In this rigorously researched study of evangelization in the highland plateau of the Eastern cordillera of the Northern Andes, Cobo Betancourt explains many of the early struggles of colonial governance in the region. The Muisca, who inhabited this region now considered Bogota (Colombia) and its surrounding areas were unlike the polities living under the Aztec and Inca empires before the arrival of the Spanish insofar as they lacked both a pre-existing imperial political structure and a common vehicular language. The evangelical strategies missionaries had developed in territories closer to the centers of the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain therefore had minimal utility in the alitplano cundiboyacense. As a result, Cobo Betancourt argues, the Christianization of this peripheral colonial region became a constantly adjusted process that the Muisca helped shape in significant ways.

The first part of the book, containing Chapters 1–3, surveys current research on Muisca societies in the early colonial period to assess how far removed Spanish priests and colonial administrators were from understanding the people they were tasked with evangelizing. The survey is also a useful corrective to misunderstandings about pre-Hispanic and sixteenth-century Muisca societies that followed the publication of the late seventeenth-century Historia de las conquistas del Nuevo Reino de Granada by Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita, which invented an apocryphal past to compete with criollo historiography about the Aztec and the Inca. The subsequent chapter examines Spanish property owners’ appeals to the Spanish Crown to address problems in colonial governance. Cobo Betancourt compares the aspirational stories narrated about the Muisca in those appeals and the royal decrees that ensued with local archival evidence describing what was happening on the ground. The juxtaposition lays bare what Cobo Betancourt calls “the paper fiction” of early colonial governance. Some of the problems peeking through the fiction were related to the previously referenced Spanish ignorance of the Muisca; others came from outright corruption and theft. The third chapter speaks directly to the latter theme. It describes in chilling detail how colonial officials and clerics in the 1570s coerced Muisca communities, decimated by recent epidemics, into turning over enormous quantities of gold objects kept by these communities as offerings for numinous ancestor-related entities referred to as santuarios. This chapter on the “mining” of santuario gold urgently deserves to be included among the recent boom of studies on mineral extraction in Iberian-controlled regions throughout the colonial period.

The second part of the book, compromised of Chapters 4–6, explains the vicissitudes of post-Tridentine reforms in the early seventeenth century as they were adjusted to the local conditions at the center of the province of the New Kingdom of Granada. For instance, Chapter 4 describes the effects of a Jesuit-led effort to embrace a new view of Indigenous Christianity that centered outward adoptions of Catholic ceremony by the newly converted. Chapter 5 explains that the new approach was enhanced by efforts made by the secular Church and some religious orders to produce evangelical materials in the many mutually incomprehensible Muisca languages of the altiplano. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes that Christian confraternities emerged as a way for the Muisca throughout the region to embrace Christianity on their own terms. Through community gatherings that came with confraternity participation in Catholic ceremony, the Muisca were able to reactivate some of the customs they had previously used to legitimate leaders before epidemic, colonial governance, and corruption hobbled their political institutions. Leadership in confraternities became a way for some surviving Indigenous leaders to reinvent their importance in their communities and for other non-elite Indigenous individuals to aspire to new positions of influence.

Cobo Betancourt’s book constitutes a crucial contribution to historiography on the colonial Andes and the spread of Iberian Catholicism throughout the early modern world. Future researchers might also be inspired to explore with further research the author’s provocation to read this history as a metonym for how other Indigenous Christian communities in peripheral regions of the Spanish Empire shaped the terms of their adoption of Christianity.