“Edward Osowski focuses on a regional set of Nahua Constantines, who, with their conversionary moments generations behind them, sought to lead by example—through patronage, public demonstrations of devotion around chosen holy images, ritual good works and alms-collection schemes, and a jealous guardianship of indigenous roles in the pious parading of Christian membership and privilege. Osowski’s study banishes older views of a uniformly disoriented native society, trudging drunk and leaderless into the colonial new order, duped into demeaning collaboration and the limits of social-climbing. His stress upon a self-legitimizing indigenous nobility, and upon the calculated and instrumental aims of these protagonists, raises vital questions that ought to stimulate new lines of research into Nahua Christian expression, not least those exploring what such vibrant religious membership and shared devotions included, and what they felt like to a widening and multi-ethnic body of participants." —Kenneth Mills, University of Toronto, and co-editor of Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History
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