Indoctrination, Conversion, and Belief in the Colonial Iberian World

The conversion of the indigenous peoples of the Americas to Roman Catholicism was among the key official objectives of the Spanish Crown, but the transfer of religion to the New World implied more than mere conversion. Demographically, it eventually affected African slaves. Spiritually, it posed challenges to the Spaniards who were in charge of executing it. This massive cultural transfer turned out to be an involved task, with tangible reverberations several centuries later. After the violence of the conquest period, missionaries largely carried out the effort to impose a uniform and single religion, although the Spanish Crown expected laypeople such as encomenderos to aid in the spread of faith. But while missionaries were carrying out their work, the Inquisition was active among professed Christians, searching out weaknesses in their beliefs. Faith turned out to be a delicate and intangible possession in need of constant care.

The uprooting of old beliefs to substitute new beliefs by force, persuasion, or both has been a recurrent event, both in lived experience and in the historiography of colonial Latin America. This transformation has been recorded largely by the victorious and rarely by the people who were indoctrinated, whose voices were customarily repressed and persecuted. Abandoning one’s religion to adopt another entails more than a mere change of rituals. It affects one’s personal and communal commitments to a specific understanding of the world and one’s role in it. Those who tried to persuade others to change their religion initially assumed that it would be a relatively painless occurrence, given their own certitude that they had the only truth in the matter. Possessed by such convictions, the missionaries who arrived at the American continent hoped for an untroubled process that would unfold a prefigured pattern of history. Their hope gave way to a realization of the magnitude of the endeavor and, within a decade, to deep worries, as it became patently obvious that so-called neophytes were not easily persuaded and that conversion would demand a steady and stressful effort by all involved. The slow evolution of acceptance of a new faith and the internal fissures created by questioning established believers on the nature of some canonical pillars of Roman Catholicism are foundational themes in the history of indoctrination, conversion, and belief in the Americas. The six works under review help clarify some aspects of the process and extend the frontiers of its historiography.

Evangelization and conversion had their first dramatic stumbles in the New World in the very first decade of indoctrination. New Spain, where the Franciscan order carried out the first intensive evangelizing, experienced the first ecclesiastical trials of notable indigenous dissidents in the mid-1530s. This well-known historical chapter, which ended with the burning of Don Carlos, ruler of Texcoco, at the stake in November 1539, is reexamined by Patricia Lopes, whose ability to construct an agile narrative turns her work into a compelling read. Lopes argues that the actors of this drama—Bishop Juan de Zumárraga and the indigenous leaders Martín Ocelotl...