To Craft Utopia & Empire: Vasco de Quiroga and the Aesthetic Afterlives of Colonial Care

In the sixteenth century, Vasco de Quiroga sought to reorganize native communities, predominantly Purépechas, around Lake Pátzcuaro (present-day Michoacán, West Mexico) through his system of hospital-pueblos. In effect, this system served as a ‘proto-congregation’ insofar as they aimed to group Native groups into orderly, urbanized spaces and introduce disciplinary techniques as a means of caring for and Christianizing them. Remembered as projects of reform and benevolence, these towns instead enacted what Rob Nixon has described as “slow violence”: harm that is gradual, invisible, and dispersed across time Rather than ‘spectacular acts of conquest’, this form of violence operated through the steady erosion of cultural autonomy, native epistemologies, language, and memory under the guise of protection and paternal care.

Within this framework, Native “craft” traditions became at once tools of survival and mechanisms of assimilation. Produced within local materials and artisanal networks, these objects were recast as “folk art” or “tradition” and integrated into colonial economies that privileged Catholic imagery and skill, while obscuring the cultural erasures and imposed identities that sustained them. By tracing these dynamics from Quiroga’s early projects to contemporary contexts from devotional sculpture produced for churches to craft economies tied to tourism and global media, this paper situates the Lake Pátzcuaro area within broader colonial art histories.