J. Michelle Molina (PhD, University of Chicago, 2004) has trailed after early modern Jesuit missionaries, first, to understand Catholic missionary mobilization and its impact on “interiority” in the Spanish Americas (To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and the Spirit of Global Expansion, University of California Press, 2013), and then, after the Jesuits were summarily arrested and exiled from Mexico in 1767, she tracked both the men and the things that they were compelled to leave behind (Inventories of Ruin: The Demise of the Mexican Jesuits, in Three Acts, Fordham University Press, 2026). The surprising find in this last project was how state notaries documented Jesuit objects, specifically, how the scribes followed specific instructions to sort and label the silver altarware that had touched the body of Christ. The bureaucratic labor of inventorying sacramental silver stands out as a very peculiar “ordered” genre that, Molina argues, points toward emergent transformations in church-state power that not only put constraints on how the state moved around the altar but also sought to define and delimit where Christ might be expected to be present, thus indicating a not-so-distant secularizing future in which increasing limits determined where the God-man could appear in the world. Molina is now trailing after the silver objects as they moved away from colonial altars, to trace how these God-touched power objects had been transformed into aesthetic objects. By the mid-twentieth century, much of this same altarware had become generic platería, a term referring to any decorative item made from silver, or plata. No longer animating religious networks, some of the finest representations of platería from the colonial period are now encased in museum glass alongside other aesthetic and decorative pieces considered significant national patrimony. This transformation results not only from the work of private collectors like Franz Mayer (Museo Franz Mayer) but was the aim of institutions like the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), a Mexican federal government bureau dedicated to historical and archaeological preservation. Molina hypothesizes that museum displays acknowledge the cultural importance of religious materiality but in a way that presents Catholicism in Mexico as contained. Religious power is history.