This chapter examines and compares three genocidal events in the early modern Caribbean and Mesoamerica: the massacres of Xaragua (Hispaniola, 1503), Cholula (Mexico, 1519), and Toxcatl (Mexico, 1520; also known as the Massacre of Templo Mayor). Each of the three mass killings marked a political and military turning point in the history of Spanish military expansion in the Americas. They share other important characteristics, too. These massacres were entirely or partially planned and executed by European actors, namely Spanish officials and military entrepreneurs (conquistadores) under the leadership of fray Nicolás de Ovando, Hernán Cortés and Pedro de Alvarado respectively. Each event can be described as a genocidal massacre targeting a specific community because of its membership of a larger group: the primary objective of the European perpetrators was to provide an object lesson for the surviving members of that group (Leo Kuper). In each case, European perpetrators sought to avoid scrutiny and censure from within their own group by explaining and justifying their actions as a pre-emptive strike against indigenous plots. The tangible involvement of indigenous actors — altogether crucial in the case of the Massacre of Cholula ax— further complicates the historical analysis of a complex sources.

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.

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.