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Book 3: The Legend of Fray Baltazar
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Death Comes for the Archbishop, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Spirituality vs. the Material World
Friendship and Compromise
Humanity’s Relationship with Nature
Colonialism, Industry, and Loss
Memory, Death, and Afterlives
Summary
Analysis
A month after Latour visited Albuquerque, he formally suspended the gregarious Father Gallegos. Though at first the villagers resented this change, they quickly threw themselves into religion under Latour in the same way they had thrown themselves into revelry under Gallegos. Feeling satisfied, Latour dispatched Vaillant to Las Vegas—only to learn that, just a few days into his journey, Vaillant had gotten measles and been waylaid in the Pecos mountains.
Just as Montoya needed to be removed from Ácoma, the materialistic Gallegos’s departure from Albuquerque ushers in a new age of religious faith and cohesion. Vaillant, known as a sickly person from the time he was a boy, is constantly falling seriously ill (though this never curbs his adventurous spirit).
Themes
Upon learning this news, Latour grabbed medicine and instructed his cook Fructosa to make a store of food. Latour then set off on an expedition to help his friend, taking an army mule so as not to separate Contento and Angelica. Latour had meant to get to Vaillant in a single day, but when he arrived at the Pecos pueblo, Jacinto advised him to spend the night; despite the clear skies, a storm was coming.
Again, the bond between Contento and Angelica is intimately linked to the friendship Latour shares with Vaillant. Indeed, Latour’s refusal to separate the two mules likely reflects his own pain at being far from his best friend at this critical moment.
Themes
Now, Latour is panicking, worrying about Vaillant and blaming himself for his friend’s illness. After all, Vaillant has always been sickly; when they were at school, he almost died of cholera. But if Vaillant cheated death before, maybe he can do so again.
Because Latour is Vaillant’s boss, he is the person who sends the vicar out on long mission trips, often in dangerous conditions. But more than that, Latour is the reason Vaillant is in the United States in the first place—no wonder the bishop feels some measure of responsibility for this scary illness.
Themes
Latour heads off to Jacinto’s home for dinner. The family’s colorful, beautiful blankets, a great source of pride for Jacinto and his wife, are folded in one corner. The space is bare and clean. For dinner, Jacinto’s wife Clara has made corn bread with squash seeds, a delicacy. While the men eat, Clara rocks the couple’s baby, who has recently fallen ill.
The limited access readers are given to Jacinto, one of the novel’s central characters, reflects Latour’s own inability to understand his guide. For example, while Latour can’t stop expressing his anxiety about Vaillant’s sickness, Jacinto’s feelings about his beloved baby’s illness are nowhere on the page.
Themes
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Latour reflects on the high rates of infant mortality in Pecos—smallpox and measles are a constant threat here. There are many legends about this tribe, including that the strongest men in Pecos were responsible for stoking a fire that had been burning “since time immemorial”; the labor of this fire allegedly sapped the men’s energy. Other stories, mostly spread by Spanish colonizers, dictated that the Pecos were snake-worshippers who fed many of their children to snakes. But when Latour thinks of all the contagious European diseases—measles, scarlatina, and whooping cough—it seems hard to believe any other cause is to blame.
Just as Ferrand tried to frame the tension on the American frontier as a result of indigenous attacks, the legends that circulate about the Pecos people cast suspicion on the tribe. But as Latour acknowledges here—in one of the novel’s first crucial reckonings with the genocidal harm of settler-colonialism—the real danger came from the Europeans, with their diseases and invasions.
Themes
Latour reflects on the once-prosperous tribe that early colonizers had reported on. After all, it was from here that the Spaniards set out in search of the seven golden cities of Quivira, enslaving people from the Pecos for their journey. As the baby coughs, Latour wonders if Jacinto is thinking about this same history.
Latour has frequently criticized material wealth as an inappropriate goal for a priest. Now, that critique takes on new layers—early Spanish conquistadors, desperate to find mythical gold in the Southwest, wrought havoc on the people who had lived there for centuries. Greed has consequences, Latour understands, and Jacinto’s baby’s illness is (even indirectly) one of them.
Themes
