Catholic Christianity and its imagery broke in on Mesoamerica suddenly in the 1520s and has been a pivot point of living and dying there ever since. But there is no simple story of an early formative stage and late decline in the history of Christian image shrines in New Spain. They began in the sixteenth century, haltingly; and with many shrines eventually scattered over a vast, broken terrain, local histories of Christian practice were bound to depart from models and prescriptions in Rome, Madrid, Mexico City, or less remote capitals and style centers. The weight of the European past and present in the development of Christianity and religious practices in New Spain was great, and diffusion from Catholic Europe lends some coherence to the history of image shrines, whether following European trends or working against them. But Europe, too, is a moving target, neither uniform nor fixed and finished in its religious culture. What, then, can be said with some confidence about the impact of European beliefs and practices on the development of those shrines? What changed where and when?

This chapter tracks their early development, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most image shrines and the full range of their distinguishing features took shape later than might be expected, mainly during a “long” seventeenth century from the 1580s to the 1720s that amounted to the formative period. Chapter 2 continues into the eighteenth century, suggesting that the late colonial period was less a time of decline for shrines and enchantment than one of consolidation and growth. (See Map 1.1 for the image shrines discussed in the text.) The substantial, if gradual, developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lead to consideration of long-term continuities from precolonial times on in the second part of Chapter 2, and the leading role of Marian and Christocentric shrines and images in Chapters 3 and 4.

Sixteenth-Century Beginnings: European Roots and Branches

Scholarship about nearly all aspects of religion in New Spain has centered on the sixteenth century rather than taking in the full sweep of the colonial period. Lines of interpretation have varied but the effect has been to treat the early years of colonization as formative for religion in the same ways that colonial institutions, imperial practices, economic activities, and labor systems were largely established then.