Chol Ritual Language
with Terrence Lee Folmar, Heidi Altman, Ausencio Cruz Guzmán, and Bernardo Pérez Martínez
©1996 J. Kathryn Josserand and Nicholas A. Hopkins

The Black Christ of Tila

The Black Christ, the Señor de Tila, is the center of a syncretic religion that combines the Catholic Christ with the Pre-Columbian Cave God, Earth Owner. When Tila was first being missionized (sometime after A.D. 1559), a mysterious man dressed all in white appeared to guide the founders of the town to its current site atop a craggy mountain, forcing them to abandon three earlier sites as unsuitable because of swampy ground or ant nests. The townspeople finally recognized the old man as Christ, and took him as their patron saint. After the sanctuary was constructed, people from San Cristóbal de las Casas came and looted the temple, and the image of Christ took refuge in a nearby cave, where his image is preserved in the form of the anthropomorphic stalagmite, also venerated in ceremonies honoring the Black Christ. People from the Gulf Coast state of Tabasco helped restore the Señor de Tila to his church, recovered some of the lost goods, and have since come to the annual festivals in great numbers, making Tila a major pilgrimage site for southern México. Related to this mythology, the name of Tila derives from Gulf Coast Náhuatl tilan (til-lan) ’place of (the) black (one)’, and Black Men who live in caves figure prominently in highland folklore (Blaffer 1972; we have also collected a folktale about a Black Man who lives in the wild, the Xnek).

It should be noted that the looting of the Señor de Tila’s shrine by "people from San Cristóbal" may represent an attempt by the official Catholic hierarchy of the Colonial capital to suppress an independent center of pilgrimage. The restoration of the shrine by "people from Tabasco" reflects the adoption of Tila (under the ecclesiastical authority of the Bishop of Chiapas) as a center of worship by Gulf Coast Catholics, whose popular cults were being suppressed in the state and diocese of Tabasco (the subject of Graham Greene’s 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory, and his 1939 travel account, Lawless Roads).

The pilgrimage cult of Black Christs associated with caves includes other prominent shrines, such as those at Esquipulas, in southeastern Guatemala, and at Chalma, in central México just southwest of México City. At the very beginning of the nineteenth century, the sixteenth century cult of Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas was introduced into the Southwest of the United States, at a shrine in Chimayó, New Mexico (Borhegyi 1956).

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