User:Willshinexc/sandbox

Article Evaluation: Censorship in Japan

Evaluating Content: I chose this article as it is part of a larger Wikipedia project called "Censorship by Country" and I was curious to see what information was available on censorship in Japan. Surprisingly, I found the article to be rather short with only two major sections beyond the introduction. Although the intro stays on topic it consists of only three sentences and seems to condense the history of censorship rather briefly. The bulk of the content in this article focuses on Japanese censorship after the Meiji Restoration and the contemporary censorship of pornography. I think there is some rather insightful and broad information in these sections that allows readers without previous experience in the subject to effectively learn about it and appreciate their clear and balanced style. However, there is a conspicuous lack of information from before the late 19th century and I think the article could stand to gain a lot from adding information about early Japanese print culture and efforts of censorship before such a late period in Japanese history. The largest problem I see with content is the massive block quote at the end of the 'History' section. It can be more effectively summarized and takes up a lot of sections space.

Evaluating Tone:

As stated above I think the tone is effective for the goal of an online encyclopedia.Terms are laid out in clear and concise terms and there are no value judgements that I could find (the writers avoided using terms like 'good' or 'bad' to describe historical shifts or ideas. Concepts are explained in a neutral tone and in the last section research is synthesized rather than simply laid out with quotes. I think the tone is effective for facilitating an introduction and keeping readers engaged without overloading them with dense content.

Evaluating Sources:

The weakest point of this article is its lack of sources. The entire history section contains no citations and all the information presented must be taken at face value. Though there are hyperlinks to other Wikipedia articles containing information on Japanese history, there are no direct sources presented to affirm the information in the article itself. The only source that is cited in one of the subsections of this portion is for a direct quote that should likely be taken out and synthesized in the first place. The final section on pornography does contain a decent number of citations and seem to come from independent sources, but they do not make up for or explain the entire history of Japanese censorship. I think this article could gain a lot from better citations and a larger number of quality, independent sources.

Talk Page:

The talk page has a few bullet points listed that have ideas and concepts to be expanded on. Though the page does not seem to be too active today, it does contain a decent amount of information that can be used as a launching point for future research. The article is listed as C-class High and Mid importance in three separate wiki-projects so it does seem like there is a vested interest in making this article more complete and better researched. One of the points listed was a desire for more information on censorship prior to WWII which mirrored my own sentiment above. This makes me realize it is important to spend time reading the talk page and getting to know the other editors as in any case it will be likely that I am not the only one with a desire to flesh out a given point more and could gain quite a bit from the collaborative environment.

Potential Topics:

I am interested in exploring the information Wikipedia has on censorship in Colonial Mexico and the effects the Inquisition had in Spanish territories and colonies. Some pages I think would be good to do this on include: Mexican Inquisition, Censorship in Mexico, Diego de Landa, Spanish Conquest of the Maya, Black Legend.

Censorship in Mexico seems to be the one I will choose to work through most thoroughly as it is rather short and only contains information from the past decade. I think this page could be off to a better start if I outline the Spanish Colonial history of censorship in Mexico and how the Inquisition affected central America at large. Right now the page only lists information on reporter deaths and the silencing of modern journalists, and although this content is certainly relevant to the page, it is poorly cited and does not encompass enough information for history of censorship in such a large country with such a well documented history. Content on the impact of the Catholic Church, missionaries, Indexes, and the destruction of native historical and religious information will all be part of the additions I hope to make. Past the colonial era I would also like to flesh out information on censorship in the early years of independence. In addition, articles like Diego de Landa, who was a key player in the destruction and censorship of native Mexican material, could be improved on with more citations and a more fleshed out history of his true involvement. Other pages that I may be able to contribute to may be the Mexican Inquisition and Spanish Conquest of the Maya, however these are pages that are already quite fleshed out and I would probably do best simply finding more sources to either support the claims or flagging information that does not seem to be well cited. Black Legend could also be a page that would benefit from more diverse sources and if I were to come across some in my research could consider doing so as well. However, like the two aforementioned articles it seems rather well fleshed out and contains a decent number of high quality sources.

