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Thèse : From Colonial Foundations to Post-Colonial Networks: Apparition Miracles and Memetics Narrate the Conquest

Créateur

  • Boyd, Beth T.
  • Myers, Kathleen Ann. Directeur de thèse

Résumé

Devotional literature such as origin narratives, prayer cycles, and hagiographic narratives have long served as vital sources of sociocultural and political information since Mexico’s colonial period. This dissertation specifically examines origin stories and their images in Mexico as critical points of reflection on Spanish colonialism over time. While narratives surrounding miraculous images have often been relegated to source texts for scholarship on religious visual culture in the Americas, I suggest that these texts in and of themselves are critical sources of information on the reception of the Spanish spiritual conquest and colonization of New Spain. Vis-à-vis the Christian miraculous, I specifically argue that origin narrative writers used the bodies and the senses of witnesses to navigate the unknown – not only about the miraculous events before them, but about the colonial systems under which such events occurred. I ultimately observe that contemporary concerns with the role of the Catholic Church and its narratives, as well as how to process such relationships with digital technologies today, continue debates on piety and control that have been active on Mexican soil since the foundation of Spain’s colonizing project.

My dissertation addresses the work of origin narratives through three chapters that look at the intersection of cult literature with colonial discourse studies, and later, how twenty-first century creators continue conversations on these traditions through digital technologies. My first two chapters address early cults that were fundamental to the establishment of Christianity in New Spain. In chapter one, Jesuit historian Francisco de Florencia’s La milagrosa invención de un tesoro escondido (1685) dialogues with Mercedarian friar Luis de Cisneros and Augustinian Juan de Grijalva on the legacies of the Virgin of Remedies as a miraculous conquest icon. I examine how Florencia, Cisneros, and Grijalva conceive of the Marian image as integral to Spain’s colonizing project; at the same time, significant apertures in the image’s origin narrative call into question how the story, and the bodies that occupy it, resist easy integration into Spanish imperial systems. This conversation continues in chapter two with Florencia’s appraisal of the New Spanish apparition of San Miguel del Milagro (St. Michael) in Narracion de la marabillosa aparición (1690), a work that actively engages with Pedro de Salmerón’s early Relación de la aparición (1643). As in the cult of the Virgin of Remedies, attention to San Miguel del Milagro’s origin narrative and its appropriation of its cult by Puebla’s archbishopric reveal significant gaps in confirming the supernatural experiences of indigenous Christian Juan Ce Cuauhtli. As the veracity of Ce Cuauhtli’s story focuses on his physical experience, I turn to scholars such as Carolyn Walker Bynum, Daniela Hacke, and Paul Musselwhite to examine the ways in which the colonized body, particularly those of Nahua Christians, is imagined as a dynamic space of Spain’s colonizing project and its hegemonic structures.

As a response to the importance of these conversations in Mexico today, my final chapter ultimately argues that twenty-first century technologies – particularly social media – continue to voice concerns with the institutions affiliated with Mexico’s colonial origin narratives and their images. This chapter specifically looks at the viral video “Todos bailan el Pasito perrón, hasta él” uploaded by late-night talk show host Rolando Ávila (2015), as well as the meme “¿Somos o no somos?,” created by Querétaro-based social media account Tlacaélel Oficial. In this final chapter, I examine how the digitalization of Mexican colonial iconography demonstrates, as Aníbal Quijano observes with his term “coloniality of power,” the repetition of colonial methods of control long after such institutionalized systems of power have been formally removed. I specifically compare social media responses from Mexico’s bishoprics to memes and viral videos that critique the power of Mexico’s Catholic Church with sixteenth and seventeenth-century edicts issued by Spain’s Holy Office of the Inquisition regarding ecclesiastical regulation of popular devotional culture.

This dissertation ultimately demonstrates that New Spanish origin narratives engaged with a dynamic world in which the miraculous was intimately connected with strategies by which Spanish subjects navigated imperial systems of control. The final piece of this project demonstrates that New Spanish origin narratives and their images, while viceregal products, are not without vibrant afterlives. Miraculous images and their digital productions present alternatives in which the origin narrative is reconceptualized as a tool for not only exploring colonial origin, but for the possibilities of what comes after. 

Informations pratiques

  • Description matérielle : 1 vol. (200 p.)
  • Ph.D. : Indiana University : 2024

OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Olivier Jacquot (30 avril 2025). Thèse : From Colonial Foundations to Post-Colonial Networks: Apparition Miracles and Memetics Narrate the Conquest. Amoxcalli. Consulté le 20 janvier 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13ufb


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