In this talk, Emmanuel Ortega will present a chapter from his upcoming book in progress, Visualizing Franciscan Anxiety and the Distortion of Native Resistance: The Domesticating Mission, to explore how the project of Christian missionizing in the Americas during the Spanish colonial period carried at its innermost ideological base European ideas of domestication. During the first phase of the so-called Golden Era of Missionizing (1524-1600), images of preachers in the wilderness began to circulate in Europe and the Americas. Some of the most influential images were produced by the Brotherhood of St. Francis to celebrate their missionizing work in the newly conquered territories. Imperial visual creators made connections between episodes from the life of St. Francis and their perilous enterprise in the Americas—often conflating the saint’s encounters with animals and wildlife with their own interactions with Indigenous communities—to demonstrate how their Brotherhood aided in controlling and containing the Spanish Empire’s frontiers. However, these images and their pictorial conventions worked to emphasize the spiritual dimensions of conquest, while obscuring their underlying colonial impulses. By tethering domestication to concepts of Franciscan innocence, this presentation will show how the violent taming of the Chichimec region of central Mexico was justified as a religious initiative and not a violent mining endeavor.

Image caption: Diego Valadés, “Didacus Valadés Fecit,” 1579, copperplate engraving, within Rhetorica Christiana ad concionandi et orandi usum accommodate […] ex Indorum maximè deprompta sunt historiis. Perugia: Petrus Jacobus Petrutius, 1579. (New York Public Library Digital Collections).