Censorship in Mexico
Due to a lack of quality information on this page pertaining to events prior to the 21st century, I will be choosing to add substantially to the Censorship in Mexico Article. I will likely focus on the historical forms of censorship that have been employed since the Inquisition was extended into Mexico by Spain and detail information mainly from the Spanish Colonial Era. Although Wikipedia has a separate page for the Mexican Inquisition, and the information I compile will have specific overlaps, I think it is important to have a broader set of information available on the methods of information control and censorship that existed prior to the last 20 years on a separate censorship page. I have outlined sources mainly on the Inquisition and repression of Indigenous religious and spiritual practices below, but have also included sources from the first Mexican Republic and later 19th century. As stated in my initial evaluation of this article, many of the sources that exist for the current article are not ideally independent and come from news publications released less than one year ago. Though it is not impossible that this information is unbiased, it would be better if the page had more citations from independent academic publications or research institutions. The article would provide readers a much better opportunity to explore the topic if there were more high quality citations that could in turn lead them to even more developed and unbiased information on the matter.

In addition to this article, I have also added the Diego de Landa article to the 'my articles' section. Diego de Landa was a Franciscan missionary who was fanatic in his destruction of Mayan codices and religious material and operated in the early years of the Mexican Inquisition. The destruction of the Maya written record is something I would like improve the quality of on Wikipedia and add more high quality sources to balance out the pages that deal with the Inquisition mainly from a euro-centric point of view. The page is of a fairly high quality already but is missing citations for direct quotes in some places and could use a wider base of sources to draw from- so this edit may be more of a developing sources and reference project than adding much more content than already exists on the page.

Bibliography:
Greenleaf, Richard E. "The Mexican Inquisition and the Indians: Sources for the Ethnohistorian." The Americas 34, no. 3 (1978): 315-44. doi:10.2307/981310.

Greenleaf, Richard E. "Francisco Millán before the Mexican Inquisition: 1538-1539." The Americas 21, no. 2 (1964): 184-95. doi:10.2307/979060.

Castanien, Donald G. "The Mexican Inquisition Censors a Private Library, 1655." The Hispanic American Historical Review 34, no. 3 (1954): 374-92. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2508899.

Timmer, David E. "Providence and Perdition: Fray Diego De Landa Justifies His Inquisition against the Yucatecan Maya." Church History 66, no. 3 (1997): 477-88. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3169452.

John F. Chuchiak IV. "In Servitio Dei: Fray Diego De Landa, the Franciscan Order, and the Return of the Extirpattion of Idolatry in the Calonial Diocese of Yucatán, 1573-1579." The Americas 61, no. 4 (2005): 611-46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4490974.

Uribe-Uran, Victor M. "The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin America during the Age of Revolution." Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 2 (2000): 425-57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2696612.

The tyranny of opinion : honor in the construction of the Mexican public sphere / Pablo Piccato.

Greenleaf, Richard E. "The Great Visitas of the Mexican Holy Office 1645-1669." The Americas 44, no. 4 (1988): 399-420. doi:10.2307/1006967.

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/13/arts/governments-censorship-arts-mexico-nourishing-hand-can-also-undermine.html

Historical Censorship
The history of censorship in Mexico can be traced back almost 500 years to the extension of inquisitorial practices from the Spanish Inquisition into Spain's New World territories in North, Central and South America. The Holy Office of the Inquisition established by decree of King Philip II in 1569 marked the first systematic attempt of the Spanish crown to create a centralized censoring body in Mexico that subjugated New Spain to the codes of the Spanish Inquisition. Although the shape of censorship had already begun to take form with the arrival of Europeans to Central America 50 years earlier, the Holy Office's subsequent dominance would go on to characterize the state of Mexican censorship from the 1570's up until the beginning of the 19th century. After Mexico gained its independence from Spain and disbanded the Office of the Inquisition (formally in 1812 but effectively by 1820) the censorship methodologies that had long distinguished Mexican censorship began to change. Censorship practices that had long been under control of the Catholic Church were now under the discretion of a newly independent government that was forced to frame its actions through secular and legal channels rather than religious orthodoxy. Thus, censorship in the 19th century occurred in many forms dissimilar to those that came before it and was most prominently guided by the constant struggle between journalists and government officials as to what constituted free speech. Issues of a free press remained salient throughout the Mexican Revolution and the following post-revolutionary rise in communist expression in the arts and journalism. The continued silencing of journalists and a state control of media would continue through the latter part of the 20th century and remain some of Mexico's most controversial issues today.

