A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City, 1519-1821 9004335560, 9789004335561

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A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City, 1519–1821

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Brill’s Companions to the Americas History, Societies, Environments and Cultures

Volume 3

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bcah

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A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City, 1519–1821 Edited by

John F. López

leiden | boston

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Cover illustration: Anonymous, Detail of the Biombo de la Conquista de México y vista de la ciudad de México, oil on canvas, 2.13 × 5.63 m. × 2 cm, c.1670–90. Courtesy of the Museo Franz Mayer Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: López, John F., editor. Title: A companion to viceregal Mexico City, 1519-1821 / edited by John F. López. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Brill’s companions to the Americas, 2468-3000 ; volume 3 | Includes bibliographic references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021027172 (print) | LCCN 2021027173 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004335561 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004335578 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Mexico City (Mexico)–History. | Mexico–History–Spanish colony, 1540-1810. Classification: LCC F1386.3 .C66 2021 (print) | LCC F1386.3 (ebook) | DDC 972/.5302–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027172 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027173

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2468-3000 isbn 978-90-04-33556-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-33557-8 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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IN MEMORIAM Dedicated to the memory of Luis Fernando Granados, a brilliant historian of colonial Latin America. “El revolucionario verdadero está guiado por grandes sentimientos de amor” Che Guevara

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Contents List of Figures and Tables xi Archival and Image Repositories xiv Notes on Contributors xv Acknowledgements xix Intoduction: Viceregal Mexico City, Colonial Cosmopolitanism, and the Hispanic World 1 John F. López

PART 1 History and Society 1 Fear, Wonder, and Absence Our Distorted View of Moctezuma´s Tenochtitlan 29 Matthew Restall 2 The Weirdest of All? Indigenous Peoples and Polities of Colonial Mexico City 51 Luis Fernando Granados 3 Blackness and Blurred Boundaries in Mexico City 76 Joan C. Bristol 4 Of Pleasures and Proscriptions Or How Residents of Mexico City ­Negotiated Gender and Family Norms 95 Sonya Lipsett-Rivera 5 War, Legitimacy, and Ceremony in 18th-Century Mexico City The Annual Funerary Honors for Fallen Soldiers 114 Frances L. Ramos

PART 2 Religious Life 6 City of Friars, City of Archbishops The Church in Mexico City in the Age of the Hapsburgs 137 Antonio Rubial García - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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7 The Cabildo of Mexico City, Patron Saints, and the Making of Local and Imperial Identities 163 Alejandro Cañeque 8 Visualizing Corporate Piety The Art of Religious Brotherhoods 181 Cristina Cruz González

PART 3 Institutions 9 Permanence and Change in Mexico City’s Viceregal Court, 1535–1821 215 Iván Escamilla González 10 Finance and Credit in Viceregal Mexico City 237 María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano 11 Uneven Chances Education in Colonial Mexico City 257 Enrique González González 12 Medicine and Municipal Rights in Viceregal Mexico City 282 Paula S. De Vos

PART 4 Special Themes 13 The Urban Plans of Mexico City, 1520–1810 303 Barbara E. Mundy 14 The Desagüe´s Watermark Cartography and Environmental Crisis at Viceregal Mexico City 328 John F. López 15 Urban Science in 18th-Century Mexico City 353 Miruna Achim

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PART 5 The Arts 16 A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City 377 Kelly Donahue-Wallace 17 Novohispanic Baroque Poetry A Lyric Chronicle of Mexico City 402 Martha Lilia Tenorio 18 Music and Literature in New Spain The Politics of Buen Gusto in 18th-Century Mexico City 424 Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell 19 The Royal Academy of San Carlos, 1781–1800 440 Amy C. Hamman and Stacie G. Widdifield Index 467

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Figures and Tables Figures 0.1  México a través de los siglos, frontispiece, 1888–89 4 0.2 Cristóbal de Villalpando, View of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, c.1695 10 0.3 Anonymous, Biombo de la Conquista de México y vista de la ciudad de México, c.1670–90 12 0.4 Anonymous, Uppsala Map, c.1550 14 1.1 The first European attempt to visualize Tenochtitlan, from the Newe Zeitung, 1521 or 1522 33 1.2 The Nuremberg Map of Tenochtitlan, from the Latin edition of Cortés’ Second Letter, 1524 35 1.3 “The Human Sacrifices of the Indians of Mexico [Von Menschenopffer de Indianner zu Mexico],” from de Bry’s Peregrinationes in Americam, 1601 41 1.4 “The Great Temple of Mexico”, from volume 12 of the Abbé Prévost’s Histoire Generales des Voyages, 1754 45 1.5 Tenochtitlan in 1519, as presented to visitors to Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology 46 1.6 From Dan Abnett’s Hernán Cortés and the Fall of the Aztec Empire 47 6.1 Miguel Ángel García Audelo and Antonio Rubial García, Map and legend of Mexico City identifying convents, monasteries, hospitals, recogimientos, parishes, and colleges, 1524–1704 158 8.1 Detail of Traslado de la Imagen de Jesús Nazareno al Hospital de la Purísima Concepción en 1633 182 8.2 Gentile Bellini, Processione in piazza San Marco, 1496 183 8.3 Patente de la Congregación de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de la Parroquia de Santa Catalina Mártir, c.1770 188 8.4 Patente de la Cofradia y Hermandad de la Coronación de Christo S.N. y San Benito de Palermo, c.1680 190 8.5 Sumario de las indulgencies y gracias perpetuas de que gozan todos los cofrades y cofradas de la pia y devota Cofradia del glorioso S. Benito de Palermo, fundada en el altar de la Iglesia de S. Francisco de Mexico, c.1681 191 8.6  Statuti della Confraternita della Morte, 1562 193 8.7 José de Ribera y Argomanis, Verdadero Retrato de la Virgen de Guadalupe, 1778 194 8.8 Cristóbal de Villalpando, Virgen de Aránzazu, c.1688 197 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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8.9 Cristóbal de Villalpando, San Ignacio escribiendo los Ejercicios, c.1688 198 8.10 Gaspar Bouttats, Nuestra Señora de Aránzazu, c.1685 199 8.11 Cristóbal de Villalpando, Virgen del Rosario, c.1690 202 8.12 Cristóbal de Villalpando, Ánimas del purgatorio, 1685 206 13.1 Unknown creator, the foundation of Tenochtitlan, Codex Mendoza, fol. 2r, c.1542 306 13.2 Unknown creator, map of Tenochtitlan (at right) and schema of the Gulf Coast (at left), from Hernán Cortés, Praeclara Ferdina[n]di. Cortesii de noua maris oceani Hyspania narratio ..., 1524 309 13.3 Unknown creator, Map of Mexico City, c.1537–55 310 13.4 Juan Gómez de Trasmonte, “Forma y levantado de la cuidad de México”, after 1628 original 314 13.5 Ildefonso de Iniesta Bejarano and Manuel Villavicencio, with additions by an anonymous hand, “Mexico Tenuxtitlan Ciudad de la America la mas Hermosa, y Rica asiento de los Exmos. Sres. Virreyes de esta nueva España ... ”, 1778 320 14.1 Miguel Noreña, Monumento hipsográfico, 1881 329 14.2 Enrico Martínez, Descripción de la comarca de México i obra del desagüe de la laguna, 1608 331 14.3 Enrico Martínez, Detail of Mexico City, Descripción de la comarca de México, 1608 336 14.4 Enrico Martínez, Detail of the sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, Descripción de la comarca de México, 1608 337 14.5 Claudius Ptolemy, Map of the World, c.150 339 14.6 Jacopo de’ Barbari, View of Venice, 1500 339 14.7 Isidore of Seville, T-O Map in Etymologiae, 1472 340 14.8 Enrico Martínez, Detail of cartouche, Descripción de la comarca de México, 1608 342 14.9 Anonymous, Uppsala Map, c.1550 349 15.1 José María Navarro, Suplemento a la famosa observación del tránsito de Venus por el disco del Sol, 1769 355 15.2 Rafael Jimeno y Planes and José Joaquín Fabregat, Vista de la Plaza Mayor, c.1802 358 16.1 Miguel Cabrera, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1753 381 16.2 Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez, Saint Peter, 1701–1710 382 16.3 Anonymous, Codex Telleriano-Remensis (detail), 16th century 383 16.4 Anonymous, Pedro de Gante, 17th century 387 16.5 Anonymous, Capuchin Nun, c.1750 389 16.6 Anonymous, Sonnet, 1701 392 16.7 Anonymous, Sor Maria Anna Teresa Bonstet, c.1757 395 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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16.8 Anonymous, De español y Mestissa produce Castizo, 18th century 399 19.1 Rafael Ximeno y Planes, Portrait of Jerónimo Antonio Gil, c.1800 447 19.2  Plaster Cast of Michelangelo’s Moses, late 18th century 454 19.3 Manuel Tolsá, Equestrian Monument to Charles IV, 1796–1803 461 19.4 José Joaquín Fabregat, View of the Plaza Mayor, 1796 463 Tables 10.1 Investments by Mexico City Convents in 1744 247 10.2 Transactions Carried Out by Monte de Piedad between 1775–81 251 10.3 Redemptions, Expenses, and Returns at Monte de Piedad between 1775–81 252 11.1 Grados Menores and Mayores in Mexico, 1553–1775 273

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Archival and Image Repositories Academia de San Carlos, Mexico City Archivo General de Indias, Seville Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City Archivo del Cabildo, Catedral Metropolitana de México, Mexico City Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Oxford Colección Borbón Lorenzana, Biblioteca Castilla-La Mancha, Toledo Colegio de la Paz, Vizcaínas, Mexico City Corsham Court, Wiltshire/Bridgeman Images, New York Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice Hospital de Jesús Nazareno, Mexico City Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, Mexico City John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Museo Basílica de Guadalupe, Mexico City Museo de América, Madrid Mueso Franz Mayer, Mexico City Museo Nacional de Historia, México/Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán Newberry Library, Chicago Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Austin Templo de San Felipe Neri, La Profesa, Mexico City UC San Diego Library Digital Collections, Special Collections & Archives, San Diego Uppsala University Library, Uppsala

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Notes on the Contributors Miruna Achim obtained her Ph.D. at Yale University. Achim currently teaches at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana–Cuajimlapa, Mexico City. She specializes in the history of science and collecting. Her most recent publications include an anthology of José Antonio Alzate’s writings (Conaculta, 2012), From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the National Museum of Mexico (Nebraska University Press, 2017), and, in collaboration with Irina Podgorny, Museos al detalle (Buenos Aires, Prohistoria, 2015). Joan C. Bristol is Associate Professor of History at George Mason University. She is the author of Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century, as well as journal articles and book chapters on commodity history, the fermented beverage pulque, and female religious life in Mexico. Alejandro Cañeque is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research focuses on the political and religious cultures of New Spain and the Spanish Empire. He is the author of The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico; Un cuerpo de dos cabezas. La cultura política del poder en la Nueva España. Siglos XVI y XVII; and most recently, Un imperio de mártires. Religión y poder en las fronteras de la Monarquía Hispánica. Cristina Cruz González received her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2009 and is Associate Professor of Art History at Oklahoma State University. She is a past Getty Research Fellow and has published in many journals including Religion and the Arts (2014), RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics (2014/2015), and The Art Bulletin (2017). She has completed a book manuscript on Franciscan image theory in New Spain and is currently researching a new project on Mexican confraternities. Paula S. De Vos teaches Latin American history and the history of science and medicine at San Diego State University. Her research, which has received support from the ACLS, NIH, and NEH, focuses on the development of Galenic pharmacy in late medieval and early modern Europe and its transmission to the Americas, particularly Mexico, under the Spanish Empire. She is co-editor of Science - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires (Stanford, 2009), and her most recent articles have appeared in History of Science, Isis, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and Journal of Ethnopharmacology. Kelly Donahue-Wallace is Professor of Art History at the University of North Texas. She is the author of Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America 1521-1821 and Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment, as well as articles on Spanish colonial art in Print Quarterly, Colonial Latin American Review, The Americas, and Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos. Donahue-Wallace is the recipient of research fellowships and grants from Spain’s Program for Cultural Cooperation, Humanities Texas, the Fulbright Foundation, Indiana University, and the Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund. Iván Escamilla González holds a Ph.D. in History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he is Professor and Researcher in the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. His current research projects include Reformism and Intellectual History of the Enlightenment in 18th-Century New Spain. He is the author of José Patricio Fernández de Uribe (1742–1796), El Cabildo Eclesiástico de México ante el Estado Borbónico (1999) and Los intereses malentendidos: El Consulado de Comerciantes de México y la monarquía española, 1700-1739 (2011), and coeditor of Resonancias imperiales: América y el Tratado de Utrecht de 1713 (2015) and Francisco Xavier Clavigero, un humanista entre dos mundos (2015). Enrique González González is Professor of History and Researcher in the Instituto de Investigaciones sobre la Universidad y Educación at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His research focuses on humanism and education in colonial Latin America. He recently published El poder de las letras: Por una historia social de las universidades de la América hispana en el período colonial and is the author of three books and articles on the diffusion and reception of the works of Juan Luis Vives. Luis Fernando Granados holds a Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University (2008). He has taught at the University of Chicago, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the Universidad Iberoamericana, and Skidmore College. In 2015, he joined the Universidad Veracruzana. He is the author of Sueñan las piedras: Alzamiento ocurrido en la ciudad de México, 14, 15 y 16 de septiembre, 1847 and En el espejo haitiano: Los indios del Bajío y el colapso del orden colonial en América Latina. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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Amy C. Hamman has taught at the University of Colorado and the University of Arizona. Her dissertation focuses on 18th-century views of Mexico City. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera is Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She has published numerous articles and chapters and has co-edited two anthologies. The most recent, with Javier Villa-Flores, is Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico. She is the author of several monographs including The Origins of Macho: Men and Masculinity in Colonial Mexico. She is the recipient of the Tibesar Award and the Marston Lafrance Research Fellowship, as well as Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grants. John F. López holds a Ph.D. from M.I.T. and is Assistant Professor of Art and Architectural History at the University of California, Davis. He specializes in the visual, material, and spatial intersections between early modern Europe and the New World. He is preparing a book, The Aquatic Metropolis, which examines the centuries-old efforts by the Aztec and Spanish to combat catastrophic inundation at Mexico City via image making, urban planning, and environmental change. López has authored articles on cartography, water, and ethnohistory and has edited special issues for the journals of Ethnohistory, Latin American Geography, and Monumentos históricos. María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano holds a Ph.D. in History and is a Research Fellow in the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Martínez López-Cano specializes in the history of finance and credit in colonial Mexico, a topic on which she has published several books. She is currently carrying out research into the Bull of the Holy Crusade in New Spain. Barbara E. Mundy holds the Robertson Chair in Latin American Art at Tulane University. Mundy studies the visual culture of early modern Latin America. Her most recent book is The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (University of Texas Press, 2015). Frances L. Ramos is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Florida-Tampa and specializes in the cultural and religious history of colonial Mexico. Her award-winning book, Identity, Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla, examines - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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how public spectacles choreographed by the municipal councilmen of New Spain’s “second city” solidified attachments to place, religion, and social group, while also proving indispensible to the political culture of the locality. She is currently working on a book project focusing on the political, intellectual, and cultural history of the War of the Spanish Succession in New Spain. Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell is Assistant Professor in Residence of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the University of Connecticut. His research analyzes cultural phenomena and the narratives of history they produce as contestatory practices that characterize modernity. He is the author of Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain (Oxford University Press, 2016), and editor of Decentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization (Lexington Books, 2020). Matthew Restall is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at Penn State University. He edits Hispanic American Historical Review and book series with Cambridge University and Penn State presses. Focusing on three areas—Yucatan and the Maya; Africans in Spanish America; and the Spanish Conquest—his roughly 100 publications include: The Maya World; Maya Conquistador; Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest; The Black Middle; 2012 and the End of the World; The Conquistadors; and, most recently, When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting Than Changed History. Antonio Rubial García is Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and full member of the Mexican Academy of History. He is the author of El convento agustino y la sociedad colonial (1533–1630), Una Monarquía criolla, La santidad controvertida, and El paraíso de los elegidos. Martha Lilia Tenorio is Professor of Hispanic Literature at the Colegio de México, where she specializes in the poetry of the Spanish Golden Age and New Spain. Tenorio has authored eight books and numerous articles, and from 2012 to 2015, was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Stacie G. Widdifield is Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona specializing in 19th- and early 20th-century Mexican art and has published widely in this area.

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Acknowledgements A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City began in 2014 as a series of conversations between Luis J. Gordo-Peláez, my former co-editor, and myself as to the nature and character of Mexico City’s colonial history. Unfortunately, Luis could not continue with the volume, but his ideas and efforts are imprinted in the pages that follow. I am more than grateful to the contributing authors for sharing their scholarly work, since without their insightful commentary there would be no volume to speak of. I am indebted to Gerda Danielsson Coe, Debbie de Wit, Evelien van der Veer, Kate Hammond, Alessandra Giliberto, and Jason Prevost at Brill for their unwavering commitment to this work over the course of too many years. Many thanks go to Katharine Schultz and Graham McLean, graduate students in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Davis, whose assistance in copyediting, indexing, standardizing essays, and working with the contributing authors was invaluable. The publication of this volume would not have been possible without the support of my department, which provided a graduate student research assistantship, and a publication grant provided jointly by the University of California, Davis’ Office of Research and the Dean’s Office of the College of Letters and Science. I owe a thank you to Fred Rogers for his collaboration with me in translating essays from Spanish to English. Deep gratitude is owed to Neil Safier, former director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, whose images grace many of the pages of this volume. I extend my deepest appreciation to my departmental colleagues, Talinn Grigor, Katharine P. Burnett, Heghnar Watenpaugh, Alexandra Sofroniew, Diana Strazdes, and Michael Yonan, for their support of this book, and to Alex Hidalgo, Chet Van Duzer, Jaime Marroquín Arredondo, and Jamie Forde for their constructive comments on the introduction.

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Introduction

Viceregal Mexico City, Colonial Cosmopolitanism, and the Hispanic World John F. López Only a handful of cities that span the course of human history—Rome, Teotihuacan, Jerusalem, Constantinople/Istanbul, Baghdad, and Beijing, among a few others—have captured as much scholarly attention, antiquarian curiosity, or the cultural imagination to such an extent and for as long as Mexico City. Capital to the Aztec, home to Spanish viceregal rule, and administrative and political nexus to modern Mexico, Mexico City has always been an urbs imperatoria (imperial city), a feat not possible without a translatio imperii (transfer of empire) between its three historical periods.1 If there is one current that undergirds the three stages of Mexico City’s historical durée—pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern—spanning almost seven centuries, it is that its political and religious leaders, intellectuals and artists, and foreign dignitaries and visitors have all extolled the virtues of the city in song, poem, sermon, speech, map, painting, and royal decree.2 Whether the city’s grandeur stems from a cadre of tlahcuilohqueh taking Aztec history to bark paper, Villalpando’s and Cabrera’s religious and secular oils on canvas, or Rivera’s, Siqueiros’, and Orozco’s post-Revolution murals, Mexico City’s, and its pre-Hispanic counterpart, Tenochtitlan’s, status as a world capital is unquestionable.3 Indeed, no ambiguity as to the city’s glory, apprehension regarding its splendor, or trepidation in describing its place as the foundation of the universe can be found in the early 16th-century Classical Nahuatl song-poems in the Cantares Mexicanos.4 Nor is any ambivalence, tentativeness, or uncertainty as to the city’s greatness detectable in Bernardo de Balbuena’s 1604 epistolary poem, Grandeza mexicana, when lauding the capital as the “center of perfection [and] hinge of the 1 On the translatio imperii between the Aztec and Spanish, see Brading, “Imperial Mexico,” p. 40 and Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World, p. 5. 2 Perhaps no greater example of such high praise is Charles V’s 1545 decree that bestowed upon Mexico City the title of muy noble, insigne, muy leal e imperial ciudad de México (very noble, distinguished, very loyal and imperial city of Mexico). 3 Tlahcuilohqueh is the Classical Nahuatl term, in the plural, for painter-scribe, also referred to as tlacuilo in Spanish. 4 Cantares Mexicanos, vol. 2, pp. 243. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004335578_002 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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world”.5 Modern Mexico City is no stranger to high praise, with Salvador Novo’s 1946 Nueva grandeza mexicana paying tribute to the eternal city within a halo.6 Indeed, such metaphysical admiration, adulation, and homage over not one century but seven, over not one historical period but three, is undoubtedly a hallmark of its sustained cultural excellence across time and space, across cultural difference and societal norms, and most definitely across its many political ruptures. Regardless of the metric used for its study, Mexico City is surely one of the world’s great cities.7 As the third installment in Brill’s Companions to the Americas series, A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City takes as its subject a single period of the city’s seven-century historical arc.8 Aztec Tenochtitlan and modern Mexico City are equally deserving of their own volumes, for an argument can be made that Mexico City is not one city but in fact three radically different capitals: each one having its own sense of political identity, spatial order, and social and cultural ethos. Yet these cities, in addition to their enduring cultural excellence, are also tethered to each other through a series of operations that include geography, time, and history on the one hand and the cultural imagination, political ideologies, and historical slippages on the other. Geography and historical slippages, for example, are not in diametric opposition to each other but rather work hand-in-hand to mythologize the city as existing in an “unbroken [historical] continuum”, beginning with Aztec Tenochtitlan and moving through time and space towards modern Mexico City.9 Spatially, this mythol5 Balbuena, Grandeza mexicana, p. 63. In this same vein, we cannot forget Cervantes de Salazar’s 1554 Latin dialogues, where “Interior de la Ciudad de México”, pp. 21–60, marvels at the orderly layout of the city and the material opulence of its buildings. 6 Novo, Nueva grandeza mexicana, p. 180. On the intersections between Balbuena’s Grandeza mexicana and Novo’s Nueva grandeza mexicana, see Kaup, “Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity and the Marketplace Baroque”. 7 Newson and King, eds., Mexico City through History and Culture, p. 2. 8 Throughout the volume, viceregal and colonial are used interchangeably despite the fact that they cover distinct time periods. The colonial period begins in 1521 with Aztec defeat, but the viceregal period starts with the establishment of the Viceroyalty of New Spain in 1535 and arrival of its first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza. In spite of this 14-year difference, the present volume covers the events leading up to the commencement of the viceregal period, beginning with Spanish arrival at Tenochtitlan in 1519. 9 In “Delirious City”, introduction to The Mexico City Reader, Gallo addresses issues and concerns of conceiving Mexico City within an “unbroken [historical] continuum”. Such a model for theorizing and comprehending Mexico City, Gallo argues, obfuscates the complexities, nuances, and even contradictions of each epoch’s capital. In turn, such obfuscation runs the risk of idealizing one historical period over another, particularly when modern Mexico City is measured against the “glorious” but lost past of colonial Mexico

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INTRODUCTION

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ogy is made more palpable by the fact that the capitals of pre-Hispanic Mexico, viceregal Mexico, and modern Mexico occupy the same geographic location, where the material vestiges of a former capital were used to construct that of a later one.10 Equally as significant, the mythologizing of Mexico City within such a historical trajectory is also a product of the historian’s craft.11 One work that may resonate with the reader, and which has its roots in the nationalist history projects of the 19th century, is México a través de los siglos, a five-volume universal, encyclopedic history of Mexico that conceives its three historical periods within the lens of positivism. Its frontispiece of a seated woman in the bloom of her youth, representing the modern-nation state, flanked by ancient American, conquistador, and modern Mexican figures—allegories for the three stages of Mexican history—reminds us of past intellectual impulses that made writing about Mexico’s history a project of modernity in service of the nation ­(Figure 0.1). Produced under the editorial supervision of the general, lawyer, politician, and historian Vicente Riva Palacio, México a través de los siglos espoused a compelling narrative of Mexico’s history and historical trajectory, seeking to instill within the Mexican reader an ontological understanding of mexicanidad (Mexicanness) via the production of historical consciousness.12 Above all others, Mexico City was the settlement par excellence of Riva Palacio’s brand of Mexican existentialism, a proposition of the motherland and its capital that evokes historical and historiographic parallelism. Indeed, historian Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo poignantly reminds us in I Speak of the City that the ­intersections between Mexico City and Mexico are so deeply intertwined that the former can be understood as shorthand for the latter and its historical memory.13

City or Aztec Tenochtitlan. Whether the “unbroken [historical] continuum” method is historically reductive, or worse yet, teleological, Gallo underscores that a more beneficial approach for scrutiny of modern Mexico City is comparative study against other coeval cities rather than with its colonial and pre-Hispanic counterparts. For Gallo’s argument, consult The Mexico City Reader, pp. 6–11. 10 By comparison, Lima, the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru and modern Peru, circumvents the narrative of a tripartite history. In part, this results from the fact that the city was founded by the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, on 18 January 1535, and at a different location from that of the Inca capital of Cuzco. 11 This is a play on the title of Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft. 12 Such historical consciousness was not attainable by all Mexicans. The prohibitive cost of the five-volume set made it available to only a small, elite readership. Another impediment to widespread readership was Mexico’s low rate of literacy amongst a population that was largely rural and agrarian. 13 Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City, p. xxi.

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figure 0.1 México a través de los siglos, frontispiece, 1888–89

Absent the positivistic proclivities, universalist aims, and nation-state impulses of yesteryear, the tri-lateral historical model continues to form an invaluable cornerstone of the city’s historiographic arc, with general history,

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specialized themes (both scholarly and for a general audience), encyclopedic dictionaries, and reference materials being examples of this approach.14 Many fine studies in Spanish, English, and other languages, too numerous to mention here, have dutifully examined the viceregal city in essay and monograph. One need only turn to Ciudad de México, época colonial: Bibliografía, a bibliographic reference, to understand the extent to which the colonial capital has been the subject of scholarly inquiry.15 Equally important are edited volumes that scrutinize the city thematically.16 In spite of these scholarly works and their publication formats, the reader may be surprised to learn that A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City is the first research companion devoted to the viceregal city in Mexican and U.S. academe.17 The Companion complements that rich and extensive scholarship on the city in multiple and mutually constitutive ways, bringing together scholars in an international effort to offer an overview of the current state of the field, analysis of its issues, concerns, and debates, and synthesis of established and newer methods, questions, and approaches that specialists of Mexico City, Latin America, the Hispanic world, and global studies can use in research. Just as vital to the mission at hand, the Companion aids introduction of the colonial capital into the seminar and undergraduate classroom in the form of a reader. Without a doubt, viceregal Mexico City’s

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See Tovar de Arechederra and Mas, eds., Ensayos sobre la Ciudad de México and Kandell, La Capital for a general history methodology. For thematic examples of a three-epoch approach, refer to Gonzalbo Aizpuru and Staples, eds., Historia de la educación en la Ciudad de México; Terrés, La Ciudad de México; and Rodríguez Kuri, ed., Historia política de la Ciudad de México. For a general audience, consult the following books published by Colección Popular: Castillo Méndez, Historia del comercio en la Ciudad de Mexico; Sierra, Historia de la navegación en la Ciudad de Mexico. For encyclopedic dictionaries, refer to Colina Rubio and Rivera Colina, Diccionario de la Ciudad de México, an endeavor that parallels Musacchio’s Diccionario enciclopédico de México for the nation. In carto-bibliographic materials, refer to: Lombardo de Ruiz, Atlas histórico de la Ciudad de México; Herrera Moreno and Ita Martínez, 500 planos de la Ciudad de México; and Carrera Stampa, Planos de la Ciudad de México. Ciudad de México, época colonial: Bibliografía, organized thematically and by sub-periods, is an excellent resource for the seasoned scholar and novice entering the field of Mexico City studies. Not to be outdone, modern Mexico City is also the subject of a similar bibliographic effort by Gortari, Hernández, and Ziccardi, culminating in the five-volume Bibliografiá de la Ciudad de México. A counterpart to these bibliographic materials are the above-mentioned works on cartography. Rubial García, ed., La ciudad barroca; Miño Grijalva, ed., La población de la ciudad de ­México en 1790; and Miller and Mundy, eds., Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City are but three examples. For a cultural and literary companion devoted to the city, see Caistor, Mexico City.

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historiography is as rich as its history, with the hope of the present volume being that it adds much grist for the mill to this historiographic tradition. The publication of A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City is extremely timely. At the time of this writing, we find ourselves amidst a series of important anniversaries for Mexico City and Mexico, including the 1325 founding of Tenochtitlan; the 1519 arrival of the Spanish at the Aztec capital; the 1521 military defeat of the Aztec at the hands of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, his men, and indigenous allies; and the 1524 establishment of Mexico City. Just as significant, the volume’s publication also coincides with the 200-year anniversary of Mexico’s independence from Spain, a feat made possible, in part, when the former royalist officer General Agustín de Iturbide and the Army of the Three Guarantees entered Mexico City on 27 September 1821, bringing closure to eleven years of armed conflict that began with Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla’s legendary call to arms, el grito de Dolores, on 16 September 1810. The closure of Mexico’s colonial period underscores its intersections with European geopolitics, where Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of Spain and the installment of his brother, Joseph, on the Spanish throne created a political vacuum that helped to foment the independence movements of the soon-to-be nations of Latin America. These anniversaries also serve an important historiographic function: They pose a scholarly challenge to the contributing authors of A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City. As Mexico prepares to celebrate two centuries of nationhood, the time is ripe to reflect upon, interrogate, and reassess Mexico City’s colonial past. To be sure, commemorating Mexico’s political autonomy and national sovereignty also demands historical scrutiny. For without analysis of its past, we run the risk of tacitly diminishing, reductively eliding, or missing entirely the nuances, complexities, and contradictions of the viceregal period. Thus, each of the volume’s contributing authors sheds a bright light on what viceregal Mexico City signified to the people that experienced the capital on a visceral level, to the institutions that established its policy and doctrine, and to the political bodies who administered it. While the volume covers a 300-year period, it does not purport to offer a universal history. To do so would run the risk of falling into a teleological trap from which there can be no escape. Rather, the volume’s overarching goal is to examine Mexico City with broad brushstrokes, offering the reader understanding of this highly complex city from multiple vantage points. As a result, the volume’s contributing authors hail from different disciplines in a shared effort to unpack the nature and character of Mexico City from the histories of music, gender, education, poetry, environment, science, cartography, religion, and politics, among many other fields of academic specialization. In the pages that follow, the reader will find no single disciplinary or methodological viewpoint undergirding the

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arguments presented throughout the volume’s chapters. Instead, the reader will find various disciplinary methods, modes of interpretation, and sources of evidence at work and in conversation with each other. As will become glaringly evident, viceregal Mexico City did not fit neatly or succinctly into a single historical moment, social group, or political philosophy; nor did a lone style of art encapsulate the entirety of its history. Indeed, the essays comprising A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City scrutinize a myriad set of social, political, religious, institutional, and artistic moments and events that demonstrate that viceregal Mexico City was a rich kaleidoscope of human experience, of meaning, and of visual and material culture that overlapped, intersected, and yes, many times over, collided. The Companion organizes Mexico City’s viceregal era into five parts: “History and Society”; “Religious Life”; “Institutions”; “Special Themes”; and “The Arts”. These thematic categories are envisioned as malleable and reflexive arenas to chart, interrogate, and reexamine the contours of Mexico City’s viceregalness. Each section is structured chronologically, beginning in the 16th century and ending in the 18th century. The Companion offers a balanced perspective of older, more established fields of academic study—histories of religion, the military, economics, courtly culture, and colonial encounters—while simultaneously bringing to the forefront newer ones—histories of the environment, indigenous cartography, and gender and family—that only a few decades ago were academically unimaginable. In addition to leavening established and newer fields of scholarly inquiry, the global turn has an important place in the volume. More than just an outpost on the periphery of the Hispanic world, Mexico City was central to Spain’s ascension as the first global superpower of the early modern period. Chapters on courtly culture, medicine, environment, cartography, science, and institutions of art demonstrate the circulation of European metropolitan models and epistemes to the New World. In this respect, the Spanish Crown expected viceregal Mexico City to be its flawless mirror, where its hopes, dreams, and desires of global dominance in a material self-interest were predicated on what historian Richard Kagan termed an “empire of towns”, and where the belief was that Mexico City, like Lima, like Manila, and the countless other cities that dotted the non-European Hispanic world, would reproduce Iberian systems and practices without deviation or intransigence.18 One need look no further than to the 1681 Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias to understand the great lengths to which Spain sought to construct

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See Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793, pp. 28–44, for Kagan’s thoughts. As a counterpart to this volume, consult Engel, A Companion to Early Modern Lima.

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the non-European Hispanic world in its image.19 Inherent in the movement of metropolitan models and ideals to distant lands is an attitude that a hermetically sealed “superior” civilization bestows culture upon, brings civilization to, and morally uplifts culturally passive, socially backward, or morally deficient peoples in far-away places. Yet, as we know from colonial and post-colonial studies, this unidirectional movement of culture is much more myth than fact, and the so-called “periphery” was hardly an apathetic receiver of metropolitan models. Quite to the contrary, Mexico City, like many other colonial settlements that comprised the Hispanic world, was a mutually constitutive body in a global network of ideas, material exchanges, and aesthetic concerns that speak to, but also demonstrate an active and vibrant manifestation of agency in the shared, albeit asymmetrical, production of early modern consciousness. Thus, while Spain intended Mexico City to mirror the metropolitan Iberian world, its reflection was not free of tension. Like the mirror in Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces,” an essay that interrogates colonial settlements as exemplars of heterotopias, Mexico City’s reflection of Spain also had an independent existence from its source, occupying a different space altogether but also having a different material presence.20 The simple fact that Mexico City stood an ocean away from Spain, but even more importantly, that it was embedded in a cultural field that had already been mediated by Mesoamerican peoples for thousands of years, blurs and distorts the mirror of colonial power, producing a city that was wonderfully familiar in its Iberianness on the one hand and on the other, disturbingly different in its Otherness to Spanish metropolitan sensibilities. And it is precisely within this image of familiarity and difference that we find fissures, ruptures, and asymmetries in Mexico City’s relationship with Spain that many of the contributing authors address when explicating the challenges faced by, objections to, and transformations of Iberian models when considering their reception in a new context. If there is one omission in the volume with respect to the global turn, it is Mexico City’s relationship to Asia, and in particular to the Philippines. Unfortunately, authors writing on the connections between Mexico City and Manila and the broader Asian world could not continue with the volume. Surely, their contributions would have offered many points of analysis as to 19

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Such an endeavor involved the systemization of over 11,000 laws that culminated in a four-volume set, of which 3,300 copies were printed. Half of these were sent to the New World to guide colonial authorities in proper governance, which historian David Brading argued, in The First America, pp. 213–215, demonstrated Spain’s legitimacy to rule the Spanish Americas. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”.

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the methodological, historical, and historiographic stakes in this emerging but already quite vibrant field of Spanish Pacific studies.21 Such a scholarly lacuna, however, does not diminish nor negate the profound impact that Asia had on Mexico City once a return passage from Asia to the American continent was located in 1565 by the Augustinian friar and navigator Andrés de Urdaneta.22 Serving as Spain’s western gateway to the Asian world, Spanish Manila, founded in 1571 by Miguel López de Legazpi and under the administrative jurisdiction of Mexico City and its viceroys as part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, was a strategic entrepôt of considerable economic importance, interlocking the world for the first time in a system of global commerce.23 The Manila-Mexico City-Seville trade network, connecting Asia, the New World, and Europe, not only magnified Mexico City’s importance in the Hispanic world but equally as important, cemented its status as a global city, making it an even brighter polestar for migration, culture, and luxury and trade goods. For two-and-a-half centuries, between 1573 and 1815, the Manila Galleon (colloquially referred to as la nao de China [the ship from China]) delivered Asia to Mexico City, making Asians of all walks of life as common in its streets, marketplaces, and plazas as the Spanish, Africans, Indians, and castas, a rich swath of the world’s racial and ethnic diversity captured in Cristóbal de Villalpando’s c.1695 View of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, a metonymic image where the plaza is illustrative of the city’s civitas mundana (Figure 0.2).24 Yet Asia’s impact on Mexico City was not just racial.25 The Manila Galleon also ensured that the viceregal capital was the benefactor of a global and globalized material culture, where 21

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For an understanding of these stakes, see, respectively, the introductions to Lee and Padrón, eds., The Spanish Pacific, 1521–1815, pp. 11–20, and Leibsohn and Priyadarshini, eds., “Transpacific: Beyond Silk and Silver”, pp. 1–15. See also Padrón, The Indies of the Setting Sun, pp. 24–29. Locating a return passage was of considerable importance. Without it, Spain would be forced to venture into the Portuguese-controlled maritime routes between Asia and the Iberian Peninsula that sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in present-day South Africa. Instead, Urdaneta located the Kuroshio Current off Japan, which forms part of the North Pacific Gyre, that would take him and others to roughly 40 degrees north of latitude on their return voyage to Spanish America. For synopsis of a larger body of scholarship on the economic and trade importance of the Manila Galleon, see: Yuste López, El comercio de la Nueva España con Filipinas, 1590–1785; Benitez, ed., El Galeón del Pacifo; Giráldez, The Age of Trade; and Gasch-Tomás, The Atlantic World and the Manila Galleons. Kagan, in “Plaza and Square”, p. 378, addressed the painting’s related theme of policía under the concept of “policía pictorialized”. On the Asian diaspora, refer to: Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico; Carrillo Martín, “Asians to New Spain”; Carrillo Martín, “Los ‘Chinos’ de Nueva España”; Slack, “The Chinos in New Spain”; Slack, “Orientalizing New Spain”; Falck Reyes and Palacios, El japonés que

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figure 0.2 Cristóbal de Villalpando, View of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, c.1695, oil on canvas, 57.63 x 45 cm Courtesy of the Corsham Court, Wiltshire/Bridgeman Images

Chinese silk and porcelain, Japanese byōbu, and Filipino ivories were just as commonplace as the Spanish decorative arts, Flemish prints, criollo paintings, and indigenous maps. As with European metropolitan models, Mexico City’s reception of Asian ones also underwent a process of active transformation to suit local needs, functions, and tastes. Mexican enconchados, mother-of-pearl inlays, influenced by Japanese lacquer works, embroidery and design adapted from Chinese and sub-continent Indian textiles, or ceramics influenced by Chinese porcelains are all the results of an Asian-Mexican intercultural exchange and transformation that anticipates the chinoiserie of the late 17th and 18th centuries by more than a century.26 One need look no further than to the collection of the

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conquistó Guadalajara; Calvo, “Japoneses en Guadalajara”; and Bailey, “A Mughal Princess in Baroque New Spain”. On the aesthetic implications of Asia on New Spain, consult: Rivero Lake, Namban Art in Viceregal Mexico; Pierce and Otsuka, eds., Asia and Spanish America; Bailey, “Asia in the Arts of Colonial Latin America”; García Sáiz and Albert de León, México Colonial; Sanabrais, “The biombo or Folding Screen”; and Priyadarshini, Chinese Porcelain in - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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Museo Franz Mayer, in present-day Mexico City, to understand the extent to which viceregal artists learned from their Asian counterparts, giving new aesthetic meaning to Asian models. Consider the c.1690 Biombo de la Conquista de México y vista de la ciudad de México that depicts the 16th-century Spanish conquest of Aztec Tenochtitlan on one side and a bird’s-eye view of 17th-century viceregal Mexico City on the other (Figures 0.3).27 The biombo evidences a formal kinship to the Japanese byōbu folding-screen-painting format, whose provenance includes gifts of diplomacy from the shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu to Viceroy Velasco the Younger (in 1613–14), but whose subject matter abandons Japanese aesthetic sensibilities and pictorial interests in favor of New World themes and subjects.28 Via history painting, the biombo recounts in picture the epic clash between the Aztec and Spanish. But, when reading the image of conquest against that of the 17th-century city, where civitas, urbs, and policía reign proudly, we glean that the artist’s underlying message is the wresting of Tenochtitlan from the pagan and idolatrous hands of the Aztec, transforming it into an orderly Christian city, a New World Jerusalem no less, by the zeal of righteous Spaniards.29 In short, the biombo’s pictorial narrative underscores the biblical ideal of good overcoming evil to illuminate viceregal Mexico City’s civitas cristiana. The biombo’s resounding effect is not just one of hybridization in how it binds an Asian genre with Christian messaging and with New World historical events, but also how it grounds Christian morality in viceregal Mexico City’s built environment.30 The transcultural interdependencies of the biombo make us aware that viceregal Mexico City was global in its character. This globalness, however, also demands consideration as to the nature of its cosmopolitanism. Introduced

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­Colonial Mexico, among a rich field of scholarship. See also Park, “Made by Migrants” to understand Manila’s intersection with Mexico City and the broader Asian world. Biombo is the Hispanization of byōbu. On the subject of biombos, reference: Castelló Yturbide and Martínez del Río de Redo, Biombos Mexicanos; Curiel and Navarrete Prieto, Viento detenido; Sanabrais, “From Byōbu to Biombo”; Sanabrais, “The Biombo or Folding Screen in New Spain”; and Mundy, “Moteuczoma Reborn”, to cite but five examples. The Franz Mayer biombo belongs to a family of biombos that share a thematic concern to describe the Aztec conquest and 17th-century Mexico City. Sanabrais makes us aware that the biombo underwent a significant reinvention beyond only subject matter once in New Spain, substituting paper for canvas, mineral pigments for oil paints, and silk panel borders for painted ones. See Sanabrais, “From Byōbu to Biombo”, p. 785. On the subjects of civitas, urbs, and policía, see Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793, pp. 1–28. Sanabrais and Terraciano bring up this point in their respective analysis of the biombo’s two images. See Sanabrais, “From Byōbu to Biombo”, p. 788; Terraciano, “Competing Memories of the Conquest of Mexico”, p. 74. For a different reading of the biombo, consult Bailey, “Asia in the Arts of Colonial Latin America”, pp. 64–65. Hybridity in colonial Latin America is richly discussed by Dean and Leibsohn in “Hybridity and Its Discontents”. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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figures 0.3 Anonymous, Biombo de la Conquista de México y vista de la ciudad de México, c.1670–90, oil on canvas, 2.13 x 5.63 m. x 2 cm Courtesy of the Museo Franz Mayer

by Diogenes in ancient Greece to mean “I am a citizen of the world”, the concept has undergone broad amplification and scrutiny since then, from Kant’s theory of perpetual peace in the production of a global federation of nations to Mignolo, van Der Veer, and Breckenridge et al., illuminating its associations with European colonial expansion and hegemony.31 Recently, scholars have addressed how local knowledge, particularly in minority communities and subaltern diasporas, is also a building block of cosmopolitanism in a wide range of social and cultural practices.32 The polemics of cosmopolitanism coupled with 31

On Kant’s proposition, see “Toward Perpetual Peace”. For counterarguments to critiques of Kant, refer to Brown, “Kant and Cosmopolitan Legacies”. On the intersections between cosmopolitanism and colonialism, consult Mignolo, “Border Thinking and Decolonial Cosmopolitanism”; van Der Veer, “Colonial Cosmopolitanism”; Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis”; and Breckenridge et al., Cosmopolitanism. 32 The Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies; Robbins and Lemos Horta, eds., Cosmopolitanisms; and Breckenridge et al., Cosmopolitanism are just a few examples of how scholars have broadened the subject.

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transcultural interdependencies are at the heart of how Mexico City galvanized its brand of colonial cosmopolitanism.33 Consider, for example, the c.1550 Indian-authored Uppsala Map (Figure 0.4).34 What is unique about this city view is not only how and why it is the product of transcultural intersections between European and New World mapping praxis, but more importantly, that it is the means by which the Spanish monarch, Charles V, obtains truth about viceregal Mexico City. The image’s veracity as to urban description, geographic detail, or social and cultural practices is one that is above reproach, as suggested by the inclusion of the dedication to Charles by the royal cosmographer, Alonso de Santa Cruz, writing that the map will be a “good augury for the future”. The map’s submission to the king for examination is no less than an “imaginative act of vision”, allowing the monarch to see what he is unable to empirically verify from across the Atlantic.35 And here is where the king, and we, have entered into the map’s cosmopolitanism that will be key to the production of the early modern Hispanic world. Truth and vision are predicated on an extraordinary feat of trust that the monarch must afford the native mapmaker as to the map’s veracity; only then can the cartographer and king enter into a trans-Atlantic, trans-cultural, and early-modern dialogue about the nature and character of viceregal Mexico City.36 The image, thus, turns on its head the presuppositions of cosmopolitanism’s who, what, and how, where local knowledge becomes a means for attaining global awareness. In other words, the Uppsala Map offers the monarch a view of the world that is only attainable through a synthesis of local history, culture, and identity, thus drawing the king into the cartographer’s vision of Mexico City. More than just the product of a native informant or that of an antagonist, the mapmaker presents Charles with a choice of profound significance: to remain conditioned by the medieval and Orientalizing European imagination that engendered the 1524 Nuremberg Map (see Restall, this volume), or to modernize the capital’s image by decoupling it from the former and its tropes, thus bringing Mexico City into early modern consciousness. Viceregal Mexico City’s history is filled with lives, actions, and things cosmopolitan that are the result of global transcultural interdependencies. But perhaps, the greatest manifestation of Mexico City’s cosmopolitanism is Mexico City itself. As the essays in this present volume attest, the viceregal capital 33 34 35 36

Van Der Veer takes a different but related approach to the subject of colonial cosmopolitanism in his essay of the same title. Consult Fernández, Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture, for other Mexican examples. I borrow “imaginative act of vision” and its underlying concept from Cummins, “A Tale of Two Cities”, pp. 157–170. See López, “Indigenous Commentary on Sixteenth-Century Mexico City” for further discussion on these ideas.

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figure 0.4 Anonymous, Uppsala Map, c.1550, watercolor on parchment, 75 x 114 cm Courtesy of the Uppsala University Library

was born anew every day from a process of invention and reinvention of all that the world offered. Ergo, Mexico City was not home to a transcendentalist or universalist society that existed beyond the reach of social and cultural difference, but rather was made manifest because of the translation of world cultures, embedding itself many times over in the intersectionalities of their inbetweenness.37 1

History and Society

Matthew Restall opens the Companion with “Fear, Wonder, and Absence”, examining the epic encounter between the Aztec and Spanish. Under the rubric of the conquistador lens, Restall reveals how the earliest Spaniards developed a distorted narrative about Tenochtitlan, drawing on their familiarity with Spanish cities or from generic or stereotypical Islamic references, the latter Orientalizing the pre-Hispanic capital and the Aztec. As Restall makes us aware, the earliest letters and chronicles describing the city offered a “hybrid 37

This point on inbetweenness draws from Pollack et al., Cosmopolitanism, pp. 6–7. For an argument of a transcendentalist society, consult Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica.

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gaze … [of] confusing European and Middle Eastern comparison”, with visual presentations of the city following suit. Cortés’ Second Letter to the Spanish monarch, Charles V, and the anonymous Nuremberg Map are thus exemplars of how text and image work in concert to offer a politically narrativized account of the encounter between the Aztec and Spanish that misleadingly mythologized Moctezuma’s surrender and the conquest of Tenochtitlan. “Fear, Wonder, and Absence” is thus a historiographic call to modern-day scholars, inheritors of this mythology, to wrest history from accounts that promulgate Spanish exceptionalism on the one hand and reduce the Aztec and Tenochtitlan to textual and visual tropes on the other. With “The Weirdest of All?”, Luis Granados turns our attention to the question of what constitutes colonial indigeneity. Over and above an essentialist argument or teleology of indigenous Westernization, Granados shows how “Indio” is more than only a racial category; it was also the product of colonial institutions that made manifest an ontological difference between indigenous peoples and the Spanish. By shedding light on how pre-Hispanic settlement patterns, native demographic diversity, or adoption of European religion and culture shaped the contours of indigeneity, Granados illuminates the tension between native cultural and social praxis and their colonial corporal body as defined by Spanish policies and institutions. Indian tribute, payment cards, or the república de indios were “agents of Mexico City’s indigenous ‘identity’ formation” that, as Granados argues, “need to be part of the … academic debate on identity, [because they were] by far a more effective marker of indigeneity than any ethnic or cultural feature”. In other words, the politics of colonialism made sure that “there was a [systemic] way of knowing who was an [I]ndio and who was not”. In “Blackness and Blurred Boundaries in Mexico City”, Joan Bristol demonstrates the ease and fluidity with which Afro-Mexicans practiced witchcraft and Christianity, showing the arc of spiritual life and its complexities. Drawing from Inquisition cases and wills, the author scrutinizes healing rituals, love magic, and exorcisms to unearth how cultural practices deemed as witchcraft by the Spanish Inquisition were coupled with devout adherence to Christian dogma via confraternity membership, bequeathing money for masses and church decoration, and ownership of religious imagery and materials. Indeed, the study of witchcraft and Christianity offers an expansive view of the range of beliefs and practices that were part of the Afro-Mexican experience. Despite the explicit prohibition and prosecution of witchcraft by the Inquisition and the racial anxieties towards Afro-Mexicans that permeated viceregal society, the Spanish, as Bristol shows, were also consumers of spells, charms, and amulets, thus articulating how such practices flowed across racial lines.

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Sonya Lipsett-Rivera in “Of Pleasures and Proscriptions” sheds a bright light on how gender and family normativity was a lifelong, socially learned process that began with the gendering of children’s play, where the roles, responsibilities, and virtues that adults should embody were inculcated in the earliest stages of life. Yet, while church and civil authorities established the models for gender and family and their undergirding morality, Lipsett-Rivera evidences how compliance was not universal in spite of the fact that Mexico City was the seat of the Catholic Church and viceregal rule in New Spain. Illicit sexual relations, homosexuality, transvestism, informal unions, and female-led households show the tensions and challenges that everyday life presented to the institutional standards of gender and family, ultimately highlighting how non-sanctioned practices and unions were part of an alternative set of ethics and codes of conduct by which people experienced gender, sexuality, and family. Frances L. Ramos closes the Companion’s section on “History and Society” with study of Mexico City’s allegiance to the Bourbon monarch, Philip V, in “War, Legitimacy, and Ceremony in 18th-Century Mexico City”. The 1700 death of the heirless and last Spanish Hapsburg king, Charles II, left a political vacuum, triggering a geopolitical crisis in Europe and the Spanish Americas that led to the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13), a battle for the crown between Spain and France, on the one hand, and the Austrian Alliance on the other. In New Spain, viceroys established military councils, raised militias, and fortified ports in defense against attack from the Alliance, but, as Ramos illuminates, they also commissioned funerary honors for fallen soldiers to garner support for Philip’s quest for the crown. Exalting the monarch’s supremacy by describing Philip as a metaphorical Good Shepherd, a biblical David, or a sun casting rays upon its subjects, Ramos argues, demonstrates Mexico City’s allegiance to Philip in the sermons, ephemeral art, and ceremonies comprising funerary honors. 2

Religious Life

Taking Mexico City’s religious life as their guiding thread, essays by Antonio Rubial García, Alejandro Cañeque, and Cristina Cruz González comprise the Companion’s second section, with Rubial García’s “City of Friars, City of Archbishops” scrutinizing the capital’s 16th- and 17th-century Christian urban development. What may be believed to be a concerted effort by different religious bodies to produce a Christian settlement at Mexico City after Aztec defeat, proves, under rigorous examination, a highly politicized, contentious, and fractured endeavor. Rubial García aptly demonstrates that competing religious

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corporations and figures—Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and archbishops, among others, many times with the support of wealthy and politically powerful families—quarreled over prime real estate to define Mexico City’s ecclesiastical space. Competition and the resulting tensions between different religious orders in the 16th century, eventually giving way to the consolidation of religious power by archbishops in the 17th century, undergird the production of Mexico City’s policía cristiana that, as Rubial García shows, was a richly diverse but highly polemical mediation of urban space in the making of a New World Jerusalem. Indeed, Mexico City’s urbanization was a Christian endeavor, but as Alejandro Cañeque explains in “The Cabildo of Mexico City, Patron Saints, and the Making of Local and Imperial Identities,” so too was its engagement in international politics. Mexico City’s selection of saints coupled religious piety with hemispherical and trans-Atlantic political objectives, affirming the capital’s preeminence within the Spanish empire by placing it in the orbit of Iberian metropolitan centers, Madrid and Seville, and ahead of other colonial cities. While the Virgin of Guadalupe was more successful than San Felipe de Jesús at embodying Mexico City’s local identity, the 1638 adoption of Madrid’s Saint Isidore the Ploughman as its protector, underscores, as Cañeque highlights, the cabildo’s desire to associate the capital with Madrid by declaring a saint affiliated with Spanish monarchs as their own, although Isidore had no connection to the city. More than only the manifestation of religious piety, Cañeque evidences how selection of patron saints was a negotiated terrain between local faith and international political interest. Although the historiography on European confraternities is bountiful, Cristina Cruz González argues that only recently have scholars turned their attention to study of confraternities outside of Europe, where analysis of their contributions from an art historical perspective is even less common, the subject of “Visualizing Corporate Piety”. Considering how religious corporate identity is performed, produced, and experienced, González situates confraternal art within Mexico City’s spiritual economy, where pious images were inscribed in picture, icon, history, and confraternity identity via the spectacle of seeing. Through the power of artifice, Cristóbal de Villalpando and other Baroque artists, González argues, conditioned colonial visuality via the “ocular impact of the icon-as-spectacle”, where seeing the miraculous object was not only directed toward marveling at artistic attention to exotic materials (pearls, silks, and diamonds) and metallurgic opulence (silver and gold), but also about how light, shadow, and bling heightened religiosity via an all-encompassing sensorial experience.

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3 Institutions With “Permanence and Change in Mexico City’s Viceregal Court, 1535–1821”, Iván Escamilla turns our attention to the other institutions that shaped viceregal life. Mexico City’s court, a cornerstone of viceregal governmentality is, as Escamilla shows, a complex body initially modeled after the aristocratic norms of courtly culture established at Madrid. Not insulated from political rupture, the viceregal system came to an end in Spanish Europe, save for the Iberian Peninsula, with the 1713 Peace of Utrecht that brought closure to the War of the Spanish Succession. As a result, Mexico City thus became the stalwart of the court system outside of Spain. Yet Bourbon rule brought about radical changes to the culture and structure of New Spanish courts, with Hapsburg reliance on aristocracy for selecting viceroys giving way to distinguished service to the Crown, with election of military men known as “soldier viceroys” being but one example. Although the court system continued until Mexican independence, recognition of its inability to effectively administer its American territories was understood in the late 18th century, as Escamilla contends, with arguments to eliminate the viceregal structure in favor of intendencies headed by governors. María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano’s “Finance and Credit in Viceregal Mexico City” brings the history of monetary policy and working capital into focus. Mexico City’s and the viceroyalty’s many industries—real estate, silver mining, agriculture, and livestock haciendas—were lubricated by a mixture of credit from ecclesiastical bodies, merchants, and the Banco de Avío Minero, the first industrial finance bank in North America, with the Monte de Piedad filling the loan needs of the poor. By scrutinizing the financial policies of different credit-lending bodies, Martínez López-Cano offers perspective on how capital was raised and mobilized to fuel a broad and vibrant colonial economy, making Mexico City a “world-class financial hub” whose economic reach was global. Yet, as Martínez López-Cano demonstrates, Mexico City’s place as an international financial capital was severely undermined by Spain’s late18th-century endeavors to siphon funds to Madrid, culminating in the 1804 extension of the Royal Decree Consolidating Public Debt Securities to Spanish America, dealing a hard blow to New Spain’s economy by decapitalizing Mexico City. Education, as Enrique González González contends in “Uneven Chances”, was a highly polemical endeavor, where divergent pedagogical views and curricula were tied to race, gender, and class. Children of indigenous nobility were trained in humanism in the 16th century to help enfold native communities into a Spanish worldview, and those of lesser stock educated in the tenets of

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catechism. Women were limited to basic literacy learned at amiga schools. At the top of the educational pyramid were Spanish men, peninsulares and criollos, who trained at Mexico City’s university to secure degrees that would ensure a pathway to important civil and church positions. Yet, as González demonstrates, this upper echelon of letrados (learned) was fraught by class distinction and competition, leading, in part, to the 1767 Jesuit expulsion from Spanish America and the closing of their colleges to curb criollo autonomy, and to Bourbon reforms secularizing education and universalizing knowledge according to Enlightenment ideals, solidifying Spanish Iberian power. In “Medicine and Municipal Rights in Viceregal Mexico City”, Paula De Vos examines the tension in medical jurisdiction between royal protomedicatos (medical boards) and cities in the Hispanic world. By invoking medieval fueros, or the rights of self-governance, De Vos highlights how Iberian cities championed their autonomy to regulate medical training, licensing, and practice over the Royal Protomedicato of Castile and its goal of universal institutional authority, limiting the latter’s jurisdiction to five leagues from Madrid. As De Vos aptly points out, this jurisdictional battle was also a root concern between Mexico City’s Royal Protomedicato and Mexican cities, where advocates for municipal rights in New Spain, not unlike their European counterparts, also cited medieval fueros and the five-league rule to curtail medical disenfranchisement. However, as De Vos shows, efforts to centralize the medical profession and terminate municipal rights reached new heights under Bourbon absolutism, a long-term contentious battle between Mexican cities and New Spain’s royal protomedicato that continued until Mexico’s independence. 4

Special Themes

Under Special Themes, Barbara Mundy, John F. López, and Miruna Achim address the histories of cartography, environment, and science. By placing three centuries of map production in dialogue in “The Urban Plans of Mexico City, 1520–1810”, Mundy offers a comprehensive view of the city’s map history and of the key issues and concerns comprising this arc, be they Tenochtitlan’s foundation and spatial organization, pre-Hispanic and colonial water management, Bourbon reorganization of the viceregal capital, or maps as vehicles of historical memory. What may be conceived as a teleology of indigenous communicentric manuscript maps giving way to printed European scientific maps, is in fact, as Mundy argues, a “full circle” return to Mexico City’s indigenous past. Highlighting how indigenous culture, history, and memory disrupt the positivist narrative that maps become more precise over time, Mundy shows

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how the city’s indigenous roots, both pre-Hispanic and colonial, were the basis for a mapping impulse that distinguishes its cartographic history from those of European and other Spanish American cities. The intersection between the histories of cartography and environment in Mexico City’s centuries-old propensity to flood is at the heart of López’ “The Desagüe’s Watermark”. Via analysis of Enrico Martínez’ 1608 Descripción de la comarca de México, the first map made by a professional cartographer in the service of drainage at the colonial capital, López illuminates how the technologies of Renaissance cartography—science and mathematical abstraction— were deployed to end New World flooding in rational terms, where nature was codified geometrically. Descripción de la comarca de México speaks to a new epistemic orientation to nature, that subordinates the basin’s rich social and cultural history in exchange for scientific coherence. Martínez’ map, López contends, was not solely part and parcel of an engineering endeavor to end environmental crisis, but a project to “free Mexico City from its historical path of development by eliminating its most iconic feature: water, thereby decoupling the viceregal capital from its Aztec origins”. If science was a cartographic endeavor, Miruna Achim shows its intersection with urban history in “Urban Science in 18th-Century Mexico City”. Via analysis of the tensions between Spanish metropolitan Enlightenment science and local scientific knowledge championed by José Antonio de Alzate, and other Creole intellectuals, many times over intertwined with native epistemes, Achim highlights how and why the latter resisted Bourbon reformist goals of universalizing scientific knowledge. Yet, the “presence of provincial elites in [scientific] cosmopolitan networks” and the “circulation of scientific facts and artifacts in formal and informal settings” illustrate how competing scientific epistemologies, either embodied via the founding of new urban scientific institutions and the promulgation of European botanical theory, such as Linnaean taxonomy, or Creole-led scientific periodicals and public displays of scientific experimentation, were essential to the production of Mexico City’s urban scientific identity in what Habermas termed the “public sphere”. 5

The Arts

No study on viceregal Mexico City would be complete without analysis of the arts, the subject of the Companion’s final section. Kelly Donahue-Wallace leads the way with “A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City”, examining the religious, social, and aesthetic implications of visual and textual representations of books and prints. Arguing for a theory of “metaphoric printedness”, images

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of imprints and prints were key didactic tools for indigenous evangelization that not only conveyed Christian dogma and religious iconography, but also imprinted Biblical figures, scripture, and narrative onto the souls of the newly converted. Study of portraits of New Spanish intellectuals sitting in libraries underscores Ángel Rama’s thesis that literacy reinforces a privileged elite that equates knowledge with power, a theme carried over to analysis of casta painting, but where things printed codified racial distinction and social hierarchy. As Donahue-Wallace adroitly shows, Mexico City had a richly diverse print culture that permeated all sectors of viceregal life, but whose meaning and value was tied to the networks in which printed objects circulated. With “Novohispanic Baroque Poetry”, Martha Lilia Tenorio addresses the compositional character and evocative qualities of poetic verse to unearth how at the core of New Spanish Baroque poetry is a “social way of life” of collective societal memory. Whether in print or the spoken word, Tenorio demonstrates how poets mobilized allegory, pageantry, and mimesis to illuminate the contours of the capital’s history, culture, and politics, be it mythologizing Tenochtitlan, capturing contemporary events, or welcoming an incoming viceroy. If modern poetry, contends Tenorio, communicates the “soliloquy of unhappiness and suffering”, then Baroque poetry, with its “scrolls and flourishes”, is but of a “fleeting moment” that bears witness to a “civic conversation, a public art, a dialogue between the inner self and the world” that reveals in verse truth about viceregal Mexico City and its society. The Spanish Enlightenment ushered in a new period of aesthetic sensibility with a return to classicism under a theory of buen gusto that reshaped music and music culture in Mexico City, the subject of Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell’s “Music and Literature in New Spain”. Buen gusto, as Ramos-Kittrell evidences, was not just a matter of stylistic taste, but the means for attaining order, reason, grace, and refinement, thus inscribing in 18th-century music praxis the highest cultural form of Spanishness. While buen gusto can be viewed as a metropolitan imposition of music aesthetic upon viceregal actors that aligned with Bourbon rule, Ramos-Kittrell is attending to a different story: how and why musicians across the capital’s racial spectrum mobilized buen gusto’s proposition of cultural ennoblement to champion their inclusion into the highest echelon of viceregal society. Thus, as Ramos-Kittrell writes, “It was the aesthetic connection that modern music had with elite notions of buen gusto that enabled [castas] to engage in Spanish modes of sociability”. Music was not the only medium conditioned by Enlightenment ideals, Bourbon Reform, and buen gusto as Amy C. Hamman and Stacie G. Widdifield demonstrate in “The Royal Academy of San Carlos, 1781–1800”. As Spain’s first academy of fine art in the Western Hemisphere, the Royal Academy of San

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Carlos was charged with instilling a new aesthetic ethos via art education, shedding the decadence and exuberance of the Baroque towards the rationality, symmetry, and order of neo-Classicism. Yet, modernizing aesthetic taste was no simple task, and establishing an academy of fine art was a monumental undertaking, requiring a curriculum, students, faculty, administrators, a library—filled with illustrations, classical texts, instructional manuals, and art treatises—and most important of all, Greco-Roman art. Forging a new path in the history of colonial art was thus dependent on the academy being a “cultural tour de force”, Hamman and Widdifield write, where it would cultivate the aesthetic sensibilities of students through academic training, and also be the arbiter of artistic taste for the citizenry of Mexico City via civic engagement in architecture, urban planning, and sculpture. What is certain from the chapters that follow is that viceregal Mexico City had a deep sense of history, drawing from all that the ancient Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa offered but where history, culture, and identity twisted and turned in extraordinary fashion to forge a new society. Viceregal Mexico City is a result of the translation of world cultures, of the identities, things, and ideas that stem from the intersectionalities of cultural exchange and social ­difference, and of the ability to adapt, adjust, and transform, albeit never without great cost and never shared equally by all, to the demands of globalization brought about by colonialism. If to be a citizen of the world is to be ­cosmopolitan, as Diogenes proclaimed in ancient Greece, then viceregal Mexico City is a rich example of how being colonial was a radical act of cosmopolitanism. Bibliography

Primary Sources

Cantares Mexicanos, León-Portilla, M. (ed.), 3 vols., Mexico City, 2011. Cervantes de Salazar, F., México en 1554: Tres diálogos latinos de Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, Mexico City, 1554 (repr. Mexico City, 2001). Balbuena, B. de., Grandeza mexicana, Mexico City, 1604. Kant, I., Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, B. Orend (ed.), trans. I. Johnston, Peterborough, 2015. Novo, S., Nueva grandeza mexicana: Ensayo sobre la Ciudad de México y sus alrededores en 1946, Mexico City, 1946. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, 4 vols., Madrid, 1681 (repr. 5 vols., Mexico City, 1987).

