Mina Garcia Soormally, an assistant professor of Spanish, presented at an Oct. 21-22 conference held at Wake Forest University on “Dominant Discourses, Guarded Voices: Religion and Society in Spain and its Empire, 14th-16th Centuries."
Her paper, “Conversion as a colonizing experiment: Fray Hernando de Talavera and the first Franciscans in New Spain,” argued that the conquest of America was presented, in its first instances, as a virtual extension of the Reconquista that had taken place in Spain starting in 711.
In it, Garcia Soormally established some parallelisms between the approaches to the other developed first by fray Hernando de Talavera, first Archbishop of Granada, and the attempts to convert the natives developed by the first Franciscans that arrived in New Spain in the early 1520s. Using the religious drama La Conquista de Jerusalén she proposed that although Talavera´s policy was not entirely successful in his context, it became the basis for the strategy used in New Spain in the first instances of the Spanish domination.