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Jeannine Schneider
History

Robert Haskett, Mentor
Stephanie Wood, Mentor

Transcending the Spiritual Conquest: From Tenochtitlan to the Mission San Francisco Solano

Considerable research has been conducted on the “Spiritual Conquest” that followed the Iberian invasions of the Americas. Few single scholarly works, however, have compared not only the methods of converting and “civilizing” indigenous peoples over the centuries but also how indigenous people transcended those changes across divergent geographic and cultural spaces. The Catholic Church, as a frontier institution, altered the political, economic, and social hierarchy of the Americas and the surrounding landscape from the Spanish invasion of Tenochtitlan to the twenty-first mission in California. This Mission, San Francisco Solano, acts as a case study exploring how the indigenous reacted to the mission system, transcended its abuses, and struggled to survive secularization under military and civil authoritative control.