Building in the Shadow of Death: Monastery Construction and the Politics of Community Reconstitution in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

Around the year 1550, an indigenous tlacuilo (painter-scribe-historian) in Tepechpan, a small altepetl north of Mexico City, narrated the tumultuous events through which he had lived. In Figure 1, we see an excerpt of this tlacuilo's contribution to the town's annals, the Tira de Tepechpan, which depicts a sequence of events from 1545 to 1549. On the left, beneath the glyph for the year 1545, the tlacuilo paints a dangling corpse, its arms crossed and eyes shut, with blood spurting from the nose and mouth. Here the tlacuilo is telling us of the 1545 hueycocolixtli, the "great sickness" that killed at least a third of the population, according to conservative estimates. Among the victims was Tepechpan's ruler, the crowned figure wrapped in funeral cloth above the year glyph.

To the right of the ruler, however, the tlacuilo tells quite a different story for the year 1549. Here he paints a stone church with a fine gothic portal and bell tower, atop what appears to be a pre-Hispanic platform. The glyph marks the construction of a new stone church.¹ The contrast here, between mass death and monumental construction, is jarring. In the stark visual language of Mexican codices, the tlacuilo seems to be telling us that despite losing much of its population, Tepechpan still persisted in a building program that was as costly as it was ambitious.

Figure 1.

Excerpt from the Tira de Tepechpan, Made by Tlacuilos, Sixteenth Century

Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Manuscrits Mexicains, nos. 13–14.

As in Tepechpan, so it was throughout central Mexico: From the Río Pánuco in the north to Oaxaca in the south, indigenous communities of different ethnicities and varying economic circumstances replaced their churches of thatch and wood with stone churches and monasteries. Laborers covered mass graves and then dug open quarries; they razed forests, hauled lumber, and burned lime; they assembled scaffolds and raised immense walls of stone; they set delicately carved limestone into gothic arches that soared into the heavens. Between the 1530s and 1580s, in the wake of demographic catastrophe, indigenous communities built 251 church-and-monastery complexes. Many of these structures still loom today over provincial cities, bustling country towns, and sparsely populated villages. As if defying their dire circumstances, indigenous communities built some of the largest edifices ever raised in colonial Mexico—in the shadow of mass death.² Figure 2 shows an example, from Yanhuitlán, Oaxaca.

Figure 2.

Ex-Convento de Santo Domingo, Yanhuitlán, Oaxaca

Source: Photo by author.

Apart from their large scale, these complexes stood out from other colonial churches in two key ways. First, since they served as logistical and liturgical hubs in the mendicants' mission system, these structures were ostentatious markers of doctrina (mission head-town) status. Missionaries resided here and carried out their administrative duties. (Lower-ranked visitas, "visitation-missions" in outlying towns, were the spokes in this schema.) Second, in terms of indigenous politics, these complexes served as the core of political and religious life in local polities, and as such they confirmed the preeminence of the doctrina's immediate community over the surrounding sujetos, politically subservient subject-towns that tended also to be visitas. Given the elevated status that these monasteries conferred on the towns that built them, I refer to these complexes as doctrina monasteries.³ This monumental mission architecture went on to influence subsequent mission building, most notably in the Philippines.⁴

Because these voluminous and mysterious structures rose in the first decades of colonization, the travelers and scholars who have stumbled upon them have long assumed that their walls had quite a story to tell. Generations of scholars have combed these structures, parsing their façades, mural paintings, and architectural layouts for clues about the cultural encounters between natives and Europeans. Most studies have sought looked at these buildings, in their completeness, and tried to trace their origins to medieval...