Browsing by Author "Fitzgerald, Joshua"

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    Deconstructing Conventual Franciscan Schools: Sixteenth-Century Architecture, Decoration, and Nahua Educational Spaces
    (University of Oregon, 2012) Fitzgerald, Joshua; Fitzgerald, Joshua; Haskett, Robert
    In the sixteenth century, during a process commonly called the “spiritual conquest,” evangelical priests refashioned Mesoamerican temples and schools into Christian churches and convents. Traditionally, scholars regarded this aspect of the Spanish Conquest as a top-down, foreigner-derived process of immediate cosmogenic transformation. Utilizing interdisciplinary methodologies and relying on Nahuatl voices, this thesis contributes to the recent scholarly effort to reinterpret spiritual conquest theory. This study compares and contrasts pre-contact and colonial schools, education techniques, and symbolic ornamentation in order to “read” the iconography and layout of the courtyard of the convent of San Andrés Calpan as a text. In the end, this thesis argues that visually-bilingual Nahua communities, using an existing architectural vernacular, created a nepantla or “a middle place” perfect for mutual misunderstandings and the persistence of local indigenous narratives alongside institutional Christian ones. Thus, Mesoamerican gods lived on in the very places designed to destroy them.
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    Unholy Pedagogy: Local Knowledge, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Lessons from Spanish Colonial Learningscapes, 1400–1650.
    (University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Fitzgerald, Joshua; Haskett, Robert
    To the present, histories about Spanish colonial education in the Americas have revealed surprisingly little in the way of indigenous perspectives on transatlantic indoctrination and local identity, and some might assume that European educational traditions dramatically uprooted Nahua culture and inserted a foreign one in the wake of systematic conversion efforts led by Christian priests. But the persistence to the present of pre-colonial traditions signifies that knowledge and culture were not uprooted, and the premise neglects the dynamic ways in which Nahuas of the sixteenth century manifested local identity under a colonial regime. Either point sparks an important historical question: how did indigenous students influence education under Spanish colonialism at the local or regional scale? To answer this question, this study will seek out evidence about pre- and colonial schooling, locate the material and psychosocial realities as they changed over time, and, significantly, develop a path forward to better understanding of Nahua community sense of place and local attachment. Its findings help to tell a more wholistic and nuanced account about local identity among Nahua communities in the intervalley region of Central Mexico. Rather than pin the discourse solely to the alphabetic texts, which were for the most part authored by European educators, this study is distinct because it builds upon ethnohistorical methodology, one that compliments Nahuatl and Spanish translations with a rich variety of visual and material culture (art, architecture, pictorial manuscripts, maps, and other materials) created by indigenous hands. It investigates complex ideas and themes, including place-identity formation and perseverance, the Spanish “spiritual conquest,” memory studies, and the transference of knowledge between cultures. One of Unholy Pedagogy’s core arguments is that indigenous learning modalities and sense of place were inextricably paired, and the combination of these produced mutual misunderstandings and mixed meanings between Native learners and Spanish educators. Therefore, this dissertation makes a unique contribution to the analysis of colonial-era religious education studies, place-identity research, and the history of learning science, and its approach recovers a more diverse and multifaceted vision of transcultural processes.