Building a visible church: The Mexican mission enterprise in the early Spanish Atlantic, 1521--1600

This dissertation presents a substantive revision of one of the most extensive and controversial mission programs in the Early Modern world. Long examined through the distorting lens of the missionaries' chronicles and more recently through native-language Christian texts central to the mission's spiritual encounter, this analysis of the post-conquest mission in Mexico focuses instead on its vast temporal reach into the society, politics, and economy of the emerging Mexican viceroyalty. The mission was not only a doctrinal program; it was also a political-economic enterprise that bound together Spanish imperial and local indigenous political sovereignty, thereby laying the foundation for the Viceroyalty of New Spain. This sociopolitical analysis rests upon civil records from Mexican archives left untouched by sixteenth-century mission historiography, especially viceregal chancellery records and Audiencia proceedings that contain indigenous petitions and denunciations, viceroys' orders, and witness testimonies. These records map the broad geographical span of the mission enterprise across the sedentary indigenous cultures in the core of the viceroyalty, from Michoacan to Oaxaca (Central Mexico). Furthermore, civil records detail understudied secular factors that defined the politics and everyday experience of the mission, including the effects of indigenous mortalities, the political and social conflicts within local indigenous states, autonomous native policing and discipline, patterns of exploitation by friars and their collaborators, and the mobilization of tremendous labor forces for the construction of two hundred-fifty 'fortress monasteries.' These edifices---a Church Visible of the most ostentatious kind---embodied a mission that powerfully fused the Mesoamerican state and the Spanish Empire. This study is organized along three lines of inquiry. Part One examines the politics of conversion in post-conquest Mexico in relation to other missions on early Atlantic frontiers. Part Two examines the internal dynamics that brought the mission enterprise to political hegemony in post-conquest Mexico. Part Three examines how demographic collapse brought an end to this enterprise's dramatic expansion. The mission enterprise became a nexus between indigenous efforts of sociopolitical reconstitution and the imperial ideologies behind Iberian transoceanic missions; in the same vein, this study's methodology bridges what has been a persisting gap between Mexican and Atlantic historiographies.