Synopses & Reviews
After the conquest of Mexico, colonial authorities attempted to enforce Christian beliefs among indigenous peoplesa project they envisioned as spiritual warfare.
The Invisible War assesses this immense but dislocated project by examining all known efforts in Central Mexico to obliterate native devotions of Mesoamerican origin between the 1530s and the late eighteenth century.
The author's innovative interpretation of these efforts is punctuated by three events: the creation of an Inquisition tribunal in Mexico in 1571; the native rebellion of Tehuantepec in 1660; and the emergence of eerily modern strategies for isolating idolaters, teaching Spanish to natives, and obtaining medical proof of sorcery from the 1720s onwards. Rather than depicting native devotions solely from the viewpoint of their colonial codifiers, this book rescues indigenous perspectives on their own beliefs. This is achieved by an analysis of previously unknown or rare ritual texts that circulated in secrecy in Nahua and Zapotec communities through an astute appropriation of European literacy. Tavárez contends that native responses gave rise to a colonial archipelago of faith in which local cosmologies merged insights from Mesoamerican and European beliefs. In the end, idolatry eradication inspired distinct reactions: while Nahua responses focused on epistemological dissent against Christianity, Zapotec strategies privileged confrontations in defense of native cosmologies.
Review
"The Invisible War provides a remarkably full and genuinely historical study of the little-known extirpation campaigns in colonial Mexico and what, in practice, idolatry in 'Indian' communities of central Mexico and Oaxaca came to mean for all the parties involved. It interweaves the actions of colonial judges and Catholic priests, Nahuatl- and Zapotec-speaking nobles, shamans, and villagers, and an array of ritual practices and sacred texts. While insisting on local 'diversity of indigenous forms of consciousness,' David Tavárez offers a sustained, deeply researched interpretation of native devotions in the colonial period as epistemological dissent to Christian evangelization and extirpation. Here is native thought and action understood in new, connected, and richly contextualized ways."William B Taylor, University of California, Berkeley
Review
"In this eye-opening book, Tavárez shows that colonial religion was an 'archipelago of faith,' of multifarious and constantly changing indigenous Christianities. Change was often prompted by violence and was as relentless as the strategies of those friars, parish priests, and minor civil magistrates who devoted their lives to homogenizing the faith and rooting out idolatry, the origin of all sin. This is a magisterial study that spans three centuries and plumbs a formidable cache of Nahua, Zapotec, and ecclesiastical sources scattered throughout Europe and the Americas. A landmark."Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin
Review
"This book is worthy of inclusion in any Mesoamerican historian's library. Tavárez offers a thoughtful framework for examining Spanish/Spanish, native/Spanish, and native/native interactions under stressful conditions; valuable insights into these complex and multifaceted relationships; and plenty of interesting biographical, institutional, and situational information. All these elements together make this a useful reference work as well."Fraces Berdan, The Americas
Review
"This meticulously researched and beautifully written work is a major contribution to our understanding of religion in indigenous communities and the Catholic Church in central Mexico and Oaxaca . . . [N]uanced, engaging, and thought-provoking."Sarah Cline, Hispanic American Historical Review
Review
"Tavárez has undertaken an ambitious study of a key and hitherto insufficiently addressed issue in Mexican indigenous and religious history . . . Tavárez has written an impressive and a scholastically rigorous book that will be welcomed by students and scholars of colonial Latin America, ethnohistory, colonialism, and religious history."Nora E. Jaffary, American Historical Review
Review
"David Tavárez renders The Invisible War in such incredible detail that it is difficult to conceive of this as his first book. It reads more like a life's work: comprehensive, yet careful; formidable, but rewarding; and engrossing while exact(ing). Each sentence demands the reader's full attention because it presents so much information about specific people, particular circumstances, and the precise interplay of devotional activities, disciplinary measures, and dissent . . . Tavárez's book is an achievement in its accuracy, analysis, and approach."Molly Basset, Colonial Latin American Review
Review
andldquo;[
Seen and Heard in Mexico] skillfully weaves together a variety of complex and significant threads while keeping at its center the important topic of the construction of childhood as a central component of postrevolutionary citizenship and nationalism.andrdquo;andmdash;John Lear, professor of history at the University of Puget Sound and author of
Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico Cityand#160;
Review
and#8220;The Southern Exodus to Mexico is an intervention in borderlands history, in black-white-Indian history, in migration history, in economic history, and in the history of national, class, and racial identities. It is also that rare and wonderful kind of historical writing: a tale of roads not taken, of dreams not quite fulfilled. Even though most of the migrants did not achieve all that they had hoped, there is much for us to learn from their ventures. Wahlstrom shows us a dynamic borderland and the peoples who traversed it.and#8221;and#8212;Paul Spickard, author of Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity
Review
"David Tavárez's book, The Invisible War, offers an especially significant challenge to the colonial religious historiography . . . Perhaps the book's greatest contribution to ethnohistory lies in its exploration of clandestine literacies in which indigenous ritual specialists produced a variety of textscalendrical, astrological, and liturgical."Susan Kellogg, Ethnohistory
Review
andquot;This is an important book, and it deserves a place on reading lists for graduate seminars and Civil War enthusiasts alike. Indeed, not only does Wahlstrom add a great deal to the historiographical discussion in Civil War history, but his work also serves as a significant contribution to Southern, emancipation, and borderlands history.andquot;andmdash;Matthew M. Stith, Civil War Book Review
Synopsis
Invisible Wars examines the impact of three centuries of colonial evangelization on indigenous religious practices in Central Mexico by focusing on clandestinely produced Nahua and Zapotec texts, trial records, and native resistance to disciplinary and punitive campaigns.
Synopsis
During the first two decades following the Mexican Revolution, children in the country gained unprecedented consideration as viable cultural critics, social actors, and subjects of reform. Not only did they become central to the reform agenda of the revolutionary nationalist government; they were also the beneficiaries of the largest percentage of the national budget.
While most historical accounts of postrevolutionary Mexico omit discussion of how children themselves experienced and perceived the sudden onslaught of resources and attention, Elena Jackson Albarrand#225;n, inand#160;Seen and Heard in Mexico, places childrenand#8217;s voices at the center of her analysis. Albarrand#225;n draws on archived records of childrenand#8217;s experiences in the form of letters, stories, scripts, drawings, interviews, presentations, and homework assignments to explore how Mexican childhood, despite the hopeful visions of revolutionary ideologues, was not a uniform experience set against the monolithic backdrop of cultural nationalism, but rather was varied and uneven. Moving children from the aesthetic to the political realm, Albarrand#225;n situates them in their rightful place at the center of Mexicoand#8217;s revolutionary narrative by examining the avenues through which children contributed to ideas about citizenship and nation.
and#160;
Synopsis
After the Civil War, a handful of former Confederate leaders joined forces with the Mexican emperor Maximilian von Hapsburg to colonize Mexico with former American slaveholders. Their plan was to develop commercial agriculture in the Mexican state of Coahuila under the guidance of former slaveholders with former slaves providing the bulk of the labor force. By developing these new centers of agricultural production and commercial exchange, the Mexican government hoped to open up new markets and, by extending the few already-existing railroads in the region, also spur further development.
and#160;The Southern Exodus to Mexico considers the experiences of both white southern elites and common white and black southern farmers and laborers who moved to Mexico during this period. Todd W. Wahlstrom examines in particular how the endemic warfare, raids, and violence along the borderlands of Texas and Coahuila affected the colonization effort. Ultimately, Native groups such as the Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and Kickapoos, along with local Mexicans, prevented southern colonies from taking hold in the region, where local tradition and careful balances of power negotiated over centuries held more sway than large nationalistic or economic forces. This study of the transcultural tensions and conflicts in this region provides new perspectives for the historical assessment of this period of Mexican and American history.
About the Author
David Tavárez is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Vassar College. He is a co-editor of Chimalpahin's Conquest: A Nahua Historian's Rewriting of Francisco López de Gómara's La conquista de México (2010).