For more than 70 years, The Americas, a publication of the Academy of American Franciscan History, has been a leading forum for scholars studying the history of Spanish America's colonial missions. As the articles collected from the journal for this special issue show, the general trend has been to move beyond the hagiographic treatment of missionaries and towards a more complex understanding of the historical roles played by the colonial missions in rural life.

While scholars such as Robert Ricard in the 1930s once posited a one-way “spiritual conquest” that cast native peoples as passive receptacles for Catholicism and European culture, such a view is no longer tenable, for several reasons.Footnote ¹ First, since then scholars have demonstrated how the durability of indigenous cultural systems influenced the acceptance, rejection, or modification of Catholic teachings to form new kinds of syncretic and hybrid belief structures. Second, scholars have come to recognize the ways in which the “local” and idiosyncratic flavor of Spanish Catholicism also contributed to this hybridity, as did the missionaries' adaptation of their teachings through the use of indigenous languages and local forms of ritual expression.Footnote ² Finally, recent scholarship has also begun to explore the contested nature of power within the missions and the larger spiritual economy that connected the missions, the missionaries, and native societies to the broader political and cultural terrain. From this perspective, conversion was simply one aspect of indigenous groups' larger strategy to survive within the constraints in which they lived.

During the 1940s and early 1950s, works published in The Americas were crucial to the establishment of mission studies as an important area of colonial Latin American historiography. Many of these early works, with their focus on the key personalities of the missions, were influenced by Herbert Bolton, who served as an advisory editor to the journal for many years, and his call for scholars to train their focus on the Hispanic contribution to the “borderlands.” Such early works tended to focus primarily on the missionaries themselves and “the spirit and the achievement of the apostolic laborers,” as Charles Piette wrote in a 1947 article.Footnote ³ Two works by Marion A. Habig on the Franciscan provinces of North (1944) and South (1946) America were important foundational studies of the order's missions and the key players in establishing the Franciscan presence throughout Spanish America.Footnote ⁴ In a 1947 contribution to The Americas, Philip Wayne Powell, a Bolton student, similarly praised the friars for their works to “pacify” the Chichimec north where the military's “war by fire and blood” had failed.Footnote ⁵ These studies, along with Piette's article, formed part of a larger body of work devoted to defending the image and labors of the Franciscans from a small but growing critique led by Sherburne Cook, which painted the missions as coercive and unhealthy institutions that contributed to the demographic decline of native groups.Footnote ⁶

More critical studies of the missionaries and their methods have tended to reveal that they were far less effective in “pacifying,” much less converting, indigenous borderland societies than Ricard and his successors believed. Several articles in The Americas challenged the view that the allegedly soft methods of the missionaries managed to overcome the larger impact of warfare, social disruption, and enslavement. Stafford Poole (Reference Poole1965) shows in his study of the Third Mexican Provincial Council of 1585 that the bishops of the Church were far more influential than the regular orders in guiding royal policy away from “war by fire and blood,” and that the mendicant friars in practice did little to offset the devastation caused by Spanish entradas and slave raids into the Chichimec north.Footnote ⁷ Christon I. Archer also demonstrates (1973) in his study of Indian deportations to Havana from the Internal Provinces that peace remained elusive in the northern borderlands despite centuries of efforts on the part of Spain's regular orders to establish peaceful settlements of converted Indians.Footnote ⁸ The situation among the non-sedentary Evueví of Paraguay was remarkably similar. As Barbara Ganson shows in an 1989 article, these missions did little to promote peace or to prevent catastrophic mortality.Footnote ⁹

