The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico

A prominent scholar of Mexican and Latin American history challenges the fields focus on historical memory to examine colonial-era conceptions of the future Going against the grain of most existing scholarship, Matthew D. OHara explores the archives of colonial Mexico to uncover a history of futuremaking. While historians and historical anthropologists of Latin America have long focused on historical memory, OHaraa Rockefeller Foundation grantee and the award-winning author of A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexicorejects this approach and its assumptions about time experience. Ranging widely across economic, political, and cultural practices, OHara reveals how colonial subjects used the resources of tradition and Catholicism to craft new futures. An intriguing, innovative work, this volume will be widely read by scholars of Latin American history, religious studies, and historical methodology.