Franciscan Missionaries and Their Networks: The Diffusion of Missionary Concepts in Eighteenth-Century New Spain

Abstract

Missionaries of the Franciscan apostolic colleges de Propaganda Fide in Colonial New Spain (Mexico) operated within networks that connected the colleges, their missions, and the capital of the colonial kingdom. Friars traveling through these networks from college to college relayed known methods and innovations to the friars' collective understanding of missiology. To that end, their movement and communications meant that methods operative in the earliest of the frontier mission fields in Texas often were used elsewhere, culminating in the application of the "metodo de Tejas" in the last Spanish frontier in North America, Alta (or Upper) California. In short, ideas and concepts circulated through these Franciscan networks in the later colonial era.