David Tavárez, a professor of anthropology at Vassar College, is the author of Rethinking Zapotec Time Cosmology, Ritual, and Resistance in Colonial Mexico and The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico, and a coauthor of two volumes, Painted Words, and Chimalpahin’s Conquest. He has also published more than sixty peer-reviewed articles and chapters on Latin American history, linguistic anthropology, and Mesoamerican studies. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, his research has also been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the John Carter Brown Library.

“As pathbreaking and revisionist as what Robert Ricard advocated some eighty years ago. . . . A most welcome addition to the ethnohistory of colonial Latin America. Most valuable is its originality and the exacting level of scholarship necessary to generate such important studies.”—Susan Schroeder, Tulane University“An intriguing assembly of cross-disciplinary investigations, exploring from different angles the ways in which indigenous Christianities emerged and proliferated in Spanish America. This volume raises big questions for the study of some purportedly old processes and breathes new life into the art of historical interpretation.”—Kenneth Mills, University of Michigan"These [essays] help show what happened on some of the most daunting frontiers of cultural exchange, where distinctive forms of Catholicism emerged. Creative misunderstandings, tense collaborations, fruitful contention: every type of encounter is represented here, with vivid evocations."—Felipe Fernández-Armesto, University of Notre Dame"This book is part of an important moment in the historiography of colonial Latin America. . . . [and represents] the cutting-edge research that is redefining the study of indigenous religions of the Americas and their relationship toChristianity."—Reading Religion