Santo Domingo, Yanhuitlan

1550-1600

Name(s) currently unknown

Yanhuitlan, Oaxaca, MEX

This monastery was one built as part of the 16th-century campaigns of evangelization. Set in a once-thriving town in the Mixtec region of Mexico, it captures the ambitions of both Dominican friars and local indigenous leaders.

Santo Domingo was built on a raised platform, and may have replaced a pre-Hispanic complex at the same site. The regular arrangement of the façade, its clear division into three tiers, is typical of Renaissance style in New Spain. Its unadorned bell tower is typical of 16th century constructions. At left, the buttresses were needed to counteract the outward thrust of the ribbed vaults that covered the nave. At right, the low arch was the public entrance to the cloister. Many monasteries had schools within. Today, Yanhuitlan has been restored by the Mexican government.

Dominican friars commissioned this building, and it may have been designed by a fellow Dominican, Francisco Marín, who was active in the area in the mid-16th century. Interior decorations were particularly lavish: Yanhuitlan boasts of a retable (retablo) painted by Andres de la Concha, a leading painter in New Spain. De la Concha, in fact, played an influential role in the area, organizing an indigenous workshop for the production of retablos.

The monastery is made of cut stone blocks. Since Santo Domingo is likely set on the site of a pre-Hispanic complex, much of the dressed stone may have been recycled. But pre-Hispanic builders never made large, enclosed buildings, so the technology of the vaulting and buttressing was new to the indigenous masons employed to create the building.

Yanhuitlan is well-known among historians of Mexico as a site of complex relations between indigenous leaders and the Catholic church. In the mid-16th century, the cacique of Yanhuitlan, don Domingo, had been baptized but was charged with idolatry. Not long after his release, a renovation of the local church complex was begun through the collaboration of don Domingo and other indigenous residents of Yanhuitlan, Dominican friars and other Spaniards.

The mendicant orders targeted large population centers in their evangelization campaigns. Their building projects were both practical, in that they needed places to teach and hold mass, but also symbolic. They were meant to offer a sacred architecture on a par with, or superior to, pre-Hispanic temples.

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Early, James. 1994. The Colonial Architecture of Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Frassani, Alessia. 2013. "The Convento of Yanhuitlan and its Altarpiece: Patronage and the Making of a Colonial Iconography in 16th-century Mixteca Alta." Colonial Latin American Review 22 (1): 67-97.

Ibarra-Sevilla, Benjamin. 2013. "The First Ribbed Vaults in the Americas: Craft Skills and Construction Processes in the Mixtec Region of Southern Mexico." Construction History 28 (1): 1-25.

Piazza, Rosalba. 2005. Los Procesos de Yanhuitlán: algunas nuevas preguntas. Colonial Latin American Review 14 (2): 205-229.

Terraciano, Kevin, 2001. The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca, Nudzahui History, 16th-18th Centuries. Stanford: Stanford University Press.