While many scholars continued to work within the Boltonian tradition, others began to look to the methodologies of social history, which, with its concern for collective and group actions, offered a more inclusive vision of colonial Latin American history. Key works by historians like Charles Gibson and members of the Berkeley School were particularly important in bringing the study of indigenous people to the historiographical mainstream. A 1950 article by Daniel D. McGarry demonstrates the subtle but important shift toward recognizing the agency of indigenous people within the missions. While operating from a profoundly Eurocentric perspective, McGarry shows how indigenous children and other neophytes served the missions of Alta California as cultural intermediaries to facilitate the friars' conversion efforts, implying that conversion could not be simply coerced or imposed. To the contrary, it required an active decision on the part of Indians to partake in the missions.Footnote ¹⁰ Through “sympathy, kindness, patience and forbearance”—that is, by offering food and trade goods while also tolerating indigenous songs, dances, and games—the Franciscans succeeded in adapting the missions to the needs of California's Indians, rather than the other way around.Footnote ¹¹

Studies focusing on the friars and their works also contributed, perhaps ironically, to the renewed focus on the mission Indians themselves, since it was the friars who were the first committed students of indigenous cultures. In a 1952 edition of the journal, both Ralph Roys and France Scholes, whose many works on New Mexico and Yucatán were pioneering in the field, contributed articles exploring the sophisticated linguistic, liturgical, and scientific productions of the Franciscans of the Yucatán and Guatemala on the Maya and their world.Footnote ¹² Despite Felipe II's decree forbidding such studies, men like Fray Antonio de Ciudad Real, Fray Bernardo de Lizana, and Fray Diego López de Cogolludo remained committed to learning about indigenous practices, languages, and histories to facilitate conversion. Setting ethnohistorical precedents, Scholes's work built upon that of McGarry and others by showing how religious doctrine was not simply foisted upon the helpless Indians, but rather that missionaries worked to package their messages in ways understandable within Maya cultural frameworks.

In addition to pushing the conversation beyond glorifying or vilifying the missionaries, the social turn was also an important moment of self-assessment, as scholars began to challenge the field's explicit (and implicit) Eurocentrism by viewing the mission from across the cultural divide. Methodologically this meant bringing a more critical eye to the readings of Spanish-language sources to avoid the Ricardian trap of simply rehashing the missionaries' own narratives. A significant contribution was Amy Bushnell's Reference Bushnell1978 study in The Americas on the Franciscan missions in Spanish Florida, in which she shows that indigenous cultural practices, particularly several related forms of ball game, endured within the missions well into the seventeenth century and were actively defended by the people of Apalache.Footnote ¹³ What's more, the friars were remarkably tolerant of the practice and, as she argues, their eventual campaign to eliminate pelota playing emerged not from their concerns about the games per se, but from their concern over the social disruption caused by the matches. In a 1985 article, Florence C. Shipek explicitly rejects the characterizations of mission Indians of California as merely passive vessels for European “civilization.”Footnote ¹⁴ Instead, by reading Spanish documents in light of their cultural and religious biases and with consideration of the state of the ethnohistorical field, Shipek presents what she calls “the Indian viewpoint.” Footnote ¹⁵ Her study reveals that notions of indigenous authority, magic, and territory all contributed to the various responses made by groups to the penetration of the friars into their lands. These studies helped to influence studies like Gary Anderson's work on Texas and the Southwest and Steven Hackel's lengthy monograph on the Franciscan missions of California.Footnote ¹⁶

However, as Susan M. Deeds notes in an important contribution to The Americas (1985), borderland scholars tended to cling to the “study of those institutions which have been stereotyped as peculiar to the frontier, the mission and the presidio” far longer than works on the colonial center.Footnote ¹⁷ Further, the relative dearth of native-language sources for the borderland missions limited the attention they received from the so-called “new philologists,” an ethnohistorical school pioneered by historian James Lockhart and many of his students, as well as the anthropologist Louise Burkhart, and dedicated to the use and interpretation of native-language sources. As a result, prior to the 1990s, studies of non-sedentary peoples, even those claiming to provide an indigenous viewpoint, tended to be more institutional and less ethnohistorical than works on the Nahuas, Zapotecs, and Mayas, and scholars in the field were relatively slow to integrate these newer methodologies with what was known about the larger political economy of the borderlands. One exception was an article by James Schofield Saeger (Reference Saeger1994) in which he critiques the enduring scholarly and popular portrayal of the Guaraní living in the Jesuit missions of the Río de la Plata.Footnote ¹⁸ As he shows, films like Roland Joffé’s The Mission (1986) continued to reproduce Ricardian and Boltonian visions of benevolent missionaries and passively receptive Indians, who in the film are incorrectly portrayed as nomadic. Saeger's work was an important influence on Barbara Ganson's 2003 ethnohistory on the Guaraní of the Jesuit missions.Footnote ¹⁹

