2020/03/10 by Joshua Jacob Fitzgerald · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Latin American history and culture #Politics and Society in Latin America #Archaeology and Natural History
paper · doi:10.4324/9780367232689-7
openalex publication_date 2020/03/10 · openalex created_date 2022/05/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Beginning in the 1520s, Spanish Catholic clergy (especially Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians) introduced Christianity throughout the Mesoamerican landscape in a disruptive fashion, taking over, and toppling indigenous sacred places and objects and replacing them with Christian ones. According to some scholars, Catholicism overtook Native practices and sense of place from the top down, the so-called “Spiritual Conquest” of Mesoamerica ( Ricard 1966 ). But local identity was not so easily destroyed. Instead, Native communities helped to shape knowledge from the ground up. This chapter sheds light upon the sense of place attachment felt by the Nahuas of Central Mexico and its effect upon Christianization in the sixteenth century. It reveals Nahua sensibilities about place-based learning and knowledge maintenance and how foreign pedagogues mistook local use of church courtyards as simply articulations of European ideals. On the ground level, in fact, these actions and learning modalities helped to preserve pre-Christian traditions, as seen in a reading of primary sources from the period. This chapter shows that the Spiritual Conquest attempted to eradicate Mesoamerican ideologies, but that, in reality, local customs persisted well into the colonial period.