Santa María, nave sculpture, St. James the Moor Slayer, horse base

This small wooden platform depicts what appear to be two indigenous people (on the right) acknowledging the authority of another figure holding (on the left), perhaps a native nobleman charged with instructing them in Christianity. In his left hand he holds a single arrow, "the wounding for love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus".* The men flank a flowering prickly pear bearing the sacred Aztec image of the eagle and serpent beneath the dove of the Holy Spirit, a syncretic folkloric vision of Christ's presence in New Spain.

* (Hardon, John A. Modern Catholic Dictionary, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1966 p. 42)