This essay examines the placement and displacement of Nahua labor in the architectural history of Mexico’s early colonial monasteries. It takes as its point of departure the story of a ghost in the Tlaxcala monastery as told by a Franciscan missionary to analyze the discursive and spatial dimensions of emergent racial ideologies in Mexico’s earliest Catholic missions. While the ghost’s appearance signals the eruption of unresolved tensions between the missionaries and the Tlaxcalans in a cohabited religious complex, the specter also animates settler colonial domination. Cross-referencing Nahuatl and Franciscan documents reveal the ghost story as a whitewashed tale of monastic ritual life wherein the ghost effaces Indigenous labor at precisely the moments and places missionaries deemed it most threatening. In so doing, this study illuminates how racial ideologies were structured discursively and experientially at the missions and contributes to urgent debates about how the history and preservation of Catholic architecture in Mexico conceals and represses the lived experience of Indigenous peoples. Neither the manuscript nor any parts of its content are currently under consideration or published in another journal.

中文翻译：

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闹鬼的修道院：墨西哥早期殖民建筑中令人不安的本土抹杀

本文探讨了纳瓦劳工在墨西哥早期殖民修道院建筑史上的安置和流离失所。它以方济各会传教士讲述的特拉斯卡拉修道院鬼魂的故事为出发点，分析墨西哥最早的天主教传教士中新兴的种族意识形态的话语和空间维度。虽然幽灵的出现标志着传教士和特拉斯卡拉人在同居的宗教建筑群中悬而未决的紧张关系的爆发，但幽灵也激发了定居者的殖民统治。交叉引用纳瓦特语和方济各会的文件揭示了这个鬼故事是一个粉饰的修道院仪式生活的故事，其中鬼魂在传教士认为最具威胁的时刻和地点抹去了原住民的劳动。在此过程中，这项研究阐明了种族意识形态是如何在宣教中以话语和经验的方式构建的，并有助于引发关于墨西哥天主教建筑的历史和保护如何隐藏和压制土著人民生活经历的紧急辩论。目前，该手稿及其任何部分内容均未在考虑中，也未在其他期刊上发表。