This chapter presents an alternative to the standard narrative of the decline of the mission enterprise, which tends to focus exclusively on Spanish politics.The chapter argues that a series of catastrophic demographic crises ultimately marked the definitive end of mendicant expansion.At least forty percent of the indigenous population perished between 1575 and 1595.In many areas, the population fell below the critical levels necessary for the mission enterprise to remain economically and socially sustainable.The civil records of the viceroyalty show the results: stalling construction projects, diminishing tributes, and declining workforces. Communities had once committed to raising doctrina monasteries now reported widespread starvation and lamented that their workforces could no longer sustain the Church.Thus, while earlier crises wrought by conquests and epidemics had seen vigorous recovery efforts that stimulated the construction and expansion of the mission enterprise, late-sixteenth century demographic crises rendered the mission unsustainable for a rising number of communities.This late-century crisis opened a new phase in the history of the mission enterprise, in which mendicants curtailed once-ambitious construction campaigns, downsized the scale and extent of their operations, and halted the expansion of the enterprise.Friars and native rulers turned to defending the infrastructure that earlier generations had built, and many of these jurisdictions came to serve as centers for concentrating outlying populations in the congregaciones of the early seventeenth century.

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.

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.