Chihuahua's colonial missions. An invaluable patrimony

Knowledge of the <i>Pragmatici</i>, 2020

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC 4.0 license. David Rex Galindo-9789004425736

AnthroNotes : National Museum of Natural History bulletin for teachers, 2014

American Historical Association, 1998

2010

In its sparest retelling, the "conquest of Mexico" is a narrow story that begins with Cortés' reckless landings of 1519 and ends with a Castilian flag flying over the ruins of Tenochtitlan in 1521. Even this well-trodden narrative involves an astounding range of Spanish and Indigenous actors, and presents complex puzzles of documentation and transcultural interpretation. It is no small wonder that the tale of these few years has consumed entire academic careers. How much more daunting, then, is the longer and more complete story of Spanish military, religious and cultural dominion? The broadest definition of the Conquest of Mexico extends over several centuries to embrace the history of evangelization, acculturation and state formation among peoples throughout Mesoamerica and North America. It includes traditions of inquiry based on

2007

The Roman Catholic miSSIOns of New Spain were an essential component of the Spanish colonial enterprise, and the effects of the missionization process on the Native American populations of the Americas were profound. How did these native populations respond to the new imperatives of colonization and religious conversion? In what ways were they able to maintain their cultural identity under the mission system? This paper examines the ways in which archaeology can address these questions of cultural continuity, with particular emphasis on the eighteenth-century Spanish missions of San Antonio, Texas.

Historical Archaeology, 2003

Archaeological data have been critical in articulating the manner by which system-wide structuring elements of Europe's colonial projects in America were adjusted or transformed in local settings. This paper explores the ways in which certain of these structuring elements in Spanish colonial America were played out in a variety of households and communities, with the ultimate goal of approaching an archaeologically informed, comparative study of American colonialism. Several parameters are offered as examples of potentially fruitful points of comparison among colonial systems through which researchers might assess local agency at both intra-and inter-colonial scales. These include varieties of economic and governmental centrality, forms of labor organization, varieties of religious experience, gender relations, idealized social identities, and frontier-urban dichotomies.

Latin American & latinx visual culture, 2021

2016

The decline of the missions in far northern Mexico during the age of Santa Anna has attracted the attention of several scholars. Most recently David Weber in The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846 has identified many complex national and regional factors that contributed to their demise, arguing that in the cases of California and Texas the government's secularization policy played a decisive role, while the reductions-towns of Indians converted to Christianity-in Arizona "crumbled by default" and in New Mexico were quietly abandoned by the clergy.' (The term secularization means the replacement of state-supported missionaries from religious orders (regular clergy) with parish-supported priests obedient to the ecclesiastical hierarchy (secular clergy).) Many of these same destructive forces operated in New Granada (modern Colombia), where the once thriving missions on the eastern llanos frontier all but disappeared by the mid-nineteenth century. In striking contrast to the Mexican governments, however, those in New Granada were determined to revitalize the missions. A review of their unsuccessful efforts, when compared with the process in far northern Mexico, offers fresh insight into the viability of the mission as a frontier institution in Spanish America during the early national period. 2 An earlier version of this essay was read at the Seventh Conference of Mexican and United States Historians, Oaxaca, 22-26 October 1985. I would like to thank David Weber and David Bushnell, who read that draft and made many valuable suggestions. I am also grateful for the helpful comments offered by other conference participants and the anonymous reader for Comparative Studies in Society and History.