Abstract

CREWE, Ryan Dominic. Baptizing colonialism: Conversion policies in Mexico after the conquest. Hist. mex. [online]. 2019, vol.68, n.3, pp.943-1000. ISSN 2448-6531.  https://doi.org/10.24201/hm.v68i3.3809.

This article examines the political history of indigenous conversions to Christianity after the Conquest. Using archival sources, indigenous annals and the communications of mendicant friars, it offers a review of the spiritual interpretations of the historiography of the first decades of missionary work in Mexico, arguing that the mass conversions seen in those years were due to a complex combination of political opportunism, iconoclastic violence and the search by indigenous leaders for protection from colonial violence. Due to the setbacks and power vacuums that followed the Spanish Conquest and the smallpox epidemic, the indigenous nobles of the altepetls of central Mexico formed alliances at the local level with mendicant friars in order to legitimize their authority and strengthen their territorial ambitions. At the same time, these friars launched a spiritual war using the children of these noblemen. The friars and their native acolytes unleashed a wave of violent acts that ended the political power of the indigenous religious elite. Despite this religious strife, mendicant missions also represented a means of reducing colonial violence. The friars offered to protect indigenous communities from the brutality, exploitation and slavery of Spanish colonists. By the 1530s, mass conversions were a result of a consensus among indigenous peoples that these missions would be the most effective way of protecting their lives, properties and communities. Through baptismal waters, indigenous communities began to reconstruct the Mesoamerican world.

Keywords : colonialism; conversion; 16th century; indigenous communities.

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