Walking Among the Dead in the Monastery: Silences and (In)visibilities in Sixteenth Century New Spain

This paper uses a decolonial framework to consider conceptions of monastic space in sixteenth century New Spain and, in so doing, calls into question the assumptions we make about the geopolitics and production of knowledge when we use mendicant sources. Focusing on a curious incident of a ghost at a Franciscan monastery, I argue that descriptions of monasteries in mendicant chronicles register tensions between friars and Indigenous users. I begin by examining the role of Franciscan chronicles in the erasure of Indigenous peoples from the colonial record by reconstructing the pathway of the ghost through the monastery, emphasizing puzzling moments of Indigenous absence in the account. Using Nahuatl sources, I contend that these absences reveal Franciscan anxieties about the Indigenous occupation of monastic space which stem from significant changes in Indigenous and Franciscan conceptions of the land at the end of the sixteenth century. In this way, the account of the ghost may be understood not only as a moralizing tale about the rhythm of spiritual life at the monastery, but also an example of how mendicant sources produce knowledge about the monastery that contains and distorts Indigenous presence. The omission of Indigenous actors from a story about how the practice of daily, liturgical life at the monastery alleviates (other)worldly pain and suffering commits a colonial violence that requires a closer look at mendicant sources and the histories we write when using them.