Before 1569
Although there was no official Office of the Inquisition in New Spain until the year 1569, many practices of the Spanish Inquisition reached Mexico long before with the first evangelizing and missionary efforts of the Spanish crown in Central America. Thus, censorship prior to the establishment of the Holy Office of the Mexican Inquisition was similar in many ways to that which came after it. Leaders of both periods maintained the aim of silencing individuals who spoke out against the Catholic Church or its practices and made their mission the institution of uniform spiritual and social order. However, unique to this early period were censorship efforts that focused more directly on countering the heretical speech of populations that would later fall outside the jurisdiction of the Holy Office upon its codification in the 1570's. Such groups included non-Catholic or recently converted indigenous Mexicans and tended to address cases of idolatry and blasphemy.

Prior to the creation of a formal tribunal, Inquisitional efforts were carried out by mendicants in monastic trials (1522-1534) and then by Bishops who served as ecclesiastic judges (1535-1571). These early monastic inquisitors focused their attention disproportionately on indigenous cases of idolatry and blasphemy and modeled their investigations and trials on informal structures they had assumed from medieval tradition. They concerned themselves with investigating claims made against individuals and punished those who they found to uphold religious and spiritual values contrary to the Catholic tradition. Although this monastic form of inquisition was replaced with the ecclesiastic form in central Mexico following the arrival of Bishops to New Spain in 1536, monastics in peripheral settlements continued to exercise intense persecution of natives who did not live up to their expectations as converted Catholics for at least the following three decades. Fray Diego de Landa used torture as late as 1562 in his Inquisitorial procedures against the indigenous people of the province of Yucatán and infamously burned Maya codices (bark paper books) containing pre-Colombian hieroglyphic writings in an attempt to eliminate indigenous access to non-Catholic spiritual guidance and rituals. However, highly visible forms of censorship such as Landa's public destruction of indigenous codices occurred inconsistently and represent just part of the many smaller incidents of censorship that worked to systematically obscure ideas the Spanish believed were dangerous and subversive to upholding the Catholic faith and social order of colonial Mexico.

The Bishop led ecclesiastic Inquisition that followed this early monastic period was similarly fervent in its prosecution of the recently converted indigenous people of Mexico. The first Bishop of Mexico Fray Juan de Zumárraga (1536-1546) tried 156 cases before the ecclesiastic Inquisition and, although defendants included Spaniards, mixed caste persons and a high number of those suspected to be illegally practicing the Jewish faith, it was Zumárraga's trials against indigenous Mexicans that proved to be his most controversial. In his most recognized trial Zumárraga brought cacique of Texcoco, Don Carlos Chichimecatecolt before his ecclesiastical Inquisition and tried him as a "dogmatizer against the faith". Despite the Bishop being unable to acquire a testimony that Don Carlos had explicitly practiced the more grave offence of idolatry and idol possession, he was executed for speaking out against the Church. Although he was reprimanded by inquisitors in Spain for his actions, Zumárraga and the bishop inquisitors of this period dealt out harsh punishments, specifically to indigenous peoples, for simply speaking out against the Church. Both Spanish officials and colonists would come to view this intensive force as a shortcoming of the central direction of the New World Inquisition in the following years. In fact, it was this extreme treatment of indigenous peoples and dissenters of the Church that would lead to the formal establishment of the Holy Office in Central America in 1569. By the end of this period a strong precedent was set as to what could and could not be said in colonial Mexico and what objects one could and could not possess.

