Sacred Geographies in Mexico from Colony to Republic

How does political change shape the lived experience of sacred geography? Conversely, how does the lived experience of sacred geography influence the formation and maintenance of political communities? Responding to these questions, this paper examines descriptions of religious institutions, buildings, and devotions over the period running from 1750-1850, a century roughly straddling Mexico's independence movements in the early nineteenth century. Historians have paid a great deal of attention to the slow, halting development of nationalism in post-republican Mexico, some finding evidence of proto-national sentiment in the political writings of eighteenth-century Creoles. Far little attention, however, has been paid to the lived experience of common spaces, which we might think of as the building blocks of political community. Taking this oversight as an opportunity, O'Hara foregrounds space as an analytic category, considering how colonial subjects and early-republican Mexicans experienced and described sacred geography. Religious institutions and spiritual geographies gestured to the universalist aspirations of Catholicism, at the same time these places were often sustained by local or regional communities. Keeping this paradox in mind, “From Colonial Spaces to National Places” argues that the period from 1750-1850 did not witness a wholesale secularization of Mexico's spiritual geography, but a redefinition of the political communities that sustained them.