Following medieval tradition, and under the new doctrinal impulse of the Council of Trent, religious confraternities constituted privileged corporate bodies of Catholic modernity. Confraternities allowed, at least theoretically, monitoring the faithful, channeling devotion institutionally, and applying the ecclesiastical dispositions laid down by the Council of Trent, after its American implementation with the Third Council of Lima (1582-1583). They served to guide the devotion of lay people during religious festivities and to provide spiritual and material support during funeral rites. They also cultivated the remembrance of deceased members through annual masses and supported their members in the face of economic hardship. For the latter, they relied on membership fees, alms collected from the local inhabitants, and – depending on the degree of importance – income from credits or the lease of real estate bequeathed by deceased members.

Confraternities also created a social space for people linked by economic, labor, or ethnic ties. Some were comprised of the local elite and held great prestige, while others corresponded to networks of certain artisanal guilds, or, in the American context, connected people classified by the colonial system into ethnic categories – morenos (blacks), indios (Indians), and castas (castes). There were also, as we will see in this chapter, mixed and pluralistic confraternities where members of different origins and conditions coexisted and practiced their religions.

The system of confraternities implemented in Latin America was thus steeped in the human and cultural diversity of colonial society. With this, indigenous neophytes, enslaved Africans, and mestizo castas were fully incorporated into the system of signs and practices deployed by the Church. The confraternity was, then, an organization that provided an identity framework to its members – a corporate identity under which non-Hispanic creoles could present themselves before the colonial system, define their level of commitment to it and, therefore, be allowed to claim a certain degree of symbolic integration and prestige – elements that could be flaunted before the Church, the State, and other groups of society.