The Origins of Mexican Catholicism

Countering the traditional view that colonial coercion was the driving force behind the religious conversion of the native population in sixteenth-century Mexico, Osvaldo F. Pardo shows how Spanish missionaries in fact drew on existing native ceremonies in order to make Christianity more accessible to the Nahua population they were trying to convert. Pardo illustrates the complex negotiations that took place in the process of making the Christian sacraments available to the native people, and at the same time, forced the missionaries to reexamine the meaning of their sacraments through the eyes of an alien culture.