Bodies struggle, Struggle bodies.: Moral speech, propaganda and religious identity in the Colonial Michoacan.

Abstract

Since seventeenth-century New Spain would be witness of development for a vast hagiographic literature that would take different shapes, including their integration in the way of biography within the chronicles of religious orders. We analyse here Rea’s and Basalenque’s works, the fi rst offi cial chronicles of the province of Michoacán. Their writings allow us, on one hand, to approach the moral discourse about the body built up at baroque, and secondly, to analyse the strategies of religious orders in their positioning towards other social groups, showing how the hagiographies were a propag3anda exercise to reinforce their legitimacy and to strength their prestige. At the same time, these works were one of the pillars on which was cemented the construction of a distinguished religious identity, facing the metropolis and facing the closer “other”