Early modern confraternities, in contradistinction to guilds, welcomed also unemployed, disabled, female, young, and elderly members into their pious, fraternal organizations. These variegated groups operated in most towns in colonial Mexico; more than 300 religious confraternities worked in Mexico City alone within the first decades after the Spanish conquest. Despite their ubiquity, little is known about their contribution to the formation of a new hybrid society following the fall of the Aztec Empire. To address this research gap, my thesis analyses archive sources from Mexico, Spain, USA, and Germany to demonstrate the extensive hospital administration, orphan care, prisoner assistance and debt relief carried out by many indigenous groups within a new Catholic framework. As both recipients and providers of care, poor indigenous inhabitants created their own post-conquest solidarity networks.
