Author Meets Critics: Andrea McComb Sanchez’s Of Corn and Catholicism: A History of Religion and Power in Pueblo Indian Patron Saint Feast Days

In her recently published book, Of Corn and Catholicism: A History of Religion and Power in Pueblo Indian Patron Saint Feast Days, Andrea McComb Sanchez examines how the religion of the Eastern Pueblo Indians of New Mexico intertwined with Spanish Catholicism. Focusing on the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, the book examines the feast days as sites of resistance, accommodation, and appropriation. The book contributes to Pueblo history while also offering theoretical insights to the scholarly discourse around tradition through what McComb Sanchez calls “bounded incorporation.” She introduces this term to describe the process by which the Eastern Pueblo navigated the imposition of colonial systems of oppression through Catholicism. This roundtable explores the book’s wide-ranging historical and theoretical contributions to the fields of Religious Studies, Indigenous Studies, History, and American Studies as well as its applicability in teaching courses on Southwest histories, religion and colonization, and borderlands.