Throughout colonial Latin America, Catholic missions set out to convert and integrate indigenous peoples into the Spanish empire. Given the importance of these missions, the lack of transregional scholarship on the subject is keenly felt. Most works focus on a specific region (primarily in New Spain or Paraguay) and a religious order. Robert Jackson's Frontiers of Evangelization: Indians in the Sierra Gorda and Chiquitos Missions seeks to address one aspect of this gap by comparing the mission experiences of sedentary Indians in present-day Bolivia with those of nonsedentary Pames and Jonaces Indians in central Mexico. Jackson is not the first to compare missions in Bolivia and New Spain: Cynthia Radding's Landscapes of Power and Identity (2005) is a more meticulous environmental and cultural history of the same Chiquitos missions studied by Jackson and the Sonoran missions of New Spain.
Frontiers of Evangelization purports to be a case study of the...
