The Black, The White, The Accurate: Transformational Textual and Visual Research on Colonial Latin America

CLAS Seed Grant      This project analyzes data in Northern New Spain in a manner that balances the mutually exclusive viewpoints of colonial Latin America that were expressed by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and the Black Legend and White Legend that they spawned. New research suggests that the interactions between Spanish missionaries in New Spain and the Aztec people in the 16th and 17th centuries were more complicated than previously thought. Rather then simply conquered and conqueror, with the missionaries forcing Christianity on the Aztecs, the two groups actively collaborated as partners. The missionaries worked to incorporate practices, beliefs, and objects that originated with the indigenous religions, and the Aztecs accepted Christianity in a way that made sense to them. This partnering appears to have repeated itself in what is now the Southwest United States and South America. The Franciscans also contemplated the creation of a Utopian New Jerusalem in Mesoamerica and in fact did some relevant building in the region of one of the strongest allies of the Spaniards, the Huejotzingo-Cálpan area.

Work to date, in preparation for the proposal we will submit to NEH, has resulted in additional collaborators joining the project. The University of Duisberg-Essen (liaison Prof. Josef Raab) and the University of Graz (liaison Prof. Roberta Maierhofer) joined the project. In addition, we have formed a partnership with CyArk, a non-profit organization dedicated to three-dimensional laser scanning of the world’s cultural treasures for the purposes of research and preservation. We have identified three cultural and geographic areas to include in the NEH proposal: Pueblo Indians in what is now Arizona and New Mexico, Aztecs in central Mexico, and Incas in Peru.

This project was sponsered by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Institute for Humanities Research.