The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

Slave Religion and Rise of the Free Peasantry 51
religion, which alone could contain the lazy and ignorant population.
"We have to return to Catholicism its empire, organize once
again the Christian family . . . re-establish the right of property . . .
and create a new permanent army" (Arboleda, 1972:207). Years before,
slave owners had excused themselves from Christianizing their
slaves, whom they called too ignorant. Now, one of their leading
ideologues was making an analogous argument against bourgeois democracy
by claiming that the ignorant masses could live in harmony
only if they were Christians.
The unity of hacienda and chapel had been severed. The exslaves
retreated into the adjoining jungle to form a self-subsistent population
of independent cultivators, free to create their own understanding
of Christianity. Christianity, which landlords like Arboleda depended
upon to contain the masses, was not weakening; rather, its
folk component was being liberated. The Church's latent function
had always been to coordinate distinct castes and classes around a
common ideological basis in which mysticism and official doctrine
congealed. The religion of the Mysteries, the miracles, the spirits of
the ancestors and the saints, together with the fear of the maleficium,
had always held the souls of the blacks. And now, just as the
landlords' perception of the Church's function was changing, so was
that of the blacks, who no longer had to submit to their masters'
God in their masters' chapels as part of their holy family.
From its inception and not only when the Jesuits ran it, Japio was
as much a ceremonial as a production center. Indeed, its chapel was
the center of the vice-parish of Our Lady of Loreto. As large as the
owner's "big house," it was built of brick and tile, unlike all the
other hacienda buildings, which were built of adobe and thatch.
With stunningly jeweled and brocaded saints, silver crowns, and
gold and coral necklaces, the value of the chapel and religious ornaments
amounted to 15 percent of the hacienda's total capital, including
slaves.
In 1753 the administrator had been instructed to take particular
care with religious observances—to compel instruction, prayer, and
singing each evening. In 1830 the visiting priest was contracted to
give mass once a month, to perform baptisms, funeral services, and
marriages for the slaves, and to undertake confession and first communion
annually. He received a yearly stipend of 70 pesos, which
was two-thirds of the administrator's, and a per capita fee for delivering
the sacraments. After the uprising of the early 18408 he ceased to
come.
After abolition, Sergio Arboleda contested the right of the Church