The Colony as the Mystical Body of Christ

Abstract

In New Spain in the sixteenth century, the colony was imagined as a sacred body, as the mystical body of Christ (corpus mysticum), in which millions of presumed Catholic Indigenous subjects figured as the body’s wounded feet. Beyond the simple secularization of a theological concept and its appropriation toward political ends, the colonial corpus mysticum became living, enfleshed, and incarnate, both sustaining the colonial project and rebelling against it. The Mexican corpus mysticum was grounded in the vernacular theologies and affects of the mortandad, the violent death world of the colonial cataclysm. The ‘mysterious materiality’ of the New World corpus mysticum points to signs of Mexican Indigenous communities’ theopolitical refusal to be subsumed into the Spanish colonial flesh-body.