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Mortified but Incorruptible: The Radical Black Mysticism of St. Martín de Porres

On November 3, 1639 at the Basílica del Santísimo Rosario del Convento de Santo

Domingo in Lima, Perú, a small crowd gathered around the bed of the dying Fray Martín de

Porres.1 Martín, a 59 year old mulato lay brother with the Orden de Predicadores – the

Dominicans – had been ill for some time and, resigned that this affliction would take his life,

called for the Viaticum, or the serving of the Eucharist during one’s last rites. A choir of monks

chanted the Credo, filling the vignette of this death scene with a soundtrack of Catholic devotion

and assurance of eternal life in Christ. As they arrived upon the phrase homo factus est (“and was

made human”), in reference to the Incarnation, the crucifix clutched in the frail hands of Fray

Martín slipped to ground, a perfunctory percussive punctuation irrupting into the sonic ambiance

of the plainchant to mark his passage out of material life.2 But the rhythmic pitter pat of the

falling cross was not a terminating coda of Martín’s significance, but a mere caesura in the

antiphonic unfolding of events reverberating around Martín, a symphonic performance that

began with his earthly ministry in Lima and continued without skipping a beat after his death.

While serving at the Convento, Martín gained acclaim throughout Limeño society – particularly

African and Andean populations – for his extraordinary piety and humility, healing powers,

bilocation, levitation, and boundless charity displayed towards all God’s creation.

This paper uses the life and death of Martín de Porres to explore the place of the black

body and the construction of casta within the political and religious imagination of Baroque

Lima. It begins by describing the political, cultural, and religious context of the Virreinato del

1 Martín’s surname appears in records alternately as “de Porres” and “de Porras.” As he has been canonized under the former spelling, I have used that version throughout this paper. When Spanish sources are quoted in this paper, I have translated them into English and included the original Spanish in the footnotes.2 A. Garcia-Ribera, St. Martín de Porres: The "Little Stories" and the Semiotics of Culture, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995, 4.

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Perú and the growth of the African slave trade along the Pacific. Next, Martín’s life and

experiences will be fitted within this milieu. A sustained dialog exists between theoretical

perspectives and archival documents to provide a textured and multivalent reading of these

accounts and better explain the process of how Martín’s society constructed him as a racialized

being. It will be shown that the black body in Lima lay suspended between overlapping and

articulating spheres of sovereignty and cultural significance, emanating from legal and

ecclesiastical authorities that bound the black body within discourses of subjugation and

exploitation to varying degrees.

Disturbing this, however, were the tropes associated with mystical Catholicism growing

in popularity throughout Ibero-America with the growing fervor and devotion of the Inquisition.

This section of the paper will examine the significance of the body as a site upon which God

could directly touch the human soul, as well as analyze the mystical consciousness from the

perspectives of religious phenomenology. In conclusion, the initial cult surrounding Martín’s

fame following his 1639 death will be examined for the ways in which his racialized body took

on greater dimensions of significance for Lima’s multiracial community of Catholics. After a

brief metaphysical exploration of death, the mediation of religious understandings and rituals

surrounding being and nonbeing will demystify the seeming-irony of how a dark-skinned

mulatto could rise to fame and sanctity in a slave society fixated upon skin color.

This paper argues that metaphysical and ethereal consciousness has been a dialectical tool

of disruption and sustenance for the experience of blackness throughout Western modernity.

Despite the political-juridical attempt to stabilize the categories of race and the behaviors of

racialized people, Catholic mysticism represented an uncontrollable variable that provided an

escape hatch through which Martín found existential freedom from the corporeal limits of his

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society, linking him to the beginning emergence of a radical black tradition in the annals of the

African Diaspora.

The Crisis of Spanish Catholic Anthropology

In 1542 the Virreinato del Perú was established in consequence of Francisco Pizarro’s

military campaign against the Incas, following the pattern established by Hernán Cortés’

conquest of the Aztecs and 1535 establishment of the Virreinato de La Nueva España. The

newly-discovered Americas and their indigenous inhabitants opened up a new discursive realm

in Spain for questions regarding bodily sovereignty of human persons. By one reckoning, the

glory of the Spanish crown demanded tribute and vassalage from Andeans, a relationship born

out of pure economic valuation. However, with the Spanish Inquisition coming into its fore,

indigenous Andeans also represented pagan peoples possessing souls in need of salvation and

conversion to Catholicism. While equally paternalistic in its view of the Indians, Catholic modes

of understanding mitigated against a purely economic valuation of Andean humanity. In the

mezcla of the Spanish conquest of the New World, tethered to both earthly and celestial

ambitions, the encomienda system emerged as a shared space of compromised power between

these two polarities of sovereignty.

Encomienda, from the Spanish verb encomendar meaning “to entrust,” was a system of

vassalage in which a tribute of labor was extracted from Amerindians in “exchange” for

instruction and education in Catholic catechism. While Spanish political sovereignty enveloped

that of the Inca Empire, on an atomized level the encomienda was not slavery in a juridical

sense, as encomendados were considered free and not the expendable property of their Spanish

masters. Despite this, the treatment meted against Andeans under encomienda proved cruel, and

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this violent juxtaposition destabilized medieval Spanish Catholic anthropology, catalyzing a new

round of questions regarding the ontology of humanity and its resulting politico-ethics. What

kinds of living beings can be called human? And what does the label “human” protect should

humans treat other humans?

The Valladolid Debate of 1550-51 tried to sort out these questions into a legible

cartography of humanity through a showcase of two oppositional views regarding Indians.

Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas argued for the natural liberty of

Indians on the basis that, as beings with rationality, they shared in equal humanity with the

Spanish. As he explained, “[t]hey are not ignorant, inhuman or bestial,” but “had estates rightly

organized, that is, prudently administered with excellent laws, religion, and institutions.”3

Opposing this view was humanist scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who believed that the

boundary between human and animal was porous and overlapping, with Indians inhabiting the

interstice as Aristotle’s “natural slave.” As deficient in rationality, Andeans were not covered

under the full protections of Spanish subjecthood. While the debate itself was declared a double

victory, it initiated a line of questioning that eventually brought about a weakening of the

encomienda system and a Spanish emphasis on protecting indigenous populations. At the same

time, Valladolid’s interstitial category of human-animal opened up a space into which African

laborers could be situated within the economic-anthropological mosaic of Spanish new world

colonization. Africans, by Spanish account, also lacked rationality, were deficient in written law

and civilization, and were Muslim or pagan peoples requiring Christianization.

3 B de las Casas, qtd. in A. Garcia-Ribera, St. Martín de Porres: The "Little Stories" and the Semiotics of Culture. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995),49

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Epidermalized Necropolitical Technologies Deployed Against Black Bodies

Within one generation following Vallodolid, African slavery in Lima increased both

numerically and in economic value, with the first traffic in black bodies arriving in the city in

1573. Prior to this, enslaved Africans in Lima had been purchased in other parts of the Caribbean

or South America and brought to Perú with their masters. With Philip II’s annexation of Portugal

to the Spanish Crown in 1580, Spain became the largest trader in black bodies and Lima saw an

amplified upsurge in the arrivals of enslaved Africans. By 1614, Afro-descended peoples

comprised 40% of Lima’s population, and by 1650 the white population of the Virreinato that

numbered 70,000 formed the minority compared to the 60,000 blacks, 30,000 mulattoes, and

eight million indigenous Andeans that called Perú home.4 The distinctions between white, black,

and Indian were blurred by the increasing numbers of “indeterminate” peoples resulting from the

genetic intermingling of Perú’s population. The elaboration of racial categorization known as

casta reveals the anxiety and preoccupation placed upon visual identity by Spanish law.

