(Spanish: 'The Brothers of the Pious Fraternity of Our Father Jesus the Nazarene'), also known as Los Penitentes, Los Hermanos, the Brotherhood of our Father Jesus of Nazareth and the Penitente Brotherhood, is a semi-secret lay confraternity of Hispano Catholic men active in Northern and Central New Mexico and southern Colorado. The confraternity's origins are not known, though most scholars agree that it arose in reaction to neglect of the region by religious authorities between the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Penitentes first became widely known during New Mexico's territorial period for their practice of physical penance during Holy Week, for which they were targeted by the institutional Catholic church and vilified in popular literature. Membership in the confraternity peaked in the late 19th century, but Penitente activities continue in the 21st century.

Historiography and conjectured origins The first known and explicit reference made to the Penitentes dates to 1833, when the newly-appointed Bishop of Durango José Antonio Laureano de Zubiría visited New Mexico (the first episcopal visit to the area in 73 years). In his writings from the visitation, he noted and condemned the activities of a "Brotherhood of Penitentes" which, in Zubiría's account, was founded illicitly in the years prior to his visit. Josiah Gregg's Commerce of the Praries (1849) notes a bloody Good Friday ceremony in Tomé, allegedly witnessed by the author more than a decade earlier. However, neither of these early accounts make categorical claims regarding the brotherhood's origins.

The United States acquired Mexico's northern territories, including the heartland of Penitente practice, after the end of the Mexican-American War. The Vicariate Apostolic (now Archdiocese) of Santa Fe was organized in 1850, prior to which the territory of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico was nominally administered by the Diocese of Durango. The new Vicariate Apostolic was headed by Bishop John Baptist Lamy, a French bishop until then laboring in Ohio, and was (excluding the preexisting Mexican clergy) staffed by Frenchmen. The Vicariate's elevation to a diocese in 1850 mostly settled jurisdictional questions, although they did not end disputes between Mexican and French clergy in the area.

Lamy and the new French clergy took quickly took note of the fact that almost every village in the new Diocese hosted a confraternity which, most notably, engaged in bloody rites of self-flagellation and even crucifixions during Holy Week. Aside from being frowned upon as a barbarous relic, the confraternity's activities disquieted American settlers in the area, and the Diocese moved to ban it. Bishop Lamy, in part from conversations with the confraternity's brothers, concluded that the Penitentes were a degenerated remnant of the Third Order of Saint Francis, which had accompanied Juan de Oñate into the territory nearly 250 years earlier but had been weakened by various events beginning with the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. This thesis was supported by accounts that Juan de Oñate flagellated himself shortly after entering New Mexico in commemoration of Holy Thursday; this event was taken to be the origin point of penance in the area.

The notion that the Penitentes were a degenerated remnant of the Third Order was adopted by protestant missionaries in the area, and by secular historians and writers. Charles Fletcher Lummis, a journalist who played a key role in promoting New Mexico as a tourist destination, first exposed the American public to the Penitentes through his writings, such as The Land of Poco Tiempo (1893). The book described the "Penitent Brothers" as a "savage", "pagan", and pseudo-Catholic secret society who controlled local politics through malfeasance, and was accompanied by photographs he took of a Holy Week procession (including a crucifixion). In the years following the release of The Land of Poco Tiempo, the Penitentes became a fixture of accounts of New Mexico, featuring in numerous articles and novels (including Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop). Scholars speculate that the increasing media visibility of the confraternity drove it into further secrecy, lest its ceremonies be misrepresented by Anglo-American writers.

What Ramón A. Gutiérrez describes as the "hegemonic" or mainstream historiography regarding the origin of the Penitentes emerged from research conducted by Angelico Chavez, a Hispano Franciscan Friar who was appointed archivist of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe in 1946. Using Spanish colonial sources, Chavez concluded that the thesis of Third-Order origin, taken as received wisdom by the mid-20th century, was incorrect. Chavez noted the absence of such an organization in a detailed account of the New Mexican church composed in 1777. However, Chavez noted Zubiría's 1833 condemnation of Penitentes, which Zubiría stated had been founded "a goodly number of years" prior. Thus, Chavez concluded that the confraternity had been formed "between 1790 and 1810", during a period of secularization in colonial Mexico, perhaps inspired by the import of an account of Spanish penitential processions and passion plays.Writing 22 years after Chavez in 1976, Marta Weigle proposed an alternative hypothesis which sought to reassess the traditional Third Order historiography. Drawing on sources composed after the reconquest of New Mexico from the Pueblo people in 1695, Weigle traced what she saw as the "basically Franciscan" practices of the Penitentes to the activities of Franciscan missionaries in northern New Mexico, who were mostly of Spanish origin and were first posted to New Spain. Spanish King Charles III's disputes with the Papacy resulted in him suppressing the Franciscans in New Spain and transferring their responsibilities to secular organs or the far-off Diocese of Durango. While they took decades to have effect, these events deprived Hispanos of the structures they were accustomed to, and former members of the Third Order took it upon themselves to form pseudo-Franciscan organizations, which became the Penitentes.

