Decline and renaissance amidst the crisis: The transformation of sonora's mission structures in the late colonial period

Abstract

Franciscan missions in Pimeria Alta (Sonora) experienced a material revival and new flourishing amidst a general trend of mission decline during the late eighteenth century. The decline of the mission as a form of colonization and settlement derived from the interplay of social structures like the influence and consolidation of non-Indian settlements around the missions, the rejection or acceptance of the mission regime by local Indians, the models of administration implemented by the friars, and the interaction between mission economies and local markets. Most of the missions that had been under them in Sonora till that time, following the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, were transferred to Franciscan friars from the Apostolic college of Querétaro and the province of Santiago de Xalisco. The analogy between the Queretan and the Xaliscan regimes reveals that frontier missions during the late colonial period were a process of maturation.