Perúvian historian Fernando Romero defined casta as “a hierarchical system of control in

which each group is assigned a social category that depends, in the majority of cases, on its

ethnic origin and its religion.”5 Precise measurements and arrangements of racial admixtures

formed the castas: a blanco and a negro formed a mulato, a negro and an indio created a zambo,

and a child born to a blanco and an indio would be called a mestizo. Still finer gradations and

categories emerged as the biogenetic productions of Perú created “new” human realities that

outpaced the legal-linguistic grasp of Spanish authorities, such as morisco denoting the offspring

of a mulato and a blanco. Fernando Romero’s list of Perúvian casta categories included mestizo

prieto, negro chino, mulato, mulato claro, mulato oscuro, mulato pardo, mulato-lobo, terceron, 4 F. Romero, “Papel de los descendientes de africanos en el desarrollo economico-social del Perú,” (Lima: Univ. de Ciencias Humanas, 1980), 1-85 Ibid., 3. “La organizacion en castas es un sistema jerarquico de control en el que a cada grupo se le asigna una categoria social que depende, en la mayoria de los casos, de su origen etnico y de su religion.”

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cuarteron, zambinga, chino, rechino, chino prieto, chino claro, zambo, zambo claro, zambo

prieto, among others, descriptions capturing both the invisible (blood) and the visible (color).6

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the black body metonymically grew to signify

specific types of labor value that the Spanish found better-suited to certain economic ambitions

than Andean bodies contained. In 1643, a councilor in Nueva Granada (modern day Colombia),

which served as an intermediate market for slaves between the Middle Passage and the Black

Pacific, stressed the physical superiority of blacks in comparison to the nature of ‘miserable’

Indians, basing his views upon the fact that Africans were “naturally so robust and strong.”7

Another civil authority from Cartagena mused that “Indians were not capable of so much work”

compared to the motive power of black bodies. A taxonomy of labor demands and the bodies

fitted for those demands developed in Perú, with Africans being used for agricultural and urban

labor predominantly, and Andeans being used to work the silver mines due to their supposed-

natural acclamation to the higher terrain.

Rachel Sarah O’Toole reports that one anonymous Perúvian chronicler declared that

“blacks [were] stronger than Spaniards” and as such, always performed the most arduous work. 8

Slavery in Lima took place within an urban environment, and here the enslaved worked

alongside the population of free blacks, multiracial individuals, and Andeans in performing many

similar tasks. Jobs including herbal healers, veterinaries, nurses, pharmacists, bleeders-surgeons,

barbers, hair curlers, embroiderers, fine cobblers, tailors, musicians for hire, dance teachers, 6 Ibid., 2.7 H. C. Feldman uses the term “Black Pacific” to “describe a newly imagined diasporic community on the periphery of the Black Atlantic,” following Paul Gilroy’s book The Black Atlantic (1993) that both “challenged the public to imagine a cultural world that connects Africa, Europe, and the Americas” while leaving “uncharted the somewhat different experience of countries in the Black Pacific like Perú.” For enslaved Africans along the Pacific, the Middle Passage was just the first part of a long arduous journey that continued over land from Colombia, Panamá , or the Rio Platense region of Argentina through the Andes to the coast. Black Rhythms of Perú: Reviving African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ Press, 2006), 7; Qtd. in R.S. O’Toole, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Perú, (Pittsburgh: Univ of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 28.8 Ibid.

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bullfighters, and comics reveal the technical proficiency and artisan training of Lima’s working

class, as well as the intimate contact the Afro-Andean population shared with the white criollos

through their labor.9

As Frederick Bowser explained, “the control of the African slave was of concern to both

slaveholders and authorities” from the very beginnings of Spanish colonization as a large slave

population was viewed as an internal threat to stability and order. As the multiplicity of

categories entailed in casta show, the legal and juridical boundaries erected between whites,

blacks, and Andeans proved difficult to enact in the lived world of Limeño experience. Other

methods of control attendant to Spanish sovereignty placed the black body under direct exterior

dominion and exposed it to physical punishment, often in public spectacles that contained

pedagogic function in creating and constituting the civil body politic of the Virreinato.

The first laws passed against the black body in Lima came just three months after the

city’s January 1535 founding, with a curfew for blacks set at two hours after sundown. Any

enslaved African found after curfew without his master’s permission was to receive 100 lashes

for the first offense and lose his genitals for the second, and if he resisted while being

apprehended, he could be killed by any Spaniard on the spot.10 While colonial laws primarily

forbade extreme abuse of Africans, numerous examples survive in judicial records that indicate

how Africans “were ruled through violence as their violated bodies marked their difference.”

After an altercation took place between Juan Hurtado and his owner’s nephew while digging an

irrigation canal – a job reserved for the lowest ranking enslaved men – Hurtado killed the

nephew in self-defense. After being apprehended by the royal guard and swiftly tried, Hurtado

was executed and decapitated so that his head could be displayed on the royal road for one 9 “Papel de los descendientes,” 25. “…curanderos de hierbas, veterinaries, enfermeros, boticarios, sangradores y cirujanos latinos, barberos, rizadores, peluqueros, bordadores, zapateros del fino, sastres, musicos de alquiler, profesores de baile, toreros, farsantes.”10 F.P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Perú, 1524-1650, (Stanford: Stanford Univ Press, 1974), 150.

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month as a deterrent.11 Likewise in 1677 an enslaved foreman named Sebastian of casa arara

(from the Bight of Benin) was whipped until he could not stand and later executed for

responding to his overseer’s criticism that “if he was not doing a good job of foreman, then [the

overseer should] name another.” Sebastian’s manner of death involved a public hanging,

followed by the mounting of his head as “an example to the blacks who should respect the

Spanish.”12 Black bodily denigration and mutilation was no stranger to the estate of Capitán don

García de Bracamonte Dávila. Known to enslaved men and women as a torturer, Dávila earned

this reputation for once forcing an enslaved man to work in shackles until his leg and foot

putrefied requiring amputation, brutally hanging recalcitrant workers, and cutting off the ear of

an enslaved woman who had tried to run away.13

The fascination in legal and juridical discourse and praxis placed upon the black body in

Baroque Lima and environs represents the deployment of necropolitical technologies against

black humanity. Achille Mbembe defined sovereignty as largely residing “in the power and the

capacity to dictate who may live and who must die,” a legitimation of power resulting in “the

generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human

bodies and populations” (emphasis retained).14 While civil law contained weak provisions for the

bodily integrity of enslaved Africans, the above examples show that black bodies functioned as

performative sites for the enactment of Spanish sovereign power, either through the authority of

the courts or a local master. Furthermore, the regime of violence that claimed sovereignty over

black bodies ruled through fear. For Mbembe, the technologies of intimidation undergirding the

peculiar institution require that "[a]ny historical account of the rise of modern terror…address

11 Bound Lives, 147, 126-7.12 Ibid., 127-8, 142-3.13 Ibid., 136.14 A. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” L. Meintjes, trans., Public Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1, (2003): 11, 14.

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slavery” because within this paradigm the black body was both “an instrument of labor”

possessing a price and “property…[having] a value.” To extract value and utility from the black

body, “the slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of injury, in a phantomlike world of horrors

and intense cruelty and profanity, and lives under the dual threats of “the overseer’s disposition

to behave in a cruel and intemperate manner” as well as the “spectacle of pain inflicted on the

slave’s body.” The phantasmagoric brutality of Perúvian slavery, like that experienced on

Capitán Dávila’s estate, both real and existential, consisted of “act[s] of caprice and pure

destruction aimed at instilling terror” that succeeded in rendering “[s]lave life, in many ways,” as

a “form of death-in-life.”15

The dual realms of civil and canon law offered two differentiated views of sovereignty

regarding black bodies, sometimes conflicting, but at other times recursive. The laws of the

Virreinato, flowing from the power of the Spanish Crown, viewed enslaved Africans as property

and free blacks and mixed race individuals as marginal subjects over whom it exercised

dominion. But within the eyes of the Vatican, black Limeños were Christian vassals with the

prerogatives and ecclesiastical rights Catholicism afforded all members of its universal church.

