Burial outside the town: the cemetery reform in the Spanish Indies, 1787-1833
From 1787 the Spanish crown worked to move burial out of the churches of its American cities into ventilated cemeteries beyond the built-up area: asking the bishops what it would cost, sending a standard design in 1804, approving Havana's in 1807, authorising expropriation of land by 1833. Revillagigedo carried it into Veracruz and Puebla against what the compilation calls the ancient preoccupation and practice. Nuns kept the right to burial at home.
Why this wins its question: The move of burial out of churches is told in English as a European Enlightenment story - Paris, Naples, the Madrid cédula of 1787 - and stops at the Atlantic. This entry follows the same reform into the Indies out of the Spanish compilation of overseas law, page by page: the circular that asked the American bishops what it would cost, the standard design sent from Madrid in 1804, the Havana cemetery approved in 1807 and endowed from the bishop's own rents, the viceroy who carried it into Veracruz and Puebla against the "preocupacion y práctica antigua", and the expropriation order of 1833. It also prints what an admiring account leaves out - that burial fees were a church revenue the crown had to audit, that it took thirty years and a royal complaint about "morosidad" to get the accounts, and that the nuns of the Indies were exempted from the reform by a cédula of 1818.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The reform begins as an inquiry into what it would cost. The article CEMENTERIOS of the compilation of overseas law records that reports were asked of the diocesans and vice-patrons of the Indies "por cédula circular de 27 de marzo de 1789, sobre el costo y medios de establecer cementerios fuera de poblado", and that the general cédula on cemeteries which those orders accompanied was that of 3 April 1787. The crown did not decree the cemeteries into existence; it asked its bishops what building them would take, and then spent fifteen years on the answer.
The reason given in the text is ventilation, and the stated ends are two. "Reconocida la utilidad de los ventilados", the compilation continues, a further cédula of 15 May 1804 was issued "acompañando un diseño para su construccion" - a standard design sent out from Madrid - and it charged that the parish priests be made to understand the merit they would earn by contributing "á tan loable fin, en que se interesaban á la vez el mayor decoro y decencia de los templos, y la salud pública." Public health and the decency of the churches are named together, in that order in the sentence and probably in that order in the archbishops' minds.
The compiler is explicit that the Havana cemetery followed the royal design, and equally explicit that this is his inference: the 1804 design, he writes, is that "á que sin duda se acomodó el de la Habana aprobado en cédula de 11 de mayo de 1807." The date of the approval is documentary; the adaptation is the compiler's supposition and is carried here as such.
In New Spain the reform was executed by a viceroy against local resistance, and the compilation says whose. Its footnote records that "desde abril de 1790 logró la constancia del virey Revilla-Gigedo el establecimiento en Veracruz de su cementerio estramuros; y tambien en Puebla (artículos 208 é 226 de su memoria), venciendo las dificultades, que oponia la preocupacion y práctica antigua, tan nociva á la salubridad y decencia pública, de hacerse en las iglesias"; and that he then began to treat with the archbishop about erecting them for the grown population of Mexico City, under royal charges of 29 June 1791 and 22 September 1792. The chronological index of the same compilation carries those two dates in one line - "cementerios en Méjico" - which is how the sequence can be checked against the article itself.
The reform was funded out of the church's own income and audited by the crown. The bishop of Havana sent on 15 November 1813 the plan he had formed "para la dotacion del cementerio construido en esa ciudad, contribuyendo para ello con sumas considerables de las rentas de la mitra", and it was approved by a royal order communicated on 31 March 1821 on condition that the money and its surplus be governed by the rules for the funds of the church fabrics. The same order demanded a circumstantial account of what the burials in the cemetery had produced every year since it was established, in what those products had been invested, what had formerly been paid to the fabrics for burials and what they received now, "de manera que se pueda venir en claro conocimiento de si las fábricas y el público son perjudicados, ó beneficiados con el actual arancel." Moving the dead moved a revenue, and the crown wanted the arithmetic.
It also took thirty years to get an answer. The same 1821 order records that the king "no ha podido menos de estrañar la morosidad, con que hasta ahora se ha procedido en un asunto de tanta importancia", and asks that the addressee employ all his zeal in the conservation and improvement of "un establecimiento tan religioso como útil á la humanidad". The phrase is the reform's own summary of itself, and the complaint beside it is the measure of how slowly it moved.
The rule did not fall on everyone equally. The Poor Clares of Havana "reclamaron la gracia de poderse enterrar en la clausura del monasterio, y se las otorgó en reales órdenes de 30 de julio de 1815 y 15 de agosto de 1817", and a circular cédula of 31 August 1818 extended to the nuns of all the communities of the Indies the exemption already declared for the professed of Spain, so that their bodies could be given ecclesiastical burial within their own enclosure. A public-health measure justified by ventilation admitted, within a decade, a standing exception of status.
By the eighteen-thirties the state was prepared to take the land. "Una real órden de 28 de setiembre de 1833 manda aplicar la ley de espropiacion al caso de que habiendo necesidad de ocupar un terreno de propiedad particular para la construccion de cementerio, no quiera cederlo su dueño." The reform that had begun by asking bishops what it would cost ended by empowering the compulsory purchase of private ground.
What the source can and cannot support. This is a dictionary of the legislation, printed in Madrid in 1844 by a compiler who had served the colonial treasury, and it establishes the orders, their dates and the terms in which they were argued. It gives no count of burials, no date for the opening of any cemetery except the approval of Havana's in 1807, and no evidence at all of what happened in the parishes of the smaller towns. One detail should also be read carefully rather than smoothed over: the article dates the general cédula on cemeteries to 3 April 1787 in its footnote and the circular asking the bishops for costings to 27 March 1789 in its text, and both dates are printed here as the source prints them.