Chapter 6 follows Scott’s army through 1847 during its advance toward Mexico City. It considers how the army sought to pacify the Mexican people by paying for what it took and explains the (sometimes violent) consequences for Mexican women. Although women made a vast array of choices in response to the US invasion, from seizing economic opportunities to armed resistance, regulars insisted that women welcomed them – an interpretation that still predominates in military histories. This misconception had strategic benefits. To the extent that army protection of women was real, martial law and army money maintained sufficient order to allow US forces to secure foodstuffs and supplies to continue military operations. To the extent that protection was rhetorical, the army used its claims of legitimacy to make levies on occupied areas (and women), fund operations, and harshly punish those who threatened military interests. The US Army found both strategies, the real and the rhetorical, critical to its invasion of Mexico.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.