The Mexican mission : indigenous reconstruction and mendicant enterprise in New Spain, 1521-1600 / Ryan Dominic Crewe, University of Colorado, Denver.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Crewe, Ryan Dominic, 1977- author.

Series:

Cambridge Latin American studies ; 114.

Cambridge Latin American studies ; 114

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History.

Church history.

Missions.

Mexico--History--Spanish colony, 1540-1810--Missions.

Mexico.

Mexico--History--Spanish colony, 1540-1810--Church history.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xviii, 305 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Summary:

In the sixty years following the Spanish conquest, indigenous communities in central Mexico suffered the equivalent of three Black Deaths, a demographic catastrophe that prompted them to rebuild under the aegis of Spanish missions. Where previous histories have framed this process as an epochal spiritual conversion, The Mexican Mission widens the lens to examine its political and economic history, revealing a worldly enterprise that both remade and colonized Mesoamerica. The mission exerted immense temporal power in struggles over indigenous jurisdictions, resources, and people. Competing communities adapted the mission to their own designs; most notably, they drafted labor to raise ostentatious monastery complexes in the midst of mass death. While the mission fostered indigenous recovery, it also grounded Spanish imperial authority in the legitimacy of local native rule. The Mexican mission became one of the most extensive in early modern history, with influences reverberating on Spanish frontiers from New Mexico to Mindanao.

Contents:

Conversion

The burning temple: religion and conquest in Mesoamerica and the Iberian Atlantic, circa 1500

Christening colonialism: the politics of conversion in post-conquest Mexico

Construction

The staff, the lash, and the trumpet: the native infrastructure of the mission enterprise

Paying for Thebaid: the colonial economy of a mendicant paradise

Building in the shadow of death: monastery construction and the politics of community reconstitution

A fraying fabric

The burning church: native and Spanish wars over the mission enterprise

Hecatomb

Salazarʹs doubt: global echoes of the Mexican mission.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 271-293) and indexes.

ISBN:

9781108492546

1108492541

9781108462921

1108462928

OCLC:

1084621718