Adding to the hydra-like nature of sovereignty in Lima was the fact that, as both the seat of the

viceroyalty and an independent city, it possessed a tier of judicial and police powers, with the

Audiencia handling the local day-to-day administration and the viceroyalty overseeing affairs for

the entire colony. Likewise, the Catholic Church in Lima stood alongside the Holy Office of the

Inquisition as two distinct ecclesiastical channels of authority. One Audiencia official

complained to the Crown in 1574 that “not only the official and familiars [of the Holy Office]

but all their blacks obtain exemption from the crimes they commit.” Eleven years later, the

contested terrain of shared sovereignty over the black body played out dramatically when fifteen

15 Ibid., 21.

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Dominican friars were expelled from the colony for seizing two blacks held in royal custody for

murder and robbery and bringing them back to their monastery to safeguard them. Far from

being a purely noble act of humanity, however, the Dominicans “freed’ these black men from jail

because they owned them as slaves, revealing this struggle between Church and state as one not

over the moral rightness of black slavery, but rather which authority could claim ultimate

dominion over black bodies.16

A Church in Chains, a Space of… Hope?

Nevertheless, the Catholic Church did provide institutional structures that blacks

exploited and appropriated as their own. Black kinship bonds were fostered and strengthened by

participation in the sacraments of marriage and baptism, and enslaved laborers used appeals to

canon law that endowed them with the right of the Sabbath day to be a day of rest.17 The most

significant institutional mechanism provided Afro-Limeños through the Catholic Church were

cofradías, or lay confraternities that functioned as social and community clubs for black

Limeños. Laws from 1549 and 1582 reveal that Limeño authorities worried about public

gatherings of blacks that took place outside the confines of a cofradía, thus making the space of

the cofradía a semi-autonomous one in which black agency could manifest. The oldest of the

African cofradías was Nuestra Señora de la Antigua which antedated the 1570s, and by 1585

there were 10 in the city. This number increased to 15 by 1619, evidencing both the growing

African population of Lima and the importance of the cofradía as a pillar in the black

community.18 16 Bound Labor, 124; The African Slave, 168-9.17 Bound Labor, 124.18 K.B. Graubart, “‘So color de una cofradía’: Catholic Confraternities and the Development of Afro-Perúvian Ethnicities in Early Colonial Perú,” Slavery & Abolition, Vol. 33, No. 1., (2012): 47, 49; The African Slave, 156. For more information on the importance of cofradías see C. Black and P. Gravestock, eds., Early Modern Confraternities in Europe And the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, (London: Ashgate,

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The cofradías provided community entertainment such as sponsoring fiestas and dances,

functioned as mutual aid and burial societies through the collection and distribution of alms, and

deepened the practice of Catholicism by “facilitating the shared worship of a saint and

preparation for a good death…”19 The relevance of black cofradías is seen in the records of

Nuestra Señora de los Reyes, which noted the “thirty seven pesos and three reales that were

spent on the funeral of a negro biafara, slave of don Pedro Hoces de Ulloa” in 1608 “because his

master only gave twenty pesos and the funeral costs fifty-seven.”20 While the African diaspora in

Perú did not produce a full-fledged syncretic religion comparable to Lucumí in Cuba or

Candomblé in Brazil, the cofradías allowed Afro-Limeños “a protective veil that allowed covert

practice for the worship of their ancestral gods.”21 The African character of the worship style

found in some cofradías bozales (African-born or non-Hispanicized slaves) led one observer to

remark that on holy days these cofradías would process through the streets “in the most

obstreperous, noisy and disagreeable fashion…dressed as devils and animals, bearing weapons,

with their faces painted ‘according to the fashion of their homelands.’”22

Though the cofradía offered a space for Catholic-filtered expressions of blackness, it

could not be separated out of the greater cultural milieu of Lima. Graubart notes that “as Lima’s

population of enslaved Africans swelled, its free minority developed their own political

language, which drew upon the discourses of those in power,” a situation which led to the self-

segregation of cofradías in accordance with casta rankings, with negros, mulatos, and morenos

forming distinct brotherhoods. The processions commemorating the Feast of Corpus Christi in

2006).19 “‘So color…”, 47.20 Ibid., 49.21 “Papel de los descendientes,” 32. “En cuanto a la población citadina de color, he hallado buen número de informaciones que parece indicaran que, por lo menos durante el primer siglo de coloniaje, encontró en las cofradías un velo protector que le permitió practicar en forma encubierta el culto a sus dioses ancestrales.”22 “’So Color…”, 44.

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1585 revealed the tensions existing between African-descended Limeños of varying degrees.

Despite La Antigua’s provenance as Lima’s first black cofradía, the mayordomos (elected

leaders) of Las Vírgenes appealed to the ecclesiastical judge “that your Mercy find that we

occupy the better place in the Corpus Christi procession than that of the said negros because we

are sons of Spanish men, and persons, because of this, of greater dignity than the negros.” La

Antigua’s countered that Las Vírgenes members were “mulatos zambaigos, sons of negra

women and india women and mulata women, and others of morena women” revealing an adept

use of language. While a Spanish father might give one a casta status above negro, a black

mother prevented one from full whiteness, and as such Las Vírgenes had “no more calidad than

do the cofrades of La Antigua.” Other records indicate that free black cofrades preferred to call

themselves moreno the more negro became synonymous with enslaved Africans.23

Though situated under the banner of Catholicism, it is not surprising that the cofradías

would reflect the greater social ideas regarding black bodies. While the Church contained

avenues and passageways leading to modalities of black agency, the discursive place it afforded

black skin was one of degradation. Stemming from the Iberian notion of limpieza de sangre

(purity of the blood) that viewed race and religion as coterminous boundaries of identification,

“one’s skin color (surely the result of one’s contaminated or unclean blood) indicated one’s

sinful nature.” This devaluation of dark skin complexion converted the black body into a

generative site for archetypes and metaphors within Spanish Catholic culture. As Frantz Fanon

observed, within the “collective unconscious” of the colonial mindset, “black = ugliness, sin,

darkness, immorality.”24 Carmelite nun Teresa de Ávila (1515-1582), known best for her

mystical writings, exemplifies Fanon’s assertion that “he is Negro who is immoral” in her

23 Ibid., 51, 5224 F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (New York: Grove Press, 1952, 2008), 169.

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autobiography La Vida. In one passage, she detailed a confrontation she had with el demonio (an

early modern Spanish moniker for Satan) who appeared to her in the form of a “negrillo muy

abominable” (very abominable Negro boy); she sprinkled holy water on him to drive him

away.25 Ávila’s Iberian notions of black skin’s significance crossed the Atlantic as part of the

Spanish colonial project. José de Acosta, Jesuit missionary in Perú from 1570-1583, detailed the

story of an Andean woman’s deathbed conversion in his work De Procuranda. As the woman

lay dying she had a vision of two men appearing to her. The first, a young white man, begged her

to repent and accept Christ. Countering this man was an “Aethiopum” or black African who

urged her to retain her pagan traditional practices instead. In his reading of this account, R. L.

Green points out that “Acosta does not explain why the devil appeared as an African. He is

content to leave the story of the encounter as it is,” a testament to the pervasive association of

black skin with evil.26

Other examples further show the employment of this religio-literary trope in Perú. Father

Rodigro de Cabreda wrote in 1602 that one of his priests, in the course of his clerical duties, saw

“four most ferocious demons take the form of some negroes with great cruelty…”27 While

Catholicism recognized Africans as possessing souls capable of salvation, a “theological racism”

that combined ideas of blood, kinship, and religion viewed the black body as a significant site of

sin and a stumbling block to sanctity. The linguistic antagonism highlighting the spectrum of

brown skin tones between the cofradías of La Antigua and Las Vírgenes make it “clear that

mulattos wanted to draw upon the privilege that Spanish association could bring them,” a

strategy employed as a result of living in a world built by and for whiteness, and one in which

25 R.L. Green, “Africans in Spanish Catholic Thought, 1568-1647: Beyond Jesuit Hagiography,” Black Theology, Vol. 11, No. 1, (2013): 102.26 Ibid., 10827 Qtd. in Ibid., 109. “Porque quarto ferocissimos demonios en figurara de unos negros con gran crueldad la avion arrastrado.”

