Beyond the Imperial Edifice: Re‐Placing the Cathedral in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

ABSTRACT This essay reconsiders the most conspicuous lacuna in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)—the omission of how Bishop Latour's cathedral is actually built. Rather than assuming that this gap masks coerced Indigenous labor, I triangulate Cather's fiction with the archival and legal history of the Santa Fe cathedral under Jean‐Baptiste Lamy, revealing a wage‐based, financially precarious project that resists easy analogy with Acoma. The article then draws on borderlands theory to propose an anthropological reading of Latour's cathedral. To temper overpoliticized interpretations, I argue that the church's foreign style is a negotiated form shaped in dialogic space, where Cather sustains logics of difference and equivalence. Finally, in conversation with settler colonial studies, this essay shows how Cather's “deep time” can both invite ideological suspicion and interrupt triumphalist imperial temporality by decentering human agency within the Southwestern landscape.