La Florida Missions by Viviana Díaz Balsera

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.