Building Colonial Cities of God offers a brilliant depiction of the mendicant orders of New Spain that reveals the integral role and enduring legacy of the friars and their institutions within the popular religious landscape and the formation of the urban cultures of the region. This history challenges earlier scholarship on mendicant orders in the Spanish colonial era that often diminish the significance of the mendicants, limit their narratives to the missionary activities of Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians within their doctrinas de indios, or restrict mendicant influence to a posited golden age of prosperity that concludes by 1570. Many accounts that extend the narrative into the later colonial era depict a history of gradual decline with little variation until Bourbon reforms and independence initiated social reformation that rendered the medieval mendicants obsolete. These histories of later mendicant institutions narrate the termination of mission expansion and the gradual erosion of their social status and significance until the mid-eighteenth century, when crown authorities shifted their support to the diocesan clergy and relieved the orders of their doctrinas. Such accounts are beholden to traditional narratives of modernity and secularism that claim that in the wake of the Council of Trent friars were forsaken in favor of the more intellectually relevant and relatable Jesuits and diocesan clergy and more modern institutions.

Karen Melvin expands her investigation into the eighteenth century, examines the historical experiences of mendicants engaged in urban work beyond the doctrinas de indios and evangelization, and incorporates additional mendicant orders in addition to prominently discussed Franciscan, Dominicans, and Augustinians. Her history delves deeply into a spectrum of colonial archives and scholarly literature to reveal that mendicant orders were inextricable components of the religious lives of urban populations and the formation of local, cultural identities in central New Spain. The unique identity of each order colored their performance of urban pastoral care and contributed to the variations in belief and practice of popular Catholicism. Consequently, mendicant orders became enmeshed within urban social and cultural life, permitting their orders to flourish through the early eighteenth century and baroque Catholicism to remain vital and relevant in the realization of urban cultures and identities. This text may certainly be critiqued for its lack of consideration of diversity, variation, and conflict within the five orders; its exclusion of Jesuits and monastic orders; and the absence of perspectives and voices of mendicants from rural doctrinas that might have nicely complicated or significantly strengthened her conclusions. However, the author recognizes such exclusions as necessary to fulfill her intent to responsibly portray the history of five mendicant orders throughout the cities of central New Spain over a period of more than two centuries. The topical structure of the book evidences that this work is more than a history of the missionary deeds of the mendicant orders. It is an illumination of the continued presence and appeal of mendicant orders' religiosity and their hand in the construction of urban cultures and the distinguishing identities of various locations.

The text opens with a concise introduction to the mendicant orders and history of central New Spain's provinces in the colonial and early modern era and the historiographical trends that have occluded the influence of the orders and the continued vitality of their Catholicisms. The first chapter shows that that while mendicants wrestled to administer their doctrinas throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, their orders enjoyed a period of prosperity as the number of friars and new urban convents increased throughout New Spain. The second chapter presents the variation between the corporate identities of the disparate orders and how each realized those identities in opposition to one another while crafting a shared mendicant identity. The first section concludes with a chapter that considers how each mendicant institution fulfilled their common urban ministries. Although changes during the period are minimized in the narrative and differences between orders are described as variations in emphasis, the third chapter opens a window into the popular religious landscape of the cities of central New Spain. The second part reveals the ways in which the several publicly debated topics united and divided the orders, yet evidence a vital institution. Melvin demonstrates that this vigor and the proximity of the orders heightened interorder disputes even as they defined competing strains of the popular religious practice of urban Catholics. The final chapter utilizes Toluca during the eighteenth century as a case study to demonstrate the influence of local and global factors and the role of mendicant orders on both the Catholic forms and place of church in colonial urban life.

This insightful contribution to the history of New Spain, the mendicant orders, and popular colonial Catholicism demonstrates that each may be best understood as more than the sum of missionary endeavors in the era but rather as part of the larger context of an early modern world. Melvin elucidates that throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mendicants engaged in pastoral work in urban settings where they continued to influence the variations in Catholic forms and practice, framing how global circumstances manifested within local contexts. This work acutely presents the complexity of religious histories by noting how the influence of various combinations of orders in a city, their official support and engagement with the laity, and the particularities of historical periods shape the local political dynamics of religion. Melvin amends conventional accounts by illuminating the endurance of baroque forms of Catholicism within the local institutions and religion of cities where the orders maintained less adversarial relationships with secular clergy. The Catholic Church and mendicant orders in particular remained a vital component of the religion and daily lives of urban parishioners through the early nineteenth century. Building Colonial Cities is a refreshing invitation for further research into the role of urban cultures and mendicants in the religious history of New Spain.