This book offers readers the opportunity to engage with the distinguished historian Guy Rozat in a reading of a fundamental document: the History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith among the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World: Achieved by the Soldiers of the Militia of the Society of Jesus in the Missions of the Province of New Spain, a religious chronicle focused on the work of the Jesuits in northern Mexico, written by the priest of that order, Andrés Pérez de Ribas. As is common in religious texts of the period, the figure of the devil occupies a central place in Pérez de Ribas's work. Regarding this, Rozat states: "Contrary to what many authors of the 19th and 20th centuries believed, and to an opinion commonly accepted to this day, it was at the beginning of the blessed Modern Times, and not in the Middle Ages, that the Prince of Darkness, hell, its hosts, and its inhabitants captured the imagination of humankind."

In this work, Guy Rozat demonstrates that Pérez de Ribas's work is more than a historical text; it is an evangelizing text that presents northern Mexico as a space inhabited by the devil. This fully justifies and exalts the catechizing efforts of the Jesuit priests and transforms the inhabitants of the region's indigenous communities into mere objects of spiritual reinvention through biblical writings.

A reading of *America, Empire of the Devil* makes it clear that the verbal constructions of the colonizers shape the identity of the colonized and that the former's discursive practices constitute, above all, an exercise of power aimed at preventing the recognition of one's own identity, thus forcing the acceptance of the foreign as true. In this way, Guy Rozat's reading presents itself as an exercise in demystifying a treatise that is often identified as historical when it is, in reality, a recollection of an exercise in domination.