Early Churches Of Mexico

Following the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the early 1500s, Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian friars fanned out across the central and southern areas of the country, founding hundreds of mission churches and monasteries to evangelize the Native population. This book documents more than 120 of these remarkable sixteenth-century sites in duotone black-and-white photographs. Virtually unknown outside Mexico, these complexes unite architecture, landscape, mural painting, and sculpture on a grand scale, in some ways rivaling the archaeological sites of the Maya and Aztecs. They represent a fascinating period in history when two distinct cultures began interweaving to form the fabric of modern Mexico. Many were founded on the sites of ancient temples and reused their masonry, and they were ornamented with architectural murals and sculptures that owe much to the existing Native tradition—almost all the construction was done by indigenous artisans. With these photos, Spears celebrates this unique architectural and cultural heritage to help ensure its protection and survival.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.

Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico includes approximately 250 articles on the people and topics most relevant to students seeking information about Mexico. Although the Concise version is a unique single-volume source of information on the entire sweep of Mexican history-pre-colonial, colonial, and moderns-it will emphasize events that affecting Mexico today, event students most need to understand.

This volume brings together 29 pieces dating from before 1932, none of which appear in her collected works and many of which are published here for the first time. Includes both fiction and essays.

Excerpt from The Old Pratham Church: With Incidents in the Early History of Mexico, N. Y The task of preparing and afterwards amplifying this sketch has not been slight; and yet it has been agreeable. Tions and omissions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Christian churches erected in Mexico during the early colonial era represented the triumph of European conquest and religious domination. Or did they? Building on recent research that questions the “cultural” conquest of Mesoamerica, Eleanor Wake shows that colonial Mexican churches also reflected the beliefs of the indigenous communities that built them. European authorities failed to recognize that the meaning of the edifices they so admired was being challenged: pre-Columbian iconography integrated into Christian imagery, altars oriented toward indigenous sacred landmarks, and carefully recycled masonry. In Framing the Sacred, Wake examines how the art and architecture of Mexico’s religious structures reveals the indigenous people’s own decisions regarding the conversion program and their accommodation of the Christian message. As Wake shows, native peoples selected aspects of the invading culture to secure their own culture’s survival. In focusing on anomalies present in indigenous art and their relationship to orthodox Christian iconography, she draws on a wide geographical sampling across various forms of Indian artistic expression, including religious sculpture and painting, innovative architectural detail, cartography, and devotional poetry. She also offers a detailed analysis of documented native ritual practices that—she argues—assist in the interpretation of the imagery. With more than 200 illustrations, including 24 in color, Framing the Sacred is the most extensive study to date of the indigenous aspects of these churches and fosters a more complete understanding of Christianity’s influence on Mexican peoples.

It is widely held that Christianity came to Belize as an extension of the conquest of Yucatan and that adherence to Christian belief and practice was abandoned in the absence of enduring Spanish authority. An alternative view comes from the excavations of Maya churches at Tipu and Lamanai, which show that the dead were buried in Christian churchyards long after the churches themselves fell into disuse, and pre-Columbian ritual objects were cached in Christian sacred spaces both during and after Spanish occupation. Excavations also reveal that the architectural style of these early churches is Franciscan in inspiration but nonetheless the product of continuing community efforts at construction and repair. A conclusion difficult to ignore is that the Maya of Tipu and Lamanai considered themselves Christians with or without Spanish presence. Viewing historical and archaeological data through the lens of her personal experience of Roman Catholicism, and informed by feminist approaches, Elizabeth Graham assesses the concept of religion, the significance of doctrine, the empowerment of the individual, and the process of conversion by examining the meanings attributed to ideas, objects and images by the Maya, by Iberian Christians, and by archaeologists. Graham’s provocative study also makes the case that the impact of Christianity in Belize was a phenomenon that uniquely shaped the development of the modern nation. A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase

This book is divided into two parts. The first is how we got involved in the study of Central American Indians. The second is what she determined, from her studies; define the changes made by the Spanish influence on the regain.