The Holy Office of the Inquisition and Book Censorship 1569-1820
In response to the demand for better oversight of the Mexican Inquisition, the Holy Office of the Inquisition was formally extended to the Americas in 1569. However, although the Office now rooted censorship in a formal decree guided by specific guidelines, such censorship was not always consistent in its enforcement or standards throughout the vast period the Mexican Inquisition spanned. Like the preceding period, the censorship efforts undertaken by the Holy Office varied by location, time, and provincial discretion. In general though the tribunal of the Mexican Inquisition operated under the same procedural guidelines that the civil criminal trials of the day did, the main difference being that the Inquisitor, who served as the judge in the final trial, was also the one who would initially gather evidence against a subject and, of course, the religious nature of its investigations. As in the preceding periods, it remained controversial for people to speak out against the Church and suspected heretics could be brought before the tribunal if they aroused suspicion from neighbors, friends or Holy Office Officials. The aim of these trials was to silence dissenters and eliminate visible opposition to the Church and crown with the ultimate hope of bringing them back into alignment with Church doctrine. The means by which this was achieved was the imprisonment, torture and finally public ridicule faced in the auto-de-fé (a public display of humiliation or punishment for those proven guilty before the tribunal) of those convicted before the Holy Office.

One of the most explicit forms of censorship that the Holy Office introduced to was the Index. The Index of Prohibited Books, which was a list of prohibited reading materials given to the people of New Spain in 1573 and enforced through the Holy Office, became one of the chief means through which censorship in colonial Mexico was attained and one of the most intensive measures taken by New World inquisitors to suppress information. Book censorship was also one of the most consistent methods of censorship, as it remained a prominent measure taken by the Office even as other priorities shifted. Although enforcement of the Index varied under the Holy Office from location to location, even distant tribunals of the Inquisition such as the one in New Spain had the authority to expurgate, prohibit, or remove from circulation any work it found offensive on its own volition. Anyone found in possession of prohibited materials could be investigated by the Mexican Inquisition and subject to imprisonment and subsequent trial. For example, in a 1655 investigation of the private library of colonial Mexican architect Melchor Perez de Soto, the Holy Office confiscated 1,592 volumes and permanently impounded many books that did not appear on the Index because they were written in Flemish and could not be formally reviewed by the local Inquisition. In instances such as this, the Mexican Inquisition had full discretion over what it would and would not allow under its jurisdiction and the boundaries of its own localized censorship gave it a rather complete control over the intellectual life of its subjects. Further, the Index gave the Inquisition oversight of all shipments into and out of colonial Mexico. Inquisitors had the right to search all cargo of a ship arriving from Europe in a process called visitation and were able to confiscate anything they found offensive. While this process was intended mainly to find prohibited print material it was not limited to such items. However, it is likely that many searches were not through enough to catch all prohibited materials and depending on the port visitations were sometimes incredibly lax.

Aside from book censorship the Holy Office was also responsible for confiscating any non approved representations of holy imagery in colonial Mexico. Anything from paintings to handkerchiefs that included representation of the saints or holy figures were subject to the discretion of the Holy Office and could be bounds for an investigation into any individual. In this manner art and craftsmanship fell under the scope of the Inquisition and non approved representations were often impounded or destroyed. The state of censorship in Mexico tended this way much through the 16th and 17th century, going through phases of more intense and lax enforcement depending on when and where the censorship was occurring. By the end of the colonial period though the Holy Office increasingly became a tool of political ends and officials or prominent community members often used the tribunal as a means of silencing opponents through the wide scope of crimes they accuse their foes of.

To what extent the Mexican Inquisition held influence over the indigenous populations in New Spain upon the establishment of the Holy Office has long been debated but it seems to be much less than that before its codification in 1569. However, some historians have argued this was simply a result of shifting demographics, trials following the groups that the Spanish deemed most dangerous to its political and religious stability. Whatever the case, the Holy Offices actions became the dominate mode of censorship in Mexico for around the next century and a half and still had a heavy hand in censoring indigenous iconography.