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blackness struggles to find being of its own.28 Where the white gaze provides society’s sense of

sight, black bodies transmogrify into empty carcasses containing depersonalized selves

“woven…out of a thousand details, anecdotes, [and] stories."29

For Unto Us a Child is Born

Martín entered this racially-fixated world on December 9, 1579 as the illegitimate

mulatto offspring of freed Panamá nian slave Ana Velázquez, called piadosa (pious). On his

baptismal record, Father Juan Antonio Polanco wrote, "I baptized Martín, son of an unknown

father," as Martín was born too dark to be claimed by his white father publicly.30 Don Juan de

Porres was a knight with the Order of Alcantara and an official in the colonial government. After

the birth of his sister Juanita two years later, Don Juan abandoned his family. Leaving Ana as a

single mother, she provided for her family by working as a laundress where they lived in the

poverty of Malambo, an African enclave and suburb of Lima that also included indigenous

Andeans working encomienda, enslaved laborers, and other free blacks and mestizajes of

differing castas. As a young child, Martín’s devotion to God and concern for the poor was

already noted by observers, like Isabel García Michel, who recalled seeing him kneeling before a

crucifix illuminated by the light of a candle while tears streamed down his transfixed face.31

When Martín was around 8, his father became impressed with the responsibility of his paternity

(perhaps on account of Juanita’s lighter skin color) and began to provide for his children’s

education. Don Juan took them to live with him in Ecuador for a few years until he was

appointed governor of Panamá , at which time Martín and Juanita returned to their mother in

28 “’So color…’ 52.29 Black Skin, 91.30 Proceso de Beatificación de fray Martín de Porres, Vol. 1 Proceso Diocesano, 1660, 1664, 1671, (Palencia, Spain: Secretariado "Martín de Porres," 1960), 40.31 St. Martín de Porres, 6.

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Lima. Though born mulatto and free – juridical positions within Lima’s rank and file that placed

Martín above enslaved full-blooded Africans – his darker moreno features still brought him

under the disapproving white gaze of his father in a manner that likely informed the development

of his young self.

Frantz Fanon described the process of epidermalization, a colonial mode of black being,

as the “internalization” of “an inferiority complex” springing from economic relations that

valued black bodies as dehumanized commodities. Racism’s phenomenology takes place in the

visual field, and here black skin becomes a signifier constructed by and for white ocular lenses.

Black skin alone carries no significance, but because “the black man…must be black in relation

to the white man,” blackness becomes a mode of being for the construction of a depersonalized

self. A self that is already “overdetermined from without,” before it can knows itself as a self, a

cognitive slave not to “the ‘idea’ that others have of [it] but of [its] own appearance.” This

inability for blacks to see their inner self without catching a refraction of their skin as seen from

white eyes led Fanon to observe that “what is called the black soul is a construction by white

folk."32 Indeed, one wonders what the young soul of Martín thought about himself, growing up

knowing that he had a father somewhere, but one that devalued him because of his darker skin

color. In a world where mulatto privilege could have provided him with material advantages, his

moreno coloring spoke louder through a visual voice than the white paternity stamped in his last

name. What thoughts swirled around the mind of the observant young Martín, watching his

African mother labor among the other poor of Malambo on the margins of Lima – Ciudad de los

Reyes – with its pomp and pretention as the seat of royal and ecclesiastical authority? What else

could have motivated his deep love for God and devotion to the poor at such a young age?

32 Black Skin, xiv, 90, 95, xviii.

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Perhaps Ana in her piety and maternal love told that he had no need for Don Juan de

Porres, having instead a heavenly father who promised to be the “padre de huérfanos” (father to

the orphans).33 Or maybe in a world filled with necropolitical terror, Martín found the Church to

be an imaginative place of numinous felicity where his childhood imagination could wander

freely. We will never know exactly what prayers overflowed from the wellspring of his

childhood emotions, but Martín’s tears at the foot of the cross testify to the deepening meaning

he found in religious devotion and signal a growing awareness to the existential conditions of life

that a/effect all living beings indiscriminately. Seen through the candle’s ambient glow, Martín’s

skin reflected back not the epidermalized creation of white Lima’s gaze, but instead formed a

refulgence of the light of Christ who gazed down upon him in pity, loving Martín so

unconditionally that he would die for his soul.

Martín Comes of Age and Chooses his Orientation

Using funds provided by Don Juan de Porres, when Martín was twelve his mother

apprenticed him to moreno and fellow Malambo resident cirujano Marcel de Rivero. The

occupation of the surgeon-barber involved cutting hair, letting out blood, and treating wounds

and fractures. In seventeenth century Lima it afforded prestige and social standing for mulattoes

like Martín, and would have provided a respectable living amongst the city’s other casta.

Romero reports that Martín learned a mixture of European, Andean, and African healing

techniques that could be described as curanderismo or hechicería with Dr. Ribera, in addition to

having previous knowledge of traditional West-Central African medicinal practices from his

mother.34 While training under Dr. Ribera, Martín’s Catholic devotion steadily increased, and at

33 Salmos 68:5, Antigua Versión de Casidoro de Reina, 1569.34 “Papel de los descendientes,” 33.

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the age of sixteen he presented himself as a donado to the Dominican friary of Santísimo Rosario

at the Convento del Santo Domingo. Because of a law passed by the Council of the Indies, no

African, Indian, mestizo, or mulatto could be ordained a priest or professed religious in the

Spanish colonies.35 This meant that Martín’s role as a donado relegated him to working as a

servant of the convent, doing menial tasks such as sweeping, cleaning, and assisting in the

infirmary. When Don Juan discovered that his son had lowered himself by taking the form of a

servant, he took it as a personal insult against his pura sangre. He arranged with Juan de

Lorenzana, the prior of the Convento, to make an exception to the law forbidding mulatto

ordination. To both of their surprises, Martín refused this arrangement, claiming that he was

happy merely to serve God in any capacity. Acting in his own volition, Martín continued in his

meager position that earned him the sobriquets Fray Escoba (Brother Broom) and perro mulato

(mulatto dog) from some of the other Dominican brothers.36

What significance can we distill from sixteen year old Martín’s desire to reject the white

privilege that could have been his? Sara Ahmed’s discussion of racial inheritance provides a

framework for thinking about what Martín’s choice might have meant in light of his biological

relationship with Don Juan. It is important to note that while race is not something essential and

biologized, it cannot be ignored that race is “very much about embodied reality” and, as Fanon

noted, takes place in the visual field. As Ahmed understood, “seeing oneself or being seen as

white or black or mixed does affect what one 'can do,' or even where one can go….” As we have

seen, Martín’s inability to enter the monastery as an ordained priest was based upon his skin

color and casta, a vivid illustration that the optics of race and racism limit possibilities, and “can

be redescribed in terms of what is and is not within reach.”37 The very sight of Martín erected a

35 C. Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States, (New York, Crossroad, 1990), 26.36 Ibid., 25; St. Martín de Porres, 4.37 S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, (Durham: Duke Univ Press, 2006), 112.

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barrier to the full expression of his inner piety, as it did in innumerable ways for the thousands of

casta negotiating the white world of Lima.

Race can be understood as a term describing a taxonomy corresponding to certain visual

phenomena that constellate around the human body. Racism can be understood as the aesthetic

judgments and ranking scale applied to those phenomena and the ethics that flow from that

valuation. Seen this way, race is a cultural practice of making sense out of biological matter, and

as such can be spoken of in terms of inheritance, as all of us enter a world fully in progress.