A third proposed origin was put forward in 1991 by art historian William Wroth, who uncovered a letter dating to 1833 (the same year of Zubiría's episcopal visitation) which denounces extreme penitential rites performed in Taos by a "hermandad de la Sangre de Cristo" (brotherhood of the Blood of Christ) and witnessed by a priest of the Diocese of Durango. Wroth linked this confraternity to similarly named ones established in Europe and, later, Mexico in the 16th and 17th centuries, and emphasized the similarity of the "hermandad de la Sangre de Cristo" with Spanish and Mexican confraternities. He concluded that a Spanish confraternity made its way to New Mexico in the early 19th century, and that the confraternity only acquired the "Penitente" label in the mid-19th century.

The most recent proposed origin was publicized in the late 1990s by historian Ramón A. Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez suggests that the Penitentes arose from a variety of local sources which coalesced inside of genízaro communities in the 18th century. Acknowledging the pervasive influence of Franciscan spirituality in colonial New Mexico, he suggested that the kernels of Penitente penance rites came from interactions between Franciscans and enslaved genízaros. The mid-18th century saw the founding of two confraternities in Santa Fe, the Confraternity of Our Lady of Light and the Confraternity of Our Lord Jesus Nazarene (popularly known as the "brothers of darkness" due to their devotion to the Passion); the latter confraternity was composed of poor men, often of Pueblo or genízaro descent. The latter confraternity is thought to have lent the Penitentes their popular moniker, the "brothers of darkness". In Gutiérrez's telling, the development of the distinct Penitente Brotherhood coincided with the formation of genízaro identity between the late 1700s and Mexican independence. Gutiérrez situates the still-current period of Penitente organization from the 1820s onward, when the confraternity's devotional practices diverged from the mainstream Spanish church in the area and acquired a secular, political dimension (by the archepiscopacy of Jean Baptiste Salpointe, Penitente hermanos mayor often concurrently served as town leaders).

Other origin theories exist; the website of the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art states that the Penitentes arose as a pseudo-Franciscan structure due the expulsion of Spanish clerics during the Pueblo Revolt in 1680. A more well-attested to theory occasionally referenced in modern scholarly sources posits that the Penitentes arose in the 1820s in reaction to Mexican independence, when the Franciscans were expelled and New Mexico's other Catholic structures were temporarily put into disarray.

Documented history

Beyond scant mentions made prior to 1850, as discussed in the previous section, the documented history of the Penitentes begins with the acquisition of most of modern-day New Mexico after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago. Soon after arriving in the territory, J.B. Lamy became intensely suspicious of the group, and probably tried to abolish it altogether, although he did not succeed in this pursuit. Lamy and his successor Salpointe both attempted to "regularize" the confraternity under the assumption that it was a wayward remnant of the Third Order of Saint Francis. This entailed a rewriting of the group's rules to lessen the intensity and violence of penitential acts, confine its actions to the private sphere (as opposed to the traditional, public processions), and center the group's spiritual goals around "good Catholic living" and the sacraments. Judging from later suppression attempts, these regularization policies did not succeed. In the first Synod of the Diocese of Santa Fe, held in 1888, Salpointe issued a public condemnation of the confraternity, stating that it should "not be fostered in the least" and that priests should refuse to celebrate mass at Moradas or associate with unrepentant Penitentes. Catholic commentators, such as Angelico Chavez, attributed at least part of the hostility between the New Mexican Church and the Penitentes to agitation by protestant missionaries; in some cases, protestant missionaries attempted to win over Penitente leaders angered by the institutional crackdown on their organizations.