Unveiling the Virgin: Maya Marianism on the Eve of the 1712 Tzeltal Revolt

Abstract In 1711, the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared to a Maya couple in the small town of Santa Marta, before wondrously transforming into a miraculous image that began to draw pilgrims from across highland Chiapas. Presuming fraud, church officials confiscated the image and arrested the Maya seers. Just weeks later, another Marian apparition, with a radical message calling for an end to Spanish colonialism, catalyzed the Tzeltal Revolt, one of the largest Indigenous rebellions in colonial New Spain before 1750. Modern scholarship mostly leaves the Santa Marta episode in the interpretive shadow of the Tzeltal Revolt, considering it in passing as a marker of rising discontent. In contrast, I examine the Santa Marta devotion in its own right, and not simply as a rebellious warm-up for the Tzeltal Revolt. This analysis illuminates three key factors in the dynamic formation of eighteenth-century Mesoamerican Marianism and Indigenous Christianities: religious exchanges and dialogues between distinct Maya ethnolinguistic groups, Nahua societies, and Spanish missionaries; gender complementarity and female religious leadership; and struggles for collective renewal and rebirth in the face of Spanish colonialism.