Ahmed explained that in the “relationship between inheritance and likeness” normally thought of

as the closeness in form between the faces of biologically related people, “we [also] inherit

proximities (and hence orientations) as our point of entry into a familial space.”38 Through casta,

Martín’s position in Limeño society placed him in an equidistant proximity from blackness and

whiteness. However, because his skin was of a darker hue, his epidermalized inheritance

rendered him a moreno to the eyes, and thus visibly of a lower casta, Fred Moten’s “material

trace of the maternal.”39 When his father abandoned the family, Martín inherited yet another

layer of proximity, this one placing him in close relation to poverty, living in a single parent

household in black Malambo. The societal positions and skin hues we are born into form an

inheritance of “the reachability of some objects, those that are 'given' to us or at least are made

available to us within the family home.” Before Martín ever had a chance to grow old enough to

understand catechism, his place in the story of Christ’s redemption, or develop a relationship

with God, his entry into the priesthood was already out of reach because the “family home” of

casta mulato held him at bay.

38 Ibid.,123.39 F. Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition, (Minneapolis: Univ of Minn Press, 2003), 18.

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Yet, Martín did have a white father, one who was the governor of Panamá no less. The

exception that Father Lorenzana was willing to make for Martín was also an inheritance. It was

the same inheritance shared by the cofredes of La Antigua who believed their white paternity

earned them preeminent positions in the Corpus Christi procession. While casta placed some

black bodies closer to commodification and objecthood, it also placed other bodies closer to

opportunity and subjecthood. Martín’s refusal to consent to his father’s wishes, an agential act of

self-sovereignty, can be read as a radical break from his inherited “past that…restrict[ed] as well

as enable[d] human action….” The inheritance of proximity is not a destined fate but "can be

refused and…does not fully determine a course of action.”40 Martín, originally rejected by his

father for his dark skin, wore his dark skin as a badge of honor when he rejected his father’s

privilege. After this episode, Don Juan disappears from the records pertaining to Martín’s life.

With the donation of his black body, Martín chose the place of his dwelling: a close relationship

with God, and the space of his dwelling: the Convento del Santísimo Rosario.

Mystical Catholicism Conjuncts with the Emergence of Black Radicalism

While epidermalized conceptions of a devalued blackness existed in the political,

religious, and cultural milieu of Lima, the Catholic Church contained yet one other plane of

meaning for Limeños in which the signification of the body – black or white – was transcended

by an ethereal mode of being: mysticism.41 The Spanish mystical tradition as exemplified by the

life and writings of Teresa de Ávila, most famously her Autobiography detailing the ascent of the

soul through four stages of consciousness, provided a blueprint for building technologies of the

40 Queer Phenomenology, 123.41 For the context of religious devotion in Baroque Lima, see F. Graziano’s study of St. Rosa de Lima, a contemporary of Martín’s who serendipitously lived at the same Convento that would form the backdrop to their dual sainthoods. Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima (Oxford: Oxford Univ Press, 2004).

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self that afforded one subjecthood in a celestial kingdom. Instead of an epidermalized

necropolitical valuation of the black body as economic object, the body as “mystical object” was

“field of sensorial experience” that transformed into “a theater, having a scenic apparatus and a

place of representation.” Through acts of mortification – self-flagellation, intense sessions of

prayer, meditation, and fasting – a divine consciousness of unity with God developed, forming

“one of the bridges between the body and the soul.”42

Baroque Spanish mysticism emerged at the dawning of modernity the same time period

that sovereign power over subject’s bodies was translating from public spectacles of corporal

and capital punishment at gallows to inner technologies of the self (except in slavery’s

necropolitics).43 Mysticism imbued the body with “a spiritual dimension, and the soul a bodily

dimension,” and placed it into a relationship with the inner self that allowed for an articulation

“between the material and the spiritual.” This spiritual poetic “exalted and allowed for the first

time for the body to become a space where the action of God was inscribed.”44 However,

mortification retained the enactment of physical discipline upon the flesh of the body as an

essential method for becoming a subject in the kingdom of God. What distinguished

necropolitical demonstrations of bodily sovereignty from mortification was that, with

mortification, the “understanding of violence was put into function by control of the

42 Translation here is mine. The original reads that the body is an “objeto mistico,” a “campo de experiencia sensorial,” that behaved as “un espacio teatral, tenía un aparato escénico y un lugar de representación.” Acts of mortification form “uno de los puentes entre el cuerpo y el alma.”J. H. Borja G., “Cuerpo y mortificación en la hagiografía colonial neogranadina,” Theologica Xaveriana, Vol 57, No. 162, (2007):262, 263.43 See M. Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, (Amherst: Univ of Mass Press, 1988).44 “Cuerpo y mortificación…,” 265. “…el cuerpo adquiere una dimension spiritual, y el alma una dimension corporal….El cuerpo se convierte entonces en una mediacion entre el mismo y el alma, entre lo material y lo spiritual….Esa relacion inversa es la que exalta y permite por vez primera que el cuerpo se convierta en un espacio donde se inscribe la accion de Dios, y por extension refleja las percepciones que la sociedad ensambla respecto de los comportamientos ideales y del tratamiento que se le debe proporcionar a los gestos.”

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consciousness,” and not an earthly political authority.45 Mortification figures as a type of spiritual

hybrid between pre-modern models of sovereignty and modern discourses of self-governance.

Martín’s acts of mortification formed part of his acclaim and appears in the recollections

of the witnesses who testified during the hearings of his beatification process. His apprentice, an

orphan named Fray Juan Vazquez de Parra, remembered that Martín would borrow a cilice or a

coarsely-woven shirt of animal hair that irritated the skin. With his companion Padre fray Juan

Masias, “[t]ogether they would go to the banana plantation in the garden of the Recollects, where

they would pray throughout the entire eve giving themselves great disciplines and their backs

would be filled with welts.”46 Fray Fernando Aragones recalled that if Martín “saw any poor at

the door of the refectory his impatience was notable until he was able to bring them food…he…

ate but bread and water so that through his great abstinence more could be fed.” This “sign of his

great charity” was one that he performed for Lima’s most needy, as “after having finished eating

he took his bowl and his cup full of food and went to the kitchen of the infirmary where he

waited on sick and impoverished Spanish, Blacks, Indians and the poor from the

neighborhood.”47

The public visible nature of mortification made the body a discursive object, but one that

didactically signaled the kinds of behaviors and virtues associated with a penitent life of sanctity,

a mode of being that held great social value for Limeño Catholics living under the intensified

devotion of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, regardless of one’s physical appearance.

Additionally, mortification and sanctity possessed a democratic spirit, and was not “a behavior

recommended exclusively for clergy and nuns” but rather was accessible to “every subject” who

devoted “attention to this practice, depending on their degree of perfection [maturity] and

45 Ibid., 266.46 J. Vazquez de Parra, qtd. in St. Martín de Porres, 90.47 F Aragones, qtd. in Ibid., 93.

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aspirations of holiness."48 In Practica de la theologia mystica, Jesuit missionary Miguel Godinez

explained: “Mortification is any laborious work we do or suffer freely: it is divided into penitent

deeds and corporal deeds: in refraining passions and senses; and the abnegation of our spiritual

wants."49 This description shows that mortification can rightly be thought as yet one more

technology of the self that constituted individuals as subjects within the seventeenth century

Ibero-American world.

The spatial imaginary of the Convento del Santo Domingo formed the backdrop for

Martín’s mystical experiences and ministry. Within the safety of this spiritualized semiosphere,

Martín’s mystical quest for union with God was sanctioned and understood. One spectacular

recollection comes to us from Martín’s mentor, Dr. Ribera, who reported that after arriving late

one night to the Convento, he asked an enslaved servant if he knew where Martín was. The

young man replied that he did not, and entered the chapel to light a candle. Immediately, the

enslaved youth came running out and called for Dr. Ribera. When Dr. Ribera arrived in the

chapel, he saw Martín “suspended in the air and put on the cross, with his hands stuck to those of

the Holy Christ crucified that is on the altar of this chapel, and the body was so attached to that

of the Holy Crucifix as if he were hugging it at a height of more than three yards above the

ground.”50 Eight other witnesses shared similar experiences of encountering Martín levitating “in

ecstasy” and “absorbed in God” while meditating at the cross. 51

48 “Cuerpo y Mortificacion…” 270. “No se trataba de un comportamiento recomendado exclusivamente para clerigos y monjas: todo sujeto debia dedicar su atencion a esta practica, dependiendo de sus grados de perfeccion y de sus aspiraciones de santidad.”49 M. Godinez, qtd. in Ibid., 267. “La mortificacion es cualquier obra penosa que hacemos o padecemos libremente: dividase en obras penales, corporals: en refrenacion de pasiones y sentidos; y en la abnegacion de los proprios quereres espirituales.”50 Processo, 139. “Y este testigo entro y vido al dicho siervo de Dios fray Martín de Porras suspenso en el aire y puesto en cruz, y tenia sus manos pegadas a las de un Santo Cristo crucificado que esta en un altar del dicho Capitulo y todo el cuerpo tenia asi mismo pegado a el del Santo Crucifixo, como que le abrazaba, y estaba del suelo mas de tres varas.51 Ibid., 175, 189, 194, 201, 226, 239, 317, 350.

