"Poseamos el desierto con la mente": The Spanish-American Mission Frontier in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Jesuit Narrativ

Abstract

This work will examine the representation of the Spanish-American mission frontier in three Jesuit-authored chronicles and hagiographies from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that portray the limits of the Spanish Empire as a desert where the exemplary missionary realizes a Christian ascetic ideal through a series of physical and spiritual tria Is. The concept of the desert will be analyzed as a trope whose genealogy extends back to Antiquity and the first centuries of Christianity. In the context of colonial Spanish America, this trope represented the exceptional triumph of the ascetic will as an object of meditation for the ruling classes and as a form of mediation in the crisis of legitimacy of Spanish sovereignty.