religious symbols associated with colonialism had waned in popularity. This fluctuating political background effectively enabled an adaptive approach to orthodox images, which saw the integration of increased aspects of local culture into the model of Catholic devotional figures. Devotion to the Señor de los Plateros and Our Lady of Atocha, which the Spanish had long promoted, diminished along with the authority of their advocates, while the reputation of the Santo Niño grew among Fresnillo’s working class, especially mine workers, many of whom were recent transplants in the region.
Several aspects of the image of the Santo Niño made it well-suited to take on a prominent role in this landscape. The statue could be detached from the image of his Our Lady of Atocha, and during the Christmas and Candlemas celebrations, the image of the Holy Child alone was used in both Plateros and Fresnillo, thanks to collaboration between the parish priests of La Purificacion in Fresnillo and the confraternity in Plateros. This bi-local movement may have contributed to a local lore that portrayed the Santo Niño as a wanderer. Another aspect of the Santo Niño’s construction that may have facilitated a sense of its animation is its nature as an imágen de vestir. A common style in the first few generations of colonials images, imágenes de vestir are sculpted images that are designed to be dressed and adorned. Although some scholars have connected this practice to pre-Columbian religious traditions, the act of clothing important religious images has an extensive history in Europe, and was consistent with the largely imported nature of these early colonial images. That said, the act of dressing these lifelike images would certainly have contributed to the blurring of the boundaries between an inanimate objects and a living manifestation of the divine. In fact, the 1585 Third Mexican Council attempted to limit the practice, in order to decrease the likelihood that indigenous locals would regard the imported Catholic images as living idols.
The enhanced significance of the Santo Niño during this particular period thus coincided with a dramatic transformation in local religious life. Several factors during the 1830s and 1840s, including the decline of Spanish leadership, the accompanying crisis of the Spanish-derived local model of Catholicism, and the growing influence of liberal and centrist regimes in regional affairs, undermined any popular devotion to traditional Catholic icons in Mexico. This changing political and religious landscape set the stage for the rise of a more ambiguous religious image. Images less definitely entrenched in this colonial history, such as the Santo Niño, which had been relatively anonymous in the peak colonial era, presented an alternative mode of engaging with Catholic images. Conflict between religious orders and the Church and an increasing secular Mexican state actually liberated such traditional images to develop their followings as expressions of Catholic folk religion that reinvigorated certain colonial images. The development of the cult of the Santo Niño in this period represents one of various ways that sacrality was transferred from systems of religious worship that were understood to be entrenched in the colonial tradition, to locally-based models of veneration.
Indeed, in the 1830s dozens of retablos began to accumulate in Plateros to thank the Santo Niño de Atocha as his reputation flourished throughout the region. The parish priests in Fresnillo displayed the retablos as a sign of Fresnillo’s recently developed status as the region’s economic heart. This increased veneration remained strikingly absent from Church records, demarcating the cult as a homegrown phenomenon. As late as the 1790s local records failed to describe the Santo Niño as an important image, or even as a religious icon separate from the Lady of Atocha, and the Señor de los Plateros remained the most prominent figure at the main altar in the chapel. To the local faithful, though, it was the Santo Niño who received credit for divine interventions on their behalf.
A significant milestone in the history of the Santo Niño can be assigned to 1848, with the publication of the Nueva Novena. The Novena established the autonomous sacred reputation of the Santo Niño, documenting his miraculous authority entirely separate from Our Lady of Atocha. In addition to dichotomizing the reputation of the icon from that of his mother, the Novena distanced the image and the colonial presence it had originally represented, portraying the Santo Niño as a traveling youth, an image that would have resonated with the local working class far more than his original stylings as a miniature royal.
The Novena was a fitting medium to further establish the cult of the Santo Niño. Increasing opposition between ecclesiastical authorities and the state had created a tense vacuum in place of effective religious leadership. Local devotional patterns in the mid-18th century were therefore closely tied to the dispersion of novenas, a series of devotional prayers repeated for nine successive days or weeks that were frequently dedicated to a specific angel, saint, or Marian title of the Virgin Mary. The Nueva Novena del Santo Niño listed nine miracles performed by the image, corroborating its miraculous reputation, and provided a formal method of imploring favors or intercessions from the Holy Child. In doing so, it significantly expanded a previously informal cult of local devotion.
Just as the Novena was an ideal medium by which to revitalize and disseminate the miraculous reputation of the Santo Niño, so too did the image and its reputed history of intercession make for an extremely compelling object of devotion. The Santo Niño, largely kept on the sidelines during the colonial period, was able to develop a unique reputation that reflected the changing political and economic conditions in the early national period. In contrast with colonial religious icons, which performed miracles that contributed to the order favored by the Spanish elites—which were interpreted to provide support for socioeconomic and racial hierarchies under the colonial order, or to emphasize the authority of the church—the miracles attributed to the Santo Niño in the Nueva Novena distinctly appealed to working class Mexicans in Fresnillo. The miracles in the novena included freedom for those unfairly imprisoned [from Pescador: the recipients of the Santo Niño’s help are individuals who have been deprived of ideal original conditions (health, freedom, safe environment) in the interaction with threatening and modernizing social spaces (the mining technology implemented by British companies, the national and liberal legal system, the diseases and conditions associated with sexual behavior, street violence… I need to look up what some of the miracles actually were!]. While colonial crucifixes might be approached by a local employer on behalf of their household, the Santo Niño in the novena was always petitioned by the affected individuals, a clear reflection of its role as a popular figure in the wake of diminishing Church authority.
The story of the Santo Niño is in many ways an encapsulation of a larger narrative that describes the complex renegotiation of popular faith in Mexico. Although the Santo Niño, like most of the religious images that still populate the fabric of Mexican faith, has its roots in the colonial introduction of an imported Iberian Catholicism, its cult was not imposed on the laity by colonial authorities. Rather, it represents the dynamic refashioning of a traditional icon according to the needs of a local community in a tenuous political and economic climate.