Knowledge and Personal Expectancies: Jesuit Intellectual Culture and Missionary Experience in the Early Jesuit Province of New Spain

The California missions, whose original church spaces and visual programs were produced by Iberian, Mexican, and Native artisans between 1769 and 1823, occupy an ambiguous chronological, geographical, and political space. They occupy lands that have pertained to conflicting territorialities: from Native nations, to New Spain, to Mexico, to the modern multicultural California. The physical and visual landscapes of the missions have been sites of complex and often incongruous religious experiences; historical trauma and romantic vision; Indigenous genocide, exploitation, resistance, and survivance; state building and global enterprise. This Dialogues section brings together critical voices, including especially the voices of California Indian scholars, to interrogate received models for thinking about the art historical legacies of the California missions. Together, the contributing authors move beyond and across borders and promote new decolonial strategies that strive to be responsive to the experience of California Indian communities and nations. This conversation emerges from cross-disciplinary relationships established at a two-day conference, “‘American’ Art and the Legacy of Conquest: Art at California’s Missions in the Global 18th–20th Centuries,” sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art and held at the University of California, Los Angeles, in November 2019.

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Book Review: The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain, by Lori Boornazian Diel

Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture ◽

10.1525/lavc.2019.140013 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 1 (4) ◽

pp. 123-124

Author(s):

Helen Burgos-Ellis

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

New Spain

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The Sultan Hernán Cortés

Representations ◽

10.1525/rep.2020.152.3.55 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 152 (1) ◽

pp. 55-84

Author(s):

Nicole T. Hughes

Keyword(s):

New Spain ◽

Religious Drama ◽

Political Interests ◽

Hernan Cortes

In 1541, the Franciscan friar Motolinía sent to Spain an account of the Tlaxcalan people performing the religious drama The Conquest of Jerusalem in Tlaxcala, New Spain. Previous scholars have read his festival account to reflect only local political interests. I argue that it is a palimpsest, containing both the Tlaxcalans’ ambitious diplomatic strategy, expressed in their performance, and Motolinía’s efforts to steer Castile’s policies in the Americas and the greater Mediterranean.

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