In the eighteenth century, New Spaniards (colonial Mexicans) so lauded their nuns that they developed a local tradition of visually opulent portraits, called monjas coronadas or and "crowned nuns, and " that picture their subjects in regal trappings at the moment of their religious profession and in death. This study identifies these portraits as markers of a vibrant and changing society that fused together indigenous and Euro-Christian traditions and ritual practices to construct a new and complex religious identity that was unique to New Spain.To discover why crowned-nun portraits, and especially the profession portrait, were in such demand in New Spain, this book offers a pioneering interpretation of these works as significant visual contributions to a local counter-colonial discourse. James M. Cordova demonstrates that the portraits were a response to the Spanish crown's project to modify and modernize colonial society-a series of reforms instituted by the Bourbon monarchs that threatened many nuns' religious identities in New Spain. His analysis of the portraits' rhetorical devices, which visually combined Euro-Christian and Mesoamerican notions of the sacred, shows how they promoted local religious and cultural values as well as client-patron relations, all of which were under scrutiny by the colonial Church. Combining visual evidence from images of the and "crowned nun and " with a discussion of the nuns' actual roles in society, Cordova reveals that nuns found their greatest agency as Christ's brides, a title through which they could, and did, challenge the Church's authority when they found it intolerable. and "