The chapter examines the systems of taxation, tributes, and donations that maintained the mission enterprise.In modern scholarship, studies continue to recycle old tropes of mendicant poverty and development projects. Departing from these analyses, this chapter examines the mission’s economic dependence on native tributes and forced labor systems.Arrangements between native rulers and missionaries constituted a colonial economy that sharply contradicted the mendicants’ self-image as ascetic hermits.The chapter begins by contrasting Spanish claims that the mission was financed through royal patronage with colonial records that demonstrate the myriad ways in which indigenous communities supported it with finances, goods, and labor.The chapter then examines the consequences of the missionaries’ dependence on native economies. Far from their imagined lives as desert hermits in a pagan land, friars lived in close proximity to indigenous towns and faced a plethora of temptations.This section examines numerous reports of misconduct by friars, as well as efforts by mendicant Orders to regulate material wealth.The missionaries’ material dependence on indigenous communities challenged ideals of poverty and chastity at the core of their identity.Thus, while indigenous people paid dearly for the mission with their labor, friars paid for it with their racked consciences.

This chapter presents a thorough re-examination of the so-called ‘Great Conversion,’ a period after the Spanish Conquest when millions of natives were baptized.Countering mendicant apologetic narratives that presented the process as a great spiritual turning, and more recent work that has limited itself to critique the apologists, this chapter demonstrates baptism was inextricably related to the social and political repercussions of conquest and demographic crisis.The chapter begins by examining the politics of indigenous adhesion to Christianity in the aftermath of conquest, highlighting the early alliances between rulers and missionaries. The chapter then examines the role of spiritual warfare and iconoclasm in mass-baptisms, which was a by-product of these early alliances.Amidst this violence, however, missionaries also extended a promise to protect indigenous communities from Spanish exploitation and enslavement of the native population.By the mid-1530s large-scale conversions resulted from an emerging consensus in indigenous communities that the mission provided them with a means to preserve their lives, property, and communities.Self-interest, spiritual warfare, and the search for sanctuary all drove this phenomenon.Through the waters of baptism, native communities began the process of remaking Mesoamerica in the 1530s.

In the late-sixteenth century, a spate of violent incidents brought disrepute upon the mission enterprise in New Spain.Spanish churchmen lamented that some of their peers were inciting natives to disobey, resist, and even burn the churches of their ecclesiastical rivals.Spaniards spilled much ink in reporting these unseemly clashes in their correspondence and chronicles.Less reported are the many similar confrontations that occurred simultaneously in indigenous communities.Such was the worldly power of the mission enterprise that those Spanish churchmen and native rulers who did not have access to it jostled, often violently, to possess it.This chapter situates these curious episodes in the broader context of a series of political crises that shook the mendicant-indigenous mission enterprise to its very foundations in the 1570s and 1580s.It examines the politics of secularization, conflicts among indigenous jurisdictions for control of the mission Church, and the many points of cross-influence between Spanish and indigenous rivalries.As a result this chapter finds a mission enterprise that began to decline not solely due to Spanish political changes that undercut mendicant power, but rather because this weakening of mendicant power in the Spanish realm interacted with the on-going fragmentation and atomization of indigenous polities.

This chapter examines the interdependent relationships between indigenous rulers and missionaries between 1530 and 1560. From its very beginnings, the mission in New Spain was a hybrid enterprise. Native territorial politics and everyday practices of governance largely determined the shape of mission organization. The chapter begins by examining the political foundation of the mission enterprise, which consisted of an expanding web of local native-missionary alliances.The mission was a vital factor in the geopolitical reshuffling of territorial power in post-conquest Mesoamerica, while indigenous territorial divisions served as the basis for the mission system of doctrinas (mission bases) and visitas (outlying mission churches). The chapter then examines the ways in which these alliances of missionaries and native governments adapted pre-conquest political and religious offices to the needs of the mission enterprise.In hundreds of doctrinas (mission bases), officials known collectively as the teopantlaca, or “church-people” – indigenous fiscales (church officers), alguaciles de doctrina (church constables), and cantores and trompeteros (singers and musicians) – oversaw the everyday experience of the mission. By adapting native hierarchical structures, territoriality, and officialdom to the mission enterprise, native rulers and missionaries furthered their respective efforts to reassert local indigenous authority and expand the mission’s doctrinal program.

This chapter explores the mission’s vital antecedents by employing a transatlantic comparison of the ways in which religion served as a marker of sovereign power, connected violence to theologies of imperialism, and offered sanctuary amid the disruptions of unprecedented transatlantic contacts. Three lines of inquiry form the basis of this chapter.First, I examine religion as an expression of political sovereignty in fifteenth-century Mesoamerica and Iberia. Second, I address the most fundamental differences between Iberia and Mesoamerica. In Iberia, religious exclusivism fuelled a Spanish theological imperialism that sought to extend Catholicism to the exclusion of all competing god and religious institutions, while Mesoamerican empires integrated defeated gods to their pantheon. Part three, meanwhile, examines the way in which unprecedented cycles of encounter, conquest violence, widespread enslavement, and severe demographic crises in the Canaries and the Caribbean also made the mission a sanctuary from the worst depredations of early colonization. The transatlantic roots of the Mexican mission enterprise consist of three interconnected but also contradicting elements: religion as an expression of political sovereignty, as a basis for repression and violence, and as a promise of protection.

The epilogue to “The Mexican Mission” takes a step back from the great edifice of the mission enterprise and situates it in its global context. It traces the ways in which observers around the globe interpreted the Mexican mission enterprise. The Mexican mission profoundly influenced the fledgling mission enterprise in the Philippines, where veterans of Mexico and the New World sought to capitalize on the lessons that Mexico could have on their influence. Similarly, this mission experience shaped Spanish expectations for domestic Morisco in Iberia.As the most widespread overseas mission program in the Spanish Empire, the Mexican mission represented a mission model whereby temporal power could produce rapid and dramatic results. Yet this very characteristic of the mission enterprise was reduced to caricature by detractors and opponents. In Japan, Buddhist monks warned that Spanish-style missions posed grave dangers to Japanese sovereignty, mentioning New Spain specifically.In Protestant Europe and Puritan North America, meanwhile, detractors pointed to Mexico as proof that Spanish missions had more to do with temporal power than spiritual inspiration.Such stereotypes undoubtedly served their authors’ interests, but also contained a grain of truth, as demonstrated in this book: for natives and Spaniards alike, the mission functioned as means of raising a new polity and new world during Mexico’s century of death.

This chapter explores the mission’s vital antecedents by employing a transatlantic comparison of the ways in which religion served as a marker of sovereign power, connected violence to theologies of imperialism, and offered sanctuary amid the disruptions of unprecedented transatlantic contacts. Three lines of inquiry form the basis of this chapter.First, I examine religion as an expression of political sovereignty in fifteenth-century Mesoamerica and Iberia. Second, I address the most fundamental differences between Iberia and Mesoamerica. In Iberia, religious exclusivism fuelled a Spanish theological imperialism that sought to extend Catholicism to the exclusion of all competing god and religious institutions, while Mesoamerican empires integrated defeated gods to their pantheon. Part three, meanwhile, examines the way in which unprecedented cycles of encounter, conquest violence, widespread enslavement, and severe demographic crises in the Canaries and the Caribbean also made the mission a sanctuary from the worst depredations of early colonization. The transatlantic roots of the Mexican mission enterprise consist of three interconnected but also contradicting elements: religion as an expression of political sovereignty, as a basis for repression and violence, and as a promise of protection.