San Miguel, Maní

1550-1600

Name(s) currently unknown

Maní, Yucatán, MEX

This expansive monastic complex was built in the city of Maní, a Maya town in Mexico. As with many 16th-century architectural projects, it was built by indigenous people under the supervision of Franciscan friars.

The church at Maní was one of several major monasteries in the Yucatán built in the 16th century. San Miguel, armed for battle and carrying a sword, is placed prominently on the façade. At left, the open barrel vault of the open chapel is visible. Friars carried this architectural form, developed in Central Mexico to accommodate large groups of new converts, to the Yucatán and other regions of New Spain. The interior of the church, like so many 16th-century churches in New Spain, was painted with murals of religious scenes.

Franciscan friars oversaw the building of San Miguel at Maní.

The monastery of San Miguel was situated next to a natural cenote, a limestone sinkhole where water collected. Cenotes were common geographic features in the Yucatán, and the indigenous residents, the Maya, believed they could be portals to otherworld.

Maní occupies an important place in the early history of Spanish America, as a site where indigenous and European values tragically clashed. In 1562, Franciscans, led by their zealous provincial head, fray Diego de Landa, spearheaded an anti-idolatry campaign among the Maya. Unfolding in and around San Miguel, it was marked by harsh interrogations (some 4,500 Maya were tortured and 158 died as a result). It culminated in a spectacular auto de fe(a ceremony of sentence and punishment by the Church) held in Maní’s main square in July, where the accused were flogged and “idols” were put to the torch.

This architectural complex shows how religious buildings and practices were adapted for indigenous worship in Spanish America. The open chapel represents one innovation developed in the 16th century for indigenous communities. In the Yucatán, the location of sacred Christian structures near cenotes, as is the case here, is another strategic innovation. Because many Maya considered cenotes sacred places, the conjunction of church and cenote would have resonated with spiritual meanings that intertwined older, local beliefs with those introduced by friars.

Jorge Pérez de Lara. All rights reserved; no reproduction without express permission of the photographer.

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Bretos, Miguel. 1987. Arquitectura y arte sacro en Yucatán, 1545-1823. Mérida: Producción Editorial Dante.

Clendinnen, Inga. 1987. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edgerton, Samuel. 2001. Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial Mexico. Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press.

Vanoye Carlo, Ana Raquel. 2013. "Sobre la historia de la arquitectura de los conventos del norte de la península de Yucatán: desde la llegada de los Franciscanos a Campech en 1544 hasta la construcción del convento de Santa Clara de Asís en 1567." Fronteras de la Historia 18 (2): 213-246.