Missions Begin with Blood: Suffering and Salvation in the Borderlands of New Spain

Winner, 2022 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize

While the idea that successful missions needed Indigenous revolts and missionary deaths seems counterintuitive, this book illustrates how it became a central logic of frontier colonization in Spanish North America. Missions Begin with Blood argues that martyrdom acted as a ceremony of possession that helped Jesuits understand violence, disease, and death as ways that God inevitably worked to advance Christendom. Whether petitioning superior...