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Secondary Literature

Carrera Stampa, M., Planos de la Ciudad de México (Desde 1521 hasta nuestros días), Boletín de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadísticas, 67:2–3, (1949). Cummins, T., “A Tale of Two Cities: The Construction of Colonial Cuzco and Lima”, in D. Fane (ed.), Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America, New York, 1996, pp. 157–170. Bailey, G., “A Mughal Princess in Baroque New Spain: Catarina de San Juan (1606–1688), The China Poblana”, Anales de Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 19:71 (1997), pp. 37–73. Bailey, G., “Asia in the Arts of Colonial Latin America”, in J.J. Rishel and S. Stratton-Pruitt (eds.), The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, New Haven and London, 2006, pp. 57–69. Beezley, W.H., “Introduction: The Dimensions of the Mexican Experience”, in W.H. ­Beezley (ed.), A Companion to Mexican History and Culture, Oxford, 2011, pp. 1–9. Benitez, F. (ed.), El Galeón del Pacifo: Acapulco-Manila, 1565–1815, Acapulco, 1992. Bloch, M., The Historian’s Craft, New York, 1953. Brading, D.A., The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867, Cambridge, 1991. Brading, D.A., “Imperial Mexico: The Viceregal Capital,” in L.A. Newson and J. P. King (eds.), Mexico City through History and Culture, Oxford, 2009, pp.39–53. Breckenridge, C.A., Pollock, S., Bhabha, H.K., and Chakrabarty, D. (eds.), Cosmopolitanism, Durham and London, 2002. Brown, G.W., “Kant and Cosmopolitan Legacies”, in G. Delanty (ed.), Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, 2nd ed., London and New York, 2019, pp. 11–20. Caistor, N., Mexico City: A Cultural and Literary Companion, New York, 2000. Calvo, T., “Japoneses en Guadalajara: ‘Blancos de Honor’ durante el Seiscientos mexicano”, in T. Calvo, La Nueva Galicia en los siglox XVI y XVII, Guadalajara, 1989, pp. 159–171. Carrillo Martín, R., “Asians to New Spain: Asian Cultural and Migration Flows in Mexico in the Early Stages of ‘Globalization’, (1565–1816)”, doctoral dissertation, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 2015. Carrillo Martín, R., “Los ‘chinos’ de la Nueva España: migración asiática en el México colonial”, Millars: Espai i historia 39:2 (2015), pp. 15–40. Castelló Yturbide, T. and Martínez del Río de Redo, M., Biombos mexicanos, Mexico City, 1970. Castillo Méndez, L.E., Historia del comercio en la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, 1973. Colina Rubio, R. and Rivera Colina, P., Diccionario de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, 2013.

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Curiel, G. and Navarrete Prieto, B., Viento detenido: Mitologías e historias en el arte del biombo: colección de biombos de los siglos XVII al XIX de Museo Soumaya, Mexico City, 1999. Dean, C. and Leibsohn, D., “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America”, Colonial Latin American Review 12:1 (2003) pp. 5–35. Delanty, G. (ed.), Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, 2nd ed., London and New York, 2019. Elliot, J.H., Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830, New Haven and London, 2006. Engel, E.A. (ed.), A Companion to Early Modern Lima, Leiden, 2019. Falck Reyes, M. and Palacios, H., El japonés que conquistó Guadalajara. La historia de Juan de Páez en la Guadalajara del siglo XVII, Guadalajara, 2009. Fernández, M., Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture, Austin, 2014. Foucault, M., “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”, in N. Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, New York, 1997, pp. 330–336. Gallo, R. (ed.), The Mexico City Reader, trans. S.F. Lorna and R. Gallo, Madison, 2004. García Sáiz, M.C. and Albert de León, M.Á., México colonial: salas de exposiciones, Alicante, marzo-abril de 1989, Murcía, mayo-junio de 1989, Alicante, 1989. Gasch-Tomás, J.L., The Atlantic World and the Manila Galleons, Leiden, 2019. Giráldez, A., The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy, Lanham, 2015. Gonzalbo Aizpuru, P. and Staples, A. (eds.), Historia de la educación en la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, 2012. Gortari, H. de, Hernández, R., and Ziccardi, A., Bibliografía de la Ciudad de México, 5 vols. Mexico City, 1991. Herrera Moreno, E. and de Ita Martínez, C., 500 planos de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, 1982. Kagan, R.L., Urban Images of the Hispanic World 1493–1793, New Haven and London, 2000. Kagan, R.L., “Plaza and Square: Perspectives on the City in the Early Modern Atlantic World”, in F.A. Robres, M. Hernández Benitez, and S. Martínez Bermejo (eds.), Mirando desde el puente: estudios en homenaje al professor James S. Amelang, Madrid, 2019, pp. 367–379. Kandell, J., La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City, New York, 1988. Kaup, M., “Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity and the Marketplace Baroque: ­Salvador Novo’s Nueva grandeza mexicana and Bernardo de Balbuena’s La grandeza mexicana, in W. Moser, A. Ndalianis, and P. Krieger (eds.), Neo-Baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster, Leiden, 2016, pp. 254–282. Lee, C.H. and Padrón, R. (eds.), The Spanish Pacific, 1521–1815: A Reader of Primary Sources, Amsterdam, 2020, pp. 11–20.

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Leibsohn, D. and Priyadarshini, M. (eds.), “Transpacific: Beyond Silk and Silver”, Colonial Latin American Review 25:1 (2016), pp. 1–15. Lombardo de Ruiz, S., Atlas histórico de la Ciudad de México, 2 vols., Mexico City, 1997. López, J.F. “Indigenous Commentary on Sixteenth-Century Mexico City”, Ethnohistory 61:2 (2014), pp. 253–275. Mignolo, W.D., “Border Thinking and Decolonial Cosmopolitanism: Overcoming Colonial/Imperial Differences”, in G. Delanty (ed.), Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, 2nd ed., London and New York, 2019, pp. 101–116. Mignolo, W.D., “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism”, in C.A. Breckenridge, S. Pollock, H.K. Bhabha, and D. Chakrabarty (eds.), Cosmopolitanism, Durham and London, 2002, pp. 157–187. Miller, M. and Mundy, B.E. (eds.), Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City: Land, Writing, and Native Rule, New Haven, 2012. Miño Grijalva, M. (ed.), La población de la ciudad de México en 1790: Estructura social, alimentación y vivienda, Aguascalientes, 2002. Mundy, B.E., “Place-Names in Mexico-Tenochtitlan”, Ethnohistory 61:2 (2014), pp. 329–355. Mundy, B.E., “Moteuczoma Reborn: Biombo Paintings and Collective Memory in Colonial Mexico City”, Winterthur Portfolio 45:2/3 (2011), pp. 161–176. Musacchio, H. (ed.), Diccionario enciclopédico de México, Mexico City, 1989. Newson, L. and King, J. (eds.), Mexico City through History and Culture, Oxford, 2009. Padrón, R., The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East and the Transpacific West, Chicago, 2020. Park, J., “Made by Migrants: Southeast Asia Ivories for Local and Global Markets, ca. 1590–1640”, The Art Bulletin 102:4 (2020), pp. 66–89. Pierce, D. and Otsuka, R. (eds.), Asia and Spanish America: Trans-Pacific Artistic and Cultural Exchange, 1500–1850; Papers from the 2006 Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum, Denver, 2009. Priyadarshini, M., Chinese Porcelain in Colonial Mexico: The Material Worlds of an Early Modern Trade, Cham, 2018. Riva Palacio, V. (ed.), México a través de los siglos, 5 vols., Barcelona, 1888–89. Rivero Lake, R., Namban Art in Viceregal Mexico, Madrid, 2005. Robbins, B. and Lemos Horta, P. (eds.), Cosmopolitanisms, New York, 2017. Rodríguez Kuri, A. (ed.), Historia politica de la Ciudad de México (desde su fundación hasta el año 2000), Mexico City, 2012. Rubial García, A. (ed.), La ciudad barroca, vol. 2, in P. Gonzalbo Aizpuru (ed.), Historia de la vida cotidiana en México, 5 vols., Mexico City, 2004–06. Sanabrais S., “The Biombo or Folding Screen in New Spain”, in D. Pierce and R. Otsuka, (eds.), Asia and Spanish America: Trans-Pacific Artistic and Cultural Exchange, 1500–1850; Papers from the 2006 Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum, ­Denver, 2009, pp. 69–94.

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Sanabrais S., “From Byōbu to Biombo: The Transformation of the Japanese Folding Screen in Colonial Mexico,” Art History 38:4 (2015), pp. 778–791. Sánchez de Tagle, E. (ed.), Ciudad de México, época colonial: Bibliografía, Mexico City, 1993. Seijas, T., Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians, New York, 2014. Sierra, C.J., Historia de la navegación en la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, 1973. Slack, Jr., E.R., “The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted Image”, ­Journal of World History 20:1 (2009), pp. 35–67. Slack, Jr., E.R., “Orientalizing New Spain: Perspectives on Asian Influence in Colonial Mexico”, Análisis 15:43 (2012), pp. 97–127. Tenorio-Trillo, M., I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Chicago, 2012. Terraciano, K., “Competing Memories of the Conquest of Mexico”, in I. Katzew (ed.), Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, Los Angeles and New Haven, 2011, pp. 55–77. Terrés, M.E., La Ciudad de México: sus orígenes y desarrollo, Mexico City, 1977. Tovar de Arechederra, I. and Mas, M. (eds.), Ensayos sobre la Ciudad de México, 6 vols., Mexico City, 1994. Van Der Veer, P., “Colonial Cosmopolitanism”, in S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (eds.), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, Oxford and New York, 2002, 165–179. Vasconcelos, J., La raza cósmica: misión de la raza Iberoamericana, Bueno Aires, 1948. Yuste López, C., El comercio de la Nueva España con Filipinas, 1590–1785, Mexico City, 1984.

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PART 1 History and Society

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CHAPTER 1

Fear, Wonder, and Absence

Our Distorted View of Moctezuma’s Tenochtitlan Matthew Restall “Its strange setting, the grandiosity of its palaces and temples, the glint of its treasures, and the repellant mystery of the human sacrifices made daily to its terrible gods, all filled the Spaniards with astonishment.” José Filgueira Valverde, Galician intellectual, 19601

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The Conquistador Lens

We are all Bernal Díaz; and therein lies the problem. Díaz’ description of Tenochtitlan has been so widely quoted that it has become inescapable. First published in 1632, his True History of the Conquest of New Spain grew slowly but steadily in popularity over the centuries, deeply mined by dozens of chroniclers and historians writing in various languages, and achieving canonical status in abridged form in the 20th century. The following passage—whether in this translation or another, paraphrased or plagiarized or properly quoted, in a scholarly article or textbook—has thus been read by millions: When we saw so many cities and villages built into the water and other great towns on dry land and that straight and level causeway going towards Mexico, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and cues and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. 1 From one of scores of renderings of the traditional narrative of the Conquest of Mexico, written, as most have been, as a biography of Cortés; and also, written, likewise as many have been, in the form of a sort of hybrid novel and work of history; Filgueira Valverde ­(1906–1996), Hernán Cortés, p. 100 (Su extraña situación, la grandeza de sus palacios y de sus templos, el fulgor de sus tesoros y el repelente misterio de los diarios sacrificios humanos ante sus terribles dioses, todo llenaba de asombro a los españoles). © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004335578_003 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream? It is not to be wondered at that I here write it down in this manner, for there is so much to think over that I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, nor even dreamed about.2 The popularity of the passage is understandable. It surely captures something of how they must have felt, those first European visitors to the great Aztec metropolis, walking the causeway to meet Moctezuma and his entourage on a clear, sunny 8 November 1519. The scene was perhaps the most stunningly beautiful and impressive combination of the natural and built environments in human history. Placed in their shoes (and who among us has not wished to see that city before its destruction?), we would likely experience a set of emotions similar to the trio recorded by Díaz and other conquistadors: disbelief, wonder, and fear. Indeed, these are the three themes of response to the city that are my focus here (the recasting of “disbelief” as “absence” is explained in due course). My concern, however, is less with how Spanish invaders saw Tenochtitlan and more with how we see it; more specifically, with how conquistador perceptions have shaped and distorted our own. In other words, deployed superficially, Díaz’ description serves a useful purpose. But upon deeper reflection, a series of problems emerge—one beneath the other, like the layers of construction uncovered by archaeologists working today in the heart of old Tenochtitlan. First of all, the Spaniards were not alone; they were accompanied by African and Taíno slaves and servants; the latter, mostly indigenous to Cuba. Many had died in the nine months since the company had left Cuba, or they had remained on the Gulf Coast or sailed to Cuba or Spain (all of which was also true of the Spaniards, almost halved in number). But there must have been 100 or even 200 surviving Taíno and African slaves and servants walking into Tenochtitlan that 8 November, their presence unrecorded by their masters, and their perceptions lost to history.3 2 I have here used the 1910 Maudslay translation in Díaz, The True History of the Conquest, vol. II, p. 37, as it is the most commonly reprinted and quoted (rivaled perhaps by the 1963 Cohen translation in the Penguin edition). My sole edit is to italicize cues, an awkward English adoption of Díaz’ Hispanized version of a Nahuatl term for “temple”. The original passage is in Díaz, Historia verdadera, Ch. 87 (1632, fol. 64v, 2008, p. 157). Usages of the passage are far too numerous to cite, but I must confess that I too have employed it, as superficially as have so many others, as a familiar hook: see Restall, Seven Myths, p. xiii. 3 The presence of Taínos in the war of 1519–21 has been given little attention in the historical literature, but the scattered pieces of evidence add up to a compelling picture; e.g. for a complaint on labor shortages in Cuba as a result, see Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Santo Domingo 99, ramo 1, no. 17 (I am grateful to Scott Cave for sharing this document

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Second, Díaz’ observation is not original. Consider this description by Juan Cano (best known for marrying Moctezuma’s daughter, Doña Isabel Moctezuma Tecuichpochtzin), referring to the wonders of the city and the riches that Moctezuma supposedly shared with the conquistadors: “They seemed to us a thing of enchantment, and we could hardly believe it was true or that we were not dreaming of them, these things of Mexico”.4 Cano’s own relación has never surfaced, but portions of it were copied and summarized by Alonso de Zorita in the 1580s, Cano having died in 1572. It would not be surprising if Díaz had therefore borrowed his famous “enchantment” phrase from Cano; for all his claim to “truth” and “eyewitness” authenticity, Díaz’ True History is replete with contradictions, inventions, and borrowings from accounts by others—most obviously, Francisco López de Gómara.5 In fact, I suspect that Díaz’ original manuscript was a recopilación or compendium of conquistador testimonies and passages copied from other books, and that the oft-quoted expression of wonder was original neither to Cano nor Díaz (after all, Cano missed the company’s 1520 encampment in the heart of Tenochtitlan, not arriving in the city until June, when it was already in a state of war).6 Francisco de Aguilar later testified that Diego de Ordaz “said he had been amazed by what he had seen”, and “in truth it appeared to have caused him fear and astonishment” (both men were veterans of the entire war).7 Cortés himself told the King of Spain that it was all “so wondrous as not to be believed”. The “great city of Temixtitan”—as Spaniards first called it—was so full of “grandeur, of strange and marvelous things” that “we here who saw them with our own eyes could not understand them with our minds”.8 The conquistador lens, then, was not a sophisticated or varied one. Lacking original imaginations, men like Díaz and Cortés drew upon generic, not with me). Also see Documentos Cortesianos (hereafter DC), vol. I, pp. 170–209; Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés, Ch. 8. 4 Cano in Martínez Baracs, Juan Cano, pp. 50, 151–52 (les parecía cosa de encantamiento y que no podían creer que fuese verdad sino que lo soñaban las cosas de México). 5 For critical appraisals of Díaz, see: Miralles, Bernal Mintió; and Duverger, Crónica de la Eternidad. 6 Grunberg, Dictionnaire, pp. 98–100. 7 Aguilar (writing c.1560) in J. Díaz et al., Conquista de Tenochtitlán, p. 176 and Fuentes, Conquistadors, p. 145 (otro nuevo mundo de grandes poblaciones y torres, y una mar, y dentro de ella una ciudad muy grande edificada; venia espantado de lo que habia visto; que a la verdad al parecer, ponia temor y espanto). Note that I have varied my gloss of terms like grande and espanto to better convey this opening point; but conquistadors like Aguilar used a limited vocabulary, and generally my translations more closely follow the original text. 8 CCR (1522, fol. 12v, 1971 [1519–25], pp. 101–102; 1993 [1519–25], p. 232) (seran de tanta admiracion que no se podran creer … la grandeza, estrañas y maravillosas cosas desta grand cibdad de Temixtitan ... los que aca con nuestros proprios ojos las veemos no las podemos con el entendimiento comprehender). - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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unique, descriptors. When it came to specific references, they tended to fall back on two categories: cities in Spain with which they were familiar; and generic or stereotypical “oriental” or Islamic world reference points. For example, Cortés rather weakly and vaguely asserted that the city was “as big as Seville and Cordoba”, and his estimate that the “main tower is higher than the tower of the cathedral in Seville” does not come close to conveying the size of the Templo Mayor—the pyramid and twin temples that towered over Tenochtitlan’s main plaza. (Seville’s Giralda is actually taller than the Templo Mayor was, but the latter was far larger in overall size). Similarly, his statement that the city’s other main plaza was “twice as big as the city of Salamanca’s plaza” barely hints at the well-kempt order and symmetry of a city that made medieval European towns seem like cramped warrens of squalor.9 Compared to the symmetry and order of Tenochtitlan, Tetzcoco, and other altepeme (plural of altepetl) of the Aztecs and other Nahuas, Spain’s towns were amorphous and claustrophobic. As for Mesoamerican temples, conquistadors usually wrote of them as “mosques” (mezquitas), just as Granada was a frequent comparative reference and Mesoamerican clothing often seemed “Moorish” (the Orientalizing of Mesoamericans in general, and the Aztecs and Moctezuma in particular, would persist for centuries after the conquest wars).10 As a result, early written descriptions of Tenochtitlan offer a kind of hybrid gaze, mixing attempts to observe and describe the city’s built environment and natural setting with often-confused or confusing European and Middle Eastern comparisons. That hybridity of perspective is also evidenced in early visual representations of the city. For example, consider the earliest such illustration, a woodcut that accompanied a pamphlet published in Augsburg in 1521 or 1522, titled Newe Zeitung, von dem Lande, das die Spanier funden haben ym 1521 Iare genant Jucatan ­(Figure 1.1). Drawing upon brief letters about the Spanish discovery of the Aztec Empire circulating in Europe, the woodcut depicts the Aztec capital as 9

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CCR (1522, fols. 16v–17r, 1971 [1519–25], pp. 102–103, 105; 1993 [1519–25], pp. 233–234, 238) (es tan grande la cibdad como Sevilla y Cordoba ... la mas prencipal es mas alta que la torre de la iglesia mayor de Sevilla ... tan grande como dos veces la plaza de la cibdad de Salamanca) (note that “la plaza de” is missing from the 1522 and 1523 editions and 1528 MS, but included in the Madrid MS; see 1993, p. 234, n.275). The comparison of Tenochtitlan’s plaza to that of Salamanca echoed down through the 16th century; e.g., Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo stated that it was “twice the city of Salamanca” (Fernández de Oviedo, Historia General, 33). For example, Cano in Martínez Baracs, Juan Cano, p. 50; also see Schreffler, “Threads”, pp. 253–257, and (on depictions of Aztecs and Moctezuma) Hajovsky, “Thevet’s ‘True’ Portrait of Moctezuma”; and Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés, Ch. 3–4.

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figure 1.1 The first European attempt to visualize Tenochtitlan from the Newe Zeitung (1521 or 1522) Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

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a medieval European island-city whose novel feature is its causeways, here imagined as bridges. The German caption—which even denies the city its own name, giving it the seemingly most relevant European one—reads: “Great Venice has five gates / at each of the gates there is a bridge / which reaches the land / and on these same five bridges / there are many drawbridges with towers on them / so that the city is impregnable”.11 If the hybridity is minimal in the Augsburg engraving, it is tantalizingly multi-faceted in the Nuremberg Map—the cartographic schema of Tenochtitlan included in the 1524 Latin editions of Cortés’ Second Letter (Figure 1.2). The map was an intriguingly hybrid cultural creation. It combined elements from three sources available to the engraver. One was the medieval European building (structures such as those in the Augsburg engraving). Another was Islamic architecture, as represented in images such as those of the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle (not shown here); the mosques and minarets of Constantinople and Jerusalem may have served as models for the “mosques” that Cortés wrote were ubiquitous to Aztec cities. A third element provided the engraver with cartographic conventions and urban features not included in Cortés’ Second Letter and which could only have come from an Aztec source (probably the lost original Aztec-made map; see Mundy, this volume). For example, the map’s schema of a square plaza set within a circular city set within a circular lake reproduced “the idealized geometries” of the Aztec conception of a city.12 It is not just the style of the map that is hybridized, but its very details, positioning Tenochtitlan in two moments in time—two universes—all in a single frame. The map thus takes us right to the months between when Moctezuma met the Spaniards and when he died, the period when Tenochtitlan was the Aztec imperial capital but with a Spanish presence—when the “Temple where they sacrifice” (Templum ubi sacrificant) still stood but with a small cross raised

11 Anonymous, Newe Zeitung; the image appears on the fifth (this one) and the seventh page. 12 Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital”, p. 16. This is not to say that representing a city in a circular or fish-eye manner was unique to Aztec culture; it was also a European technique. There have been about a dozen studies of the Nuremberg Map, of varying length and depth, published since the 1930s (see the historiographical summary in Boone, “This New World Now Revealed”, p. 42, n.1), but three recent articles represent the map’s authoritative studies to date: Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital”; Matos Moctezuma, “Reflexiones acerca del plano de Tenochtitlan”; and Boone, “This New World Now Revealed”. In Boone’s words (“This New World Now Revealed”, p. 38), the map “presents Tenochtitlan as belonging to two temporalities”; in Mundy’s (“Mapping the Aztec Capital”, p. 26), it is “stretched like a taut rope between Cortés’ ideological programme and that of its Culhua-Mexica [Aztec] prototype”. Schreffler suggests a possible connection to the Nuremberg Chronicle, “Threads”, pp. 257–62.

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figure 1.2 The Nuremberg Map of Tenochtitlan, from the Latin edition of Cortés’ Second Letter, published in Nuremberg in 1524. A ­version with labels in Italian was printed in Venice in 1525. The smaller circular space on the left is the Gulf of Mexico. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

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upon it. At the top of the map, on the eastern horizon, an oversized Hapsburg banner flutters. The message to King Charles was clear: here is a city and empire of marvels and riches; its rotten religious core (the central plaza of “sacrifice”) justifies all means to conquer and convert its people; that enterprise has begun (the cross on the pyramid) and will soon be completed (the banner will be carried from the edge to the center). More than a mere promise of victory, the map’s very existence was a claim of possession; maps in the Europe of this era were tightly controlled and guarded objects of intelligence. Cortés told the Spanish king that during the months when Moctezuma was under his control, the emperor had given him “a cloth upon which was drawn the whole [Gulf] coast”, a map that may have been a source of the coastal sketch included by the Nuremberg printers. Both maps were intended as evidence of the Aztec ruler’s submission; the Nuremberg Map is thus a cartographic manifestation of the Spanish-invented surrender of Moctezuma.13 That invention was the central point and purpose of Cortés’ Second Letter, designed to invert the reality of conquistador failure and defeat in 1520, and convince the king of Spanish triumph. But Moctezuma’s death, the capture of Tenochtitlan in 1521, and the persistence of a violent Spanish presence in Mexico effectively sealed the myth of the emperor’s surrender. It became a foundation stone of the Spanish ideology of colonial justification, seemingly as ineradicable as the Nuremberg Map of Tenochtitlan—which is now reproduced in scores of books and websites, often attributed to Cortés himself, as if it were the eye-witness sketch by a victorious captain of his new acquisition.14 The point is not that the Nuremberg Map, or the details offered by Cortés or Cano, Díaz or the Anonymous Conquistador, are wrong. Indeed, they all contain unique insights and angles of perspective onto the Tenochtitlan of 1519. But they are heavy distortions, weighed down and twisted with political agendas, cultural interference, and the inadequacy of human memory. Our view of the city—and I mean “our” in the broadest sense, encompassing centuries of Western chroniclers, writers, and scholars—has been not only influenced but determined by those distortions. We see Tenochtitlan not as it was in Moctezuma’s day; we see it partially as it was, and partially as it has been imagined and invented since 1519.

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CCR (1960, p. 57; 1971, p. 94) (me trajeron figurada en un paño toda la costa). My analysis here is heavily indebted to the insights in Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital”, pp. 26–28. Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés, is effectively a book-length exploration of why Moctezuma’s surrender is a myth, and how it persisted for so long.

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Fear and Wonder

Let us return to Díaz’ “enchantment” description, and a third problem with the famous passage: it is not really describing Tenochtitlan, but Itztapalapa. Certainly the sweep of Díaz’ gaze seems to include the capital city, but the location of his scenic overlook is the peninsula leading towards Itztapalapa, the road at sufficient elevation to afford a view of much of Lake Tetzcoco and the many settlements on its islands and shores. The point may seem minor, but it is part of a larger misuse of descriptions of the city by Díaz and other early Spanish sources. For example, some assume that the account of seeing Tenochtitlan for the first time comes from the moment when the advancing invasion force descended the pass between the volcanoes to set their eyes on the Valley of Mexico for the first time (in fact, that November morning was hazy, and neither Díaz nor Cortés nor any other eyewitness source claimed to have such a view).15 Similarly, descriptions by Díaz, Cortés, and others of the marketplace in Tlatelolco are often used as referents to Tenochtitlan proper, even to its central plaza. There are many reasons for this confusion and ambiguity, not least of which are the issues to do with genre, audience, and the fact that most conquistador testimonies were recorded years or decades later. But all that aside, one can detect three broad stages through which Spanish descriptions of Tenochtitlan passed. The first was sheer amazement: wonder at the splendor and scale of the city, tinged with fear that the centralization of power that had made it possible might be turned against the invaders. The second stage was a more focused marveling at the wealth concentrated in the capital, particularly in the marketplaces and in Moctezuma’s court—his palaces, storerooms, zoos, and collections. This preoccupation would prove to be a sustained one. It was reflected not only in the attention given to wealth, valuables, gifts, and tribute items in published accounts (most obviously, again, Cortés, Gómara, and Díaz), but also in minor accounts (most not published until the last century) and in the testimony given in Cortés’ residencia. The latter was the crown investigation into his record in office, a standard procedure that in Cortés’ case was unusually protracted, generating some six thousand folios of documentation over 19 years. The overwhelming concern of the investigation was fungible wealth. Put in the terms of our topic here, the crown’s interest was this: how much wealth, in the form of precious metals and other portable material goods of value, was there in Tenochtitlan in 1519; where did it 15

Again, I am among those who have made that mistake (Restall, Seven Myths, p. xiii; nobody has called me out on it, in print or in person).

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end up, why, and did the crown receive its customary quinto (20 per cent tax)? Similar concerns were threaded through residencias of other conquistadors and officials, as well as in civil lawsuits (Cortés faced some 50 of these from the 1520s to his death in 1547). As a result, Tenochtitlan became something of a mystical place of lost wealth, of immeasurable riches stolen or squandered or hidden, but always denied the petitioner or plaintiff or witness.16 The third stage of the conquistador—then Spanish, and soon European— perception of Tenochtitlan is a vast and highly problematic topic in its own right; but it can be summarized in one freighted phrase: human sacrifice. Consider this scene: in 1554, two Spaniards strolled through Mexico City, chatting in Latin. Their dialogue was fictional, but it tidily reflected the popular perception of the Aztecs that had rapidly taken hold in the colony (as in Europe). Walking through the plaza that had been, since long before the Spanish invasion, the ceremonial center of the city; one Spaniard pointed out where “men and women were offered up and sacrificed as victims to idols ... as if in a butcher shop”. This horror, “incredible as it may seem”, occurred “almost monthly”, taking the lives of “numberless thousands”. The other Spaniard responded, “O Indians, most blessed by the arrival of the Spaniards, who were transformed from their former great misery to their present happiness, and from their previous slavery to true liberty!”17 The more grisly and diabolist the image of Aztec religion, the more profound the redemption of the indigenous Mexican people—and the more justified their conquest and subjugation. Just as accusations of cannibalism had been used to justify enslaving indigenous peoples in the Caribbean, so did the conquest and colonization of mainland “Indians”, such as the Aztecs become justified and legalized through accusations of “idolatry”, sodomy, and cannibalism. “Because of the care and devotion the natives of these parts devote to the nurturing and veneration of their idols and of the devil”, declared Cortés in the orders read out to the invasion force gathered in Tlaxcala in December of 1520, prior to the assault against Tenochtitlan, “your primary motive and goal is to separate and uproot all the natives of these parts from those idolatries”.18 This 16 Cortés residencia in AGI, Justicia, fols. 220–225; excerpted in various compilations since the late-19th century, the best of which is DC, vols. I and II. Other residencias and probanzas (proofs of merit) in AGI, Justicia 49 (Velázquez residencia) and AGI, México 203. Civil suits in numerous areas of the AGI and Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Hospital de Jesús. 17 Cervantes de Salazar, Life in the Imperial City, p. 74. 18 DC, vol. I, p. 165; also in AGI, Justicia 220, leg. 4, fols. 342–49, with a copy (not seen by me) in AGN, Hospital de Jesús, cuad. 1, fols. 1–4 (su principal motive e intencion sea apartar y desarraigar de las dichas idolatrias a todos los naturales destas partes).

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was not a reflection of Cortés’ mythical piety, but a small yet significant link in the manufactured legal chain of conquest justification. The initial wave of letters and reports that reached the court in Spain were filled with the same trio of accusations against the Aztecs (idol-worship, cannibalism, and sodomy), with lurid descriptions of ritual executions as shockingly satanical. The propaganda hit its mark. In the cluster of edicts issued by Charles V in October of 1522, he reasoned that, as he had: received reports that many chiefs and lords and others of the land hold many local people as slaves, which they capture and retain through the wars that they wage against each other; and many of those slaves they keep to eat and to kill and to sacrifice before their idols; and that this gives us license to recover [rescatar] those Indian slaves; and it will serve us and be to the advantage of the settlers and benefit those Indian slaves if I hereby give license and authority ... to the settlers ... to recover those Indian slaves and take them as their own slaves.19 No matter how much Spanish theologians and other officials debated issues surrounding the nature of “Indians” and how their alleged past justified their present treatment, Tenochtitlan’s reputation as a city of “human sacrifice” was set—and remains deeply rooted today. As Gaspar de Villagrá put it in his epic poem about Spanish conquests, first published in 1610: “not more than one hundred years ago / every year in the City of Mexico / were offered up in ­tribute, in horrific inferno / more than one hundred thousand souls”.20 But in the contrastingly bright present, the poet-conquistador proclaimed, that dark past had been forgotten by the contentedly Christian “Indians”, just as “the trees and plants [are] forgetful in the happy spring of the hardships of the winter past”.21 Over the centuries that followed, readers of Spanish, Italian, Latin, French, English, and Dutch learned “facts” such as these (the example is from Ogilby’s America of 1670): the “business of the Satanical Religion” of the Aztecs was to sacrifice “to their Devil-god Vitzilopuchtli [sic]” thousands of people a year, 19

DC, vol. I, p. 260; original in the archive of the ayuntamiento of Mexico City, also reproduced as CC, document 5. 20 Villagrá, Historia de la Nueva Mexico, fol. 29v (my translation of el horrible infierno / Tuvo todos los años de tributo, / De mas de cien mil almas para arriba, / Que en solos sacrificios bomitava, / La gran Ciudad de Mexico perdida). The poem is primarily about the early history of New Mexico, but seeks to tie that history to the triumph over the Aztecs and to conquistador glories in general. 21 Villagrá, Historia de la Nueva Mexico, fol. 30r.

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“whose flesh likewise afterwards they did eat in a solemn Banquet”. Rather than sharing in this religion, however, the peoples subject to the Aztecs increasingly grew to “abhor” their “particular Religion”, with its “cruel slaughters and butcheries of Men”. This, Protestant authors concluded, “was the chief reason why they so easily receiv’d the Roman Religion”.22 The images that accompanied such books offered lurid illustrations of Aztec butchery. Some became well known and influential, copied again and again; a good example is “Human Sacrifices of the Indians of Mexico”, used for centuries to accompany numerous accounts and histories in many languages (Figure 1.3).23 Variations on this visual theme often included an Aztec priest holding aloft a human heart, freshly torn from a sacrificial victim—an image fundamental to popular perceptions of the Aztecs to this day (a cartoon version graces the cover of Terry Deary’s Angry Aztecs, for example, part of his massively successful Horrible Histories series).24 The five-century persistence of a distorted (not to say hypocritical) negative stereotype, generated for political purposes long ago expired, has made Tenochtitlan a place “frozen in time, torn between a prestigious pre-Hispanic past and a colonial history bent on destroying whatever had survived of ancient times”. That is how Serge Gruzinski put it recently, crediting Cortés with promoting Tenochtitlan as the “emblematic metropolis” and “the Mexicas at the expense of their neighbours, allies and adversaries, which has persisted in our fixation on the ‘Aztecs’; the idea that there was an ‘Indian religion’, with its places of worship or pyramids, its great festivals, and its human sacrifices”.25 I would argue that the credit goes less to Cortés, and more to a larger cultural and intellectual phenomenon, whereby the conquistadors converted their fear and wonder into a simple and prejudicial stereotype. That stereotype was perpetuated by the conquistadors, and by the chroniclers and jurists who idolized them, as central to their campaign of legal defense and justification. It soon became enshrined in the conquest story’s traditional narrative, so that the modern perception of Tenochtitlan is still frozen in the conquistador gaze.

22 Quotes from Ogilby, America, pp. 239, 275 (also see the 1671 Dutch edition by Montanus). 23 “Von Menschenopffer de Indianner zu Mexico”, showing executions taking place atop a highly stylized and imaginary Great Temple in Tenochtitlan, was first published in De Bry, Peregrinationes, 3rd part, plate VIII (the image here), then again by De Bry in 1602 in his Americae, Nona et postrema pars, and then in numerous publications through to the present century. With its bizarre architecture and horned devils, the menacing scene has “a sinister and oppressive tone”, as Boone, “Incarnations”, p. 73, noted. 24 For example, an engraving in a 1707 Dutch edition of Herrera’s Historia General, accompanying Herrera’s passage detailing the horrors of Aztec sacrifice (Aa, Naaukeurige versameling, vol. 10, pp. 185–204); Deary, Angry Aztecs. 25 Gruzinski, The Eagle, p. 156. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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figure 1.3 “The Human Sacrifices of the Indians of Mexico [Von Menschenopffer de Indianner zu Mexico]”, showing executions taking place in Tenochtitlan, from de Bry’s Peregrinationes in Americam, 1601. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

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The emphasis on the ceremonial center, with its grim devotion to “human sacrifice”, has eclipsed the crowds, the noise, the smells, neighborhood life, and the complex sense of community. Tenochtitlan was not soulless, horror-bound, and empty; it was vibrant and full of life, a place of festivals and families. 3 Absence The elements that fed into descriptions of fear and wonder lead quickly to the third category of interest here: disbelief. Early conquistador reactions were pregnant with the concept—wonder expressed as a possible dream or optical illusion. The exaggerations regarding the city’s size, its population, and the daily orgies of “human sacrifice” and cannibalism, all strained credulity, even in a Europe hungry for such fantastic tales. More significantly, such exaggerations were compounded by a simple tragic fact: by the time anybody in Europe read accounts or saw woodcuts of Tenochtitlan, the city was an illusion. It had already been destroyed, its buildings razed, its people extinguished. That, at least, was what people in Europe believed. In fact, the city had not been destroyed, nor had the Mexica all perished. But Spanish accounts gave that impression, reinforced by exaggerated claims that the old Aztec Empire had been instantly replaced by a new Christian kingdom: New Spain. In other words, central to how Tenochtitlan was understood by Spaniards—and consequently by the West, us included—was, and is, its disappearance, its loss, its absence.26 The point is well illustrated by the question of population. The Franciscan friar Jerónimo de Mendieta imagined later in the century that “the Indian people were so numerous that most of their towns and roads had the appearance of anthills [hormigueros], a thing of admiration to those who saw it but which must have instilled a terrible fear [terrible terror] in the few Spaniards that Cortés brought with him”.27 Mendieta unwittingly captured the paradox of the Spanish response to the Mexica population: the teeming masses, filling the streets and canoes, were countless and intimidating; but as such, they were faceless, collective not individual, more like ants than real human beings. That attitude made it easier to imagine the city without its indigenous population. In his Second Letter, Cortés imagined how perfect such a city would be, were it saved just for Spaniards. Its location on a lacustrine island was noteworthy not just for making the place “very beautiful”, he told the king, but because 26 Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, is a book-length assault on the “myth [of] the death of Tenochtitlan as an indigenous city”, p. 3. 27 Mendieta, Historia Eclesiástica Indiana, p. 175.

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it could allow the conquistadors to create a segregated urban environment— with Spaniards living “separate from the natives, because a stretch of water comes between us”.28 That paradox of a city both as a teeming anthill and as a prime location emptied and ready for Spanish settlement was consolidated in the traditional narrative of the “Conquest of Mexico”, in particular its grossly distorted tale of the early months of 1520. From November of the previous year until June, the 250 or so conquistadors in the city were there as guests of Moctezuma’s, more or less at his mercy. Even if they had retained 100 or 200 African, Taíno and Mesoamerican slaves and servants, the visitors were outnumbered some 150 to 1 and easily contained in the palace complex of Axayacatl and adjacent buildings in the ceremonial center. Around them, the urban population, and the thousands who walked or canoed to the capital daily, carried on their lives. The city of families and festivals functioned as always. Such a picture of those months cannot, of course, be found in the traditional narrative, either in its earliest forms (Cortés, Gómara, Díaz) or its modern ones. For in that narrative, Moctezuma surrenders to Cortés and the Spaniards effectively occupy Tenochtitlan, governing the empire through the captive and submissive emperor. Within that lie—engendered by the need to justify the invasion and its violence—the teeming masses become subservient, as if shrunk in size, easily controlled by a tiny occupying force.29 After the siege brought the war in the Valley of Mexico to an end in August of 1521, the notion of an empty city was reiterated; and thus began five centuries of an evolving history of Tenochtitlan’s population, complete with the paradox of plenty and absence. In fact, the city’s population had not all perished in the siege; quasi-indigenous accounts contain folk memories of survivors in a miserable state, but alive nonetheless.30 The city was never empty, despite the fact that Spaniards enslaved thousands of the survivors (as they did across Mesoamerica throughout this and subsequent conquest wars).31 But as the mass enslavement of indigenous people drew increasing scrutiny over subsequent decades, Spanish accounts repeated claims by Cortés, Gómara, and others that the Tlaxcalteca

28 29 30 31

CCR (1522: fols. 16v–17r; 1971 [1519–25], pp. 102–3, 105; 1993 [1519–25], pp. 233–34, 238). For challenges to the traditional narrative of the 235-day period between the Spanish arrival and the death of Moctezuma, see: Brooks, “Construction of an Arrest”; Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés, Ch. 6. By “quasi-indigenous”, I am referring to sources such as the Franciscan-Tlatelolca account in the Florentine Codex (e.g., see Lockhart, We People Here, pp. 48–255). Cave, “Madalena”; Reséndez, The Other Slavery, pp. 13–99; and Stone, “Indian Harvest”.

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allies had slaughtered their Aztec enemies.32 Modern historians added to this a new explanation—smallpox—picking up on scant, late-16th century evidence to argue that an epidemic of the disease decimated a starving, battered population, leaving the Spaniards to occupy a lifeless city of rotting corpses.33 In a final twist, in parallel to the perpetuation of the picture of a Tenochtitlan emptied by war and disease, modern scholars seized upon the idea that the city’s original population had been vast—hundreds of thousands of people, larger than any other city in the Americas or Europe—thereby exaggerating the contrast between pre-war plenty and post-war absence. Yet while the valley may have held up to a million inhabitants, the Tenochtitlan of 250,000 or more is pure historiographical myth. The Spanish official Alonso de Zuazo reported from Cuba in 1521 that Tenochtitlan had 60,000 people and Tetzcoco twice that many.34 The figure of 60,000 was commonly cited in the 16th century, although sometimes as houses (for example, Jeronymo Girava Tarragonez’ “sesenta mil casas”), setting in motion a long chain of citations used by modern scholars to claim numbers four or five times higher (and sometimes even an absurd 500,000 or more). The Anonymous Conquistador asserted “most people who have seen the great city of Temistitan Mexico judge it to have sixty thousand inhabitants”.35 He was referring to Mexico City around 1550, and although the quote is often mistakenly read as referring to pre-war Tenochtitlan, in fact, he and Zuazo were probably correct: the almost 14 square kilometers of Tenochtitlan likely did contain 60,000 inhabitants, 80,000 at most, in 1519 (and perhaps, too, in 1550). No levels above the ground floor were residential in the Aztec city, so it could not possibly have been more densely populated than modern Manhattan.36 Just as the hybrid gaze of the conquistadors can be seen in text and image, so can the paradox of a city both teeming and empty. Note that the Nuremberg Map includes people in canoes on the lake, but none in the city. The map 32 33 34 35 36

Clendinnen analyzed this aspect of the Cortesian narrative in a much-acclaimed article (“Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty”). See Brooks, “Revising the Conquest”, for a debunking of the myth of the epidemic during the siege. Zuazo in CDHM, vol. I, p. 366. Girava Tarragonez in Apiano, La Cosmographia, p. x; Anonymous Conquistador in CDHM, vol. I, p. 391. Modern references are far too numerous to cite, but examples are Soustelle, Daily Life, pp. 31–32; Gruzinski, The Eagle, p. 147, citing Smith, Aztec; also see Rojas, Tenochtitlan, pp. 50–54, 88–90. My argument on the impossibility of a Tenochtitlan with a six-figure population is heavily indebted to Susan Toby Evans, personal communication, and Ancient Mexico, p. 549.

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spawned scores of copies through the early modern period. In the 16th-century, iterations by Benedetto Bordone and Giovanni Battista Ramusio likewise left the city empty and the lake lively with canoeing figures, but by the

figure 1.4 “The Great Temple of Mexico”, from volume 12 of the Abbé Prévost’s Histoire Generales des Voyages, first published in Paris in 1754 Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

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figure 1.5 Tenochtitlan in 1519, as presented to visitors to Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology (painting c.1955 by Luis ­Covarrubias, 1919–1985) Photograph courtesy of author

17th, most maps had omitted the people on the lake.37 The following century ­reproduced these visual tropes of European depictions from earlier centuries. The ­rendering of Tenochtitlan in the Abbé Prévost’s multi-volume 1754 Histoire Generales, for example (Figure 1.4), continued the hybrid imagining, mentioned above, of an Aztec city with impossibly European buildings; but note too, the startling paucity of people. Modern visions of old Tenochtitlan are likewise more often devoid of Mendieta’s ant-like inhabitants. The most obvious example is the best-known modern image of the city, the 1955 bird’s-eye painting by Luis Covarrubias in Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology, showing the island-city hovering on the bright blue water (“a jewel in the center of an azure lake”), with snow-capped volcanoes on the horizon (Figure 1.5).38 The painting is captivating, and thus not surprisingly reproduced and imitated in hundreds of books, magazines, and websites, occasionally with attempts to include people and canoes, but usually showing a city that is empty. Call it the Mary Celeste view of Tenochtitlan—buildings in perfect condition, as if the people were erased in 37 38

This cartographic history is detailed by Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital”, p. 32; and in Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés, Ch. 4, drawing upon examples of such maps in the John Carter Brown Library (and reproducing 1556 Ramusio and 1634 De Bry examples). The “jewel” phrase is Mundy’s (“Mapping the Aztec Capital”, p. 11); on the Covarrubias painting, also see Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, pp. 25, 28.

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figure 1.6 From Dan Abnett’s Hernán Cortés and the Fall of the Aztec Empire, a graphic version for 21st-­century young readers

a flash, not unlike the traditional narrative’s characterization of “the Conquest” and its miraculously rapid erasure of pre-Christian Mexico. The architectural model of the ceremonial center (Figure 1.5), laid out before Covarrubias’ painting, reinforces this impression. Arguably, museum visitors are as consciously aware as the museum’s creators and curators that the model is by definition intended to show buildings, not to imply human absence; yet the model and the painting combine to reinscribe the empty city in our subconscious minds, perpetuating a centuries-old tradition. Because the painting in the National Museum is well known, let me end with an image that is not—but which captures the point well (Figure 1.6). Taken from a graphic history for young readers, titled Hernán Cortés and the Fall of the Aztec Empire, the second frame of this sample page shows Tenochtitlan the way we have come to see it in such reconstructions: empty.39 The book’s creators are not to be faulted for failing to include the city’s population. On the contrary, they do a fine job of accurately conveying the city’s story and its demise as it has been handed down since the 1520s. At the book’s end, Tenochtitlan 39 Abnett, Hernán Cortés, pp. 6–7.

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is an equally empty, smoking ruin; in the next frame, a Spanish-style city rises phoenix-like in its place. At least the European buildings in early modern representations of the city have been replaced in these modern versions with Aztec structures—whose accuracy archaeologists are increasingly able to demonstrate. But our collective imagination has yet to repopulate the city. Viceregal Mexico City stands in our way, as do the German printers, the Spanish conquistadors, and everyone else who struggled through the early modern centuries to describe and understand Tenochtitlan, along the way making it stranger, emptier, less and less Aztec. We are the heirs of that struggle. Bibliography

AGI AGN CCR CDHM DC

Primary Sources

Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Mexico Cortés’ Cartas de relación (see Hernando Cortés; various editions cited in the notes by publication year) Colección de Documentos para la Historia de México (see García Icazbalceta, 1858–66) Documentos Cortesianos (see José Luis Martínez)

Aa, P. van der, Naaukeurige versameling der gedenk-waardigste zee en land-reysen na Oost en West-Indiën, 28 vols., Leiden, 1706–1708. Anonymous, Newe Zeitung, von dem Lande, das die Spanier funden haben ym 1521 Iare genant Jucatan, Augsburg, 1522. Apiano, P., La Cosmographia de Pedro Apiano, corregida y añadida por Gemma Frisio, Medico y Mathematico, Antwerp, 1575. Cervantes de Salazar, F., Life in the Imperial and Loyal City of Mexico in New Spain and the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico as Described in the Dialogues for the Study of the Latin Language, Austin, 1953. Cortés, H., Carta de relacio[n] e[m]biada a Su S. Majestad [etc.], Seville, 1522. Cortés, H., Cartas de Relación, A. Delgado Gómez (ed.), Madrid, 1993. Cortés, H., Cartas de Relacíon, M. Alcalá (ed.), Mexico City, 1960. Cortés, H., Hernán Cortés: Letters from Mexico, A.R. Pagden (ed. and trans.), New York, 1971. De Bry, T., Peregrinationes in Americam, Germanice, Pars IX, Frankfurt, 1601. Díaz, J., A. Tapia, B. Vásquez, and F. Aguilar, La conquista de Tenochtitlán, G. Vásquez (ed.), Madrid, 1988. Díaz del Castillo, B., Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España, F.A. Remón (ed.), Madrid, 1632.

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Díaz del Castillo, B., The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, A.P. Maudslay (ed. and trans.), 5 vols., London, 1908–1916. Fuentes, P. de, (ed. and trans.), The Conquistadors: First-Person Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, New York, 1963. García Icazbalceta, J. (ed.), Colección de Documentos para la Historia de México, 2 vols., Mexico City, 1858–1866. Lockhart, J., We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, Berkeley, 1993. Luis Martínez, J., Documentos Cortesianos, 4 vols., Mexico City, 1991. Ogilby, J., America: Being an Accurate Description of the New World [etc.], London, 1670. Mendieta, J. de, Historia Eclesiástica Indiana, J.G. Icazbalceta (ed.), Mexico City, 1870. Oviedo y Valdés, G.F. de, Historia general y natural de las Indias, J. Pérez de Tudela Bueso (ed.), 5 vols., Madrid, 1959. Villagrá, G. de, Historia de la Nueva Mexico, Alcalá, 1610.



Secondary Literature

Abnett, D., Hernán Cortés and the Fall of the Aztec Empire, New York, 2007. Boone, E.H., “Incarnations of the Aztec Supernatural: The Image of Huitzilopochtli in Mexico and Europe”, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 79:2 (1989), pp. 1–107. Boone, E.H., “This New World Now Revealed: Hernán Cortés and the Presentation of Mexico to Europe”, Word & Image 27:1 (2011), pp. 31–46. Brooks, F.J., “Revising the Conquest of Mexico: Smallpox, Sources, and Populations”, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24:1 (1993), pp. 1–29. Brooks, F.J., “Motecuzoma Xocoyotl, Hernán Cortés, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo: The Construction of an Arrest”, Hispanic American Historical Review 75:2 (1995), pp. 149–183. Cave, S., “Madalena: The Entangled History of One Indigenous Floridian Woman in the Atlantic World”, The Americas 74:2 (2017), pp. 171–200. Clendinnen, I., “‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico”, Representations 33 (1991), pp. 65–100; repr. in The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society: Essays on Mesoamerican Society and Culture, Cambridge, 2010, pp. 49–90. Deary, T., Angry Aztecs, London, 1997. Duverger, C., Crónica de la Eternidad: ¿Quién escribió la Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España?, Madrid, 2013; also published as Cortés et son double: Enquête sur une mystification, Paris, 2013. Evans, S.T., Ancient Mexico and Central America, London, 2013. Filgueira Valverde, J., Hernán Cortés: su vida contada a los muchachos de las dos Españas, Madrid, 1960. Grunberg, B., Dictionnaire des Conquistadores de Mexico, Paris, 2001. Gruzinski, S., The Eagle and the Dragon: Globalization and European Dreams of Conquest in China and America in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge, 2014.

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Hajovsky, P.T., “André Thevet’s ‘True’ Portrait of Moctezuma and its European Legacy”, Word & Image 25:4 (2009), pp. 335–352. Matos Moctezuma, E., “Reflexiones acerca del plano de Tenochtitlan publicado en Nuremberg en 1524”, Caravelle: Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-brésilien 76:77 (1987), pp. 183–195. Martínez Baracs, R., La perdida Relación de la Nueva España y su conquista de Juan Cano, Mexico City, 2006. Miralles, J., Y Bernal Mintió: El lado oscuro de su Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, Mexico City, 2008. Mundy, B.E., “Mapping the Aztec Capital: The 1524 Nuremberg Map of Tenochtitlan, Its Sources, and Meanings”, Imago Mundi 50 (1998), pp. 11–33. Mundy, B.E., The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City, Austin, 2015. Reséndez, A., The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, Boston, 2016. Restall, M., Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, New York, 2003; Updated Edition, 2021. Restall, M., When Montezuma Met Cortés: A True History of the Meeting that Changed History, New York, 2018. Rojas, J.L. de, Tenochtitlan: Capital of the Aztec Empire, Gainesville, 2012. Schreffler, M.J., “‘Threads of Every Color’: On Mudéjar and Cultural Comparison in Colonial Latin America”, in J. Bloom and S. Blair (eds.), And Diverse are their Hues: Color in Islamic Art and Culture, New Haven, 2011, pp. 245–69. Smith, M.E., Aztec City-State Capitals, Gainesville, 2008. Soustelle, J., The Daily Life of the Aztecs, trans. P. O’Brien, Harmondsworth, 1964. Stone, E.W., “Indian Harvest: The Rise of the Indigenous Slave Trade and Diaspora from Española to the Circum-Caribbean, 1492–1542”, doctoral dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 2014.

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CHAPTER 2

The Weirdest of All?

Indigenous Peoples and Polities of Colonial Mexico City Luis Fernando Granados For almost three centuries, San Juan Tenochtitlan and Santiago Tlatelolco were the largest and likely the wealthiest indigenous polities or repúblicas de indios in New Spain. At the beginning of the 19th century, when the capital of New Spain had a little more than 110,000 dwellers, their subjects numbered well over 30,000 women, men, and children.1 They also ruled over a sizable portion of Mexico City’s built environment—perhaps half of it. The people of Santiago Tlatelolco and San Juan Tenochtitlan were nevertheless quite odd: working shoulder to shoulder with thousands of Europeans, Africans, Asians, and a multitude of peoples of “mixed” descent, they hardly fit the conventional notion of Indian: they spoke Spanish and dressed in Western clothes, they were not peasants but “unskilled” workers and artisans. And yet, the city they inhabited could not be truly described as “Spanish”, for a considerable part of it continued to resemble the pre-Hispanic metropolis Mexico City had supposedly replaced: canals were pervasive, adobe was still the main construction material, maize and pulque never ceased to be the people’s dietary staple. The indigenous peoples and polities of colonial Mexico City thus challenge a number of assumptions about New Spain’s natives and also about the character of New Spain’s capital. Seen from their unique position within colonial society, indigeneity and urbanism cannot be understood as simply related to Mesoamerica’s ancestral past and to the adoption of European civilization. This chapter seeks to outline an alternative way of understanding Mexico City as an indigenous city as it tries to define colonial indigeneity in a less essentialist manner. Its goal is to show that studying the people of San Juan Tenochtitlan and Santiago Tlatelolco inevitably leads to the question of what it might have meant to be indio in New Spain, and to rethinking the very meaning of city and urban life in Spanish America. 1 Pérez Toledo and Klein, Población y estructura social de la ciudad de México, p. 61, table i.5. I estimate the indigenous population based on the “Matrícula de San Juan [Tenochtitlan], año de 1800”, Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Padrones, vols. 96–97, 99–101, 103–105—the San Juan Tenochtitlan’s tribute roll of 1800—which lists 27,108 women, men, and children—but which does not include residents from Santiago Tlatelolco. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004335578_004 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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The chapter is organized in seven parts. The first one discusses the nature of city and indigeneity in New Spain. After that—and moving as if from the bottom up—consecutive parts discuss indigenous Mexico City’s physical (second), social (third), economic (fourth), cultural (fifth), and political (sixth) features. The concluding part suggests a way to make sense of the paradoxical history of Mexico City’s indigenous peoples and polities—and beyond. 1

Indians and Cities

Conventionally, pairing City to Indian in a sentence would only make an oxymoron. Cities—urban life—are thought to be among the greatest European contributions to the landscapes of the Americas; Indians are imagined to be quintessentially static and rural. Of course, no one ignores that before the 16th century that Amerindian peoples did build large, complex, impressive urban sites. Yet it is telling that, for the most part, those settlements are described and analyzed not so much as cities but as religious or sacred sites. To some extent, such a bias has been merely the result of archeology’s traditional disposition towards the monumental. But it has also been a consequence of the particular configuration of most pre-Hispanic cities—a “dispersed” pattern of settlement and spatial organization that contradicts the Western understanding of city as a dense cluster of dwellings with vibrant economic life, social mobility, a centripetal effect on its hinterland, and so on. To complicate matters further, in the sociological tradition there is a venerable dichotomy opposing the “openness” and fluidity of city life to the “closeness” and rigidity of rural communities— the proverbial contrast Ferdinand Tönnies is said to have conceptualized as Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.2 More than “dispersed”, though, pre-Hispanic settlements might be better understood as being inclusive, for the distinction between agricultural and non-agricultural activities was not as marked as in other urban traditions.3 From what is known, in Mesoamerica physical dispersion did not impede pre-Hispanic settlements from fulfilling most functions cities are supposed to perform: besides being religious and political centers, a number of them were mercantile nodes and manufacturing poles, as well as home to considerable populations. The double city of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco constitutes one of the clearest examples that urbanism—as a “way of life”, as an architectural 2 Tönnies, Community and Civil Society. 3 Bernal García and García Zamorano, “El altepetl colonial y sus antecedentes prehispánicos”; Smith, Aztec City-State Capitals.

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system—­had been highly developed in post-classical Mesoamerica. Although its 250,000 inhabitants are no more than an estimate, there is no doubt that the “American Venice” was a settlement with a particularly high concentration of people, wealth, monumental architecture, and symbolic power—located, moreover, on a site more artificial than most.4 If Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco was not an imperial city, this is simply because there was no such thing as an “Aztec empire”—yet by any other standard it could very well have been one.5 Built on the western part of Lake Texcoco by expanding the surface of a group of islets that used to dot the expanse of water (one plot at a time, which left enough liquid in between as to make the settlement fully amphibious) and connected to the mainland only by human-made causeways (part and parcel of a complex system of water management encompassing most of the lake), the double city’s nearly 14 square kilometers were certainly exceptional.6 It is important to keep in mind that the Mexica “capital” was a double city, for that speaks to the fact that Mesoamerican cities were not just settlements but political entities as well; to use the language of Rome, that they were urbes as much as they were civitates.7 In fact, early Tlatelolco had been a wholly independent polity—and kept its own ruling lineage even after becoming a tributary to Tenochtitlan. The arrangement was fully consistent with Mesoamerican political culture: within and among polities, dominion was more often than not expressed as the articulation and aggregation of subjugated entities— through pacts very similar to the ones known for medieval Europe—rather than as their destruction and fusion into the victor’s realm.8 Mexica accounts of their own migration show that such a “modular” principle of political organization applied not only to the regional level but also internally, and so it is likely that Tenochtitlan’s division in four main quarters and a number of discrete neighborhoods reflected the sinuous origins and heterogeneous composition of the Mexica people rather than a simple administrative partition.9 In the 16th century, most altepeme or “city-states” in Mesoamerica were actually composite polities—their ethnic “identity” being less the consequence of a shared history and culture than the result of shifting alliances and the hazardous outcome of war. 4 Calnek, “The Internal Structure of Tenochtitlan”; Clendinnen, Aztecs. 5 Carrasco, Estructura político-territorial del imperio tenochca. 6 Evans, Ancient Mexico and Central America, p. 549; Calnek, “Conjunto y patrón residencial en Tenochtitlan”. 7 On the distinction between urbs and civitas, see Isin, “Historical Sociology of the City”, p. 312. 8 López Austin and López Luján, El pasado indígena, pp. 225–228; Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest, chapter 2. 9 Navarrete Linares, Los orígenes de los pueblos indígenas del valle de México, pp. 176–181.

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Even before the colonial period, then, politics played a significant role in the making of Mesoamerican societies. Since politics without engagement, divisiveness, and room for contingency is simply impossible, it is easy to understand why 21st-first-century anthropology and ethnohistory no longer have use for the old stereotype of indigenous societies as autarchic, timeless, and homogeneous. Picturing indigenous peoples and communities as contingent, heterogeneous, and divisive, fully within the world and yet unmistakably alienated from the political and symbolic economy developed by the Spanish—­ indeed as peoples with history—is thus not simple intellectual fashion or anachronistic projection of today’s globalized societies. 2

Between Civilization and Nature

Significant as it might be, remembering the origins of the “Mesoamerican indigenous community” is not enough. To truly make sense of the history of colonial Mexico City one first must kill a memory—a tricky, deceitful memory. For Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco was not razed in the summer of 1521. As a matter of fact, the destruction of the city is merely a literary trope, crafted mostly by a certain Hernán Cortés, intended to render “Spanish” the victory obtained by a number of Mesoamerican polities in their war against Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco—war in which a small party of European of late participated.10 Not that Cortés invented everything, of course: war there was—and it was long, nasty, and bloody; it was fought on the lake, along the causeways, and inside the city, and it damaged large sections of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco’s built environment.11 It is just that the scope and depth of the destruction described by Cortés and accepted by most writers and historians ever since is ostensibly a tale intended to embellish his own actions and, furthermore, since it is a highly implausible narrative (see Restall, this volume). There is plenty of physical evidence that the razing of TenochtitlanTlatelolco did not take place—notwithstanding the establishment of a new civitas at Tenochtitlan’s center and despite later efforts by the Spanish to drain Lake Texcoco (see López, this volume).12 For more than three centuries the city continued to be shaped by the lake around it and by Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco’s infrastructure. In terms of occupied surface there was virtually no change: 10 11 12

Hernán Cortés to Charles V, Coyoacán, 15 May 1522; for an English translation, see MacNutt (ed.), Letters of Cortés, vol. 2, pp. 3–148. Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés. Estrada, “Los barrios de indios de la ciudad de México”; Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan.

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the settlement “Mexico City”—the urbs, not the Spanish community—took almost exactly the same area as Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco. Only in the second half of the 19th century did the built environment begin to grow beyond the pre-Hispanic islets and artificial plots.13 Concomitantly, colonial Mexico City’s main “arteries” remained virtually the same as in pre-Hispanic times: the four causeways linking it to the lake’s shore and, most conspicuously, the maze of canals crisscrossing the city, which were dried out at a surprisingly slow pace— leaving behind an urban nomenclature rich in “bridges”. The best-known course of water, a wide canal connecting the Spanish city’s main square, its public granary, and the southeastern indigenous neighborhoods to the valley’s meridian cities and towns was tellingly named the acequia real—and it was still operating, right in front of the Spanish city hall, in the 1750s. To be sure, the establishment and partial construction of a Spanish settlement at the center of Tenochtitlan—known in the scholarly literature as the traza—implied a major disruption in the amphibious city’s architectural life. It was certainly a crucial historical event—and of course the very condition of possibility for the indigenous city’s existence. Nevertheless, just as Cortés’ narrative exaggerated the extent of the destruction produced by war in 1521, the traza’s impact on Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco’s former territory has been taken out of proportion—and likely for the same reasons. First and foremost, because even at its most ambitious, the traza would occupy no more than half of colonial Mexico City’s built environment—and that only in the early 19th century.14 Indeed, the “city of palaces” was a rather small settlement: a squareshaped area made up of roughly 14 city blocks per side. The traza’s Renaissance form—a grid of wide streets intersecting at 90 degrees angles—was of course at odds with Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco’s spatial structure. Yet the effect of the traza on the city’s landscape was piecemeal at best, in part because it took decades to “fill” the new blocks with Spanish buildings, and because the areas the Spanish decided not to “rebuild” for themselves had only a handful of European constructions.15 As a matter of fact, the traza did not even take any of Tlatelolco’s territory. In those regions, blocks were not defined by straight streets but by the shape of chinampas—the artificial plots with which 13

Most cartographic reconstructions of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco agree with that of Carrera, “Mexico-Tenochtitlan”, which depicts the pre-Hispanic built environment extending roughly from Mixuca on the southeast to Nonoalco on the northwest, and from Atzacoalco (Romita) on the southwest to Tepito on the northeast. 14 Toussaint (ed.), Información de méritos y servicios de Alonso García Bravo; see also Toussaint, “Introducción al estudio histórico de los planos”, in Toussaint, Gómez, and Fernández, Planos de la ciudad de México, pp. 21–22. 15 Mier, La primera traza de la ciudad de México.

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Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco had been made—and buildings tended to conform to the Mesoamerican model of domestic architecture, which, given the rules of inheritance and patrilocality, eventually resulted in the proliferation of relatively sinuous streets of uneven width.16 As the population recovered from the 16th-century demographic catastrophe and the settlement became drier, a city of alleys and irregular blocks would emerge—a nightmare for functionaries, planners, and historians alike.17 It is simply not true, however, that the city-beyond-the-traza had no discernable spatial structure. Like many villages, towns, and cities throughout colonial Mesoamerica, the main “pieces” of such structure were little squares adjacent to Christian churches, built most likely next to old “pagan” temples. Half markets, half religious gathering sites, and often completed with water fountains, public baths, or pulque taverns, these plazas were essentially focal points around which specific communities lived—at least most of their members, for community membership did not preclude geographic mobility within the city and because these architectural clusters were not physically impregnable. In the late 18th century, 70 of such units were still recognizable ­architecturally—50 in Tenochtitlan, 20 in Tlatelolco—but it is likely that they numbered more in the early colonial period.18 In Tenochtitlan, the vast majority of them were linked or gravitated around bigger plazas, organized along the same pattern, which worked as regional poles and where the Franciscans established four indigenous parish churches: Santa María la Redonda to the northwest, San Juan (later known as Señor San José) to the southwest, San Pablo to the southeast, and San Sebastián to the northeast—matching almost exactly the “seats” of the four pre-Hispanic tlayacame—Cuepopan, Moyotlan, Teopan, and Aztacualpa.19 Tenochtitlan’s southeastern “extension”—a large area reaching down to the former islet of Mixuca, eventually organized as the parish of Santo Tomás la Palma—was a fifth “quarter” or tayacatl in all but name, and the same could be said of Tlatelolco, separated as it was from Tenochtitlan by a canal well into the 18th century. Architecturally, these six regions constituted indigenous Mexico City. Needless to say, each one of them had a different settlement pattern, demographic density, and economic orientation; each one of them had a particular relationship with the Spanish city; and each one of them experienced the desiccation 16 17

Calnek, “The Internal Structure of Tenochtitlan”; Alcántara, “Los barrios de Tenochtitlan”. A prime example of the Spanish (mis)understanding of the barrios is Villarroel, Enfermedades políticas que padece la capital de esta Nueva España. 18 Lira, Comunidades indígenas frente a la ciudad de México. 19 Toussaint, Gómez, and Fernández, Planos de la ciudad de México; Moreno, “México”.

