Utopia through the Kaleidoscope: The Colors of Silk in Colonial Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Following the arrival of Europeans to the New World, one of the most fascinating early exchanges of knowledge and technology that ensued was the introduction of the silk industry to Mexico. While in some places this was unsuccessful and/or short-lived, particularly in Oaxaca, it flourished for the better part of a century. For Franciscan and Dominican missionaries, silk presented an economic commodity key to realizing their vision of a Catholic Utopia that they would build in a land that they viewed as almost perfect for the renewal of Christianity. Meanwhile, Indigenous communities not only raised and sometimes reeled the raw silk thread that was subsequently woven in colonial craft guilds, but they were also active consumers of their own finished silk products, particularly sumptuous liturgical vestments of diverse and brilliant colors. As these elaborate textiles adorned sixteenth-century churches, they also exemplified some of the many ways in which a different concept of Utopia, one akin to prehispanic notions of a “Flowery Heaven,” developed. In this paper, we draw from textual and visual evidence to trace out how silk tied together these different yet profoundly interwoven utopian visions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33617