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Kneeling at the foot of the cross with transfixed eyes upon Jesus forms a familiar refrain

of Martín’s life. Ahmed reminds us that “[o]rientations are about the direction we take that put

some things and not others in our reach.” Martín chose to orient himself towards the cross, and

by making the Convento his permanent home he received a new life direction that placed a

different kind of future in his reach. But it is important to remember how Martín came to be in

this place. If “[w]hat is reachable is determined precisely by orientations that we have already

taken,” then we can say that Martín’s road to sanctity began as a child when he kneeled before

Jesus with tears in his eyes. His childhood faith endowed him with the potentiality of a mode of

being that resulted in him no longer crying at the foot of the cross, but being high and lifted up

before it in the gaze of the Convento’s denizens. As “action searches for identity as the mark of

attainment,” Martín’s performances of mortification pointed towards the mark of sanctity that

would eventually memorialize his name.

While mortification resignified the body away from epidermalized exterior dimensions

into a vessel whose sensory intuition formed a canal to the soul and God, the mode of being it

stimulated came with an altered consciousness as well. In his explorations into the mystical

mind, William James observed that mystical states “modify the inner life of the subject” in real

tangible ways. While the reality of the exterior world remains unchanged, the cognitive

apparatus for understanding and making sense of the world does change, with the “prime

characteristic of cosmic consciousness” being a consciousness “of the life and order of the

universe.” Once the mystical mind is thus opened and activated, it brings “an intellectual

enlightenment which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence – would make

him almost a member of a new species.”52 Indeed, other stories abound that recount Martín’s

52 W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, (New York: Random House, 1929): 372, 389.

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mystical episodes beyond levitation, such as bilocation through astral project, and visions in

which he – a former negrillo – confronted and did battle with the devil himself as protagonist.53

As Teresa de Ávila explained, during a mystical state "the soul is fully awake as regards God,

but wholly asleep as regards things of this world….”54

The verity of the inner mind of a mystic cannot be “proven” as true or false through

empirical methods, but as a phenomenological experience “the existence of mystical states

absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators

of what we may believe.” James argued for the “realness” of this experience, noting that “[a]s a

rule, mystical states merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of

consciousness.”55 One way to see the effects of the cosmic consciousness in Martín’s life is his

ability to transcend the limits of epidermalization. As Padre Fray Alonso de Arenas y Añano and

Padre Fray Gerónimo Baptista de Barnuy both testified, other Dominicans at the convent would

“mean-mouth” Martín and call him perro mulato (mulatto dog) when they asked him to do

certain tasks if “he did not do them as fast as they liked.” Instead of responding in anger or

allowing himself to take offense, Martín bore these verbal barbs in humility.56 However, at other

times, the denigration of being called a mulatto dog evidenced his humility as a mere dialectical

defense deployed against racism. When Don Feliciano de Vega, the Archbishop of Mexico, fell

ill while visiting Lima, he ordered Martín in obedience to come and heal him. Entering the room,

Martín slyly asked “What does a Prince want with the hand of a poor mulatto lay brother?” Yet

another occasion, when Padre Fray Pedro de Montesdoca was sick, he got mad at Martín

“because of some niñería (childishness) which took place in the cell…and became disrespectful,

53 St. Martín de Porres, 68, 69.54 T. de Ávila, qtd. in Varieties, 400.55 Ibid., 418.56 St. Martín de Porres, 61.

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saying [Martín] was a mulato dog and other bad things.” Instead of silent humility, Martín

disrupted the verbal barrage by laughing and leaving the cell.57

It is clear that Martín’s humility and deliberate ignorance of the slurs leveled against him

by other religious leaders did not register with him in the way they intended. The "‘other-

worldliness’ encouraged by the mystical consciousness” led to an “over-abstraction from

practical life” that enabled Martín to translate his personal experiences with racism and bigotry

into the passion fueling his ministry that placed Afro- and Indigenous Limeños front and center.

Martín leveraged his liminal position as a donado servant, holding the keys to the gate of the

Convento, to open up a space for Lima’s outcasts. Dr. Ribera recalled an incident in which

Martín brought an injured Andean “[b]ehind the false door of the convent” to “take care of him

and put him in the infirmary with the blacks of the convent.” Objecting to this opening of the

Convento, some of the white friars “then went to tell the Prior how the said servant of God

brought sick people from outside to cure and Indians and poor Blacks.” When the Prior ordered

the Andean to leave, Martín sent him to the house of his sister Juanita.58

Francisca, a black slave at the Convento, remembered that after hearing some “words

exchanged in anger,” a black man was “gravely and mortally wounded with a wound in one of

his flanks with his intestines hanging out.” When the crowd of witnesses saw this, they “took the

wounded black to the false door of the convent so that the said venerable brother fray Martín de

Porras would cure him.” The crowd of black Limeños had obviously grown accustomed to the

false door of the Convento being open to them through the figure of Martín, “because he always

exercised great acts of charity especially with the poor for which he felt deeply.” Additionally,

Francisca knew he could help Lima’s poorest “because he was a surgeon and barber,” skills that

57 Ibid., 16, 72.58 Varieties, 404; St. Martín de Porres, 80.

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he was placed into close proximity to through his father’s casta and money.59 It should not be

elided that both of these memories enter the annals of history from black mouths, and it reveals

that Martín’s liminality – on the edges of whiteness and the Convento – formed a significant part

of the way he navigated his ministry and came to be remembered by other black Limeños.

While Fanon’s phenomenological description that "every ontology is made unattainable

in a colonized and civilized society" due to the fact that “[t]he black man has no ontological

resistance in the eyes of the white man” is correct, but devoutly Catholic Lima contained spaces

where a higher metaphysical ontology of divine unity was attainable through mystical

consciousness. Martín’s “escape” from epidermalization must be read as part of a larger tradition

of black radicalism whose focus, we are reminded by Cedric Robinson, “was on the structures of

the mind. Its epistemology granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material.” 60 Indeed,

another donada Limeña and former slave Ursula de Jesus (1604-1668) lived as a Franciscan lay

sister as she too was banned by law from becoming a full-fledged nun. Nevertheless, her

mystical visions and conversations with the dead survive in her diary Las Almas del

Purgatorio.61

Blackness is not black skin, but blackness is an inheritance, a proximity, that people with

black skin have been placed in relation to, and this inheritance is mightier than the mere shadow

of whiteness. Black mysticism exists within an ontology all to itself on its own astral plane. But

despite this quintessential immateriality, there remains a factness of radical blackness that leaps

from the pages of Martín’s history. Short of this explanation, “[h]ow can we,” as Fred Moten

asks, “fathom a social life that tends toward death, that enacts a kind of being-toward-death” and 59 Ibid., 80.60 C. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (Chapel Hill: Univ of NC Press, 1983), 244-245.61 Ursula’s diary of her mystic visions has been translated into English. See N. E. van Deusen, ed. The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Perúvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesus, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004).