By the 1990s, the theoretical problems arising from the incongruence of institutional mission studies within the larger field were becoming apparent. Following the methodologies of the “new cultural history” influenced by scholars like Clifford Geertz, students of the borderlands began to see the missions not just as places of conversion or acculturation, but as loci of political, economic, and even cultural power struggles. Such a perspective eschews the binaries that often dominated the literature, which tended to paint Indians as either hapless victims or doting subjects, and the friars as evil tyrants or benevolent patriarchs. Instead, this new body of research emphasized that the nature of Indian-Spanish interactions within the missions could be understood only within the larger cultural, economic, and political contexts in which it took place. One influential study in this tradition has been Cynthia Radding's Reference Radding1998 article from The Americas on the missions of Sonora, in which she argues that the ties between Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries and the Tegüima and O'odham people cannot be understood apart from the larger economic and political struggles precipitated by Spanish slave raiding, resettlement, and warfare.Footnote ²⁰ For her, conversion was less about the wholesale adoption of foreign religious ideas than it was about the selective appropriation of Catholic and Spanish norms to “salvage their communities within the institutional confines of the mission.”Footnote ²¹ While missionaries could police outward behaviors, they remained largely ignorant of the cultural worlds of their neophytes, for whom Catholic practices like baptism and feasts served to reinforce autochthonous notions of kinship and authority. Such an interpretation stands Ricard's “spiritual conquest” model on its head by suggesting that the adoption of Catholic practices actually allowed indigenous communities to better court the assistance of missionaries (and the military) in recreating their ethnic identities within the confines of the missions and their rancherías (settlements).

One outcome of the cultural turn that has yielded important results in recent years has been the growing body of work emphasizing that multidirectional and contested nature of power within the missions, which led many missionaries to adapt their teachings to the local cultural environment. In 2006, the editors of The Americas dedicated an entire edition to understanding the phenomenon of linguistic and cultural translations between Indians and non-Indians in colonial Latin America. As Susan Elizabeth Ramírez noted in her introduction, the very act of translation can also be an act of power, particularly “when members of one party consider the others inferiors and infidels.”Footnote ²² The same could be said for modern scholars, who have continued to work since the 1990s to untangle the linguistic structures of power embedded in colonial documents. Charlotte M. Gradie, for instance, argued in a 1994 contribution to the journal that the Chichimecs, long the scourge of the Spanish silver economy of northern Mexico, were not the reified and timeless people they appeared to be in Spanish documents, but rather an invention of Spanish political and legal culture that permitted the violent subjugation and enslavement of certain “uncivilized” peoples.Footnote ²³

Very recently, a few scholars have also begun to analyze the contested nature of power within the missions of the Andean world, where geographical isolation, civil war, and social disruption all worked to complicate the relationship between Indians and the secular and regular clergy. María N. Marsilli, in her study of the Arequipan countryside, has shown that the support of the indigenous leadership of the Collagua and Cabana Indians for the anti-secularization campaign of the late sixteenth century was motivated by many factors, including pre-Hispanic indigenous organization, the social ambitions of the Native elite and priests, and the economic ties that bound the Arequipan countryside to places like Lima and Potosí.Footnote ²⁴ She shows that both the economic elite and priests depended upon maintaining good relations with the indigenous elite, who controlled access to labor and who could make or break an ambitious priest's career. Political and economic factors like these could be as limiting as cultural barriers and misunderstandings. In a 2016 article, Gabriela Ramos also shows how Andeans caciques within the Provincia de Huarochirí exploited the pastoral visitations of the Church to push forward their local political agendas.Footnote ²⁵ Again, a careful study of the sources makes it clear that missions were far more than places of conversion and submission to the missionary fathers. Indigenous societies chose to approach them, or not, with many considerations in mind.