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of Lake Texcoco differently. For example, the southeast was more “rural”, on the western quarters the Spanish presence was more palpable, the textile industry tended to be located on the southwest, and the eastern sections were longer influenced by the lake. Nevertheless, the indigenous city’s spatial structure was and continued to be clearly distinguishable, “trapped” as it was by the traza and the receding lake—and despite the fact that neither the Spanish city nor the urbs as a whole ever had a city wall or any other kind of hard border.20 Not even in the late 18th century did the physical cleavage between the Spanish and the indigenous city disappear: beyond the neatly aligned tezontle buildings of the city center there was always a city of ill-shaped barrios, crooked alleys, adobe compounds, surviving chinampas, and working orchards, which somewhat smoothly melted away into the swamps and the lake. One was a city of wealth, home of the largest and most powerful Spanish-American nobility, and where the largest Catholic cathedral in the Americas stood; the other was a city of mud, one-nave, flat-roofed churches, and Indians—Indians and thousands of people of “mixed” descent. 3

A Paradoxical Decline

Like their buildings and canals, the people of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco were not obliterated in the summer of 1521. Although the battle was long and gruesome, there is no evidence that the Mexica defeat ended with a massive slaughter. As the fighting escalated, moreover, large numbers of people took refuge in some of the many cities surrounding the lake—and so the scores of survivors Cortés reported as surrendering in the battle’s final days could not have been but a fraction of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco’s population. A few months later, some if not most of the refugees were moving back to the city. It is certain, nevertheless, that by then the double city was deeply, perhaps irretrievably shattered demographically, for some months before the battle the city had been hit by the first smallpox epidemics ever experienced in Mesoamerica. The outburst killed perhaps half of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco’s population and left the survivors likely shocked and surely disorganized. (It even killed Tenochtitlan’s main ruler.)21 Since it was still a sizable population, though, it is fair to say that the vast majority of the people living in Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco’s built environment at the beginning of the colonial period would be considered to be indio.

20 Torre, Los muros de agua. 21 McCaa, “Spanish and Nahuatl Views on Smallpox”; Cook, Born to Die, pp. 63–70.

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Three centuries later, that was no longer the case: at the beginning of the 19th century, a little less than 30 per cent of Mexico City’s population was still classed as indio while almost half of it was registered in the censuses as español.22 Needless to say, this is one of the most significant developments of colonial Mexico City: the fact that the former settlement of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco became increasingly occupied by peoples other than the Mexica. In that sense, it is true that colonial Mexico City was never an indigenous metropolis. Yet, it is important to notice the way in which indigenous Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco became one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the New World: for despite the virulence of the 16th-century epidemics, the building of the Spanish town, and the great flood of 1629, Mexico City’s indigenous population continued to be more numerous than those defined as “Spanish” or “African”, perhaps until the second half of 17th century. After that, and despite a return of epidemic disease in the 1730s, the indigenous population grew somewhat steadily—accelerating its pace towards the end of the century.23 The demise of Mexico City’s indigenous population was then rather slow and uneven—and this in turn means that Mexico City was never fully a “Spanish” settlement either. Moreover, from the very beginning a significant and rising minority of the city’s inhabitants was thought to be of mixed descent and thus excluded from the main “ethnic” categories concocted by the regime to naturalize colonial domination. To be sure, colonial Mexico City’s cosmopolitanism was mostly due to the influx of immigrants from the Iberian Peninsula (including Portuguese until the mid-17th century) and enslaved workers from Africa’s western coast—­ augmented with a smaller number of “Asians” from the Philippines and China and other European subjects to the Habsburg monarchy. But it was also a consequence of the movement of many Mesoamerican peoples, following older migratory patterns or attracted by the amphibious city’s increased centrality after it became the capital of New Spain. First, of course, there were the Otomi—who had been present in Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco since pre-Hispanic times and continued to dwell in the city after the establishment of the Spanish civitas. Nahuas from the “allied” cities of Texcoco and Tacuba were also present in Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco from the time the Spanish decided to settle in the Mexica altepetl—including members of their ruling elites—as well as peoples from the many polities that had been subject to the Aztec triple alliance.24 Soon thereafter—or at the same time—something even more significant began to 22 Miño (ed.), La población de la ciudad de México hacia 1790, p. 35. 23 Gibson, The Aztecs under the Spanish Rule, p. 379. 24 Jalpa, “Migrantes y extravagantes”.

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happen: peoples from the Mesoamerican south, mostly Mixtecs and Zapotecs, came to live in the city, and in such numbers that the Dominicans felt they had to organize a special, “floating” parish to take care of them.25 Overall, in the first century of colonial rule, at least four Mesoamerican languages were customarily spoken in Mexico City. The Spanish decision to classify all Mesoamerican peoples as indios certainly encouraged the development of a shared “identity” among those considered to be descendant of the vanquished, but that could not eradicate the differences indios saw among themselves—and so, for example, the secular rivalry between Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco was still expressed in the middle of the 16th century via stone battles carried out by youngsters. Eventually, elected officials and legal representatives from a number of New Spain’s indigenous polities would spend long months in city houses owned by their communities, litigating before the Indian courts … against their indigenous neighbors more often, and often more bitterly, than against their European oppressors.26 Nevertheless, the main source of internal differentiation among the indigenous dwellers of Mexico City continued to be allegiance to the patron saints housed in the 70 or so little churches anchoring the communities known in Nahuatl as calpultin and tlaxilacaltin—to whom the Spanish decided to apply the Arabic-influenced term barrio(s). Though the barrios of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco were imagined as ethnic and religious communities—bound together by a shared origin and a shared religious practice—the truth is that they were always open to the influx of immigrants, mostly peasants from central Mesoamerica. Immigrants were in fact the main reason Mexico City’s population managed to recover during the long 18th century, for the “natives” of New Spain’s capital did not have the ability to grow their ranks endogenously. Censuses conducted in the second half of the 18th century unequivocally show the diverse origins of Mexico City’s indigenous inhabitants.27 Since some of them came to work as domestic servants or were employed in guild-regulated artisanal workshops, it was natural that they would live in the “city of palaces”. Parish records and anecdotal evidence have long noticed the presence of indios living and working within the terms of the Spanish settlement, sharing spaces and practices with the peoples of mixed descent and with destitute Spaniards.28 Yet that was not the experience of most immigrants—who tended to settle in the barrios, mingled and 25 Sotomayor, “La cofradía de Nuestra Señora del Santísimo Rosario”. 26 Ducey, A Nation of Villages, pp. 56–57; Jalpa, “Migrantes y extravagantes”. 27 Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race”; Arrom, The Women of Mexico City. 28 Pescador, De bautizados a fieles difuntos.

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intermarried with the locals, and eventually transferred their tributary adscription from their villages of origin. The fact that most immigrants would not dwell in the city center but on the traza’s outskirts should surprise no one; in Mexico City’s history, that has been the rule rather than the exception. Until recently, however, the historiographical consensus was that colonial Mexico City did not know spatial segregation; in other words, that the social and political scheme devised by the Spanish in the 16th century—the establishment of two “republics” or realms: one de españoles, one de indios—never translated into a discernable pattern of settlement, or that the cleavage became irrelevant by the end of the 17th century, as the city became more mestiza.29 An ecclesiastical census from 1777 and the San Juan Tenochtitlan’s tribute roll of 1800 have rendered such an interpretation obsolete: both documents prove beyond doubt that most indigenous peoples—whether affiliated to Santiago Tlatelolco and San Juan Tenochtitlan or not—lived within the parishes that circled the Spanish city.30 (Conversely, 60.81 per cent of all españoles registered in 1777 were counted in the three parishes roughly covering the traza: Sagrario, San Miguel, and Santa Veracruz.)31 Thus one of the most notable socio-spatial traits of indigenous Mexico City becomes apparent: namely, that a significant proportion of its members, perhaps the majority of them, did not descend from the Mexica, yet lived in and belonged to “Mexica” communities organized more or less corporately around their religious practice. 4

Making the City

Few, if any, of those classified as indios in colonial Mexico City did what is customarily expected from Indians—scholarly and in the Western imagination.32 The most obvious departure of such expectation is that most indigenous peoples living in Mexico City were not peasants. That does not mean, however, that agriculture was entirely non-existent: like in many other pre-industrial cities, yet perhaps more actively as a result of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco’s pattern of settlement and the high productivity of the chinampa, domestic agriculture

29 30 31 32

O’Gorman, “Reflexiones sobre la distribución urbana colonial de la ciudad de México”. Sánchez Santiró, Padrón del arzobispado de México; “Matrícula de San Juan [Tenochtitlan], año de 1800”, AGN, Padrones, vols. 96–97, 99–101, 103–105. My calculation—based on Sánchez Santiró, Padrón del arzobispado de México. See Barabas, “La construcción del indio como bárbaro”.

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provided a modicum of ecological autonomy to the people of Mexico City.33 Judging from the public granary’s records, in fact, maize production might have become somewhat significant in the 18th century, as the lake receded and more land became available for human use.34 Towards the southeast, meanwhile, a number of indigenous families became engaged in the production of hay, perhaps to serve the nearby slaughterhouse.35 And quite naturally, the lacustrine environment encouraged other primary economic activities such as fishing and duck hunting —which left its mark on the city’s landscape in the name of a barrio: Candelaria Ometotixtlan de los Patos. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that “rural” endeavors were always peripheral to the indigenous urban economy, both geographically and socially. As for the rest of Mexico City’s indigenous dwellers, the vast majority of them were engaged in a wide array of trades, jobs, and occupations within almost all “industrial” branches and lines of business—indeed in pretty much every form of labor the urbs demanded and had to offer. Surely, no indigenous person ever joined the Spanish bureaucracy, became a Catholic priest, headed a guild, or owned an import-export house. But that does not mean that indigenous peoples were explicitly and systematically excluded from the labor market. The main exceptions were, of course, the viceregal administration, the Catholic hierarchy, and some of the most prestigious guilds, which by law were restricted to “pure-blooded” Spaniards—yet it is telling that few artisanal corporations actually enforced those regulations or did not turn a blind eye to the activities of workshops and masters of tributary status.36 Thus, indios could be found among the ranks of silversmiths, painters, coach-makers, ironsmiths, tailors, butchers, and a number of other trades seemingly more prestigious and presumably closer to the Spanish way of life. Equally, indios participated in quintessentially urban activities such as carpentry, weaving, pottery, button-making, shoemaking, candle-making, and tanning. And by the late 18th century, indios were engaged in the most “developed” and profitable of business, particularly indianilla cloth production and the making of cigars and cigarettes. In the final years of Spanish rule, the occupational gamut was truly impressive, with 247 different labor categories being used in the records of San Juan Tenochtitlan’s barrios alone.37

33 On ecological autonomy, see Tutino, “The Revolutionary Capacity of Rural Communities”. 34 Florescano, Precios y crisis agrícolas en México, p. 172. 35 Granados, “Cosmopolitan Indians and Mesoamerican Barrios in Bourbon Mexico City”, pp. 488–489. 36 González Angulo, “Los gremios de artesanos y el régimen de castas”. 37 Granados, “Cosmopolitan Indians and Mesoamerican Barrios in Bourbon Mexico City”, p. 426.

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Nevertheless, given the pre-industrial character of New Spain’s economy, it is hardly surprising that most indigenous peoples were “unskilled” workers with virtually no corporations to “protect” them. Indeed, porters, water-carriers, domestic servants, and—above all—masons made up the bulk of the indigenous working force in the late 16th century, as well as in the early 19th century. To be sure, the demolition of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco’s main temples required the labor of thousands of people over a considerable period of time. In turn, building the Spanish city—sometimes with the very same stones— mobilized the skill and effort of many more. So big the endeavor was, even disproportionate, that for certain projects—most notably the construction of the Catholic cathedral, begun in the 1550s, completed in the 1820s—gangs of journeymen and assistants, carpenters, ironsmiths, and masons of every stripe were drawn from the surrounding towns and cities.38 Whether the builders of Spanish Mexico City were more numerous than the crowds that raised Jerusalem’s Second Temple, as Motolinía famously proclaimed, is of course debatable; what is beyond doubt is that indigenous peoples they were.39 Throughout, unclogging canals and paving streets, fixing temples and palaces shattered by the many earthquakes the city suffered, distributing fresh water from the pair of aqueducts serving the built environment—all that and more was also done mostly by people of tributary status. At no point, however, did the indios of Mexico City carry out these endeavors all by themselves. Labor segregation along “ethnic” lines was virtually non-existent, even in trades that relied on coerced labor like baking and weaving. Of course, the spatial distribution of some large workshops and branches of industry over the built environment meant that certain trades were slightly more Indian, and also that some barrios had higher concentrations of particular kinds of workers, regardless of “ethnicity”. But it is almost certain that the daily experience of most indigenous workers would involve interacting, in the barrios and in the Spanish city, with people of mixed descent and even with some Spaniards, who despite their political (legal) status, would share housing, work, leisure, and church with them. 5

Becoming Cosmopolitan

Propinquity is said to beget confusion, promiscuity, and miscegenation— especially miscegenation. In Mexico, miscegenation has been elevated to the national project’s very pinnacle, and thus it has functioned as the 38 Quiroz, Economía, obras públicas y trabajadores urbanos. 39 García Pimentel (ed.), Memoriales de fray Toribio de Motolinía, p. 24. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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guiding principle for understanding Mexican culture and history. Meanwhile, a ­venerable tradition of urban thought has for long seen cities as prime sites of cultural exchange and innovation.40 It is little wonder that the encounter of both intellectual currents would have produced a narrative for Mexico City that emphasizes the production of mestizaje as the city’s vocation. Edmundo O’Gorman’s argument that it was impossible for the separation between the traza and the indigenous city to subsist partakes of this perspective. Just as most accounts that have used Cristóbal de Villalpando’s 1695 La plaza mayor de México as a metonymy for the city’s character: a crowd of Spaniards, Indians, and (some) Africans, nobles and priests, servants and merchants, porters and beggars, meandering somewhat randomly through vending stalls could have only produced a new culture—indeed the culture of a new country.41 From such a standpoint, the indios of Mexico City cannot help but look a little suspicious. It is not just that most of them were artisans and “unskilled” workers, or that they worked and often lived together with mulatos and mestizos.42 It is that they looked, spoke, dressed, ate, and prayed in ways remarkably similar to those of their non-indigenous neighbors and co-workers. From the sacred to the most mundane, and since the very time of their “conquest”, Mexico City’s indigenous peoples made creative use of pretty much everything brought in by European, African, and Asian immigrants—twisting, selecting, or transforming whatever material, tool, technique, practice, trope, and meaning that did not suit their needs, but also embracing, rather enthusiastically, anything they deemed worthy. To be sure, ascertaining the cultural differences between Europeans, Amerindians, Africans, and (eventually) Asians must have been easier early in the 16th century than later in the colonial period. But as Spanish domination went on, the illusion of knowing beyond a reasonable doubt who was who, which practice was whom, melted into the valley’s thin air. By the time the empire collapsed, the barrios of Mexico City were largely made up of devout Catholics who spoke Spanish, ate inordinate quantities of bread and beef, had European names and surnames, and even followed New Spain’s fashion. Their sheared heads depicted in paintings may have been the origin of a post-colonial nickname intended to belittle the poor (pelados), but it is unlikely that the images reflected their actual hairdos.43 In their becoming Christian, Mexico City’s indigenous peoples were perhaps at their best in embracing European culture “critically”. Although the ultimate 40 41 42 43

See, for example, Hall, Cities in Civilization. O’Gorman, “Reflexiones sobre la distribución urbana colonial de la ciudad de México”. Villalpando’s painting belongs to the Corsham Court’s collection. Lozano, “Las comunidades domésticas de indios de la capital novohispana”. But see Cuadriello, “Winged and Imagined Indians”. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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reasons for their decision to incorporate the new “deities” into their symbolic economy remain mysterious, it is clear that the indigenous peoples’ willingness to follow Christian practice had something to do with the compromising disposition of their new “shepherds”, as evidenced for example in the Franciscans’ decision to leave Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco’s sacred geography unchanged.44 Until the 1770s, moreover, the parishes of Santa María la Redonda, San Juan, San Pablo, San Sebastián, and Santiago Tlatelolco were still conceived as Indian-only jurisdictions—which surely cemented the continuity between pre-Hispanic past and Christian present.45 Of course, replacing Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc as the altepetl main deities with an image of the virgin as Mexico City’s patroness (in the 1570s) seems to imply a radical break with the pre-Hispanic worldview—until it is realized that Our Lady of Remedios grew out of a local devotion from Naucalpan, one of the valley’s northwestern polities.46 Lastly, from the tributary record it is possible to observe an even more significant instance of the Spanish inability to wholly shape indigenous peoples’ religious sensibilities. In the late 1700s, more than a century after the Spanish American elites embraced the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe and half a century after they managed to make her New Spain’s patroness—and despite the fact that Guadalupe’s shrine was just a couple of miles north of the city—the most common names among the indigenous women of San Juan Tenochtitlan (after María, of course) were Josefa and Gertrudis, not Guadalupe.47 Likewise, the manner in which indigenous peoples appropriated other cultural practices and beliefs, mostly but not only European, cannot be understood as though their only choice was either to accept or to reject them wholly— much less without the possibility of keeping their own. After all, few “items” within any cultural system are usually experienced as mutually exclusive— even when, analytically, they look heterogeneous and contradictory. Speaking 44 Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, pp. 116–119, and 125; see also above, n. 20. A famous page of Codex Osuna (c.1565), fol. 8v, Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, summarizes it all: Franciscan Mexico City was organized in four churches (Santa María la Redonda, San Juan, San Pablo, and San Sebastián) matching the four pre-Hispanic quadrants—with Peter of Ghent and the Aztec totemic cactus at its center. 45 O’Hara, A Flock Divided. 46 Granados Salinas, “Mexico City’s Symbolic Geography”; Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, chapter 9. 47 There are 9,419 urban women registered in the “Matrícula de San Juan [Tenochtitlan], año de 1800”, AGN, Padrones, vols. 96–97, 99–101, 103–105. (The republic’s subject towns and villages are not included.) “Guadalupe” was part of the name of 422 of them (4.48 per cent), whereas “Gertrudis” appears in 592 names (6.29 per cent) and “Josefa” in 1,031 names (10.95 per cent). On the significance of naming patterns, see Taylor, “The Virgin of Guadalupe in New Spain”.

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Spanish, for example, did not necessarily imply abandoning Nahuatl or other Mesoamerican languages; it could have merely meant turning Spanish into a new lingua franca for public and political purposes. Since Nahuatl and Otomi continued to be spoken widely in the basin well into the 19th century, it is likely that some, if not most, indios were actually bilingual or remained acquainted with their ancestors’ languages. Besides, the crucial evidence that Nahuatl ceased to be Mexico City’s vernacular by the early 18th century is a shift in the notarial record—a significant change, no doubt, but hardly reflective of the sound of the city’s streets and homes.48 The dietary revolution of Mexico City’s indigenous peoples shows even more emphatically that adopting the new and foreign was done without compromising a connection to the old and aboriginal—for bread (wheat) and meat (beef and pork) consumption did not displace the reliance on maize for sustenance and pulque for inebriation.49 More than by conflict or competition, daily life in indigenous Mexico City seems to have been characterized by the coexistence and complementarity of different cultural inputs—producing indeed its own brand of cosmopolitanism. At no point in time, however, was colonial Mexico City a harmonious place. How could it have been? Over the course of the colonial period the urbs experienced a century of entrenched epidemic disease, the overthrown of a viceroy, a flood that took a decade to recede, a massive revolt by the end of the 17th century, again the deadly effect of matlazahuatl, a short century of economic “growth” with the social polarization it provoked, and in the last 50 years of Spanish rule—as imperial competition worldwide unsettled the colonial grip—an arrogant attempt to “re-conquer” both the city and the kingdom(s).50 No wonder people clashed with and insulted each other at home, in their work, and on the streets, employing a repertoire of slurs and gestures that mimicked the colonial symbolic apparatus, the set of ideas, laws, and policies that affirmed European superiority, African abjectness, Asian treachery, and Amerindian minority.51

48 Kellogg, Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture. 49 On bread, see García Acosta, Las panaderías, sus dueños y trabajadores; on meat, consult Quiroz, La carne entre el lujo y la subsistencia; on maize, see Florescano, Precios del maíz y crisis agrícolas en México, p. 19; on pulque, refer to Viqueira, ¿Relajados o reprimidos?, pp. 169–219. 50 Cook, Born to Die, chapter 3; Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, chapter 5; Boyer, La gran inundación; Silva Prada, La política de una rebelión; Molina del Villar, La Nueva España y el matlazahuatl, chapter 4; Van Young, “Los ricos se vuelven más ricos y los pobres más pobres”; Viqueira, ¿Relajados o reprimidos?; Voekel, Alone before God. 51 Stern, The Secret History of Gender, chapter 11; Lipsett-Rivera, “De obra y palabra”.

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The Three-Headed City

In the end, of course, it was a matter of power—the power the Spanish managed to acquire during the 16th century by taking advantage of the demographic crisis, by enthusing Mesoamerican elites into accepting their rule, by adapting their goals to the realities on the ground and yet proclaiming that their initiatives were the cause of everything that changed. The cornerstone of such power, both as a legitimizing discourse and as a societal principle of organization, was the ontological presumption on the difference between españoles and indios, expressed in the constitutional notion that all Amerindian peoples were fundamentally and irremediably inferior to all peoples (and things) European.52 Consolidated in the last third of the 16th century, this early modern form of systemic racism was the colonial order’s trademark, until a crumbling Spanish government abolished Indian tribute in 1810 and soon thereafter, when the constitution of 1812 proclaimed that the indigenous peoples were part of the Spanish nation.53 More than merely an anthropological fantasy, the scheme was truly an otherness-producing governmental device: for it is not just that there were no indios before the Europeans invented them, but rather that their very existence depended on the colonial institutions and actions intended to dominate them. The beginning of colonial domination in Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco, however, was a little odd. For about half a century, the Spanish acted rather ambivalent, as if they did not know what to do with the former hegemonic polity. On the one hand, they kept the leadership of Tenochtitlan in prison, indicating that they were now in charge; but, on the other, they refused to extinguish the Mexica altepeme and, more significantly, decided not to collect tribute from their members.54 Perhaps it was understood that working in the reconstruction of the city center would be their way of acknowledging Spanish dominion. Perhaps they realized that their chances to subjugate other Mesoamerican polities depended on keeping the identity of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco and Mexico City somewhat blurred. Perhaps it was the Franciscan dream of reinventing Christianity with untarnished subjects what facilitated the preservation of both polities. In any event, the Spanish insisted on preserving the ruling lineage

52 Todorov, La conquête de l’Amérique; Pastor, Cuerpos sociales, cuerpos sacrificiales. 53 “Constitución”, article 5, paragraph 1; see also Granados, “Huérfanos, solteros, súbditos neoclásicos”. 54 Miranda, El tributo indígena en la Nueva España, p. 134.

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of Tenochtitlan as intact as possible, even after the creation of the system of republics in the 1550s.55 Only in the second half of the 16th century, and in some respects only after the 1570s, did a recognizable colonial order come into existence—in Mexico City as well as in the rest of Mesoamerica—with the establishment and consolidation of the two main mechanisms responsible for “producing” and managing the Indian population: the tribute and the republic or cabildo de naturales. The former was a fee for the Spanish king that every indigenous community and later every indigenous person had to pay, first in kind and eventually in cash, as a token of their submission. For this reason, it would be inappropriate to call it a tax. Since no other group, class, or estate were required to pay it, and since it was unrelated to any economic activity that indios might engage in, the tribute could actually be described as an ontological levy.56 Because it was political and thus explicit and systematic, the tribute was by far a more effective a marker of indigeneity than any ethnic or cultural feature. The manner it was assessed, collected, and supervised confirms this point. For most of its history, the tribute was extracted by indigenous officials—called merinos in Mexico City—working in association with Spanish contractors, responsible in turn to deliver pre-established sums, calculated upon semi-demographic statistics, to the colonial administration. But in the last third of the 18th century, after the viceregal government took direct control of its management, the tributary office began to issue individual payment cards all indios were required to carry in public—and so by end of the colonial period there was a concrete way of knowing who was an indio and who was not.57 Even more significantly, the tribute was instrumental for integrating the local political community, the republic, whose government was in charge of a council and a governor. The law was always explicit on this point: only tributaries in good standing were members of the republic. In this sense, the tribute was also an enfranchising institution, and the money transferred to the king was a “membership fee” into the monarchy’s body politic.58 Unlike the tribute, derived from the pre-Hispanic practice of expressing dominion in kind, the republic was in principle a Spanish institution, intended to replace the rule 55

Castañeda de la Paz, “Historia de una casa real”. Some members of the Aztec nobility were incorporated into Spanish society, most notably the family of Moctezuma; on the Spanish house of Moctezuma, see Hernández Franco, “El mayorazgo Moctezuma”. 56 Granados, “Entre mujeres y principales”. 57 Granados, “Pasaportes neoclásicos”. 58 Miranda, El tributo indígena en la Nueva España.

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of the nobility with an elected body of aldermen and a governor appointed by the viceroy. For most of the 16th century, however, the governors of San Juan Tenochtitlan belonged to the ruling lineage of Tenochtitlan, and it is almost certain that the council followed a rotational principle—reminiscent of similar practices also found in Tlaxcala and Chalco—to elect members of only one tayacatl or quadrant at a time, guaranteeing in this manner that every altepetl’s constituent part would hold power every four years.59 Eventually a new, more “meritocratic” elite, plebeian by origin and whose legitimacy would be more closely related to the colonial regime, was formed—yet the process was far from straight forward. Particularly in the second half of the 17th century the appointment of governors and council members was hotly disputed. And so deep the crisis was that it was frequent for (illegitimate) claimants to be accused of being mulatos and even españoles. Such a governmental disarray might help explain why in 1692 the authorities of San Juan Tenochtitlan could not contain a massive explosion of popular anger, triggered by a sudden increase in the price of maize, that lead to the sacking of the vending stalls on the urbs’ main square, as well as the viceregal palace’s partial burning.60 Like most pre-modern polities, Mexico City’s indigenous republics were more communities than territories—although, as in many other places, their territorial dimension became more important over time.61 To be sure, the original scheme devised by the Spanish did have a material, territorial component. But it is pretty clear that it depended on the political act of setting the Spanish community apart from the defeated Mexica polities and that is why Spanish buildings and dwellers occupied lands belonging to San Juan Tenochtitlan and Santiago Tlatelolco since the beginning of the 16th century and, vice versa, that indios were easily found within the Spanish city’s limits. In other words, the jurisdictional nature of the republics allowed and indeed called for the geographic juxtaposition of their powers and also of the Spanish civitas’ right to rule over certain peoples and places. Without the political arrangement, then, it would have been impossible to distinguish indigenous peoples from Spaniards and peoples of mixed descent living, working, and interacting with each other. By the same token, it is plausible to think that the political compartmentalization’s ultimate function was to block the development of a shared sense of “citizenship” among indios, mulatos, and mestizos. That is, it was the fact that Mexico City was a city with three polities—indeed a three-headed ­city—that 59 60 61

Castañeda de la Paz, “Historia de una casa real”; Gibson, “Rotation of Alcaldes in the Indian Cabildo of Mexico City”. Silva Prada, La política de una rebelión. Granados, “Calpultin decimonónicos”.

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allowed the regime and the people involved to know every one’s place in society; it was the politics of colonialism that made the people of San Juan Tenochtitlan and Santiago Tlatelolco indios.62 Nothing more. Nothing less. 7

Concrete Coloniality, Awkward Cosmpolitanism

If a material metaphor helps understanding this chapter’s main argument, it could be said that colonial Mexico City indigeneity had the shape of a torta, the sandwich-like meal one finds almost everywhere in the 21st-century metropolis: something defined by its bottom and upper layers, not so much by the stuff in the middle. The bottom half of the bread roll is the physical city, the conglomerate of alleys, adobe compounds, and little churches around the traza. The upper half corresponds to the tributary status of those subject to the republics of San Juan Tenochtitlan and Santiago Tlatelolco: the political system intended to keep Indians unequal and separated. In between, a number of layers of stuff one might consider related to the ethnicity, labor practices, religious sensibilities, and so on, of nearly a third of Mexico City’s dwellers: say the indigenous leadership marching ahead of Our Lady of Remedios every time the Spanish cabildo brought the sacred statue into the city; say the water carrier construed by Claudio Linati in the 1820s—a brown-skinned “unskilled” worker, barefoot yet wearing trousers and a shirt, with two clay vessels full of water from a city fountain resting on his head.63 Richer and more appealing than the “covers”, culture had nevertheless less significant a role in the making and experiencing of colonial indigeneity than the blunter effect of the built environment and the subtler impact of political decisions made far away from the streets of Mexico City. Until recently, space and politics have been for the most part ignored, seen as a marginal aspect of social reproduction, or conceived as a byproduct of cultural and economic processes—either the stage where things happen or the conscious expression of them.64 This chapter, on the contrary, has tried to show that the physical structure of Mexico City’s barrios, paired with the colonialist desiderata about the differences between European and Amerindian 62 63 64

Moreno, “México”; Estrada, “San Juan Tenochtitlan y Santiago Tlatelolco”. Granados Salinas, “Mexico City’s Symbolic Geography”; Linati, Costumes civils, militaires et religieux du Mexique, plate 7. For a discussion on the so-called “spatial turn”, see, for example, Withers, “Place and the ‘Spatial Turn’ in Geography and History”, and Kingston, “Mind Over Matter?”; on the renewed attention historians have been paid to the political, even if it does not deal with the colonial period, a good start is Palacios (ed.), Ensayos sobre la nueva historia política de América Latina.

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civilizations, must be considered in their creative dimension, truly as agents of Mexico City’s indigenous “identity” formation—and so that the mute and the volatile, the ideological and the material, the contingent and the exogenous, need to be part of the political and academic debate on identity, still plagued by essentialist notions of culture and self, and also by the tendency to think of such matters as immanent, concerning the inner life of individuals, groups, classes, and nations.65 My contention, then, is that the indigenous condition in Mexico City—and perhaps throughout New Spain and the Americas at large— was the result of the complex, subtle interplay of physical actions and political facts. The primacy, nevertheless, remained with the political, for the definition of indigenous barrio had nothing to do with any “indigenous way” of occupying and signifying the space but with the colonial condition—the affirmation that some people were indios and thus neophyte Christian and legal minors. Built from without and from above, their communities—their barrios, their parishes, their civitates—could not exist beyond the early-modern empire. The city they built, inhabited, and worked in was not merely a place, much less a decorative stage; it was actually the concrete manifestation of their subordination—indeed coloniality’s embodiment, conduit, and agent.66 This implies, in turn, reconsidering the “acculturation” of Mexico City’s indigenous peoples not as a teleological process, inevitably leading towards their “Westernization”, nor as an instance of yet another clash of civilizations, wherein the actors’ only choices were resisting or accepting practices, words, and meanings imported from Europe, Africa, and Asia. Rather, it suggests that experiencing the world in the early modern period could not have been done but partially, tentatively, contradictorily, and always a little clumsily—and without the preordained sense most accounts of modernity attribute to the world revolution that began in the 16th century. If the indigenous peoples’ way of speaking Spanish or praying to the Christian god did not match the expectations held by their rulers or those of some scholars, that does not mean they were any less fluent or faithful, nor that they were in the process of becoming mestizos or Mexican—just like the españoles of Mexico City learned to love pulque and maize without compromising their Spanishness and their superiority complex.67 A fragmentary, clumsy embracement of other people’s culture may not have resulted in a stylish, eloquent kind of cosmopolitanism; yet its awkwardness was probably as cosmopolitan as it gets—as it continues to be experienced by most migrant, subaltern, and marginal peoples in the world.

65 Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’”. 66 See Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social”. 67 Alberro, Del gachupín al criollo. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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Hall, P., Cities in Civilization, New York, 1998. Hernández Franco, J., “El mayorazgo Moctezuma: Reflexiones sobre un proceso de movilidad vertical con alternancias (1509–1807)”, Estudis 32 (2006), pp. 215–235. Isin, E.F., “Historical Sociology of the City”, in G. Delanty and E.F. Isin (eds.), Handbook of Historical Sociology, London, 2003, pp. 312–324. Israel, J., Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610–1670, London, 1975. Jalpa, T., “Migrantes y extravagantes: Indios de la periferia en la ciudad de México durante los siglos XVI y XVII”, in F. Castro (ed.), Los indios y las ciudades de Nueva España, Mexico City, 2010, pp. 79–104. Kellogg, S., Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500–1700, Norman, 1995. Kingston, R., “Mind Over Matter?: History and the Spatial Turn”, Cultural and Social History 7:1 (2010), pp. 111–121. Lira, A., Comunidades indígenas frente a la ciudad de México: Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco, sus pueblos y barrios, 1812–1919, Mexico City, 1983. Linati, C., Costumes civils, militaires et religieux du Mexique, Brussels, 1828. Lipsett-Rivera, S., “De obra y palabra: Patterns of Insults in Mexico, 1750–1856”, The Americas 54:4 (1998), pp. 511–539. Lockhart, J., The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries, Stanford, 1992. López Austin, A., and López Luján, L., El pasado indígena, Mexico City, 2001. Lozano, T., “Las comunidades domésticas de indios de la capital novohispana, siglo XVIII”, in F. Castro (ed.), Los indios y las ciudades de Nueva España, Mexico City, 2010, pp. 327–350. MacNutt, F.A. (ed.), Letters of Cortés: The Five Letters of Relation from Hernán Cortés to the Emperor Charles V, 2 vols., New York, 1908. McCaa, R., “Spanish and Nahuatl Views on Smallpox and Demographic Catastrophe in Mexico”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 25:3 (1995), pp. 397–431. Mier y Terán, L., La primera traza de la ciudad de México, 1524–1535, 2 vols., Mexico City, 2005. Miles, R., Carthage Must be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, London, 2010. Miño, M. (ed.), La población de la ciudad de México hacia 1790: Estructura social, alimentación y vivienda, Mexico City, 2002. Miranda, J., El tributo indígena en la Nueva España durante el siglo XVI, Mexico City, 1980. Molina del Villar, A., La Nueva España y el matlazahuatl, 1736–1739, Zamora-Mexico City, 2001. Moreno, R., “México: Las tres ciudades de la época colonial”, Revista de la Universidad de México 476 (1990), pp. 7–12. Mundy, B.E., The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City, Austin, 2015.

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Navarrete Linares, F., Los orígenes de los pueblos indígenas del valle de México: Los ­altépetl y sus historias, Mexico City, 2011. O’Gorman, E., “Reflexiones sobre la distribución urbana colonial de la ciudad de México”, in E. O’Gorman, Seis estudios históricos de tema mexicano, Xalapa, 1960, pp. 11–40. O’Hara, M.D., A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749–1857, Durham, 2010. Palacios, G. (ed.), Ensayos sobre la nueva historia política de América Latina, siglo XIX, Mexico City, 2007. Pastor, M., Cuerpos sociales, cuerpos sacrificiales, Mexico City, 2004. Pérez Toledo, S., and Klein, H.S., Población y estructura social de la ciudad de México, 1790–1842, Mexico City, 2004. Pescador, J.J., De bautizados a fieles difuntos: Familia y mentalidades en una parroquia urbana, Santa Catarina de México, 1568–1820, Mexico City, 1992. Quijano, A., “Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social”, Journal of World-Systems Research 11:2 (2002), pp. 342–386. Quiroz Muñoz, E., La carne entre el lujo y la subsistencia: Mercado, abastecimiento y precios en la ciudad de México, 1750–1812, Mexico City, 2005. Quiroz Muñoz, E., Economía, obras públicas y trabajadores urbanos: Ciudad de México 1687–1807, Mexico City, 2016. Restall, M., When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History, New York, 2018. Sánchez Santiró, E., Padrón del arzobispado de México, 1777, Mexico City, 2003. Seed, P., “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753”, Hispanic American Historical Review 64:4 (1982), pp. 569–606. Sierra, C.J., Historia de la navegación en la ciudad de México, Mexico City, 1973. Silva Prada, N., La política de una rebelión: Los indígenas frente al tumulto de 1692 en la ciudad de México, Mexico City, 2007. Smith, M.E., Aztec City-State Capitals, Gainesville, 2008. Sotomayor Sandoval, S.A., “La cofradía de Nuestra Señora del Santísimo Rosario de indios mixtecos y zapotecos extravagantes del imperial convento del señor Santo Domingo de la ciudad de México, 1594–1753”, Itinerantes 3 (2013), pp. 11–25. Stern, S., The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men and Power in Late Colonial Mexico, Chapel Hill, 1995. Southall, A., The City in Time and Space, Cambridge, 1998. Taylor, W.B., “The Virgin of Guadalupe in New Spain: An Inquiry into the Social History of Marian Devotion”, American Ethnologist 14:1 (1987), pp. 9–33. Todorov, T., La conquête de l’Amérique: La question de l’Autre, Paris, 1982. Tönnies, F., Community and Civil Society, J. Harris (ed.), trans. J. Harris and M. Hollis, Cambridge, 2001. Torre, G. de la, Los muros de agua: El resguardo de la ciudad de México, siglo XVIII, ­Mexico City, 1999.

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Toussaint, M. (ed.), Información de méritos y servicios de Alonso García Bravo, alarife que trazó la ciudad de México, Mexico City, 1956. Toussaint, M., “Introducción al estudio histórico de los planos”, in M. Toussaint, F. Gómez de Orozco, and J. Fernández, Planos de la ciudad de México, siglos XVI y XVII: Estudio histórico, urbanístico y bibliográfico, Mexico City, 1938, pp. 17–29. Tutino, J., “The Revolutionary Capacity of Rural Communities: Ecological Autonomy and Its Demise”, in E. Servín, L. Reina, and J. Tutino (eds.), Cycles of Conflict, Centuries of Change: Crisis, Reform, and Revolution in Mexico, Durham, 2007, pp. 211–268. Van Young, E., “Los ricos se vuelven más ricos y los pobres más pobres: Salarios reales y estándares populares de vida a fines de la colonia en México”, in E. Van Young, La crisis del orden colonial: Estructura agraria y rebeliones populares de la Nueva España, 1750–1821, Mexico City, 1992, pp. 51–123. Villarroel, H., Enfermedades políticas que padece la capital de esta Nueva España, ­Mexico City, 1937. Viqueira, J.P., ¿Relajados o reprimidos?: Diversiones públicas y vida social en la ciudad de México durante el siglo de las luces, Mexico City, 1987. Voekel, P., Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico, Durham, 2002. Withers, C.W.J., “Place and the ‘Spatial Turn’ in Geography and History”, Journal of the History of Ideas 70:4 (2009), pp. 637–658.

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CHAPTER 3

Blackness and Blurred Boundaries in Mexico City Joan C. Bristol Viceregal Mexico City was at least as Afro-Mexican as it was Spanish, and perhaps more so depending on the metric one uses.1 Although African descent people were a minority in relation to the viceroyalty as a whole, they formed a majority of Mexico City residents in the colonial period. Even a casual observer could tell that Blacks and Mulattos were the biggest group in Mexico City, and any reading of colonial documents makes it clear that people labeled negro and mulato were participants in every aspect of colonial urban society, from church-based organizations to riots in the streets.2 This chapter scrutinizes the presence and participation of African descent people in viceregal urban life in the 17th century through a study of their religious practices. These included involvement in mainstream Catholic life through church attendance and orthodox practices, as well as involvement in ritual practices meant to heal bodies and minds, which in some cases were defined as illegal and labeled “witchcraft” by Spanish authorities. Religion serves as a lens to explore the Afro-Mexican experience more broadly; it allows us to look at family life, social relationships, and ideas about identity based in conceptions of race and ethnicity. African descent people formed lay religious organizations whose members identified as Black and Mulatto and sometimes used ethnic markers such as the labels Congo and Angola. They also married endogamously to a significant degree. Yet it is important to realize that in densely populated Mexico City there was a great deal of social mixing that complicated Black or Mulatto identities. As Afro-Mexicans participated in viceregal urban life they came in contact and forged relationships with members of all social groups and participated in all aspects of city life. Mexico City’s other colonial residents could not have conceived of the city without the constant and visible presence of Afro-Mexicans whom they interacted with as friends, neighbors, coreligionists, colleagues, service providers, and servants. Despite this obvious colonial presence, historians largely ignored Blacks and Mulattos until the mid-20th century; this scholarly exclusion is due to many factors, including present-day 1 For a fuller description of the issues discussed in this chapter and for information about New Spain more generally see Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches. 2 Gemelli Careri, Viaje a Nueva España, p. 22. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004335578_005 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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demographics, as African descent people form a small and often disregarded portion of the country today. Although over 110,000 West and West Central Africans were brought to New Spain before 1640, the slave trade declined, although did not end, after mid-century, and the numbers of African-born people decreased.3 At the same time, marriage and less formal sexual unions among Africans, Native Americans, and Spaniards, such as those described in Sonya Lipsett-Rivera’s chapter in this volume, boosted the mixed population, largely based in urban areas like Mexico City. 1

Afro-Mexicans in Mexico City and the Viceroyalty

While Blacks and Mulattos lived throughout New Spain, they were concentrated in cities and predominated in urban areas. Mexico City, as the seat of the viceroyalty of New Spain and its ecclesiastical center, was a draw for Spaniards and was thus also a center for African descent people, given their initial status as enslaved and free servants to the city’s elites. It was a mark of prestige for Spaniards to have a Black or Mulatto slave, and in the city, most served as domestic servants—pages, coachmen, cooks, and wet nurses—often in visible positions where their presence would reflect the status of their owner.4 Afro-Mexican occupations were not only based on servitude, however; Blacks and Mulattos worked as artisans, marketplace vendors, and in a variety of other occupations. Yet, their options for social mobility were restricted. For example, late 16th-century legislation declared that Blacks were not to work with gold fabrication, or have looms unless they passed exams, and they could never be silk weavers. They were not allowed to attend university or take religious orders.5 The prohibitions on the kinds of work Afro-Mexicans could engage in not only reflect Spanish ideas that Blacks could not do these jobs well, but also reflect Spanish fears about having their own positions challenged in the social hierarchy.6 Although viceregal cities were home to many Blacks and Mulattos, the capital and other Spanish-populated cities were not representative of the larger colony: those who identified as Black and Mulatto were a minority within the 3 Aguirre Beltrán, Población, p. 217; Curtin, Slave Trade, pp. 95–126; and Palmer, Slaves of the White God, pp. 26–30. 4 Mondragón Barrios, Esclavos africanos en la Ciudad de México, p. 51; Velásquez, Mujeres de origen africáno, pp. 161–228. 5 For a rare exception to this rule in Puebla, see Bristol, “Although I am Black”. 6 Mondragón Barrios, Esclavos africanos en la Ciudad de México, pp. 53–54.

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colony as a whole. In 1570, Africans and their descendants were 0.67 per cent of the colony’s population; in 1646, they were 8.8 per cent. Although this was larger than the Spanish population, both groups were miniscule compared to the Indigenous groups (98.7 per cent of the total population in 1570 and 74.6 per cent in 1646).7 Mexico City reflected these colony-wide trends in terms of having a significant number of African-descent people; in the 17th century, Mexico City had 70,000 inhabitants, with the mixed population (which included Blacks and Mulattos as well as Mestizos) making up 35–40 per cent of the overall population.8 Overall, probably 200,000 Africans were forcibly transported to Mexico from West Africa and West Central Africa during the course of the slave trade.9 In the 16th century, the enslaved came primarily from the Senegambia (now Senegal and Gambia) and present-day Guinea-Bissau, with the Bran (the modern Bram, Gola, or Burama), the Gelofe (Wolof), and Biafara (Biafada) ethnic groups representing the majority.10 In the 17th century, West Central Africans, the majority of who embarked at Luanda and other Angolan ports including Lobito and Benguela, made up three quarters of the enslaved people brought to Mexico.11 The African slave trade fell off dramatically after 1650 as the Indigenous population, decimated by disease in the 16th century, began to recover demographically, and the growing population of Mestizos, Creoles, Blacks, and Mulattos also provided an important labor source. The dissolution of the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1640 also limited the trade, as did the Dutch occupation of formerly Portuguese-controlled ports in West Central Africa. In Mexico City, as in other viceregal cities, Afro-Mexicans lived in the traza, the Spanish center of the city, set apart from the Indigenous villages outside the city. According to the viceregal theory of physical and juridical space laid out in the two republic system, while Indigenous people, as members of the república de indios, were supposed to live in their own villages under the jurisdiction of their own officials, Afro-Mexicans were seen as an inferior part of the república de españoles, the Spanish republic. This system broke down in practice, especially in densely populated areas where members of different groups lived in close proximity, formed relationships with each other, and had children together. The frequent prohibitions against Spaniards and Blacks 7 Aguirre Beltrán, Población, pp. 210–219. 8 Velásquez Gutiérrez, Mujeres de origen africáno, p. 19. 9 Curtin, Slave Trade, p. 46; Ngou-Mve, El África Bantu, pp. 97–147. 10 Curtin, Slave Trade, pp. 96–116; Aguirre Beltrán, Población, pp. 99–148; and Eltis and Richardson, “The ‘Numbers Game’ and Routes to Slavery”, p. 2. 11 Curtin, Slave Trade, p. 111. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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living in Indigenous villages makes it clear that in fact non-Natives did live there.12 Yet, it is striking that in 17th-century Mexico City people usually married within their own “parent-child group”, so that Blacks and Mulattos were more likely to marry each other than people from other groups.13 They most often chose spouses from a similar ethnic group, whether defined by a specific ethnic marker (Angola, Congo) in the early 17th century or a general sense of “Africanity” (being from Africa) later in the century. The identity category “Angolan” was especially important in 17th-century Mexico City.14 Afro-Mexican couples rarely used Spaniards as marriage witnesses and often asked friends who also identified as Black or Mulatto to serve as witnesses, even when they came from widely dispersed parts of the city. Thus, a sense of shared racial identity often created ties among Afro-Mexicans even when they did not live near each other.15 As we will see in the following examples, in the crowded urban environment of Mexico City people of different classes and ethnic groups crossed paths constantly, working alongside and for each other in domestic settings, textile and other kinds of workshops, and markets, praying together in churches and other spaces, and living with each other and forming families. Examining religious practice allows us to see these dynamics at work while also revealing the limitations posed by the social hierarchy: while Afro-Mexicans might form relationships with members of other groups and even with elite members of society they were ultimately subject to Spanish authority. Afro-Mexicans engaged in a range of ritual practices and this chapter focuses on two: unorthodox practices aimed at healing that were labeled “witchcraft” by colonial authorities and orthodox Catholic practices, particularly confraternity membership. In some ways these were very different sets of practices: witchcraft was defined as blasphemous and could be prosecuted by the Inquisition. Confraternities were not just licit; the church encouraged them as a way to integrate colonial residents into the mainstream religious life of the colony. Although witchcraft and confraternity membership were seen as fundamentally different kinds of practices by colonial authorities, however, examining them together gives us an expansive sense of Afro-Mexican ideas and activities. First, although colonial authorities defined these practices as opposites, they were not separate in the minds of colonial residents; confraternity members might also be healers or go to healers. Second, and more importantly, 12 Konetzke, Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, pp. 287, 308, 402. 13 Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, pp. 82–83. 14 Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, pp. 85–103. 15 Ibid., pp. 83–84. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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the seemingly different examples of witchcraft practices and confraternity membership, existing at either end of a spectrum of licitness and orthodoxy, reveal similar core realities about Afro-Mexican life in Mexico City. Looking at witchcraft and confraternities we see that the urban environment allowed both practices to flourish and disseminate and that these practices both facilitated connections between Afro-Mexicans that might be read as representing group identities as well as connections with members of other social groups that might be read as mediating against a sense of Afro-Mexican identity. 2

Connecting and Identifying through Healing

Studying healing rituals in which Blacks and Mulattos were involved is a good way to comprehend how Afro-Mexicans occupied the city’s social structure and understood their place within it. Afro-Mexicans were central to healing rituals as both practitioners and consumers of curing practices. Although most Black and Mulatto healing practitioners bought their medicinal materials from Indigenous people, they then administered them to Afro-Mexican and Spanish patients and prescribed how they would be used. Because healing rituals could raise concerns about magic and demonic involvement, our information about such rituals comes from witchcraft cases adjudicated by the Mexican Inquisition. Inquisition records include denunciations of people accused of crimes, testimonies of witnesses, formal accusations, confessions, or other declarations by the accused, and sentences for those convicted of crimes. Although these records often recount exceptional events, especially in witchcraft accusations, they also reveal much about daily life and cultural practices. Urban residents believed that illness and misfortune could originate from within the physical realm, but they also believed that physical and psychic adversity could be caused by the ill will of other humans or spirits, by demonic possession, and by other causes that were not related to the physical body. Physical problems could be cured through rituals that engaged the supernatural realm, as could problems with social relationships, such as romantic liaisons or interactions with authority figures, such as slaveowners or supervisors. Healers used materials such as herbs, roots, and plants, the bones, hair, nails, body fluids, and body parts of humans and animals, and Christian images and prayers. These materials became effective only when prepared and handled properly, however; it was the rituals surrounding the use of these materials that made them powerful. The reason that healing rituals provide such insight into social relations is because people crossed social boundaries when health was concerned. One of the striking aspects resulting from the largely urban nature of Mexican slavery

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is that Afro-Mexicans were well-integrated into viceregal society in the ­capital and other cities. Witchcraft cases make it clear that Afro-Mexicans formed relationships with people who differed from them in terms of class, race, and ethnicity. Spaniards in particular consulted Afro-Mexicans in times of need and entrusted their bodies to these practitioners. A case in point: in 1618, a Mulatto woman named Ana de Pinto treated the Spanish alguacil (constable) Bartolomé Ruiz when he was ill by applying poultices, preparing and prescribing drinks, and sewing a small bag embroidered with a cross into his shirt. She also “made the sign of the cross over the chest and ears of the sick man, at the same time making crosses everywhere in the name of the Holy Trinity, God the father, God the son, and God the holy spirit”, while murmuring words that witnesses could not decipher.16 Bartolomé had obediently submitted to her cures, apparently without questioning them, even when an Indigenous observer speculated that the drinks that she prescribed contained peyote, a hallucinogen associated with Indigenous rituals and prohibited by Inquisitorial edicts.17 In fact, when Ana had asked Ruiz if he would drink what she gave him, Bartolomé responded “that to have health there was nothing that he would not take”.18 Even when testifying before the Inquisition, Ruiz claimed that he had welcomed Ana de Pinto’s treatments. The Pinto case demonstrates that Spaniards entrusted their bodies to Afro-Mexican curers in the same way that they entrusted their lives to the Afro-Mexican cooks and wet nurses that worked in their houses. The presence of the Indigenous witness reminds us also that members of all groups came together in these moments and in the course of daily life more generally. Many other cases of Spaniards consulting Afro-Mexicans appear in the Inquisitorial files for Mexico City. For example, in 1627, a woman, presumably Spanish, testified that years before she had known a Mulata midwife who had put brooms in the windows of a house to protect a newborn and a mother.19 In 1633, a Spanish woman testified that her Black servant had brought her to consult a Black female ventriloquist (una negra que decian que hablaba por el pecho) to help her divine the location of the diamond.20 When Spaniards were in trouble they turned to Afro-Mexicans for help, at times forming emotional ties in the process. Of course, they also formed less positive ties: the reason 16 17 18 19 20

Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Inquisición 318.9, 1618, 468v–469. The Inquisition had circulated the first edict against the use of hallucinogens the year before (in 1617) and continued to issue many others during the colonial period. See Quezada, “The Inquisition’s Repression of Curanderos”, p. 38. AGN, Inquisición 318.9, 1618, p. 470v. AGN, Inquisición 360.55, 1627, pp. 159–161. AGN, Inquisición 373.20, 1633, pp. 183–184v.

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we have this information is because the curers’ activities raised suspicions in their patients or in the patients’ family members. Yet, overall these cases show Afro-Mexicans’ high degree of integration in viceregal urban society, as well as the high degree of trust that colonial residents placed in non-European forms of healing. Witchcraft cases also reveal that Blacks and Mulattos formed direct, unmediated relationships with each other through these same curing practices. As with the example of marriage witnesses drawn from throughout the city, discussed above, Afro-Mexican clients seem to have consulted specialists outside of their social group, turning to people of different social standing in stratified Mexico City. We see this particularly in cases where Blacks and Mulattos dealt with issues of slavery and servitude. For example, an enslaved Mulatta named Lucia living in Mexico City in 1600 was “very afflicted” by her owner (although the specific treatment is not explained) and consulted with another slave, Juana, identified as a negra, about how to remedy her situation. Juana gave or sold Lucia a special stick to carry in her blouse, claiming that it would make Lucia’s owner more reasonable. A short time after Lucia’s owners sold her, which Lucia presented to the Inquisition as a positive event, although she admitted that she was not sure that this happened because of Juana’s treatment or because she had run away from her owners for a period of four months.21 We see a similar attempt to control an owner in 1632, when a young Black slave named Francisco bought a root from an older Black man also named Francisco. The elder Francisco advised the younger to chew the root and apply his root-infused saliva on his face. When the case went to the Inquisition, witnesses were divided about whether the young man wished to make his owner treat him better or whether he wanted his owner to sell him.22 It is striking that these were very similar techniques to those used in cases of love magic more generally. Love magic was used to control the behavior and emotions of other people, whether the object was an adulterous husband or the object of infatuation. The rituals that slaves used on their owners were similar to love magic in terms of goals (changing another person’s behavior and feelings) and methods (the use of the stick and roots on one’s own body). The use of love magic on enslavers provides us with another example of how Afro-Mexican slaves and servants adapted commonly accepted practices to their own circumstances.23 For our purposes, it is notable that in both cases when enslaved people needed help with issues of servitude they consulted 21 AGN, Inquisición 254.103, 1600, pp. 248r–249r. 22 AGN, Inquisición 376.17, 1632, pp. 87, 89. 23 Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches, pp. 167–170.

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with fellow enslaved Afro-Mexicans. They also went to Black healers for other problems. In 1678, a free Mulatta named Inés treated the son of a Black slave named Matías de Cañas in Mexico City by applying a poultice, administering an enema, and finally placing two eggs in a bowl of water and then placing it under the boy’s bed. When she returned the next day and examined them she claimed that he was sick because an ill-wisher had given him the evil eye.24 Although these cases reveal the networks that Afro-Mexicans formed to deal with the struggles of servitude, they also reveal their integration into viceregal cultural life: this kind of divination was likely based on medieval European techniques in which the image of the witch causing the problem became embossed on the egg.25 Finally, witchcraft cases reveal Spanish fears toward Afro-Mexicans and give us a sense of Spanish anxiety about maintaining authority over the urban and colonial population, especially when sharing their homes with Afro-Mexican and Indigenous slaves and servants. The fear of the home being invaded is clear in the 1659 declaration of a Spanish cleric, Bachiller Antonio Escudero de Rosas, against his father’s Black Creole slave, Cristóbal.26 The cleric claimed that Cristóbal had summoned a duende, or spirit, that caused havoc in the house. Stones were thrown at the house, the family heard strange noises, and silver basins for holding holy water, one decorated with an image of Jesus and the other with a cross, disappeared. It became so unbearable that the family had to vacate the premises and apply for licenses to celebrate masses in the house to exorcise the spirit. Although the problems stopped for a while, they started again when Cristóbal was sent to serve in a textile workshop as punishment for stealing. Rosas testified that the family’s image of San Diego was erased from the canvas on which it was painted. The cleric also testified that Cristóbal drank concoctions of herbs and powders with no ill results, but that when another enslaved person consumed them, he became very sick, and Cristóbal had to cure him. On one level, this accusation represents an individual’s fears that his family was harboring a powerful evil force in their home—a slave who could summon a duende, steal from them, and make them ill. On another level, it reflects larger Spanish fears about loss of authority and position. Rosas claimed that Cristóbal attacked the Christian authority (the duende attacked and eradicated religious objects) that formed the basis of Spanish claims to authority. The cleric also claimed that Cristóbal literally displaced his enslavers, since 24 25 26

AGN, Inquisición 520.10, 1678, pp. 16–17v. Aguirre Beltrán, Medicina y magia, p. 179. AGN, Inquisición 444.4, 1659.

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the duende had driven them from their house. This mirrored Spanish fears that their subordinates would try to oust Spaniards from their positions of power. Such accusations remind us that although Mexico City was the center of Spanish viceregal power, the authority that Spaniards had was somewhat contingent on the behavior of the other inhabitants of the city. 3

Church-Based Practices and Networks

Like the unorthodox healing rituals sometimes defined as witchcraft by the church, church-based religious rituals also facilitated the growth of African-based and Afro-Mexican identities on the one hand and helped Blacks and Mulattos integrate into viceregal society on the other. Like other urban residents, Afro-Mexicans participated in the Christian life of the colony in the private space of their homes, in the public spaces of churches, and in the semi-public space of confraternities, organizations of lay people devoted to a particular saint that also served as mutual aid societies. Yet, these ritual spaces, particularly confraternities, also allowed them to form groups based on specifically African or Afro-Mexican identities. Cristina Cruz González’ article in this volume provides a wonderful example of this process through the discussion of the Black confraternity of San Benito de Palermo, also mentioned below. One way that Mexico City’s Afro-Mexicans expressed their Christian identities, as well as their material successes in some cases, was through bequests made in their wills. In 1693, José del Valle (pardo, or brown-skinned) stipulated that if his heir predeceased him, his goods and money would go to a confraternity in the convent of San Agustín of Mexico City, of which he was a member.27 Valle also planned to leave the substantial sum of 100 pesos with his confessor to distribute among the poor and left money for 100 masses to be said for his soul.28 Teresa de Losada, a former slave who worked as a moneylender, left money for 50 masses in her 1690 will. She also left gold and pearl jewelry to adorn the image of the virgin in the hospital of San Lázaro, where the Afro-Mexican Merced confraternity was located.29 Wills also give us a sense of the religious objects that Blacks and Mulattos possessed. Teresa de Losada owned an image of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, as well as images of Saints Anthony, Joseph, Juan, and Teresa, Cayetano, and Our Lady of the 27 28 29

Archivo General de Notarías (hereafter AN), vol. 1315, notary Juan Díaz de Rivera (199), 1693, 6. AN, vol. 1315, notary Juan Díaz de Rivera (199), 1693, p. 6. AN, vol. 776, notary José de Castro (119), 1690, p. 38.

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Assumption.30 These objects indicate that in her religious practice she identified with the mainstream of novohispano society. These were popular saints— for example, Saint Joseph, father of Jesus, became the patron saint of Mexico in 1555 and of Spain in 1679. The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception had a wide following, and in the 18th century was named patron saint of Spain’s territories.31 Saint Cayetano, canonized in 1671, only a short time before Losada made her will, was active in the Catholic Counter-Reformation of the 16th century and in the fight against the spread of Protestantism, a project very dear to the hearts of the Spanish monarchy, although more in the 16th century than the in 17th century.32 In possessing these images, Teresa may have been expressing her identity as a resident of New Spain whose religious devotion and spiritual beliefs were integrated with those of other members of that society. Like Valle and Losada, when the Parda fruit vendor María de la Concepción made her will in 1678, she chose to leave a significant part of her property to religious institutions, instructing that her slave be sold to the highest bidder and that the proceeds from the sale be given to the chapel of Our Lady of the Solitude in the cathedral of Mexico, where she also wanted to be buried. She wanted her money to be used to ornament the chapel and the image of the virgin “because of the devotion that I have for her”.33 Concepción also gave pearl bracelets, whose worth she calculated at about 240 pesos, as alms to adorn the statue of the virgin in the chapel of the church of the Holy Trinity of Mexico. She bequeathed a picture of San Felipe de Jesús to the church of the nuns of Jesús María de México, and another picture of Our Lady of the Solitude to the church of Our Lady of the Affliction. Finally, she left 100 pesos to her confessor to distribute among the poor, although she did not have enough money for masses to be said to speed her soul through purgatory.34 Mateo de la Cruz was a free mulato prieto, or dark Mulatto, who had only been freed the year before writing his will in 1682. He claimed that his worldly possessions consisted of some aged cheese, a cross, and a few pounds of steel. However, he could rely on the several confraternities of which he was a member to bury him and planned to leave 20 pesos to the image of Our Lady of the Rosary in the college of the Dominicans.35 Josepha de la Cruz, a Mulatto woman who also claimed that she was too poor to pay for masses after her death, arranged 30 31 32 33 34 35

AN, vol. 776, notary José de Castro (119), 1690, p. 38v. Catholic Encyclopedia on-line edition, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07674d.htm. Catholic Encyclopedia on-line edition, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03145a.htm. AN, vol. 2200, notary Jiménez de Siles (326), 1678, p. 15. The Virgin of Solitude is the patron saint of Oaxaca. AN, vol. 2200, notary Jiménez de Siles (326), 1678, p. 15v. AN, vol. 1453, notary Tomas Fernández de Guevara (229), 1690, pp. 170v–172.

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for her burial to be paid for by the several confraternities of which she was a member. Although she was poor, her 1685 will listed, besides basic household items, pictures of different saints, an image of Nuestra Señora de la Limpieza Concepción, a small Christ figure, and some engravings.36 The religious objects that these Afro-Mexicans owned, as well as the money they left for masses, reflects an important aspect of Afro-Mexican life in the capital: many Blacks and Mulattos were devout Catholics who practiced their religion in similar ways as other viceregal residents. We see this Catholic devotion reflected in confraternity membership, mentioned in several of the wills discussed above. These organizations of lay people devoted to a particular saint encouraged the development of individual devotion and acts of piety and also served as mutual aid societies: members paid dues and collected alms to finance religious festivals, maintain chapels and religious images, and ensure that members received proper burials and funeral services when they died.37 Confraternities were formed on the basis of common employment, class, neighborhood, ethnicity, and phenotype. Mexico City had a number of confraternities composed of Africans and their descendants beginning as early as the 16th century.38 Such Afro-Mexican confraternities often provided the only legal meeting place for their members, since Blacks and Mulattos were repeatedly forbidden from gathering in large groups. In 1612, Afro-Mexicans in the capital were prohibited from gathering together for any reason, with this injunction repeated in 1622.39 In 1623, however, a prohibition specifically targeted confraternities while also tacitly acknowledging their right to exist: the government ordered that confraternities of Blacks and Mulattos in Mexico City were not allowed to participate in public processions. This indicates that they were still meeting despite the ban against Afro-­Mexican gatherings.40 We will see below that the fears of Afro-Mexican subversion arising in confraternities was largely unfounded but powerfully frightening for Spaniards in the capital. As with the healing practices discussed above, confraternities encouraged both integration into urban life as well as the creation of separate identities in Mexico City’s Black and Mulatto population. Afro-Mexicans belonged to mixed confraternities in addition to specifically Afro-Mexican groups. Membership 36 37 38 39 40

AN, vol. 3369, notary Marcos Pacheco de Figueroa (499), 1685, pp. 64r–65r. Lavrin, “Cofradías novohispanas”, p. 49. Velásquez Gutiérrez, Mujeres de origen africáno, p. 171. See von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, for a longer discussion of these confraternities. AGN, Ordenanzas, 22 April 1622, vol. 4, exp. 40, 40v. AGN, Ordenanzas, 22 May 1623, vol. 4, exp. 61, 60.

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in Afro-Mexican and other confraternities bound their members to colonial society by encouraging them to value saints’ images and Christian practices. Afro-Mexican confraternities also provided a means to create collective identities: saints that were seen as Black or had African connotations were especially popular among Afro-Mexicans. These included the Ethiopian Saint Iphigenia and the Sicilian Saint Benito who prayed to become darker-complexioned in order to prove his pious devotion to God.41 Mexico City had a number of confraternities composed of Africans and their descendants. The Cofradía de los Morenos de San Benito (the Confraternity of Colored People of Saint Benito) of Mexico City was authorized in a 1599 papal bull.42 It was located in the Convent of Santa María la Redonda and moved to the Convent of San Francisco of Mexico in 1633. The members celebrated the feast day of San Benito on the last Sunday of the month of October and had their procession on Holy Wednesday. They paid half a Spanish real every week in dues, and a peso to maintain the Holy Wednesday procession, and they provided medical help for sick members and ten pesos to help offset the cost of burying members when they died.43 The members of the Afro-Mexican confraternity of the Merced celebrated the feast day of San Roque and in the 1650s, this celebration was funded by a patroness who had bequeathed to them 50 pesos. To celebrate the saint’s day, they fed six poor residents of the hospital regardless of their caste position.44 In the 18th century this confraternity was located in the Jesuit church in Mexico City.45 Others were founded in the early 18th century. A 1706 description of the city lists a Cofradía de la Preciossa Sangre de Cristo Señor Nuestro, and a Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, both founded by Blacks and Mulattos.46 In 1711, Pope Pius V authorized the establishment of a confraternity of morenos and morenas called the Derramamiento de la sangre de christo, y de la Virgen María in the church of Santo Domingo in Mexico City.47 The document mandated that the confraternity would be obliged to support a doctor, pharmacist, and surgeon, and provide ten pesos for their burials. Each brother or sister had to pay four reales to purchase wax each year. These examples underscore the way that confraternities provided a sense of collective support to their members by helping them with Christian burials and other financial matters, while 41 Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, pp. 24–30. 42 It was originally called the Coronación de Christo Nuestro Señor, y San Benito. See Vetancurt, Teatro Mexicano, p. 36. 43 Ibid. 44 AGN, Inquisición 458.21 1659, p. 236v. 45 AGN, Bienes Nacionales vol. 574, 1706, p. 3v. 46 AGN, Bienes Nacionales vol. 574, 1706, México, p. 3–3v. 47 AGN, Inquisición 751.2 1711, pp. 611–611v.