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in direct result of that proximity to death “maintains a terribly beautiful vitality?”62 In this way,

Martín’s mysticism was born out of the “continuing development of a collective consciousness”

desiring liberation, “motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being,

the ontological totality,” and thus “constitute[d] a fundamental danger [and] disruption to social

life” in Lima.63

Cyprian Davis invites us to view Martín through the prism of this radical black aesthetic.

Reading through the topical accounts of a lay brother’s humility, Martín emerges as someone

who “made his choices with independence and determination,” possessing “the persistence and

strength of character required for such an arduous ministry.” A ministry that earned Martín

acclaim throughout Lima as “both mature and heroic, not a boy but a man, not a tentative novice

but a powerhouse of ministry….In him, Africa’s roots bore fruit in holiness. Through him,

Africa’s sons and daughters made the Catholic church their own.”64 The mystical political

imagination of Fray Martín that enveloped him into the sovereignty of God as a subject of a

heavenly kingdom had direct dialectical consequences for black Lima through the space his

death, and only his death, could pave open. But before we see how Martín rematerialized in

Lima postmortem, it is first necessary to explore the significance of death more broadly.

Metaphysics and Phenomenology of Death

Despite the ubiquity of death as a necessary corollary to life, a firm, singular, bounded

definition of death seems forever unattainable. Colloquial understandings of death figure it as a

termination, an ending, the cessation of life processes in an arrangement of organic compounds

called a body, but this description proves insufficient and one-sided when investigated through

62 F. Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 2, (2008): 188.63 Black Marxism, 246; “The Case of Blackness,” 188.64 The History of Black Catholics, 27.

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the lenses of phenomenology and metaphysics. In God, Death, and Time, Emmanuel Lévinas

inquired, "Is not death something other than the dialectic of being and nothingness in the flow of

time?”65 To Lévinas’ query, I add a few of my own. What do we know about death?66 What are

the possible ways that humans can gain knowledge about death, and can this knowledge be

regarded as truth? While death hovers over life “as a departure without return, a question without

givens, a pure interrogation mark,” an attempt will be made to follow death’s caravan past the

interrogation mark’s bounded epistemological terrain into the mysterious frontier of the beyond.

All life is sensually experienced. The cognitive processes out of which understanding and

knowledge synthesize are first fed by an emergent stream of perceptions which we confront and

interact with through embodied space. The five senses – sight, touch, hearing, taste, and smell –

mediate our experience in the world, and present objects outside of ourselves as givens, a priori

things or beings. “The body is our general medium for having a world,” a world known only

through interaction but not through intuition. More than merely knowing the world outside, the

phenomenological world constitutes and fashions the selves that we know (and discover)

ourselves to be. The primacy of perception’s work in creating the realities we know cannot be

overstated, as Merleau-Ponty averred that “the world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all

my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.” As such, the mediated experience of the world as

it appears to our senses is the only epistemological foundation for knowledge and truth. “Truth

does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the

world, and only in the world does he know himself.”67 

65 E. Lévinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. B. Bergo, (Stanford: Stanford Univ Press, 2000), 14.66 While the title of Lévinas’ 14 Nov 1975 is "What do we Know of Death?," I offer a slightly rephrased version here as my own query.

67 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, C. Smith, trans. (Routledge, 1962), 146, xii.

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The background ether that gives shape to and opens up opportunity for phenomenological

experience is an animated body, a living, sensing, fleshly object. For this reason, Lévinas calls

death “the irremediable gap” beyond which “biological movements lose all dependence in

relation to signification, to expression.” Death stops the body’s chemical and metabolic

processes, and ceases the body’s sensual mediation. “Death is decomposition; it is the no-

response."68 Outside of the ontology of life, experience has no meaning or basis within which to

be had. While it may seem like common sense to bracket all experience within life, how, then,

can one have an experience of death? And how can one gather experiential knowledge about

death’s truth if experience is the property of the living?

Death, by its logical definition, cannot penetrate the veil of life. It never has had that

power and it never shall. Death casts is shadow upon life, but death itself lay beyond experience.

Lévinas asked if our relation to death, one anticipated but never attained concretely, can “still be

assimilated to a knowledge and thus to an experience, to a revelation?” The only experiences

provided us to gain knowledge of death, "all that we can say or think about death and dying, and

their inevitability, comes to us secondhand.” The “science” of death is an ongoing process that

“comes to us from the experience and observation of other men, of their behavior as dying and as

mortals aware of their death and forgetful of their death." No living person has ever experienced

death, and as such can make no claims of truth or certainty regarding its nature. The termination

of a person’s life as cataloged through the perceptions of others, the eternal end that “is but a

moment only of death" is not, “despite everything that seemed so at first glance…an empirical

facticity..." but contains a “meaning that surprises” beyond our limited understanding that

“annihilation…is not limited to nothingness.” Death’s significance is not found in direct

experience, but rather “takes a meaning other than an experience of death…a meaning that

68 God, Death, and Time, 11.

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comes from the death of another person, of what concerns us therein."69 Death in this light is a

measure of social relations and the meanings that imbue any particular death are participatory

reflections of the community that experienced the departing of a person. In the case of Fray

Martín his death then cannot be a clinical description of what happened to his already mortified

body when the crucifix fell out of his hands, but instead represents a dimension of meanings

constituted by a diverse community of Limeños, each stemming from their overlapping yet

differentiated concerns as they looked to Martín’s example as a source of meaning in their lives.

The Death of Fray Martín, the Beginning of his Story

The central focus of any narrative of Martín’s life revolves around his death, for only by

crossing death’s threshold could he enter the immortality that Catholic sainthood bestows.

Immediately upon his death, a cult to his memory developed in Lima, nurtured through the

activities of cofradías from all castas. Through the production of images and narratives relating

to the miracles and ministry of Martín, a sustained campaign developed that eventually catalyzed

the opening of the proceso sumario in 1657.70 In the eighteen intervening years following his

death, Martín’s consciousness lived in the collective memories and practices of Limeños, and his

acclaim grew so great that “the fathers of the Convento del Santisimo Rosario of Lima decided

that the moment had already arrived to begin an official investigation of his life.”71 After a false

start due to the issuance of new Vatican guidelines outlining the process for beatification

investigations, the first round of testimony took place from 1660-1664. This body of testimony

has been quoted liberally throughout this paper reflexively. However, a more critical read can

69 God, Death, and Time, 10, 870 C. L. Cussen, “Fray Martín de Porres and the Religious Imagination of Creole Lima,” PhD Dissertation, University of PA, 1996, 167.71 Processo, 10. “…los Padres del Convento del Santisimo Rosario de Lima decidieron que ya era llegado el momento de iniciar una investigacion oficial de su vida.”

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reveal the racialized contours embedded within its narrative passageways charting the course of

Martín’s travels that lead from Lima’s streets through its Catholic imagination and “into the

heavens mounted on his sweeping broom.”72

In her analysis of the Proceso de Beatificación, Cecila L. Cussen found that the

overwhelming majority of witnesses who testified were white creoles, with only sixteen mixed

race or black respondents.73 However, as we have already seen from the cofradías that paraded

boisterously on holy days in animal costumes, the practice of Catholicism among black Limeños

involved African inflections, and often veered away from the dogmatic path of pure catechism.

The Processo made it clear that it would not accept the testimony of anyone who claimed that a

miracle or intercession had been made for them by invoking Martín through wax figures,

portraits, lamps, candles, or tablets.74 Structuring the Proceso for an audience in Rome, the only

totemic evidence admissible were relics directly related to Martín’s fleshly body, such as bits of

his bone or the dirt from his first gravesite. By limiting the recorded testimony of Martín’s cult in

this way, it is likely that many Afro- stories – stories that no doubt helped the oral transmission

of his sanctity – never made it into the Proceso.

Nevertheless, nearly every house in Lima contained representations of his body in the

form of paper stamps to printed portraits or engravings of his likeness. And with the urban nature

of Lima’s slavery and the parity of its white and black population, how much daily labor was

performed in the shadow of Martín’s moreno-colored face? The image of this venerable Fray

who looked similar to many of Lima’s most-oppressed stood as a silent reassuring representation

of boundless possibilities and existential freedom to the enslaved Limeños who encountered him.

