By Carlos F. Cámara Gutiérrez, reporter with the Diario de Yucatán, and Indalecio Cardeña Vázquez, anthropologist and president of the Yucatan Humanistic Studies Circle.
Sheltered by the jungles of Quintana Roo, and surrounded by pre-Colombian Mayan buildimgs, the open chapel stands tall, in open defiance of advancing urban sprawl.
In the heart of the archaeological site, some 15 km (9 miles) north of Chetumal and 800 meters (half a mile) from the bay, one of the most remarkable treasures of religious architecture in the Peninsula lives on. The place name can be translated as “in the midst of three villages” or “place surrounded by breadnut trees”.
The remains of this colonial building constitute one of the oldest treasures of sacred art in the region, bearing witness to the advance of Spanish occupation during the first three decades of the 16th century.
The building at Oxtankah is an important archaeological monument of both historical and cultural significance, since it helps us understand various aspects of our country’s history, and the origins of the open or Indians’ chapel in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Gonzalo Guerrero in the Mayan city
Oxtankah was an important Mayan city in the territory of the Chactemal lordship, according to theories put forward by some archaeologists. Besides housing this cultural heritage, it seems also to have taken in Gonzalo Guerrero, remembered by history as the father of mestizaje on the American continent.
In 1511, the sailor and arquebusier originally from the village of Niebla, near the port of Palos in Spain, was shipwrecked when his vessel foundered during a voyage from the province of Darien (the area between Panama and Colombia) to the island of Hispaniola (today shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and arrived on the north coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, unaware of how his life was about to change.
According to some chronicles, Gonzalo Guerrero was captured by men of the local ruler Ah Kin Cutz, of Xamanhá, and was sold as a slave to the lord of Chactemal, Nachan Ca’an, the most powerful ruler in the region. One of his daughtrers freed the Spaniard, who by 1514 had not only adopted Mayan customs, but had also become a Nacom, or war chief.
Conquistadors and missionaries
However, over and above the fascinating story of Gonzalo Guerrero, the Mayan city of Oxtankah was one of the principal strongholds of this part of the Peninsula during the pre-Hispanic era.
During the long process of the Conquest of Yucatan, Alonso Dávila, an envoy of Francisco de Montejo the Adelantado, founded the la Villa Real de Chactemal on this spot in 1531, and raised a primitive church built of perishable materials.
Decades later, with the arrival of the first missionary of the Order of Friars Minor to this untamed area, a first Franciscan chapel was erected, and some years afterwards another Catholic church was built on the same site, only this time with the features of an open chapel like those being constructed in Yucatan during the Colonial period.
After several centuries and many important historical events, such as the Caste War, the village of Payo Obispo was founded at the end of the 19th century near Oxtankah. It is now called Chetumal, and is the capital of Quintana Roo.
The open chapel at Oxtankah is one of three religious buildings that survive in the Yucatan Peninsula inside ancient Mayan sites.
One of the other two is at Boca Iglesia, in the north of Quintana Roo, very near Cabo Catoche, and is believed to be the first Catholic chapel in Latin America; the third is inside the archaeological zone at Dzibilchaltún, some 17 km (10.5 miles) north of Merida.
Architecture of great value
Luis Ojeda Godoy, a specialist from the National Institute of Anthropology and History, states that, judging by its construction design, the open chapel at Oxtankah belongs to the early stages of the Spanish occupation of the area during the Colonial period.
According to Ojeda Godoy, this kind of building with a semi-circular arch, built on Mayan settlements, is particularly valuable, since they represent an architectural solution developed by the friars in the Peninsula to the problem of attending the large numbers of indigenous people they had to evangelize.
Beside the functional aspect that the friars adopted in order to try and catechize the natives in an open space, the design, the layout, and even the materials used in the construction of the chapel hold yet more secrets.
The Indian chapel
The surviving remains of the structure correspond to the third religious building erected in Oxtankah during the 16th century. Judging from colonial sources and the archaeological evidence, it could be said that the significance of this Mayan site stems from the presence of an immediate predecessor to the open or Indian chapels as we know them throughout the Yucatan Peninsula.
Accounts tell how, during the second attempt at the conquest of Yucatan by the Adelantado Francisco de Montejo between 1531 and 1535, Alonso Dávila founded the Villa Real de Chactemal here in 1531, and built the first chapel of perishable materials, similar to the palm-leaf houses of the Maya.
Dávila and his army intended to subjugate the region, but the settlement only lasted a short time owing to the hostility of the Maya. In the fall of 1532, the conquistadors withdrew from the area, dismanteling the shrine before they left.
Twelve years later, after the city of San Francisco de Campeche had been founded, Merida had been erected as capital of the new Spanish province on the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of T’ho, and the town of Bacalar had been esablished; a Franciscan missionary named Lorenzo de Bienvenida very succesfully, and alone, evangelized the area around the third of these Spanish settlements in 1545 and 1546.
