This book tells a gripping story of destruction, devastation, and agency that seeks to upend many of the assumptions that historians have promoted regarding the evangelization of early colonial Mexico. In her work, Hughes, has focused on the great pestilence of 1576, the huey cocoliztli, not as a divine moment that crushed the native will and brought the indigenous peoples of New Spain kneeling to the newly erected churches seeking succor from an angry Christian God, but rather as a moment of devastation that spurred agency: that led the natives to rebuild their world in the wake of conquest, pestilence, and destruction to create a new and unique modus vivendi. Even from the vantage point of modern epidemics, it is difficult to imagine the world of the natives of what is now Mexico in the wake of the Spanish invasion. Everything they had that was familiar, everything that had nourished them physically, emotionally, and spiritually was targeted by the invaders. Cities were destroyed, crops uprooted and burned, hundreds of thousands died from warfare, dislocation, and pestilence in the wake of the arrival of those strangers. And then the natives were subjected to forced labor and even slavery by the newcomers. A new language and new religion were imposed. Yet, through all of this, the natives watched and learned and managed to cope with the invaders, learn their ways, and build a new life for themselves. This is in essence what Hughes has so masterfully described through her examination of the pestilence of 1576.

Hughes’ study consists of a detailed introduction, four thematic chapters, and a brief conclusion. The introduction is extremely effective in setting the time and place of the argument and outlining the major themes of the work. In it, Hughes moves the reader from the consideration of the typical post-invasion history into a view of the individuals affected by the changes brought on by the Spaniards. Important here, and later, is her sensitivity to accounts written by natives in their own language, largely in Nahuatl. In addition, she notes the importance of pictographic evidence, not just how things were written about but how they were depicted in pictorial manuscripts. In the second chapter, Hughes moves to explore relationship between mortality and the rituals offered by the missionary Church to the natives. This response became an important part of the dialog between the natives and the missionaries. Chapter 2 focuses on the body: the mystical body of Christ and the frail and dying bodies of the natives affected by the mortality. Because of the epidemic and the response to it, the Church became a Church of the dead for the dead. Hughes also explores the damaged body, the footless body, the body ravaged by death and illness that, in many ways, came to reflect the Church. If the natives were indeed the feet of the mystical body, it had become footless, and the native Church diverged from the Spanish.

The third chapter considers the visitation made to the Archdiocese of Mexico by Archbishop Pedro Moya de Contreras in the years immediately after the outbreak of the pestilence. Spanish rituals of possession required the person acquiring land to walk the land in question. In many ways, this is precisely what Moya did: to physically view and claim the territory ravaged by illness for the institutional Church. Yet his visitation also corresponded to the beginning of the Spanish policy of congregación, wherein sparsely populated, outlying villages were moved to larger ones (congregated) to create larger population centers and facilitate Spanish administration of the region. The program was not universally accepted by the natives, any more than they accepted having missionary friars replaced by secular clerics. The natives rejected the cartographies of the Spanish and lived their own instead.

The final chapter considers the depiction of this same physical territory from the point of view of the native cartographers whose drawings of their regions accompanied a series of government surveys, requested in the aftermath of the pestilence. These maps described the reality seen by the native cartographer, regional, personal, locally bounded, and heavily imbued with the indigenous traditions of place. The drawings are in dialog with the narratives that they accompanied since the latter were from the perspective of the Spanish officials. The pictorials proclaim the local and the indigenous. The conclusion to the book then weaves these threads into the final argument heralding the creation of a native and local Church that emerged from the pestilence.

This work is strong and thought-provoking. It is replete with archival finds and demonstrates a wide range of interpretive skills. Based on archival materials in Spain and in the New World, as well as on pictographic sources generated in the colonial period, Hughes has found extremely solid evidence for her conclusions, which are also informed by developments that occurred well after the period in question. One area where some consideration might have been pointed was to the possible different outcomes from places / regions controlled by different religious orders and the secular clergy. Clearly this work focuses on the indigenous peoples—not the missionaries. But the Dominicans and Franciscans differed from one another in their methods of evangelization. The Franciscans had a clear millenarian streak that was largely absent in their Dominican and Augustinian brothers. While the outcome might have been the same, one wonders if the path taken in each community might have been quite unique? All in all, this is a stimulating and well-argued piece that is sure to become part of the advanced curriculum.