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also ensuring their participation in the church-sanctioned religious life of the city. Specifically, Afro-Mexican confraternities allowed Blacks and Mulattos to create collective identities through collective means of support and provided their members with a limited sense of self-determination, albeit one mediated by the required presence of Spanish clerics and officials at their meetings and on their governing boards. These Catholic institutions provided Africans and their descendants a way to create a sense of identity within the restrictive social structure of New Spain. Yet, they also provide an example of the limits of that opportunity, as is shown by the descriptions below of the events of 1608–12 in Mexico City. 4

Spanish Anxieties and Limitations on Afro-Mexican Opportunities

Spaniards in Mexico City and elsewhere had long feared Afro-Mexicans as potential rebels and their confraternities as sites of potential insurrection. For example, in 1537, Mexico City Spaniards were rocked by a rumor that a group of Black slaves had chosen a king and enlisted Indigenous allies in a planned uprising and neighboring mining areas.48 There were at least two slave revolts in Mexico City in the 1540s and more in the mid- and late-16th century in other areas.49 The Spanish anxieties stoked by these events, whether real or imagined, gives context for the incidents discussed here. In 1608, a rumor swept through the city that Black residents, gathered for Easter, had crowned a king and queen.50 Most city dwellers were unfazed; the chronicler Juan de Torquemada called the story “foolish” and claimed that the viceroy and Audiencia members did not take it seriously.51 Nonetheless, several enslaved people were arrested and whipped publicly as an example of Spanish dominance.52 This act of punishment ended the rumors. However, when a different rumor surfaced 48

49 50

51 52

Quiñones Keber, Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript, p. 93; Mondragón Barrios, Esclavos africanos en la Ciudad de México, p. 62; and Davidson, “Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico, 1519–1650”, p. 90. Davidson claims that this plot was probably real. Davidson, “Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico, 1519–1650”, pp. 90–91; Mondragón Barrios, Esclavos africanos en la Ciudad de México, p. 63. Querol y Roso, Negros y mulatos de Nueva España, pp. 28–29. He includes a transcribed document, ms. 2.010, fols. 236 a 241, no. 168 from the Sección de Manuscritos de la Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid. It is a description of the uprising of 1612, written by an anonymous author and dedicated to Don Luis de Velasco, former viceroy of New Spain (1607–11), who was at that time the head of the Council of the Indies. Torquemada, Monarquía Indiana, p. 759. Ibid.

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a few years later about a conspiracy said to have begun in an Afro-Mexican confraternity, contemporaries were less dismissive. An anonymous account claimed that in 1611 more than 1500 members, both free and enslaved, of the Black Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de la Merced gathered to bury an enslaved Black woman who, they believed, had been killed by her owner.53 Confraternity members carried the body through the streets of the city for hours, parading past the Inquisition headquarters and the viceroy’s palace, and ended at the home of the dead woman’s enslaver, where protesters yelled threats and threw stones.54 Government officials investigated, imprisoned, whipped, and ultimately exiled the leaders, ordering their enslavers to sell them outside of the colony. Among those punished was an elderly enslaved man named Diego, one of the heads of the Confraternity of the Merced.55 This was not the end of the story, however. According to the anonymous Spanish source, the city’s Blacks, led by the heads of the Merced confraternity, began to plan another uprising for Christmas of 1611, although it was postponed when troops on their way to the Philippines stopped in the capital. Then, in the spring of 1612, one of the Merced confraternity leaders died and the group held a funeral. During the burial, according to the anonymous source, “many Blacks gathered with ceremonies and barbaric rites used in their nation”.56 They anointed the body and the gravesite with wine and oil and threw in one of their members. Wine and earth were showered over the man until, according to the account, he arose with a weapon in his hand. According to the author, this was a ritualized act that symbolized insurrection. The descriptions of the funeral emphasized the wildness and primitivism associated with Africans and their descendants in a way that evokes European descriptions of African burials, in which traders and missionaries in Africa not only described Africans as savage but also claimed that their customs of singing and dancing at graves were evidence of their stupidity and lack of seriousness.57 Peeling back the overlay of Spanish judgment, however, it is worth noting that these rituals are reminiscent of rites from West and West Central Africa where mourners gathered at 53

Querol y Roso, Negros y mulatos de Nueva España, p. 29. María Elena Martínez suggests that the anonymous Spanish author may have been Dr. Luis López de Azoca, a criminal judge who investigated the 1608 events and who urged that the importation of Africans into New Spain be stopped in order to prevent further disturbances. Thus, he may have exaggerated the size and nature of the conspiracy, or even made it up, in order to press home his point. See Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain”, pp. 498–499 and 507–513. 54 Querol y Roso, Negros y mulatos de Nueva España, p. 29. 55 Ibid., p. 29–30. 56 Ibid., p. 30. 57 Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, p. 119; Barbot, Barbot on Guinea, p. 639.

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gravesites to sing, make animal sacrifices, and pour palm wine on the grave in order to ensure that the spirit of the dead person would stay at rest.58 The rituals may also have had some connection to war preparations; in West Africa, warriors made animal sacrifices and poured palm wine over the sacrificed bodies.59 After the burial, again according to the anonymous source, the confraternity members began planning the insurrection for Holy Thursday. Afro-Mexicans from outside the city were supposed to gather weapons, and the city’s Black and Mulatto confraternities would fund the purchase of more arms.60 According to the Indigenous historian Chimalpahín’s Diario, the Afro-Mexican rebels planned to elect a Black king and a mulata morisca (light-skinned female Mulatto) as queen and intended to enslave the colony’s Indigenous residents, branding them on the cheek to indicate their mastery over them.61 Spaniards would all be killed, except for the most beautiful Spanish women who would become the rebels’ brides. Chimalpahín claimed that any male children born of unions between Afro-Mexican men and Spanish women would be killed, so they could not take revenge for their Spanish forebears. Female children of these unions would be raised to partner with Black men, and so, Chimalpahín claimed, “in this fashion their seed, generation and descent would return [to be born] Black”.62 According to Chimalpahín, Spanish women were to be taken out of convents and Black women put in their place. Male clerics would be killed, except for members of Discalced Carmelites, the Discalced of San Diego, and the Jesuits. After castration, these friars would be saved for teaching children. Historian María Elena Martínez points out that this new order, as described by Chimalpahín, did not represent an overturning of the Spanish system. Instead, “What they were essentially accused of plotting to create was their own version (or inversion) of the sistema de castas, the colonial hierarchical system of classification that was based on proportions of Spanish, native, and Black blood”.63 Afro-Mexicans would take the place of Spaniards but the Spanish ideologies of gender, difference, religion, and social hierarchy would remain intact. If Chimalpahín’s version of the planned conspiracy were accurate, this would indicate the degree to which these Africans and descendants had assimilated Spanish culture and social values. If his version were not true, this gruesome tale represents elite fears in a vivid and compelling manner—surrounded by 58 Cavazzi, Descrição Histórica, 124; Battel, The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battel, pp. 34–35; and Almada, Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea, pp. 35–36. 59 Álvares, Ethiopia Minor, p. 10. 60 Querol y Roso, Negros y mulatos de Nueva España, p. 31. 61 Chimalpahín, Diario, p. 289. 62 Ibid., p. 291. 63 Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain”, pp. 482–483.

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Afro-Mexicans and other non-white groups Spaniards believed themselves under siege, at risk of losing their privileges and their lives. According to the anonymous account, the plans fell apart when two Portuguese slave traders, who understood the “language of Angola”, probably Kimbundu, overheard talk about the plan and informed the authorities, who also received a similar report from a cleric.64 The Audiencia suspended the Holy Week processions and closed the churches in the city and nearby on Holy Thursday.65 After an investigation, nine gallows were set up in the city center, and the leaders of the alleged aborted insurrection, between 30 and 40 people, were hanged on 2 May 1612. The cadavers were on display the following day, when the bodies were taken down, but the heads remained on pikes. Six of the cadavers were quartered, and the remaining prisoners were exiled. The colonial government dissolved the Afro-Mexican confraternities and reiterated the existing prohibition on Afro-Mexicans from carrying arms. Blacks and Mulattos were not allowed to gather for any reason, whether for dances, burials, or parties. In 1623, the crown sent an ordinance regulating confraternities of Blacks and Mulattos in Mexico City, suggesting that even if they had been dissolved after 1612, they reformed quickly.66 After 1612, the government also ordered that no free Black would be without work (it is not clear if this extended to women as well as men). Blacks and Mulattos were prohibited from using luxury items and from wearing silks and jewels.67 Finally, after 1612, the colonial authorities established two companies of soldiers in Mexico City to protect its residents as well as the public buildings, including the prison and the gunpowder magazine.68 Although it seems likely that the conspiracy did not happen or was exaggerated in the minds of its chroniclers, it does reflect Spaniards’ fears of insurrection and their keen awareness that demographically they were a minority in the city and that their authority had to be carefully maintained in the face of an oppressed majority. 5 Conclusion New Spain’s Black and Mulatto population was largely urban and as such many lived in Mexico City the viceroyalty’s biggest and most important city. One could find free and enslaved Blacks and Mulattos in every part of 64 Querol y Roso, Negros y mulatos de Nueva España, p.15. 65 Vetancurt, Teatro Mexicano, p. 217; Chimalpahín, Diario, pp. 281–289. 66 AGN, Ordenanzas, 22 May 1623, vol. 4, exp. 61, p. 60. 67 AGN, Ordenanzas, 2 April 1612, vol. 1, exp. 164, p. 146. 68 Querol y Roso, Negros y mulatos de Nueva España, p. 20.

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the capital: elite areas and poor neighborhoods, public churches and private homes, ­marketplaces, and religious and civic processions. In these urban spaces, Blacks and Mulattos formed relationship with each other and with members of other social groups. These relationships were at times harmonious and friendly and at other times filled with enmity and discord. There was something special about the urban setting as well, however, particularly in terms of the opportunities and ­limitations that Afro-Mexicans living in the diverse and densely populated city experienced. Afro-Mexicans formed relationships with each other and members of other groups in official confraternities and in informal neighborhood settings where they shared information about healing. The examples discussed here show that Blacks and Mulattos were integrated into the life of the city. Yet, in times of heightened anxiety some Spaniards saw Blacks and Mulattos as a separate group, one that threatened Spanish rule and revealed the degree to which imperial rule relied on the activities of subject people. The examples discussed in this chapter demonstrate that Blacks and Mulattos were crucial to the city’s functioning, that they helped define the city’s character, and that the history of Mexico City and the Afro-Mexican population is inextricably linked. Bibliography

Primary Sources

Almada, A., Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea (c.1594), trans. P. Hair, Liverpool, 1984. Álvares, M., Ethiopia Minor and a Geographical Account of the Province of Sierra Leone (c.1615), trans. P. Hair, Liverpool, 1990. Barbot, J., Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa 1678–1712, P. Hair, A. Jones, and R. Law (eds.), 2 vols., London, 1992. Battel, A., The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battel of Leigh, in Angola and the Adjoining Regions, ed. E. Ravenstein, Lichtenstein, 1967. Bosman, W., A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, Divided into the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts, London, 1705. Cavazzi de Montecúccolo, J., Descrição Histórica dos Tres Reinos do Congo, Matamba e Angola Agrupamento de Estudios de Cartografia Antiga, Seccão de Lisboa Publicacões, 2 vols., trans. G. Leguzzano, Lisbon, 1965. Chimalpahín, D., Diario, trans. R. Tena, Mexico City, 2001. Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript, E. Quiñones Keber (ed.), Austin, 1995. Gemelli Careri, G., Viaje a Nueva España, F. Perujo (ed.), Mexico City, 1976.

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Konetzke, R. (ed.), Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica 1493–1810, vol. 2, Madrid, 1953–1958. Querol y Roso, L., Negros y mulatos de Nueva España (Historia de su alzamiento en Méjico en 1612), Valencia, 1935. Torquemada, J., Monarquía Indiana, Mexico City, 1615 (repr. Mexico City, 1969). Vetancurt, A., Teatro Mexicano, Mexico City, 1698.



Secondary Literature

Aguirre Beltrán, G., La población negra de México, Mexico City, 1946 (repr. Mexico City, 1989). Aguirre Beltrán, G., Medicina y magia en México, Mexico City, 1963 (repr. Mexico City, 1992). Behar, R., “Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in Late Colonial Mexico”, American Ethnologist 14 (1987), pp. 34–54. Bennett, H., Africans in Colonial Mexico, Bloomington, 2005. Bristol, J.C., “‘Although I am Black, I am Beautiful’: Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, Black Carmelite of Puebla”, in N. Jaffary (ed.), Gender, Race, and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas, Burlington, 2007, pp. 67–79. Bristol, J.C., Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century, Albuquerque, 2007. Cope, R., The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720, Madison, 1994. Curtin, P., The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, Madison, 1969. Davidson, D., “Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico, 1519–1650”, in R. Price (ed.), Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, Baltimore, 1979, pp. 82–103. Eltis, D. and Richardson, P., “The ‘Numbers Game’ and Routes to Slavery”, in D. Eltis and P. Richardson (eds.), Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity, and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, London, 1997, pp. 1–14. Germeten, N. von, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans, Gainesville, 2006. Lavrin, A., “Cofradías novohispanas: economías material y espiritual”, in P. Martínez López-Cano, G. Wobeser, and J. Muñoz (eds.), Cofradías, Capellanías y Obras Pías, Mexico City, 1988, pp. 49–64. Martínez, M., “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico”, The William and Mary Quarterly 61 (2004), pp. 479–520. Mondragón Barrios, L., Esclavos africanos en la ciudad de México: El servicio doméstico durante el siglo XVI, Mexico City, 1999.

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Ngou-Mve, N., El África Bantu en la colonización de México, Madrid, 1994. Palmer, C., Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650, Cambridge, 1976. Quezada, N., “The Inquisition’s Repression of Curanderos”, in M. Perry and A. Cruz (eds.), Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, Berkeley, 1991. Quezada, N., Sexualidad, Amor, y Eroticismo: México Prehispánico y México Colonial, Mexico City, 1996. Velásquez, M., Mujeres de origen africáno en la capital novohispana, siglos XVII y XVIII, Mexico City, 2006.

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CHAPTER 4

Of Pleasures and Proscriptions

Or How Residents of Mexico City Negotiated Gender and Family Norms Sonya Lipsett-Rivera In a 1531 treatise on family life, the Franciscan friar Francisco de Osuna wrote that when people of faith heard that a woman was giving birth, they should send someone to the closest church to ring the bell nine times. Hearing this sound, city residents and neighbors would then pray nine Ave Marías to help the mother in childbirth and to welcome the child into the Christian community.1 Whether or not inhabitants of Mexico City put this tradition into practice, Osuna’s recommendation highlighted the way people received and then influenced those born in their midst. Every child in Mexico City entered into a household and a family that would guide their sense of place and identity within the larger community. It was within these early surroundings that young people learned what it meant to be a boy or a girl—their paths began to diverge as they ventured outside their homes, and they embraced their station in life. As a setting, Mexico City provided many sights, sounds, and places where they could explore, meet others and eventually form a family. This process, however, was not always straightforward; many individuals did not follow the models sanctioned by church and state. People lived according to community standards and accepted considerable deviations from the norm. The household into which a child was born into marked their lives as residents of Mexico City; some were born into wealth and station within the mansions adjacent the Zócalo, but even within these houses, children could be received into families of the enslaved or servants. Ideas about gender as well as the prevailing norms for courtship, seduction, and marriage guided them all into maturity. Yet, although religious and secular tenets and even laws governed these trajectories, community standards and norms were often much looser. Therefore, in order to gain an understanding of gender and family in Mexico City, the tension between official norms and actual practices must be explored. As boys and girls grew up, they took on the trappings of their gender roles—clothes, attitudes, and work—and they moved along the path set out for them. They circulated within Mexico City’s many social venues—either the 1 Osuna, Norte de los estados, p. 109. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004335578_006 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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bullfights that the wealthy attended with the viceroy or the fandangos of the poor—and they walked in the parks and along the canal banks in a dance of courtship that transcended their rank. These occasions and locations allowed for men to court and seduce women and engage in passionate, often illicit relationships. Despite the watchful eyes of community members and authorities and the reiteration of rules governing the formation of families, residents had their own norms and ideas about what constituted a family. Mexico City was a highly diverse place with a huge range of attractions and diversions; within in its boundaries, men and women grew into their roles to form their families. 1

Birth and Childhood

Children in Mexico City were born not just into families but also traditions. Before the conquest, one of the rituals to greet a newborn was to take their umbilical cord and bury it in a place appropriate to their gender—for boys, the battlefield, and for girls, a corner of the household compound. Such customs could not continue, at least openly, under the onslaught of Christianization, but midwives still treated umbilical cords with care, interring them to protect newborns from the evil eye.2 This tradition shows how complex social norms were despite the prevailing official Catholicism; different ethnic and racial groups brought elements of practice from their own backgrounds into the cultural brew that was Mexico City (see Bristol, this volume). Although Spanish law and official religious doctrines regulated family and domestic life, in reality, families lived according to their own norms within certain thresholds of tolerance.3 The families and neighborhoods into which children were delivered shaped their views on gender and family. While people in New Spain cherished their children not all were fortunate; born to poor mothers or outside of wedlock, some were abandoned. Panics over the treatment of abandoned babies led to the establishment of a foundling homes.4 Others went to live in convents or monasteries at very young ages, and thus, the nuns and monks became their surrogate families.5 Many residents contributed to these and other charities to support orphans, while 2 Rubial García, La plaza, el palacio y el convento, p. 104. Rubial García writes that all ethnicities shared this belief. 3 Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Vivir en Nueva España, p. 283. 4 Gonzalbo Aizpuru, “La Casa de niños expósitos de la ciudad de México”, pp. 409–430; Jiménez Martínez, “¿Somos de la basura?”, pp. 169–179. 5 Rubial García, Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos, p. 199; Lavrin, “Masculine and Feminine”, p. 6.

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others adopted waifs informally either as family members or as servants.6 The destinies of children who came into the world in Mexico City thus varied greatly depending on whether they were born within the central district called the traza or the outlying indigenous neighborhoods. In their first stage of life, boys and girls were part of a tight-knit domestic and highly feminine world; they were breastfed by their mothers or wet nurses. In New Spain, wet nurses lived with the family, so babies did not generally leave their families.7 They were kept close to home in these first years; it was acceptable for boys and girls to play and interact within the domestic setting, and gender norms were not as strictly enforced, as they were later at the end of the infancy period.8 During this period, mothers took charge of the moral formation of their offspring—a role which was taken for granted until the 18th century, when, harnessing prevailing ideas, women began to demand recognition of their social contribution as mothers.9 When boys began to follow their fathers and thus leave the home, their paths started to diverge from that of their sisters: gender norms dictated a male engagement with the outside world for men and a greater enclosure for women who, by and large, had to remain as much as possible indoors. As boys and girls grew and matured, they learned their gender roles in ways that depended on their families’ means and status. Respectability within the gender norms meant attitudes of humility and control. Girls had to learn to walk without skipping or swaying their hips, keeping their eyes to themselves in a downward gaze. Boys needed to toughen up for the hard work that was ahead of them but also, at the same time, learn to bow and doff their hats in acts of deference to those above them in the social hierarchy.10 Girls were ideally supposed to remain for the most part in the home as part of the notion of recogimiento or enclosure—the idea that a woman’s purity could be ensured by keeping her secluded. Nevertheless, families of lesser means needed to send all their children on errands and small tasks. If they had the resources, parents enrolled their sons and daughters in an informal type of schooling called the amigas (see González González, this volume). Often described as more of 6 Kanter, Hijos del Pueblo, pp. 61–62; Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, p. 78. 7 Despite the urgings of moral authorities, many mothers used wet nurses instead of breastfeeding themselves. See: Cerda, Libro intitulado vida política de todos los estados de mugeres, p. 1; Galindo, Parte segunda del directorio de Penitentes, p. 156; Sánchez, El Padre de familias, pp. 174–176, 185; Rossell, La educación conforme a los principios, pp. 64–65; and Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Vivir en Nueva España, p. 115. 8 Rossell, La educación conforme a los principios, pp. 51–53; Shelton, For Tranquility and Order, p. 119. 9 Lipsett-Rivera, “Marriage and Family Relations in Mexico”, pp. 121–148. 10 Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life, p. 149.

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a child-minding service than educational, the women who ran these schools inculcated rudimentary training, catechism, and proper behavior to both sexes from the age of three to about five or seven.11 After this stage, boys left for other educational establishments or to enter into an apprenticeship, which would allow them to learn a trade.12 Beyond these early years, girls learned womanly skills such as sewing, weaving, embroidery and although they were often taught to read, they were rarely instructed in writing. To a great extent, education for girls was limited and their training was completed in the home.13 These were children born into families of some means—more often the young from families of lesser means in Mexico City were not able to attend schools and instead learned skills from their families or in the streets. The young had to learn their place in society and within their domestic contexts; this meant that they had to pick up the proper subservience and respect for their elders and social superiors. At the time, people found it shocking conduct for the young to be disrespectful, and so, from a young age, they had to pick up the language, both verbal and bodily, of deference and subservience.14 The influential writer on morals and manners, Don Juan de Escoiquiz, wrote that: “After God, there is no greater obligation than to our parents”.15 In the 18th century, some parents denounced sons who did not live up to the social standards; among their accusations of womanizing, gambling, drinking to excess, and dishonesty was an undercurrent of despair at their offspring’s lack of respect and their failure to live up to expectations.16 These young men tainted family honor not just by their behavior but because their rebelliousness highlighted the failure of parental discipline. Their guardians explained at length their efforts to educate their sons with blows and other types of punishments; by recounting these corrective strategies they presented themselves as good parents and their offspring as incorrigible. Girls were also expected to learn deference with particular submission to men either as parents, patriarchs, and later husbands. Respect for elders and deference were values that cut across racial and ethnic lines in Mexico City but indigenous parents found disturbing the Hispanic ­tendency to harsh attitudes towards children. They embraced a milder and 11

Thompson, “Children and Schooling”, p. 37; Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Vivir en Nueva España, p. 119; Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, pp. 17–18; and Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Historia de la educación, p. 39. 12 Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Vivir en Nueva España, p. 119; Carrera Stampa, Los gremios mexicanos; and Pérez Toledo, Los Hijos del trabajo. 13 Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Vivir en Nueva España, p. 120. 14 Kanter, Hijos del Pueblo, p. 58. 15 Escoiquiz, Tratado de las Obligaciones del Hombre, p. 91. 16 Cáceres Menéndez and Patch, “Gente de mal vivir”, pp. 363–391.

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more tolerant attitude with less emphasis on corporal punishment.17 Legally, young men reached adulthood at 25, whereas women simply transferred their status as dependents to other men at the time of marriage.18 Despite these gender differences, both men and women, even at maturity, had learned behaviors of respect and sometimes submission that followed them into adulthood. For those growing up in Mexico City, however, childhood was not all grimness and rules. These boys and girls experienced the gaiety of processions and festivals that punctuated the religious calendar of New Spain. Celebrations for the various Saints’ Days and other major ecclesiastical dates were marked by serious processions, but these also included music, dances, costumes, and people wearing colossal heads, as well as allegorical carts, giants, dragons, and much more. The public who came out to see the processions usually included children (see Cruz González, this volume).19 For these and most other important events such as the king’s birthday, the city streets were decorated with tapestries and lights; at night, residents enjoyed elaborate fireworks.20 In the Alameda, children could watch puppet shows and boys engaged in much rough play such as moros y cristianos (Moors and Christians—probably a bit like cowboys and Indians). Children also played gallina ciega (blind man’s bluff), sang, and hunted the chickens or turkeys that freely roamed the city streets.21 Some of the most common toys of the period were blowpipes, kites, spinning tops, balls, lassos, swings, wooden swords, horns with which they mimicked cow herding, rattles, and hoops they used to blow soap bubbles. Many of these toys were imitations of tools used by adults—thus, children learned the roles they would take on later in life.22 Boys learned to embrace danger with games, such as playing with toy cannons and 17

Tanck de Estrada, “Muerte precoz”, pp. 213–246, points to the Nahua tradition of the huehuetlatolli or talks of the elders as a reason for embracing a gentler manner of setting children on the right path. See also Tanck de Estrada, Pueblos de Indios, p. 392. 18 Premo, Children of the Father King, p. 22. 19 Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals, pp. 28–29. 20 Robles, Diario de sucesos notables (1665–1703), vol. 1, pp. 72, 95; vol. 2, pp. 223–224, 229; and vol. 3, p. 184. 21 Rubial García, Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos, pp. 71, 73. Puppets had a long history in Mexico. Introduced by the Spanish, both missionaries and conquerors used them to communicate with the indigenous population. By the 18th century, puppeteers plied their craft in many spaces such as private houses, alleys, and parks and also went to cities and smaller communities all over Mexico. See Jurado Rojas, “Puppet Theater in Eighteenth-Century Mexico”, pp. 315–329. Puppet theatres of poor reputation congregated in the calle de Venero (now Mesones). See Vidal, “El pequeño teatro del mundo”, pp. 99–113; Tanck de Estrada, “Muerte precoz”, p. 224. 22 Tanck de Estrada, “Muerte precoz”, pp. 223–224. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, p. 68, comments on this trend.

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fight with cane swords.23 As they played and circulated in the city, children learned gender roles either from example, from games or from the images that surrounded them.24 As they matured and reached the next stage in their lives, Mexico City children already had absorbed the lessons of gender. 2

Courtship and Couples

Mexico City was full of places to meet, and because of its wonderful climate, people could circulate outdoors in comfort for most of the year. Although at the highest reaches of society arranged marriages were not uncommon, for most residents, courtship occurred in more informal manners. Young men and women undoubtedly often met in the course of their daily tasks, but there were also numerous ways to socialize in the evenings when, in a more informal setting, they could flirt and sweet talk each other into a relationship. There were formal procedures when romances advanced to marriage; these were laid out by the Catholic Church but were generally recognized and integrated into codes of seduction common within the population of this period. Despite official prohibitions, men and women of all ethnicities and classes resorted to magic in order to attract and seduce their love interests. Magic combined elements from all cultures; Afro-Mexican men, for example, used religious images along with herbs to attract women (see Bristol, this volume).25 People carried amulets imbued with love magic (often made from hummingbirds) in gendered manners; men wore them at their waists, whereas women displayed them in their cleavage or more discretely, in shoes or purses.26 Tattoos of male goats were supposed to make men good lovers and horsemen.27 As they circulated and socialized, men and women had gendered notions of attractiveness and thus they used different strategies within their social grouping to display themselves. Female strategies included the use of indecent colors such as red and purple and clothes of silk and velvet, as well as strategic padding, jewels, and high-heeled shoes.28 In contrast, men exuded their manliness through attire; swords or knives were fundamental parts of their ­accessories. Men of lesser means tended to wear bright colors, whereas wealthier men 23 24

González Obregón, La Vida de México en 1810, pp. 98–99. Villaseñor Black, Creating the Cult of St. Joseph; Loreto López, “Familial Religiosity and Images in the Home”, pp. 26–49. 25 Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches, p. 167. 26 Quezada, Sexualidad, amor y erotismo, p. 237. 27 Rubial García, Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos, p. 155. 28 Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation, p. 165.

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i­ mitated French fashion.29 In the late colonial period, men of means wore diamond brooches or jeweled hatpins.30 Riding horses was also associated with manliness, and thus men tried to show off their skills in the saddle.31 Of course, fashion choices were determined to a great extent by financial resources but also, to some extent, by ethnicity. Mexico City offered many venues and social occasions where men and women could deploy these seductive strategies. Among those of the upper crust these events were more formal and often part of the ceremonial agenda surrounding the viceroy. The wealthy and august attended bullfights as well as the elegant soirées called saraos. Those of lesser wealth and rank tended to meet in the places of less prestige, such as in markets, streets, taverns, and in tenements, but all residents had some version of the paseo or promenade. Men and women would circulate in the Alameda or along the banks of the many canals that crisscrossed the city; the wealthy did so in carriages and on horseback, while those of humbler means walked or rented boats that traveled on the canals.32 For Saints’ Days and festivals, some residents built altars at their doors and everyone went about at night to view them but also to socialize—a custom which ecclesiastical authorities denounced as coarse and lustful.33 Although the Church promoted strict modesty and discouraged flirtations, religious events indirectly provided moments when morals and rules were relaxed. During carnivals and other festivals, men and women relaxed their inhibitions, often putting on lavish costumes and cross-dressing.34 Mexico City inhabitants also used many occasions to organize masquerades in which they could go out at night in fancy dress, or in the evening when they inverted gender norms: men wore dresses and carried fans and spindles; women donned pants and lugged pistols and swords.35 These occasions provided a type of escape from the prevailing customs, but some residents refused to obey these rules outside of the carnivalesque atmosphere. In the 17th century, Inquisition officials prosecuted a group of men who dressed as women on a daily basis. 29 Rubial García, Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos, p. 56. 30 François, “Cloth and Silver”, pp. 325–362. 31 Quezada, Sexualidad, amor y erotismo, p. 238. 32 Rubial García, Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos, pp. 72, 112, 171–172; González Obregón, La Vida de México, pp. 86, 96; and Du Bron, “El Caballo en la sociedad virreinal”, p. 75. 33 Robles, Diario de sucesos notables, vol. 1, pp. 44, 47, 106, 130–131; vol. 2, p. 277; Fabián y Fuero, Colección de providencias diocesanas, pp. 451–452, Edict LIII. 34 Rubial García, La plaza, el palacio y el convento, pp. 62–63; Viqueira Albán, Propriety and Permissiveness, p. 104. 35 Robles, Diario de sucesos notables, vol. 1, pp. 29, 72, 87, 158, 205–206; vol. 2, pp. 224, 225; vol. 3, p. 129; Rubial García, Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos, p. 85; and Rubial García, La plaza, el palacio y el convento, p. 58.

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Described as “flashy transvestites”, for the most part, they had been overlooked by Mexico City residents until this point.36 Women who dressed in male attire were less frequent, but sometimes women might do so to hide, to arouse their lover, or to take on male roles.37 The diarist Antonio de Robles recounted that a mulata woman fought the bulls riding a horse seated like a man. He was very dismissive of her talents as a bullfighter and noted that, unlike the noble men who fought the bulls at this time, she did it for the money.38 Wherever couples met, according to moral codes, they were supposed to follow a path to marriage, but not everyone respected these rules. The act of betrothal, called esponsales was a formal engagement to marry that was sometimes performed before witnesses and notarized but could be a quick and furtive promise. Men sealed this agreement by gifts called prendas.39 Although they were part of an official and formal process, these presents became part of a language of seduction and a prelude to sexual relations. Men frequently gave cloth or bits of jewelry to women they were wooing.40 Gifts signaled a man’s interest, but for women, the decision to enter into a pre-marital sexual relationship involved the considerable personal risk of pregnancy. Their suitors used charming words to entice their inamoratas, which at times, were described by these women as charming.41 But the most important words were a promise to marry—often only verbally but at times, with a written agreement.42 Depending on their status, these undertakings were more or less specific. Those suitors considered to be a caballeros (gentlemen) or an hombre de bien— a man of honor, simply pointed to their reputation for virtue and assured women that they need not have any worries.43 Others of less status often promised to marry 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Gruzinski, “The Ashes of Desire”, pp. 207, 210. Archivo General de la Nación-Tribunal Superior Judicial del Distrito Federal [hereafter AGN-TSJDF] (Colonial) Alcaldes Ordinarios Serie Criminal, caja 35B, exp. 82, Mexico City, 1804. Robles, Diario de sucesos notables, vol. 3, p. 132. Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, p. 38; Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Vivir en Nueva España, p. 288; Lavrin, “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico”, p. 61; Margadant, “La Familia en el derecho Novohispano”, p. 28; and Rubial García, La plaza, el palacio y el convento, p. 75. See my discussion of this process in Lipsett-Rivera, “The Intersection of Rape and Marriage”, pp. 559–590, and Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation, pp. 222–225. AGN-TSJDF (Colonial) Alcaldes Ordinarios Serie Criminal, caja 31B, exp. 105, Mexico City, 1763; AGN-TSJDF (Colonial) Alcaldes Ordinarios Serie Criminal, caja 31B, exp. 115, Mexico City, 1776. Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, p. 38. AGN-TSJDF (Colonial) Alcaldes Ordinarios Serie Criminal, caja 31B, exp. 105, Mexico City, 1763; AGN-TSJDF (Colonial) Alcaldes Ordinarios Serie Criminal, caja 31B, exp. 115, Mexico City, 1776; AGN-TSJDF (Colonial) Corregidores Coyoacán Serie Criminal, caja 28B, exp.102,

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“if something happened”—a vague reference to pregnancy.44 Many men did not honor these promises and, consequently, the women or their guardians sued them for breaching their agreement. Thus, when young women entered into pre-marital sexual relationships, they surely must have been aware of the risks. Possibly, they agreed because of their suitor’s appeal but also perhaps as a rebellion against societal norms.45 It was not at all uncommon for couples to engage in sexual relations once the betrothal had been announced, and most couples, undoubtedly, proceeded to a wedding ceremony. 3

Families and Households

Couples formed through marriage but also more informally. Although there was no legal or religious basis for recognition of men and women who lived together without the sacrament of marriage, community norms did sanction such pairs. But couples were often just part of a larger household; in New Spain, people lived in extended families that often crowded into small residences. Thus, the families begun through marriage or amasiato (living together) had to integrate themselves into a larger group of extended relatives, friends, and sometimes, adopted children. These households were usually headed by a patriarch, but female-headed households were also extremely common. Mexico City provided a vast range of living spaces for these households, ranging from the mansions at the city center to the jacales (adobe huts) that lined the edge of the city.46 Most residents could only rent a single room to house their households, which meant that the entire family slept together and shared communal services with others in the building.47 A case in point: In a 1753 census of Mexico City, 22 people shared one small accommodation in one of the large rental buildings.48 Within these extended families, hierarchy was an organizing principle. This ranking was not just one that privileged men but rather it was based on age and importance. As such, children had to respect and defer not just to their

44 45 46 47 48

Mexico City, 1789; and Archivo General de la Nación [hereafter AGN] Clero Regular y Secular, vol. 641, fol. 40–63, Mexico City, 1786. AGN-TSJDF (Colonial) Alcaldes Ordinarios Serie Criminal, caja 31B, exp. 115, Mexico City, 1776; AGN-TSJDF (Colonial) Corregidores Serie Criminal, caja 16B, exp. 106, Mexico City, 1795. Lavrin, “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico”, pp. 47–92. Morales and Gayón, “Viviendas”, p. 345. Torre, et al., “La vivienda”, p. 116; Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination, p. 30, writes that few plebeians in Mexico City could afford a home; Morales and Gayón, “Viviendas”, p. 345. Torre, et al., “La vivienda”, p. 120.

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parents and other elders but also to those siblings born before them. But this relationship was not just unidirectional; although household members had to adhere to these rules of respect and submission, those at the top of the hierarchy had a duty of care. Within married or other couples, these reciprocal duties meant that the man had to provide for his wife or lover and, in return, she had to obey him. Osuna wrote: “Women subject yourselves to your husbands like to a lord because the husband is the head of the wife like Christ is in the Church”.49 But although Osuna stressed wifely obedience, he also stated that “your wife is a big piece of yourself: now you are not two but rather one flesh”.50 As a result of the union of marriage, “just as you are obligated to maintain your own body you must maintain your wife, work for her, give her food and drink, as well as clothes, and all that you would normally provide to your body”.51 There was also a gendered idea of the responsibilities and occupations that corresponded to each party; men’s work took them outside the home, whereas women were supposed to remain within the domestic setting. According to these norms, mothers looked after children from birth until they were toddlers, but then, officially, it was fathers who were responsible for the moral education and welfare of their offspring.52 The reality was not quite so stark; mothers continued to take responsibility for their sons and daughters as they grew older, and frequently, if the father was absent or not invested in childrearing, they took on this task either on their own or with the help of their extended family.53 Although for religious writers, the only valid couples and families were those joined in marriage, Mexico City was full of people who lived together without any formal sanctions. In legal terms, these pairs were in illicit relationships or amancebamiento (cohabitation). The lack of a formal marriage came to light when neighbors denounced these informal unions to the authorities, who often raided homes at night to catch men and women in moments of intimacy.54 Despite the prevailing religiosity of Mexico City residents, there was also considerable tolerance for such couples; the denunciations reveal that many had lived together “as if married” for many years, sometimes decades, and often had

49 Osuna, Norte de los estados, 90v–91; Cerda, Libro intitulado vida política, 323v, writes “el hombre es cabeça y principio de donde la muger procedió”. 50 Osuna, Norte de los estados, 92v. 51 Ibid. 52 Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, pp. 56–57, 69–70. 53 Lipsett-Rivera, “Marriage and Family Relations in Mexico”, pp. 138–141. 54 AGN-Tribunal Superior Judicial del DF (Colonial) Alcaldes Ordinarios, caja 23B, exp. 70, Mexico City, 1790.

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several children.55 Many of these couples simply chose not to marry, but others could not; either, they could not afford the fees, they had a living spouse, or they were too closely related. Those who were called to testify about these informal unions reveal how they conceived of marriage; the words they used were a kind of rote description: “they ate at the same table and slept in the same bed”.56 Community standards recognized the domestic intimacy of a couple whether they were blessed by the sacrament of marriage or not. When asked to testify about her tenants, caught in an illicit relationship, Juana Martina said “they lived together as if husband and wife and in her opinion that meant that they were married”.57 In addition, she also noted that they fought every day, which sadly seemed to her symptomatic of the married state.58 But conflict was not the only indicator of family life; at times, officials found these illicit couples in the midst of dealing with the life of a busy household. When the local authorities raided Don Juan Antonio Castel’s home, they found him cooking the evening meal. Upstairs, his mistress was breastfeeding their latest child.59 Despite their illegitimacy in official terms, these couples embraced many of the same expectations of gender roles that were customary in families. Women counted on their husbands or lovers to provide a daily sum of money called the diario, los alimentos (food), or lo preciso (the precise amount) which was usually about two reales. Although many men were feckless, those who did provide this amount of money or other sums to their wives or their mistresses interpreted it as one of the sources of authority within the family. These ideas about family in colonial Mexico City were the focus of reform efforts in the 18th century. On the one hand, the Church promoted Saint Joseph as a role model for men; in religious paintings and sculptures as well as sermons, the message was that Saint Joseph was the perfect husband as well as a 55

Lavrin, “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico”, p. 62, uses the term “consensual marriages”; Lavrin, “La sexualidad y las normas de la moral sexual”, p. 490; Schwaller, “La Identidad sexual”, p. 71; Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Vivir en Nueva España, p. 283; Margadant, “La Familia en el derecho Novohispano”, p. 27; Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation, pp. 173–174; Ochoa, “Por faltar a sus obligaciones”, p. 365, uses the term “seudomatrimonio”; Lozano Armendares, No codiciaras la mujer ajena, pp. 67, 70. 56 Bennett, Colonial Blackness, pp. 41, 48, comments on this pattern. 57 AGN Criminal, vol. 725, fol. 2–54, Mexico City, 1796. 58 AGN Criminal, vol. 725, fol. 2–54, Mexico City, 1796. See also: AGN-TSJDF (Colonial) Corregidores, Teniente General de Xochimilco, Serie Criminal, caja 31A, exp. 41, Xochimilco, 1779; Tribunal Superior Judicial del DF (Colonial) Corregidores, Marquesado del Valle, caja 30a, exp. 29, Coyoacán, 1748. Another variant on this formula was if the man was jealous of the woman. See AGN Criminal, vol. 624, fol. 214–305, Mexico City, 1778. 59 AGN-TSJDF (Colonial) Alcaldes Ordinarios Serie Criminal, caja 31B, exp. 115, Mexico City, 1776.

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good worker.60 These ideas coincided with the thrust of the Bourbon Reforms, which attempted to instill a more sober attitude and work habits among Mexico City’s male population. Officials imposed a type of work uniform—­ basically men had to present themselves wearing pants, shirts, and some form of cape. For indigenous men, this was the tilma, and for others, either a cape or a blanket.61 Workers in the royal manufactories and other positions who reported to work without the prescribed clothing were turned away.62 The thrust of these rules was to institute a new kind man whose values of hard work and sobriety contrasted with the many men who walked about Mexico City clad only in hole-filled sheets, gambling and drinking. At the same time, Bourbon officials attacked the guilds opening up jobs to women that previously had been closely guarded by these male groups.63 These changes meant subtle transformations in the way men and women conceived of their relation to work and their roles within the family. Traditionally, moral authorities had emphasized male roles in supporting the family and even counseled women to choose mates who were able to take on this mantle.64 4

Gender, Sexuality, and Family

Once married, couples were able to finally engage in sexual relations legitimately. In fact, the wedding imparted on husbands and wives not just the right to sex but also the responsibility because the married state implied procreation. Gendered ideas in the colonial period meant that men were expected to be more sexually aggressive. But the moralist Osuna advised men that while their wives might be more timid in their carnal desires, they should look for hints of advances and encourage their spouses to express their longings.65 Nonetheless, marriage set up a reciprocal duty of sexual acts called the débito conyugal or conjugal debt.66 Officially, this obligation was supposed to be a 60

Villaseñor Black, Creating the Cult; Villaseñor Black, “Love and Marriage in the Spanish Empire”, pp. 637–667. 61 Martín, “La desnudez en la Nueva España del siglo XVIII”, pp. 261–294. 62 Deans-Smith, Bureaucrats, Planters and Workers, p. 205. 63 Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, p. 26. It helped that employers could also pay women less than men. 64 Anonymous, Breve instrucción, p. xi; Galindo, Excelencias de la castidad y virginidad, p. 5v. 65 Osuna, Norte de los estados, 70v–71; Ferrer, Suma Moral, p. 187. Córdoba, Jardín de las nobles donzellas, part II, chapter 4, discusses in contrast condemned women who had any carnal appetites including for sex. 66 Lavrin, “La sexualidad y las normas de la moral sexual”, p. 497.

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mutual commitment; both men and women could ask for sex and the other person normally had to accede.67 Despite this blanket advice, some excuses for refusing relations were acceptable; for example, if the man was sick, repugnant, drunk, or crazy, or if he was engaged in an adulterous affair, and finally, if the request was for a prohibited sexual act.68 There were also days in the religious calendar when couples were expected to remain chaste.69 Although it is unlikely that Mexico City residents read up on these rules, they had a sense of what was appropriate. One wife complained that her spouse simply asked for sex too often, both in daytime and at night, while another protested that her husband had bad breath.70 Nonetheless, most of these complaints were exceptional, as it was more common for couples’ intimate lives to remain private. Despite the expectation that sexuality was private and personal, the experts had rules about how men and women should perform these acts. Other than the classic missionary position, ecclesiastical writers only sanctioned four others: side-by-side, standing up, having the woman seated, or on all fours. Regardless of this endorsement, religious authorities encouraged couples to use the missionary position because they believed that it promoted fertility. Some exceptions to these rules could be made if the husband was obese or ill, in which case, women could be on top.71 It was understood that men took the lead in a couple’s intimacy. Relationships between couples were, of course, not just about sex but also about affection, and although kisses and hugs were all part of a close bond, even married couples were not supposed to engage in such conduct in public. Even in private, moral authorities counseled couples to avoid “excessive enjoyment” of each other.72 Both men and women in Mexico City spoke of their struggle with the “pull of the flesh” and their desire for members of the opposite sex.73 The sexual urges that men and women felt often translated into many types of relationships that were outside of the norms of family life and marriage. 67 Anonymous, Breve instrucción, Ch. XLVI-XLVII; Ferrer, Suma Moral, p. 187. 68 Ferrer, Suma Moral, pp. 186–189; Quintana, Confesionario en lengua Mixe, pp. 48–49. 69 Lavrin, “La sexualidad y las normas de la moral sexual”, p. 497; Lavrin, “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico”, p. 74. 70 Lavrin, “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico”, p. 75; Ferrer, Suma Moral, p. 187, agreed that spouses should not ask for sex too often; Lozano Armendares, “Las sinrazones del corazón”, p. 100. 71 Osuna, Norte de los estados, 71v, 73; Lavrin, “La sexualidad y las normas de la moral sexual”, p. 497. 72 Lavrin, “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico”, p. 73; Lavrin, “La sexualidad y las normas de la moral sexual”, p. 497; Osuna, Norte de los estados, p. 71, also recommended kissing and hugging between spouses. 73 Lavrin, “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico”, pp. 49, 61; Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, p. 62.

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Apart from the many informal unions common to Mexico City, many men and women rejected both marriage and informal unions as well as the regulations imposed upon their sex lives by the prevailing morality. From the early days, prostitutes were part of city life; royal policy on this activity waxed and waned with calls for official brothels in the 16th century and prohibitions in later periods. Nonetheless, sex for hire was common and operated on many levels, both hidden in businesses and homes, and out in the street with richly attired courtesans who circulated in their carriages. After darkness fell, the prestigious area around the viceregal palace and cathedral changed in tone. Prostitutes and their clients took over the streets and had their trysts in church doors and the cemetery, as well as the hidden corners of the market, the arcades, and in the stairways, patios, and corridors of the viceregal palace.74 But prostitutes and their clients were certainly not the only residents to engage in furtive sexual encounters. Places associated with loose women became preferred locations for assignations, but in addition, inhibitions fell away with drink at the many pulquerías that dotted the urban landscape as well as with the music and dance at fandangos and other popular parties. Periodically, the authorities tried to crack down on this moral laxity. In a 1790 raid on a house, Mexico City officials found it full of men and women and people of both sexes crowded into a room. Because they considered these conducts “disorderly”, the officials proceeded to make arrests.75 Patrols often encountered tipsy couples as well as those in the throes of passion. Ignacio Arana was caught kissing a woman in the night streets; when confronted, he stated “that it was no sin to cuddle women”.76 Others with more concern for appearances and means rented rooms for their trysts, or in a pinch, had sex in a hired carriage.77 There were many places where couples could find the isolation needed for such encounters. Temascales, or sweat baths, were among the most notorious for both heterosexual and same-sex couples.78 A midwife reported such an incident in 1791 at the Temascal de los Canales; she had brought her patient, a recent mother, to the bath to recover from childbirth. But the mother, an actress, invited friends both male and female, and as members of the party disrobed and drank; it became quite riotous.79 Mexico City officials were fighting a losing battle when they 74 75 76 77 78 79

Atondo Rodríguez, El amor venal, pp. 40–44, 174–175, 186, 231–234; Rubial García, Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos, p. 63. AGN-TSJDF (Colonial) Alcaldes Ordinarios, caja 23B, exp. 70, Mexico City, 1790. AGN Clero Regular y Secular vol. 57, exp. 2, fol. 148–156, Mexico City, 1796. AGN Criminal, vol. 495, fol. 130–148, Mexico City, 1807. They also said that they communicated in the streets. Atondo Rodríguez, El amor venal, p. 175. AGN-TSJDF (Colonial) Alcaldes Ordinarios Serie Criminal, caja 32B, exp. 81, Mexico City, 1791.

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tried to rein in the pleasures of the residents; despite all sorts of prohibitions and controls, men and women continued to enjoy drink, dance, music, and each other. 5 Conclusion The ways that men and women performed their gender roles and formed families in Mexico City were more than likely the same as in the rest of New Spain. But, because it was a metropolis—the largest city in the viceroyalty—it brought together an incredibly diverse population, not just in terms of ethnicities and racial identities but also regarding pursuits and entertainments. The constrictions of gender roles might have been slightly looser with the many festivities allowing people to explore gender identities and relationships and family norms. In addition, the celebrations, which had overtly religious purposes, were frequently subverted to allow for nighttime rendezvous, riotous behavior, and amorous trysts. These contradictory elements of the many ecclesiastical celebrations were ironic considering that Mexico City was central to the Catholic Church in New Spain—seat of the Archbishopric and the Holy Office. Nevertheless, it is impossible to understand the ways that residents actually lived without taking into account the inconsistencies between the models presented to the populace and the ways that they actually lived. Despite the considerable weight that viceregal institutions placed on conformity and compliance with the rules of gender and family norms, the community set their own standards. Mexico City’s setting and wonderful climate allowed residents to mingle and benefit from the many locations of amusements. From a young age, boys and some girls played in parks and streets, flew kites from the flat roofs of the buildings, and enjoyed the constant festivities with their attendant lights and fireworks. They carried with them the lessons they learned and their budding sense of the ways that they had to perform their gender but also their place in the social and family hierarchy. Youth in Mexico City absorbed life lessons not just in educational establishments but also in the streets. As they matured, they began to attend the paseos in the Alameda or along the canal banks for other pleasures, namely, to begin the dance of courtship and seduction. For many of these young people, wooing led to betrothal and eventually marriage, but others did not follow the path laid out for them by ecclesiastical norms. Instead, they found hidden spots in temascales, carriages, or even rented rooms to engage in illicit sexual relations, and at times, lived together as if married. Men and women in Mexico City constantly had to negotiate the lines between

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orthodoxy and nonconformity in their conduct and personal lives. The rich and vibrant character of Mexico City allowed a certain amount of tolerance and anonymity for residents to choose a path outside the norm. Bibliography

Primary Sources



Secondary Literature

Anonymous, Breve instrucción a los Christianos casadas y útiles advertencias a los que pretenden serlo, Puebla, 1790. Cerda, J., Libro intitulado vida política de todos los estados de mugeres: en el qual dan muy provechosos y Christianos documentos y avisos, para criarse y conservarse debidamente las mugeres en sus estados, Alcalá de Henares, 1599. Córdoba, M., Jardín de las nobles donzellas, s.l., 1542. Escoiquiz, J., Tratado de las Obligaciones del Hombre, Madrid, 1803. Fabián y Fuero, F., Colección de providencias diocesanas del Obispado de Puebla de los Ángeles, Puebla, 1770. Ferrer, V., Suma Moral para examen de curas y confesors en que a la luz del sol de las escuelas Santo Thomás, se desvanecen los perniciosos extremos de laxedad y rigor…, Valencia, 1736. Galindo, P., Excelencias de la castidad y virginidad. Dividese en dos partes, Madrid, 1681. Galindo, P., Parte segunda del directorio de Penitentes, y practica de una buena y prudente confesión, Madrid, 1680. Osuna, F., Norte de los estados en que se da regla de bivir a los mancebos: y a los casados; y a los viudos; y a todos los continentes; y se tratan muy por estenso los remedios del desastrado casamiento; enseñando que tal a de ser la vida del cristiano casado, Seville, 1531. Quintana, F.A., Confesionario en lengua Mixe Con una construcción de las Oraciones Christiana y un Compendio de Voces Mixes para enseñarse a pronunciar dichas lenguas, Puebla, 1773. Robles, A., Diario de sucesos notables (1665–1703), 3 vols., Mexico City, 1946. Rossell, M., La educación conforme a los principios de la religión christiana, leyes y costumbres, de la nación española en tres libros dirigidos a los padres de familia, Madrid, 1786. Sánchez, M., El Padre de familias, Brevemente instruido en sus muchas obligaciones de padre, Madrid, 1786.

Ariès. P., Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. R. Baldiek, New York, 1961. Arrom, S., The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857, Stanford, 1985.

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Atondo Rodríguez, A.M., El amor venal y la condición femenina en el México colonial, Mexico City, 1992. Bennett, H.L., Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico, Bloomington, 2009. Bristol, J.C., Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century, Albuquerque, 2007. Cáceres Menéndez, B., and R. Patch, “‘Gente de mal vivir’: Families and Incorrigible Sons in New Spain, 1721–1729”, Revista de Indias 66:237 (2006), pp. 363–391. Carrera Stampa, M., Los gremios mexicanos. La organización gremial en Nueva España, 1521–1861, Mexico City, 1954. Cope, D.R., The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720, Madison, 1994. Curcio-Nagy, L., The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity, Albuquerque, 2004. Deans-Smith, S., Bureaucrats, Planters and Workers: The Making of the Tobacco Monopoly in Bourbon Mexico, Austin, 1992. Du Bron, M.J.V., “El Caballo en la sociedad virreinal Novohispano de los siglos XVI y XVII. La caballería del Dios Marte”, in M.A.J. Márquez Ruiz, La Gesta del caballo en la historia de México, Mexico City, 2010, pp. 71–77. François, M., “Cloth and Silver: Pawning and Material Life in Mexico City at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century”, The Americas 60:3 (2004), pp. 325–362. Gonzalbo Aizpuru, P., “La Casa de niños expósitos de la ciudad de México: una fundación del siglo XVIII”, Historia Mexicana 31:3 (1982), pp. 409–430. Gonzalbo Aizpuru, P., Historia de la educación en la época colonial. La educación de los criollos y la vida urbana, Mexico City, 1990. Gonzalbo Aizpuru, P., Vivir en Nueva España: Orden y desorden en la vida cotidiana, Mexico City, 2009. González Obregón, L., La Vida de México en 1810, Mexico City, 1979. Gruzinski, S., “The Ashes of Desire: Homosexuality in Mid-Seventeenth-Century New Spain”, trans. I. López-Calvo, in P. Sigal (ed.), Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America, Chicago, 2003, pp.197–214. Jiménez Martínez, A., “¿Somos de la basura? El mito fundador de la casa de niños expósitos de la ciudad de México (1767)”, Revista de historia de América 139 (2008), pp. 169–179. Jurado Rojas, Y., “Puppet Theater in Eighteenth-Century Mexico”, The Americas 67:3 (2011), pp. 315–329. Kanter, D., Hijos del Pueblo: Gender, Family, and Community in Rural Mexico, 1730–1850, Austin, 2008. Lavrin, A., “Masculine and Feminine: Construction of Gender Roles in the Regular Orders in Early Modern Mexico”, Explorations in Renaissance Culture 34:1 (2008), pp. 1–26.

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Lavrin, A., “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico: A Church Dilemma”, in A. Lavrin (ed.), Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, Lincoln, 1989, pp. 47–92. Lavrin, A., “La sexualidad y las normas de la moral sexual”, in A. Rubial García (ed.), Historia de la vida cotidiana en México, Tomo II, La ciudad barroca, Mexico City, 2005, pp. 489–518. Lipsett-Rivera, S., Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life, 1750–1856, Lincoln, 2012. Lipsett-Rivera, S., “Marriage and Family Relations in Mexico during the Transition from Colony to Nation”, in V. Uribe (ed.), State and Society in Spanish America During the “Age of Revolution”: New Research on Historical Continuities and Change ca. 1750s–1850s, Wilmington, 2001, pp. 121–148. Lipsett-Rivera, S., “The Intersection of Rape and Marriage in Late-Colonial and EarlyNational Mexico”, Colonial Latin American Historical Review 6:4 (1997), pp. 559–590. Loreto López, R., “Familial Religiosity and Images in the Home: Eighteenth-Century Puebla de los Angeles, Mexico”, Journal of Family History 22:1 (1997), pp. 26–49. Lozano Armendares, T., “Las sinrazones del corazón”, in P. Gonzalbo Aizpuru (ed.), Amor e historia: La expresión de los afectos en el mundo de ayer, Mexico City, 2013, pp. 89–107. Lozano Armendares, T., No codiciaras la mujer ajena: El adulterio en las comunidades domésticas Novohispanas ciudad de México, siglo XVIII, Mexico City, 2005. Margadant, G.F., “La Familia en el derecho Novohispano”, in P. Gonzalbo Aizpuru (ed.), Familias novohispanas. Siglos XVI al XIX, Mexico City, 1991, pp. 27–56. Martín, N., “La desnudez en la Nueva España del siglo XVIII”, Anuario de Estudios Americanos 29 (1972), pp. 261–294. Morales, M.D., and M. Gayón, “Viviendas, casas y usos de suelo en la ciudad de México, 1848–1881”, in R. Loreto López (ed.), Casas, vivienda y hogares en la historia de México, Mexico City, 2001, pp. 339–355. Ochoa, M.R., “Por faltar a sus obligaciones”: Matrimonio, género y autoridad entre la población indígena de la ciudad de México colonial, siglos XVIII y XIX”, in F.C. Gutiérrez (ed.), Los Indios y las ciudades de la Nueva España, Mexico City, 2010, pp. 351–370. Pérez Toledo, S., Los Hijos del trabajo. Los artesanos de la ciudad de México, 1780–1853, Mexico City, 1996. Premo, B., Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima, Chapel Hill, 2005. Quezada, N., Sexualidad, amor y erotismo. México prehispánico y México colonial, Mexico City, 1996. Rubial García, A., Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos: La vida cotidiana en la época de Sor Juana, Mexico City, 2005. Rubial García, A., La plaza, el palacio y el convento. La ciudad de México en el siglo XVII., Mexico City, 1998.

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Schwaller, J.F., “La Identidad sexual: Familia y mentalidades a fines del siglo XVI”, in P. Gonzalbo Aizpuru (ed.), Familias novohispanas. Siglos XVI al XIX, Mexico City, 1991, pp. 59–72. Shelton, L.M., For Tranquility and Order: Family and Community on Mexico’s Northern Frontier, 1800–1850, Tucson, 2010. Tanck de Estrada, D., “Muerte precoz. Los niños en el siglo XVIII”, in P. Gonzalbbo Aizpuru (ed.), Historia de la vida cotidiana en México. III El siglo XVIII: entre tradición y cambio, Mexico City, 2005, pp. 213–245. Tanck de Estrada, D., Pueblos de Indios y educación en el México colonial, 1750–1821, Mexico City, 1999. Thompson, A.T., “Children and Schooling in Guanajuato, Mexico, 1790–1840”, SECOLAS Annals 23 (1992), pp. 36–52. Torre Villalpando, G. de la, S. Lombardo de Ruiz, and J.G. Angulo, “La vivienda en una zona al suroeste de la Plaza Mayor de la ciudad de México (1753–1811)”, in R. Loreto López (ed.), Casas, vivienda y hogares en la historia de México, Mexico City, 2001, pp. 109–146. Twinam, A., Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Latin America, Stanford, 1999. Vidal, N., “‘El pequeño teatro del mundo.’ Les marionettes et l’histoire du Mexique”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 32 (1985), pp. 99 -113. Villaseñor Black, C., Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire, Princeton, 2006. Villaseñor Black, C., “Love and Marriage in the Spanish Empire: Depictions of Holy Matrimony and Gender Discourses in the Seventeenth Century”, Sixteenth Century Journal 32:3 (2001), pp. 637–667. Viqueira Albán, J.P., Propriety and Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico, trans. S. LipsettRivera and S. Rivera Ayala, Wilmington, 1999.

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CHAPTER 5

War, Legitimacy, and Ceremony in 18th-Century Mexico City The Annual Funerary Honors for Fallen Soldiers Frances L. Ramos On 1 November 1700, Charles II, the last Spanish Habsburg king, died heirless, leading Spain and its empire into a 13-year period of war over the rise of the named successor, the French Duke of Anjou—the renamed Philip V, king of Spain. Leopold I of Austria contested the succession on behalf of his son, the Archduke Charles, and England, the Netherlands, and Portugal soon banded together against Bourbon rule. While most of the fighting occurred within Spain, Spanish America felt the implications of Europe’s imperial struggle, as historians largely recognize that most of the fighting had to do with access to the Indies.1 From one day to the next, the Spanish empire’s greatest enemy became its most important ally, with the grandson of French King Louis XIV now its monarch. Indeed, Spain spent much of the late 17th century engaged in costly war against France, the repercussions of which were also felt in the Indies as French privateers took full advantage of the wars to wreak havoc along the coastline of Spanish America. But, on 31 December 1700, Philip V ordered a change in precedent; he sent a decree to New Spain indicating that Spain and France were now allies, notifying the viceroy that French squadrons would be arriving periodically. He ordered that they be received and be allowed to trade to maintain themselves.2 From the onset of tension, the new king and his advisors were clear in defining the enemy as all members of the “Austrian Alliance”, and by 1703, paranoia regarding a possible English and Dutch attack on the Americas had reached a fever pitch. One decree warned that the English and Dutch were preparing for a “conquest of America” and had reportedly loaded squadrons of 1 As indicated by Iván Escamilla González, the Spanish Crown gave the French Compagnie de Guinée the asiento (the exclusive right to sell slaves to the Spanish colonies) in August 1701, and by June 1702, Great Britain, the United Provinces, and Austria had already declared war against Spain and France. See Escamilla González, Intereses mal entendidos, p. 83. 2 Navarro García, “Cambio de dinastía”, p. 120. King to Viceroy of New Spain, Buen Retiro, 12 June 1703, Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), vol. 31, exp. 105, fols. 315r–316r; King to Viceroy of New Spain, Buen Retiro, 18 June 1703, AGN, vol. 31, exp. 106, fols. 317r–318r. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004335578_007 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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ships with over 15,000 men. Spain’s new Bourbon monarch demanded that his American viceroys follow through on previous orders to protect all American ports and asked that they create military councils with experience dealing with all foreseeable threats. To the viceroy of Mexico, he ordered that the passage from Veracruz to Mexico City be fortified with the help of military engineers.3 In Mexico City, secular and ecclesiastical elites did not take for granted that subjects would accept easily the change in ruling dynasty. Spain’s Habsburg kings ruled through personal influence, which not only included patronage and the administration of justice, but also the mystique of kingship, as communicated through elaborate ceremonial and sermons that emphasized the ruler’s virtues. In New Spain’s viceregal capital, ecclesiastical and secular elites depended on pageantry to instill reverence for Spain’s ruling dynasty and in the late 16th and 17th centuries, the king’s simulacrum, the viceroy, served as the conduit for royal authority, making the monarch seen and felt across the Atlantic. As Alejandro Cañeque has argued, in 17th-century Mexico City, Spain’s subjects experienced monarchy in close proximity, as court ceremonial and elaborate pageantry helped to bridge the distance that separated the Old World from the New.4 As Iván Escamilla González illustrates in an essay in this volume, the 18th-century court changed considerably, as viceroys stopped being appointed from the highest echelons of Spain`s nobility and as their efforts became channeled toward meeting the reformist agenda of the Bourbon Crown. Nevertheless, the ceremonial culture of the Mexican court remained important, as the viceroy continued to serve as a stand-in for the king. Under the Bourbons, ceremony increasingly reflected changes in imperial policy. As has been provocatively argued by Linda Curcio-Nagy, late 18th-century Bourbon officials centralized authority on the king not only through administrative reforms, like the creation of new jurisdictions, but through pageantry that symbolically heightened the importance of the monarch. In Mexico City, juras, or royal oath ceremonies, became longer and more elaborate, while viceregal entrance ceremonies were pared down, mirroring the reduced administrative influence of the viceroy and the growing absolutism of the monarch. In the 17th century, triumphal arches often depicted arriving viceroys as Apollo, but in the 18th century, astral imagery was most commonly reserved for the king, as officials worked to centralize his power and showcase the monarch as a ruler who cast beneficent rays throughout the empire. By Mexico City’s oath ceremony for Ferdinand VI in 1747, the municipal council 3 King to the viceroy of New Spain, 28 April 1703, Madrid, in Muro Orejón (ed.), Cedulario, pp. 90–93. 4 See Cañeque, The King’s Living Image.

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had already started privatizing large parts of the spectacle, and the Real Protomedicato constructed a triumphal arch in the cemetery of the Church of the Hospital of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception and Jesus the Nazarene that captured the absolutism of the Bourbon monarchy. It depicted Apollo atop a rainbow uniting the Atlantic Ocean.5 As the defining ceremony of Bourbon absolutism, the royal oath ceremony became grander and more costly as the century wore on. While Philip V’s cost a mere 6,469 pesos, Charles III’s rose to 22,515 pesos, and Charles IV’s jura totaled 108,571 pesos, a staggering amount that did not account for inflation.6 Curcio-Nagy posits that as discontent grew among New Spain’s economically impinged lower classes and as the Crown increasingly preferred peninsulars to Creoles for most bureaucratic and high-ranking Church positions, public ceremony educated the populace to regard the monarch as the source of all decision-making. Over time, people may have felt less inclined to blame “evil ministers” than the king himself.7 Consequently, the expansion of pre-existing ceremonies dedicated to the cult of the king and the trimming of ceremonies not in the service of Bourbon absolutism (such as Carnaval and Corpus Christi) may have helped to lay the groundwork for the early 19th-century Independence movements. But, as this chapter argues, in Mexico City the cult of the Bourbon king began to grow at the turn of the 18th century, when the reign of the dynasty was not even assured, and funerary honors for fallen soldiers played an important role in this process. Indeed, during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702– 13), secular and ecclesiastical supporters of Philip V still needed to persuade subjects throughout the Spanish empire of the French contender’s legitimate right to rule. As the cabeza of New Spain, or head of its body politic, Mexico City had acted as a principal theater for showcasing monarchical legitimacy. In 1683, Charles II first established annual funerary honors for fallen soldiers to help expedite the transition of their souls from Purgatory, and in 1694, while the empire fought against France during the Nine Years’ War, Mexico City hosted the event for the first time. From this year onwards, the commemoration became linked to the patronage of the viceroy who would henceforth have a direct hand in organizing the event. As a result, while viceregal entries did decline in importance during the 18th century, as the king’s principal representative in New Spain, the viceroy continued to play a central role in many spectacles, including annual funerary honors. Through public ceremony, the 5 Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City, p. 27. 6 Ibid., pp. 74–75. 7 Ibid., p. 85.