Friar Bienvenida was one of a group of four Franciscans sent by friar Toribio de Benavente to the Yucatan Peninsula in 1544 to make contact with Montejo and begin the evangelization of the territory, as although there were some Spanish settlements, the region had not been Christianized, and control over the Maya was not consolidated. The other three friars were Luis de Villalpando, Melchor de Benavente and Juan de Herrera, who travelled to Campeche and subsequently to Merida.
During those years, 1545-1546, friar Bienvenida is believed to have built a new chapel, still from perishable materials, on the same site where Alonso Dávila had built the first church. Although we lack documentary evidence for this theory, it is reasonable to assume it happened, given the amount of time Bienvenida spent in the area; his probable knowledge of the place’s importance, and the existence of an earlier chapel; the experience he had acquired of evangelization; and the need to have a building to support his missionary work.
However, it was not until years later in the mid-16th century, possibly in the late 1550s, that the Indians’ chapel whose remains survive today was built, showing the characteristic features of these structures: an apse or vault where the presbytery stands, with a chamber on either side, built of stone and bearing evidence of a roof and stucco finish, and a shelter made of branches attached to the presbytery, and functioning as a central nave.
This building met the immediate need for a religious venue for celebrating a variety of ceremonies, as well as a place where a significant number of people could congregate at the same time for evangelization.
Friar John of Merida, designer of open chapels
Open or Indians’ chapels were created by Friar John of Merida, a conquistador and architect known as Master John, who was part of Francisco de Montejo the Younger’s army during the last phase of the conquest of Yucatan, from 1540 to 1542, and later became a Franciscan.
After the foundation of Merida, this soldier-builder who designed all of Montejo’s House and its facade, according to the archaeologist Luis Millet Cámara, entered the Franciscan order. Friar Bernardo de Lizana states in his 17th-century “Devotional of Our Lady of Izamal” that he was the first friar to be ordained in Yucatan, taking the name John of Merida.
Colonial sources mention that he took charge of the final stages of construction on the Great Monastery of St. Francis in Merida, and that he built the monastery complexes at Maní, Izamal and Valladolid. In Maní, he created what is recognized as the first Indians’ chapel in Yucatan, adapted to the geography and climate of Yucatan, with his own personal stamp.
The design of these sacred structures, with architectural features only found in the Yucatan Peninsula, can be attributed to the Franciscans John of Merida and Bienvenida, who met in the capital of Yucatan in 1547, when the latter arrived in the city to rejoin his three companions after the extensive missionary journeys that earned him the nickname “The Explorer”.
It is extremely likely that the two exchanged personal experiences. Bienvenida as a friar and his problem, faced by all Franciscans at the time, of not having a church in isolated regions, and Master John as an architect who must have studied the geography and characteristics of the Peninsula very well during his travels in the military.
And so, in 1549, Master John, now a friar with a deep religious sense, but also an excellent perspective on construction techniques, and Friar Bienvenida, possessing broad experience of evangelizing, reinforced in recent years during his missions in the Bacalar area, and later in Yucatan, must have shared and discussed their experiences and challenges. John had found a temporary solution for the latter in the creation of a hybrid architecture that produced the Indians’ chapels: a modified Romanic apse, and a central nave with Mayan walls and roof. The idea was first tried at Maní in the first half of the 16th century, and later throughout the Yucatan Peninsula.
An invaluable monument of sacred architecture
The surviving remains of the Indians’ chapel at Oxtankah, the third religious structure there with these specific arctitectural features, provide archeological evidence that, when compared with the timeline of monastery-building in the east of Yucatan, allows us to place its construction at the end of the 1550s.
In fact, researchers Fernando Cortés de Brasdefer and Bandini Cortés de Brasdefer Romano write that the dates of European ceramics found in the Mayan city of Chactemal, called Columbia Plain and Maiolica, correspond to the 16th and 17th centuries.
The oldest Columbia Plain ceramics, part of the “Morisco” tradition, in the Caribbean are from the 15th and 16th centuries (1492-1550); while the archaeologist José Manuel Lojo Galán points out that there was a second, later phase in the 16th and 17th centuries (1550-1650).
So the probable construction in Oxtankah of a chapel made from perishable materials, similar to Mayan huts, by friar Lorenzo de Bienvenida in 1545, as part of his extensive evangelizing work in the Bacalar region; the architectural knowledge, and awareness of the Yucatan Peninsula that Master John acquired as a conquistador, architect and encomendero; and the exchange of ideas between the two friars from 1547 onwards; as well as an understanding of the challenges involved in building churches in remote areas, together created what we know today as Indians’ chapels, one of the most precious treasures of sacred art in the Peninsula.
The open chapel at Oxtankah is therefore a concrete testament to the rich architectural heritage of the region, and its preservation, recognition and promotion are vital for future generations. It is a unique, priceless heritage that deserves to be protected and appreciated as part of the Yucatan Peninsula’s history and culture.
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