Alex R. Mayfield* Galleons from the “Mouth of Hell”: Empire and Religion in Seventeenth Century Acapulco https://doi.org/10.1515/jemc-2018-0008 Abstract: Scholarship on the Spanish galleon trade has tended to ignore both the importance of religion and the significance of the port of Acapulco. This paper will seek to offset each shortcoming by offering a glimpse into the religious life of Acapulco during the seventeenth century. This glimpse will aim to establish the spatial linkages between religion and economy in the port by (1) identifying the sacred places, practices, and missions of the city, and (2) illustrating how they were intimately related to the galleon trade. Though Acapulco occupied a para- doxical space within the broader Spain’s imperial vision, its unique spiritual cartography continued to be dictated by the aims of that vision. The port provides a unique case study by which to understand the complex and often-contradictory relationship between urbanity, trade, and religiosity in the Spanish empire. It illustrates that the economic and religious structures needed to create heavenly spaces in Spanish colonial holdings also produced unintended byproducts, places where religion and economics merged to produce more unexpected outcomes. Acapulco never became the envisioned heavenly city; yet, throughout the seven- teenth century, it continued to demonstrate that economics and religion remained integrally connected. Keywords: Acapulco, early modern Catholicism, galleon trade, Spanish colonialism, mendicant orders, trade and religion 1 Galleons and the “Mouth of Hell” It pleased God we came safe to Acapulco, which in the country language signifies ‘mouth of Hell.’ 1 *Corresponding author: Alex R. Mayfield, School of Theology, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA, E-mail: mayfieaa@bu.edu 1 Domingo Fernández Navarrete, The Travels and Controversies of Friar Domingo Navarrete, 1618 1686 (Cambridge, UK: Published for the Hakluyt Society at the University Press, 1962), 36. Journal of Early Modern Christianity 2018; 5(2): 221–245