Chapter 6 traces how, in the aftermath of these reforms, the Neogranadian church, at the parish level, became an Indigenous and grassroots organisation. One aspect of this transformation was institutional, as it came to be better staffed, organised, and equipped. Another was ideological, as the lessons of the Jesuit experiments with missionary methods were extended across the archdiocese, centring everyday practice, popular devotion, and social institutions. But the most significant aspect was led by Indigenous people themselves, as the shift away from punitive policies and towards a more inclusive Christianisation, coupled with the implementation of a more effective language policy, created space and opportunities for people in rural parishes to interact with Christianity in new ways. This went much further than the authorities had intended, as they learned when they sought to rein in some of these changes, and it transformed the New Kingdom of Granada forever.

The conclusion reflects on the profound transformations undergone by the New Kingdom of Granada by the late seventeenth century, and how this began to powerfully shape the images of the early colonial past that began to appear in works of historical writing in that period, with long-lasting consequences. This triumphal register of writing, that cast the Muisca as the third great empire of the Americas and asserted the swift success of the Spanish colonial administration, has long obscured perceptions about the Indigenous people of highland New Granada. As this book has demonstrated, a granular exploration of an exhaustive array of colonial archival sources paints a very different picture: on the one hand, of the anxieties and limitations at the heart of the colonial project, the incomplete and contingent nature of colonial power, and of deep and multi-layered crises of governance; and on the other, of the complex ways in which Indigenous people, in their interaction with Christianity, made possible the coming of the New Kingdom of Granada.

This chapter analyzes recent conservative efforts to build parties in Latin America. Its main case study is Argentina’s Republican Proposal (PRO) party, one of the most important examples of conservative party-building in Latin America. This chapter explains the success of right-wing parties born in nonauthoritarian contexts through the strategic decisions of leaders about whether to invest in high-cost resources (ideational and organizational) that will allow parties to take root in inhospitable contexts. This chapter demonstrates that the competitiveness of right-wing parties has been driven by three factors: programmatic innovation by personalistic leaders; organizational mobilization of both core and noncore constituencies; and an elite fear of the "Venezuela model."

This chapter looks at the right-wing landscape in Chile, in particular the four parties present in it. To better understand the similarities and differences between these four parties, this chapter analyzes novel survey data that allows for a detailed description of those who identify with the right in contemporary Chile. By mapping out the right-wing electorate, the authors show that the formation of a stable electoral coalition between these four right-wing parties is anything but simple because of the important ideological differences between their voters.

Chapter 1 explores the contours of the religious practices of the Muisca in the early decades after the European invasion. To do so it unravels a series of overlapping assumptions and stereotypes about the functioning of their religious practices, social organisation, and political economy. While much of the historiography continues to take for granted that these people constituted a pagan laity led in the worship of a transcendental religion by a hierarchy of priests who performed sacrifices in temples, this chapter shows that these long-held narratives are fictions originating in the earliest descriptions of the region, later embellished and developed by seventeenth-century chroniclers. Instead, drawing a large corpus of colonial observations, it reveals a highly localised series of immanentist religous practices, centred on the maintenance of lineage deities that Spaniards called santuarios and a sophisticated ritual economy of reciprocal exchange, that were intimately connected to the workings of political power and economic production.

Chapter 2 explores the early history of colonial rule in the New Kingdom of Granada, and of the priests and officials first tasked with introducing Christianity to its Indigenous peoples. This involves unravelling a series of powerful assumptions entrenched in the historiography that insist on the efficacy of colonial power. Instead, the chapter shows that the ability of colonial officials, missionaries, and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic to effect change on the ground remained fleeting, contingent, and inconstant. To do so, it explores the participatory nature of the royal administration and judiciary, both at an imperial and a local level, and its reliance on petitioners, supplicants and rescript; reassesses the role of the legislative projects of local officials, whose efficacy is so often taken for granted; and tests the real impact of these institutions and their claims on the lives of Indigenous people through a careful re-reading of all surviving records of early visitations, showing that for decades colonial control remained an illusion and that in practice power remained far from the hands of colonial officials in the New Kingdom.

This chapter uses data from the Dataset of Parties, Elections, and Ideology in Latin America (DPEILA) to understand the recent rightward move being seen in many party systems within the region, as well as the subsequent process of party-system polarization. The authors argue that major economic downturns favor radical, antisystem alternatives, thereby creating an opportunity for newly created parties to campaign on extreme policy platforms. They also demonstrate that polarization increases when leftist incumbents are associated with progressive policy change, as right-wing parties have become more ideologically extreme. This indicates that the left turn of the 2000s has at times favored the radicalization of important sectors of the right.