Of late, it appears that the art history of colonial Latin America has finally come into its own. After decades of being relegated to the sidelines, or more accurately, crammed between the more populated fields of precolumbian and modern art histories, scholars of these three centuries have finally amassed a critical mass, led by scholars such as Barbara Mundy, Jeanette Peterson, and Carolyn Dean, to only name a few. Monographs produced in the last ten years have refined a distinct methodology, derived from those polished in the 1990s by the fields of anthropology, history, and religious studies, but adapted to better interpret the visual and material worlds. Alessia Frassani's Building Yanhuitlan: Art, Politics, and Religion in the Mixteca Alta since 1500 is a clear heir to this intellectual genealogy, poised as an exemplar of the field's potentiality for our next generation of scholars.

This beautifully illustrated monograph takes up the life history of the Mixtec town of Yanhuitlan's parish church as a case study; Frassani repeatedly refers to her work as a microhistory, subtly placing her work within the larger academic discourses of history. Using an impressive array of documentary sources, Frassani uses this religious structure as a lens from which to analyze the social and political climate of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Mixteca Alta. In doing so, this text places itself among other monographs dedicated to this particular historical context, namely Kevin Terraciano's The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca (2001).

The brief introduction situates the text within the field of colonial Mexican art history, providing a cogent historiography. Frassani deftly navigates shifts in theoretical discourses that have defined the last two decades of research. Primarily among them, Frassani notes how James Lockhart and his students successfully reoriented colonial Latin American history towards the centering of indigenous experience. Perhaps more attention could have been paid towards the subsequent generation of this school, the “New Philology,” but Frassani rightly points to art historians Jeanette Favrot Peterson (The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco, 1993) and Samuel Y. Edgerton (Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial Mexico, 2001) as building upon this intellectual foundation in their method of using the visual world as an index of indigenous agency.

Frassani's first chapter lays out the social, political, and religious complexities of sixteenth-century Yanhuitlan by providing readers with a succinct overview of its Postclassic history. She focuses on two colonial-era sources, an Inquisition trial held between 1544 and 1546, and the Codex Yanhuitlan, a mid-sixteenth-century pictorial manuscript that covers 20 years of European and indigenous interaction. Frassani blithely interrogates the supposed authority of these (and additional) coeval documentary and visual sources, arguing that irrespective of a source's authorship, which can seem exceedingly self-evident, scholars are better served to recognize the nuances of their source's production history.

Chapter 2 provides a concise history of the church itself; Frassani situates the structure in the regional, interregional, and global networks that made possible its construction and decoration. Unlike most colonial-era buildings, the church of Yanhuitlan's own biography is well known, thanks largely to the employ of two master artists, Andrés de Concha (d. 1612) and Francisco Becerra (d. 1605). Both born in Spain, they immigrated to New Spain early in their careers, fulfilling painting, sculptural, and architectural commissions for various sites through the viceroyalty. Frassani locates them within the complex web of artistic influences that linked New Spain to their mother country, rightly placing the seemingly provincial church of Yanhuitlan within the early modern global economy.

Frassani then moves to smaller-scale visual culture that similarly engaged in this transatlantic network, printed religious texts. While this chapter could have benefitted from a substantial expansion, given the richness of the material discussed, the author ably shows how the printed image served as a rhetorical if not figurative exemplar for the paintings Concha executed for the main altarpiece. Chapter 4 then builds on this analysis as Frassani elucidates the iconography of the church's additional visual art, supplementing the material record with archival sources in the form of testaments and church inventories. It is unfortunate that Aaron M. Hyman's “Inventing Painting: Cristóbal de Villalpando, Juan Correa, and New Spain's Transatlantic Canon” was released too late to figure in Frassani's discussion. His reading of the relationship between artistic identity, European print culture, and New Spanish religious art would have made an enlightening conversation partner for this author's work.

Chapters 5 and 6 examine the sociopolitical context of Yanhuitlan's colonial period. Through her examination of an eighteenth-century legal battle over the rightful owner of the palace and adjoining agricultural fields, Frassani is able to reconstruct the physical layout of the compound and the family's formal possession ceremonies. This case suggests divergent local views of the proper functioning of this space, as an elite private residence versus a communal meeting house, throwing into relief shifting notions of authority and the status of landholding. The chapter also situates the palace, the church, and the town aqueduct into their spatialized urban contexts. The following chapter continues this ethnographic history, investigating alternative political structures to that of the cacicazgo (chiefdom); Frassani concludes that with the passage of time the town's elite lineage actively worked to ensure the political repression of governmental roles introduced by the Spanish administration.

Frassani's final body chapter turns to the ritualized animation of the church, documenting the sculptural images housed within it from the sixteenth century until the modern era. The community owns and maintains an impressive number of processional crucifixes and angels, which are all reproduced in color plates. Despite the fragmentary nature of documentary sources that refer to the Yanhuitlan's ritual life, Frassani details the sculptures’ use, specifically during Holy Week, carrying her discussion up to 2014. She concludes that the continued use of these colonial artworks in the town's religious life demonstrates the “continuing process of identify formation” (p. 95).

While the text is impressive in its methodological scope, areas for further exploration include the relationship between circulating print culture (chapter 3) and colonial-period spatiality (chapter 6). Regardless, this monograph stands as an insightful contribution to the field, typifying the methodological acumen necessary for the contemporary study of Latin American colonial art history.