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viceroy shored up political legitimacy, exalted the supremacy of the monarch, and promoted the Bourbon Crown’s absolutist agenda. Although the annual commemoration began under the sponsorship of Charles II, pro-Bourbon officials in Spain and Mexico would co-opt it during the War of the Spanish Succession. Throughout the war, the sermons and ephemeral structures helped to recruit soldiers and while doing so, underscored Bourbon absolutism, either by casting the monarch as a metaphorical Good Shepherd, the biblical King David, or as an allegorical sun casting beneficent rays. Significantly, David was not the son of Saul, King of the Hebrews, but had been chosen by Saul to rule, similar to how Charles II selected Philip of Anjou as his heir shortly before his death. Although the order to celebrate the ceremony came from Spain, the viceroy, who faced serious challenges in Mexico City, benefited politically from the commemoration. Later in the 1760s, as the Bourbon monarchy of Charles III (1759–80) set about implementing a host of controversial reforms, for which the viceroy required support from Mexico City’s residents, the Marquis de Croix revived the funerary honors. The annual ceremony, with its recalling of the trope of King David, helped the viceroy reaffirm absolutism. 1

The Inauguration of Military Honors for Soldiers

The last Habsburg king of Spain, Charles II, first ordered that cities throughout his empire hold funerary honors for soldiers in 1683. Lima complied in 1684, but not until 1694 did Mexico City inaugurate the annual ceremony under the auspices of the beleaguered viceroy, the Count of Galve.8 Just two years after the largest riot in the capital’s history, the viceroy decided to finally host and subsidize the funerary honors in one of the city’s most prestigious churches, the Jesuit Casa Profesa (see Ramos-Kittrell, this volume). Two blocks directly off the main plaza and on the same street as the city’s silversmith’s guild and the capital’s esteemed Franciscan Order, the location of the event certainly made an impact on the urban landscape.9

8 See López y Martínez, Sermon en la honoracion annua, y universal sufragio que de orden de la magestad Catolica del Rey N.S.D. Carlos II. 9 Galve selected the Casa Profesa where it would continue to take place until the expulsion of the Jesuits from all of Spanish America in 1767. For a recent study of the inaugural funerary honors and an analysis of the catafalque commissioned by the Count of Galve, see Cuesta García de Leonardo, “La mano del monarca grande”, pp. 51–85. For an analysis of the Corn Riot of 1692, see Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination, especially Chapter 7, pp. 125–160.

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Galve paid for much of the costs of the inaugural event himself (which presumably exceeded the amount that would be spent in “normal” years) with the stipulation that in the future it be commemorated on the octave of All Souls’ Day (2 November).10 According to art historian María José Cuesta García de Leonardo, the viceroy likely chose to host the ceremony as a way of reaffirming his own legitimacy by linking it to that of Charles II. Accused of various forms of corruption and, more significantly, of failing to curb the rising price of grain that lead to the Corn Riot of 1692 and the subsequent burning down of half the viceregal palace, the viceroy supposedly saw the ceremony as a way of conveying messages regarding his beneficence and responsibility through characterizations regarding the main subject of the ceremony’s ten-story catafalque, which was not the military, but the king who looked after the soldiers who sacrificed their lives for the Crown. Jesuit orator Tomás Escalante began the inaugural sermon by drawing attention to the pyramidal structure, asking “Who ordered that it be built?”, to which he answered: Charles II. Nevertheless, he quickly noted that the viceroy, the “right hand of your Catholic majesty in these kingdoms”, had the catafalque erected here in Mexico, thereby highlighting his authority.11 Despite many real failings, the viceroy excelled at defense (especially along the contentious borderlands) and the ceremony played on this strength. As the captain general of the militias, Galve depended on able and willing soldiers. The sermon and catafalque condensed messages regarding the king’s and viceroy’s role as head of the military and their special care for the men who served the viceroyalty, empire, and faith. Inaugurated in Madrid in 1683, the funerary honors cast Spain’s soldiers as defenders of Christendom and through the mass and collective prayers that marked the occasion helped to release their souls from Purgatory. While wealthy Spaniards and Creoles could set aside money for such prayers in their last wills and testaments, soldiers usually had little resources and the promise of these annual prayers served to supplement their modest salaries and conceivably enticed some men to enlist in the military, especially given that they would undoubtedly magnify their propensity for sin as soldiers and that this would only lengthen their time in Purgatory.12 The inaugural sermon underscored the piety of the soldiers, who as the orator stressed, proved similar to the ancient Maccabees who had fought for the preservation of their religion (2nd century B.C.) against King Antiochus; those who died in the struggle over Jerusalem received traditional funerary rites and as King David later recalled, lived on as “saints” for their sacrifice. The 10 Mendez, Fúnebres ecos que responde a las voces del llanto de sus soldados, n.p. 11 Ibid., p. 1. 12 Cuesta García de Leonardo, “La mano del monarca grande”, pp. 60–61.

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catafalque’s decorative scheme emphasized how Charles II helped his soldiers cheat death by glorifying their sacrifice for the Spanish empire; this allowed their fame to live on. One painting on the pyre, for example, consisted of two hands: one grasped a sword and the other a palm. Because ancients and contemporaries recognized the palm as a symbol representing fame, the painting indicated that the soldiers would live on thanks to the public recognition stimulated by their monarch.13 The beneficence of the monarch, then, allowed Galve—as the inaugurator of the annual ceremony—to benefit. The sermon and catafalque cast both as paternal benefactors. In the sermon given in the Casa Profesa the following year, the orator Juan Martínez de la Parra continued to set the tone for future sermons in honor of Spain’s soldiers, stressing the importance of their service, as well as the king’s shepherding of his flock. Beginning with Charles I of Spain, Castilian kings had all been compared at one time or another with the Good Shepherd, and during the reign of Charles II, this metaphor became commonplace and especially during moments of obvious external or internal crisis. By the second half of the 17th century and then through the 18th century, in New Spain designers of emblems frequently depicted the king as the sun shining down on his subjects.14 By continuing to petition for God’s support, Charles II intended to preserve the empire, as his predecessors had done, and Galve inaugurated the ceremonies in Mexico City during the Nine Years’ War when the coastlines seemed particularly vulnerable to the threat of French corsairs. The ceremony placated God, but it also shepherded the soldiers who died in the service of the Crown. Consequently, the annual masses acted as a recruitment device. Because the men accrued stains on their souls that inhibited them from ascending straight to Heaven, the mass and sermon, as celebrated in cities throughout the empire, served to purge their sins. The annual ceremony also reflected positively on the monarch, as his subjects surely appreciated how well he cared for those who served him. For Martínez de la Parra, the strengthening of morale among soldiers proved indispensable. He explained how Charles I “arrived” in the New World through the first conquistadors, earning the personal device plus ultra, a play on non plus ultra, the words supposedly placed by Hercules at the straights of Gibraltar to mark the limits of the known world. Charles II, however, also explored a new world (the netherworld) to free souls from Purgatory. As noted by Martínez de la Parra, no fleets arrive and no armadas navigate in its waters, but it is a “world” just as important to the empire.15 13 Mendez, Fúnebres ecos con que responde a las vozes del llanto de sus soldados difuntos, n.p. 14 See Sánchez Llanes, “El buen pastor en Carlos II”, pp. 203–732; Mínguez, Los reyes solares. 15 Martínez de la Parra, Oracion funebre en las annuales honras, fols. 3r–7v.

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Legitimizing the Bourbon Succession

After Galve held funerary honors in 1694, they remained part of the annual calendar of the Casa Profesa, but after 1696, ten years went by before a member of the capital’s elite chose to sponsor another printing of a sermon commemorating the event; a high-placed functionary or ecclesiastic typically paid for a sermon to impress a viceroy, archbishop, king, or a member of the royal family. Because sermons cost a great deal to print, elites reserved sponsorship for extraordinary years. Following two of the most eventful years of the War of the Spanish Succession, in 1707, the sitting viceroy, the Duke of Alburquerque, held elaborate funerary honors for Spain’s soldiers. The order to do so came from Spain in the wake of the decisive victory at Almansa following a difficult two years for Franco-Spanish forces, which included the temporary occupation of Madrid. High-ranking officials like the Secretario del Despacho Universal understood the importance of ceremony for strengthening the legitimacy of the new Bourbon king and took pains to glorify Philip V’s military victories. Similar to the inaugural funerary honors held in 1694, those in 1707 emphasized Philip V as the Good Shepherd, but, in the context of the war, they also stressed his leadership in battle. Habsburg monarchs had long ceased fighting directly in war, and relaciones de suceso, the printed pamphlets with news censured carefully by the Secretario del Despacho Universal’s office, emphasized how the young Bourbon king led troops into battle, modeling heroism and virtue for his soldiers and subjects.16 Because of chronically ill health, the last Habsburg king had never fought in battle, and Philip V would be the only Spanish Bourbon king to do so. In May 1706, after failing to re-conquer Barcelona from the Archduke Charles and refusing to sign a Partition Treaty proposed by the Austrian Alliance that would have divided the empire among Spain’s enemies, the chronicler Vicente Bacallar y Sanna coined Philip V “el Animoso” or “Beloved”, thereby intertwining his devotion with his willingness to fight.17 This, along with characterizations of the monarch as a messiah, crossed the ocean to Mexico City via printed pamphlets and became disseminated by priests through sermons. What is more, in 1707, the Jesuit Juan de Goycoechea highlighted this image of the king in the funerary honors for Spanish soldiers, and in 1711, during the funerary honors to mark the victories at Brihuega and Villaviciosa that signaled the inevitable victory of Philip V. 16 17

See González Cruz, Propaganda e información. Borreguero Beltrán, “Imagen y propaganda de guerra en el conflicto sucesorio ­(1700–1713)”, pp. 98–99.

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But, in 1707, France and Spain had just undergone a series of dramatic losses before achieving one of the most decisive victories of the entire conflict, the victory at Almansa. By the end of 1705, Bourbon forces had lost almost all of Catalonia and Valencia to the allies, and in June of 1706, 30,000 enemy soldiers approached Madrid, forcing Philip V to evacuate after ordering all of his tribunals to do the same. Not all high-level bureaucrats obeyed, however, and to the Bourbon king’s dismay, the capital held an oath ceremony for the Archduke Charles of Austria—the renamed Charles III—on 30 June, after which the Council of the Indies reconvened. Following the reestablishment of Bourbon rule the following month, Philip V banished the disloyal bureaucrats who served on the council and declared their posts vacant. For there to be no confusion regarding the cost of disloyalty, he sent a detailed account of the events to New Spain and ordered the viceroy to disregard all communications sent by the “tyrannical government” between 30 June and 11 July, the day Bourbon forces retook the capital.18 Then, in the fall of 1706, all of the Castilian territories that had previously been lost, as well as the extreme south of Valencia, returned to Bourbon rule. The following April, Bourbon forces defeated the Austrian Alliance on the plains outside of Almansa and, after this decisive victory, recaptured all of Valencia. High-ranking officials in Madrid lost no time in sharing the good news with Mexico City.19 After this, the Crown ordered the Duke of Alburquerque to celebrate lavish funerary honors for Spain’s fallen soldiers. Clearly, this victory allowed supporters of Philip V to argue that God favored France and Spain and to try to persuade those who still waffled in their loyalty toward the Bourbon side. But, more than likely, the ceremony also benefitted the viceroy. Possibly, just as the Count of Galve sought to shore up legitimacy by reminding all of his ties to Charles II, the Duke of Alburquerque, who had been undergoing a contentious struggle with the capital’s consulado merchants, sought to do the same. Shortly after arriving in New Spain, the viceroy came into conflict with the powerful Sánchez de Tagle family who led the merchant monopoly; although complicated, the conflict hinged on price ceilings and trade with Acapulco, and in 1703, the viceroy even had three members of the family arrested in an obvious act of retribution. Analyzing the conflict, Christoph Rosenmüller has determined that the viceroy had selfish reasons for challenging the monopoly. According to many merchants and officials, the viceroy allowed French sailors to exceed the amount that they could sell legally and permitted the entry 18 19

King to viceroy, Madrid, 18 October 1706, AGN, vol. 33, exp. 15, fols. 61–63. Relación diaria, y singular de la gran batalla, que dieron las armas del rey nuestro señor en los campos de Almansa [...], AGN, vol. 33, Madrid, 14 July 1707, fols. 188r–201v.

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of ships from other Spanish colonies, which was strictly prohibited under the empire’s mercantilist policies.20 While following an order by the Crown to commemorate the victory in Almansa, it is also probable that the Duke of Alburquerque hoped to distract Mexico City’s powerful residents. And, to complicate matters, in 1706 and 1707, the viceroy also had to manage threatening intelligence reports. Because he lacked sufficient soldiers to ward off an enemy attack, it is also possible that he looked to the funerary honors as a recruitment tool. Reacting to rumors that the English planned to invade ports along the Atlantic, the Duke of Alburquerque mobilized central Mexico to defend itself. According to Joseph de Pobeda, a Spaniard who was kidnapped by English pirates while travelling from Puerto Principe to Havana, 80 ships sent over by Queen Anne supposedly intended to attack Spain’s silver fleet.21 Shortly after learning of different rumors in early September 1706, the viceroy received word that after failing to reclaim Barcelona and after losing 10,000 men and countless pieces of artillery, the king and court had to leave Madrid. Furthermore, he also received word of the fragile state of Caracas that had benefitted greatly from Dutch contrabandists and slave traders located in Curacao and that seemed to be devolving into significant factionalism, political disorder, and, quite possibly, rebellion.22 After hearing all this disturbing news, the viceroy convened a committee of military men with experience fighting in Europe. These provided a negative and largely reactionary picture of New Spain’s population, and that of Mexico City in particular. According to these European commanders, the Indians only adhered to the Catholic faith out of fear, and the castas represented a terrible moral influence; if the English arrived and declared religious freedom, they feared that the empire would quickly disintegrate. Creoles, moreover, were also not beyond reproach, as they could be lazy and consorted with castas, while poor Spaniards also did not escape suspicion, as they often fled Spain after committing serious crimes.23 Because Mexico City had recently undergone the largest riot in its history, the committee stressed the need to protect the “head and heart” of the viceroyalty.24 To this end, the viceroy asked the capital’s leading men to lend horses 20 21 22 23 24

Rosenmüller, Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues, pp. 79–96, 154–156. Testimonio de los autos hechos sobre las providencias dadas por el excelentísimo Virrey de esta Nueva España para su defensa, 1707, Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), México 480, fols. 1r–10v. See Olivas, “The Global Politics of the Transatlantic Slave Trade”, pp. 85–110. Testimonio de los autos hechos sobre las providencias dadas por el excelentísimo Virrey de esta Nueva España para su defensa, 1707, AGI, México 480, fols. 17r–25. Ibid., fols. 1–23v.

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and arms and asked the alcaldes mayores, or head magistrates, of central ­Mexico’s major towns to gather volunteer soldiers to defend the port and passage to the capital. But, in addition to readying a battalion of white militiamen and three battalions of free blacks, the capital could not recruit more soldiers and found itself woefully short of arms. The white militiamen all had swords, but only ten muskets and 90 harquebuses between them.25 Then, to complicate matters, officials did not only have to contend with the threat of external enemies. They also feared a conspiracy from within. Although in hindsight it does appear like the Duke of Alburquerque over reacted, at the end of 1706, he arrested several people in Mexico City for making vaguely disloyal (or at the very least ambivalent) remarks about Philip V.26 In this tense climate, the viceroy followed Philip V’s orders to honor Spain’s fallen soldiers, and by analyzing the commemoration in context, we can see that it reflected Alburquerque’s concerns. As when Galve inaugurated the annual commemoration in 1694 and the orator Escalante provided a long dedication to the viceroy in the printed sermon, in 1707, so did Juan Díaz Bracamonte, the oidor, or audiencia judge, who commissioned the printing of the sermon by famed orator Juan de Goycoechea. Bracamonte praised the viceroy for personally traveling to Veracruz to oversee its fortification and for ordering that Acapulco be reinforced after hearing of the existence of enemy ships along the coast of Guatemala. He reiterated how after learning of the failure to retake Barcelona, the viceroy asked the archbishop for permission to bring the Virgin of the Remedies—Mexico’s “Ark of the Covenant”—to Mexico City; there it remained for one year to protect the monarchy and the queen as she gave birth to Spain’s first Bourbon prince. While listening to the sermon, attendees gazed upon a large catafalque of which there is unfortunately no description. But, regardless, Goycoechea’s sermon condensed messages regarding Philip V’s leadership and legitimacy and consequently, the loyalty owed to his simulacrum, the viceroy. Furthermore, the sermon praised the soldiers to such an extent that it transformed the ceremony into a recruitment tool, especially given the difficult year in which it took place when both Spain and New Spain were so vulnerable. Goycoechea focused on Philip V and his inevitable victory over the Alliance. As a response to the victory in Almansa, the sermon ignored the series of failures that had recently plagued the Bourbon side. As David González Cruz has noted, during the War of the Spanish Succession, both sides publicized victories widely and made a point of downplaying or even suppressing news 25 26

Ibid, fols. 41r–72v. See Navarro García, Conspiración en México.

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of defeat given that this would demoralize soldiers.27 The sermon, moreover, focused more on the king than on the soldiers. The title of the sermon begins Philippo Quinto David Segundo, and declared he would defeat his enemies and restore the limits of his empire.28 Throughout the years of fighting, priests in New Spain drew comparisons between Philip V and David, King of Israel, and labeled Austria’s Protestant allies as heretical outsiders and a threat to Spain’s Catholic empire. The construction of Philip as David—the heir who was not a direct descendent of King Saul—mattered in the context of the war. God chose David to rule, and people throughout the empire needed to feel that the rise of a Bourbon ruler reflected divine will. Furthermore, many contemporaries had begun to acknowledge Spain’s decline and desired a “rebirth”.29 A Bourbon “David” promised victory over the “Philistines” and a long period of peace. David became the second King of Israel in the 9th century B.C., but before that, he was the youngest of eight sons of Jesse. After defeating Goliath, he won a permanent place at Saul’s court but soon awoke the king’s jealousy. After the death of Saul, God called him to take his place as king. He led the people of Juda at Hebron, while continuing to unite the Philistines and the rest of Israel that remained loyal to Saul’s son Isobeth. Although contemporary scholars debate this, he reportedly united Israel after seven and a half years of war against the Philistines and a civil war among the Israelites. Panegyrists characterized Philip V as the adopted son of Charles II who would allow for Spain’s regeneration. In this sense, Philip represented the perfect David, but, given that he led troops into battle throughout the entire course of the war, comparisons to David also proved apt. In fact, Goycoechea began the entire sermon with a discussion of God’s favoring of David and then stated quite clearly that his story foretold that of Philip V. Saul transformed David into a king through his testament, just as Charles II would later do with Philip.30 According to Goycoechea, both Philip and King David spent the first seven years of their reign in a state of almost perpetual warfare and owed their success to their giving thanks to their soldiers. After succeeding Saul, David ordered his funeral, specifying that it follow Hebrew ritual. He cried for both Saul and his eldest son Jonathan and asked the people to honor all of the fallen soldiers who died fighting the Philistines on Mount Gilboa. As David continued 27 González Cruz, Propaganda e información, pp. 22–23. 28 Goycoechea, Philippo Quinto David Segundo. 29 For a treatment of this theme, see Ramos, “Arte efímero, espectáculo, y la reafirmación de la autoridad real en Puebla”, pp. 179–218. 30 Goycoechea, Philippo Quinto David Segundo, fols. 1r–3r.

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to triumph, his honoring of the dead only increased. Consequently, he not only defeated kings who challenged him, but extended the limits of the kingdom of Israel. Despite the fact that Philip V ordered the funerary honors following Almansa, Goycoechea condensed the king’s and the viceroy’s roles in defending the empire. Speaking directly to the Duke of Alburquerque, he stated that as “prince of his militia and Captain General” the king has ordered you to honor the soldiers. He continued by declaring that the viceroy did not have to wish to have the good fortune of those who were able to be next to the king in battle (as he had repeatedly stated) because in addition to defending these kingdoms from “Foreign Nations”, “with only this pious action, Your Excellency gains the greatest glory for those heroic acts in the war”. In other words, the viceroy deserves credit for the mass and sermon that assures the king’s success, just as giving thanks to the dead assured King David’s victory over his enemies. Furthermore, although unspoken (but surely obvious given the circumstances), the ceremony may have helped to attract needed men to the militia. Eventually, conditions settled down in New Spain, although the war in Europe seemed to shift more favorably toward the Austrian Alliance. In 1710, the Alliance even occupied Madrid for a second time, but shortly thereafter, the tide changed. On 8–9 December, Bourbon forces defeated the Alliance in the town of Brihuega and the next day (10–11 December), defeated more enemy troops at Villaviciosa. The twin victories decimated the Alliance, and as Henry Kamen has stated, “permanently saved the cause of Philip V”.31 In a decree dated 11 January 1711, the king ordered celebrations and acts of thanksgiving and sent a full account of the victories to New Spain, stating that God has permitted his vassals to see the “the final punishment, and extermination of my enemies”.32 Beginning on 12 July 1711, Mexico City inaugurated six weeks of celebrations with separate institutions holding celebratory masses and sermons of thanksgiving in honor of the victories. Funerary honors for fallen soldiers played a role in the display. Because the victories came during the octave of the feast of the Immaculate Conception (Spain’s special patroness) the monarch instructed churches, religious orders, and universities to pay tribute to the virgin. By this point, the Duke of Alburquerque had left for Spain and the Duke of Linares had taken his place; it was up to him to coordinate much of the celebration.33

31 Kamen, The War of Succession in Spain, p. 23. 32 King to the viceroy of New Spain, Zaragoza, 11 January 1711, AGN, vol. 35, exp. 1, folio 1r–1v. 33 See the dedication to the imprint that contains both the sermon and the description of the catafalque. Castilla, Elogio sepulchral.

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Since the inauguration of the funerary honors in New Spain in 1694, Mexico’s viceroys had acted as the special patrons of the ceremonies, and in 1711, Linares hosted an extraordinary one to commemorate the victories. He paid for the ceremony, chose the church, and invited the entire court, as well as leading gentlemen within the city. The Jesuit priest who gave the sermon, Miguel de la Castilla, expressed his thanks to all the Spanish soldiers who gave their lives for the empire on behalf of the Duke of Linares. Because these funerary honors were not the annual ones that occurred on All Souls’ Day, but part of the longer series of events commemorating Brihuega and Villaviciosa, Linares chose the eve of the feast of Saint James, or Santiago, the patron saint of Spain. He also specifically chose to honor the men who lost their lives defending Madrid, the capital of the empire, during the second occupation by the Austrian Alliance.34 During the second occupation of Madrid, Protestant auxiliary forces reportedly destroyed holy wafers and sacred images, to the great dismay of the capital’s Catholic population. In his sermon, the Jesuit Miguel de la Castilla recalled Mexico City’s inaugural funerary sermon for fallen soldiers held in 1694 and compared the Spanish soldiers who forced the Alliance to leave Madrid to the Maccabees, who in the 2nd century B.C. fought to preserve the Jewish religion from Hellenistic influence. However, he did not parrot previous sermons, but related this fully to the context of war within their collective homeland, explaining how the Spaniards died honorable deaths defending their patria. Castilla described the inability of Philip V to take back Barcelona (“abandoned by his soldiers”), how many towns had been occupied by the Alliance, and finally how there was “a plague in the heart of the Kingdom, because there was now the enemy in the Court of Madrid”. Like the Maccabees, the Spanish soldiers did not only fight to win back territory, but also to defend their faith.35 While listening to the sermon, spectators gazed upon a seven-story ephemeral pyramid, the “tomb”, atop which sat a variety of weapons typically used by soldiers; these represented the thousands of men slain during the past year of war against the Alliance. The entire structure glowed with the light of 100 finely crafted candles and entertained onlookers with a diversity of poems. However, one image centered on the second floor, in front of the altar, underscored the role of the king as both a military leader and a Good Shepherd. Artists painted the top of a shield with the fragment of the zodiac extending from Leo to Libra. On top of the lion (which was to the right of the shield) artists 34 35

Ibid., fols. 8v, 3r–4r. Ibid., fols. 4r–5r.

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painted “caballero Nuestro Rey D. Philippo V”, suggesting that he was depicted in equestrian style, probably in military dress. Furthermore, the description states that instead of a face, his was the sun shining forth, and that an ­epigraph read Philippus V. Os Lampadis and suggested that the designers did this because of the common interpretation of his name and the “well-known [and] common prophecy” associated with it. Early modern men—and especially the erudite trained in the scholastic tradition—understood the importance of prefiguration and proved adept at identifying hidden meanings and portents. Etymology, for example, represented one of the most powerful tools in an orator’s arsenal, and during the War of the Spanish Succession, various orators in New Spain noted the origin of Philip’s name as os lampadis, “the mouth of a lamp”.36 This popular understanding of Philip, and the exploration of its significance given the current context, likely came from readings of the Breviarium apostolorum, a 7th-century Latin source based on Greco-Roman texts and the first to discuss Santiago’s preaching in Spain. It, along with De ortu et obitu partum, attributed to Isidore of Seville in the seventh century, referred to the etymology of the name of the apostle Philip.37 Panegyrists compared Philip to the light of faith, threatened by the darkness of Austria’s heretical alliance with Protestant forces, or in keeping with how orators, poets, and artisans commonly characterized Spanish monarchs during elaborate public rituals, as the sun casting benevolent light throughout the empire. To the left of the image, the artist painted dusk, as if the sun was setting, and stars which represented Spanish soldiers. A poem near the image explained that the brightest star, the lucero, represented the viceroy.38 Albeit on a smaller scale, the Duke of Linares also shone beneficent light as he guided souls out of Purgatory. During the War of the Spanish Succession, funerary honors for fallen soldiers continued to play an important role in the internal politics of the viceroyalty and the encouragement of loyalty to the new Bourbon king. In 1707, the Duke of Alburquerque acted on orders from Philip V to commemorate the funerary honors following the victory in Almansa, but there is no doubt that as in the case with Galve, the honors provided added political benefits. The call to do so, moreover, came in a difficult year for Mexico City, which saw itself threatened from outside and from within. To assure the capital’s residents, Goycoechea characterized the monarch as King David, the adopted son of Saul and a great warrior-king, and thereby exalted Philip V as a military hero. It also 36 Castilla, Elogio sepulchral, fols. 10–10v. 37 Rose, Ritual Memory, pp. 136–139. 38 Castilla, Elogio sepulchral, f. 11.

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celebrated the viceroy as the king’s representative in New Spain. In 1711, with victory all but assured, the funerary honors returned to the original inaugural theme of the Maccabees, but again championed Philip V as a military hero and benevolent ruler who, with the help of his viceroy, extended his reach as far as the rays of the sun. 3

Ceremony and Bourbon Absolutism in the 1760s

Long after the conclusion of the war, the ceremony would be reinvigorated as a ceremony of Bourbon absolutism to meet specific political ends. The funerary honors remained part of the calendar of the Casa Profesa until the expulsion of the Jesuit Order from the Spanish empire in 1767, but neither viceroys nor bureaucrats commissioned another printing of a sermon marking a funerary honor until the 1760s. As noted, elites reserved the printing of sermons for extraordinary occasions, and in 1767, the new viceroy the Marquis de Croix needed to make a positive impression not only through the spectacle, but also through keepsakes of the commemorative sermon. The viceroy arrived in New Spain on 10 July 1766, and on 25 June 1767, he oversaw the removal of the Jesuit Order, one of the most controversial of the Crown’s 18th-century innovations. Without any notice, the men who had educated the vast majority of Creole youths had been forcibly removed to waiting ships with scarcely the clothes on their backs, suspected, among others things, of insufficient loyalty to the Crown. Now, the Marquis de Croix had to temper disquiet and remind all of the king’s benevolence. Furthermore, given that soldiers escorted the priests, the ceremony needed to reaffirm the importance of the military, especially given the fact that the viceroy and other bureaucrats were attempting to establish a standing army. Furthermore, following the removal of the Jesuits, the viceroy helped put down various uprisings and did so with unprecedented ruthlessness. The removal of the Jesuit Order and early attempts to create a standing army caused tension in the capital, and in 1767, the first year of the Marquis de Croix’s administration, he needed to impress the population. Because holding the funerary honors for fallen soldiers in the Casa Profesa would likely have inflamed resentment among wealthy Creoles who remained loyal to the Jesuits, the viceroy decided to hold them on the same street, in the city’s Franciscan convent. The printed sermon, examples of which would have been shared with important members of the Creole community in Mexico City, included a dedication to the viceroy that lauded his military achievements. Among other distinctions during his long career, the viceroy had served as a lieutenant general

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in the army of His Majesty, and accompanied the then Infante to Italy when he took possession of Tuscany. He eventually became Governor of Ceuta and Captain General of Galicia.39 As in previous sermons in honor of Spain’s deceased soldiers, in 1767, the Franciscan orator José Manuel Rodríguez compared the Spanish monarch to King David, but in the context of Charles III’s (1716–88) growing absolutism in policies like the creation of the standing army, the expulsion of the Jesuits, and the ruthless quashing of dissent, the audience likely recognized a harsher David than had been drawn in previous sermons. Rodríguez described David as an absolutist; he was the “terror of his enemies” and Charles III shared all his same “noble characteristics”.40 In 1768, the viceroy chose to move the funerary honors to the cathedral where it would continue to be celebrated on a permanent basis. Although there is no detailed description of the catafalque, the printed sermon makes mention of the pyramidal tomb inside the cathedral, surrounded by four statues that reflect the king’s faith, religion, gratitude, and piety.41 Cathedral canon Gregorio de Omaña gave a sermon that played on historical memory to legitimize current events. He began by celebrating the military for doing what was needed to defend the empire, regardless of the difficulty. He enquired about key military figures from Spain’s past and present, including conquistadors like Cortés, the Pizarros, the Almagros, and the Alvarados, and praised them for dying like men and stated that they were worthy of immortality. Omaña continued, providing a long list of men throughout Spanish history who did what was necessary to defend their kingdoms and leaders. This, of course, led to stains on their souls that required special cleansing and, for this reason the pious Charles II established the annual masses in cities throughout the empire. The soldiers deserved this attention because they repeatedly saved the empire and faith from destruction, and Omaña even noted at length how they aided Charles III’s father, Philip V, in his struggle against the Austrian Alliance during the War of the Spanish Succession. Right after the victory at Villaviciosa, Omaña described how Philip V ordered that 20,000 masses be said for the dead in the monastery next door to the battle site.42 39

Rodríguez, Oración fúnebre, que en las exequias, que de orden del excelentisimo Sr. D. Carlos Francisco de Croix, Virrey de esta Nueva España. &c. se celebraron por los militares españoles difuntos, pp. 1–2. 40 Ibid., pp. 3–5. 41 Ibid., p. 16. 42 Omaña, Oracion funebre que en las anniversarias honras de los militares defuntos de España, celebradas en la Santa Iglesia de Mexico dijo en presencia del Excmo Sr Marques de Croix … El dia 19 de Noviembre de este año de 1768 […], pp. 1–17.

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Having just lived through the expulsion of the Jesuit Order and the beginnings of the establishment of the standing army, Creoles in Mexico City surely understood the messages conveyed. Regardless of what many Creoles may have personally felt, the sermon stressed that the military deserved respect for honoring the empire and that the king enjoyed absolute authority. Furthermore, Omaña tried to convey that what had recently occurred in New Spain did not represent a novelty, as Spain’s soldiers had always had to shoulder difficult missions and would continue to do so in the future. By the 1770s, Mexico City replaced its volunteer militias with permanent military battalions, which the municipal council helped to maintain. The soldiers required barracks and uniforms, and their exercises on public streets upset the customary rhythm of urban life. It took getting used to, but as Alan Kuethe and Kenneth Andrien have argued, during Spain’s 18th century, the administrative and economic reforms put forward by Bourbon reformers served, above all else, to meet the exigencies of continuous war.43 By its very definition, early modern war required a military, the expansion of which served as the foundation of the Bourbon reform project. Rational expenditure, fiscal streamlining, and more direct oversight would help to make the viceroyalty more lucrative in order to meet the demands of constant war. If we take the printing of the sermons as a measure of the importance of the ceremony, the funerary honors enjoyed renewed significance in the late 18th century. With the standing army playing a central role in urban life, the funerary honors for soldiers likely drew larger crowds than ever before. Elites continued to pay for the printing of sermons intermittently through the end of the century, and the sermon in 1786 also recalled how the empire had almost been lost in the War of the Spanish Succession and how there had been an insufficient amount of soldiers to supply the entire empire. It celebrated all that the Bourbons had achieved since the death of the last Habsburg king.44 4 Conclusion Spain’s last Habsburg monarch asked cities throughout the empire to celebrate annual funerary honors for Spain’s fallen soldiers in 1684, but not until 1694, when under pressure to reclaim some legitimacy following a destructive riot, did the Count of Galve inaugurate the commemoration in New Spain’s 43 44

See Kuethe and Andrien, The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century. Sarria y Alderete, Oracion funebre que en las solemnes honras que se celebran anualmente en la Santa Iglesia Metropolitana de Mexico a la gloriosa memoria de los difuntos militares que siguieron las triunfantes vanderas Españolas, dijo el día 25 de Noviembre de 1789, pp. 23–24. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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viceregal court. Only six years later, Spain would enter into a succession crisis in which Charles II’s named successor, the Bourbon Philip V, would have to fight for the Crown. During this period, the Bourbon side appropriated the ceremony; in 1707, Philip V made it a point of asking cities to celebrate the victory in Almansa by hosting the funerary honors for soldiers despite the fact that these would have been celebrated anyway as part of the cyclical calendars of particular churches. Then, in 1711, the Duke of Linares also chose to celebrate the victories in Brihuega and Villaviciosa by holding funerary honors for fallen soldiers. Instead of holding them in November, as was customary, he held them in July, on the eve of the feast day of Santiago, the patron saint of Spain. Funerary honors for fallen soldiers telegraphed messages regarding the importance of the military, the legitimacy of Bourbon rule, and the absolute authority of the king, and it did all of this while allowing the viceroy to benefit. It became a useful tool of Bourbon rule during key years, including 1767, when the Marquis de Croix had to oversee the expulsion of the Jesuit Order from the viceroyalty and the beginnings of the creation of a standing army, something that would be more firmly cemented in the 1770s. And the annual sermon and catafalque continued to stand as a symbol of how the monarch supported his soldiers and as a beacon that hoped to attract more men to fight for their king, as well as for their own souls. By the late 18th century, one orator claimed that it had succeeded in serving the ends it had been conceived for. In 1786, the sermon described an army that spanned the farthest corners of the empire.45 While the ceremony demonstrated the gratitude of Spain’s subjects by helping the souls of departed soldiers ascend into Heaven, it also emboldened soldiers who were still alive. They would be able to fight every day confident that when they passed into the netherworld, Spain’s subjects would work hard to expedite their transition out of Purgatory. This, as noted in various sermons, would give them the confidence needed to fight. Their king—their David—would always look after them. Bibliography

AGI AGN

Primary Sources

Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Mexico

Castilla, M. de la, Elogio sepulchral a la immortal memoria de los españoles que murieron en el victoriosa expulsión del ejército enemigo, segunda vez apoderado de la corte de Madrid, Mexico City, 1711. 45

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Goycoechea, J., Philippo Quinto David Segundo, en la piedad primero rey de las Españas; honrando sus fuertes, celebrando exequias a sus militares diffuntos, reyna entre los leones; vençe sus enemigos; restaura los terminos de su imperio; en succession feliz eterniza su solio; y se haze un nombre grande, igual con el que oy tiene entre los reyes el renombre de Grande. Sermon que predicó el dia 5. de Noviembre de este año de 1707, Mexico City, 1707. Lopez y Martínez, Francisco, Sermon en la honoracion annua y universal sufragio: que de orden de la magestad Catolica del Rey N.S. D. Carlos II: el deseado se fundó en la Iglesia Metropolitana de Lima [. . .], Facsimile, Lima, ca. 1684, London, 2018. Martínez de la Parra, J., Oración fúnebre en las annuales honras, que por mandado, y reales expensas de nuestro Catholico Rey, y señor Carlos II. Se celebraron en la Casa Professa de La Compañia de Jesus de México, por los soldados, que han muerto en defensa de las Catholicas armas de España, Mexico City, 1696. Mendez, F., Fúnebres ecos que responde a las voces del llanto de sus soldados difuntos la piedad de nuestro Gran Monarca, por las lenguas de las luces que enciende en la suntuosa pira que, en obediencia a sus órdenes, erige el Excmo Señor Gaspar de la Cerda, Conde de Galve, Virrey, Mexico City, 1695. Muro Orejón, A. (ed.), Cedulario americano del siglo XVIII: colección de disposiciones legales indianas desde 1680 a 1800, contenidas en los cedularios del Archivo General de Indias, Seville, 1999. Omaña, G., Oración fúnebre que en las anniversarias honras de los militares defuntos de españa, celebradas en la santa iglesia de México. Dijo en presencia del Excmo Sr Marques de Croix ... El dia 19 de Noviembre de este año de 1768 [...] el Canónigo Majistral de dicha Santa Iglesia, Mexico City, 1768. Rodriguez, J.M., Oración fúnebre, que en las exequias, que de orden del Excelentisimo Sr. D. Carlos Francisco de Croix, Virrey de esta Nueva España. &c. se celebraron por los militares españoles difuntos, en la Iglesia del Convento Grande de N.S.P.S. Francisco de México, el dia 6 de Noviembre de 1767. Con asistencia de todos los tribunales […], Mexico City, 1767. Sarria y Alderete, J., Oración fúnebre que en las solemnes honras que se celebran anualmente en la Santa Iglesia Metropolitana de México a la gloriosa memoria de los difuntos militares que siguieron las triunfantes banderas españolas, dijo el día 25 de Noviembre de 1789, Mexico City, 1792.



Secondary Literature

Borreguero Beltrán, C., “Imagen y propaganda de guerra en el conflicto sucesorio (1700–1713)”, Manuscrits: Revista d’història Moderna 21 (2003), pp. 98–99. Cañeque, A., The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico, New York, 2004.

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Cope, R. Douglas, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico, 1660–1720. Madison, WI, 1994 Cuesta García de Leonardo, M., “La mano del monarca grande de las españas: la muerte de Los Soldados Y El Poder Del Virrey Galve En La Nueva España, 1694”, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 38:108 (2016), pp. 51–85. Curcio-Nagy, L., The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity, Albuquerque, 2004. Eissa-Barrosso, F.A. and A. Vázquez Varela (eds.), Early Bourbon Spanish America: Politics and Society in a Forgotten Era, Leiden, 2013. Escamilla, González, Iván, Los intereses malentendidos: el consulado de comerciantes de México y la Monarquía Española. Mexico City, 2011. González Cruz, D., Propaganda e información en tiempos de guerra: España y América (1700–1714), Madrid, 2009. Kamen, H., The War of Succession in Spain, 1700–1715, Bloomington, 1969. Kuethe, A.J., and K.J. Andrien, The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century: War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713–1796, Cambridge, 2014. Mínguez, V., Los reyes solares: iconografía astral de la monarquía hispánica, Castelló de la Plana, 2001. Navarro García, L., Conspiración en México durante el gobierno del Virrey Alburquerque, Valladolid, 1982. Olivas, A., “The Global Politics of the Transatlantic Slave Trade during the War of the Spanish Succession, 1700–1715”, in F.A. Eissa-Barrosso and A. Vázquez Varela (eds.), Early Bourbon Spanish America: Politics and Society in a Forgotten Era, Leiden, 2013, pp. 85–110. Ramos, F.L., “Arte efímero, espectáculo, y la reafirmación de la autoridad en la Puebla durante el siglo XVIII: la celebración en honor del Hércules Borbónico”, Relaciones 97 (2004), pp. 179–218. Rose, E., Ritual Memory: The Apocryphal Acts and Liturgical Commemoration in the Early Medieval West (c. 500–1215), Leiden, 2009. Rosenmüller, C., Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial Mexico, 1702–1710, Calgary, 2008. Sánchez Llanes, I., “El buen pastor en Carlos II: equidad y crítica política”, Hispania: Revista española de historia 73:245 (2013), pp. 203–732.

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PART 2 Religious Life

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CHAPTER 6

City of Friars, City of Archbishops

The Church in Mexico City in the Age of the Hapsburgs Antonio Rubial García Today, the buildings that best typify the historic center of Mexico’s capital, as well as the centers of most Latin American cities, are churches, which bear witness not only to the urbanization that sprang from Christianization, but also to the key role they played in the economic, social, political, and cultural life of the viceroyalty. First, the male religious orders, then the bishops and their parishes, and finally the female religious orders, saw the city as an earthly Jerusalem, manifesting their presence and conflicts in the form of shrines, churches, convents, schools, parishes, hospitals, and chapels. The different religious groups drew the local populations and their guilds and brotherhoods to these testimonies in stone with the promise that miraculous images would satisfy all their current and future needs, making their presence felt in the streets and squares via sculptures of saints, coats of arms, festivals, processions, and prayers (see Cruz González, this volume). Churches also served as places where the living could gather and socialize, and the dead could be buried and within them were held the ceremonies that set the pace of colonial life. With the ringing of bells and the chanting of masses, archbishops were enthroned, absent kings and queens were joyfully celebrated and dolefully mourned, and the changing seasons were marked. Through sermons that were preached during these festivities, the faithful could learn of news from the rest of New Spain and the world, draw aesthetic sustenance from music and the visual arts, and learn of the daily ongoings of their neighbors. Certain churches—parishes—were the only ones authorized to celebrate and register baptisms and weddings (and to be paid for their services), which explains why they had the most reliable population registers. At the end of the 17th century, they also began to keep track of who went to confession and received yearly communion, thus enabling the clergy to keep a watchful eye on the most important aspects of people’s lives, and also on the religious and civic festivities that marked the life of the community. Moreover, religious institutions owned half of all the real estate in the ­capital, which along with paying for their construction, maintenance, and remodeling, invigorated the economy. Since the religious communities consumed goods and services, they contributed to the employment of servants, © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004335578_008 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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craftsmen, and professionals. Neighborhoods were named after monasteries and were important distribution centers for potable water given their commissioning of public fountains and access to water-distribution networks, which few other establishments controlled. Since most aristocratic and middle-class families, along with some of the city’s humblest families, had relatives who were monks or members of the clergy, they assumed responsibility for supporting them, and for paying for their religious buildings or contributing funds for their maintenance and remodeling. Because of family connections and friendships, lay society traded with religious members and received loans from them (see Martínez López-Cano, this volume). Merchants also stored their goods in monasteries and sought sanctuary within their walls when fleeing from justice. In addition, the Church was also the main promoter of music and the visual arts; its members authored a large percentage of printed books (see Donahue-Wallace, this volume); political figures were educated in their schools (see González González, this volume); and a great number of hospitals, hospices, shelters, and orphanages were under its supervision. Cities could not have been built, and their economic, social, and cultural infrastructure could not have been created without the religious institutions of New Spain. Before going into further detail, I should stress that, while Rome exercised full control over New Spanish Church dogma, every aspect of its administration had been placed in the hands of the king of Spain via a papal concession known as the Regio Patronato. For this reason, many ecclesiastical matters, such as the foundation of temples and convents, the collection of tithes, or the appointment of bishops, were closely linked to civil power. Although clerics were considered a privileged class, the Church was not a monolithic body that acted uniformly and with full consensus, since it contained two large groups known respectively as the secular and regular clergy. The former took their name from the Latin word saeculum, meaning “century”, whose members did not live in monastic communities but were answerable to the bishop; the latter drew their name from the Latin word regula, referring to “rule”, which governed monastic life, based, in part, on prayer and other collective practices. Due to gender, nuns were not considered members of the regular or secular clergy, although they played an important role as intermediaries to God. As a result of their oversight of Indians, both groups of clerics were constantly embroiled in conflict, often drawing nuns into the quarrels. One important consequence resulting from clergy feuds that had urban implications was the distribution of religious buildings within different city sectors, allocating space to the different religious branches of the Church.1

1 See Rubial (ed.), La Iglesia en el México Colonial, for an overview of the colonial church.

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The Struggle to Occupy Urban Space: The 16th-Century City

The building of Mexico City atop the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the ancient lake capital of the Mexicas, gave rise to a situation that was unprecedented in the Christian world. Unlike the case of Peru, where the Spanish city of Lima and the indigenous city of Cuzco were located in two completely different places, an extraordinary situation occurred in Mexico: two different societies occupied the same city. Although this fictional coexistence between the republics of Indians and Spaniards, of two separate administrative and social entities, could not be sustained for very long, from a legal standpoint, two parallel cities were managed in which ethnic differences were conceived along corporatist terms. The regular clergy in these two cities would be responsible for the parroquial administration of the Indian population, while the secular authorities would administer the Spanish and mestizo populace. In everyday practice, however, no such sharp lines were drawn. 2

The Religious Orders and the Initial Planning of the City, 1523–1554

The first religious order to secure a place within this peculiar legal framework were the Franciscans. In 1523, three brothers from Flanders arrived, and in 1524, another 12 from Extremadura joined them. Since the capital was only just beginning to take shape, these friars played an important role in its layout and distribution. One of the city’s most prominent figures, Fray Pieter van der Moere, soon to be known as Peter of Ghent, was, according to the Codex Osuna, likely instrumental in the initial organization and distribution of Indian parishes called doctrinas. For example, Ghent was responsible for naming the barrios of San Juan de Letrán Moyotlan, San Pablo Teopan, Santa María Tlaquechiuhcan (or Cuepopan), and San Sebastián Atzacualco that surrounded the Spanish city or traza. These names, taken from the four most important basilicas in Rome, bore witness to the friars’ intention to make the new city the hub of Christianity in the New World.2 A fifth barrio, established in the indigenous city of Tlatelolco, was dedicated to Saint James, which took its name from a small chapel built by the conquistadors to give thanks to the patron saint of Castile.3 Tlatelolco had been the first area conquered by the Spanish, and they attributed their triumph to Saint James, who played an important symbolic role in the Spanish Reconquista and was thus referred to as matamoros or the Moor slayer. 2 Gutiérrez and Romero, “A imagen y semejanza, la Roma del nuevo mundo”, pp. 163–174. 3 Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, p. 175.

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The chapel built in honor of Saint James was not the only one that the conquistadors, who primarily stemmed from Extremadura, constructed to commemorate their victory. From very early on, the Spanish constructed a small church (located at the start of the causeway of Tlacopan) to Saint Hippolytus, on whose feast day, 13 August, Tenochtitlan was conquered. It is also very likely that a chapel dedicated to Guadalupe, the patroness of the Extremadurans, was founded at Tepeyac. Another two chapels were built to commemorate the Noche Triste that had occurred a year earlier, rather than to memorialize their 13 August victory. Near the chapel of Saint Hippolytus, another structure was dedicated to the Spanish “martyrs” who had fallen in the conquest, and yet another was dedicated to Our Lady of Remedios at Totoltepec, where Cortés and his men took refuge during their flight from Tenochtitlan.4 By 1524, there also existed a small chapel adjoining the Hospital de Jesús, which Cortés founded to succor impoverished Spaniards. In 1526, the conquistador also erected another chapel on the calzada de Tacuba to house the headquarters of the Spanish brotherhood of the Vera Cruz, which commemorated the day Cortés’ arrived on the coast of New Spain.5 Although the religious appropriation of urban space by the conquistadors illustrates the important role that Christianity played in their lives, it did not greatly affect the Christianization process. Some of the chapels eventually disappeared, while others continued to play key roles as religious centers within the city. However, it has been largely forgotten that, with the exception of Saint Hippolytus, they were founded to give thanks for the conquest. Unlike the limited effects of conquistadors’ religious structures, the 12 Franciscan friars, who arrived from Extremadura in 1524, were to have a decisive impact on the city’s urban landscape. After receiving a grand welcome from Hernán Cortés, the 12 Franciscans were granted a plot of land near the plaza on which to build a monastery, which rested next to Tenochtitlan’s demolished Templo Mayor. However, they did not remain there for long. This first contact between Cortés and the 12 Spanish missionaries was quite brief; the conquistador set out on a mission to Hibueras (Honduras) three months after Franciscan arrival. Nevertheless, Cortés forged a relationship with the Franciscans, as attested by the fact that he left the Franciscan Toribio de Motolinía in charge of supervising the city.6 The Franciscans devoted themselves to the spiritual guidance of the capital’s inhabitants, both Spanish and indigenous, from the monasteries of Santiago 4 Ibid., p. 257. 5 Bazarte Martínez, Las cofradías de españoles en la ciudad de México (1526–1869), p. 35. Also see Cervantes, México en 1554 y Túmulo imperial, p. 61 and note 184 by O’Gorman. 6 Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera, p. 458.

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Tlatelolco and San Francisco, with the latter being moved westward near the barrio of San Juan. Alongside it, they founded San José de los Naturales, from which the friars administered the sacraments to the Indians and also visited the four Indian barrios surrounding the Spanish traza and the roughly 50 chapels located within these indigenous wards.7 Both places were crucial during these first 50 years of religious life in the capital. Friar Peter of Ghent trained a cadre of future Indian leaders at San José, where the education comprised catechism, Latin, music, and painting. Nearby, the Hospital de Indios was founded under royal patronage, and in 1536, the Colegio de Santa Cruz was established next to the convent of Tlatelolco to educate the Nahua elite, who would play an important role in helping the Franciscans carry out their missionary work. With respect to the religious instruction of the Spanish population, the Franciscans would soon share this task with the Dominicans, who founded a church and monastery a few blocks north of the main square in 1526, and with the Augustinians, who established their headquarters in the southwestern portion of the Spanish traza in 1533. These three monasteries were located in the western part of the city, which was more densely populated for at least three reasons: it lay near the mainland; the fountain supplying drinking water from Chapultepec, via an aqueduct, was in this zone; and the main entry route to the capital, via the causeway of Tacuba, was also located in this area. In this part of the city, the interaction and socialization between Spaniards and the Indians was more evident than in the eastern zones, where the separation between the two republics seemed more of an abstract concept than a concrete reality (see Granados, this volume). Arriving in 1528, the Franciscan bishop-elect, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, made no radical changes to the urban landscape established by the clergy. In fact, the alliances that he forged with his Franciscan brothers to combat the abuses of the First Audiencia of 1529 reveal his close ties to his Order. After his consecration as bishop in 1534, Zumárraga set out to strengthen the cathedral. Initially, he hardly had enough priests to take charge of the religious duties and responsibilities. Eventually, the prelate created the first cathedral chapter and converted the iglesia mayor into the main liturgical center in the city, establishing the only parish where Spaniards could receive the sacrament and turning its atrium into an important cemetery. Zumárraga also went on to found San Juan de Letrán, an orphanage for mestizos, a boarding school for Indian daughters of the indigenous nobility, and the hospital de Amor de Dios for syphilitics. However, despite Zumárraga’s deeds, he could not displace the very important 7 Morales, “Santoral franciscano en los barrios indígenas de la ciudad de México”, p. 356.

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religious role the mendicant monasteries played within the city, all of which were located west of the city’s main plaza. Zumárraga also sponsored the brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament, which, in 1540, merged with the brotherhood of Charity, which was established to care for the poor. Both institutions included among their members the richest, most influential men of the city and were jointly responsible for celebrating the feast of Corpus Christi and lighting the cathedral lamp next to the Holy Sacrament. As of 1547, this brotherhood took charge of the Colegio de la Caridad, an orphanage for the illegitimate mestizo daughters of the conquistadors. A few years earlier, in 1541, the brotherhood, with Zumárraga’s consent, founded the monasterio-recogimiento of Mother of God in the same building that housed the archbishop’s boarding school for Indian girls of indigenous nobility. In this establishment, various legitimate descendants of these women took religious vows and joined the Order of the Immaculate Conception, which had been reformed in the days of Queen Isabel.8 3 The Clash Between Two Church Projects for the City: The Archbishop vs. The Monasteries, 1555–1570 When Zumárraga died in 1548, shortly after being made archbishop, the city and its diocese remained leaderless for six years. His absence was barely felt, however, since the clergy continued to oversee many aspects of church administration. This situation began to change in 1554 with the arrival of the new archbishop, the Dominican Fray Alonso de Montúfar (1554–72). One of Montúfar’s first administrative deeds was to summon the First Provincial Council in 1555, thus beginning a new Christian era subject to episcopal authority, giving rise to clashes with friars—above all, with Franciscans and Augustinians— about three issues: the collection of Indian tithes; the archbishop’s role in matrimonial matters; and parish administration. The last concern was one closely related to the religious administration of Indians in the viceregal capital. Since their arrival in Mexico City, the Franciscans were responsible for parish administration in the Indian barrios. Because San José and Santiago were located in the city’s western zone, however, these were always better attended to by the friars than the faraway eastern barrios, which were unhealthy, sparsely populated, and visited only sporadically. Taking advantage of the Second Provincial Council, Archbishop Montúfar began sending priests in 1565 into the 8 Lavrin, Brides of Christ, pp. 246–247. Barreto, La expansión de la orden concepcionista en Hispanoamérica (1570–1586), pp. 48–61.

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eastern barrios of San Sebastián and San Pablo to administer the sacraments to Indians despite complaints from Franciscans. By then, the sharp distinction between the two republics had blurred. With the European and mestizo populations increasing, they occupied the indigenous wards, above all in the western portion of the city, which was prized for being nearest to the mainland. For this reason, in 1568, Montúfar created the Spanish parishes of Veracruz and Saint Catherine, which were under the administration of secular clergy and the location where two confraternities had their chapels.9 The new parishes were directly adjoined to the western barrios, where the friars had been administering the sacraments to Indians, Spaniards, and mestizos for over 40 years. The Franciscans, along with the capital’s two Indian city councils, continually filed complaints with the civil authorities for this intrusion.10 To reinforce episcopal presence in this part of the city, in 1567, Montúfar supported the founding of a hospice for the poor and insane next to the chapel of Saint Hippolytus.11 In the context of religious appropriation of urban space, the first two nun convents promoted by Montúfar, along with the two most powerful cofradías in the city, played an important role. Around 1560, city councilman Bernardino de Albornoz and the brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament founded, with episcopal support, the first autonomous convent belonging to the Order of the Immaculate Conception, breaking away from the recogimiento de la Madre de Dios, which was established in the days of Zumárraga. But the Order’s founding became a new bone of contention between the archbishop and friars, as well as an arena for infighting among the different factions within the city council. Shortly after the convent opened, Albornoz’ daughter, Sor Ana de Soto, the convent’s founder, and several nuns quarreled with Archbishop Montúfar, eventually requesting that the convent come under control of the Franciscan Order.12 However, nuns, supported by the family of Luis de Castilla, who

9

Juan Bautista, ¿Cómo te confundes?, p. 179. A brotherhood founded by Hernán Cortés had existed in the Santa Veracruz chapel on the calzada de Tacuba since 1526. Furthermore, the city council minutes for 12 January 1537 mention that members of the brotherhood of Saint Catherine had been granted a plot of land next to the road to Tlatelolco in order to build a hospital and chapel. 10 Ramírez, “Las nuevas órdenes en las tramas semántico-espaciales de la Ciudad de Mexico, siglo XVI”, p. 1042. 11 Muriel, Hospitales de Nueva España, vol. I, p. 202. 12 As the Order with the largest number of provinces in Spanish America, from 1528 onward, the Franciscans had a general commisioner for the Indies, based in Madrid, who was responsible for New World affairs. By 1538, a special commissioner for New Spain was based in Mexico.

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opposed Albornoz, preferred the archbishop’s mandate, arguing that the convent had been established from Zumárraga’s recogimiento de la Madre de Dios. These disputes ended with a split among factions that occurred with Montúfar’s death, giving rise to the founding of different religious establishments.13 Possibly reacting to such conflicts, in 1568, the archbishop championed the founding of a new convent dedicated to Saint Claire that would come under the auspices of the Holy Trinity tailor’s guild. To further this goal, the Galván sisters, beatas, and members of the Third Franciscan Order arrived from Puebla. Notably, various members of the Order refused administrative duties, because they believed it would distract from their evangelical mission. This convent, and the others previously mentioned, entered into several conflicts when Montúfar died, mainly because neither the Crown nor the Papacy had authorized the founding of the convents. Amidst these quarrels, one of the capital’s most important religious centers took shape: the shrine dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe at Tepeyac. Beginning in 1555, a new image of the Immaculate Conception was hung in the old chapel dedicated to the patroness of Extremadura, which was strategically located at the end of the causeway of Tepeyac, joining the northern part of the city to the mainland. Archbishop Montúfar was instrumental in the founding of Guadalupe’s shrine, promoting it and also collecting its alms. Despite Franciscan opposition, who considered it a dangerous fomenter of idolatry, the chapel became a shrine for the capital’s inhabitants. Spaniards and the Indians alike traveled to the shrine to hear mass, to flagellate themselves, and to ask the virgin for her assistance. Both European-born (peninsulares) and American-born (criollos) Spaniards founded a brotherhood at the shrine, which, by 1562, was collecting sizeable donations, and beginning in 1566, newly-appointed viceroys were received at Guadalupe’s shrine prior to entering the city.14 With support for the new shrine, convents, and secular parishes, the archbishop was sending a clear message that the religious affairs of the city were to be controlled, from that moment onward, from the cathedral rather than from the monasteries. 4 Introduction of the Episcopal Model: New Religious Orders and New Convents, 1571–1600 Montúfar’s work was carried on by his successor, Pedro Moya de Contreras, who arrived in New Spain in 1570 to establish the Tribunal of the Holy Inquisition 13 Barreto, La expansión, pp. 61–65. 14 Lundberg, Unification and Conflict, pp. 197–210. Juan Bautista, ¿Cómo te confundes?, p. 153.

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and who, in 1572, was named Archbishop of Mexico. Later, Philip II appointed Moya royal inspector (visitador) of the viceroyalty and also held the position of interim viceroy from 1584 to 1585. His support in the Spanish peninsula and his political posts helped to ensure that his endeavors as archbishop—above all, his summoning of the Third Mexican Provincial Council in 1585—were a crowning success. Soon after his arrival in New Spain, Archbishop Moya began to clash with Viceroy Martín Enríquez, who wholeheartedly backed the Augustinians. He entrusted the administration of the San Pablo parish to them in 1575, after Indians and Spaniards living in the barrio had complained about the secular clergy’s mismanagement. Despite the objections raised by the archbishop, the Augustinian provincial, Fray Alonso de la Veracruz, soon after received permission from the viceroy and the royal tribunal to open a monastery and a school next to the parish, where the Augustinians could study Nahuatl and theology.15 To counteract the accusations against them, in 1582, the friars brought the miraculous image of the Christ of Totolapan from a village near Amilpas that was under their mission’s jurisdiction. In 1587, the image was eventually transferred to the Order’s principal church.16 San Pablo would prove to be key for the Augustinians, becoming the staging point from which to supervise the Indian missions in the eastern barrios of the capital.17 To counteract the power of the religious orders who were responsible for evangelization, Moya encouraged the establishment of new institutions in the city, which had an impact on the urban landscape. By then, city sectors had been allocated except for two secular parishes founded by Montúfar: the western, more populated side of the city belonged to the Orders; the eastern side, except for the parish-college of San Pablo, was wide open for episcopal activity. Shortly after Moya took up his position in 1572, the first Jesuits arrived in Mexico City, becoming key collaborators and supporters of the new archbishop and promoters of the reforms that the Council of Trent was carrying out. With the support of Moya and several rich landowners, the Jesuits founded three colleges in the northeastern part of the city, which were in close proximity to the main square and the cathedral. Later, in the western part of the city,

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Rubial, “La labor educativa al interior de las órdenes mendicantes en Nueva España”, pp. 64–65. Grijalva, Crónica de la Orden de Nuestro Padre San Agustín en las provincias, pp. 225–226. Ramírez, “Las nuevas órdenes”, pp. 1048–1050.

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the Company of Jesus opened its Casa Profesa, where priests could take their fourth vow, the last requirement to be a Jesuit with full rights.18 Besides the Jesuits, and also to counteract the power of the first Orders to arrive in Mexico City, the Crown and Archbishop Moya led the arrival of two new mendicant groups: the Discalced Franciscans, known as “discalced” because of their austere lifestyle, and the Carmelites.19 Both Orders, which had been reformed in Spain with the support of the king, encouraged spiritual retreat and prayer. The need to gather alms and other resources demanded that they also undertake pastoral work. Both Orders arrived in Mexico, at the request of Archbishop Moya, for the sole purpose of founding hospices to lodge travelers on their way to missions in the Philippines and New Mexico. The Mercedarians, the fourth religious group to reach Mexico City, while Moya was archbishop, is a different case from the others. The Order already had several monasteries in the region of Guatemala attending to the Indian population, but it wanted to open a college in the viceregal capital for its students to study at the university level. Moya did not see the project to completion, but by the end of the century, the Mercedarians had founded a church and convent on the eastern side of the capital, notwithstanding opposition from the Augustinians, who feared competition in the collection of alms.20 Mexico City’s growing prosperity and an increase of criollo population in cities triggered the founding of new religious communities devoted to the protection of women. Recogimientos, orphanages, and monasteries played an important role in strengthening episcopal jurisdiction in the capital, while at the same time providing shelter to a growing number of unmarried women or abandoned wives. An example of one such institution was the emparedamiento (shelter) of Santa Mónica built by Pedro Trujillo and his wife, Isabel López, who, in 1582, with the support of Pedro Moya, financed the construction of a home for divorced and abandoned women, orphans, and wives of officials serving in the Philippines. However, with respect to the protection of women, it was the convents, rather than the recogimientos, that played a key role, and Archbishop Moya was a central figure in their establishment and deployed them to consolidate episcopal control over the city. As already mentioned, Archbishop Montúfar 18 19 20

These schools were San Pedro y San Pablo for criollos and Jesuit postulants; San Gregorio for Indian nobility; and San Ildefonso for students with scholarships. See Gonzalbo, Historia de la educación en la época colonial, pp. 159–172. De la Madre de Dios, Tesoro escondido en el Santo Carmelo Mexicano, pp. 33–35. Ramírez, Los carmelitas descalzos en la Nueva España, pp. 129–131. León Cázares, Reforma o extinción, pp. 109–123.

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had founded two convents, but without royal or pontifical authorization. Moya achieved both but also attained the submission of the Order of the Immaculate Conception to his authority, resolving the Order’s internal conflicts. Moreover, Moya joined forces with the powerful Bernardino de Albornoz, and with his help, founded new convents, transferring 35 nuns belonging to the Order of the Immaculate Conception dissatisfied with episcopal authority. In 1573, Ana de Soto, Moya’s main opponent, along with a group of “rebellious” nuns, were sent to support the Jesús de la Penitencia, a recogimiento (hostel) for prostitutes (referred to as “The Repentant Ones”), a foundation established by Councillor Albornoz and the confraternity of la Soledad. 21 In 1575, another group of “rebels”, headed by Sor Margarita Echanez, was responsible for founding the Regina Coeli convent for noblewomen, another project of Albornoz and his wife’s family, the Vázquez Bullón; at a later date, the convent joined the Order of the Immaculate Conception. Both buildings, the hostel for repentant women and the Regina convent, were located in the neighborhoods under Franciscan control. A year earlier, in 1574, another dissident group, led by the Cano Moctezuma sisters—the mestizo granddaughters of the Emperor Moctezuma—was sent to the convent of Santa Clara to reform the Galván sisters, who had rebelled against Moya and who were petitioning to join the Franciscans. The archbishop imposed as mother superior a member from the Order of the Immaculate Conception to show his authority over this community. However, the king gave permission for the nuns to remain under Franciscan control, and in 1582, they founded a new convent a block away from the Franciscan monastery.22 To recover from this failure, Moya undertook the task of promoting the foundation of a third convent under the aegis of the Order of the Immaculate Conception—that of Jesús María, which was for destitute daughters of encomenderos or Spaniards who had received Indian labor grants. The king was the patron of Jesús María and endowed 12 poor maidens, but the convent was soon filled with wealthy nuns, several of whom were the daughters of mine owners who counted with large dowries.23 A few years later, a new convent, sponsored by Archbishop Moya and belonging to the Order of Saint Jerome, was founded in the southern portion of the city. Its patroness, Isabel de Guevara, requested that sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Conception administer the convent, which began to accept girls to be educated, many of whom later took their vows in the institution. The convents had now become 21 Barreto, La expansión, pp. 30–45. 22 Holler, Escogidas Plantas, pp. 56–60. 23 Amerlinck and Ramos, Conventos de monjas, p. 63.

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an important strategy of important families, confraternities, and archbishops to control urban space.24 When Pedro Moya de Contreras completed his term in 1589, five convents had been founded in the capital, all of which, with the exception of Santa Clara, were under episcopal authority. However, the following decades were to bring new conflicts between the regular and secular clergy over the control of monastic institutions. In 1596, the cathedral canon Sancho Sánchez Muñoz founded, with the aid of the nuns of the Immaculate Conception and at his expense, the convent of Encarnación in the barrio of Santo Domingo. It triggered a bitter conflict between the Dominican Order and the cathedral council, which ended with the Audiencia issuing a ruling in favor of the cathedral and the convent. Opposition to the convent must have been closely related to the fact that the Dominicans had finally succeeded, in 1593, in establishing a convent of their own, Saint Catherine of Siena, which faced the convent of la Encarnación. The Dominicans saw the convent of La Encarnación as an intrusion by the cathedral in a neighborhood that they considered under their administrative domain, since their headquarters was just around the corner. The nuns who founded the Saint Catherine convent had arrived from Oaxaca, a region dominated by the Dominicans, and by building the Mexico City convent, the Order reinforced its position in both the capital and viceroyalty.25 At the end of the century, four new convents were founded over the span of four years. Two were under the jurisdiction of the council (even with its vacant seat), and the other two under Franciscan supervision. In 1598, the convent of San Lorenzo was established with property belonging to the Mendoza family, descendants of encomenderos and related to the founders of the real minero de Zacatecas.26 Two years later, in 1600, the rich merchant, Diego Caballero, financed the building of a new convent within the archiepiscopal territory, Santa Inés, belonging to the Order of the Immaculate Conception. To counteract the cathedrals, the Franciscans founded, with the support of the Indian leaders, the convent of San Juan de la Penitencia next to the Indian parish church in the Moyotla quarter of the city. With this religious space, the friars strengthened their presence in the Indian neighborhoods on the western side of the city. In 1589, they obtained permission from Viceroy Marquis of Villamanrique to establish, in the Santa María Tlaquechiuhcan barrio, a new

24 25 26

Ibid., p. 68. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, pp. 26–34. Amerlinck and Ramos, Conventos de monjas, pp. 72, 77. Bazarte Martínez, Tovar Esquivel, and Tronco Rosas, El Convento Jerónimo de San Lorenzo, pp. 5–12.

