The Climate of History in Colonial New Spain: The Little Ice Age, Christian Millenarianism, and Indigenous Religious Transformations in the Central Mexican Valley, c. 1536-1640.

This essay compares ideas of nature, divinity, and history in late sixteenth-century colonial New Spain. I reconstruct the ecological, religious, and political contexts of this period to compare the emergence of two related discourses: Christian Utopian and Apocalyptic institutions, as well as transformations in contemporaneous Nahua ecological, spiritual, and political thought. These developments occurred during a time of significant climate change known as the “Little Ice Age,” exacerbated by anthropogenic catastrophes wrought by colonization. The differences and occasional dialogues between Christian millenarianism and Nahua intellectual productions highlight how the former, ironically, understood human relationships to nature in relatively static and unchanging terms. Nahua texts, by contrast, demonstrated a critical sensitivity to the contingencies of climate change and catastrophe. These insights add critical dimension to recent studies of indigenous religious traditions in colonial Mexico. They also suggest that indigenous traditions themselves should be understood as context-specific, undergoing constant negotiation and adaptation.