Recent scholarship has also looked to the ways in which missionaries incorporated local beliefs and cultural practices into their own teachings of Catholic doctrine to help translate complex theological concepts. In his contribution to the 2006 special edition mentioned above, David Tavárez shows, through his analysis of 15 Zapotec ritual songs, that following a particularly severe extirpation campaign during the late sixteenth century, Dominican friars developed a new “intellectual experiment”: the appropriation of Zapotec songs as a means to facilitate the introduction of Christian thought and practice.Footnote ²⁶ Tavárez argues that the Dominicans and their Zapotec collaborators likely worked together not only to find parallel concepts between the linguistic and cultural systems, but to appropriate an entire ritual song genre called the dij dola.

In a 2010 special edition of The Americas on evangelization, Kristin Dutcher Mann observed similar tactics used by Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries during Christmas celebrations in the missions of northern New Spain. Building on the works of Edward Spicer, Cynthia Radding, and Susan Deeds, Mann also sees the missions as “entangled in webs of power that involved Spaniards, missionaries, relocated Indian converts, neophytes from different ethnic groups, and nonmissionized groups.”Footnote ²⁷ Like the missionaries of Sonora studied by Radding, Jesuits and Franciscans throughout the northern borderland missions worked to localize Christian stories and to repurpose native rituals to redirect their meaning toward Christian worship. Indigenous practices and customs were not simply replaced with European ones, but actively encouraged. Indigenous Christianity retained a strong local flair in part through negotiation and adaptation on the part of the missionaries themselves. In his introduction to the aforementioned 2010 special edition, John F. Schwaller provides a brief historiography on the phenomenon of “evangelization as performance,” demonstrating the growth of these types of studies.Footnote ²⁸

In recent years, Mark Z. Christensen has worked to merge the methodologies of the “new philologists” and the new cultural historians with the better-established scholarship on the Atlantic World, a field of inquiry that developed over the past three decades exploring the economic, cultural, and political linkages between Europe, the Americas, and Africa. As we scholars have come to recognize how the diversity of indigenous cultures influenced the experience of conversion and acculturation, we have also become more aware of the diversity within European cultures and religions. In a 2010 article from The Americas, for instance, Christensen argues that the Catholicism preached throughout the Indies was hardly monolithic, a reality at the heart of the Tridentine Reforms of the late sixteenth century. Through his analysis of several types of indigenous ecclesiastical texts, Christensen argues that Mexican Catholicism developed through both the preaching of heterodoxy and the local cultural reception of those teachings, thus imbuing local religiosity with regionally and culturally specific flair.Footnote ²⁹ Through his analysis of several Nahuatl- and Maya-language religious texts, he shows that Mesoamericans tended to confuse and conflate various Catholic stories as they incorporated them into their own cultural worlds, a product of the inherent difficulties—or perhaps impossibilities—of translation, as well as the heterodoxy of Spanish Catholicism.

Over seven decades, The Americas has helped to push the conversation on Spain's missions toward a more complex and integrative analysis of their place within the larger colonial world. However, historiographical shifts in the field have tended to follow the better established works on the colonial center, rather than to lead. In part, this is simply a reflection of the comparatively limited number of scholars working in the field. But it also reflects the tardy realization that missions were not simply institutions. They were, on the one hand, spaces of economic, social, and cultural production. On the other, they were also spaces of negotiation, refugee resettlement, migration, ethnogenesis, and cultural and biological death. From this perspective, the history of the missions appears to have more in common with the colonial center—much more, in fact—than scholars have traditionally realized. As the articles from The Americas discussed in this essay show, the journal has been a leader in bringing the literature to where it is today. Despite recent developments, there remains much to be discovered about the missions, their native inhabitants, and even about the missionaries themselves, as Asunción Lavrin's Reference Lavrin2015 article shows.Footnote ³⁰ Future studies will likely continue to reveal the degree to which missions were connected to, rather than separate from, the larger colonial world.