Social Science Research Council

"Art and Identity in Colonial Oaxaca: Dominicans, Spaniards and Mixtecs at the Convento of Yanhuitlan"

The mission building campaign undertaken in Latin America on the wave of the Spanish Conquest was the largest evangelical and artistic enterprise in the history of the Catholic Church. In the turn of just a few decades, Spanish mendicant friars at the head of the missionary efforts had established hundreds of conventos (missions) throughout the American colonies. These institutions, which were intended to provide accommodation for friars, were designed to carry out doctrinal, educational and liturgical activities. However, they soon became booming economic and cultural centers.

My dissertation provides the first comprehensive study of the Dominican convento of Yanhuitlan in the Mixtec region of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. I offer a critique of the current formalist approach to colonial art, which grants separate attention to architecture, painting and sculpture. I will instead look at the convento as a whole: a privileged locus of power and cultural mediation between indigenous and foreign rulers, from the first embattled moments of the encounter to the centuries of coexistence that followed the conquest.

I argue that the appropriation of Christian beliefs, imagery and even pageantry was a conscious political strategy by local Mixtec rulers that guaranteed decades of unprecedented prosperity in the town. However, at the same time as Mixtec rulers were taking advantage of Christian beliefs, the Spanish friars using the local craftsmanship (as demonstrated in textile production, painting and sculpture) as a Mixtec vehicle for communicating Christian doctrine. Civic and religious ceremonies constituted the most fertile opportunity for cultural mediation throughout the colonial period. I will analyze religious practice as much as a means of imperial policy as a negotiation of Mixtec ethnic identity.