The model of creolization among Atlantic people explored in Sidbury and Canizares-Esguerra's article "Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic" has several aspects which are of relevance to Catarina Álvares Paraguaçu of Bahia, one of the fifteen people highlighted in Racine’s book, The Human Tradition in the Atlantic World, 1500–1850. First, like Africa, Bahia was dominated by small political states, which were frequently at war, and which did not pass down land as personal wealth, and were therefore willing to incorporate useful outsides into their polity.[1] Paraguaçu was the daughter of a local Tupinamba chief, and was given to Portuguese adventurer Diogo Álvares when he proved himself a competent warrior in order to seal the alliance.
Other aspects of Sidbury’s model of creolization include travel between Atlantic countries, racial intermarriage with the ascent of mixed race descendents to leadership positions,[2] and the role of religion as a means of integrating “far-flung and unrelated indigenous communities into a common global discourse.”[3] He notes that “Catholicism has always manifested itself as one form or another of the local religion,” giving as an example, the female descendents of the last Incan emperor (a divine being directly descended from the Sun), marrying relatives of Jesuit founder Ignacio of Loyola, and Cardinal-nephew Francisco de Borja. This integrated Incan royalty into what might be termed the ruling family of Christ; the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Paraguaçu accompanied her husband, Diogo Álvares to Portugal, where she was feted by Portuguese nobility, baptized, formally married in an elaborate ceremony presided over by a bishop, and returned to Bahia where her children "established the most illustrious families of seventeenth-century Bahia.”[4] Where Incan nobility “commissioned paintings connecting Catholic sacred, global narratives,” and built a chapel “decorated with paintings of local indigenous Catholic cults,”[5] Paraguaçu commissioned a chapel honoring the Virgin Mary, after her return from Portugal. This chapel was built after she experienced a recurring dream in which “a woman came to her, claiming to have been seized by the Indians, begging to be saved." Search parties were organized which found nothing amiss, but when the vision kept recurring, a search of indigenous homes turned up a carved image of the Virgin Mary, which had been tossed in a corner.[6] The face was that of the women in her dreams. This sequence of events was interpreted as showing that Indigenes "were capable of replicating in the New World the religious orthodoxy" of the Old, and that “Christian Indian women could be held up as models for Indians and Europeans alike for their debout, chaste, monogamous lifestyles," and this story has become part of Brazil's founding myth.[7].
[1] James Sidbury and Jorge Canizares-Esguerra "Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic," The William and Mary Quarterly, 68, no. 2 (April 2011):185. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.68.2.0181 (accessed June 16, 2012).
[2] Ibid., 183.
[3] Sidbury 196.
[4] Karen Racine, Human Tradition in the Atlantic World, 1500–1850, The (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2010):6, http://lib.myilibrary.com?ID=292261 (accessed June 16, 2012).
[5] Ibid.
[6] Racine, 8.
[7] Ibid, 11.
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