Indigenous Sacraments: Christian Rituals and Local Responses at the Fringes of Spanish America, 1529-1800

Indigenous Sacraments provides the first study of Indigenous perceptions of the Christian sacraments at the fringes of colonial Spanish America, particularly in the missions established by the Jesuits in northwestern Mexico, central southern Chile, and the Gran Chaco. After Jesuit missionaries arrived in these regions between the end of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, their sacraments came to control every rite of passage, from birth to reaching adulthood to the formation...