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church, la Redonda, with an adjoining monastery, occupying it in 1597.27 Not long after, in 1601, they founded their third nunnery of Santa Isabel, in the barrio with the support of a rich widow. She provided them with a plot of land, near the fountain that supplied that portion of the city with water, and with a large sum of money to build the convent. As we have seen, the distribution of convents in the city marked the space of the traza. On the one hand, because of their monumental size, they encompassed several city blocks, and thus functioned more like citadels within the city. Even some, like that of the Immaculate Conception, appropriated entire streets, breaking up the city’s original grid formation. On the other hand, while the nuns from the mendicant orders built their convents near their respective Orders’ monasteries, those dependent on the archbishopric were scattered throughout the city, further illustrating the episcopacy’s need to mark its possession over the city’s urban space. Along with convents and monasteries, the monumental cathedrals constructed in the second half of the 16th century in the capital cities with episcopal sees also bore witness to the growing power of the bishops. Mexico City’s cathedral, which was begun during the epoch of Montúfar, had a long construction phase given the difficulties of setting its foundation in the island’s marshy subsoil. In spite of the enthusiasm to advance the new cathedral, progress was slow, so much so that the original church continued to be used and was even remodeled to celebrate the 1585 Provincial Council. Although the remodel diminished its fortress-like appearance, it further delayed building the new cathedral. The cathedral was the main space of the ecclesiastical chapter, comprising 26 canons and high-ranking priests. In addition, there were 24 chaplains who were in charge of religious services. Given their long tenure, social ties, and corporate spirit, members of the cathedral chapter were patrons and main promoters of the artworks that adorned the cathedral. When archbishops died, the cathedral chapter declared itself sede vacante, meaning “with the seat being vacant”. The chapter then governed the diocese while the successor prelate was appointed, a situation common in American dioceses, which led to an increase of their corporate privileges.28 The cathedral was central in promoting the founding of the San Pedro congregation, an Order of priests established in 1577 under Archbishop Moya’s sponsorship. Initially, this congregation did not have a chapel of its own, but in 1598, it signed a deed of joint ownership with the archconfraternity of the 27 Chimalpáhin, Diario, p. 69. 28 Pérez Puente, Tiempos de crisis, tiempos de consolidación, pp. 17–20.

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Holy Trinity (the religious arm of the tailor’s guild) to share its church located at the end of Moneda Street. Both brotherhoods functioned as owners of the building, albeit not without friction. During Moya’s tenure, the cathedral strengthened ties with the shrine at Tepeyac, which led to the drafting of the constitution for the brotherhood of Guadalupe and appointment of the shrine’s first chaplain, who remained ­subject to the cathedral.29 At that time, Tepeyac’s only competitor was the sanctuary of the Virgen de los Remedios, which was under the control of Mexico City’s town council, and who, almost yearly, organized a procession of the image of the virgin from its shrine at the hill of Totoltepec to pray for rain. By 1600, Mexico City’s ecclesiastical spaces were clearly delineated. There were nine mendicant monasteries with their respective churches, three Jesuit colleges with its Casa Profesa, six hospitals, seven parishes (five of which were dedicated to indigenous evangelization by friars), and ten convents for nuns. Mexico City was a place where the Church had established its model of policía cristiana, and after an initial period of conflict, managed to achieve a certain degree of harmonious coexistence between the friars and archbishops. 5

The Ecclesiastical Institutions in the Baroque City, 1600–1700

Throughout the 17th century, the urban landscape took on a new dimension, characterized not only by the building of new churches and convents, but also by radical changes to existing ones. Some of these buildings were remodeled and enlarged, while others were rebuilt from their foundations. Such changes, triggered by earthquakes, floods (especially the catastrophic one of 1629), and the growth of different religious communities, could be carried out because of the mounting wealth accumulated by ecclesiastical institutions, in part, the product of numerous donations. The city’s newfound prosperity, stemming from trade, haciendas, and mines, was made manifest not only in transforming its religious buildings, which was a source of pride, but also in the sumptuous nature of its interiors: profusely ornate pulpits; gilded altarpieces; monumental wall paintings; magnificent organs that produced exquisite music; beautifully carved choir stalls and lecterns; and loftly works of gold and silver in sacristies. Without a doubt, Baroque art was everywhere! A fundamental aspect of the growth of churches during this period was the public’s fascination with reliquaries, sculptures of saints, and miraculous 29 Miranda, Dos cultos fundantes, pp. 46, 295–300.

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images of Christ and the Virgin Mary. A society continually devastated by epidemics, earthquakes, fires, and droughts, and many of whose members lived in dire poverty and were emotionally and physically vulnerable, could easily convert a simple painting or sculpture into a miraculous effigy to be processioned throughout the city. Thus, the miraculous effigy became an object of veneration that was showered with offerings, supplications, promises of alms, candles, fasts, and prayers. The number of such images increased during this period, and along with the important shrines of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Virgin of the Remedies, about another 50 miraculous images were housed in churches, hospitals, and colleges. Their physical presence served to imbue such spaces with sacred character and quality. In addition to these images, there were others. These were borne from the oaths to patron saints and ceremonies organized by the city’s different boroughs, who were responsible for ensuring the health and well-being of its inhabitants. The different barrios chose these heavenly intercessors following a catastrophe. Such cults played a fundamental role in building a symbolic framework that underpinned the cohesion and identity of both the borough and city as a whole. With miraculous images, the city was transformed into a great temple, especially during the festivals that filled its streets and squares with crowds following effigies of their saints. 6

Baroque Bishops and the Founding of Religious Institutions

The course set in the 16th century was consolidated in subsequent centuries due to the unwavering support of the Crown, which viewed their appointed officials as more effective for achieving their political goals than the clergy, whose appointments by election made them more autonomous. To increase its power and influence, religious institutions in the episcopal sees were strengthened. On one hand, the vicar generals (provisoratos) who imparted ecclesiastical justice and the chaplaincy courts were bolstered to increase the revenues of the secular clergy. And, on the other hand, conciliar seminaries were founded (Archbishop Aguiar established one in Mexico City), while the cathedral chapter was given more control over the university. The bishops also promoted charitable institutions, such as hospitals, orphanages, student residences, and recogimientos. They also supported the founding of congregations, such as the oratory of San Felipe Neri, new convents, and important urban sanctuaries. To carry out these projects, the bishops counted on the collaboration of members of the cathedral chapters, the secular clergy, rich merchants, and abbesses and prioresses of convents under their jurisdiction. An outstanding

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aspect of the success of these activities was an increase in income for cathedrals due to improving mechanisms for collecting tithes, and also because the religious orders began to pay taxes on the production of their haciendas.30 One immediate result of these reforms was, that, with the support of the viceroys and because of an increase in tithing, work on the cathedral accelerated. In 1629, Viceroy Marquis of Cerralvo (1624–35) ordered the old cathedral demolished in hopes that his decision would accelerate work on the new one; however, the great flood of 1629 halted construction for a decade, which later resumed in 1640. The arrival of the new viceroy, the Duke of Alburquerque (1653–60), marked a new construction impulse. Taking advantage that no archbishop was in place, Alburquerque, in 1656, dedicated the cathedral, despite the structure lacking a roof. Finally, in 1667, the Marquis of Mancera (1664–73) rededicated the cathedral because its vaults and dome had been completed; however, the facade and interior decorations remained unfinished. There was no archbishop in place at this time, since the archbishop-elect, Fray Payo de Ribera, was on his way from Guatemala. At both dedications, the members of the cathedral chapter and viceroy, in the absence of an archbishop, were the protagonists of the celebrations, having agreed that the archbishop need not be present. After all, the cathedral was also the place where the sacred power of the king was made manifest (the main altar was dedicated to the three Kings of the Magi), where the births and marriages of members of the royal family were commemorated, and archbishops were buried. The building of the capital’s second most important church, the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe at Tepeyac, which, since the previous century, had been under the jurisdiction of both the archbishop and cathedral chapter, was quite a different matter. Upon his arrival, the archbishop, Juan Pérez de la Serna (1613–26), began promoting the construction of a sturdier church and one better adapted to the needs of a growing stream of visitors. At the end of the century, in 1695, Archbishop Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas (1682–98) laid the cornerstone of a new church at Tepeyac, which was completed after his death and dedicated in 1709 by the cathedral chapter in the absence of an archbishop.31 Another important achievement of the archbishops was the founding of six convents, continuing the practice of episcopal appropriation of urban space, particularly since they answered to the archbishop. Two of these, San José de Gracia and Nuestra Señora de Balvanera, were established by annexing the recogimientos of Santa Mónica and Jesús de la Penitencia, which were founded 30 Rubial (ed.), La Iglesia en el México Colonial, pp. 283–285. 31 Brading, Mexican Phoenix, pp. 119–125.

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for prostitutes. Archbishop Juan Pérez de la Serna established the first Carmelite convent in the capital, that of Santa Teresa y San José, by supporting two nuns from the Order of the Immaculate Conception to leave their convent to found the new one, which was located next to the episcopal palace. To ensure the new convent’s prosperity, the prelate gifted it a miraculous image of Christ, which was brought from the Indian village of Mapeté (el Cardonal), near Ixmiquilpan.32 In 1624, Archbishop Pérez de la Serna also promoted the founding of a ­Cistercian convent under the patronage of Saint Bernard, which was in compliance with the will of a rich merchant. However, due to problems with the will’s executor and because of the 1629 flood, the project was left in abeyance until Archbishop Francisco Manso y Zúñiga (1627–35), taking advantage of a conflict in the Regina convent, sent the dissenting nuns to the convent of Saint Bernard, placing them under the rule of the Order of the Immaculate Conception.33 Until this point, the mother nuns who helped found convents had been criollas, and in most cases, their convents had been linked to the Order of the Immaculate Conception. The first Capuchin convent in the capital was an exception to this rule, founded by nuns from Toledo, thanks to the auspices of the archbishops and the financial support from the rich merchant, Simón de Haro. After three decades of negotiations, the church and convent were inaugurated in 1666 under the dedication of the first Mexican saint, Felipe de Jesús, and with the support of Viceroy Marquis de Mancera, and that of his wife, who was a great admirer of the Capuchins (see Cañeque, this volume).34 The founding of the convent of San Felipe de Jesús was typical of the overall trend in this new era. In the second half of the 17th century, the old monasteries and their churches were on the edge of collapse due to earthquakes and floods. Since the heirs of the original patrons were not fulfilling their obligations, because of the enormous expense they represented, nuns, with the endorsement of the archbishops, requested the support of powerful merchants to help them resolve this problem. Keen to occupy a prominent place in New Spanish society, where they generated their fortunes, new-monied merchants made generous donations in exchange for the nobility they lacked but desired. The wives and daughters of merchants played an important role in this process, influencing the decision to apply capital for the benefit of convents, and even professing as nuns in them. Such was the case of Sor Teresa de Molina, daughter of the merchant Esteban de Molina and a nun in the convent of the Carmelites, who 32 33 34

Rubial, “Orígenes milagrosos y nuevos templos”, pp. 34–36. Amerlinck and Ramos, Conventos de monjas, pp. 49, 109. Ibid., pp. 116–119.

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used her father’s fortune to establish a second Carmelite convent in the capital, that of Santa Teresa la Nueva, which was consecrated in 1704 by the archbishop.35 While the number of convents grew, the number of recogimientos for poor women decreased. This deficit was offset by Archbishop Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas, who not only erected a new building for the hospicio de la Misericordia, a shelter for delinquent women and prostitutes, but also, and in conjunction with the sala del Crimen founded a second institution, the María Magdalena recogimiento, a prison to separate those who had committed serious crimes from young women forced into prostitution due to dire poverty. With support from the priests of the Oratory of San Felipe Neri, the archbishop founded a third institution, that of San Miguel de Belén, which offered shelter, on a voluntary basis, to poor girls who were in danger of becoming prostitutes.36 Brought to Mexico by Father Antonio Calderón in 1657, the Oratory of San Felipe Neri opened a home to care for elderly and sick priest, and although some refused to join, it was a success because of the support of Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas. In 1687, the archbishop consecrated its church dedicated to San Felipe Neri, which was located in the San Agustín district of Mexico City, and in 1697, obtained a papal bull, officially recognizing its foundation. Its main ministry focused on preaching, providing spiritual guidance, looking after the sick and destitute, and teaching the Christian doctrine, for which they founded a brotherhood.37 The Oratory of San Felipe Neri was one of two corporations that counted on the capital’s secular clergy for their protection and support. The other was the congregation of San Pedro, which, from 1689, with the consent of Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas, oversaw a hospital that cared for sick, insane, and elderly priests. The brotherhood’s wealth provided for the construction of a comfortable building to the care for these priests, but also allowed for the remodeling of the church of the Santísima Trinidad, which, as mentioned earlier, was shared with the archconfraternity of tailors. This church, the only one of its kind, began sharing its space with ten other confraternities and by the start of the 18th century, they also counted with altars and crypts within the sanctuary.38 The parish of San Miguel Archangel was Archbishop Aguiar’s last establishment. At the end of the 17th century, the Spanish portion of the city had grown southward and as a result, a new parish was essential, which was the result 35 Rubial, “Monjas y mercaderes”, pp. 361–385. 36 Muriel, Los Recogimientos de mujeres, pp. 58–61, 81–85. 37 Maza, Los templos de San Felipe Neri de la ciudad de México, pp. 14–24. 38 Salazar, “El templo de la Santísima Trinidad de México, una historia en construcción”, pp. 28–35.

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of a 1689 royal decree. The hermitage of San Lucas temporarily housed the parish until 1692, when it moved to a newly constructed church located at the entrance to the causeway of Iztapalapa. The founding of the parish, the city’s third for Spaniards, in the Augustinian barrio of San Pablo demonstrated that Archbishop Montúfar’s longstanding aim of seizing parts of the city that friars claimed as their own was still being pursued. 7

The City of Friars and Jesuits

Episcopal presence did not overshadow the progress that friars had made since the previous century. By the end of the 17th century, the city’s 19 convents of friars were all landmarks, neighborhoods bore the names of their saints, and fountains provided potable water to the city’s inhabitants. Because of their constant flow of income, young criollos enlarged and remodeled them, creating complexes that occupied several city blocks, and filled their walls with works of art. Five of them, in addition to being provincial administrative heads, housed novitiates and schools for those entering the Orders and infirmaries for old, insane, or sick friars, accommodating around 150 who were cared for by dozens of servants and slaves. The rest were modest houses, occupied by two or three dozen friars who served parishes, theological schools, or hospitals. Most of the capital’s miraculous images were displayed in their churches, where numerous brotherhoods had their headquarters. Almost all merchants, artisans, and members of the gentry were buried in their chapels and naves, who would bequeath substantial alms to pray for souls in purgatory. In addition to this income, monastery inhabitants received the products of various haciendas and orchards and together with convents, owned half of all the houses, workshops, and stores that were leased in the city. Without a doubt, the Franciscans had the strongest presence in the city. They, as already mentioned, administered three Indian parishes (with their respective monasteries), and three convents in the western portion of the city. Furthermore, the friars had, since 1667, a casa recoleta (community of contemplative life), adjacent to the chapel of San Cosme, which housed 30 brothers. Since religious establishments of this type could not administer the sacrament because its occupants were wholly devoted to prayer and meditation, their sustenance depended on the plentiful donations that flowed into its chapel, which possessed a miraculous image of Our Lady of Consolation.39 This image, 39

Robles, Diario, vol. I, p. 157. Vetancurt, Teatro mexicano, p. 75.

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along with another Franciscan effigy, the Virgin of the Assumption, which was worshipped in the Indian parish of Santa María la Redonda, became important cult objects of veneration in the city.40 The city’s second most important order was that of Saint Augustine, which administered three Indian parishes, with adjoining convents, in the capital’s eastern side. In the 17th century, with the assistance of Viceroy Luis de Velasco the Younger, whose confessor was an Augustinian, the college of San Pablo (constructed in the 16th century) added two more convents: San Sebastián, which the Carmelites transferred to the Augustinians in 1607, and Soledad y Santa Cruz in 1609.41 The Dominicans founded two new convents in the city during the 17th century. In 1603, Porta Coeli was established to house the provincial theological college. However, by 1628 it was still unfinished, resulting in the continued request of alms from convents in the Mixteca region. The second convent, la Piedad, a community of contemplative life, was founded in 1608 on the outskirts of Mexico City, near a causeway that linked the city to Coyoacán, and whose shrine was dedicated to a virgin of the same name.42 From 1677, the Dominicans also administered the Mixteca parish that was based in the Rosary chapel of their main church. From here, they ministered to the large population of Indians from Oaxaca living in Mexico City, whose language some of the Dominicans spoke. In the barrio of Santo Domingo, which was closely linked to the said friars, stood a Dominican convent and the headquarters of the Holy Inquisition. During this same period, the Mercedarians and Carmelites also increased the number of their religious houses. The former owned an orchard-convent on the road to Tacuba and two establishments in the city: the college of Belén for theological studies and the headquarter monastery of la Merced, housing a miracle-working virgin of the same name. The Carmelites, on the other hand, had a sumptuous convent located in the northern side of the city, which was remodeled in the 18th century. It housed two brotherhoods, one of which was under the protection of Our Lady of Carmel and her scapulary. The Order also owned two important orchards, with adjacent convents, in towns near Mexico City: San Joaquín, in Legaria, and Santo Ángel, near Coyoacán, where its theological college was located. The Jesuits, unlike the mendicants orders, had no convents. Instead, they had extended their holdings to several blocks northeast of the city’s main 40 Chimalpáhin, Diario, p. 69. Rubial, “Orígenes milagrosos”, pp. 46–52. 41 Ruíz Zavala, Historia de la provincia agustiniana del Santísimo Nombre de Jesús, vol. II, p. 360. 42 Franco y Ortega, Segunda Parte de la Historia de la Provincia de Santiago de México, pp. 107–109. Rubial, “Orígenes milagrosos”, pp. 42–46.

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plaza. The Order’s three colleges, financed by the income from several haciendas, educated a large number of students. Its churches of San Pedro y San Pablo and la Profesa also attended to the spiritual needs of the sizeable populace. In the early 17th century, the Order opened San Andrés on the calzada de Tacuba to lodge missionaries who were on their way to the Philippines; in the 18th century, San Andrés became a spiritual retreat. The Order’s churches were also used by various congregations that came together once a year to take part in Ignatian spiritual exercises under the guidance of Jesuit priests. Since the end of the 17th century, one of these fraternities, the congregation del Divino Salvador, administered a hospital for demented women. The Jesuit Order also promoted the cults of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin of Loreto, with the latter having a chapel next to the college of San Gregorio.43 After 1600, Mexico City’s religious communities grew by three new Hospitaller Orders—San Juan de Dios, San Antonio de Abad, and Bethlehemites. The first, in 1604, took over the hospital de Nuestra Señora de los Desamparados, which was founded in the previous century by a philanthropic doctor in the Alameda. A convent that served as the Order’s headquarters, with a novitiate and a college, was constructed adjacent to the hospital. In the early 18th century, the Order also administered the hospital de San Lazaro, whose mission was to care for lepers; the hospital had been under the administration of the Medina Picazo family throughout the 17th century. With the hospital, the Order of San Juan de Dios also received a church that was especially known for its miracle-working image of Nuestra Señora de la Bala, which had become a pilgrimage destination that brought in large sums of alms.44 In 1687, the Order of San Antonio de Abad opened a small hospital to care for those suffering from fuego sacro (erysipelas). Shortly before 1687, Archbishop Payo Enríquez de Ribera founded a hospital, college, and convent belonging to the Bethlehemites, whose Order was established in the city of Santiago de Guatemala, where Payo Enríquez de Ribera had been a bishop. Next to the hospital, the Bethlehemite friars also opened an elementary school.45 At the start of the 18th century, besides its numerous shrines and chapels, Mexico City counted with 65 churches, of which 19 had adjoining monasteries, 18 had adjacent convents, 11 included hospitals, four had Spanish parishes, nine encompassed colegios, and four included shelters for women and orphanages for girls (Figure 6.1). Over the course of 150 years, the number of houses of worship in Mexico City had doubled, and counted upwards of 1,500 secular 43 Florencia y Oviedo, Zodiaco mariano, pp. 144–146. 44 Rubial, “Orígenes milagrosos”, pp. 40–42. 45 Muriel, Los hospitales de Nueva España, vol. II, pp. 83–85, 93–105.

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Figure 6.1 Miguel Ángel García Audelo and Antonio Rubial García, Map and legend of ­Mexico City identifying convents, monasteries, hospitals, recogimientos, ­parishes, and colleges, 1524–1704  C ONVENTOS MASCULINOS 1. San Francisco, 1524 2. Santo Domingo, 1526 3. Porta Coeli, 1603 4. San Agustín El Grande, 1533 5. Nuestra Señora del Carmen, 1585 6. San Diego, 1593 7. Nuestra Señora de la Merced, 1595 8. Nuestra Señora del Belem, mercedarios, 1686 9. Nuestra Señora de Montserrat, benedictino, 1614  D OCTINAS DE FRAILES ANEXADAS A CONVENTOS 10. San José de los Naturales, franciscano, 1525

11. Santiago de Tlatelolco, franciscano, 1536 12. Santa María la Redonda, franciscano, 1589 13. San Pablo y su colegio, agustinos, 1575 14. San Sebastián, agustino, 1585–1607 15. Santa Cruz, agustino, 1609 16. Parroquia de mixtecos, dominica, 1677 17. San Juan, 1598  T EMPLO DE LAS COFRADÍAS 18. La Santísima Trinidad, Archicofradía de la Trinidad y  Congragación de San Pedro, 1530–1598  M ONASTERIOS DE MONJAS (Bajo autoridad episcopal) 19. La Concepción, concepcionista, 1541–1561

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City of Friars, City of Archbishops 20. Regina Coeli, concepcionista, 1575 21. Jesús María, concepcionista, 1581 22. San Jerónimo, jerónimas, 1586 23. La Encarnación, concepcionista, 1593 24. Santa Inés, concepcionista, 1593 25. San José de Gracia, concepcionista, 1610 26. San Bernardo, concepcionista, 1636 27. Nuestra Señora de Balvanera, concepcionista, 1634 28. San Lorenzo, agustino, 1598 29. Santa Teresa y San José, carmelita, 1615 30. Santa Teresa La Nueva, carmelita, 1700–1704 31. San Felipe de Jesús, capuchino, 1666  M ONASTERIOS DE MONJAS (Bajo autoridad de los frailes) 32. Santa Clara, franciscano, 1582 33. San Juan de la Penitencia, franciscano, 1598 34. Santa Isabel, franciscano, 1601 35. Santa Catalina de Siena, dominico, 1593  C ONGREGACIÓN CLERO SECULAR 36. Oratorio de San Felipe Neri, oratoriano, 1657

159 47. Hospicio de la Misericordia, ca. 1580 48. Santa María Magdalena, 1692 49. San Miguel de Belem, 1683  PARROQUIAS SECULARES 50. Sagrario de la Catedral, 1530 51. Santa Veracruz, 1568 52. Santa Catalina de Alejandría, 1568 53. San Miguel, 1689  H OSPITALES 54. La Concepción y Jesús Nazareno, 1524 55. Amor de Dios, 1541 56. Real de Indios, 1553 57. San Hipólito, hermanos de la caridad, 1567 58. San Juan de Dios, juaninos, 1604 59. Espíritu Santo, hermanos de la caridad, 1612 60. San Antonio Abad, antoninos, 1628 61. Nuestra Señora de Belem, betlemitas, 1675 62. Divino Salvador, Cofradía del Divino Salvador, 1699 63. San Pedro, Congregación de San Pedro, 1689

 C OLEGIOS (Residencias) 37. San Pedro y San Pablo, jesuita, 1572 38. San Ildefonso, jesuita, 1583 39. San Gregorio, jesuita, 1586 40. La Profesa, jesuita, 1610 41. San Andrés, jesuita, 1672 42. San Juan de Letrán, secular, 1548 43. Colegio de Cristo, secular, 1612 44. Colegio de Todos los Santos, secular, 1573

64. San Lázaro, [López, 1572], juaninos, 1721  S ANTUARIOS DE LOS REGULARES 65. Nuestra Señora de la Bala en el Hospital de San Lázaro

45. San Ramón, seculares de Michoacán y mercedarios, 1628

69. San Nicolás Tolentino, agustinos calzados, ca. 1605

 R ECOGIMIENTOS Y COLEGIOS DE MUJERES 46. La Caridad de Niñas, Cofradía del Santísimo Sacramento, 1548

66. Nuestra Señora de la Piedad, dominico 67. San Cosme y San Damián, recoletos franciscanos  H OSPICIOS PARA FRAILES FILIPINOS 68. Santo Tomás Villanueva, agustinos descalzos, 1665

 S ANTUARIO DEL CLERO SECULAR 70. Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, Catedral Metropolitana

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clerics, 1,200 friars, and 1,000 nuns.46 Although they made up less than 10 per cent of the city’s Spanish population, and were mainly criollos, they wielded enormous influence and power: 80 per cent of the city’s population belonged to guilds and brotherhoods based in churches and monastic institutions, drawing from all ethnic and social groups. 8 Epilogue Beginning in 1700, the new Bourbon dynasty exercised even greater control over the Church, favoring political and economic interests over spiritual ones. From a position of Regalismo, efforts were made to curtail ecclesiastical privileges. The Society of Jesus was most affected by these developments, as it was eventually expelled from New Spain in 1767 and ultimately dissolved. In addition, the Crown gave its unconditional support to the episcopacy, which became one of the most important instruments for clerical reform. A sign of this support was the founding of four new convents, two of which were for the education of girls. However, another convent, dedicated to the care of the daughters of the indigenous nobility, was transferred to the Franciscans by its founder, Viceroy Marquis de Valero. This development radically changed the makeup of the Church in Mexico City, resulting, among other things, in six parishes being transferred from the supervision of the regular clergy to the secular clergy between 1749 and 1769. In 1772, Archbishop Antonio de Lorenzana implemented other episcopal reforms, adding three new parishes to the older regular parishes and to the four under episcopacy control, bringing the total to 13. The new parishes were established without regard to parishioners’ ethnic origin, thus breaking with the old and no longer functional division between the republic of Indians and the republic of Spaniards. Undoubtedly, one of the aims of the archbishop’s episcopal reforms was to put an end to the social and economic segregation of indigenous peoples. However, since the Bourbon state was unwilling to stop collecting Indian tribute, and although the differences in parish management were theoretically done away with, the tributary differences remained in place, and became even larger. In this respect, Indians did not cease to be Indians. Nevertheless, of all the jurisdictions that operated in the city (those of the cuarteles, ayuntamiento, etc.), the parish network was the best organized, attesting to the triumph of the episcopal system over the one devised by friars in the 16th century, and to the important role the Church played during the viceregal period. 46 Medina, Crónica de la Santa Provincia de San Diego de Mèxico, fol. 238.

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Bautista, J., ¿Cómo te confundes?¿acaso no somos conquistados? Anales de Juan ­Bautista, ed. and trans. L. Reyes, Mexico City, 2001. Cervantes de Salazar, F., México en 1554 y Túmulo imperial, ed. E. O’Gorman, Mexico City, 2000. Chimalpáhin, D., Diary, trans. R. Tena, Mexico City, 2001. Díaz del Castillo, B., Historia verdadera de la conquista de Nueva España, ed. J. Ramírez Cabañas, Mexico City, 1983. Florencia, F. and Oviedo, J.A., Zodiaco mariano, ed. A. Rubial, Mexico City, 1995. Franco y Ortega, A., Segunda Parte de la Historia de la Provincia de Santiago de México Orden de Predicadores en la Nueva España, [1645], Mexico City, 1900. Grijalva, J., Crónica de la Orden de Nuestro Padre San Agustín en las provincias de Nueva España, ed. N. León, Mexico City, 1985. Madre de Dios, A., Tesoro escondido en el Santo Carmelo Mexicano. Mina rica de ejemplos y virtudes en la Historia de los carmelitas descalzos de la provincia de la Nueva España, ed. M. Ramos, Mexico City, 1984. Medina, B., Crónica de la Santa Provincia de San Diego de México [1682], Mexico City, 1977. Robles, A., Diario de sucesos notables, 3 vols., Mexico City, 1972. Torquemada, J., De los veintiún libros rituales y Monarquía Indiana [Seville, 1615], 7 vols., ed. M. León Portilla, Mexico City, 1979–1983. Vetancurt, A., Teatro Mexicano, Descripción breve de los sucesos ejemplares históricos, políticos, militares y religiosos del Nuevo Mundo occidental de las Indias [Mexico City, 1698], Mexico City, 1982.

Amerlinck, M.C. and Ramos, M., Conventos de monjas, fundaciones en el México virreinal, Mexico City, 1995. Barreto, D., La expansión de la orden concepcionista en Hispanoamérica (1570–1583), doctoral dissertation, UNAM, Mexico City, 2016. Bazarte Martínez, A., Las cofradías de españoles en la ciudad de México (1526–1869), Mexico City, 1989. Bazarte Martínez, A., E. Tovar Esquivel, and M. Tronco Rosas, El Convento Jerónimo de San Lorenzo (1598–1867), Mexico City, 2001. Brading, D., Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe, Image, and Tradition Across Five Centuries, Cambridge, 2001. Gonzalbo Aispuru, P., Historia de la Educación en la época colonial. La educación de los criollos y la vida urbana, Mexico City, 1990.

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Gutiérrez Haces, J. and Romero, J.R., “A imagen y semejanza, la Roma del nuevo mundo”, Actas del XIV coloquio internacional de Historia del Arte, Mexico City, 1994, pp. 163–174. Holler, J.S., Escogidas Plantas: Nuns and Beatas in Mexico City, 1531–1601, New York, 2005. Lavrin, A., Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico, Stanford, 2008. León Cázares, M.C., Reforma o extinción. Un siglo de adaptaciones de la orden de Nuestra Señora de Merced en Nueva España, Mexico City, 2004. Lundberg, M., Unification and Conflict: The Church Politics of Alonso de Montúfar, O.P. Archbishop of Mexico City, 1554–1572, Lund, 2002. Maza, F., Los templos del oratorio de San Felipe Neri en la ciudad de México. Con historias que parecen cuentos, Mexico City, 1970. Miranda Godínez, J., Dos cultos fundantes: Los Remedios y Guadalupe, 1521–1649, Zamora, 2001. Morales Valerio, F., “Santoral franciscano en los barrios indígenas de la ciudad de México”, Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl XXIV (1994), pp. 351–385. Muriel, J., Hospitales de la Nueva España, Mexico, 2 vols., Mexico City, 1970. Muriel, J., Los recogimientos de mujeres, Mexico City, 1974. Pérez Puente, L., Tiempos de crisis, tiempos de consolidación. La catedral metropolitana de la Ciudad de México, 1653–1680, Mexico City, 2005. Ramírez Méndez, J., “Las nuevas órdenes en las tramas semántico-espaciales de la Ciudad de México, siglo XVI”, Historia Mexicana 63:3 (2014), pp. 1015–1075. Ramírez Méndez, J., Los carmelitas descalzos en la Nueva España. Del activismo misional al apostolado urbano, 1585–1614, Mexico City, 2015. Rubial García, A., “Monjas y mercaderes. Comercio y construcciones conventuales en la ciudad de México durante el siglo XVII”, Colonial Latin American Historical Review 7:4 (1998), pp. 361–385. Rubial García, A., (ed.), La Iglesia en el México Colonial, Mexico City, 2013. Rubial García, A., “La labor educativa al interior de las órdenes mendicantes en Nueva España”, in J. Santana Vela and P.S. Urquijo Torres (eds.), Proyectos educativos en México. Perspectivas históricas, Morelia, 2014, pp. 61–94. Rubial García, A., “Orígenes milagrosos y nuevos templos. Imágenes y espacios sagrados en la Ciudad de México, siglos XVII y XVIII”, Boletín de Monumentos históricos 3:34 (2015), pp. 29–60. Ruíz Zavala, A., Historia de la provincia agustiniana del Santísimo Nombre de Jesús de México, 2 vols., Mexico City, 1984. Salazar, N., “El templo de la Santísima Trinidad de México, una historia en construcción”, Boletín de Monumentos Históricos 3:24 (2012), pp. 28–70.

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CHAPTER 7

The Cabildo of Mexico City, Patron Saints, and the Making of Local and Imperial Identities Alejandro Cañeque The cabildo or city council was an essential institution of the Spanish imperial polity. Political writers and thinkers, strongly influenced by Aristotelian principles, saw the city as the foundation of the political community. The city was seen as the quintessential embodiment of community and the first patria to which the citizen owed duty and loyalty. At the same time, the city was the basic unit of political organization, and the kingdom was an entity comprised of many cities.1 This explains why the establishment of cities, with their governing bodies, the cabildos, was at the root of Spanish rule and settlement in the New World. In the case of Mexico City, municipal authority was vested in two kinds of officers: regidores or councilors and alcaldes ordinarios or magistrates. In the 17th century there were usually 16 regidores and two alcaldes, elected by the regidores every year on New Year’s Day. The king’s representative in the city council was the corregidor, the city’s chief magistrate. He sat on the cabildo, presiding over it, although he was not, in a strict sense, a member of it.2 Traditionally historians contended that, by the 17th century, with the appointment of corregidores (the first one in Mexico City was appointed in 1573), the sale of town council positions, and closed elections (only members of the council were entitled to vote), the Spanish American municipalities had lost their autonomy through the increasing centralization of the Crown’s authority, with corregidores and, in the case of Mexico City and Lima, viceroys interfering in their affairs. Any elections of members of the cabildo that still occurred were generally subject to the approval of the corregidor or viceroy. As the cabildos were gradually deprived of whatever initiative and independence they might have possessed in the beginning, the office of regidor became politically of less and less consequence.3 More recently, some historians, referring 1 Thompson, “Castile, Spain, and the Monarchy”, pp. 127–128, 155. 2 The most complete study of Mexico City’s cabildo is Pazos, El ayuntamiento de la ciudad de México en el siglo XVII. 3 Ots Capdequí, El estado español en las Indias, pp. 61–63; Haring, The Spanish Empire in America, pp. 147–155; and Parry, The Sale of Public Office in the Spanish Indies, pp. 33–47. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004335578_009 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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to the case of New Spain, have argued that municipal councils, especially the cabildos of Mexico City and Puebla, provided positive political leadership for a broad combination of Creole groups. The cabildo, in fact, represented local interests and was the principal political and representative institution of the Creole population. It supported the Creole line in all the major political issues, even where this brought them directly into collision with viceregal policy. The viceroys, for their part, recognized the political importance of city councils, while trying to neutralize them by interfering in the elections as much as they could.4 In many ways, the cabildo of Mexico City fulfilled a role very similar to that of the Castilian cities represented in the Cortes. At its foundation, the Crown awarded Mexico City the title of “metropolis” or “head” of the kingdom of New Spain. This was highly significant, for among the privileges “head cities” were entitled to was the right to send their deputies to the Castilian Cortes. In fact, Mexico City never exercised this right, one of the reasons being the enormous distance between Mexico and the Iberian Peninsula. But this does not mean that the Mexican aldermen or the Crown were not conscious of the position that the Mexican city council occupied in the monarchy’s constitutional order. When levying new taxes, the Mexican council fulfilled the same role as the cities of Castile that voted in Cortes: the Crown had to ask it for its consent, without which it could not proceed. On the other hand, and similarly to the Castilian Parliament, the predominant political discourse of the Mexican aldermen, in relation to the monarch’s authority, was one of cooperation. Nevertheless, the regidores did show a high degree of independence, opposing in many occasions the Crown’s policies. As a fundamental member of the imperial body politic, the cabildo of Mexico City always insisted on its constitutional right to share power with the monarch in the face of the constant assertions of royal authority embodied in the actions of the viceroys.5 In the 16th and 17th centuries, one sure way of affirming the power and preeminence of a city was by closely associating it with distinguished and prominent saints. Although historians have only recently started to explore the political aspects of patron sainthood in the early modern Spanish world, much work needs to be done so that we can fully understand the extraordinary importance that the figure of the patron saint had in shaping the local and imperial identities of the inhabitants of the Spanish Empire. Patron saints were seen not only as the spiritual protectors of cities and the empire, but also 4 Israel, Race, Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico, pp. 94–98. 5 For a more detailed analysis of the political culture that gave shape to municipal power and authority, see Cañeque, The King’s Living Image, pp. 65–77.

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as the symbolic embodiment of their identity as well. In this regard, patron sainthood should be understood as “a cultural construct which could be reformulated according to a city’s concrete preoccupations and aspirations”.6 Furthermore, because this was a world in which religion and politics were inextricably bound together—the religious was always political, and politics was invariably shaped by religion—declaring a particular saint as the patron of a city or a country was not only a religious act but could also be, and often was, a political one. It was in the hands of the cabildos to decide which saints their cities were going to honor and celebrate. When on 14 September 1627, Pope Urban VIII signed the decree of beatification of the six Franciscan friars and 20 Japanese Christians who had been executed in Japan in 1597, the members of Mexico City’s cabildo rejoiced, because among the martyrs of Nagasaki was Felipe de Jesús, a young Franciscan from Mexico City. The beatification of Felipe brought great pride to the leaders of the city, and, less than three years after the decree was issued, in January 1630, the municipal council voted to make San Felipe de Jesús one of the patron saints of the city. Mexico City focused on San Felipe so exclusively that by the end of the 17th century the city had practically forgotten that he had been just one among 26 other martyrs. There was good reason for the city to behave in this way. San Felipe was the first Mexican Creole to become a saint. Although technically only a beatus, the inhabitants of Mexico City referred to Felipe de Jesús as San Felipe, since the assumption was that beatification was just the preamble to sainthood.7 Mexico City’s leaders exulted at the great mercies that God had given the city with a homegrown saint. In their view, the beatification of Felipe de Jesús would place Mexico City on the same level as the leading cities in the Spanish Empire. As one preacher put it, “Before Felipe, Mexico City had to confess itself inferior to others ... now it is among the most insigne of the world”. Having a native saint put Mexico in the company of cities like Madrid or Seville and ahead of colonial competitors like Puebla or Lima. This was of special significance because Madrid and Seville had always been the models for Spanish American cities.8

6 Río Barredo, Madrid, Urbs Regia, p. 96. 7 In reality, the pope had awarded the cult of San Felipe de Jesús extra liturgical privileges beyond those inherent in beatification. In many respects, within the archbishopric of Mexico City, he had the same privileges as any other saint. See Conover, Pious Imperialism, pp. 62–63. Formal beatification had only been introduced in the 17th century. For the long-winded and protracted process of canonization, see Finucane, Contested Canonizations, especially pp. 1–32; Ditchfield, “Tridentine Worship and the Cult of Saints”, pp. 207–216. 8 Conover, Pious imperialism, pp. 59, 80.

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For any city, to be able to appear as the patria or hometown of a highly prestigious saint evidently served to increase its “symbolic capital” and to reinforce its weight in the monarchy. A saint’s preeminence was established according to a “hierarchy of prestige” in which the first place was occupied by the apostles and after them, in order of preeminence, the seven apostolic men (disciples of Saint Peter and Saint Paul who had allegedly evangelized Spain), the martyrs of Antiquity, martyrs in general, archbishops, bishops, etc. This explains, for instance, why numerous cities (Córdoba, Huesca, Valencia, Zaragoza, and even Rome) claimed to be the hometown (patria natural) of Saint Lawrence, one of the most revered martyrs of Roman Antiquity.9 This would also explain the sudden blossoming of obscure martyrs from early Christianity, whose bodies and relics were “invented”, that is, discovered all over Spain throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. From city to city, Spain experienced a sort of patron saint fever. New Spain shared in this enthusiasm for patron sainthood, and, as in Europe, the elections of patron saints multiplied. The variety of threats a community could experience (scarcity of victuals, epidemics, fires, earthquakes, storms, floods) and the diversity of people interested in promoting new patron saints led the cabildos of the great cities of New Spain to multiply the elections of patron saints. However, not all patrons were equal. The largest cities usually had one or two main patrons with whom the city particularly identified and to whom the municipal councils dedicated the largest budgets.10 In the case of Mexico City, the two main patrons were Saint Hippolytus and the Virgin of Remedies. Both of them were closely identified with the Spanish conquest of Mexico (the surrender of Tenochtitlan had occurred on 13 August, Saint Hippolytus’ feast day, and Hernán Cortés had apparently placed a statue of the Virgin of Remedies in the temple of Huitzilopochtli). However, the Virgin of Remedies, elected patroness in 1574, would be thoroughly embraced by all inhabitants of Mexico City, be they indigenous, Creole, or peninsular (at least until the mid-18th century, when her devotional popularity would gradually be replaced by that of the Virgin of Guadalupe).11 9 10 11

Gómez Zorraquino, “Los santos patronos”, pp. 61–66. Ramos, Identity, Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla, pp. 81–87. Curcio-Nagy, “Native Icon”, pp. 367–391; Conover, “Reassessing the Rise of Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe”, pp. 265–275. In the 17th and 18th centuries many other patron saints were added by the Mexico City cabildo: Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus (c.1604), Saint Nicholas of Tolentino (1611), Saint Teresa of Jesus (1618), Saint Philip of Jesus (1630), Saint Dominic (1630), Saint Isidore the Ploughman (1638), Saint Francis Xavier (1660), Saint Bernard (1699), Saint Anthony the Abbot (1723), Saint Joseph (1732), and the Virgin of Guadalupe (1737). It is important to note that this multiplication of patrons was not peculiar to Mexico City, but was typical of many cities in the Catholic world (by 1731, Naples, for example, had 35 patron saints). See Ragon, “Los santos patronos”, pp. 369, 386–387.

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In the 16th century, a patron saint was usually elected because it was the saint of the day when the event in need of protection had happened or was chosen simply by drawing lots.12 But in the 17th century the criteria for the election of patron saints became more demanding. The saint was expected to offer solid and verifiable references: attention was paid to news from outside the community and those protectors whose efficacy had been verified were received more enthusiastically. However, the rhythm of the elections tended to coincide with the great waves of 17th-century canonizations rather than with local crises, which is a clear indication that electing a patron saint was above all a matter of prestige. Of the 37 patron saints elected in Mexico City, Puebla, and San Luis Potosí during the colonial period, only six were elected in the 16th century, 18 between 1600–1660, four between 1661–1720, and nine between 1721–1753.13 In the case of the New World, the newness of its cities made the longing for native saints even more significant as they allowed these cities to establish a spiritual and historical relationship with Rome and the Catholic world that was central to their authority.14 In this respect, the study of patron sainthood offers a privileged window into the ways in which the local and the imperial intersected in the Habsburg Empire. In contrast to Spanish and Italian cities, Mexican cities did not seem to have been especially attracted to the early Christian martyrs. After all, they could not trace a direct link to the ancient martyrs, as the European cities could. On the whole, Mexican cities tended to favor Spanish saints. Among these elections, two saints are of special relevance: Saint Teresa and Saint Isidore the Ploughman. In 1618, Mexico City and Puebla simultaneously elected Saint Teresa as their patroness. Acting on a petition from the Carmelites, Mexico City’s cabildo voted to make Saint Teresa a patron saint as soon as she was beatified.15 It has been argued that this election had more to do with the Habsburg kings’ political wishes than with true devotion to the saint.16 However, the former did not have to necessarily preclude the latter. While it is true that Philip III had written to all the cities of the monarchy asking them to receive Teresa as their patron and advocate, at the same time her cult was becoming enormously popular in Mexico.17 If the 12

The procedure of drawing lots seems to have been especially common during the Conquest and at the time when the first cities were founded. See Ragon, “Los santos patronos”, pp. 363, 369–370. 13 Ibid., p. 375. See also the appendix, p. 386. 14 Osorio, Inventing Lima, p. 137. 15 Conover, Pious Imperialism, pp. 211–212, endnotes 69 and 70. 16 Ragon, “Los santos patronos”, p. 373. 17 On Philip III’s letter, see Rowe, Saint and Nation, p. 56. Santa Teresa was perhaps the most prominent Spanish saint in Mexico City. See Conover, Pious Imperialism, p. 95.

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inhabitants of Mexico City (or at least the members of its municipal council) saw themselves as loyal subjects of the Spanish king, it made a great deal of sense to adopt as patron a saint who was especially cherished by the Spanish monarchs.18 From the Mexican perspective, there was no conflict in loving and being loyal to both the local community and the Spanish king. In many respects, the election of patron saints can be seen as a phenomenon very much similar to the writing of local histories, which also became enormously popular in the 17th century. As Richard Kagan has observed, although these chorographies offered a vision of the Spanish monarchy quite different from the one being written by royal historians (it was much more particularistic and much less unitary—the city was the true patria), in any case, chorography was not incompatible with the history articulated on behalf of the crown, as cities in these local histories were invariably depicted as “always faithful, always noble and always loyal to its lord”.19 The fact that Mexico City saw itself as part of a larger entity whose center was in Madrid may also explain the surprising fact that in 1638 the city chose Saint Isidore the Ploughman (San Isidro Labrador), the quintessential madrileño saint, as one of its protectors.20 In contrast to Saint Joseph, another very popular saint among Mexican cities, and to Saint Teresa, who were not local but Hispanic or universal saints, since they were not identified with any locality in particular, San Isidro was clearly a local figure. However, as will be shown below, San Isidro also came to be closely associated with the Spanish monarchs. This close relationship between an eminently local saint and the head of the Spanish Empire may be the reason that led the Mexican cabildo to include him among its patrons. Wishing to place itself on the same level as the imperial capital may have been a determining factor in the Mexican council’s decision to declare as patron a local saint who had no connection whatsoever with the city. In any case, continuous patronage was not guaranteed. If saints did not comply with their obligations, their cults would languish, no matter how much the religious orders tried to keep them alive.21 If a patron saint’s deeds were of a lackluster nature, if his or her figure was adorned with few virtues, and, more importantly, if his or her ability to work miracles alive or after death was not very impressive, all of this contributed to a decrease in the saint’s appeal to the faithful. No doubt this was what happened with Mexico City’s patronage of San Felipe de Jesús. Despite the enthusiasm of the immediate years after 18 19 20 21

On Philip III’s devotion for Santa Teresa, see Rowe, Saint and Nation, pp. 54–57, 77–85. Kagan, “Clio and the Crown”, pp. 90, 99. Ragon, “Los santos patronos”, p. 372; Conover, Pious Imperialism, p. 72. Ragon, “Los santos patronos”, pp. 375–377; Gómez Zorraquino, “Los santos patronos”, p. 61.

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his beatification, his cult never really took off. By the end of the 17th century, the figure of San Felipe was becoming increasingly irrelevant. Considering that historians have argued that this was precisely the period that marked the triumph of a Creole identity, it appears rather surprising that the cult of the only Creole saint from Mexico City did not become more popular. At the same time, the cult of the Virgin of Remedies, who was identified with the conquest and with peninsular Spaniards, remained very popular. For most of the colonial period, the Virgin of Remedies was seen as the protector of the city. Whenever danger or disaster threatened the capital, the city called first upon the Virgin of Remedies. In contrast, the city never appealed to San Felipe for protection from an impending disaster.22 The case of San Felipe should remind us of the need to complicate the notion of Creole identity, an identity that went far beyond the simplistic dichotomy of us vs. them. But why did Felipe de Jesús fail as patron saint? To begin with, Felipe was a saint manqué, since he was only a beato, who would not achieve sainthood until the second half of the 19th century. Moreover, his patronage of Mexico City started off badly. In 1629, the city experienced catastrophic flooding and would remain flooded for several years during which time the cabildo canceled all public ceremonies. For the fledgling cult of San Felipe, the absence of public celebrations for so many years did not contribute to popularizing his cult.23 But more importantly, as Cornelius Conover has argued, the residents of Mexico City abandoned San Felipe not for lack of hometown appeal, but rather for his poor religious credentials. In his view, the faithful chose holy figures more for their perceived ability to perform miracles than for their local identity.24 In the case of San Felipe, few miracles were ever credited to him and his own hagiography, published for the first time in 1683, does not include any miracles directly attributable to him. Unlike many other candidates for sainthood, San Felipe’s beatification preceded the development of his cult rather than a preexisting cult leading to his beatification (evidence of a widespread following was a signal to the pope and the cardinals of the Congregation of Rites that they should respond to a petition for canonization). San Felipe’s life before his death was short and unremarkable. His experience in Japan showed his main weaknesses. His performance in Nagasaki had been less than stellar: apparently, he had tried to escape execution several times.25 Even his own 22 Conover, Pious Imperialism, pp. 72, 211, endnote 68. Conover, “Saintly Biography”, p. 458. 23 Conover, Pious Imperialism, p. 72. It should be mentioned that the city had its own patron saint of floods, San Gregorio Taumaturgo, who did not seem to be very effective either. 24 Conover, Pious Imperialism, p. 93. 25 Ibid., p. 71.

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biographer had to dedicate an entire chapter to defend him from the charge of cowardice.26 San Felipe’s lack of appeal stands in stark contrast to another Creole saint, Saint Rose of Lima, whose petition for sainthood was swiftly expedited. By the extremely slow standards of the Roman Curia, the progress of her cause was meteoric: She did not have to wait the mandatory 50 years after her death in 1617 for the process of beatification to be opened.27 Once she was beatified in 1668, in 1669, the pope declared her patron of Lima and Peru and, in 1670, patron of America and the Philippines. Finally, in 1671 she was canonized. During the next century, Santa Rosa’s cult spread on both sides of the Atlantic with the help of numerous textual and iconic representations.28 Unlike San Felipe, Santa Rosa had everything that a successful 17th-century saint was supposed to have. Ever since her death in 1617 at age 31, Rosa de Santa María had been a popular figure to the inhabitants of Lima, who created brotherhoods to foment her cult. Even before her death, she had already established a circle of religious followers and developed a reputation as protector of the city. By the time the process of beatification was reopened in the 1650s, she was seen as a symbol of the city of Lima. At the same time, there were reports of miraculous apparitions of Rosa both in Europe and in Peru. Furthermore, in 1664, a Latin hagiography of Santa Rosa was published in Rome, which was quickly translated into Spanish, Italian, and even German. It was to become the most successful account of her life and an invaluable tool for promoting Rosa’s cause.29 The contrast with the figure of San Felipe de Jesús could not be greater. The first hagiography of San Felipe did not appear until 1683, more than 50 years after his beatification. Santa Rosa, we must acknowledge, had a significant advantage over San Felipe, an advantage that may help explain the unusual speed with which she was canonized after her beatification: the Queen Regent, Mariana de Austria, took a personal interest in her cause and, fortunately for Santa Rosa, the Queen was in a position to exert direct pressure on the two popes involved in her case, Clement IX and Clement X, as she had played a crucial role in their election to the papacy.30 26 27

28 29 30

See Medina, Vida, martyrio, y beatificacion, chap. XIII. Although in 1630 the Holy See had initiated an official inquiry into Rosa’s canonization, the proceedings were halted because Urban VIII made the criteria for sanctity more stringent, encouraging more historical documentation and requiring that 50 years elapse after an individual’s death before he or she could be considered for canonization. But her case was reactivated in 1656 when pope Alexander VII made an exception to the fifty-year rule. Myers, “Redeemer of America”, p. 258. Myers, “Redeemer of America”, pp. 251–259. See Hansen, Vita mirabilis. See Dandelet, Spanish Rome, p. 211. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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Probably as a reaction to Santa Rosa’s American patronage, in 1674 Mexico City’s cathedral chapter requested from the pope that Felipe de Jesús be made a patron saint of all of New Spain. However, the chapter was informed by its representative in Rome that, unfortunately, before their request could be taken into consideration, first Felipe had to be canonized. Still, the chapter did not give up and requested of the king that the feast of San Felipe be made equal to that of Santa Rosa. In 1689, the king agreed and made the feast of San Felipe a fiesta de tabla, that is to say, a feast at which the attendance of all royal officials was mandatory.31 Despite these petitions, the Mexican City council never seemed to be very interested in spending money to foment San Felipe’s cult. Right after his beatification, the cabildo refused to provide funds to dedicate a parish to San Felipe. It would be thanks to Philip IV’s generosity that in 1638 a chapel to San Felipe was created in the cathedral. This chapel became the center for the veneration of Felipe de Jesús and gave the cult both stability and visibility.32 But this was very little compared to the efforts made by the Lima cabildo to foster Santa Rosa’s cult. The officials in Lima were more than willing to make the necessary financial contributions, as they were perfectly aware that successfully placing a saint in Rome required a wealth of resources. By 1668, the cabildo had spent more than 22,000 ducats to secure Santa Rosa’s beatification.33 Less money was needed to convince the royal court in Madrid, since the Spanish monarchs tended to have a favorable view of these kinds of endeavors. San Felipe’s lack of popular success stands in stark contrast to the fate of another local saint who also lacked many of the credentials required for Counter-Reformation sainthood: the already mentioned San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of Madrid. Although he was a man and a Spaniard, two factors that, according to Peter Burke, greatly increased the chances of an individual being canonized in the 17th century, he lacked many other characteristics shared by the majority of those who achieved sainthood in the early modern period: he was not of noble ancestry; he was not a cleric, in particular, not a member of a religious order; he did not found a religious order; he was not a missionary; he was not a bishop; he did not engage in charitable activity; he was not a mystic; and he was never associated with a saintly figure (“sainthood was contagious”). He was just a labrador, a peasant or ploughman who

31 Conover, Pious Imperialism, pp. 81–82. As if to make the competition between the two Creole saints more visible, the cathedral chapter decided to build an altar to Santa Rosa in the chapel of San Felipe. 32 Ibid., pp. 182–183. 33 Osorio, Inventing Lima, p. 139. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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never left his village.34 In many respects, San Isidro and San Felipe are parallel figures because each was an obscure individual who became the patron saint of a powerful city in search of a native patron. Although Madrid became the political and administrative center of the monarchy in 1561, it did not have a prestigious religious genealogy and could not compete with Toledo as a prominent religious center of the Hispanic world. Not only did Madrid lack a bishop and a cathedral (in contrast to Mexico City), but, in contrast to Toledo, which was protected by three famous saints (San Ildefonso, Santa Leocadia, and San Eugenio), Madrid did not have a native tutelary saint. Although it already had a patron saint, Santa Ana, the mother of the Virgin Mary, Madrid lacked the patronage of a native saint who could become closely identified with the city and help it shape an identity separate from that of the royal court.35 But, in contrast to San Felipe, San Isidro became an immensely popular figure, closely identified with the city of Madrid. Unlike Felipe de Jesús, the fact that, after his beatification in 1619, he was quickly canonized in 1622, probably contributed in no small measure to the increase in his popularity. It is true that San Isidro had some initial advantage in relation to San Felipe, as there already existed a small local cult established around his figure with a confraternity devoted to the saint. However, his cult did not appear listed in the section dedicated to the santos extravagantes (those who enjoyed popular veneration even though they had not been canonized by the Church) included in the massive Flos sanctorum published by Alonso de Villegas between 1578 and 1603.36 Isidro had a great disadvantage in relation to Felipe de Jesús: he was a lay person who had to compete with the religious orders, who tried hard in Rome to impose their own candidates for sainthood. The chances that an individual would be declared a saint increased enormously when that individual was the member of a religious order: the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Jesuits, in this order, were especially successful in securing the canonization of their coreligionists in the 17th century.37 To be able to count on the powerful advertising machinery of a religious order was an enormous advantage that Isidro lacked. Initially, he could only count on the support of the city of Madrid. 34 35 36 37

On how to become a Counter-Reformation saint, see Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, pp. 53–57. Río Barredo, “Literatura y ritual”, p. 164. Sáez, “El culto a San Isidro labrador”, pp. 1039–1040. According to Peter Burke, of the 55 persons who were canonized between 1588 and 1767, only six came from the laity while 38 were members of religious orders. Of these, eight were Franciscans, seven were Dominicans, and six were Jesuits. See Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, p. 54.

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To be canonized, Isidro had to overcome great hurdles. While the push for ­canonization started in the 1560s, in 1599 the two agents that the city had sent to Rome to quicken the bureaucratic process informed the ayuntamiento of the little attention that had been paid by the Holy See to the cause of Madrid’s patron.38 This lack of interest on the part of the Roman Curia should be no surprise, as Isidro’s claim to sainthood was based on an obscure Latin chronicle written in the 13th century, some 100 years after his death. At the same time that the city was maneuvering in Rome, the figure of Isidro was being subjected to a skillful public campaign to foster his presence and visibility in Madrid. In this regard, Isidro had the benefit of being considered in practice the patron saint of the city even before he was beatified.39 In contrast, Felipe de Jesús, who was completely unknown before his beatification, was made the patron saint of Mexico City as a result of his beatification. The campaign to canonize Isidro counted on the collaboration of an illustrious pen: that of Lope de Vega, who wrote an epic poem (Isidro, published in 1599) and a three-act play (San Isidro, Labrador de Madrid, published in 1617, but which had been performed since 1598) to celebrate the life and miracles of Madrid’s patron.40 Along with Lope, other authors (the majority of them religious) reworked Isidro’s life into an “invented tradition”, which combined religious traditions with the preoccupations and aspirations of many inhabitants of the city, for whom it was of the utmost importance to create a historical memory for the city. In this reworking, the figure of Isidro would be associated with the Reconquista, in particular with the Christian triumph at the famous battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, which had allowed for the opening of Andalusia to Christian conquest. He would be identified with the shepherd who, according to medieval chronicles, had guided Alfonso VIII in the decisive battle. Although this story did not appear in the hagiography of San Isidro published in 1622, the legend was popularized by Lope in both the poem and the play he had dedicated to the farm laborer.41 This association of Madrid’s patron with the Reconquista made it possible to proclaim the continuity and purity of the city’s Christianity, even when it was under Muslim rule; hence, the hagiographers’ insistence on the Christian origins of Isidro’s family. In this way, Isidro appears 38 Sáez, “El culto a San Isidro labrador”, p. 1036. 39 Río Barredo, “Literatura y ritual”, p. 152. 40 Canning, Lope de Vega’s Comedias de tema religioso, pp. 50–51. 41 Because the presence of San Isidro in the Las Navas battle was never based on solid evidence, the story would eventually be rejected by Rome. See Río Barredo, “Literatura y ritual”, p. 163.

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as a cristiano viejo, whose purity of blood could not be questioned. This was an image in perfect correspondence with the ideals of the city’s ruling elites.42 Although after 1593 the Spanish monarchs enthusiastically supported Isidro’s canonization (in the same way as they supported the martyrs of Japan and many other Spanish candidates for sainthood), the initiative for and the financing of his canonization process always came from the Madrid city council.43 As in the case of Santa Rosa, the Madrid council spent enormous amounts of money to secure success, especially after Isidro’s beatification. In the short three years leading to his canonization, the city spent the hefty sum of 70,000 ducats.44 From Madrid’s perspective, they were no doubt 70,000 ducats well spent. Thanks to this economic effort, Madrid, the center of the mighty Spanish monarchy, had at last been able to cover its historical religious deficit with an ever more prestigious native saint. This saint, furthermore, was endowed with an enormous power: the power to cure kings. In contrast to Felipe de Jesús, Isidro was credited with a vast number of miracles, performed both in remote and recent times.45 In addition, Isidro possessed a great advantage in relation to Felipe de Jesús, as Madrid had “memory places”, which helped give visibility to the saint and perpetuate his cult: a shrine (ermita) with a fountain whose water was deemed miraculous and, above all, the sepulcher with his incorrupt body (in the parish of San Andrés). The sepulcher was an effective memory place, which by allowing the visualization of the saint’s body could in a powerful way contribute to increasing popular devotion. In 1593, for example, the city council decided to expose the saint’s remains as a way to support the canonization effort.46 On the other hand, since the reign of Philip II, the figure, or more properly the (incorrupt) body of Isidro began to be associated with the Spanish kings, something that was obviously favored by the fact that Madrid was also the seat of the royal court. In 1588 the city decided to expose Isidro’s body at his parish of San Andrés for nine days to pray for the success of the Spanish armada, 42 43 44 45

46

For an analysis of the reworking of San Isidro’s life, see Río Barredo, Madrid, Urbs Regia, chap. III. See Río Barredo, “Literatura y ritual”, pp. 149–158. Sáez, “El culto a San Isidro labrador”, p. 1041. On the different kinds of expenses necessary to secure canonization in Rome, see Río Barredo, “Literatura y ritual”, p. 157. Up to 432 miracles are enumerated by Alonso de Villegas in his Vida de San Isidro Labrador, published in Madrid in 1592 (the printing of this work, whose aim was clearly to popularize Isidro’s figure, would be paid for by one of the members of Madrid’s municipal council). According to Villegas, 64 of these miracles had happened between 1588 and 1598. See Sáez, “El culto a San Isidro labrador”, pp. 1040–1041. Zozaya Montes, “Construcciones para una canonización”, p. 21.

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which was about to invade England.47 This association of Isidro’s body with the royal body reached its culmination during the reign of Philip III. While returning from a trip to Lisbon in 1619, the king fell gravely ill and was forced to stop off at Casarrubios del Monte, a small town about 30 miles south of Madrid. When the Madrid council received the bad news, it decided to take Isidro’s body in solemn procession to the royal monastery of La Encarnación. But when the king’s illness worsened, the city council made the extraordinary decision to take the body of the recently beatified Isidro all the way to Casarrubios. There the ark containing the beato’s body was taken to the king’s room, where it was opened so that the monarch could kiss a little pouch containing one finger and three teeth belonging to the saint.48 When three days later the king showed a clear improvement, Isidro’s thaumaturgic reputation received an enormous thrust, while his figure became indelibly tied to the Spanish monarchy. It comes as no surprise that with such credentials Isidro’s canonization did not have to wait much longer. In total contrast to San Isidro, the local Mexican hero Felipe de Jesús never became a symbol of Mexico City’s identity, as had been hoped for by the city fathers, and his canonization would have to wait for more than 200 years. Given his lackluster credentials, which resulted in a lack of popular devotion to him and little commitment on the part of Mexico City’s cabildo, the city would have to look somewhere else to find a native figure who could meet the requirements for prestigious native patron sainthood. Around the mid-17th century, some inhabitants of Mexico City seem to have thought that figure could be the Virgin of Guadalupe. In that regard, juxtaposing the Virgin of Guadalupe to the figure of San Isidro may be illuminating. While today we think of Guadalupe as the quintessential symbol of Mexico, things were rather different in the 17th century, since, at that time, Guadalupe was a purely local cult, and not a very popular one at that. Like Isidro, for a long time Guadalupe was a minor figure whose first published hagiographies appeared more than a century after the events they alleged to recount. The shrine and image of Mary at Tepeyac were rarely mentioned in the cabildo minutes before 1648 (though they frequently mention the Virgin of Remedies), and sermons on Guadalupe did not start to be published until the 1670s. In Guadalupe’s case, not even a manuscript version of the tradition predating the published texts exists. This has led many scholars to argue that the cult of Guadalupe was simply an “invented tradition” that expressed a “Creole consciousness”, a contention buttressed by the fact that all four printed accounts published in the second half of the 17th century 47 Ibid., pp. 19–20. 48 Diácono, Vida y milagros del glorioso San Isidro el Labrador, pp. 150–159.

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were authored by Creole priests.49 William Taylor, however, has argued that it was Indian devotion that kept the small cult going for more than a century before Creole authors started to write about it. He has also pointed out that peninsular devotees were prominent throughout the 17th and even the 18th centuries, something that complicates the view of Guadalupe as a proto-nationalist figure.50 To fully understand the role Guadalupe played in the 17th century, we need to place her in the context of the search for patron sainthood that mobilized so many cities in the Spanish Habsburg Empire. This approach may clarify some of the reasons for the growth in popularity of the Guadalupe cult. From this perspective, the fact that her cult included all segments of society, from Indians to peninsular Spaniards, does not seem incompatible with the Creole promotion of her figure. On the contrary, the universal appeal of a native holy figure would have been the ideal outcome. The local dimension of the figure of Guadalupe is something that has generally been overlooked by scholars. Although today the Virgin of Guadalupe is a hugely popular religious symbol identified with the Mexican nation, this was not the case in the 17th century. Originally, Guadalupe was strongly associated with Mexico City. Miguel Sánchez, the author of the first printed account telling the story of Guadalupe (published in 1648), gave special attention to her role as protectress of the city.51 Given the lack of traction of Felipe’s cult in Mexico City, it is rather possible that at that time Sánchez was searching for another, more appealing native candidate for patron sainthood. This may be the reason that had led him to publish his account of the miraculous image at that precise time.52 While in the 17th century the Virgin of Guadalupe was a minor local cult, her image experienced the same kind of promotion that had allowed San Isidro to become closely associated with the city of Madrid. However, in her case, it would take a whole century for her cult to become firmly established around the mid-18th century. Furthermore, in the course of 49

50 51 52

The accounts, published between 1648 and 1688, were: Miguel Sánchez’s Imagen de la Virgen María (1648); Luis Lasso de la Vega’s Huei tlamahuiçoltica (1649); Luis Becerra Tanco’s Felicidad de México (1666, 1675); and Francisco de Florencia’s La estrella del norte de México (1688). Some of the scholars who have taken the “Creole consciousness” approach are Jacques Lafaye, Stafford Poole, David Brading, and Richard Kagan. Taylor, “Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe”, p. 281. For a rejection of the idea that the cult of Guadalupe was a manifestation of Creole patriotism, see Conover, “Reassessing the Rise of Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe”. Taylor, “Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe”, p. 280. Sánchez, Imagen de la Virgen María madre de Dios de Guadalupe. It should be noted that Sánchez was also well acquainted with the figure of Felipe de Jesús, as he was the author of one sermon dedicated to him, published only a few years before he published the story of Guadalupe. See Sánchez, Sermón de S. Felipe de Iesvs.

