By Alexandra Alarcon
On the cover of UC Santa Barbara History professor Juan Cobo Betancourt’s new book, a 17th-century painting from what is now Colombia reveals something unexpected. At the center of the scene is not a Spanish priest nor a colonial official but an Indigenous child.
“An Indigenous family is at the center of this,” Cobo told a UCBS audience last week. “Not because the man in question is a token figure, but because he’s the ruler. He’s the head of this confraternity.”
Cobo spoke about his book The Coming of the Kingdom: The Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada, at an event hosted by UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center as part of its Humanities Decanted series.
UCSB Spanish professor Antonio Cortijo Ocaña, right, joins historian Juan Cobo Betancourt for a discussion of Cobo’s new book, The Coming of the Kingdom, during UCSB’s Humanities Decanted series.
Cobo, a professor of history, was joined by Antonio Cortijo, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese, for a conversation about how the Muisca, an Indigenous group from the New Kingdom of Granada, navigated Catholic reform and colonial rule during the 16th and 17th centuries, often collaborating with the colonizers in order to ensure the community’s survival.
Don Pedro Tabaco was an Indigenous leader—or cacique—from the town of Cómbita. He commissioned the painting San Nicolás de Tolentino y las Ánimas that is on the cover of Cobo’s book, which shows him and his family in the middle of a church scene. Cobo says the image shows that some Indigenous leaders worked within colonial institutions—sometimes by reinventing themselves as Christian authorities—to hold onto power and support their communities.
The cover of The Coming of the Kingdom, by UCSB historian Juan Cobo Betancourt, features a 17th-century painting commissioned by don Pedro Tabaco, a Muisca leader in colonial Colombia.
“In some cases we see Indigenous rulers who reinvent themselves as Christian leaders, effectively by investing very heavily in running these institutions,” Cobo said.
That same painting highlights the book’s central idea: Indigenous people in colonial Colombia weren’t just shaped by empire—they adapted to it and, at times, reshaped it from within. “In the end, what the book argues is that Indigenous people were able to negotiate the terms of their own Christianization at a local level in transformative ways,” Cobo said. He describes the process as “complicated, participatory, incomplete and contested,” shaped by communities using colonial institutions to maintain social ties and build new ones.
Cobo explained that, in the aftermath of the Spanish invasion, the Muisca faced devastating population loss, forced resettlement, and economic disruption. In response, they turned to Catholic institutions—like confraternities and mission churches—as ways to survive and adapt.
Cobo described these institutions as social support systems. They offered assistance for funerals, childcare, and elderly care—resources communities used, he said, to “reweave a social fabric that was unraveling.”
But while some institutions—like churches—helped communities stay connected, language became another way colonial officials drew lines of power.
Cobo said colonial officials used language as a way to reinforce hierarchies: Indigenous languages that were more widely spoken—or easier for the Spanish to standardize—were used in missionary work. Others were pushed aside, and the people who spoke them were often excluded from colonial institutions.
“The question is, how much, and which languages are capable. If your language looks like one of our languages, then it probably is a good one. And we can translate these complicated concepts,” Cobo said, paraphrasing the Spanish mindset.
Unlike places like Mexico or Central America, Colombia doesn’t have a rich archive of Indigenous-language texts—just a handful of word lists and grammar guides. So, to piece together how Indigenous communities lived under Spanish rule, Cobo relied on colonial documents such as petitions, legal records, and missionary reports.
“The power belongs to the people on the ground,” Cobo said. “They were organizing themselves in really interesting ways to survive profound change.”
UC Santa Barbara history professor Juan Cobo Betancourt discusses Indigenous leadership and survival in colonial Colombia during a recent talk.
By focusing on a region that’s often left out of the spotlight—the New Kingdom of Granada, which covers much of present-day Colombia—Cobo hopes his work helps shift how historians look at colonial Latin America. In this area, where most Indigenous voices survive only through Spanish-written texts, he has looked for the strategies communities used to hold onto power and reshape their world.
“I think if this book does anything, I hope it helps to provide a kind of methodological clue as to how historians of those regions might approach these messy institutions,” Cobo said.
Alexandra Alarcon is a fourth-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in sociology and minoring in journalism. She is also a web and media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.