Abstract
Toward a decolonial history of Christianity in Latin America, this chapter identifies indigenous counterclaims to the Spanish narrative of spiritual conquest. In the course of the sixteenth century, indigenous communities across New Spain grafted the Christian church onto their own histories, cosmologies, and landscapes, creating the mythologies, structures, and institutions that ensured the church’s projection into the future. Through the emplacement of churches, these maps summon an idealized landscape that projects the church into an indigenous future. Accepting Christianity but refusing Spanish authority over Christian practice the version of indigenous Christianity depicted in the mapas is geographically bounded and defined in relation to indigenous structures of authority.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The research elaborated here forms part of my current book project, Contagion and the Sacred in Mexico, funded and supported by the University of California President’s Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
- 2.
Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519, no. 7542 (2015): 171–180, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258
- 3.
Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico; an Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
- 4.
Jorge Klor de Alva considers the various ways that indigenous communities have responded to Christianity. Jorge Klor de Alva, “Spiritual Accommodation and Conflict in New Spain: Towards a Typology of Aztec Responses to Christianity,” in The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800: Anthropology and History - Harvard University, ed. G.A. Collier (New York: Academic Press, 1982), 345–66.
- 5.
Enrique Dussel, “Epistemological Decolonization of Theology,” Chap. 2, this volume.
- 6.
Stephanie Wood, “The Cosmic Conquest: Late-Colonial Views of the Sword and Cross in Central Mexican ‘Títulos,’” Ethnohistory 38, no. 2 (1991): 185–86.
- 7.
José Lezama Lima, “La curiosidad barroca,” in La expresión Americana (Fondo de Cultura Económica: 1993). See also English excerpt and translation: “Baroque Curiosity” in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, eds, Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham: Duke: 2010, 212–240), 213. Lima explains, it is not the art of Tridentine “counterreform” but the art of “counter conquest”. Celoria subsequently picks up the theme of counter-conquest in his Ensayo de contraconquista (2001)
- 8.
Mundy explains that the purpose of the relaciones was to make New Spain “visible” to the king. Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 12, 23.
- 9.
Mundy, 34.
- 10.
Serge Gruzinski and Eileen Corrigan, The conquest of Mexico: the incorporation of Indian societies into the Western world, 16th–18th centuries (Cambridge, UK; Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA, USA: Polity Press ; Marketing and production, Blackwell Publishers, 1993).
- 11.
Diana Magaloni-Kerpel identifies covent imagery in the Florentine Codex. Magaloni-Kerpel, Diana, “Painting a New Era: Conquest, Prophecy, and the World to Come,” in Invasion and Transformation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico, Mesoamerican Worlds (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2008), http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebookbatch.PMUSE_batch:muse9781607320012
- 12.
Note the Mexican art historian at LACMA who interprets the appearance of a rainbow over an illustration depicting the arrival of the Spanish to the New World as indicating the spiritual conquest as a “new covenant”.
- 13.
I was first brought to consider the relationship between churches, grids, and indigenous landscapes in the mapas of the Relaciones geográfricas by William B. Taylor, in his essay on the Texupa map in Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History.
- 14.
Dana Leibsohn, “Colony and Cartography: Shifting Signs on Indigenous Maps of New Spain,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America , 1450–1650, ed. Claire J. Farago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 264–81; Eleanor Wake, Framing the Sacred: The Indian Churches of Early Colonial Mexico (Norman: University Of Oklahoma Press, 2016).
- 15.
Leibsohn , “Colony and Cartography: Shifting Signs on Indigenous Maps of New Spain,” 279.
- 16.
Leibsohn, 267.
- 17.
Mundy writes of the symbolism of the churches on these landscapes is that the mapas “uses churches to symbolize human settlements as was typical of coeval European maps.” Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, 70.
- 18.
Leibsohn , “Colony and Cartography: Shifting Signs on Indigenous Maps of New Spain,” 275.
- 19.
Stephanie Woods extraordinary and important digital and annotated archive of the maps was essential for this project. https://mapas.uoregon.edu/teoz
- 20.
Alfonso Caso, El mapa de Teozacoalco (México, D.F.: Editorial Cultura, TG, SA, 1949).
- 21.
Amara L. Solari, “Circles of Creation: The Invention of Maya Cartography in Early Colonial Yucatán,” The Art Bulletin 92, no. 3 (2010): 154.
- 22.
Wood mapas project.
- 23.
Davíd Carrasco and Scott Sessions, eds., Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretive Journey through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2, Har/Map edition (Albuquerque: Cambridge, MA: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 429.
- 24.
Solari , “Circles of Creation,” 154.
- 25.
Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, 82.
- 26.
Personal communication with David Carrasco, at the Peabody Museum Mesoamerican Studies Center, Spring 2017.
- 27.
James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries, 1 edition (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1994), 206.
- 28.
Lockhart, 257.
- 29.
Wake, Framing the Sacred, 84–87.
- 30.
Wake, Framing the Sacred.
- 31.
Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest, 257.
- 32.
Wake, Framing the Sacred, 116.
- 33.
Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press: Durham ; London, 2014).
- 34.
Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests (2003), 192.
- 35.
Jennifer Scheper Hughes, “Traditionalist Catholicism and Liturgical Renewal in the Diocese of Cuernavaca, Mexico.” In, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Timothy Matovina, and Robert A. Orsi, Catholics in the Vatican II Era: Local Histories of a Global Event (New York, NY, USA ; Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hughes, J.S. (2019). Mapping the Autochthonous Indigenous Church: Toward a Decolonial History of Christianity in las Américas. In: Barreto, R., Sirvent, R. (eds) Decolonial Christianities. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24165-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24166-7
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)