New Mexico after Diego de Vargas’s triumphant reconquest of 1692 was different than before the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. Gone was the emphasis on the Franciscan missions to the Pueblo Indians, replaced by an emphasis on a self-sufficient colony of agriculturalists and a bulwark against real and imagined threats from Spain’s European rivals in the Americas.
This work details the policies and practices of the Franciscan Order from 1692 through Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez’s 1776 report on the state of missions. Norris gives equal attention to the evolving relationship between the Franciscans and the civil-military authorities. It is in this context that the demise to which he refers is most apparent. In pre-Revolt New Mexico, the Franciscans wielded considerably more power in their struggles with the province’s governors, at times using the Inquisition to remove them from office. There were more friars in more missions before 1680. From 1692 on the...