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Mexico City’s search for an appropriate native patron saint, Guadalupe would shed her local identity to become the symbol of all New Spain in the 18th century (in 1754 she was proclaimed by the pope patroness of the viceroyalty) and of the Mexican nation in the 19th century. In that regard, Guadalupe was even more successful than Isidro. To conclude, the scramble for native patron sainthood that dominated the cities of the Spanish Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries was much more than a mere manifestation of the piety of the inhabitants of the empire. This patron saint fever was rooted in the fact that the patria was still identified with one’s place of birth and that the idea of community as a national entity remained underdeveloped in these centuries. On the other hand, in Castile, the cities played a fundamental political role, and direct consultation of the cities came to be considered as acceptable and constitutional a procedure as that of summoning the Cortes. That may be the reason why the most prominent political writers of the 16th and 17th centuries rarely mentioned the role played by the Cortes in the political structure of the monarchy, instead highlighting the different councils, which aided in governing the monarchy, from town councils to royal courts to royal councils. In the case of Mexico City, as we saw at the beginning of this essay, it fulfilled a role very similar to that of the Castilian cities represented in the Cortes. At the time of its founding, Mexico City was politically assimilated to those cities, the crown awarding the city the title of “head” of the kingdom of New Spain. It has been argued that the wave of local histories that were published in the late 16th and 17th centuries “might reasonably be seen as a defensive movement against the exaltation of [a] royal power”, which was acquiring its greatest strength precisely at this time.53 It could be added that the enthusiasm of so many cities for native saintly patronage at this time was also part of the same movement to assert the crucial place that cities occupied in the structure of the Spanish monarchy. At the same time, it is important to point out that the Spanish monarchs were more than willing to support the canonization processes of local saints, because this served to enhance their prestige and reputation. The monarchs’ power was reflected not only in the extension and wealth of their possessions, but also in the abundance of national saints. As the great humanist and historian Ambrosio de Morales had declared in the 16th century, there were many things that ennobled a country and made it superior to others (the climate, the land’s fertility, the wealth of precious metals, its commerce, its illustrious men), but it was the number of its saints—the most illustrious 53

See Thompson, “Castile, Spain, and the Monarchy”, pp. 155–156; Kagan, “Clio and the Crown”, p. 95.

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among illustrious men—that which made a country truly superior. And in that regard, Spain had nothing to be envious of when compared to other nations, as she had had so many distinguished saints since the very beginnings of Christianity.54 As the words of Morales show, patron sainthood was a ­phenomenon mutually reinforced by local and imperial interests, whose outcome depended upon a complex array of factors that interacted with one another. Bibliography

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Conover, C., Pious Imperialism: Spanish Rule and the Cult of Saints in Mexico City, ­Albuquerque, 2019. Conover, C.B., “Saintly Biography and the Cult of San Felipe de Jesús in Mexico City, 1597- 1697”, The Americas 67:4 (2011), pp. 441–466. Conover, C.B., “Reassessing the Rise of Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe, 1650s–1780s”, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 27:2 (2011), pp. 251–279. Curcio-Nagy, L., “Native Icon to City Protectress to Royal Patroness: Ritual, Political Symbolism, and the Virgin of Remedies”, The Americas 52:3 (1996), pp. 367–391. Dandelet, T.J., Spanish Rome, 1500–1700, New Haven, 2001. Ditchfield, S., “Tridentine Worship and the Cult of Saints”, in R. Po-chia Hsia (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, Cambridge, 2007, vol. 6, pp. 201–224. Finucane, R.C., Contested Canonizations: The Last Medieval Saints, 1482–1523, Washington, D.C., 2011. Gómez Zorraquino, J.I., “Los santos patronos y la identidad de las comunidades locales en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII”, Jerónimo Zurita 85 (2010), pp. 39–74. Haring, C.H., The Spanish Empire in America, New York, 1947. Israel, J.I., Race, Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610–1670, London, 1975. Kagan, R., “Clio and the Crown: Writing History in Habsburg Spain”, in R.L. Kagan and G. Parker (eds.), Spain, Europe, and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 73–99. Myers, K.A., “Redeemer of America: Rosa de Lima (1586–1617), the Dynamics of Identity, and Canonization”, in A. Greer and J. Bilinkoff (eds.), Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, New York, 2003, pp. 251–275. Osorio, A.B., Inventing Lima: Baroque Modernity in Peru’s South Sea Metropolis, New York, 2008. Ots Capdequí, J.M., El Estado español en las Indias, Mexico City, 1941. Parry, J.H., The Sale of Public Office in the Spanish Indies under the Habsburgs, Berkeley, 1953. Pazos Pazos, M.L.J., El ayuntamiento de la ciudad de México en el siglo XVII: Continuidad institucional y cambio social, Seville, 1999. Ragon, P., “Los santos patronos de las ciudades del México central (siglos XVI y XVII)”, Historia Mexicana 52:2 (2002), pp. 361–389. Ramos, F.L., Identity, Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla, Tucson, 2012. Río Barredo, M.J. del, Madrid, Urbs Regia. La capital ceremonial de la Monarquía Católica, Madrid 2000. Río Barredo, M.J., “Literatura y ritual en la creación de una identidad urbana: Isidro, patrón de Madrid”, Edad de Oro XVII (1998), pp. 149–168. Rowe, E.K., Saint and Nation: Santiago, Teresa of Avila, and Plural Identities in Early Modern Spain, University Park, 2011. Sáez, R., “El culto a San Isidro labrador o la invención y triunfo de una amplia operación político-religiosa (1580–1622)”, in M. Vise (ed.), Homenaje a Henri Guerrero: La hagi-

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ografía entre historia y literatura en la España de la Edad Media y del Siglo de Oro, Madrid, 2005, pp. 1033–1045. Taylor, W.B., “Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe in the Seventeenth Century: Hagiography and Beyond”, in A. Greer and J. Bilinkoff (eds.), Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, New York, 2003, pp. 277–298. Thompson, I.A.A., “Castile, Spain, and the Monarchy: The Political Community from patria natural to patria nacional”, in R.L. Kagan and G. Parker (eds.), Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 125–159. Zozaya Montes, L., “Construcciones para una canonización: reflexiones sobre los lugares de memoria y de culto en honor a San Isidro Labrador”, Tiempos Modernos: Revista Electrónica de Historia Moderna 7:22 (2011), pp. 1–24.

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Chapter 8

Visualizing Corporate Piety The Art of Religious Brotherhoods Cristina Cruz González 1 Memory, History, Historiography: The Hospital de Jesús and the Scuola Grande Traveling the world in the 17th century, the Italian adventurer Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri (1651–1725) chanced upon a religious procession in Mexico City and recorded his impression: The procession began with nearly a hundred statues, all adorned with flowers; next came the confraternities and all the mendicant orders … then proceeded the clergy supporting the monstrance on a wooden altar. Rounding off the pomp stood the archbishop, viceroy, officials, and nobility. Throughout the procession, one could regularly enjoy the dances of the giants and the people in disguise wearing various costumes.1 Such festivities and their confraternal participation can be appreciated in numerous visual narratives from colonial Mexico. An anonymous 18th-century painting, based on a now-lost 17th-century production, commemorates the 1663 installation of the miraculous image of Christ at the pioneering hospital de la Purísima Concepción in Mexico City (Figure 8.1). Cortés ordered the hospital to be built, legend has it, at the very site where the conqueror first encountered the Emperor Motecuhzoma in 1519.2 Although the foundation was officially dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, residents in Mexico City knew it as the hospital del Marqués due to its elite, historic patronage. But once the miraculous image of Christ was installed, the institution would thereafter be known as the hospital de Jesús. The painting, then, not only narrates a procession but also documents the formation of corporate identity

1 Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Gemelli Careri, Viaje a la Nueva España, p. 114. 2 Muriel, Hospitales de la Nueva España, vol. 1, pp. 37–51; Guerra, “La Caridad Heroica de Hernán Cortés”; and Junquera y Mato, “El Hospital de Jesús”. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004335578_010 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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figure 8.1 Detail of Traslado de la Imagen de Jesús Nazareno al Hospital de la Purísima Concepción en 1633, c.1781, oil on canvas, 150 x 320 cm. Collection of the Hospital de Jesús Nazareno, Mexico City Image by author (artwork in the public domain)

and perpetuates that identity for future members.3 Heralded by indigenous ­musicians, the pageant includes a native confraternity with their banners and standards, elite indigenous women, and a second confraternity with the canopied image of Christ. The woman who stares directly at the viewer might well be the wealthy Petronila Gerónima, the donor of the sculpture. The splendor, pomp, and magnitude of Baroque procession is on full display and, with the presence of a heterogeneous cast, the painting seems primed for observation. As our vantage point monitors the scene, we engage in a powerful surveillance that allows for the inspection and regulation of colonial figures, religious members, and social classes. The painting documents sacred space, patronage, and procession while affirming group devotion and affiliation; it does not do this privately, but within the public sphere. For scholars today, the 18th-century composition also evinces a historicizing impulse, as it was produced at a time when the prestige and appeal of the confraternity was waning and when corporate, public displays of piety were curtailed by Bourbon legislation. Gemelli Careri, of course, was not new to religious spectacle, not only because he was a seasoned traveler but also because his native Italy provided a rich lived and artistic experience that prefaced his Spanish-American travels— one need only think of Gentile Bellini’s c.1496 portrait of the Confraternity of Saint John in the Piazza San Marco to appreciate the grandeur of Venetian pageantry and religious display (Figure 8.2). The celebrated painting includes the Doge, standard-bearers, musicians, and members of a brotherhood against 3 For the painting, see Berndt, “Memoria Pictórica”, pp. 99–100; Alamán, Obras, vol. 2, pp. 150– 153. Alamán includes an engraving based on the 18th-century painting.

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figure 8.2 Gentile Bellini, Processione in piazza San Marco, 1496, tempera and oil on canvas, 373 x 745 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice Image courtesy of Creative Commons (artwork in the public domain)

a cityscape that can only be Venice. Narrating the annual Feast of the Holy Cross and a miracle attributed to a fragment of the True Cross during the 1444 procession, the composition powerfully locates the members of the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista (appearing in the foreground and dressed in white) as the proud custodians of the relic. As expected, the confraternity commissioned the painting for their headquarters in Venice. One is struck by the similarities between the Venetian and Mexican works. Both stand as portraits of their respective organizations and affirm corporate, social status; they also reference miraculous objects of devotion and a confraternity’s connection to—and creation of—early modern urban sites, sacralizing and historicizing city spaces.4 Although group identity might be mitigated by the dynamics of a city—reflecting ethnic and social fragmentation in the case of the viceregal capital—confraternities also contributed to the notion of the city as a space simultaneously composed of the sacred and the trace. To borrow a concept from Pierre Nora, confraternities helped engineer the city as both milieux de mémoire and lieux de memoire; religious brotherhoods were part of the edifice constituting the sacred (parading miraculous images, promoting rites and rituals, constructing places of worship) but they also simultaneously shaped urban

4 Comparisons between Venice and Mexico City date to the contact period and continued until the 19th century. An early literary double-take is found in Cervantes Saavedra, Novelas ejemplares, p. 221. On this mirroring impulse in early modern visual sources, see Kim, “Uneasy Reflections”.

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mythologies, ideologies, and narrative strategies.5 The religious procession and the representation of procession (and, even more so, its reproduction) were related but not quite the same thing. Although this chapter focuses on the art of religious brotherhoods in viceregal Mexico City, it seems appropriate to recall the Scuola Grande and the dual vantage point of the traveler Gemelli Careri as a way of referencing the historiography of confraternities and the seminal contributions of post-1960 Italian studies.6 It was at this time, and with this focus, that confraternity scholarship moved out of the periphery of medieval religious history and eventually became one of the most active subjects of research in early modern European studies. The works of John Bossy, Brian Pullan, Richard Trexler, and Ronald Weissman are especially important in this regard. Bossy posited the framework of the “social miracle” in attempting to comprehend religious brotherhoods and their coexistence alongside mendicant orders and clergy.7 Pullan, meanwhile, focused on the Scuole Grande of Venice and the development of confraternal charitable aid, drawing comparisons with the social welfare provided by Protestant states.8 Weissman and Trexler considered confraternities to be social tools employed by Florentines to navigate both rites of passage and antagonistic social relations.9 More recent scholarship has increased our understanding of lay organizations and their impact on the social, religious, civic, and material world around them.10 Especially important are volumes by Renaissance historians that venture beyond Italy and, at times, attend to material and visual culture.11 Confraternity studies has recently turned its attention to the formation and function of brotherhoods and charities lying outside of Europe. Historians of Spanish America, for example, have approached confraternal organizations as key agents in conversion campaigns and Tridentine efforts to regulate Christian societies. Their works compare corporate piety in rural and urban areas, 5 6

Nora, “Between Memory and History”. For an excellent review of the scholarship, see Terpstra’s introductory essay in the volume, The Politics of Ritual Kinship, pp. 1–8. 7 Bossy, Christianity in the West. 8 Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice. 9 Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence and Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence. 10 Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century; Wisch and Cole (eds.), Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy. 11 Black and Gravestock (eds.), Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas; Terpstra, Prosperi, and Pastore (eds.), Faith’s Boundaries; and Presciutti (ed.), Space, Place, and Motion.

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consider colonial distinctions of class, ethnicity, and gender in the formation of brotherhoods, scrutinize the shifting relations of these lay organizations to political and ecclesiastical authorities, and weigh their importance as financial institutions in a colonial economy. Procession, ritual, and the visual aspects of devotion have not gone entirely unexamined: monographs centered on any one of New Spain’s most famous painters—Juan Correa, José Juárez, Cristóbal Villalpando, Miguel Cabrera—must necessarily contend with confraternity commissions, contracts, and demands. But approaching visual culture from the vantage point of the confraternity is still rare; in this regard, the work of Susan Verdi Webster is especially significant. From the architectonic visual program of the Holy Cross confraternity in Huejotzingo to the material and pictorial setting for native brotherhoods in colonial Quito, Verdi Webster’s research has pushed the boundaries of confraternity scholarship beyond Italy, examining the symbiotic relationship between religious kinship and visual culture in both Spain and Spanish America.12 Nevertheless, for students seeking a better understanding of confraternities and their contribution to colonial vision and visuality, much work remains to be done. Although the first American confraternity was established by 1525, and many would be founded throughout the rest of the 16th century, it was really in the 17th century that their numbers sharply rose. In Mexico City alone, there were 20 such organizations for Spaniards and over 80 for natives, mestizos, blacks, mulattos, and other castas.13 Confraternities can be linked to more than just death and devotion, politics and processions. Pious corporations financed shrines, chapels, hospitals, schools, orphanages, and meeting halls, commissioning the altars, paintings, sculptures, and architectural programs for these structures. Confraternal art both decorated and defined corporate space; images encouraged kinship and social cohesion, reinforcing a group’s association with a patron saint or devotion. Some paintings and sculptures prompted corporeal reactions: self-mortification often took place before—and in direct response to—an image. Prized artworks were kept in private chapels, but a great many devotional images exited religious buildings and were paraded on special feast days or during times of public need. Brotherhoods were able 12

Webster, “Research on Confraternities in the Colonial Americas”. For Quito, see “Native Brotherhoods and Visual Culture in Colonial Quito (Ecuador)”; “Ethnicity, Gender, and Visual Culture in the Confraternity of the Rosary in Colonial Quito”; “The Confraternity of the Most Holy Sacrament and the Church of El Sagrario, Quito”. For Mexico, see “Art, Ritual, and Confraternities in Sixteenth-Century New Spain”; “The Descent from the Cross in Sixteenth-Century New Spain”. 13 Cuevas, Historia de la Iglesia en México, vol. 1, p. 405; Muriel, “La Capilla de la Cena en la Catedral de México”, p. 1.

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to lay claim to religious imagery, doctrinal emblems, and devotional icons. In the process of appropriation, social, religious, and philanthropic corporations transformed colonial vision and visuality. If confraternities were essential to the social and spiritual economy of colonial society, then the visual image must also be understood in this economy of exchange. This chapter interrogates a select number of pictorial and textual sources with the hope that readers will appreciate the richness of the Mexican archive and find both complexity and potential in the evidence presented. Specifically, I examine two major branches of confraternal art in Mexico City: membership books and chapel paintings. Thus, I review some of the most common, affordable, and iterable corporate images as well as some of the most costly and prestigious works to be commissioned by brotherhoods in New Spain. In both cases, images defined confraternal space, were often the focus of confraternal activity, encouraged social cohesion, and, as self-portraits, performed corporate identity. 2

Performing Identity: Membership Books and Patents

One of the earliest and most significant Spanish confraternities in Mexico City was dedicated to Saint Catherine of Alexandria. In 1537, the ayuntamiento authorized its location a few blocks north from the Church of Santo Domingo. By 1568, at the urging of the Viceroy Martín Enríquez, the confraternity agreed to establish a parish for Spaniards, one of the earliest in the city.14 By 1693, Cristóbal de Medina Vargas renovated and enlarged the parish, adding a new crossing and capilla mayor. The church was renovated yet again in 1740.15 In his 1777 diary of the city, Juan de Viera lauds the construction and decoration, suggesting that the parish might easily pass for a cathedral in another city. Today, the church still stands (sans Baroque retablos) in the neighborhood of La Lagunilla. Given both its socio-historical importance and physical position—between Tepeyac and the Metropolitan Cathedral—the parish of Santa Catarina drew visitors and was even allowed the privilege of receiving the Virgin of Guadalupe on at least two occasions. Following the floods of 1629, the icon traveled from Tepeyac to the cathedral, stopping briefly at Santa Catarina. On its return to Tepeyac in 1634, the miraculous tilma visited the parish again, this time staying for two days. It is difficult to gauge the popularity of the image in 1629—yet 14

The first Spanish parish in Mexico City was the cathedral and the second was the Church of San Miguel. 15 Fernández, Cristóbal de Medina Vargas, p. 51.

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one might argue that its peregrination to Santa Catarina and its multi-year stay at the Metropolitan Cathedral were part of the archbishop’s efforts to actively construct guadalupismo in the 17th century and to do so specifically with the support of the city’s Spanish population.16 Despite its proclaimed racial exclusivity, the Santa Catarina confraternity was far from isolated as the parish oversaw nearby native chapels and was the baptismal church for congregants from San Francisco Tepito, Apahuascan (Santa Ana), and La Concepción. By 1680, Santa Catarina was sponsoring and lending space to the Congregation of Our Lady of Guadalupe, an indigenous confraternity. Surviving membership books once belonging to this organization provide individual names and detail the terms of exchange between association and associate: in one example, a warrant (patente) (Figure 8.3) acts as acknowledgement by the mayordomo and treasurer of the confraternity that sister Juana has paid two reales as her introductory membership fee and has agreed to pay half a real each week thereafter.17 Juana must be punctual with her payments, for a lapse of four months voids her membership and frees the confraternity from any future obligations. What does she get in return? At her death, the corporation will provide 20 reales for a sung mass and Christian burial, and she will thereafter be included in the confraternity’s frequent prayers for the souls in purgatory. A 1689 membership form for the Confraternity of San Benito de Palermo—a corporation expressly for black men and women—similarly details the obligations of both organization and member.18 Here, medical aid is provided to 16 Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images, pp. 102–103, 239, n. 19 and n. 21. 17 The contract reads: “El Rector, y Thesorero de esta Concgregación, certificamos en la forma, que podémos que se recibió por Hermana á Juana [illegible] quien dio por su assiento dos reales, con obligacion a dar semanariamente medio real de jornalillo: y se obliga la Congregacion a dar a dicho Congregante quando fallezca veinte pesos en reales y a que se le mande cantar una Missa, y participan assi mismo los vivos, como los defuntos de las Missas que mentalmente se cantan el dia doze de cada mes como de la Novena, Fiesta Titular, y del Aniversario que se ha de hacer por dichos Congregantes Defuntos todos los años, y se advierte la puntual paga por ser … acordado que el Hermano Congregante que deviere quarto meses, que hacen un peso, sea borrado y dicha Congregacion libre de dar cosa alguna: Y para que conste dimos la presente en Mexico, sellado con el Sello de nuestra Congregacion … del mes de enero de 177(4?). [2 signatures]”. La Reina de las Américas, p. 99. 18 Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Cofradías y Archicofradías, v. 212, exp. 10. The patent reads: “Yo [blank] Mayordomo de la Hermandad, de la Coronación de Christo Señor Nuestro y San Benito de Palermo, que esta fundada en el Convento de Señor San Francisco de México, certifico, y doy fee como se assentó Maria de la Asunccion por hermana de la dicha cofradia, y dio dos reales por su entrada y asiento y se obligo a dar medio real cada semana, y cuatro reales para la cera de la Quaresma y por razon de lo referido es obligada la

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figure 8.3 Patente de la Congregación de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de la Parroquia de Santa Catalina Mártir, c.1770, engraving, 31cm x 20.5 cm. Museo Basílica de ­Guadalupe, Mexico City Image by author (artwork in the public domain)

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the sick member, in this case María de la Asunción, but only ten pesos are furnished for her coffin, burial, mass, and funerary candles. If the terms of exchange seem slightly uneven, we must remember the Counter-Reformation vision of helpless souls in the afterlife and the Catholic goal of minimizing one’s time in a fiery purgatory. With enough prayer, penitence, church attendance, charity, and donations, one’s soul—or that of a fellow member—might be rescued from an area of torment and be secured a place in heaven. The price of salvation was measured out in indulgences—the more one accumulated, the better one’s spiritual ranking in the afterlife. In the case of San Benito, indulgences were granted in exchange for any of the following: praying in the saint’s chapel or oratory in the Franciscan convent, attending the congregation’s public and private meetings, giving shelter to the poor, resolving disputes between factions or neighbors, tending to the bodies of deceased brothers and other Christian faithful, participating in any licensed procession, or accompanying the Santísimo Sacramento when taken to aid the sick.19 For both the Guadalupe and the San Benito confraternities, we are presented with a legal and social contract, proof of female participation, an indication of financial resources, the visual focus of a member’s devotion, and a self-portrait of the organization’s membership. The choice of San Benito (b. Sicily, 1526; d. Palermo, 1589) for a black organization affiliated with the Franciscan monastery was not arbitrary—the image of the saint descendant of slaves also functioned as a self-image, an indication of both religious sameness and ethnic difference (Figures 8.4–8.5). In the brotherhood’s insignia, the black saint most often appears in his Franciscan habit and is holding a crucifix in one hand and the nails of the Passion in the other. The Franciscan emblem—the stigmata or five wounds—is often cited, reminding members of the saint’s mendicant affiliation and that of their own organization. The organization dedicated to San Benito not only responded to a colonial context; it facilitated its process. As Nicole von Germeten’s work makes clear, the rise of lay religiosity in the late colonial period went hand in hand with a surge in population and the subsequent racialization of Mexican society—the 18th-century casta genre, in fact, is part and parcel of this process. Census data

19

dicha hermandad a darle medico, cirujano y botica, para que le acudan con medicamentos y si falleciere darle diez pesos, ataud, y cera. Y de no acudir a lo referido pasados quarto meses se den por excluidos de la dicha hermandad. Y para que dello conste de la presente firmada de mi nombre, y sellada con el sello de la cofradía. En Mexico, el 14 del mes de Junio de 16 año 89”. For black confraternities, see von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers; von Germeten, “Black Brotherhoods in Mexico City”; Castañeda García, “Santos de Color”; and Roselló Soberón, “Las fiestas religiosas de la cofradía de San Benito de Palermo”. Archivo General de la Nación, Cofradías y Archicofradías, vol. 179, exp. 1.

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figure 8.4 Patente de la Cofradia y Hermandad de la Coronación de Christo S.N. y San Benito de Palermo, c.1680, engraving Image courtesy of the Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Library Digital Collections (artwork in the public domain)

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figure 8.5 Sumario de las indulgencies y gracias perpetuas de que gozan todos los cofrades y cofradas de la pia y devota Cofradia del glorioso S. Benito de Palermo, fundada en el altar de la Iglesia de S. Francisco de Mexico, c.1681, engraving Image courtesy of the Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Library Digital Collections (artwork in the public domain)

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shows that, at least prior to the year 1640, more Africans than Spaniards came to New Spain (with at least 100,000 arriving on Portuguese slave ships). In Mexico City, a capital with a majority indigenous population and an estimated 60,000 residents of African descent, brotherhoods not only proved central to the social and religious fabric of the city but were fundamental to the construction of race and the maintenance of a racially divided society. San Benito, then, became not only an ideal saint but a homogenizing template for the Afro-Mexican, encouraging group formation that went beyond the categories of rich or poor, free or enslaved, light or dark. Acculturation and racialization functioned as two sides of the same colonial coin, propelling the formation of subaltern confraternities in the viceregal capital and creating space for the performance of colonial identities. This was not limited to black brotherhoods—our Guadalupe patent is again illustrative of an acculturation process that was supported and stimulated through images. In the patent’s engraving, designed by the confraternity treasurer Don José de Vera, the virgin appears as protector of the congregation that takes her name. The formal organization of the image is not unlike the scheme we often find in the old world. The frontispiece for the 1562 Statutes of S. Maria della Morte in Bologna (Figure 8.6), for example, shows the brothers gathered around in full processional robes—some have hoods pulled over to preserve anonymity while others hold the painted boards used when escorting the condemned to execution. The background illustrates the confraternity in action, processing with a cross outside Bologna. In the Guadalupe engraving, we see the Mexican icon protecting the native congregation, but, here too, not all worshippers are alike: the indigenous converts, in pre-Columbian finery on the left, stand in marked contrast to the acculturated Christians on the right. Within the group, the children are notable for their distinct haircut, a colonial marker for indigenous neophytes. For all members of the brotherhood, the image captured the initial Christianization of their noble ancestors as well as their own religious devotion, ethnic position, and corporate attachment. The self-portrait, then, turns out to be a double portrait. This cultural duality was ascribed to indigenous Christians in later representations involving Guadalupe, for instance in José de Ribera Argomanis’ painting of the virgin as “Patroness of New Spain” from 1778 (Figure 8.7). Again, the indigenous body is a binary being: the pious Christian is coupled with the “noble savage” at the foot of the Mexican Phoenix who, in this scene, stands supported by her own foundation myth and that of her territory. Mexico City appears as a site-specific (if bipartite) location—it is both the destined capital of the Aztec empire and a prodigious landscape chosen by the Mother of God. The two indigenous bystanders echo the paired traditions and,

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figure 8.6 Statuti della Confraternita della Morte, 1562, illuminated miniature, 355 x 240 mm. Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna Image courtesy of Biblioteca Digitale Dell’Archiginnasio, Archiweb (artwork in the public domain)

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figure 8.7 José de Ribera y Argomanis, Verdadero Retrato de la Virgen de Guadalupe, 1778, oil on canvas, 162.6 x 172.7 cm. Museo Basílica de Guadalupe, Mexico City Image by author (artwork in the public domain)

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together, form a fantasy lineage that powerfully conveys a process of group formation and socialization. 3

Collective Devotion, Seeing Together

Images of patron saints, the Virgin Mary, or doctrinal devotions such as the Immaculate Conception, the Trinity, and the Blessed Sacrament, functioned as ethnic and class markers for elite Spanish groups as well.20 The Confraternity of Our Lady of Aranzazu, a corporation that built and managed its own chapel in the atrium of the Franciscan monastery in Mexico City, was an exclusive Basque organization founded in 1681.21 From the start, Aranzazu was a proud and nationalistic group that privileged its wealthy membership, their families, and their numerous charitable causes. The confraternity’s most famous contribution was the establishment of the school for orphaned girls, the Colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola (more popularly known as the Colegio de Vizcaínas).22 Viera notes: “[The college] was founded in 1740 at the expense of the Basque nation and it is sufficiently large to house up to 1000 girls with added comfort. The church at this college is a curious reliquary”.23 The designation of the Jesuit saint for their most public of philanthropic projects can be explained by the fact that Loyola was born in the Basque region of Guipuzcoa and, on his journey to Montserrat in 1522, stopped at the sanctuary of the Virgin of Aranzazu, prayed before the icon, and took his vow of chastity.24 The much-anticipated Aranzazu Chapel in the Franciscan monastery was finished in 1688. The chapel was not just a place of worship, but also functioned as a meeting room for the organization. An early inventory provides a description of the main altar, letting us know that it contained an image of Our Lady of Aranzazu in its central niche, two sculptures of San Joaquín and Santa Ana, six paintings narrating the life of the virgin, eleven full-length sculptures of the icon (including two made of ivory), and four large mirrors (two framed

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Bazarte Martínez, Las cofradías de españoles en la Ciudad de México. The classic study on the confraternity is Luque Alcaide, La Cofradía de Aránzazu. See also Tellechea Idígoras, “La Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de Aránzazu”. 22 Muriel, Los vascos en México; Muriel (ed.), La sociedad novohispana; and Obregón, El Real Colegio de San Ignacio de México. 23 “ ... se fundó el año de 1740, a expensas de la nación vascongada, y tiene capacidad para poder tener dentro hasta mil niñas con sobrado desahogo. La iglesia de este colegio es un curioso relicario”. Viera, Breve y compendiosa narración, p. 64. 24 See Zaballa Beascoechea, “Aránzazu y San Ignacio”; Loyola, Obras completas, pp. 93–95.

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with fine Venetian crystal and two with frames of gold).25 Cristóbal de Villalpando, one of the most renowned artists in New Spain, was commissioned by the confraternity to paint a portrait of this Basque devotion in the second half of the 17th century (Figure 8.8). There is some dispute concerning the original location of the painting—a payment book assigns the altar paintings to the artist Nicolás de Arteaga—but, regardless, Villalpando supplied the confraternity with the work and at least two others: a Crucifixion and a portrait of Saint Ignatius writing the Spiritual Exercises (Figure 8.9).26 The grouping is a clear indicator of the prominence and wealth of the confraternity in late 17th-century Mexico and the premium placed on art and architecture by members of this corporation. The paintings, furthermore, express one of the chief aims of the Basque brotherhood in New Spain—to foster group identity and social cohesion within the transplanted community and their descendants. Villalpando’s composition of the virgin, now housed in the Colegio de Vizcaínas, does not reproduce the icon in her niche exactly but locates the image in a rugged Basque landscape that explicitly narrates her legendary beginning. According to the story, a shepherd in Guipuzcoa discovered the Marian sculpture in a spiny tree in 1469. The Franciscans in the area built a modest sanctuary for the object and, by the mid-16th century, the icon’s legend had spread. Villalpando’s painting clearly differs from an earlier engraving (c.1685), by Gasper Bouttats, a Flemish model the Mexican painter likely had on hand (Figure 8.10).27 It is even entirely possible that Villalpando’s portrait followed one of the six altar paintings or even combined them to some extent. Whatever the case, Villalpando’s composition becomes a standard formula in colonial Mexico. Icon, history, and group identity similarly fuse in a later colonial painting that shows the Basque merchant Francisco de Fagoaga and his family with a painting of the Marian devotion in their private oratory.28 Separated by gender, the ten family members flank an altar supporting a painting of 25 26 27 28

Luque Alcaide, La Cofradía de Aránzazu, p. 332. For the 1710 inventory, see Obregón, El Real Colegio, pp. 24–25; Gutiérrez Haces, Ángeles, Bargellini, and Ruiz Gomar, Cristóbal de Villalpando, p. 383. For a reproduction of the Crucifixion, see Gutiérrez Haces et al., Cristóbal de Villalpando, p. 425. Despite the incongruity between the Bouttats print and the Villalpando painting, the artist might still have followed a printed model. Gutiérrez Haces et al., Cristóbal de Villalpando, p. 246. Francisco de Fagoaga was an important member of the Aranzazu confraternity. On the family, see Sanchiz, “La familia Fagoaga”. The anonymous painting, created between 1734 and 1736, is in a private collection in Mexico City. For a reproduction and a description, see Curiel, “Retrato de la familia Fagoaga-Arozqueta” (added 28 March 2008): http://www.esteticas.unam.mx/revista_imagenes/imago/ima_curiel03.html.

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figure 8.8 Cristóbal de Villalpando, Virgen de Aránzazu, c.1688, oil on canvas, 184.3 x 108cm. Colegio de la Paz, Vizcaínas, Mexico City Image by author (artwork in the public domain)

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figure 8.9 Cristóbal de Villalpando, San Ignacio escribiendo los Ejercicios, c.1688, oil on wood, 167 x 115 cm. Colegio de la Paz, Vizcaínas, Mexico City Image by author (artwork in the public domain)

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figure 8.10 Gaspar Bouttats, Nuestra Señora de Aránzazu, c.1685, engraving, 28cm (fol.). Published in Juan de Luzuriaga, Paranympho Celeste (Mexico City: Herederos de la Viuda de Bernardo Calderon, 1686). John Carter Brown Library, Providence Image courtesy of Open Library (artwork in the public domain)

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the Virgin of Aranzazu. As in Villalpando’s rendition, the elaborately dressed icon sits in a tree with a bell hanging from one of its protruding branches. The shepherd and his flock surround the tree, and the seer recognizes the divine object before him. The virgin’s facial features approach Villalpando’s darker-skinned icon—in this regard, both depart from the sculptural prototype in Spain.29 Another 18th-century Mexican painting of the icon, now in a private collection in Spain, follows Villalpando even more closely by including a sacred and lush landscape, a spiny tree, and an abundance of birds, multiple buildings, and sheep at the edge of a stream. The posture and dress of the shepherd are almost identical in both paintings. In this version, a devotee (a Poor Clare) is shown half-length in the foreground.30 Aside from advancing the Marian devotion, these portraits of Aranzazu propagate the icon’s cultural associations and site-specific bonds. The point must be made, the link between Aranzazu’s devotion and Basque identity was largely consolidated not in Spain, but in 17th-century Mexico. The architectural and visual program commissioned by the Aranzazu confraternity and inaugurated in 1688 was prefigured by a textual project, no less monumental, organized by Juan Luzuriaga. A friar at the Franciscan monastery in Mexico City, Luzuriaga wrote and published the first history of the icon and its devotion in 1686, a work that included the Bouttats print. Four years later, the paradigmatic history would be reprinted in San Sebastian and Madrid.31 The fourth chapter is especially powerful as it narrates how the virgin’s appearance extinguished preexisting rivalries and conflicts within the communities of northern Spain— specifically the regions of Guipuzcoa, Vizcaya, Alava, and Navarra. A Basque group identity can be attributed, therefore, to the foundation of the Marian devotion. Luzuriaga’s history would serve as inspiration for many 18th-century sermons published by the confraternity in Mexico City. Villalpando’s portrait of Guipuzcoa’s most famous native son, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, similarly served to foster devotional ties and ethnic associations within the brotherhood. Prepared for the chapel’s meeting room (as described by an inventory), the portrait of this illustrious servant was an extension of local devotion to the Jesuit saint and his homeland.32 The Aranzazu confraternity in Mexico City proudly claimed to be the first to celebrate the feast of 29 30 31 32

Black Madonnas populated early modern Spain (e.g., Guadalupe in Extremadura), but Aranzazu was not one of them. On the representational value of black(-ish) icons in the early modern transatlantic Spanish world, see Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe, pp. 17–68. For a reproduction of this painting, see: http://bertan.gipuzkoakultura.net/bertan3/ argazkiak/g/57-2.jpg. Luzuriaga’s Paranympho Celeste. Gutiérrez Haces et al., Cristóbal de Villalpando, pp. 384–385.

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the “Conversion of Saint Ignatius Loyola”. Sermons regularly boasted that Mexico—¡antes que España o Roma!—enjoyed this privilege due to the initiatives of the Basque community living in New Spain.33 More than keeping customs and traditions from the old country alive, members of the confraternity were key architects in the very construction of Basque culture and devotion.34 Villalpando’s program for the Aranzazu Chapel could be the New World version of Tintoretto’s program for the Venetian confraternity of San Rocco—so esteemed the organization, and so prestigious the artist. Yet unlike the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the chapel annexed to the Franciscan monastery no longer exists—long gone are the majority of artistic treasures, the altars, the silver, and the processional paraphernalia.35 Fortunately, however, the Vizcaínas library is somewhat intact—full of contracts and payments issued to painters, sculptors, architects, and gilders—presenting vast possibilities for future art historical research. The much-in-demand Villalpando also received important commissions from the Archicofradía de Nuestra Señora del Rosario in Mexico City (Figure 8.11). Although the confraternity was only one of five brotherhoods located at the Dominican monastery, it was certainly the most important.36 Unlike the Aranzazu portrait, Villalpando specifically paints the Virgin of the Rosary as a devotional cult image—that is, he represents the Marian icon that once resided in the altar’s main niche. We know from a variety of sources that the sculpture was a dressed object and that it was always displayed in sumptuous attire. The chapel even had its own camarín where delicately embroidered dresses—encrusted with pearls, emeralds, and other precious stones—were kept. Viera, describing the icon and its setting in 1777, noted: [The] Rosary Chapel—beyond the richness held by the holy image which is carved and draped in diamonds and pearls, with crowns of gold and diamonds resting on the heads of the Virgin and Child—has a platform with two banisters made of thick silver. The altar itself has floral and

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For example, Pérez, Sermon del Esclarecido y Glorioso Patriarca San Ignacio de Loyola. See Mansilla, Zaballa Beascoechea, Álvarez Gila (eds.), Euskal Herria y el Nuevo Mundo; García Ayluardo, “El milagro de la Virgen de Aránzazu”. Antonio García Cubas provides one of the last descriptions of the chapel prior to its demolition. García Cubas, El libro de mis recuerdos, p. 73. The others were 1) Del Santo Entierro de Cristo Nuestro Redentor, 2) San Crispino y Crispiano, 3) La Expiración de Cristo y Nuestra Señora de Consolación (a black confraternity), and 4) Nuestra Señora del Rosario (for Mixtecs and Zapotecs). This last group is an unusual instance of a non-Nahua indigenous confraternity in Mexico City. See Sotomayor Sandoval, “La cofradía de Nuestra Señora del Santísimo Rosario de indios mixtecos y zapotecos”.

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figure 8.11 Cristóbal de Villalpando, Virgen del Rosario, c.1690, oil on canvas, 231 x 170 cm. Templo de San Felipe Neri, La Profesa, Mexico City Image by author (artwork in the public domain)

v­ egetal decorations made of solid silver and candelabra, lamps, and lighting of great magnitude.37 37

“ ... la capilla del Rosario a más de la riqueza que tiene la santa imagen que es de talla, vestida de diamantes y perlas, con corona de oro y diamantes la Señora y el niño, tiene dos baran-

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Villalpando’s painting, like Viera’s later description, captures the ocular impact of the icon-as-spectacle: the experience of seeing the highly valued ­miraculous object was about exotic materials (pearls, silks, and diamonds) and metallurgic opulence (silver and gold), but it was also about optics, light, shadow, and bling. More than conspicuous consumption, art historian Krista Thompson compellingly explains that bling is about “the visual effect of light being reflected on precious stones and metals”.38 Viera’s description and the painted portrait of the Marian sculpture—the image within the image—reinforces a religious experience in which vision and visibility are continually regulated: light illuminates, but the shimmer of refracted light on a myriad of shiny surfaces within a church might also cause a surplus of sparkle, or a glaring visual effect. As Thompson eloquently states, the “state between hyper-visibility and blinding invisibility” has its own representational value.39 We might imagine that value for the cult object in its setting, where the sense of sight was only one aspect of the sensorial experience, but one might also explore that value in pictorial and textual interpretations. In Villalpando’s portrait we see the icon: heavy damask curtains are dramatically (and supernaturally) drawn open by angels, offering an unbridled view of a perfectly lit, perfectly centered, perfectly accessible miraculous being. Just as the physical icon makes the Virgin Mary present, the artist provides the gift of ocular contact with the numinous. Accordingly, Villalpando’s mimetic conceits are also pious gestures: we are able to visually read the silver and silk threads on the icon’s embroidered dress, the pearl and diamond encrusted brooches capture and deflect light, the shiny surface of the silver altar and the sheen of the virgin’s crown of gold are the luster of thick oil paint applied with dexterity and devotion to a canvas surface. The artist confirms and inspires our own pious visions. The Villalpando painting, now housed in the pinacoteca of the former Jesuit church La Profesa, was originally kept in the confraternal chapel although its precise location remains unclear. It may have been publicly displayed in the chapel or privately located in the sculpture’s camarín. What is certain is that it was not the only Villalpando image of the Virgen del Rosario, nor the only painting he completed for the Rosary Chapel: a contract

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dales de plata muy gruesos, y en el altar mucha ramilletería de plata maciza, candeleros, lámparas, y candiles de mucha magnitud”. Viera, Breve y compendiosa narración, pp. 60–61. Citing the Oxford English Dictionary definition, Thompson proceeds to interrogate “bling” as a rhetorical and aesthetic trope in hip-hop culture and, most significantly, as a critical term for art history. Thompson, “The Sound of Light”, p. 483. Ibid.

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has the artist agreeing to paint the cupola, produce a painting for the altar, and touch-up the already existing monumental canvases in the chapel.40 The icon garnered the devotion of both its own confraternity and the city’s public at large. In the late 17th century, the sculpture was frequently paraded in full regalia from the Dominican church to the Metropolitan Cathedral. ­Antonio de Robles remembers the 1690 procession and writes: [The] Rosary Chapel was opened and Our Lady of the Rosary was brought out at 5 in the morning and taken to the cathedral; from here it returned with a great procession in the afternoon. The archbishop attended the festivities in full pontifical attire; the viceroy and city residents were also present: there were many fireworks, it followed the processional route, through the streets of Escalerillas, Reloj, and Encarnación.41 The dressed cult object—rather than static and quiet—actively navigated an urban stage in the bright light of day, surrounded by crowds, ritual paraphernalia, and pyrotechnics. The city streets were transformed into ceremonial circuits, with participants, spectator, and object all joining in the religious theatre and urban spectacle. The icon and its movements reaffirmed the bond between the virgin and the city while stressing the perceived devotion of the confraternity to both. Members of a brotherhood devoted to the Our Lady of the Rosary must have seen themselves as architects in the delineation of a capital that was as devout as it was proud. In Robles’ account, the devotional object is neither in its sanctuary niche (Viera’s description) nor is it a “true copy” (Villalpando’s painting); rather, the diarist describes an animate image that departs the sacred and holy in order to join the earthly and profane, sacralizing the urban environment in the process. The Virgin of the Rosary and its numerous reproductions and descriptions expressed the confraternity’s religious devotion, its associated treasure, and its historic tie to the Dominican Order. A Marian figure clasping a rosary, furthermore, captured the chief function of most confraternities—to aid the souls in purgatory. Aside from being a powerful intercessor in times of drought and pestilence, the virgin could, with enough prayer, use her rosary to literally pull souls out of that uncomfortable purgatorio. Thus, she was not simply 40 Maza, El pintor Cristóbal de Villalpando, p. 125. A second Villalpando portrait of the icon also has the object sumptuously attired and in her niche, but here she is venerated by a gathering of Dominican saints. For a reproduction and discussion, see Gutiérrez Haces et al., Cristóbal de Villalpando, pp. 248–249. 41 Robles, Diario de sucesos notables, vol. 2, p. 272.

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a mediator; rather, her rosary was a physical instrument—like the Carmelite scapular, the Franciscan cord, or the Augustinian belt—capable of securing one’s salvation. In a great number of colonial paintings this is precisely how the virgin and saints are shown: empathetic beings that provide much needed assistance to a bounty of spirits pleading for salvation. Juan Correa’s painting from a former Franciscan convent in Hidalgo, and Villalpando’s retablo de ánimas from the church of San Bernardino de Siena in Xochimilco, are just two poignant examples (Figure 8.12). The central image of the Xochimilco altar has Saint Dominic, the Virgin del Carmen, and Saint Francis assisting souls in a fiery purgatory while, above, we are witness to the Precious Blood of Christ. Concerned brothers take note: as the virgin and saints are nourished by Christ’s blood, we too are helped via divine intercession. The Correa painting similarly shows pitiful souls—including monarchs and priests—clamoring for the attention of Saint Francis and the Augustinian Saint Nicolas Tolentino. The focus on both saints is understandable: the Archicofradía del Cordón (Arch-Confraternity of the Girdle) was established at the Franciscan monastery in Mexico City and specifically dedicated to the souls in purgatory while Saint Nicolas of Tolentino, aside from being a popular Augustinian saint typically depicted in a state of self-mortification, was also patron saint of souls in purgatory. Both saints, then, were committed to salvation and this shared responsibility was rehearsed in painting and public performance. According to Domingo Chimalpahín, a confraternity dedicated to las Ánimas del Purgatorio in Cuepopan (one of the four calpullis of Tenochtitlan) took effigies of both saints on their inaugural procession in 1612: “They took Saint Nicholas of Tolentino in their procession, to show that he was the patron saint of those souls that he releases from purgatory ... they also took in their procession our beloved father Saint Francis to equally show that those who receive his cord and use it as their girdle on earth, when they die he will aid them by pulling them out of purgatory”.42 It is difficult to underestimate the importance and prevalence of confraternities specifically dedicated to the souls in purgatory. According to the Augustinian friar Juan de Grijalva (c.1624), every monastery had at least one such organization.43 Members of these brotherhoods likely identified with ánimas paintings on two levels: as the souls 42

43

“12 abril 1612: Llevaron en la procesión a San Nicolás de Tolentino, para significar que era patrono de las dichas animas, a las que saca del purgatorio ... también llevaron en la procesión a nuestro querido padre San Francisco, para significar igualmente que, a los que reciben su cordón y con él se ciñen en la tierra, cuando murieren él los auxiliará sacándoles del purgatorio”. Chimalpáhin, Diario, p. 283. “En todos los conventos hay cofradías de las Ánimas del Purgatorio, cantando una misa los lunes por todos los difuntos ... ” Grijalva, Crónica de la Orden de N.P.S. Agustín, p. 161.

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figure 8.12 Cristóbal de Villalpando, Ánimas del purgatorio, 1685, oil on canvas, 220 x 110 cm. Templo de San Bernardino de Siena, Xochimilco, Mexico City Image by author (artwork in the public domain)

receiving assistance and as the agents who provided aid. While the popular image expressed a Tridentine view of salvation and a localized understanding of it, confraternities proved instrumental to the production, proliferation, and power of such works of art.

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Perhaps the wealthiest and certainly the most prestigious confraternity in Mexico City was the brotherhood of the Santísimo Sacramento y Caridad (Holy Sacrament and Charity). Founded in 1538 on the grounds of the Franciscan monastery, Archbishop Juan de Zumárraga allowed the organization to move into New Spain’s first cathedral in 1544. At this site, the group had their own chapel (Capilla de la Cena) and were in charge of the Holy Sacrament and its display. The brotherhood also had the esteemed privilege of accompanying the monstrance every time it exited the cathedral, no small detail for it meant countless public demonstrations throughout the year.44 Established by conquerors, the corporation came to include their descendants, rich merchants, and elite families. The group founded the Colegio de Niñas (Colegio de Doncellas de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad), sponsored the annual Corpus Christi festival, and funded the parade known as La Batalla Naval (commemorating the Eucharist’s protection of a Spanish ship in 1625). When occupying the primitive cathedral, the brotherhood commissioned an altar dedicated to the Last Supper.45 This altar was transferred over to the new Metropolitan Cathedral by 1638.46 In preparation for the 1651 Corpus Christi celebrations, and because the old altar was ill-fitted for a now larger chapel, the confraternity commissioned prominent artist José Juárez to provide paintings for a lofty retablo. Descriptions of the entire iconographical program along with expense accounts, progress reports, and payments are archived in Colegio de Vizcaínas. From the original 1650 contract we know that the artist agreed to provide at least seven large compositions with scenes taken from the Old and New Testaments. The old altar screen would be replaced in its entirety, save for a single painting of the Last Supper to be restored and reinstalled by Juárez. The anonymous composition belonged to the confraternity in its infancy and it had stayed with the brotherhood ever since. The painting was quite possibly a product of Pedro de Gante’s native art school, San José de los Naturales, since the celebrated workshop was conveniently located on the grounds of the Franciscan monastery in the mid-16th century. One is reminded of the stunning feathered triptych from the same period, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, displaying the Last Supper at its center (below a crucifixion

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As Gutiérrez Haces notes: “la eucaristía aparecía constantemente en la vida cotidiana del novohispano, ya fuera por las calles cuando viajaba como viático o en fiestas y procesiones de la cofradía más poderosa del virreinato”. Gutiérrez Haces et al., Cristóbal de Villalpando, p. 252. Muriel, “Capilla de la Cena”, p. 7. Ibid., p. 17.

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scene) with flanking portraits of Peter and Paul.47 The Latin inscription located under the communion table proclaims: “For this is my body. For this is the chalice of my blood, of the new and eternal testament: the mystery of faith which will be shed for you and for many unto the remission of sins”.48 The confraternity painting, now lost, was so highly valued by the organization’s members that it was rescued and reused by one of Mexico’s leading Baroque artists. Aside from lending its name to the chapel, the visual narrative provided the organization with a portrait of their devotion, philanthropic aspirations, and corporate identity. The theme of the Last Supper is an expected one for a confraternity dedicated to the Holy Sacrament as this meeting of Jesus with his apostles provides the setting for Transubstantiation, the key moment of the liturgical celebration when bread and wine become divine body and blood. The association between the Last Supper and the Holy Sacrament is one that was regularly made in 16th-century Catholic art—for example, one rendition by Spanish artist Juan de Juanes (c.1560) explicitly shows Christ holding the Eucharistic wafer and asserting the doctrine to his surrounding apostles and to the viewer.49 As their official title suggests, the Mexican confraternity drew a direct connection between the Holy Sacrament and caritas as a basic Christian provision. More instructive than the Juanes painting, then, are several works by Tintoretto that place a multitude of servants, hungry children, and beggars at the scene of the Last Supper. The compositions were made for Holy Sacrament confraternities and, so, reflect the identity and philanthropic profile of these organizations, teaching pious members that the body of Christ—in the form of help for the destitute—is present in every act of charity.50 The visual centerpiece of the chapel commissioned by the most renowned confraternity in New Spain, located in the most important cathedral in the viceroyalty, emphasized the brotherhood’s devotion to the Holy Sacrament 47

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The triptych was in a Florentine collection and then acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 19th century. It can be viewed here: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/worksof-art/88.3.1/. See also Clifton, The Body of Christ, pp. 106–107. A similar work from the same period is at the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City and is reproduced in Cuadriello, Catálogo comentado del acervo del Museo Nacional de Arte, vol. 1, pp. 220–223. The words are taken from the Roman Missal, and I include my translation of the Latin. The official English translation (post-1969) is: “For this is the chalice of my blood, of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins”. The composition is at the Museo del Prado in Madrid and can be viewed here: https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-last-supper/2800c04da3ad-41eb-a75b-fe359d7d1dde. See Black, Italian Confraternities, p. 264; Hills, “Piety and Patronage”; and Worthen, “Tintoretto’s Paintings”.

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and the doctrine of Transubstantiation, but it was also a double portrait of the first Christian body and the original cohort of confrères who established the organization in Mexico City. Christ with his disciples was, in a sense, the ideal corporation in which the group is greater than the sum of its parts. The Christian holy body is community, and Paul makes the point when he advises the Corinthians, “Now you are the body of Christ, and members in particular” and “that there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care one for another” (1 Corinthians 12: 14–27). The holy body, then, is the Holy Sacrament, charity, and the Christian community linked by spiritual and social kinship. By insisting on a historic painting of the Last Supper, however, the late 17th-century Mexican confraternity purposefully extended the paradigm to include an alliance of men brought together by devotion and history—the conquest of a pre-Columbian capital and an investment in a viceregal city of God. For the late colonial brotherhood, the painting of the Last Supper was picture and relic; a spiritual ideal and a material remain. Bibliography

Primary Sources



Secondary Literature

Alamán, L., Obras de D. Lucas Alamán (Biblioteca de Autores Mexicanos, Volume 28), 4 vols., Mexico City, 1900. Cervantes Saavedra, M., Novelas ejemplares, Barcelona, 1998. Chimalpáhin, D., Diario, trans. R. Tena, Mexico City, 2001. García Cubas, A., El libro de mis recuerdos, vol. 1, Mexico City, 1904. Gemelli Careri, G.F., Viaje a la Nueva España, trans. F. Perujo, Mexico City, 2002. Grijalva, J., Crónica de la Orden de N.P.S. Agustín en las Provincias de la Nueva España, Mexico City, 1985. Loyola, I., Obras completas de San Ignacio de Loyola, Madrid, 1963. Luzuriaga, J., Paranympho Celeste, Historia de la mistica zarza, milagrosa imagen y prodigioso santuario de Aránzazu, Mexico City, 1686. Pérez, J.A., Sermon del Esclarecido y Glorioso Patriarca San Ignacio de Loyola, Mexico City, 1723. Robles, R., Diario de sucesos notables (Colección de Escritores Mexicanos, Volumes 30–32), 2 vols., Mexico City, 1972. Viera, J., Breve y compendiosa narración de la ciudad de México, Mexico City, 1992.

Bazarte Martínez, A., Las cofradías de españoles en la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, 1989.

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Black, C., and P. Gravestock (eds.), Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Aldershot, 2006. Black, C., Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge, 2003. Bossy, J., Christianity in the West: 1400–1700, Oxford, 1985. Brendt de León, B., “Memoria pictórica de la fiesta barroca en la Nueva España”, in J. Cuadriello (ed.), Los Pinceles de la Historia: De la Patria Criolla a la Nación Mexicana, 1750–1860, Mexico City, 2000, pp. 93–104. Castañeda García, R., “Santos negros, devotos de color: Las cofradías de San Benito de Palermo en Nueva España, siglos XVII-XVIII”, in Ó. Álvarez Gila, A. Angulo Morales, and J. Ramos Martínez (eds.), Devoción, paisanaje e identidad: Las cofradías y congregaciones de naturales en España y en América (siglos XVI-XIX), Bilbao, 2014, pp. 145–164. Clifton, J., The Body of Christ in the Art of Europe and New Spain, 1150–1800, Houston, 1997. Cuadriello, J., Catálogo comentado del acervo del Museo Nacional de Arte (Nueva España, Volume 1), 2 vols., Mexico City, 1999. Cuevas, M., Historia de la Iglesia en México, vol. 1, Mexico City, 1921. Curiel, G., “Retrato de la familia Fagoaga-Arozqueta” (added 28 March 2008): http://www.esteticas.unam.mx/revista_imagenes/imago/ima_curiel03.html. Escobedo Mansilla, R., A. de Zaballa Beascoechea, and Ó. Álvarez Gila (eds.), Euskal Herria y el Nuevo Mundo, Vitoria, 1996. Ezcaray, A., Oración panegirica en la magnifica y solemne fiesta que en demostración de su affecto devoción y lealtad celebró la siempre ilustre y noble hermandad de Aránzazu, Mexico City, 1663. Favrot Peterson, J., Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas, Austin, 2014. Fernández, M., Cristóbal de Medina Vargas y la arquitectura salomónica en la Nueva España durante el siglo XVII, Mexico City, 2002. García Ayluardo, C., “El milagro de la Virgen de Aránzazu: Los vascos como grupo de poder en la Ciudad de México”, in C. García Ayluardo and M. Ramos Medina (eds.), Manifestaciones religiosas en el mundo colonial americano, Mexico City, 1997, pp. 331–348. Germeten, N. von, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans, Gainesville, 2006. Germeten, N. von, “Black Brotherhoods in Mexico City: Adapting Confraternities to Fit a Transforming Community”, in J. Cañizares Esguerra, J. Sidbury, and M. Childs (eds.), The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, Philadelphia, 2013, pp. 248–268. Guerra, F., “La Caridad Heroica de Hernán Cortés”, Quinto Centenario 9 (1985), pp. 37–50.

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Visualizing Corporate Piety

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Gutiérrez Haces, J., P. Ángeles, C. Bargellini, and R. Ruiz Gomar, Cristóbal de Villalpando, Mexico City, 1997. Hills, P., “Piety and Patronage in Cinquecento Venice”, Art History 6:1 (1983), pp. 30–43. Junquera y Mato, J.J., “El Hospital de Jesús de México y Claudio de Arciniega”, Quinto Centenario 9 (1985), pp. 147–155. Kim, D.Y., “Uneasy Reflections: Images of Venice and Tenochtitlan in Benedetto Bordone’s Isolario”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 49/50 (2006), pp. 80–91. La Reina de las Américas: Works of Art from the Mueum of the Basilica de Guadalupe, Chicago, 1996. Luque Alcaide, E., La Cofradía de Aránzazu de Mexico 1681–1799, Pamplona, 1995. Maza, F., El pintor Cristóbal de Villalpando, Mexico City, 1964. Muriel, J., “La Capilla de la Cena en la Catedral de México”, Estudios de Historia Novohispana 3:3 (1970), pp. 1–22. Muriel, J., (ed.), Los vascos en México y su Colegio de las Vizcaínas, Mexico City, 1987. Muriel, J., Hospitales de la Nueva España (Publicaciones del Instituto de Historia, Volume 35), 2 vols., Mexico City, 1990. Muriel, J., La sociedad novohispana y sus colegios de niñas, Mexico City, 1995. Nora, P., “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, Representations 26 (1989), pp. 7–24. Obregón, G., El Real Colegio de San Ignacio de México, Mexico City, 1949. Presciutti, D., Space, Place, and Motion: Locating Confraternities in the Late Medieval and Early Modern City, Leiden, 2017. Pullan, B., Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State to 1670, Cambridge, 1971. Roselló Soberón, E., “Las fiestas religiosas de la cofradía de San Benito de Palermo: herencia medieval en la sociedad barroca novohispana del siglo XVII”, in C. Company, A. González, and L. von der Walde (eds.), Textos Medievales: Recursos, Pensamiento e Influencia, Mexico City, 2005, pp. 379–394. Sanchiz, J., “La Familia Fagoaga. Apuntes Genealógicos”, Estudios de Historia Novohispana 23 (2000), pp. 129–167. Sotomayor Sandoval, S.A., “La cofradía de Nuestra Señora del Santísimo Rosario de indios mixtecos y zapotecos extravagantes del imperial convento del señor Santo Domingo de la ciudad de México 1594–1753”, Itinerantes: Revista de Historia y Religión 3 (2013), pp. 11–25. Taylor, W., Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma, Albuquerque, 2010. Tellechea Idígoras, J.I., “La Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de Aránzazu en la Ciudad de México (1681–1794)”, in O. Álvarez (ed.), Las huellas de Aránzazu en América. 1er Congreso Internacional Aránzazu y los Franciscanos Vascos en América, San Sebastián, 2004, pp. 43–54.

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Terpstra, N., A. Prosperi, and S. Pastore (eds.), Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, Turnhout, 2012. Terpstra, N. (ed.), The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy, Cambridge, 2000. Thompson, K., “The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop”, The Art Bulletin 91:4 (2009), p. 483. Trexler, R., Public Life in Renaissance Florence, Ithaca, 1980. Verdi Webster, S., “Native Brotherhoods and Visual Culture in Colonial Quito (Ecuador): The Confraternity of the Rosary”, in N. Terpstra, A. Prosperi, and S. Pastore (eds.), Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, Turnhout, 2012, pp. 277–299. Verdi Webster, S., “Ethnicity, Gender, and Visual Culture in the Confraternity of the Rosary in Colonial Quito”, in S. Pastore, A. Prosperi, and N. Terpstra (eds.), Brotherhood and Boundaries. Fraternità e barriere, Pisa, 2011, pp. 387–398, 634–639. Verdi Webster, S., “The Confraternity of the Most Holy Sacrament and the Church of El Sagrario, Quito”, Confraternitas 12:1 (2001), p. 3016. Verdi Webster, S., “Research on Confraternities in the Colonial Americas”, Confraternitas 9:1 (1998), pp. 13–24. Verdi Webster, S., “Art, Ritual, and Confraternities in Sixteenth-Century New Spain: Penitential Imagery at the Monastery of San Miguel, Huejotzingo”, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 20 (1997), pp. 5–43. Verdi Webster, S., “The Descent from the Cross in Sixteenth-Century New Spain”, The Early Drama, Art, and Music Review 19:2 (1997), pp. 69–85. Weissman, R., Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence, New York, 1982. Wisch, B. and D. Cole (eds.), Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy: Ritual, Spectacle, Image, Cambridge, 2000. Worthen, T., “Tintoretto’s Paintings for the Banco del Sacramento in S. Margherita”, The Art Bulletin 78:4 (1996), pp. 707–732. Zaballa Beascoechea, A., “Aránzazu y San Ignacio: iconos de los vascos en Nueva España”, in O. Álvarez Gila (ed.), Organización, identidad e imagen de las colectividades vascas de la emigración, siglos XVI-XXI, Bilbao, 2010, pp. 117–142.

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PART 3 Institutions

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CHAPTER 9

Permanence and Change in Mexico City’s Viceregal Court, 1535–1821 Iván Escamilla González The presence of the Spanish viceroys and their court in Mexico City between the mid-16th century and the early 19th century has always been a dominant feature of the historical perception of New Spain.1 In Mexico, as in Peru, the adjective “viceregal” has been widely used to refer to everything related to Spanish rule in this region of the New World. At the same time, the use of “viceregal” in counterpoint to the term “colonial” has been the subject of frequent historiographic controversies and debate over the nature and character of this system of governance.2 Paradoxically, scholars have yet to fully address the character and function of viceroys and the institution of the viceregal court in the Indies. This lack of attention can be partially explained by the fact that, until the mid-20th century, with only a few exceptions,3 study of viceroys of New Spain was limited to a few chronological summaries, such as those by Manuel Rivera Cambas or to anecdotic accounts by literati turned historians, such as Artemio de Valle-Arizpe or Manuel Romero de Terreros.4 The first analytical study of viceroys as an institution was the 1955 ground breaking work by José Ignacio Rubio Mañé, Introducción al estudio de los virreyes de la Nueva España.5 It was followed, among other works, by Lewis Hanke’s Los virreyes de Nueva España bajo la casa de Austria, Ernesto de la Torre Villar’s Instrucciones y memorias de los virreyes novohispanos, and José Antonio Calderón Quijano’s 1 Cañeque, The King’s Living Image, pp. 1–16. 2 The controversies and debates will not be addressed here. However, for a recent example of these, see the online debate entitled “Para seguir con el debate en torno al colonialismo”, organized in 2005 by the journal Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos. In particular, see the contributions by Jean-Michel Sallmann and Annick Lempérière. 3 For example, Aiton, Antonio de Mendoza. 4 Rivera Cambas, Los gobernantes de México; Romero de Terreros, Bocetos de la vida social en la Nueva España; and Valle-Arizpe, Virreyes y virreinas de la Nueva España. In contrast, one of the first studies devoted to the history of the old palace of the viceroys is Valle-Arizpe’s El Palacio Nacional de México. 5 Rubio Mañé originally published his work under the title Introducción al estudio de los virreyes de la Nueva España. Since then, it has been reprinted as El virreinato. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004335578_011 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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Los virreyes de Nueva España en el reinado de Carlos III and Los virreyes de Nueva España en el reinado de Carlos IV.6 However, the growing body of scholarship on early modern European courts, along with approaches pertaining to cultural history, has allowed for a reassessment of viceregal courts and their political, cultural, and artistic links with colonial society during the 16th and 17th centuries, and for comparisons with other viceregal courts under Spanish Hapsburg rule.7 Albeit to a far lesser extent than their predecessors, 18th-century viceroys and their courts have also come under scrutiny in recent years.8 Continuing this historiographic trend, the present article highlights the importance of viceroys and their courts in defining the role of Mexico City as a political capital, economic hub, and cultural center. Additionally, it also examines the changing relationship between the court and Mexico City until the decline of the viceregal system under Bourbon Reform. 1

Inventing Court

In the 1698 treatise on Mexico City, “Tratado de la ciudad de México”, included in his chronicle of the Franciscan province of Mexico, the criollo chronicler Fray Agustín de Vetancurt asserts that the grandeur of Mexico City derived from its conquest and re-founding by Hernán Cortés “en el mismo sitio que fue cabeza en su gentilidad del Imperio Mexicano, porque la que fue maestra de los gentilicios errores, fuese cabeza de las católicas verdades [ … ]”.9 Hence, because of its pre-Hispanic past, the new city remained the cabeza y corte (“capital and court”) of New Spain, and was distinguished by “the attendance of the viceroy in full majesty, the authority of the archbishop, the royal chancery, and the illustrious tribunals … ”.10 Indeed, while Mexico City was 6 Hanke, Los virreyes de Nueva España bajo la casa de Austria; De la Torre, Instrucciones y memorias de los virreyes novohispanos; Calderón Quijano, Los virreyes de Nueva España en el reinado de Carlos III and Los virreyes de Nueva España en el reinado de Carlos IV. 7 Two examples of this historiographic trend in Mexico are: Escamilla González, “La corte de los virreyes” and Pastor Téllez, Mujeres y poder. In Spain: Montes González, “La ‘jaula’ de las virreinas” and Rivero Rodríguez, La edad de oro de los virreyes, among other sources cited in this article. Due to the lack of space and the need for a different approach, we will not touch on the topic of the archbishop-viceroys and their courts, a theme virtually absent in scholarly literature, save for Latasa Vasallo’s “La casa del obispo-virrey Palafox”. 8 Rosenmüller, “Friends, Followers, Countrymen”. 9 Agustín de Vetancurt, “Tratado de la ciudad de México y las grandezas que la ilustran después que la fundaron españoles”, in La ciudad de México en el siglo XVIII (1690–1780), pp. 37–129. 10 Ibid., pp. 49, 52.