72 “Papel de los descendientes, 33. “Se podría decir que Martín subió a los altares montado en su escoba de barrendero.”73 “Fray Martín de Porres…,” 205.74 Proceso, 44, 45. Every witness was to be asked this question before their testimony could be recorded.

Padilioni 32

After his body was examined in 1664 with the closing of the first round of testimony and

reinterred, the priests who encountered his slowly decomposing black body reported that it

smelled of roses, this olfactory experience a veritable sign of Catholic incorruption and sanctity,

and a familiar trope in hagiography.75 One of the grave diggers testified that after moving the

bones, he scraped from his hands dirt containing small bits of Martín’s flesh, which he gave to

his sick friend Juan Criollo to mix with water and drink. Juan, a manumitted slave, testified that

his malady was instantly cured by drinking this mixture, a story that mirrors in necrotic fashion

the partaking of the Holy Eucharist.

As we have seen, death is known through the experience of the other, and the meanings

imparted to it are meanings a community creates out of what concerns them therein. While

innumerable black Limeño bodies died through the mechanisms of slavery, Martín’s dead black

body took on a special significance solely by virtue of mystical Catholicism. In humanity’s quest

to understand the givenness of being and the mystery of nonbeing, religion functions as “one of

the most powerful sources for the development of a coherent meaning system” and “serve[s] as

primary myths through which individuals face the existential givens.”76 In the case of death’s

explanation-defying impenetrability, “[s]ervices or rituals to memorialize the person who has

passed often are powerful ways to create sustaining meaning” in “symbolic form.” After the

proceso sumario closed in 1664, fourteen “anxious” years passed until notice arrived from Rome

that the Vatican had granted the opening of a proceso apostolico. With the Holy See assenting to

the representations of Fray Martín constructed through his testigos the official march down the

pathway towards sainthood commenced. When Lima heard the news the city spent several days

in fête that included the celebration of solemn masses, the setting off of fireworks, and all of the

75 “Fray Martín de Porres…,” 219-220.76 L. Hoffman, “An Existential-Phenomenological Approach to the Psychology of Religion, Pastoral Psychology, (2012): 787.

Padilioni 33

city’s cofradías marching in processions to the sound of energetic panygerics and music played

upon chirimías and atabales while women dropped roses and chrysanthemums from balconies

overhead.77 What might strike many casual observers as great irony – that one of Lima’s dark-

skinned castas would be regaled and memorialized en perpetua by the highest and lowest of his

society – becomes demystified when situated within the discursive and practical context of a

Baroque Catholic worldview. While the process would stall for three centuries until Pope John

XIII brought it to completion with the 1962 canonization of St. Martín de Porres, this abridged

look at his initial cult rests here at 1670.

History is Haunted by the Spirits of the Dead

But what can we say about the truth of this matter? Admittedly, as a researcher I do not

treat it lightly that this exploration on the theme of Martín’s death reads, at times, more like a

story of magical realism than a verifiable account of an historical actor. As Foucault averred,

truth is not a property inherent in things, but rather emerges as part of the "grid of intelligibility"

produced by regimes of power through historico-political discourses. "History functions within

politics, and politics is used to calculate historical relations of force." For Foucault, war and

power constitute "historical discourse's truth-matrix,” the same necropower that Mbembe located

within slavery.78 The truth of black chattel slavery is that its very processes destroyed material

trace of the black body, rendering it invisible and speechless. Instead of questioning the veracity

of accounts like the one presented here, a better question would be why do so many Diasporic

stories rely upon spectral evidence to plead their cases? The twelve million Africans transported

to the Western Hemisphere and their enslaved progeny were at one time material facts that now

77 Proceso, 10, 11; Cussen, 166. 78 M. Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, (New York: Picador, 1997), 164, 165.

Padilioni 34

come to us as spirits, ghosts, and saints, “not because their relation to the past is merely

imaginary, but because it goes beyond the limit of what is representable within the discursive

formation that we call history.”79

Perhaps a deeper truth yet can be gleaned from the insights of Karen Barad, who reminds

us that on the quantum level, there are no givens or absolutes but rather, “the indeterminate

nature of existence” is composed of disjointed “entanglements of here and there, now and then…

a ghostly sense of dis/continuity.…” Following Derrida’s concept of hauntology Barad provokes

us think of being/becoming as “co-existing multiplicities of entangled relations of past-present-

future-here-there that constitute the worldly phenomena we too often mistake as things existing

here-now.” On the quantum level, divorced from spacetime and the discursive structures we use

to navigate this realm, [t]he past is never closed, never finished one and for all….[t]o address the

past (and future), to speak with ghosts, is not to entertain or reconstruct some narrative of the

way it was, but to respond, to be responsible, to take responsibility for that which we inherit.”

Martín yet lives and offers his voice for all of the Diaspora, not as an agential being of flesh and

blood, but because the phenomena constellating around his consciousness “are material

entanglements enfolded and threaded through the spacetimemattering of the universe” quickened

to life each time the living invoke his name through practical memory, “the pattern of

sedimented enfoldings” that “is written into the fabric of the world. The world ‘holds’ the

memory of all traces; or rather, the world is its memory.” 80

Lastly, Martín’s legacy can be described as a science or the instantiation of a type of

knowledge described by Chela Sandoval as a “differential” or “oppositional mode of

79 S. Palmié, Wizards & Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity & Tradition, (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002), 12.80 K. Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continutites, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come,” Derrida Today, Vol. 3, No. 2, (2010): 240, 248, 264, 261.

Padilioni 35

consciousness” that functions “like the clutch of an automobile, the mechanism that permits the

driver to select, engage, and disengage gears in a system for the transmission of power.” Martín

escaped the dimensions of his bodily limits through his mind, deeding the inheritance of his

consciousness as a dialectic tool of memory in the “methodology of the oppressed.” These

technologies work to “decolonize the imagination” through what Sandoval dubs the “physics of

love," in which love is understood as "a social movement...enacted by revolutionary, mobile, and

global coalitions."81

There can be no doubt that truly stupendous happenings were experienced by those in the

proximity of de Porres, the dark-skinned discarded mulatto who gained entry to the “everlasting

and triumphant mystical tradition,” and whose practical example, William James tells us, speaks

with “an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think.” Possessing “neither

birthday nor native land,” Martín’s voice resounds “[p]erpetually, telling of the unity of man

with God” in speech that “antedates languages” and “do[es] not grow old.”82 Martín’s memory

weaves a utopian vision of futurity out of his “rejection of a here and now and an insistence on

potentially or concrete possibility for another world.”83 What better testimony to the remarkable

force of Martín’s consciousness can be uttered than that offered by Fray Cristóbal de San Juan:

Martín de Porres… practiced continually in his holy and blameless life, a subject more angel than man, more of heaven than of earth, every part of him God in life, deeds, words and thoughts, in whom it is recognized very clearly and distinctly, and as such he gave service and gifts to those in close proximity, without reservation for himself despite the time of day or night, this witness saw with his eyes and touched with his hands the great power of the grace of God, that a man of flesh and blood can be made a seraphim so aflame in callings of charity, as was the said brother Fray Martín de Porres (emphasis added).84

81 C. Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, (Minneapolis, Univ of Minn Press, 2000), 183, 57,68.82 Varieties, 410.

83; J.E. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 1.84 Proceso, 99-100. “Martín de Porras experimento continuamente en su santa vida e inculpable un sujeto mas angel que homre mas del cielo que de la tierra, todo el de Dios en vida, obras, palabras, y pensamientos, en que se reconocia muy clara y distintamente, y como tal se daba al servicio y regalo de los proximos, sin reservar hora de dia

Padilioni 36

ni de noche para si, viendo este testigo con los ojos y tocando con las manos el gran poder de la gracia de Dios, que de un hombre de carne y sangre puede hacer un serafin tan encendido en llamas de caridad como lo era el dicho hermano Fray Martín de Porras.”

Padilioni 37

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