The Invisible War

"This meticulously researched and beautifully written work is a major contribution to our understanding of religion in indigenous communities and the Catholic Church in central Mexico and Oaxaca . . . [N]uanced, engaging, and thought-provoking." -- Sarah Cline * Hispanic American Historical Review *
"The Invisible War provides a remarkably full and genuinely historical study of the little-known extirpation campaigns in colonial Mexico and what, in practice, idolatry in 'Indian' communities of central Mexico and Oaxaca came to mean for all the parties involved. It interweaves the actions of colonial judges and Catholic priests, Nahuatl- and Zapotec-speaking nobles, shamans, and villagers, and an array of ritual practices and sacred texts. While insisting on local 'diversity of indigenous forms of consciousness,' David Tavárez offers a sustained, deeply researched interpretation of native devotions in the colonial period as epistemological dissent to Christian evangelization and extirpation. Here is native thought and action understood in new, connected, and richly contextualized ways." -- William B Taylor, University of California * Berkeley *
"This book is worthy of inclusion in any Mesoamerican historian's library. Tavárez offers a thoughtful framework for examining Spanish/Spanish, native/Spanish, and native/native interactions under stressful conditions; valuable insights into these complex and multifaceted relationships; and plenty of interesting biographical, institutional, and situational information. All these elements together make this a useful reference work as well." -- Fraces Berdan * The Americas *
"In David Tavarez's The Invisible War, two longstanding projects come to fruition: Inquisition studies and Indigenous-language-based ethnohistory . . . The book is admirably transparent in its use of text and data, and impressive in its mobilization of diverse tools of inquiry . . . Its greatest strength, [...], is its rich description of the diversity of cosmologies and magical practices that existed in the netherworld of unsanctioned belief among communities whose cultures layered Indigenous and European religion." -- Sean F. McEnroe * Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History *
"In this eye-opening book, Tavárez shows that colonial religion was an 'archipelago of faith,' of multifarious and constantly changing indigenous Christianities. Change was often prompted by violence and was as relentless as the strategies of those friars, parish priests, and minor civil magistrates who devoted their lives to homogenizing the faith and rooting out idolatry, the origin of all sin. This is a magisterial study that spans three centuries and plumbs a formidable cache of Nahua, Zapotec, and ecclesiastical sources scattered throughout Europe and the Americas. A landmark." -- Jorge Canizares-Esguerra * University of Texas at Austin *
"Tavárez has undertaken an ambitious study of a key and hitherto insufficiently addressed issue in Mexican indigenous and religious history . . . Tavárez has written an impressive and a scholastically rigorous book that will be welcomed by students and scholars of colonial Latin America, ethnohistory, colonialism, and religious history." -- Nora E. Jaffary * American Historical Review *
"David Tavárez's book, The Invisible War, offers an especially significant challenge to the colonial religious historiography . . . Perhaps the book's greatest contribution to ethnohistory lies in its exploration of clandestine literacies in which indigenous ritual specialists produced a variety of texts—calendrical, astrological, and liturgical." -- Susan Kellogg * Ethnohistory *
"David Tavárez renders The Invisible War in such incredible detail that it is difficult to conceive of this as his first book. It reads more like a life's work: comprehensive, yet careful; formidable, but rewarding; and engrossing while exact(ing). Each sentence demands the reader's full attention because it presents so much information about specific people, particular circumstances, and the precise interplay of devotional activities, disciplinary measures, and dissent . . . Tavárez's book is an achievement in its accuracy, analysis, and approach." -- Molly Basset * Colonial Latin American Review *