The Power of Song: Music and Dance in the Mission Communities of Northern New Spain, 1590–1810 (review)

Summary Review

In this important volume, Kristin Dutcher Mann uses the phenomenon of music as a prism through which to analyze the mission communities of Northern New Spain. She ranges widely through time and space, beginning with the initial contacts between missionaries and indigenous peoples in central Mexico in the sixteenth century and progressing to the developments in Spain’s last mission chain in Alta California at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The volume’s introduction identifies themes such as identity, control, the undermining of control, and communication styles which will form the major part of the analysis in the subsequent chapters. The introduction also clearly and deliberately relates the author’s efforts to the theoretical and historical questions which are part of the current historiographical discussion about the Spanish colonial project in its religious and secular manifestations during the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries.

The first two chapters set the scene. The first offers background material on the role of music among the indigenous peoples of what was to become Northern New Spain during the pre-contact period. This chapter appropriately relies upon the anthropological literature concerning the vast expanse of northern New Spain before the contact period. This material is supplemented with observations drawn from the writings of the earliest missionaries who came into contact with a number of the indigenous groups of the region. The second chapter offers a succinct and well reasoned summary of the role of music in Catholicism in late medieval and early modern Europe.

The heart of the book follows. It consists, first, of three chronologically-arranged chapters which analyze the role of music during the expansion of the mission frontier from central Mexico northward. These chapters consistently and successfully attempt to recover the experience of the indigenous peoples as actors. Mann routinely couples the Spanish entradas with indigenous practices associated with communicating intentions to a new group. She is at pains to capture the complexity of indigenous experience, for instance in the manner in which song and dance could be used both to support and to oppose mission activities.

Two final thematically arranged chapters analyze the role of music as attempting to restructure time and space among the indigenous peoples affected by the establishment of the missions in Northern New Spain. These synthetic chapters treat the mission experience in northern New Spain as a whole. Mann considers the restructuring of ritual time, the role of daily routines, and the interplay between the imposition of a new temporal order and the development of indigenous resistance. She also examines a variety of types of space, such as sacred space, social space, and gendered space, in a thorough fashion. She employs this analysis to construct a convincing analysis of the feast of Corpus Christi, which was in many ways a pre-eminent celebration in the mission communities.

Finally, in the conclusion, the author offers a series of important reflections about the role of music in the creation and re-creation of various indigenous identities during the colonial period and afterwards.

This work will first appeal to mission historians and musicologists. But it also makes a very significant wider contribution to the general study of the complex and dynamic relationship between colonizers and colonized in an important part of the Americas.

Music was an essential part of community life in most indigenous communities in northern New Spain. Indeed, when the indigenous California native Pablo Tac was studying at the Urbanum in Rome in the 1830s and sought to depict his own people for his fellow seminarians and his teachers, he did so by drawing a picture of two Indians dancing to music. Similarly, the European religious who staffed the missions Kristin Mann examines were generally Jesuits and Franciscans, members of orders with rich musical traditions of their own. Accordingly, the decision to...