The Mexican Mission
Indigenous Reconstruction and Mendicant Enterprise in New Spain, 1521–1600

Offers a social history of the Mexican mission enterprise, emphasizing the centrality of indigenous politics, economics, and demographic catastrophe.

Ryan Dominic Crewe (Author)

9781108462921, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 December 2020

327 pages, 14 b/w illus. 3 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.566 kg

'The Mexican Mission will become a central text for those studying the history of the early church in New Spain.' Jason Dyck, Comptes Rendus

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.

Introduction
Part I. Conversion: 1. The burning temple: religion and conquest in Mesoamerica and the Iberian Atlantic, circa 1500
2. Christening colonialism: the politics of conversion in post-conquest Mexico
Part II. Construction: 3. The staff, the lash, and the trumpet: the native infrastructure of the mission enterprise
4. Paying for Thebaid: the colonial economy of a mendicant paradise
5. Building in the shadow of death: monastery construction and the politics of community reconstitution
Part III. A Fraying Fabric: 6. The burning church: native and Spanish wars over the mission enterprise
7. Hecatomb
Epilogue: Salazar's doubt: global echoes of the Mexican mission.

Subject Areas: Anthropology [JHM], History of the Americas [HBJK], European history [HBJD]