Throughout this chapter, I trace a number of performative acts in the long history of the colonization of the North American continent by evoking a fragmented narrative of cultural encounters. In this narrative, Hispanic colonizers and a diversity of indigenous peoples engaged in the tense production of mutual knowledge through corporal performance art ranging from military spectacle to religious acts to pantomime and drama. These tenuous but widespread practices attest to an open competition between secular and religious authorities over the captive audience of indigenous peoples on their way to becoming Hispanicized, Latinized. I consider four sets of records in the colonial archive of the Interior Provinces of New Spain, specifically throughout those northern border territories of the viceroyalty annexed into the U.S. after the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848: Alta California, New Mexico, and Texas. By looking at the Requerimiento, religious and miraculous performances, cultural ethnographies of indigenous performance, and the repressed secular tradition of satirical drama, I discuss the evolution of colonial performances and encounters around performances in this large geographic area throughout three hundred years.