Maya Blue and Franciscan Evangelism

In the first decades of Franciscan evangelical campaign in Yucatán, Mexico (1540–90), Maya builders and artists directed construction pictorial decoration hundreds Christian edifices, ranging from small-scale chapels to larger churches entire monastic complexes, offering a material record peninsula’s religious transformation. Strategic color selection deployment blue pigment particular architectural, iconographic, liturgical contexts enabled Indigenous catechumens reconcile post-Tridentine conceptions divinity with precontact sacred ideologies. By weaving diverse methodologies study visual sources, textual documents, characterization techniques, we demonstrate how colonial theory actively engineered localized Catholicism.