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Book 7: Spring in the Navajo Country
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
At the end of his visit, Latour decides to formally recall Vaillant. Then, he heads to Eusabio’s house, where he sees Eusabio and his family, including two young nephews, engaged in a religious ceremony. Eusabio introduces his two nephews to Latour, using their Navajo names. Latour explains that he wants to send a letter to Vaillant, and Eusabio agrees to accompany him to Santa Fé to post it.
Latour’s decision to recall Vaillant signals that even this noble bishop has some limits in his selflessness. Though Eusabio truly cares for Latour, he also makes a point of refusing to conform to white settler norms, using his nephew’s Navajo names instead of the Catholic ones Latour might expect.
Themes
Literary Devices
The two men ride the 400 miles to Santa Fé, through sun and sandstorms. Latour muses that “travelling with Eusabio was like travelling with the landscape made human,” as Eusabio takes each change in weather in stride. Eusabio is also careful to clean up after himself, leaving no trace on the land. “Just as it was the white man’s way to assert himself in any landscape,” Latour thinks, “it was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not stand out against it.”
This moment, one of the most important in the novel, speaks to the colonial idea of “improvement”; starting with philosopher John Locke and continuing with important U.S. political leaders like Thomas Jefferson, the ideology of America’s first settlers dictated that to change a landscape was the only way to own it. In addition to breeding a materialism that is seemingly antithetical to Latour’s Catholic views, the white settlers’ desire to “assert” themselves onto the landscape wrecked a great deal of human and environmental carnage.
Themes
Indeed, Latour notices that the indigenous tribes tend to make their homes out of the most abundant materials in their areas, so that the houses almost blend into nature. And while tribal artists spend long hours on intricate jewelry or belt buckles, they spend very little time trying to mold or adorn the outside world. The tribes are even cautious in their water use, as if they want to avoid awakening the sleeping wilderness.
In the novel’s penultimate chapter, Navajo leader Manuelito will inform Latour that these New Mexican landscapes are “more sacred” to the indigenous people that live there than any church could ever be. The respect Eusabio shows for his environment, therefore, is itself a kind of religious act.
Themes
