The Tetralemma

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The Tetralemma
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The Tetralemma as Yes!, No!, Both Yes and
No!, and Neither Yes nor No!, can in a
practical, and human fuzzy sense, be found in
Latin American history, from the time of the
conquest.
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• Conformity And An Enthusiastic Embrace Yes!

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• The New World as the end of the world made it the
  opportune landing for the New Jerusalems descent
  from the sky. Meditating on the conquered
  Tenochtitlán, Motolinía wrote, You were once
  Babylon, full of confusion and evil now you are
  another Jerusalem, the mother of provinces and
  kingdoms. Elaboration of the Amerindians as
  descendants of the lost tribes of Israel
  reinforced the link between the New World and the
  New Jerusalem, notably in the ponderings of
  Agustín de Betancur at the end of the 17th
  century. Following a tally of twelve religious
  families in Mexico, Betancur mixed metaphors to
  celebrate his noble city as a new Jerusalem with
  twelve gates through which to enter the Jerusalem
  of triumph. The twelve tribes of Israel are
  twelve precious stones that shine like stars
  in the crown of the woman of Apocalypse. With
  such noble encouragement, the Amerindians were
  baptized in droves.

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• Liberation theologists continue this tradition
  into the present when they unambiguously assert
  that Europe is no longer the center of Christian
  history. Latin America is. The recuperated
  New World was romanticized as a promised land in
  a flurry of benedictions from José Martís Our
  America (and its extension into the Cuban
  Revolution) to José Vasconceloss explicit
  description of America as the true Christian
  promised land. For Rubén Darío, America was
  the future of the world.

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• Resistance And Reaction Against No!

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• Conspicuous during the 1680 revolt of the Pueblo
  Amerindians in northern New Mexico was a
  sustained effort to extirpate all vestiges of
  Christianity. One writer witnessing the
  rebellion reported that the pueblo Amerindians
  profaned the holy Christian temples, burning
  them and the images from their altars, mocking at
  the things belonging to divine worship, wearing
  the priestly vestments in their idolatrous
  dances, and making trophies of them, as well as
  of the sacred vessels.

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• The Pueblos persevered as reluctant converts to
  Catholicism even after the 1692 reconquest. A
  missionary report almost a century later was
  still lamenting how the Pueblos preferred their
  native names, and when we call them by their
  saints names they usually have their joke among
  themselves, repeating the saints name to each
  other as if in ridicule.

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• Synthesizing, Neither Conformity Nor Resistance
  Yes and No!

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• Among the Tzeltals and Tzotzils of Chiapas,
  Mexico, unlike most indigenous groups, did not
  strive to restore a prehispanic ideal but rather
  to practice the Catholic faith in a manner
  consonant with indigenous traditions. An initial
  quest for syncretic synthesis became extremist
  because it met wit an authoritarian, repressive
  response from the clergy. Once the cult was
  prohibited and ostracized, its adherents took the
  offensive to safeguard their faith and to fin in
  the Virgins silent discourse an articulation of
  their millennial aspirations.

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• In 1780 José Gabriel Condorcanqui of Peru took
  the name Túpac Amaru and rose in revolt against
  colonial abuse of the Amerindians. Túpac Amaru
  II claimed direct descent from Juana Pilcorvaco,
  daughter of the Túpac Amaru who had been executed
  in 1572, and viceregal authorities recognized
  this claim. In nativist perspective he held a
  hereditary claim to legitimate reign, but Inca
  nobility had mutated over centuries of colonial
  rule and by 1780 was more Hispanic than
  indigenous in its lifestyle. The new Túpac
  Amaru, a mestizo born in 1740, had considerable
  wealth and education, lived ostentatiously, and
  was married to a Creole. The corregidor
  considered him a fraudulent Amerindian.

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• Conformity And Resistance Neither Yes Nor No!
  (The Problem Millennialism, something totally
  new, a New Age)

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• After 1492, Edenic and golden-age ideals were
  projected onto the pristine landscape and noble
  savages of the Americas, particularly in the
  tropics. Some chronicles, such as that of an
  Augustinian describing Mexico, privileged the
  biblical model Just as in Paradise He created
  the plants in growth and the fruits all ripened,
  so in the gardens of this new Paradise He did not
  delay in ordering the imperfect to the perfect.
  In 1514 Peter Martyr favored the Greek model when
  he observed that the natives of Hispaniola go
  naked and know neither weights nor measures, nor
  that source of all misfortune, money living in
  a golden age, without laws, without lying judges,
  without books. Everything among them was common
  property and all happily shared the abundance
  because there was no sense of mine and thine.

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• The Mixtón war in Michoacan, Mexico, begun in
  1540, is exemplary in its representation of the
  major motifs of nativist millennialism. The
  prophets represented this total war as a feat of
  supernatural omnipotence, but the always
  imminent, never actualized return of the deity
  leaves the implementation to the earthly agents.
  The peoples will (to eliminate the Spaniards, to
  return to tradition) is rerouted by the prophets
  and returns transcendentalized, hyperebolic, and
  oracular. Once that roundabout authorization is
  accomplished, and once the claim is made that the
  deity will accomplish the mission with
  supernatural intervention, then the people go to
  war. The deity serves as a means to objectify,
  sanction, legitimate, consolidate, and empower he
  will of the people. The ancestral, pain-free
  paradise anticipated beyond victory is likewise
  conditioned by the doubled monologue that echoes
  between community and deity.

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• For a more secular, less millennial form of
  Neither Yes Nor No Brazilian Capoeira and
  Candomblé (or Caribbean Santería)