Military Ethos and Visual Culture in Post-Conquest Mexico (Transculturalisms, 1400-1700)

Bringing to bear her extensive knowledge of the cultures of Renaissance Europe and sixteenth-century Mexico, Monica Dominguez Torres here investigates the significance of military images and symbols in post-Conquest Mexico. She shows how the "conquest" in fact involved dynamic exchanges between cultures; and that certain interconnections between martial, social and religious elements resonated with similar intensity among Mesoamericans and Europeans, creating indeed cultural bridges between these diverse communities. Multi-disciplinary in approach, this study builds on scholarship in the fields of visual, literary and cultural studies to analyze the European and Mesoamerican content of the martial imagery fostered within the indigenous settlements of central Mexico, as well as the ways in which local communities and leaders appropriated, manipulated, modified and reinterpreted foreign visual codes. Military Ethos and Visual Culture in Post-Conquest Mexico draws on poststructuralist and post-colonial approaches to analyze the complex dynamics of identity formation in colonial communities.