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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.
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 examines the social and political history of the construction of the most significant physical monuments produced in the Mexican mission: a network of 251 monasteries, which I refer to as doctrina monasteries.While scholars have examined these structures in terms of architectural and art history, the social history of these monasteries remains neglected. I argue that these monumental building campaigns formed part of indigenous efforts to reconstitute communities in the wake of the severe disruptions caused by the hueycocolixtli epidemic of 1545-1547.Remarkably, in the decade after losing a third of their population, the number of indigenous communities that decided to build large monasteries more than doubled, from 43 to 119 large-scale projects.For indigenous rulers, monastery construction served as a highly visible means of reasserting political power.As a replacement for the teocalli (Mesoamerican temple), the doctrina monastery came to represent the sovereignty of the local native state.Moreover, the process of producing the monastery employed indigenous mechanisms of tribute and obligatory labor that reinforced rulers’ claims over outlying territories and peoples. Nonetheless, labor and tribute were not automatic mechanisms.Instead, the mobilization of labor and tributes were governed by expectations of reciprocity that bound rulers to commoners.Archival evidence reveals the frailty of such arrangements. As ongoing demographic crises strained the social contract, resistance to building campaigns intensified.Thus, these colossal structures embodied aspirations that ultimately were far more fragile than the stone and mortar of these structures’ hulking walls.
Across the highlands of central Mexico, hundreds of stone churches stand as a testament to the turbulent history of sixteenth-century Mexico. Austere and windowless, their massive walls of dark red stone propped by pyramidal buttresses, the largest of these missions are among the most imposing erected in the Spanish Empire. In bustling provincial towns and near-abandoned villages these edifices are still imposing, with gothic arches and barrel vaults often rising as high as eighty feet. Closer up these structures lose their severe appearance as their details come into view. In delicately-carved façades, and on murals inside the churches and their adjoining monasteries, native artists left lavish evidence of Mesoamerica’s encounter with the European Renaissance. Surrounding these structures, vast churchyards attest to the multitudes that once assembled for masses and instruction. The scale of these missions seems outsize for the handful of mendicant friars who used them as their bases. Yet between 1521 and 1590, indigenous communities undertook monumental campaigns in the wake of conquest and in spite of four catastrophic epidemics, each of which was on the magnitude of the Black Death. Stone by stone, laborers built the infrastructure for one of the most extensive mission enterprises in global history. Amid these stout cloisters and churches that still echo with murmured prayers, questions arise: What motivated native communities to raise these complexes while they sought to recover from conquest and epidemics? Are these walls a testament to Spanish power? Or are they monuments to indigenous persistence?
Paying taxes is one of the least popular activities worldwide. Latin America in particular is notorious for having low direct taxes, weak compliance and enforcement, and high levels of inequality. Although fiscal extraction has gained renewed interest among governments in recent years, with the end of the commodity boom adding special urgency, the successful adoption and implementation of tax reforms is easier said than done, even when tax policy prescriptions are widely shared. This volume provides the first comprehensive, region-wide assessment of the role of political factors, including public opinion, democratic institutions, natural resources, interest groups, political ideology, and state capacity. What explains the region's low levels of taxation? What explains the low progressivity in its tax structure? And what explains considerable differences across countries? In addressing these questions, each of the volume's chapters makes original theoretical and empirical contributions toward understanding how to overcome the political challenges to taxation.
How does international migration affect political parties’ electoral strategies in the sending countries? This article argues that remittances help political parties decide whom to target during elections. Drawing from theories of vote targeting and those on the effects of remittances, this study addresses how political parties’ electoral strategies follow the specific characteristics of remittance recipients. Using individual-level data from Mexico’s 2006 presidential elections, the results show that receiving remittances had a significant impact on experiencing electoral targeting, especially by the then-incumbent PAN. This study reveals the importance of remittances in shaping the strategies of Mexican political parties.
A significant proportion of the population in Latin America depends on the informal economy and lacks adequate protection against a variety of economic risks. This article suggests that economic vulnerability affects the way individuals relate to political parties. Given the truncated structure of welfare states in the region, citizens in the informal sector receive lower levels of social security benefits and face higher economic uncertainty. This vulnerability makes it difficult for voters to establish strong programmatic linkages with political parties because partisan platforms and policies do not necessarily represent their interests and needs. Using cross-national microlevel data, this study shows that individuals living in informality are skeptical about state social policy efforts and exhibit weaker partisan attachments. The findings suggest that effective political representation of disadvantaged groups remains a challenge in Latin American democracies.
In many developing countries with weak formal institutions, the protection of state actors is essential for organized criminal activities and illicit markets to emerge and thrive. This article examines the relationship between the state’s regulation of drug trafficking and its associated violence in highly fragmented markets. It argues that political competition influences coordination among the police, generating different types of regulatory regimes. Police with greater coordination implement protection rackets that curb violence; uncoordinated police carry out particularistic negotiations with drug traffickers that exacerbate criminal violence. This argument is illustrated with a subnational comparison of two Argentine provinces that experienced a similar drug market expansion with different patterns of violence. These cases show how corrupt states can obtain relative order in highly fragmented drug markets, and illustrate police influence in shaping the evolution of drug dealing in metropolitan areas.