19th Century
At the start of the 19th century censorship efforts were still legally bound to the Holy Office and the Mexican Inquisition carried out its duties much like it had at the close of the preceding century. However, in the years following 1812 the channels through which censorship operated changed rather quickly and by the time Mexico gained its independence in 1821 censorship had begun to be redefined through various secular mechanisms, mainly the press. This process of managing censorship through the press began to take shape around the turn of the first decade. It was catalyzed by the Spanish Cortes' abolition of its old codes of censorship in favor of speech through article 371 of the 1812 Spanish Constitution of Cadiz. The Constitution's liberal changes quickly made their way to Mexico but were not initially influential due to colonial officials' present concern over the insurgencies of Miguel Hidalgo and other revolutionaries. As a result much of press and speech continued to be censored on the same religious and moral grounds they had been in preceding decades. Despite the apathy of colonial officials to consider a truly free press and the repeal of the 1812 Spanish Constitution in Spain in 1814, much of the 1812 Constitution's language and content, including its liberal conception of a free press, would find itself worked into the 1824 Constitution of Mexico and continue to influence the nature of Mexican censorship well after the nation's independence in 1821.

However, the rather liberal and unrestricted sentiments pertaining to the press found in the 1824 Constitution would be modified soon after their implementation and it was not until the 1828 reform of the Constitution that press censorship began to resemble the form it would take for the rest of the 19th century. The most fundamental of these changes was the redesign of the press jury. The press jury in 19th century Mexico was a jury of citizens that would assemble to hear complaints issued against publications and then deliberate over whether they were subversive, immoral, or slanderous. Although jury size fluctuated throughout the time the press jury was in use, its redesign in 1828 required 9 press jury members to deem a work subversive, immoral, or slanderous in order to bring the case before a lower criminal court, creating a buffer between defendant and prosecution that had not existed during the Mexican Inquisition. The press jury would find itself in a tenuous position soon after its new codes went into effect when in 1829 President Vicente Guerrero gave the state the power to punish journalists without the use of a jury and then again in 1831 when the subsequent conservative government of Anastasio Bustamante placed all crimes of the press under the direct discretion of judges. Further, in 1839 then interim president Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna issued a proclamation that allowed his government to peruse and apprehend authors whose works it deemed salacious, investing itself with the power to imprison journalists without the use of a jury. Although this proclamation was repealed only three weeks after it was issued, the punishments brought against journalists who deviated from safe topics during this time often included significant prison time. The culture of repression surrounding decrees like Santa Anna's were pervasive enough to keep writers from signing their work out of fear of being investigated: a problem that became so widespread that in 1855 President Ignacio Comonfort made it was made illegal to publish anonymously. Ultimately, these initial backlashes were not the end of the press jury which found itself fall in and out of favor with the various governments of the time; they do, however, mark a trend of government mandated censorship in the early to mid 19th century that was characterized by rapid changes and inconsistent standards as to what constituted a free press.

The 1857 Constitution signified a turning point for government censorship of expression and ushered in a more liberal conception of free speech than had existed in in the first half of the 19th century. Building off the Constitution of 1824, Articles 6 and 7 of the new Constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and the unrestricted expression of ideas. However, it was not until after the War of the Reform ended in 1861, and the Law of 2 February 1861 was enacted to regulate article 7 of the Constitution, that the press jury's operation was laid out in clearer terms and re-instituted as a means of press regulation. The press juries consistent use would be delayed until the French Occupation of Mexico ceased, and the Law of 2 February was successfully implemented through an identical text in the 1868 modification to the Constitution. This allowed freedom of the press and press juries to continue to operate with relatively few interruptions until 1882. The rise of Porfirio Diaz in the late 1870's and his subsequent seven terms as president would role back freedom of the press and speech through threats of violence directed at newspapers and reports. In the latter part of the 19th century censorship was mainly implemented through the press and the changes Porfirio and his government's made would continue to effect freedom of speech and expression into the Mexican Revolution of the 20th century.

Historical Censorship
The history of censorship in Mexico can be traced back almost 500 years to the extension of inquisitorial practices from the Spanish Inquisition into Spain's New World territories in North, Central and South America. The Holy Office of the Inquisition established by decree of King Philip II in 1569 marked the first systematic attempt of the Spanish Crown to create a centralized censoring body in Mexico that subjugated New Spain to the codes of the Spanish Inquisition. Although the structure of censorship had already begun to take shape with the arrival of Europeans to Central America 50 years earlier, the Holy Office's subsequent dominance would go on to characterize the state of Mexican censorship from the 1570's up until the beginning of the 19th century. After Mexico gained its independence from Spain and disbanded the Office of the Inquisition (formally in 1812 but effectively by 1820) the censorship methodologies that had long distinguished Mexican censorship began to change. Censorship practices that had long been under the control of the Catholic Church were now under the discretion of a newly independent government that was forced to frame its actions through secular and legal channels rather than religious orthodoxy. As a result, censorship in the 19th century occurred in many forms dissimilar to those that came before it and was dominated by the constant struggle between journalists and government officials as to what constituted free speech. Issues of a free press remained salient throughout the Mexican Revolution and the following post-revolutionary rise of communist expression in the arts and journalism. The continued silencing of journalists and a state control of media would continue through the latter part of the 20th century and remain as some of Mexico's most controversial issues today.

