Death Comes for the Archbishop Violence Quotes

While the religious leaders in Rome discuss how things are going in North America, they're quick to repeat some of the horror stories they've heard about Native Americans massacring the white people who have moved there. We never actually witness anything like this in the book, but people seem pretty bent on using these stories to represent the Native American peoples as bloodthirsty "savages."

The people of New Mexico aren't shy around death and carnage. In fact, they're more than happy to hang up a dead and bloody sheep in their kitchen even when there's a distinguished guest in the house. This is the frontier, after all, and you can't get hung up on politeness (or cleanliness!) in a world where survival is the main goal.

The stories of Native American raids on white colonial outposts keep swirling around Father Latour once he's in New Mexico. But many of these stories seem to be exaggerated, since he spends over fifty years in the area without ever encountering a single violent Native American. He encounters plenty of violent white dudes, but those aren't the people that the colonizers like to tell stories about.

It only takes one look at Magdalena for Fathers Latour and Vaillant to realize that her husband must be abusing her. The sad thing is that the two of them leave without offering to help her in any way. It's only when they suspect her husband to have killed other men that they eventually move in and hang the guy for his crimes.

If there's a villain in this book, it has to be Buck Scales. Sure, he doesn't stick around for very long, but he's definitely the closest thing to pure evil that we encounter in our reading. The guy pretty much murders anyone who comes to his door for help. And why? Because he likes to steal their horses and supplies and sell them. Yup, the guy murders people for petty theft. He's not exactly your model citizen.

Trinidad Lucero is training to become a priest, but there are definitely times when the guy gets a little overzealous with his training. He wants so badly to purify himself from sin that he asks other people to punish him by constantly whipping him. The whipping eventually gets so bad that the poor guy has to take weeks to recover.

Old Father Lucero doesn't want anyone finding his hidden stash of money. And even though he's a weak old man, he'll totally murder anyone who comes near his fortune. Now that's what you call a (butt-kicking) miser.

At Doña Isabella's party, we briefly meet two young military officers who will be seeing one another for the last time. This is because one of them will soon be killed in a war with the Native Americans. This passage serves to remind us that the occupation of America by white colonizers wasn't a peaceful thing. It was a bloody affair that lasted on and off for hundreds of years.

A dude named Chavez doesn't trust Father Latour because he's too nice to the Native American peoples of New Mexico. This Chavez guy tends to enjoy wartime more than peace, because the second he hears about a Native American attack, he jumps on his horse and goes out to hunt down some Native Americans. Many people don't know this, but the practice of "scalping" was actually just as common among the white colonizers of North America as it was among the Native Americans.

The earliest missionaries who came to North America weren't always welcomed with open arms. In some instances, they were badly tortured and killed. But these guys were martyred for their faith, so they became legendary among people like Father Latour.