Heritage and Its Missions

Explores how heritage discourses and local publics interact at Catholic mission sites in the southwestern United States, northern Mexico, and the Southern Cone.

Interdisciplinary in scope and classed under the name “critical heritage studies,” Heritage and Its Missions make extensive use of ethnographic perspectives to examine heritage not as a collection of inert things upon which a general historical interest is centered, but as a series of active meanings that have consequences in the social, political, and economic arenas. This approach considers the places of interaction between heritage discourses and local publics as constructed spaces where the very materiality of the social and the political unfolds.

Heritage and Its Missions brings together researchers from several countries interested in the pre-republican Catholic missions in the Americas as heritage. Each essay discusses the past and current heritage meanings applied to a specific mission by national and multicultural States, local Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, international heritage institutions, and scholars. They then address how heritage actors produce knowledge from their positioned perspectives, how different actors, collectives, communities, and publics relate to them, how heritage representations are deployed and contested as social facts, and how different conceptions of “heritage” collide, collaborate, and intersperse to produce the meanings around which heritage struggles unfold.