Before 1569
Although there was no official Office of the Inquisition in New Spain until 1569, many practices of the Spanish Inquisition reached Mexico long before with the first evangelizing and missionary efforts of the Spanish Crown in Central America. Censorship prior to the establishment of the Holy Office of the Mexican Inquisition was in many ways similar to that which came after. Leaders of both periods maintained the aim of silencing individuals who spoke out against the Catholic Church or its practices and made their mission the institution of uniform spiritual and social order. Unique to this early period were censorship efforts that focused more directly on countering the heretical speech of groups that would later fall outside the jurisdiction of the Holy Office upon its codification in the 1570's. Such groups included non-Catholic or recently converted indigenous Mexicans who were disproportionately accused of idolatry and blasphemy.

Prior to the creation of a formal tribunal, Inquisitional efforts were carried out by mendicants in monastic trials (1522-1534) and then by Bishops who served as ecclesiastic judges (1535-1571). These early monastic inquisitors focused their attention disproportionately on indigenous cases of idolatry and blasphemy and modeled their investigations and trials on informal structures they had assumed from medieval tradition. They concerned themselves with investigating claims made against individuals and punished those who they found to uphold religious and spiritual values contrary to Catholic tradition. Although this monastic form of inquisition was replaced with the ecclesiastic form in central Mexico following the arrival of Bishops to New Spain in 1536, monastics in peripheral settlements continued to exercise intense persecution of natives who did not live up to their expectations as converted Catholics for at least the following three decades. Fray Diego de Landa used torture as late as 1562 in his Inquisitorial procedures against indigenous Mexicans in the province of Yucatán and infamously burned Maya codices (bark paper books) containing pre-Colombian hieroglyphic writings in an attempt to eliminate indigenous access to non-Catholic spiritual guidance and rituals. However, highly visible forms of censorship such as Landa's public destruction of indigenous codices occurred inconsistently and represent just part of the many smaller incidents of censorship that worked to systematically obscure ideas the Spanish believed were dangerous and subversive to upholding the Catholic faith and social order of colonial Mexico. Smaller instances of idolatry that did not find themselves the center of public burnings constituted the bulk of early censorship efforts against indigenous people and the zeal with which the Spanish perused non-Christian idols was rooted in their concern of exerting social order over an unfamiliar religion they did understand.

The bishop led ecclesiastic Inquisition that followed this early monastic period was similarly active in its prosecution of the recently converted indigenous people of Mexico. Although these bishop led Inquisitions did not prosecute a large number of indigenous Mexicans before formal tribunals, they did often extend their trials of natives further than colonial oversight in Spain would have preferred. The first Bishop of Mexico Fray Juan de Zumárraga (1536-1546) tried 156 cases before the ecclesiastic Inquisition and, although defendants included Spaniards, mixed caste persons and a high number of those suspected to be illegally practicing the Jewish faith, it was Zumárraga's trials against indigenous Mexicans that proved to be his most controversial. In his most recognized trial Zumárraga brought cacique of Texcoco, Don Carlos Chichimecatecolt before his ecclesiastical Inquisition and tried him as a "dogmatizer against the faith". Despite the Bishop being unable to solicit a testimony that Don Carlos had explicitly practiced the more grave offence of idolatry and idol possession, he was executed for speaking out against the Church. Although he was reprimanded by inquisitors in Spain for his actions, Zumárraga and the bishop inquisitors of this period dealt out harsh punishments to indigenous peoples for simply speaking out against the Church. Both Spanish officials and colonists would come to view this intensive force as a shortcoming of the central direction of the New World Inquisition in the following years. In fact, it was this extreme treatment of indigenous peoples and dissenters of the Church that would lead to the formal establishment of the Holy Office in Central America in 1571, after decree of Phillip II in 1569. By the end of this period a strong precedent was set as to what could and could not be said in colonial Mexico and what objects one could and could not possess.

