Epilogue, as Prologue

This concluding chapter looks at the discovery of a perplexing set of documents created in New Spain. Referred to as títulos primordiales, or primordial titles, the sources described the founding of Indigenous communities in the aftermath of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. The títulos resonate strongly with other colonial documents of futuremaking and the shared ways of relating to time surveyed throughout this book. The Indigenous authors of the primordial titles engaged in a radical act of situating themselves in time: they marshaled the resources of the past, the resources of memory, and the resources of tradition to achieve goals in the present and craft diverse futures. Sometimes they presented their assembled resources as a narrative of the sixteenth-century present, at other times in the form of history or chronicle.

Prayers

This chapter studies the logic of traditional innovation by investigating a form of sanctioned Catholic practice. In the eighteenth century, a new movement flourished in many of the most important cities and towns of New Spain. Calling themselves Holy Schools of Christ, these groups combined collective piety sometimes associated with baroque Catholicism, such as the lashing of flesh, with an intense demand for self-regulation of an individual's thoughts and actions. The participants in the Holy Schools might appear as surprisingly modern in their attitude toward controlling the future and their attempts to achieve individual or collective improvement. Yet to characterize this movement as a moment of hybrid modernity in which elements of the past persisted despite a turn toward the modern would be deeply misleading. For the members and supporters of the Holy Schools, innovation required tradition. Individuals of this period, in other words, were often future-oriented without being modern.

Confessions

This chapter discusses the conceptual and practical tools of Catholicism that many colonial subjects used to shape their futures. Christianity came with a host of ideas and practices that influenced one's relationship to the future, even the future of eternity in the form of salvation or damnation. Introduced through European missionaries in the sixteenth century, such concepts as free will and sin demanded new ways not only of thinking about religion and spirituality but also of living and relating to time. The chapter draws on a rich body of scholarship related to these themes but also delves into a unique set of primary sources, especially the intriguing genre of confession manuals. When examined over the arc of the colonial period, these sources reveal an evolving sense of individual futuremaking through the tools of Catholicism.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the analysis of time experience and futuremaking through historical case studies in colonial Mexico. Colonial Mexico developed a culture of innovation, human aspiration, and futuremaking that was subsequently forgotten in part because it did not fit with later definitions of modernity and innovation as secular phenomena and things untethered to the past or tradition. This choice of historical method and topics is driven by a desire to step outside some of the dominant paradigms in the study of Latin America and colonialism in general. Examining the relationship between past, present, and future offers a way to reconsider Mexico's colonial era, its subsequent historical development, and how people have understood that history.

Promises

This chapter focuses on the realm of politics and collective motivation at the violent end of the colonial era. Sparked by a crisis in the Spanish monarchy in 1808 and the rebellion led by Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in 1810, more than a decade of uncertainty and violent conflict would lead to Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821. Through a reading of political rhetoric during this era, the chapter explores the use of biblical references and interpretation as a way of navigating the uncertainty of the present. For royalist preachers, this often meant emotional appeals to their flocks and a call for them to defend traditional forms of authority and hierarchy. Yet these tools of tradition, especially biblical typology, were also used most forcefully by supporters of new visions of political community, including the most radical leaders of the insurgency. Even during the collapse of the colonial order, futuremaking included a strong element of tradition.

Stars

This chapter examines colonial modes of prediction, especially astrology and popular forms of divination. While most people in New Spain believed that heavenly objects could influence conditions on earth, there was great disagreement on the relative strength and importance of such forces and whether or not humans could or should discern them. Colonial consumers of prediction understood the twin notions of free will and divine intervention and used a vernacular theology to evaluate diviners and their accuracy. As a result, by the eighteenth century, many subjects in New Spain had adopted a more critical attitude toward the information produced by astrology and divination. As colonial subjects employed these tools of tradition, often in conversation with the Inquisition and its investigations, they helped to create a new culture of knowledge that championed a more precise and empirically grounded telling of the future.

Money

This chapter assesses the shift in credit practices and its implications for how colonial subjects experienced the future. Ideas about money and economic relationships had also transformed by the end of the colonial era, leading to a far more flexible system of credit and trade. By 1800 a more liberal market for credit and a new attitude toward risk and just pricing could be found throughout New Spain. Innovative financial instruments created opportunities for sophisticated financial hedging and risk management. Yet custom and values strongly influenced these innovations. They grew out of a tradition in Christian theology in which the church carved out a role for itself as a protector of the poor and where in theory, if not always in practice, its regulatory authority over economic transactions ensured some basic amount of market justice.