Juan Cobo Betancourt, “Christianity, Colonialism, & the Muisca peoples of the Northern Andes”

Public Lecture: Juan Cobo Betancourt, “Christianity, Colonialism, & the Muisca peoples of the Northern Andes”

Alhecama Theatre, 215 E. Canon Perdido Street, located in El Presidio de Santa Bárbara State Historic Park

Free and open to the public. RSVP to historyassociates@ia.ucsb.edu

How does colonialism work without a strong colonial state? How does religious conversion work without an effective missionary project? How can historians work with an archive full of fictions? Taking the history of the Muisca peoples of the Northern Andes of what is now Colombia, who from the 1530s found themselves at the centre of efforts by Europeans to transform them into Catholic, tribute-paying vassals of the Spanish crown, this talk explores the complex and contradictory ways in which Christianity, Spanish colonialism, and Indigenous politics came together to produce a new kind of society to the disappointment of everyone involved.

Juan Cobo Betancourt is Associate Professor of History and Director
of the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program and
Center for Latin American and Iberian Research at UC Santa
Barbara. He has written three books on questions of religion,
race, law, and language in colonial Latin America.