La Florida Missions

Name: La Florida Missions
Author: Viviana Díaz Balsera
ISBN: 9781683406594

Spaces of Globalization, Resistance, and Transformation

Edited by Viviana Díaz Balsera

Published by: University of Florida Press

Series: Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

Bringing together scholars from many different disciplines, this book approaches Florida’s early Spanish missions as dynamic, multiethnic spaces where Indigenous peoples and missionaries negotiated power, culture, and survival.

348 Pages6.14 × 9.2122 b/w illus., 4 tables, notes, index

Hardcover
9781683406594
Published: September 22, 2026

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9781683406013
Published: September 22, 2026

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PDF
9781683405887
Published: September 22, 2026

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Description
Authors
Praise
Table of Contents

Reinterpreting Florida’s mission sites as places where Indigenous peoples and missionaries negotiated power, culture, and survival

This book approaches Florida’s early Spanish missions as dynamic, multiethnic spaces where Indigenous actors resisted as well as negotiated the transformation of their world into challenging spaces of globalization. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, La Florida Missions brings together scholars from anthropology, archaeology, cultural studies, ethnohistory, linguistics, literature, and religious studies. The contributors to the volume move beyond earlier paradigms that envision the missions only as sites of cultural loss, oppression, and destruction.

La Florida Missions opens with the 1565 attempts of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to negotiate with the Calusa, followed by essays on missions to the Mocama, Guale, Timucua, and Apalachee peoples into the eighteenth century, highlighting Franciscan and Indigenous perspectives. The book closes with the experiences of present-day Apalachee descendants in Louisiana, who continue to fight for recognition of their tribal identity. La Florida Missions helps show how Native peoples resisted and outlasted the European invasion of southeastern North America by continually adjusting to the unpredictable forces around them.

Viviana Díaz Balsera, professor emerita of Spanish at the University of Miami, is the author of Guardians of Idolatry: Gods, Demons, and Priests in Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions and coeditor of La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence.

“The multidisciplinary essays included in this volume not only reassess the historiography of mission studies, but they offer exciting new approaches to the field. A watershed publication.”—J. Michael Francis, coauthor of Murder and Martyrdom in Spanish Florida: Don Juan and the Guale Uprising of 1597
“The original and significant contribution of La Florida Missions is that the essays cohere around the themes of complexity, heterogeneity, and multisidedness rather than failure and loss, as well as the lasting legacies of both change and endurance for Native peoples rather than extinction and eradication.”—Robbie Ethridge, coeditor of The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology

List of Figures

List of Tables

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Challenging Paradises: La Florida Missions as Spaces of Globalization, Resistance, and Transformation
Viviana Díaz Balsera

Chapter 1. Queen Antonia of the Calusa and Indigenous Female Leadership during the Missionization Period
Traci Ardren

Chapter 2. Centering Mocama Communities and Indigenous Landscapes in a Time of Spanish Missions
Keith Ashley

Chapter 3. Escobedo’s Whales: Material Silences in the Epics of Florida
Thomas Hallock

Chapter 4. A Franciscan Tale of Captivity in Oré’s Account of the Martyrs of La Florida (ca. 1619)
Raquel Chang-Rodríguez

Chapter 5. A que vamos à la Yglesia? Liturgical Performance and Franciscan Identity in Fr. Francisco Pareja’s 1628 Catechism
Timothy J. Johnson

Chapter 6. Performing a Hieroglyph in La Florida: Gregorio de Movilla’s Tercero Cathecismo for the Timucua
Viviana Díaz Balsera and George Aaron Broadwell

Chapter 7. Timucua Voices in Spanish Sources
Alejandra Dubcovsky

Chapter 8. Decolonizing Conversion: The Deep Indigenous History of Religious Exchange in and beyond Florida
Denise I. Bossy

Chapter 9. Apalachee, Historians, Archaeologists, and the Franciscan Missions of Northwest Florida
Rochelle A. Marrinan

Chapter 10. Breaking Bread and the Persistence of Apalachee Foodways during Colonization
Tanya M. Peres

Chapter 11. The Apalachee in West Florida, 1704–1763
John E. Worth

Chapter 12. Apalache? Appalachia? The Talimali Band the Apalachee Indians, Twenty-First-Century Colonialism, and the Struggle for Tribal Sovereignty
Kimberly Borchard

List of Contributors

Index