The Holy Office of the Inquisition and Book Censorship 1569-1820
In response to the demand for better oversight of the Mexican Inquisition, the Holy Office of the Inquisition was formally extended to the Americas by decree in 1569. However, although the Office now practiced censorship under specific guidelines, such censorship was not always consistent in its enforcement or standards throughout the Mexican Inquisition. Similar to the preceding period, the censorship efforts undertaken by the Holy Office varied by location, time, and provincial discretion. In general the tribunal of the Mexican Inquisition operated under the same procedural guidelines as the civil criminal trials of the day. The main differences being the religious nature of the investigations and the fact that the Inquisitor, who served as the judge in the final trial, was also the one who would initially gather evidence against the subject. It remained controversial for people to speak out against the Church and as a result suspected heretics could be brought before the tribunal if they aroused the suspicion of their neighbors, friends or Holy Office Officials. The aim of these trials was to silence dissenters and eliminate visible opposition to the Church and Crown with the ultimate hope of bringing them back into alignment with Church doctrine. The means by which this was achieved was the imprisonment, torture and finally public ridicule faced in the auto-de-fé (a public display of humiliation or punishment for those proven guilty before the tribunal) of those convicted before the Holy Office.

One of the most explicit forms of censorship that the Holy Office introduced was the Index. The Index of Prohibited Books, which was a list of prohibited reading materials given to the people of New Spain in 1573 and enforced through the Holy Office, became one of the chief means through which censorship in colonial Mexico was attained and one of the most intensive measures taken by New World inquisitors to suppress information. Book censorship was one of the most consistent methods of censorship and remained a prominent measure taken by the Office even as other priorities shifted. Although enforcement of the Index by the Holy Office varied from location to location, even distant tribunals of the Inquisition such as the one in New Spain had the authority to expurgate, prohibit, or remove from circulation any work it found offensive on its own volition. Anyone found in possession of prohibited materials could be investigated by the Mexican Inquisition and subject to imprisonment and subsequent trial. For example, in a 1655 investigation of the private library of colonial Mexican architect Melchor Perez de Soto, the Holy Office confiscated 1,592 books and permanently impounded many that did not even appear on the Index because they were written in Flemish and could not be formally reviewed by the local Inquisition. In instances such as this, the Mexican Inquisition had full discretion over what it would and would not allow under its jurisdiction and the boundaries of its own localized censorship gave it rather complete control over the intellectual life of its subjects. The Index also gave the Inquisition oversight of all shipments into and out of colonial Mexico. Inquisitors had the right to search all cargo of a ship arriving from Europe in a process called visitation and the authority to confiscate anything they found offensive. While this process was mainly intended to find prohibited print material it was not limited to such items. It is likely that many of these searches were not thorough enough to catch all prohibited materials and depending on the port of entry visitations were sometimes incredibly lax.

Aside from book censorship the Holy Office was also responsible for censoring countless other forms of written and crafted materials that were found to be offensive to the church. After the great auto-de-fé of 1649, an event that found 109 people guilty under the tribunal's codes (13 of which were put to death), the focus of the Inquisition in Mexico shifted from spectacle punishments to more mundane enforcement of smaller offences. This included an increased vigilance of inquisitors over newly printed materials like pamphlets and plays. Anything from dramatic scripts to protestant icons that made their way across the ocean and arrived in Mexican ports became subject to searches similar to those of illicit books banned on the Index. The state of censorship in Mexico trended this way through much of the 17th and 18th century, going through phases of more intense and lax enforcement depending on when and where the censorship was occurring but largely focusing its attention on lesser offences than it had in the 16th and early 17th century. By the end of the colonial period the Holy Office increasingly became a tool of political ends and officials or prominent community members often used the tribunal as a means of silencing opponents through the wide scope of religious crimes they could accuse their foes of.