From monumental cathedrals to simple parish churches, perhaps as many as 100,000 churches and civic buildings were constructed in Mexico during the viceregal or colonial period (1535-1821). Many of these structures remain today as witnesses to the fruitful blending of Old and New World forms and styles that created an architecture of enduring vitality.

In this profusely illustrated book, Robert J. Mullen provides a much-needed overview of Mexican colonial architecture and its attendant sculpture. Writing with just the right level of detail for students and general readers, he places the architecture in its social and economic context. He shows how buildings in the larger cities remained closer to European designs, while buildings in the pueblos often included prehispanic indigenous elements.

This book grew out of the author's twenty-five-year exploration of Mexico's architectural and sculptural heritage. Combining an enthusiast's love for the subject with a scholar's care for accuracy, it is the perfect introduction to the full range of Mexico's colonial architecture.

Trail of Footprints offers an intimate glimpse into the commission, circulation, and use of indigenous maps from colonial Mexico. A collection of sixty largely unpublished maps from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and made in the southern region of Oaxaca anchors an analysis of the way ethnically diverse societies produced knowledge in colonial settings. Mapmaking, proposes Hidalgo, formed part of an epistemological shift tied to the negotiation of land and natural resources between the region’s Spanish, Indian, and mixed-race communities. The craft of making maps drew from social memory, indigenous and European conceptions of space and ritual, and Spanish legal practices designed to adjust spatial boundaries in the New World. Indigenous mapmaking brought together a distinct coalition of social actors—Indian leaders, native towns, notaries, surveyors, judges, artisans, merchants, muleteers, collectors, and painters—who participated in the critical observation of the region’s geographic features. Demand for maps reconfigured technologies associated with the making of colorants, adhesives, and paper that drew from Indian botany and experimentation, trans-Atlantic commerce, and Iberian notarial culture. The maps in this study reflect a regional perspective associated with Oaxaca’s decentralized organization, its strategic position amidst a network of important trade routes that linked central Mexico to Central America, and the ruggedness and diversity of its physical landscape.