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

This excellent book explores the place of music and dance in the development of the Spanish colonial mission system across northern New Spain, a vast region that extended from the Californias in the west to the Gulf of Mexico in the east. Primary data relevant to this topic are scattered through hundreds of colonial-period sources, most created by Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries and preserved today in repositories in Mexico, Europe, and the United States. This study represents the first attempt to bring these data together and interpret them in terms of the more encompassing social and cultural processes that characterized European efforts to dominate the Indigenous residents of the region and Indigenous responses to these efforts. The result is an insightful overview of continuity and change in the role envisioned by the Catholic Church for music and dance in evangelization and of the new cultural practices and social formations that emerged from the encounter of European and Indigenous musical traditions.

Informed throughout by perspectives drawn from musicology and ethnomusicology, the book’s orientation is primarily that of social and cultural history, reflecting the author’s training as a historian. In the introduction, she identifies the question, “How did music and dance function in mission communities?”, as defining the focus of her study. She addresses this question in terms of three fundamental propositions about the significance of music and dance in human societies: (1) they serve to create and reinforce collective identities, (2) they can be utilized as instruments of social control, and (3) they are powerful communicative tools that can effectively convey religious concepts as well as information about ethnicity and gender.

The main body of the book is organized into three sections. The first summarizes the musical and dance traditions of Indigenous people in New Spain prior to European contact as these can be reconstructed from the colonial sources, followed by an overview of their European counterparts during the Spanish colonial period. The second section focuses on music and dance in the mission communities and Spanish colonial society in general during three successive time periods: the early colonial period from 1519 to 1680; the subsequent nine decades framed by the large-scale revolt of Indigenous people in New Mexico in 1680 and the Spanish Crown’s expulsion of the Jesuits from its domains in 1767; and the final half-century of the colonial period, during which Franciscan missionaries assumed primary responsibility for establishing and administering the missions among the Indigenous people of northern New Spain. The third section considers the missionaries’ reliance on music and dance to restructure the temporal, spatial, and social organizational frameworks within which the mission populations operated and how members of the mission communities both resisted such restructuring and adapted it to their own ends. The book concludes with a brief review of the principal themes developed in these three sections and a reiteration of the central point that the power of music and dance in the colonial mission context resided in their “ability to reshape colonial cultural encounters, restructure time and space, and forge new religious identities” (p. 260).

This study is a major contribution to an understanding of the colonial mission endeavor in northern New Spain, its value enhanced by situating music and dance at the center of this endeavor. The author accompanies her analyses of broader theoretical and topical issues with a well-chosen selection of missionary observations and perspectives on music and dance in the missions and compelling evidence of how Indigenous people actively participated in, and to a notable degree controlled, the creation of new musical and dance traditions within a dynamic, evolving colonial context. Written in a clear, engaging style and exemplifying the highest standards of scholarship, The Power of Song is an outstanding addition to the growing body...