Having once marked the centre of the courtyard or patio at the Exconvento de San Francisco, the stone cross at Tepeapulco, northeast of Mexico City in present-day Hidalgo, now sits plastered to the modern church's façade (Fig. 4.1). Even in its new, peripheral home, the former patio cross still stands out against the Exconvento's architectural fabric. At roughly 1.2 metres in height, the cross amasses various symbols carved in low and high relief, pigments that ooze from drilled, vacant holes, and sculpted textures that prompt viewers to explore and touch its body. Upon closer inspection, the cross's symbols reveal themes related to Christ's death: a crown of thorns marks the centre, a red-tipped spear extends across the diagonal, a skull near the base foretells his bodily end at Golgotha, and the slanting letters INRI at the top identify the Messiah from Nazareth. Patio crosses produced in New Spain, such as this example from Tepeapulco, display the arma Christi to recount Christ's Passion. These crosses, made by and for Nahua converts in central New Spain, were key components of conversion spaces built throughout the Valley of Mexico in the sixteenth century.

Following their arrival in New Spain in 1524, mendicant friars needed to construct religious spaces that could serve large groups of Indigenous converts. In a copper engraving by Franciscan friar Diego Valadés, we see their architectural response (Fig. 4.2). As his idealised print reveals, outdoor patios and evenly spaced chapels functioned as spaces to teach Christian doctrine, administer sacraments, study language, and convert Indigenous souls.

Each patio's design in New Spain was unique, but most had four walls and a central cross. At the centre of Valadés's print, the twelve Franciscan friars who first arrived in the Valley of Mexico hold up the Church to usher in a new era of Christianity. At the centre of actual patios, however, the carved patio crosses stood tall, sometimes on a rising pedestal. During Christian feast days and special masses, friars led converts counterclockwise around the patio's perimeter and recited Christian teachings or reviewed the stations of the cross. The patio cross anchored these spatial narratives in the patio landscape, and its symbols further unveiled Christ's final days on Earth. Given their central role in the visual and didactic programmes of the patio, crosses and their arma were useful devices in a spatial pedagogy that centred around the life and death of Christ.