The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico by Matthew D. O’Hara (review)

This is a “book that is consciously pushing back against the notion that the past weighs heavily on the present” (13). That said, the author sets out to offer a new reading of New Spain’s colonial history by looking at the future-making of a broad variety of historical actors from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Though inspired by Koselleck, O’Hara has to be lauded for his effort to move beyond the sharp divide between modernity and tradition, giving back agency to people in the colonial period in thinking about and practicing their futures. He states correctly that “futuremaking occurred in a productive dialogue between the resources of the past and the demands of the present” (153). Although its title is somewhat misleading—this is not a book about the future, but rather one about future-making—the study is an important contribution to the history of temporalities of future as it is now being studied, for example by the International Research Training Group’s Temporalidades del Futuro, a collaboration between Mexican and German institutions.

O’Hara does not claim to write an encompassing history but rather focuses on specific moments in time. His narrative moves chronologically. His first chapter deals with “Confessions” as an individual way of relating to the future in the context of Catholicism. Of course, many studies have been written about the way that Christian ideas and practices influenced the limits and possibilities of thinking about sin, the soul, and the way to save it. What is new is O’Hara’s approach: to analyze the ritual of confession as a “way to communicate ideas and a new way of relating to the future” (20) among colonial subjects.

If confession was indeed a common ritual, stargazing was not. The prognosis of the experts was much sought after because people wanted to get advice about what their tomorrow would bring. While the Inquisition generally allowed the printing of calendars and almanacs, it persecuted prominent astrologers mercilessly. O’Hara shows that astrology was one of the everyday forms of future-making that in hindsight we deem to be “irrational” but at that time was paving the way for what we now consider to be modern forms of aspiration.

Other chapters discuss attitudes toward money and prayer as elements of future-making. The knowledge of the changing value of money was a pathbreaking step in the early modern Western world. It was, of course, very closely connected to the European discovery and development of the New World colonies and their output of silver. O’Hara shows that the new understanding of money opened the way for a new estimation of credit and thus new forms of planning for the future. Although the chapter on prayer rather reads like an essay about the Santa Escuelas, it nonetheless opens a window on how traditional practices paved the way for more individual—and thus “modern”—forms of pious and economic behavior. Promises and anxieties characterized the era of independence, the focus of the book’s final chapter. Here, the author focuses on sermons that reflect the emotional communities of colonial Mexico.

The book is inspiring and thought-provoking and thus raises many questions. What did colonial subjects actually do when they “made future?” This issue is not at the center of O’Hara’s study, and yet it is promising to follow his lead in writing the history of the future—or future-making—in Latin America.