Encomiendo mi alma (parcel my soul): Pastoral technologies of extraction in 18th-Century New Spain

• In Event: More-Than-Human Histories of Extraction: Violence and Care in the Technological Landscape

Abstract

Immediately following the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica, Spanish authorities desired to inspect, review, and tour their recently claimed land for such reasons as the consolidation of empire through environmental, resource, and labor extraction, in tandem with the discipline and evangelization of the Indigenous inhabitants. This paper focuses on the diaries and surveys of ecclesiastical visitas (visits) to the geographic and cultural region of the Huasteca during the eighteenth century. While scholars have employed visitas to understand the changing social structures of Indigenous pueblos over time, as well as to unravel territorial disputes and the development of the Spanish colonial administration, in this instance, I approach the documentary body of visitas to the Huasteca with questions about how sex, gender, and health constructions were formed and informed by the religious inspections of lands and people. This pastoral technology of care with aims of extraction (both physical and immaterial), shaped a regime of colonial sexuality, gender, and health during the eighteenth century at a time when the development of science, technology, and environmental resource extraction were heavily influenced by religion. The more-than-human relationships between land and people in the Indigenous communities of the Huasteca were transformed by Spanish colonization, this paper discusses how that happened as Catholic practices and discourse enforced a European theology where the most important “more-than-human relationship” was with the Spanish church and crown.

Author

• Margaretta Gabriela Baez, University of Oklahoma