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home to the Audiencia Real since 1527, it was the 1535 appointment of Antonio de Mendoza, a member of a powerful Castilian family, as the first viceroy of New Spain that first conferred upon the capital a courtly character, since it was the seat or residence of the monarch or his representative. From that moment onward, Mexico City’s inhabitants grew accustomed to the spectacle of a new viceroy arriving every four or five years, accompanied by a large retinue that included his secretary, “senior servants” (criados mayores), gentlemen-in-waiting, chaplain, and several servants from his household in Spain. This entourage also included his wife and her ladies-in-waiting, if married, and opportunists searching for fame and fortune in New Spain. Analogous to the monarch whom the viceroy represented and in line with the legal meaning of the word, this large entourage was commonly referred to as the “court” of the viceroy. However, the use of the word “court” to refer to the city and to the viceroy’s presence had other implications. Initially, it implied that the territory of New Spain was a “kingdom” incorporated into the Crown of Castile at the time of its conquest, a fact that would be a decisive factor in the relationship between the Spanish king and his distant New Spanish subjects during the next two centuries. Contrary to the historiography, when New Spain became part of the Spanish king’s realm, the problem of how to govern the multiple states that comprised the “Spanish monarchy” from a distance was far from resolved. In some cases, the issue was remedied by appointing a representative that stood in place for the absent monarch; hence, the title “viceroy” (virrey or visorrey in Spanish) bestowed on this person derived from the compound Latin word, “vicerex”. However, this alter ego of the monarch did not always occupy the same position vis-à-vis local society. The royal houses that had existed in the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily since the Middle Ages continued to function after their incorporation into the composite monarchy (in this case, via the Crown of Aragón). Importantly, lineages of local nobility continued to occupy traditional roles, or positions at court, and maintained the practice of bequeathing these positions to their descendants. Located at the apex of the old courtly structure, the viceroys of the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily presided over public ceremonies that gave them a kingly quality, an absolute necessity for principalities that had traditionally demanded the presence of the monarch among his subjects. The court thus served as a natural framework for addressing and negotiating the differing interests of the king and nobles.11 In the New World, where the Indian lords of Mexico-Tenochtitlan and their courts were eliminated at the time of the conquest, the situation was quite 11

Rivero Rodríguez, La edad de oro de los virreyes, pp. 133–173.

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different. New Spain’s viceroys were not sent to preside over a royal court, but rather to oversee the administrative, judicial, and fiscal machinery created by the Crown to exact obedience from unruly conquistadors and their heirs, and to administer the vast territories of the Indies. For these reasons, their appointments were endowed with broad powers that included titles of governor, captain general, and president of the Mexican Audiencia, which served as an extension of the Council of the Indies. At the same time, and although subject to royal ratification of his actions, the viceroy exercised the king’s rights and duties in his name, including the obligation of protector of the Church, the power to appoint individuals to administrative, military, and government positions, to authorize private parties to collect taxes, and to grant pensions drawn from the Royal Treasury. Yet, a kingdom without a royal house but governed by the king’s representative, with the support of the Council of the Indies and surrounded by a personal entourage, was indeed a peculiar reality. The chairman of the Council of the Indies duly warned Viceroy Marquis of Montesclaros before sailing for New Spain in 1603: In that land, there is no king other than the viceroy; his servants and the royal officials are like the counts and marquises, the oidores and justices are like the Grandees, and so forth. This comparison should not be seen as an exaggeration, for as esteem and treatment are concerned, it is entirely true.12 These powers gave viceroys a broad and wide administrative reach, especially at the end of the 16th century, when the old elite, comprising conquistadors and encomenderos (Spaniards provided with Indian labor grants), began to decline and was replaced by a new privileged class of businessmen, landowners, and letrados, many of whom were criollos. Both the nouveau riche in search of honors and titles to boost their social status, and those seeking bureaucratic or ecclesiastical positions, curried favor with the viceroys, flattering and showering them with gifts. In turn, viceroys, either personally or via servants or protégés (figures akin to royal favorites or validos who had politically controlled the monarchy since the early 17th century),13 used their power to influence legal matters and grant jobs or rewards, which enabled them to form groups 12 13

“Instrucción dada al marqués de Montesclaros por Pablo de la Laguna, presidente del Consejo de Indias”, in Hanke, Los virreyes de Nueva España bajo la casa de Austria, vol. II, p. 270. In “Del criado al valido”, Büschges examines the cases of several favorites of the viceroys, including the Marquises of Guadalcázar, Gelves, and Cerralvo.

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of dependents, forge political alliances, and frequently enrich themselves via illicit business in ­collusion with local magnates.14 Reciprocity was central to all relationships in viceregal courts, as witnessed by the peculiar case of the viceroys’ confessors, who were usually chosen from among the members of the local religious orders and who obtained privileges and protection for their respective congregations in exchange for the spiritual guidance they provided.15 In this way, although they differed in origin and character from the courts of the Old World, viceregal courts in Mexico City were an important forum for negotiating privileges and obedience between the Crown and colonial elites. This may help explain why New Spain remained loyal to the empire during the 17th century, in marked contrast with European territories, such as Catalonia and Portugal, which sought independence from the Spanish monarchy. However, the eventual shattering of the hopes harbored by New Spanish elites led to periods of significant political turmoil in Mexico and its capital, including the 1624 overthrow of Viceroy Marquis of Gelves and the decade of political unrest following the 1642 removal from office of Viceroy Marquis of Villena by the royal visitador Juan de Palafox y Mendoza. 2

The Court and Its Social and Urban Setting

Without detracting from its importance as the nucleus and stage of political power, the lasting influence of the viceregal court in colonial life lies in its character as an American center of Spanish courtly life since the late 16th century. The Spanish model of courtly life flourished during this time because of a double phenomenon: a permanent royal residence and the consolidation of royal favorites into an informal institution of the monarchy. After Philip II established his permanent residence in Madrid in 1561 and had also transferred all royal councils of government, the Castilian court evolved into the epicenter of a worldwide empire. Indebted to royal patronage, the Spanish court grew in sophistication and refinement, making it the most admired and imitated throughout Europe until 1660. Moreover, a set of rituals or ceremonies imported from Flanders resulted in a strictly hierarchical palace and rendered the sovereign a sacred figure to whom only a select group of nobles, holding 14 15

Rosenmüller offers substantive detail on how the viceregal court was a foci for trading favors and privileges based on royal grace and favor. See Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues, pp. 29–78. In “Las alianzas sagradas”, Rubial García provides a full overview of the viceregal confessional in the 17th century.

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important court positions (oficios mayores) had access. Arising from this exclusive environment, the valido was not just a personal confidant of the king, but also an enforcer of his policies and a universal dispenser of royal favors. As a result, aristocrats gravitated towards court, seeking to find favor in the eyes of the king and his valido in hopes of ascending to the most important palace positions and eventually gaining appointment to a prestigious and lucrative royal post, such as a member of a royal council or even viceroy to one of the kingdoms in Europe or the Indies. Most of the New Spanish viceroys appointed between the late 16th century and the start of the 18th century were educated and well connected in courtly circles, in the valido’s good graces, and even related to each other, as was the case with the Marquises of Cadereita and the Dukes of Alburquerque, whose families provided New Spain with three viceroys between 1635 and 1702. For this reason and although it was neither a royal house nor a permanent establishment, changing with each new viceroy, the court in New Spain, not unlike the great noble houses in Spain, reproduced the protocols and features of the court in Madrid.16 This similitude began with a series of ceremonial honors conferred upon the viceroy similar to those afforded a king, including an honor guard, the right to have a carriage drawn by a team of six mules, and the privilege of being received under a canopy when entering a church, which were all meticulously outlined in the Laws of the Indies. These prerogatives were important not only to ensure that a viceroy’s American subjects respected his authority, but also to highlight his role as the king’s representative in rituals of great political significance that would renew mutual vows of loyalty between the monarch and his subjects.17 Perhaps, none was more important than an incoming viceroy’s public and ceremonious entrance into Mexico City on horseback and under triumphal arches of ephemeral architecture in the manner of European royal entries. The viceroy’s court also replicated the twin structure of the palace in Madrid, where the king and queen each had their own retinues and rituals. Strictly speaking, only the viceroys represented the king and although their wives had no formal title, the latter were far from being mere appendages of their spouses. Like their husbands, many belonged to influential families and 16 17

Escamilla González addresses the transference of courtly structures and offices, particularly those of Madrid, to Mexico by viceroys. See “La corte de los virreyes”, pp. 374–383. Consult Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City, for an overview of the socio-political aspects of viceregal entry processions, royal oaths of allegiance, and other political ceremonies. For comprehension of European and Novohispanic rituals related to viceregal entry in the mid-18th century, see Berndt León Mariscal’s “Discursos de poder”.

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held important positions at court. As a result, viceregal couples embodied mutually beneficial alliances between powerful aristocratic families. Indeed, even in the arena of protocol, they enjoyed the same public esteem afforded their husbands, as exemplified by the famous jaula or closed gallery next to the cathedral presbytery, from which they took part in liturgy not unlike in European royal chapels.18 This privileged position allowed viceroys’ wives to build their own groups of dependents, support charitable foundations, and become patrons of the arts, as witnessed by the support that several provided to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of 17th-century New Spain’s greatest literary figures.19 Another similarity between the viceregal court and its metropolitan prototype was the important part it played in the daily life of the city. Although it was an informal institution situated in the midst of legally constituted entities such as the city council, the cathedral chapter, the university, or the republic of Indians, all of which had their own headquarters, the court occupied a privileged location within the city.20 Beginning in 1567, viceroys lived in the Royal Palace of Mexico, which was originally constructed by Hernán Cortés on a vast plot of land east of the city’s main square. Until it was destroyed during a plebian uprising in 1692, the building’s appearance and spatial organization reflected the viceroy’s twin roles as the king’s representative and a potentate in his own right. On its southern side, the Royal Palace housed the Audiencia, other royal courts, and treasury offices. The northern half contained the residence of the viceroy and his retinue (up to a hundred people in the early 18th century), the private apartments of the viceroy and his wife, lodging for courtiers and servants, reception halls for public and theatrical events and festivities, a chapel, and gardens.21 Although court members lived in the palace, they moved freely throughout the city to fulfill the duties of representing the king, to participate in religious services and ceremonies, or to unabashedly pursue worldly pleasures. The 18 19

20 21

Consult Montes González’ “La ‘jaula’ de las virreinas” for a summary of the history of this enclosed gallery in the 17th century and its political and liturgical significance. The historiography on the wives of viceroy has witnessed a remarkable expansion in recent years. For example, see “¿Sólo una virreina consorte?” and “Doña Mariana Riederer de Paar” by Arenas Frutos, “Las virreinas novohispanas” by Rubial, and Mujeres y poder by Pastor Téllez. On the relationship between the viceroys and the corporations in Mexico City, see Lempérière, Entre Dios y el rey, pp. 72–116. Castro Morales’ “Evolución arquitectónica” provides ample documentary, visual, and archeological evidence of the palace’s architectural history, along with plans that reconstruct its internal layout. See Schreffler, The Art of Allegiance, for understanding of the palace’s decoration in the 16th and 17th centuries.

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viceroy, vicereine, and their respective retinues could often be seen visiting the cathedral or the shrines of Guadalupe, Remedios, or La Piedad, witnessing academic ceremonies at the Royal University, enjoying banquets in the cloisters of convents or monasteries, strolling the paths of the Alameda, or Iztacalco, or attending soirées or celebrations (saraos) in their honor in the country houses of criollo aristocrats in the nearby townships of San Ángel, Tacubaya, or San Agustín de las Cuevas. These pastimes seemed distasteful and provincial to sophisticated courtiers such as the Vicereine María Luisa Manrique de Lara, the Countess of Paredes, who, in 1682, wrote to her cousin in Spain, the Duchess of Aveiro: I assure you that the only [new things] that reach this land are from there [Spain], that it’s as dull as ditchwater, and that one suffers from ­loneliness.22 However, for the capital’s elites, the entertaining of viceroys was not just a means of alleviating nostalgia for Madrid. These occasions were perfect opportunities to engage the viceroy and vicereine in an atmosphere that was more conducive to winning their favor and reaching political and business agreements. The 17th-century viceregal court was an environment that favored intensive cultural exchange between the palatial world and colonial society. By explicit wish of the Crown, the viceroys’ house functioned as a school of etiquette to which young criollo ladies and gentlemen were admitted in order to learn the art of serving viceregal elites and to become proficient in the courtly codes of communication and courtship through gestures and bodily language, admirably all condensed in dance. In addition to these, they learned essential aristocratic values such as honor and purity of lineage, and the use of violence to defend them. The viceregal court was a place where Novohispanic elites came in contact with the latest European trends in dress, music, and theater. In turn, when court elites returned to Spain, they took with them a good number of indigenous cultural practices and traits, such as the consumption of chocolate or the devotion of the Virgin of Guadalupe. While in New Spain, viceroys acquired and adorned their homes with both luxury items and everyday objects—genre paintings, city views, featherworks, enconchados (mother-of-pearl paintings), ecclesiastical and domestic silverware, and even artworks from Asia, such as biombos (Japanese folding screens) and ivory carvings brought to Mexico by 22

From Vicereine Countess of Paredes to the Duchess of Aveiro, Mexico, 30 December 1682, in Cartas de Lysi, p. 177.

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the Manila galleons—all of which would return to Spain with their owners.23 Satisfying a viceregal lifestyle required the services of a large workforce, including household servants, such as Indian girls to grind corn for tortillas, slaves, stable hands, and coachmen, among others, and those specialized in the arts, such as painters, cabinet makers, architects, and entertainers—poets, musicians, and actors—who provided comfort and entertainment to the court. 3

New Viceroys for a New Dynasty

The death of Charles II of Spain in 1700, the last of the Hapsburg monarchs, and the lack of an heir triggered the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) between factions that supported the immediate ascension to the throne by the French Bourbon prince, Philip V, and those who championed his rival, the Archduke Charles of Austria. Ending with the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 and the recognition of Philip V as the monarch of Spain, the War of the Spanish Succession sparked an unprecedented crisis that strengthened the hand of governmental reformists in Spain and the Indies. As a result of the Utrecht accord, Spain lost its European kingdoms external to the Iberian Peninsula, and the old viceregal system from that moment on was almost entirely confined to the New World, which radically changed the way viceroys were appointed and the character of the households they maintained in Mexico City. In 1702, coinciding with start of the war, the first viceroy appointed by Philip V, Francisco Fernández de la Cueva, Duke of Alburquerque, arrived in Mexico City. Alburquerque’s appointment was a gesture by the Bourbon king aimed at winning over powerful Spanish aristocratic families, but it was a compromise that clashed with the reformist expectations raised by the new dynasty. According to critics, Spain could only become a major power again if it managed to make its American empire a true springboard of economic and military might, just as Britain and France had achieved prosperity due to their navies and trade with their colonies in the West Indies and North America. Many concurred that a key obstacle to achieving this goal were the viceroys and their forms of governance, whom they accused of being self-serving and corrupt, to the detriment of faithfully serving the king and enforcing the rule of law. Such accusations where confirmed when it was discovered that Viceroy Alburquerque, while endeavoring to keep New Spain loyal to Philip V, had concealed smuggling at the port of Veracruz and embezzled funds from the 23

For understanding of the role of viceregal courts in the collecting and patronage of the arts, consult Montes, Mecenazgo virreinal y patrocinio artístico.

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royal treasury. As a result of Alburquerque’s actions, we can better understand French spy Jean de Monségur’s 1708 recommendation for selecting viceroys: [A]mong the generals who have served [the king] well in the war, since, given that they are honorable, loyal to their lord and lovers of true glory, it is likely that they will not allow anything to tarnish their good reputation, and satisfied with the generous incomes to which they are legally entitled, will avoid all embezzlement and illegal dealings, deeming them to be cowardly, despicable and contrary to justice and fairness.24 Between 1710 and 1755, and in the light of these experiences and the distancing of the old aristocracy, who supported the Archduke Charles of Austria in the War of Succession, from the court at Madrid, a change occurred in how individuals were designated viceroys of New Spain.25 Members of powerful noble families that had monopolized the position were gradually displaced by individuals born of low provincial nobility. For example, in 1722, a criollo viceroy was named, the Peruvian Juan Vázquez de Acuña, Marquis de Casafuerte; in 1746 the king appointed brigadier Juan Francisco de Güemes y Horcasitas, who received the title of first Count of Revillagigedo only after beginning his tenure as viceroy. From this moment onward, the common denominator for being selected a viceroy was distinguished service in the name of the Crown. Several of the new viceroys were career military men, referred to as “soldier viceroys”, who had served in wars during the reign of Philip V. Others were prominent politicians, such as the Marquis of Valero, who, after a long career, became President of the Council of the Indies, or the Count of Fuenclara, a diplomat of good reputation in several European courts.26 Another important change was the political role played by the viceroys within the new absolutist monarchy that replaced the old system of Hapsburg government councils with a series of government ministries. Under the new system, the viceroy continued to be the king’s representative, but he no longer would have the responsibility of negotiating the loyalty of American 24 Monségur, Las nuevas memorias, p. 94. 25 In 1955, Rubio Mañé pointed out this key change in the social dynamics for selecting a viceroy in the 18th century. See El virreinato, vol. I, pp. 269–270. Consult Luzzi, “Entre la prudencia del rey”, on how loyalty was a factor in the crisis and renewal of the court in Madrid during the War of Succession. 26 For a recent study of Philip V’s “soldier viceroys”, see Eissa-Barroso, “The Honor of the Spanish Nation”. Refer to Escamilla González’ “Nueva España ante la diplomacia de la era de Utrecht”, for an analysis of the Marquis of Valero, a career politician who became viceroy of New Spain.

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subjects in exchange for favors and privileges. Increasingly, the viceroy was charged with implementing a series of political, fiscal, and military reforms aimed at unequivocally redefining the relationship between the Crown and its kingdoms in the Indies. Within this new structure, the viceroys regularly formed part of the political clientele of the Secretary for the Indies and the Navy, responsable, as of 1717, for designing and executing the monarch’s American policies. With curtailing the ascension of the aristocracy to the post of viceroy, the stream of favors that traditionally flowed from the royal palace was reduced significantly, which in turn changed the relationship between viceroys and colonial society. Viceregal examples of munificent and public displays of patronage, quite frequent in the previous century, became the exception to the rule, with one such instance being the Marquis of Valero’s resounding support for the 1724 founding of the Corpus Christi convent for Capuchin Indian nuns. Furthermore, the old political-patronage system was weakened by the Crown establishing new mechanisms for overseeing and controlling viceregal power from a distance. While favoritism did not completely disappear, new viceroys had to comply with new restrictions. In but one example, viceroys were limited to assigning no more than 12 positions to their retainers. The beneficiaries of such favors were almost always a viceroy’s domestic staff, countrymen or relatives, or individuals recommended by the Secretary of the Indies.27 In theory, viceroys had to eschew old local practices of conviviality and compromise with criollo elites. In practice, they had to find new ways to maintain cordial relationships with criollo elites in order to reach political consensus and to overcome their subtle but effective tactics of resistance. On this topic, upon handing control of New Spain to his successor in 1716, the Duke of Linares wrote: [ … ] their purpose is to live in absolute freedoms, and believing that they have fulfilled their obligations as subjects merely by saying that they acknowledge the king as their sovereign [ … ] what I must say to Your Excellency is to lavish attention on all, expect nothing [in return], and trust very few, because here they neither fear nor obey authority, mock those who entreat them, and never fulfill any of their promises.28 27 28

See, for example, Rosenmüller, “Friends, Followers, Countrymen”, on the First Count of Revillagigedo. “Relación dada por el Excmo. Señor Duque de Linares Fernando de Alencastre Noroña y Silva a D. Baltasar de Zúñiga y Guzmán”, 1716, in Torre Villar, Instrucciones y memorias de los virreyes novohispanos, vol. II, p. 776.

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From the Old Court to a New One

The new viceroys were very different from their predecessors, and not only because of origins and careers. Many of them were not married or were widowed, although some, like the Duke of la Conquista, in 1740, were accompanied by children, nephews, or nieces. After the Duke of Alburquerque and his wife departed New Spain in 1712, almost 35 years passed without a vicereine, resulting in a sharp decline in courtly social life, which had always revolved around a viceroy’s wife. Without a consort, the viceroys’ retinues gradually became smaller in the first half of the 18th century. For example, the frugal and unmarried Marquis de Casafuerte arrived in Mexico with a retinue of only 20, and the Count of Fuenclara, upon his arrival in 1742, had the same number of retainers.29 In line with these changes, it was not long before portions of the reconstructed Royal Palace, where viceroys spent their daily and increasingly private life, were also modified. With the arrival of the Duke of Linares, the palace’s living quarters were relocated to the southern portion of the new building, with the Audiencia Real and other tribunals occupying these former court spaces, while others remained vacant. It became customary for the viceroys’ servants, without supervision from their patrons, to lease and sublease the empty rooms on the first and mezzanine floors as taverns, warehouses, or inexpensive lodgings, and even housing a bowling alley, a wine shop, and a gambling establishment. According to the chronicler Francisco Sedano, in a few years the palace became “a respectable tenement building”.30 The reappearance of the vicereines, with the 1746 arrival of Antonia Ceferina Padilla Aguayo, wife of the first Count of Revillagigedo, followed by that of Luisa María del Rosario de Ahumada, spouse of the Marquis de las Amarillas, gave rise to lively social activity that was, in part, reminiscent of the courtly splendors of the 17th century, including balls, theatrical performances, and invitations from the viceroys’ most important subjects to visit their country houses. However, key 18th-century sources suggest that the old palace etiquette had been abandoned in favor of a more relaxed and less formal coexistence between the viceregal family and New Spanish elites. Undoubtedly, 29

30

Juan Vázquez de Acuña, Marquis of Casafuerte, “Nota de la familia que llevo a Nueva España con motivo de estar para embarcarme y pasar a servir el virreinato de México”, Cádiz, 16 June 1722, Archivo General de las Indias (hereafter AGI), Casa de la Contratación, 5472, N. 2, R. 5; Sarrablo Aguareles, El conde de Fuenclara, vol. II, pp. 24–25, 29. Sedano, Noticias de México, vol. III, pp. 32–33. For a full account of the modifications the palace underwent in the first half of the 18th century, see Castro Morales, “Evolución arquitectónica”, pp. 87–100.

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the occupation of the Royal Palace by plebeian tenants served as an excuse for holding social events in other, more intimate, surroundings where, in the words of a diarist of the time, the viceroy and his family could “hold court” with a smaller, more select, circle of friends. As in European courts of the day, the viceroys’ leisure activities were becoming increasingly bourgeois and private.31 However, a more lax environment did not mean that the viceroy ceased to be treated with the reverence that befitted a representative of the monarch. While strict etiquette would appear to have become increasingly confined to the political dealings between the viceroy and Mexico City’s most important corporations, it was central to frequently held important public events. This is evidenced by the detailed protocol manuals of the time,32 the persistent controversies over ceremonial procedures between secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and even in painting, such as the 1760 Visit of a Viceroy to the Cathedral of Mexico City in the collection of Mexico’s National Museum of History, which depicts the procession of the viceroy and other authorities through Mexico City’s main square and taking part in the customary service held in the cathedral to give thanks for the news that the royal family was in good health.33 Thus, the routine, ongoing presence of a viceroy who embodied the king of Spain’s power continued to be one of the fundamental certainties of the colonial political system, even after 1765 when New Spain was shaken by a new, more radical series of reforms triggered by the visita general carried out by José de Gálvez, minister to Charles III. 5

Enlightened Leaders

The new function of the viceroy in Spanish imperial politics and the replacement of the old viceregal court by new forms of sociability were not the only signs that the relationship between colonial society and its rulers had changed. The reformist character of the different ministries that governed the monarchy during the 18th century was combined with Enlightenment ideas to provide 31

32 33

On the “resurgence” of the court in the mid-18th century, see Castro Santa Anna, “Diario de sucesos notables”; García Panes, Diario particular del camino que sigue un virrey; and Rivadeneyra and Barrientos, Diario notable. On the new character of these forms of coexistence in the 18th-century Occidental world, consult Castan, “Lo público y lo particular”. For example, the Ceremonial de la Nobilísima Ciudad de México, a compilation of anonymous notes, written between 1755 and 1771, on the protocol pertaining to Mexico City’s city council. See Curiel and Rubial, “Los espejos de lo propio”, pp. 73–74, on the painting titled Visita de un virrey a la catedral de México and for an understanding of the solemnity depicted in the historical sources.

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a new conception of power. The monarch was to represent the legitimate interests of the “public” and use his authority to foster the material and moral advancement of his subjects. Any individual or collective privileges that contravened this objective were to be suppressed by the absolute power of the State in the name of common good and reason. Mexico City served as a laboratory for the implementation of this philosophy by the viceroys. The development of the city during the previous two centuries produced an urban space that comprised a series of overlapping jurisdictions with little interest in joint cooperating in cobbling streets, drainage, or garbage collection for the greater good. Since viceroys were the only individuals with the authority to reconcile the conflicting corporate and private interests that divided the city, they used their power to reform a capital whose conditions were deemed unworthy for the Crown’s most valuable kingdom. Hence, in the first half of the century, they reintroduced the division of the city into “quarters” to facilitate its surveillance, and introduced population-control mechanisms, such as the 1753 census carried out by the first Count of Revillagigedo. In addition, they promoted the improvement of public areas such as the Alameda and made the city council responsible for paving city streets, but not without great resistance.34 By 1770, viceroys extended their reach over the city to institutions that had utilitarian objectives in mind. For example, Viceroy Antonio María Bucareli rebuilt the hospital de San Hipólito for the insane and founded the hospicio de Pobres. One cannot speak about the transformation of the viceroys into authoritarian reformers without mentioning the second Count of Revillagigedo, Juan Vicente Güemes Pacheco de Padilla. At the cost of riding roughshod over the vested interests of the traditional city corporations, Revillagigedo provided the city with public services, such as street lighting and garbage collection, leveled and paved streets and city squares, established a police force, regulated areas within the city devoted to trade, and carried out a population census.35 The viceroy’s reach also included remodeling the Royal Palace and doing away with the rented lodgings, warehouses, and taverns, which, as previously mentioned, defaced its interior.36 Revillagigedo himself summarized the ethics of 34 35 36

See Sánchez de Tagle, Los dueños de la calle, on the relationship between the new philosophy of government and the city. The 1753 census is discussed by De la Torre Villalpando in “El padrón de habitantes”. Revillagigedo summarizes his achievements in Compendio de providencias de policía. For comprehension of the city council’s reaction against Revillagigedo, consult Miranda Pacheco, “El juicio de residencia al virrey Revillagigedo”. See Castro Morales, “Evolución arquitectónica”, pp. 139–147, on Revillagigedo’s refurbishing of the viceregal palace.

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the enlightened government official in 1792, referring to the steps he had taken as follows: [ … ] if I may say so, I am, and have been, this capital’s agent of happiness. I will also say, without vanity, that my satisfaction lies in having met my obligations for the benefit of the king’s subjects, in the service of the king, and with profound gratitude [ … ].37 This facet of the viceroys is also visible in the new types of enlightened social coexistence and communication that marked their private lives. For example, Viceroy Antonio Flórez and his wife held nightly social gatherings in their private chambers, to which they invited criollo intellectuals such as Antonio de León y Gama and José Antonio de Alzate.38 Interested in economic studies of strategic relevance for the Crown, Flórez supported the establishment of a professorship in science at the Jardín Botánico, which recently opened at the viceregal palace, and endorsed Manuel Antonio Valdés, editor for the kingdom’s main newspaper, the Gaceta de México, ordering government authorities to send Valdés statistical and geographical information about their respective territories, inclusive of natural resources, for publication.39 6

The Empty Throne

In a series of reflections on the government of Mexico City, an anonymous author, in 1788, suspected to be the criollo judge, Baltasar Ladrón de Guevara, lamented the scant respect that everyday people showed the viceroy: In front of his palace, and even if he is leaning out of its windows, the people do not hesitate to engage in immodest or even obscene behavior, shouting and committing other excesses that show how little respect they have for such an important official, at whom they do not even glance out of curiosity when he passes by, and much less show humble deference.40 In fact, despite the vaunted achievements of the new Enlightenment ­policies, the position of the viceroy underwent a constant devaluation during the last 37 38 39 40

Cited in Revillagigedo, Compendio de providencias de policía, p. 14. Bustamante describes these social gatherings in Suplemento a la historia, p. 374. “Dedicatoria” and “Prólogo” in Valdés, Gazetas de México. [Ladrón de Guevara], Reflexiones y apuntes, p. 101.

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decades of the 18th century. One sign of this diminished prestige was the decline of old political rituals that glorified the king’s representative. While this decline is partly due to change in the institution of the viceroy, it was also a consequence of increasing oversight by the Royal Treasury, which led, in the early 18th century, to the imposition of severe budgetary limits on the amount that Mexico City could spend on welcoming an incoming viceroy.41 After 1771, many viceroys did not receive a formal procession, as was the case with Martín de Mayorga in 1779. After a disagreement between the Audiencia and city council, during the 1783 viceregal reception, even the viceroy’s inaugural horseback parade was replaced by a coach ride. Perhaps the final coup de grâce to viceregal procession came after 1794, when the custom of building triumphal arches seems to have fallen by the wayside.42 However, it was not the tradition of the “soldier viceroys” initiated by the Bourbons, with continued appointments between 1760 and the early 19th century, that was the main factor in demystifying the position.43 In reality, the decline of the viceroys can be attributed to the crisis in the Spanish imperial system. Echoing the criticism of the institution of the viceroy that began at the start of the century, in 1768, Viceroy Marquis of Croix and royal inspector José de Gálvez warned the king that New Spain’s system of government needed to be overhauled entirely. They proposed dividing the kingdom into intendancies headed by governors in direct communication with Madrid, granting them full authority over fiscal matters, and questions of defense and good governance, ultimately displacing the institution of the viceroy. Various political circumstances delayed instituting the plan of intendencies until 1787, thus allowing the office of the viceroy to continue. The type of individuals appointed after 1794, however, reflected the metropole’s growing inability to effectively control its American territories amid the crisis caused by the French Revolution, the naval war with Great Britain, and the consequent bankruptcy of the Spanish imperial treasury. 41 Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City, pp. 79–83. 42 García Panes, Diario particular del camino que sigue un virrey, pp. 116–117, describes the 1783 incident. Chiva Beltrán, El triunfo del virrey, pp. 227–297, addresses the decline of processions welcoming the viceroy to the city. 43 The only charismatic person to hold the post of viceroy in the whole century, Bernardo de Gálvez, was appointed in 1785. Gálvez’ victories over the British during the American War of Independence, and the steps he took to alleviate the famine that struck New Spain in 1786, helped to make him, his wife, and young son extremely popular among the inhabitants of Mexico City. Gálvez’ tenure was cut short by his premature death in 1786, lasting only one and a half years in office.

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The increasing lack of political talent of the viceroys was clearly evident in the case of José de Iturrigaray, appointed in 1803 with the support of Manuel Godoy, the personal favorite and prime minister to Charles IV. During those years (from 1803–08), Godoy’s alliance with Napoleon Bonaparte effectively meant that Spain subsidized the latter’s military exploits, a financial burden that could only be borne by resorting to desperate measures. To provide the much-needed funding, beginning in 1805, Iturrigaray diligently implemented Godoy’s orders to pay interest on the Royal Bonds issued by the Crown and required that all capital belonging to chaplaincies, lay religious brotherhoods, and charitable foundations in the Indies be sent to Spain to pay off the public debt incurred by the royal treasury. In an economy like New Spain’s, financial activity centered on inexpensive credit and indefinite terms, which ecclesiastical corporations and charitable foundations granted on funds under their charge. The consolidation of Royal Bonds was a serious matter that made Iturrigaray extremely unpopular among colonial elites. Discontent with Godoy’s policies in Spain and pressure from the French led to the fall of the prime minister in early 1808, the abdication of Charles IV, the imprisonment of his son and successor, Ferdinand VII, and the imposition of Joseph Bonaparte as king with the support of Napoleon’s armies. While peninsular resistance to French invasion was being organized around the Junta Central, the American territories were facing an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy in the total absence, for the first time, of a Spanish monarch. Viceroy Iturrigaray’s sympathies for those who argued for establishing an independent government in New Spain exhausted his enemies’ patience. On the night of 15 September 1808, a militia of commerce employees, under orders of the merchant and landowner, Gabriel de Yermo, seized the Royal Palace, deposed Iturrigaray, and sent him prisoner to Spain accused of disloyalty. With Iturrigaray’s overthrow, the viceregal institution in New Spain came to a de facto end. Despite all the changes it had undergone and the disrepute into which it had fallen during the 18th century, until this point, the system proved to be the best means for extending the enduring power of Spanish kings to the Indies and for bringing justice to their most distant subjects. Conversely, the next viceroys governed in the name of a deposed king whose powers were soon assumed by the national assembly known as the Cortes de Cádiz, which enacted a liberal constitution in 1812. To make matters worse, beginning in 1810, the peace and internal cohesion of New Spain was shattered by an insurgent uprising which, in 1813, refused to recognize the royal authority embodied by the viceroy and unequivocally declared in favor of independence. Furthermore, despite the return of Ferdinand VII and the absolutist system in 1814,

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the inhabitants of Mexico City and also New Spain could not forget the days of electing their own political figures under a constitutional government.44 Given this political turmoil, the viceroyalty was a dead institution, supported only by the violence that the royalist army inflicted against the insurgent movement (until it almost defeated it in 1816) and in the persecution and repression of liberals. This helps to explain why the government of Juan Ruiz de Apodaca, the last legitimately appointed viceroy, quickly collapsed when the royalist veteran Agustín de Iturbide assumed leadership, in February 1821, of a peaceful independence movement, taking advantage of the reinstatement of the Spanish constitution and the government of the Cortes by means of a military coup the year before. Entrenched in the capital, Apodaca was ousted by Spanish troops who, in turn, surrendered upon hearing that Iturbide had negotiated the independence of the “Mexican Empire” with the newly arrived Spanish envoy to New Spain, Juan O’Donojú. Interestingly, O’Donojú was not appointed as a viceroy by the Cortes but as jefe político superior since the 1812 Spanish constitution had abolished the viceregal post. Agustín de Iturbide entered Mexico City, on 27 September 1821, at the head of the Army of the Three Guarantees (Ejército de las Tres Garantías). His entry on horseback, under triumphal arches and celebration by the population, must have reminded the oldest onlookers of the days when viceroys rode into the capital in a similar manner, even down to the reception with canopy at the doors of the cathedral, which Iturbide rejected. Henceforth, viceroys would only exist in the memory of a new nation as symbols of despotism and oppression of a colonial regime. Nevertheless, Mexico City, whose history was deeply marked by the viceroys, exempted from condemnation the memory of Bucareli and the second count of Revillagigedo, naming streets after them. Both viceroys would be remembered in Mexican history not as representatives of the authoritarianism born out of the Enlightenment, but rather as epitomes of the ideal official, genuinely concerned with the welfare of the public to which the new republic aspired after 1824.45 Bibliography

Primary Sources

Bustamante, C.M., Suplemento a la historia de los tres siglos de México del P. Andrés Cavo, Mexico City, 1998. 44 45

Ávila explains the circumstances that led to the declaration of independence in En nombre de la nación, pp. 183–211. For the circumstances from the perspective of Mexico City, see Anna, La caída del gobierno español, pp. 223–225. For examples, see the account of Bucareli’s administration by Bustamante, Suplemento a la historia, pp. 315–326. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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Cartas de Lysi. La mecenas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz en correspondencia inédita, ­preliminary study, eds. H. Calvo and B. Colombí, Madrid, 2015. Castro Santa Anna, J.M., “Diario de sucesos notables, escrito por D. José Manuel de Castro Santa Anna”, Documentos para la historia de Méjico. Tomo IV, Mexico City, 1854. Ceremonial de la Nobilísima Ciudad de México por lo acaecido el año de 1755, transcription, with foreword and notes, by A. Henestrosa, Mexico City, 1976. García Panes, D., Diario particular del camino que sigue un virrey de México desde su llegada a Veracruz hasta su entrada pública en la capital, preliminary study by L. Díaz Trechuelo, Madrid, 1994. Güemes, J.V. de, second Count of Revillagigedo, Compendio de providencias de policía de México del segundo conde de Revillagigedo, paleographic version, with introduction and notes, by I. González-Polo, Mexico City, 1983. Hanke, L., Los virreyes españoles en América durante el gobierno de la Casa de Austria. México, 3 vols., Madrid, 1976–1978. Instrucciones y memorias de los virreyes novohispanos, 2 vols., preliminary study, with bibliography and notes, by E. de la Torre Villar (ed.), Mexico City, 1991. La ciudad de México en el siglo XVIII (1690–1780). Tres crónicas, introduction by A. Rubial García, Mexico City, 1990. Ladrón de Guevara, B., Reflexiones y apuntes sobre la ciudad de México ( fines de la Colonia), paleographic version, with introduction and notes, by I. González-Polo, Mexico City, 1984. Monségur, J., Las nuevas memorias del capitán Jean de Monségur, ed. J.P. Berthe, Mexico City, 1994. Rivadeneyra y Barrientos, J.A., Diario notable de la excelentísima señora Marquesa de las Amarillas virreina de México, desde el puerto de Cádiz hasta la referida corte, Mexico City, 1757. Sedano, F., Noticias de México, preliminary notes by J. Fernández de Córdoba, notes by V. Andrade, 3 vols., Mexico City, 1974. Valdés, M.A., Gazetas de México, compendio de noticias de Nueva España que comprehenden los años de 1788, y 1789. Tomo tercero, Mexico City, 1789.



Secondary Literature

Aiton, A.S., Antonio de Mendoza, First Viceroy of New Spain, Durham, 1927. Anna, T.E., La caída del gobierno español en la ciudad de México, Mexico City, 1987. Arenas Frutos, I., “¿Sólo una virreina consorte de la Nueva España? 1660–1664. La II marquesa de Leiva y II condesa de Baños”, Anuario de Estudios Americanos 67:2 (2010), pp. 551–575. Arenas Frutos, I., “Doña Mariana Riederer de Paar, marquesa de Guadalcázar: una virreina alemana en la Nueva España (México, 1612–1619)”, in M.L. Pazos and V. Zárate Toscano (eds.), Memorias sin olvido: el México de María Justina Sarabia, Santiago de Compostela, 2014, pp. 29–45. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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Ávila, A., En nombre de la nación. La formación del gobierno representativo en México (1808–1824), Mexico City, 2002. Berndt León-Mariscal, B., “Discursos de poder en un nuevo dominio: el trayecto del virrey marqués de las Amarillas de Veracruz a Puebla, las fiestas de entrada y el ceremonial político”, Relaciones Estudios de Historia y Sociedad 101 (2003), pp. 227–259. Büschges, C., “Del criado al valido. El padronazgo de los virreyes de Nápoles y Nueva España (primera mitad del siglo XVII)”, in F. Cantú (ed.), Las cortes virreinales de la Monarquía española: América e Italia, Rome, 2008, pp. 157–181. Calderón Quijano, J.A. (ed.), Los virreyes de Nueva España en el reinado de Carlos III, 2 vols., Seville, 1967. Calderón Quijano, J.A., Los virreyes de Nueva España en el reinado de Carlos IV, 2 vols., Seville, 1972. Cañeque, A., The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico, New York, 2004. Castan, N., “Lo público y lo particular”, in P. Ariès and G. Duby (eds.), Historia de la vida privada. Tomo 6. La comunidad, el Estado y la familia en los siglos XVI-XVIII, Madrid, 1992, pp. 15–55. Castro Morales, E., “Evolución arquitectónica”, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City, 1976, pp. 1–319. Chiva Beltrán, J., El triunfo del virrey. Glorias novohispanas: origen, apogeo y ocaso de la entrada virreinal, Castellón de la Plana, 2012. Curcio-Nagy, L.A., The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity, Albuquerque, 2004. Curiel, G. and Rubial, A., “Los espejos de lo propio: ritos públicos y usos privados en la pintura virreinal”, Pintura y vida cotidiana en México 1650–1950, Mexico City, 1999, pp. 49–153. De la Torre Villalpando, G., “El padrón de habitantes de la ciudad de México en 1753”, in S. Lombardo de Ruiz (ed.), El quehacer de censar. Cuatro historias, Mexico City, 2006. Eissa-Barroso, F.A., “The Honor of the Spanish Nation: Military Officers, Mediterranean Campaigns, and American Government Under Felipe V”, in F.A. Eissa-Barroso and A. Vázquez Varela (eds.), Early Bourbon Spanish America: Politics and Society in a Forgotten Era (1700–1759), Leyden, 2013, pp. 39–60. Escamilla González, I., “La corte de los virreyes”, in A. Rubial García (ed.), Historia de la vida cotidiana en México. Tomo II. La ciudad barroca, Mexico City, 2005, pp. 371–406. Escamilla González, I., “Nueva España ante la diplomacia de la era de Utrecht, 1716– 1720: el caso de la Guerra de la Cuádruple Alianza”, in F.A. Eissa-Barroso, M. Souto Mantecón, and G. Pinzón Ríos (eds.), Resonancias imperiales: América y el Tratado de Utrecht de 1713, Mexico City, 2015, pp. 21–45. Latasa Vasallo, P., “La casa del obispo-virrey Palafox: familia y patronazgo. Un análisis comparativo con la corte virreinal hispanoamericana”, in R. Fernández Gracia (ed.),

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Palafox. Iglesia, cultura y Estado en el siglo XVII. Congreso Internacional IV Centenario del nacimiento de don Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, Pamplona, 2001, pp. 199–228. Lempérière, A., Entre Dios y el rey: la república. La ciudad de México en los siglos XVI al XIX, Mexico City, 2013. Luzzi, M., “Entre la prudencia del rey y la fidelidad a su persona y dinastía: los grupos de poder en la corte de Felipe V durante la Guerra de Sucesión”, Cuadernos Dieciochistas 15 (2014), pp. 135–163. Miranda Pacheco, S., “El juicio de residencia al virrey Revillagigedo y los intereses oligárquicos en la ciudad de México”, Estudios de Historia Novohispana 29 (2003), pp. 49–75. Montes González, F., “La ‘jaula’ de las virreinas. Polémica en torno a un asiento indecoroso en la catedral de México”, in C. López Calderón, M.Á. Fernández Valle, and I. Rodríguez Moya (eds.), Barroco iberoamericano: identidades culturales de un imperio, vol. 1, Santiago de Compostela, 2013, pp. 231–247. Montes González, F., Mecenazgo virreinal y patrocinio artístico. El ducado de Alburquerque en la Nueva España, Seville, 2016. “Para seguir con el debate en torno al colonialismo”, Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [online], debates, uploaded on 8 February 2005; consulted on 25 February 2016, URL: http://nuevomundo.revues.org/430; DOI: 10.4000/nuevomundo.430. Pastor Téllez, D., Mujeres y poder. Las virreinas novohispanas de la Casa de Austria, M.A. thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2013. Rivera Cambas, M., Los gobernantes de México. Galería de biografías y retratos de los virreyes, emperadores, presidentes y otros gobernantes que ha tenido México, desde don Hernando Cortés hasta el C. Benito Juárez, 2 vols., Mexico City, 1872–1873. Rivero Rodríguez, M., La edad de oro de los virreyes. El virreinato en la Monarquía Hispánica durante los siglos XVI y XVII, Madrid, 2011. Romero de Terreros, M., Bocetos de la vida social en la Nueva España, Mexico City, 1944. Rosenmüller, C., “Friends, Followers, Countrymen: Viceregal Patronage in Mid-Eighteenth Century New Spain”, Estudios de Historia Novohispana 34 (2006), pp. 47–72. Rosenmüller, C., Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial Mexico, 1702–1710, Calgary, 2008. Rubial García, A., “Las alianzas sagradas. Religiosos cortesanos en el siglo XVII novohispano”, in F.J. Cervantes Bello (ed.), La Iglesia en la Nueva España. Relaciones económicas e interacciones políticas, Puebla, 2010, pp. 165–191. Rubial García, A., “Las virreinas novohispanas. Presencias y ausencias”, Estudios de Historia Novohispana 50 (2014), pp. 3–44. Rubio Mañé, J.I., El virreinato, 4 vols., 2nd edition, Mexico City, 1983. Sánchez de Tagle, E., Los dueños de la calle. Una historia de la vía pública en la época colonial, Mexico City, 1997. Sarrablo Aguareles, E., El conde de Fuenclara, embajador y virrey de Nueva España (1687–1752), 2 vols., Seville, 1955–1966.

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Schreffler, M.J., The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain, University Park, 2007. Valle-Arizpe, A., Virreyes y virreinas de la Nueva España. Tradiciones, leyendas y sucedidos del México virreinal, Mexico City, 1947. Valle-Arizpe, A., El Palacio Nacional de México. Monografía histórica y anecdótica, ­Mexico City, 1952.

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CHAPTER 10

Finance and Credit in Viceregal Mexico City María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano During the colonial period, all economic activities depended on credit or financing. Agriculture, cattle raising, commerce, manufacturing, and transportation required capital investment that often took the form of credit; merchandise was usually sold on credit, and even the hiring of workers involved credit. Furthermore, credit was widely used to buy consumer goods, pay medical expenses, cover business losses, and make donations or bequests to the Church, aimed, among other things, at founding convents or paying nuns’ dowries.1 In order to understand the nature of credit during this period, we need to understand the conditions in which it functioned. First, we have to consider the importance of Old World cities since they were the main recipients of income from the countryside, the hubs where the financial institutions were located, and the focal points for credit transactions. Second, we should understand that, in the absence of credit institutions in the strict sense or banks in the modern sense, the vacuum was filled by private parties and corporations which, while not devoted to promoting business activities or fostering economic growth per se, provided the different types of loans and credits that were indispensable for the development of different economic activities. Due to the influx of money into the city—above all into its business sector, the Royal Treasury and the Church—these groups and institutions became the main sources of financing in New Spain. Thus, according to the origin of funds, historians distinguish between commercial, ecclesiastical, and public-sector credit, each with specific characteristics. Merchants specialized in short-term loans and selling on credit; ecclesiastical institutions sought to earn income on long-term loans, becoming the main sources of such financing; and the Royal Treasury provided mercury on credit to owners of mine to stimulate silver production. In the late 18th century, two formal credit institutions were founded: the Monte de Piedad in 1775 and the Banco de Avío Minero in 1784. However, when credit flows through non-institutional channels, difficulties arose for outsiders to obtain loans. Personal relationships, trust, and guarantees 1 Martínez, “Introducción”, in El crédito en Nueva España. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004335578_012 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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that an applicant could offer were decisive factors in accessing credit. Hence, merchants extended credit to those who could form part of their business networks, while, for much of the colonial era, the ecclesiastical institutions only granted credit to individuals and corporations who put up mortgage sureties. Households met their daily spending needs by pawning clothes or home items in shops and clothing and household stores. 1

Credit in Mexico City

As Ross Hassig has shown, upon Spanish arrival, Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco not only controlled production and trade in the Valley of Mexico due to their political dominance and taxation system, but also extended their influence to other areas because of their control of faraway markets and long-distance trade networks.2 After the conquest, the political and economic power of Mexico City increased, becoming the capital of New Spain and the seat of viceregal government, the Real Audiencia, and home to the viceroyalty’s fiscal and economic institutions—the Royal Treasury, Mint, and the Consulado de Comerciantes. With over 100,000 inhabitants by the 18th century, it was also the most populated city in the Americas, making it home to the richest men of the day and the main mercantile center in New Spain. Due to the administrative and financial centralization that prevailed since the first years of Spanish rule, tax revenues flowed into the Royal Treasury.3 In addition to the Royal Treasury, Mexico City was also home to the only mint in the viceroyalty (founded in 1535) and to the only Consulado de Comerciantes (established at the end of the 16th century), which, until 1795, was the only institution of this type, when those in Veracruz and Guadalajara were founded.4 Moreover, regardless of its source, the Church’s wealth tended to be concentrated in the cities. The archdiocese of Mexico City was the richest in all of North America, receiving the largest tithe revenues in all of New Spain. Besides the cathedral, the city housed the headquarters of the different orders of the regular clergy, the viceroyalty’s main convents and religious brotherhoods, and the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, institutions which, in addition to possessing their own assets, administered large legacies bequeathed by the devout, which it lent out on interest (as we will see below). 2 Hassig, Trade, Tribute, and Transportation, Ch. 5. 3 For the mid-18th century, see Sánchez, Corte de caja, graph 4, p. 249. 4 Valle, “Expansión de la economía mercantil”.

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In short, not only the richest Church institutions in the viceroyalty, but also the royal exchequer, were located in the capital. These factors, among others, favored the concentration of financial liquidity and payment systems in Mexico City, enabling it to become a world-class economic hub. 2

Mercantile Credit

The large-scale exploitation of the silver mines that occurred in the mid-16th century bolstered economic activity and facilitated the monetization and marketization of the colonial economy.5 As Carlos Sempat Assadourian has shown in his now classic study, the exploitation of the mines had a “drag effect” on other productive activities, such as agriculture, livestock, and handicraft production, boosted trade, increased the demand for services in areas such as transportation and roadbuilding, and undoubtedly led to an increase in the use of money.6 Over three centuries, investment increased in every area of the economy, requiring greater mobility of resources and the increased provision of capital on a credit basis. Internal and external trade increased dramatically and by the second half of the 16th century, silver, both raw and minted, was the main export from New Spain, above all to Spain and the Philippines. Under the Bourbon dynasty, New Spain became the world’s main silver producer. Likewise the Mexican Mint was the largest institution of its kind in the world, turning out 20 million pesos’ worth of coins by the last decade of the 18th century. The 8-real or peso (272-maravedi) coin enjoyed great international prestige, being accepted as legal tender in Europe, the New World, and Asia, and even in the United States and Canada until the mid-19th century. Merchant participation in credit is closely linked to their investment strategies. As is clear from the flourishing trade with Spain and the Philippines, the largest merchants, known as almanceneros or warehousers, sought to acquire raw silver and silver coins in order to engage profitable business activities that yielded wide profit margins. Since imports were paid for in either raw silver or currency, and their transactions were in bulk, merchants required access to large sums of money. Given the oligopolistic nature of trade, the market was dominated by a few powerful businessmen with great liquidity, which, in turn, limited the number of traders and ensured that the select few were quite 5 Even the indigenous community, with its traditional productive practices, did not remain untouched by this phenomenon. 6 Assadourian, El sistema de la economía colonial.

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successful. As a result, merchants with great liquidity could purchase large shipments of goods and then sell them on credit to retailers and tradesmen in the provinces.7 Due to its large population, Mexico City was New Spain’s primary consumer market. In addition, the viceregal capital was the point of distribution or center for financing the import-export trade, trade in precious metals with the mining centers, and other types of trade between different locales in the region. In turn, due to the concentration of capital and the node of colonial trade, Mexico City became a world-class financial hub, since it could extend credit, both in cash and in kind, to other parts of New Spain, thus playing an increasingly influential role throughout the viceroyalty. Since the city’s warehousers, most of whom belonged to the Consulado de Comerciantes, not only controlled both the importation of products into the viceroyalty and their subsequent distribution, but given the need for liquidity to engage in foreign trade, they sought to acquire silver at cut-rate prices. Specializing in commercial credits and short-term loans, they used various instruments in order to carry out business transactions and extend their commercial networks to more business operators and activities Historians have shown how mining depended on credit granted by the elite group of businessmen in Mexico City, who often operated through agents, partners, and local merchants.8 Yet, this dependence grew in the 1630s, when the Crown ceased to extend credit for mercury, a substance essential for amalgamating silver, and called in the debt owed to the Royal Treasury.9 Via a process known as rescate, the merchant advanced money and supplies to the miner, who promised to settle the debt in silver. From a formal standpoint, the rescate was an exchange of money for silver, rather than a loan. Thus, it was not governed by legal and scriptural prohibitions against usury, which, strictly speaking, only applied to the interest paid on a loan. Depending on the situation and how far the mine was from Mexico City, the premium or discount agreed upon varied between five and eight reales per mark (65 reales), leaving the merchant a sizeable profit. Since the payment term were usually between 35 and 40 days, the interest due on a one-year loan was high, near 100 per cent. For example, in 1593, the miner Francisco de Cárdenas, a resident of San Luis Potosí, received silver 7 For the 16th century, see Martínez, “Los mercaderes de la ciudad de México”; in the 17th century, consult Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite; and for the 18th century, refer to Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico; Kicza, Colonial Entrepreneurs; and Borchart, Los mercaderes y el capitalismo. On trade with the Philippines, see Yuste, Emporios transpacíficos. 8 Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society; García, Riqueza, poder y prestigio; Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite and “El crédito comercial”. 9 Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society.

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reales in the amount of 330 pesos and in exchange agreed to pay 337.5 silver pesos in 40 days. In this particular case, the parties agreed on a 12.5 per cent discount of eight reales per mark, which amounted to an annual interest rate of almost 120 per cent.10 In this way, the merchant obtained silver at an excellent rate—between 7.5 per cent and 12.5 per cent below its legal value—but made the conditions to the miner burdensome. From the 16th century onward, the lack of adequate financing for the mining industry made silver production dependent on the credit granted by merchants, who were apparently the only group to lend money to this high-risk sector—albeit with very sizeable profit margins. The large merchants also earned significant profits from precious metals. They sold consignments of silver or gold at their legal price and required payment in currency between one and six months, depending on whether the transaction involved wrought silver, hallmarked silver, or gold chains. Since unminted silver and gold were accepted at less than their official value in day-to-day practice, such transactions garnered merchants substantive profits, between 12 per cent and 48 per cent a year in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.11 These transactions were not in violation of usury laws either, since they were governed by purchase contracts rather than loan agreements.12 Less frequently, they made cash loans, with maturities of under a year, but without supplanting ecclesiastical institutions and other money-lending groups. Large merchants, therefore, sought to monopolize silver, and from the end of the 16th century were linked to the Mint, which did not directly supervise the minting of coins until 1733. They bought silver from private parties and leased the Mint’s facilities to coin it, at a profit, as Louisa Hoberman has shown, of around 5 per cent during the 17th century.13 In the 17th and 18th centuries, silver traders established companies or stores, also known as silver banks, to finance mining companies.14 As an example of how these businesses operated, in 1655, in addition to his business activities, José de Retes, was appointed apartador general de oro y plata (assayer of gold and silver) in the Mexican Mint, in exchange for a payment of 60,000 pesos. This position paid him 3 pesos and 1 real for each gold mark minted, and 9 grains (roughly three quarters of a real) for each silver mark minted. That same year, along with the merchant José de 10 Martínez, La génesis del crédito colonial, pp. 60–61. Also, on the subject of how credit functioned and credit premiums, see Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society; Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite; and Martínez, “La venta de oro”, Fig. 2. 11 Martínez, “La venta de oro”, especially Figs. 1, 3, and 4. 12 Martínez, “La venta de oro”. 13 See Hoberman’s, Mexico’s Merchant Elite and “El crédito colonial y el sector minero”. 14 Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite; Huerta, “Los Retes”; and Brading, Miners and Merchants.

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Quesada, Retes founded a company for financing and buying silver in a shop on Empedradillo Street, later establishing branches in the mining districts of Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, Parral, and Guanajuato. The firm granted cash credits to be paid in silver, with terms ranging from two to eight months depending the distance the mining district was from Mexico City, with a discount of two reales per mark, which, at the time, had a value of 68 reales.15 Another tool that merchants used to control working capital was the libranza (payment order), which, like the present-day bank check, could be issued in one place and cashed in another, as well as serving as a credit instrument. Although the libranza was in use since the 16th century, their employment intensified in the second half of the 18th century. Merchants extended credit lines to the mine owners, who would in turn send them all their silver production, accepting libranzas in exchange. Periodically, the books were balanced and debts were settled.16 Mexico City merchants also forged links with other areas of business, granting credit to landowners, haulage contractors, workshop owners, and small businessmen in order to draw them into their business networks. These networks, in which links between compatriots, family ties, and liquidity played a crucial role, extended over New Spain via proxies, agents, encomenderos, and business partners.17 In order to maintain trading links in different places, above all in mining regions, large merchants depended on relatives and small businessmen to whom they supplied goods on credit or offered other types of financial support. When the volume of business in a given area was high, merchants would opened an affiliate, putting up most of the capital while a local partner would supervise sales and distribution; both would share in the profits.18 On other occasions, they approached traders already operating in the area or travelling salesmen, offering them a commission on the products they sold or granting them credit on terms that enabled them to settle the debt with the profits from their sales.19 This pattern was repeated all along the distribution chain, right down to the retail level, where according to Marie Francois, small shopkeepers in Mexico City granted credit to their clients against items left in pawn.20 15 Huerta, “Los Retes”. 16 Pérez, Plata y libranzas. 17 Martínez, “Los mercaderes de la ciudad de México”; Valle, “Expansión mercantil”; Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite; Brading, Miners and Merchants; Kicza, Colonial Entrepreneurs; Borchart, Los mercaderes y el capitalismo; and Yuste, “Comercio y crédito”. 18 Martínez, La génesis del crédito colonial; Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite; Kicza, Colonial Entrepreneurs; and Yuste, “Comercio y Crédito”. 19 Ibid. 20 Francois, A Culture of Everyday Credit.

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Large merchants in Mexico City also maintained close links with a wide range of provincial officials whom they backed politically in exchange for commercial advantages in the officials’ jurisdiction, as was the case with the distribution of merchandise in Indian towns. With the assistance of the alcade mayor, warehousers gave advances of cash, raw materials, or other supplies to Indian communities, who were required to deliver their harvest at less than market rate. For example, in Oaxaca, merchants used this strategy to monopolize the production of cochineal, a dyestuff in great demand in the European textile industry.21 In short, large merchants controlled the silver trade and the means of payment, dominating the wholesale trade and the distribution of imported goods within the viceroyalty, while also controlling other business activities through credits and loans. From the 17th century, large merchants were notable for their wealth, which enabled them to affirm their position as members of an elite class, some of whom were awarded aristocratic titles in the 18th century.22 Finally, we must also consider the role played by the Consulado de Comerciantes, an entity that acted as a financial agent of the Crown, supplying it with funds it obtained from private parties and Church institutions, to which it paid 5 per cent interest on loans.23 3

The Church Institutions and Credit

To accomplish the spiritual mission that was their raison d’être, afford the splendor of their cults, and consolidate their place in society, ecclesiastical institutions required resources.24 Both the Church and the Crown demanded that ecclesiastical institutions be self-sufficient, without depending on alms or subsidies. As a result, they sought after fixed and secure income, which explains their keenness for interest and thus, their rentier mindset when investing capital. Church institutions specialized in long-term loans based on ground-rent contracts and irregular deposit certificates, instruments that enabled them to lend and charge a fixed rent without engaging in usury. Ground-rent 21 Hamnett, Politics and Trade; Dehouve, “El crédito de repartimiento”. 22 Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite; Brading, Miners and Merchants; and Valle, Finanzas piadosas. 23 Valle, “El Consulado de comerciantes”. 24 On Church institutions and their influence on the colonial economy and society, see: Rubial (ed.), La Iglesia en el México colonial.

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agreements were, in effect, purchase contracts whereby a sum of money was handed over to the buyer and the seller was empowered to charge rent or interest on the amount until the principal was paid. Since such agreements were legally based on real property, underwriting the obligation formed an inherent part the contract, whereby the property owner was obliged to pay interest by virtue of possessing it. No date for paying off the principal was specified in the contract, which remained open until all principal was paid.25 Irregular deposits, which were not legally considered loans, became popular in New Spain in the 18th century, gradually replacing ground-rent contracts. Unlike groundrent agreements, irregular deposits stipulated an expiration date and were personally binding, although they were underwritten by a mortgage surety or a guarantor. These instruments enabled solvent traders and businessmen to have access to Church loans.26 The rate of interest charged on ground rents and irregular deposits was governed by civil law. At the beginning of the 17th century, an annual rate of 5 per cent was established, which was lower than that charged on other credit transactions, ranging between 15 per cent and 25 per cent, or even more, as in the case of loans to mine owners.27 Ground-rent agreements and irregular deposits made the Church the main source of long-term financing in New Spain. Even in the case of irregular deposits, ecclesiastical institutions agreed to extend contracts when they came due, provided that debtors were not in arrears. Since most of these loans were backed by real estate sureties, either in the form of buildings or haciendas, and given that the 5 per cent interest rate was the lowest in the market, credit tended to be extended, jeopardizing their profitability as liens and mortgages accumulated. We must also note that credit did not always take the form of cash loans. It was common to issue them in favor of an institution (by means of ground rents or irregular deposits) to pay the principal on a nun’s dowry or an endowment for a religious foundation by mortgaging property. In other words, the institution granted credit to the debtor, who was charged interest until the principal was paid.28 Such transactions explains the high indebtedness of real estate. Many haciendas were encumbered between 80 and 100 per cent of their value, often resulting in bankruptcy and being auctioned. By the second half of the 18th century, haciendas were no longer considered good securities.29 25 Martínez, El crédito a largo plazo, Ch. 1. 26 Wobeser, El crédito eclesiástico. 27 The ground-rent rate was previously higher. It was 10 per cent until it dropped to 7.14 per cent in 1563 and went to 5 per cent in 1608. Martínez, El crédito a largo plazo, Ch. 1. Martínez, La génesis del crédito colonial. 28 Martínez, El crédito a largo plazo; Wobeser, El crédito eclesiástico. 29 Wobeser, El crédito eclesiástico.

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Convents and confraternities were important financial instruments for the amounts of credit they granted. However, more vital to the credit system were chaplaincy funds and charities administered by private parties or corporations and were supervised, in each diocese, by the Juzgado de testamentos, capellanías, y obras pías (“Ecclesiastical Court with Jurisdiction over Wills, Chaplaincies, and Pious Works”), which controlled all the chaplaincies and charitable foundations that were founded in Mexico City’s archdiocese. 4

The Convents

In Spanish America, convents were exclusively urban institutions. By the end of the colonial period, New Spain counted with 57, of which 22 or nearly 40 per cent were located in Mexico City.30 Home to the daughters of rich families from Mexico City and from other locations, convents’ assets consisted of their initial capital and the dowries, between 2,000 and 4,000 pesos, paid by nuns’ families, which remained in the possession of the convent at the time of a nun’s death. In the 18th century, the richest convents were the ones founded in the 16th century, with their assets supplemented by donations, alms given by patrons and benefactors, and legacies they administered for the purposes of celebrating feast days, masses, and other religious activities. The Immaculate Conception was the first convent founded, in 1541, in Mexico City (see Rubial, this volume). While it took more than 30 years for others to be established, between 1573 and 1636, as New Spain’s economy expanded, 14 more were founded—Regina Coeli (1573), Santa Clara (1573), Nuestra Señora de la Balvanera (1573), Jesús María (1580), San Jerónimo (1585), Santa Catalina de Sena (1593), la Encarnación (1593), San Juan de la Penitencia (1598), San Lorenzo (1598), Santa Inés (1600), Santa Isabel (1601), San José de Gracia (1610), Santa Teresa la Antigua (1625), and San Bernardo (1636). These were followed, in the second half of the 17th century, by San Felipe de Jesús (1666); in the 18th century, by Santa Teresa la Nueva (1704), Corpus Christi (1724), Santa Brígida (1744), Nuestra Señora del Pilar or de la Enseñanza Antigua (1754), and Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (1787); and in the 19th century, by Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (1811), also known as Enseñanza Nueva.31 In the 16th century, the involvement of convents in credit transactions was modest. However, their participation increased in the following century. For example, in 1609, 30 years after being founded, the convent of Jesús María had 30 Loreto, “La función social y urbana”, p. 245, Fig. 2. 31 Martínez, El crédito a largo plazo, p. 99.

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granted credit in the amount of almost 85,000 pesos.32 In another example, in 1645, the principal owed to the convents of Encarnación, San Jerónimo, San Lorenzo, Regina Coeli, Santa Teresa la Antigua, and San Bernardo amounted to 836,986 pesos.33 These figures demonstrate the riches that these corporations had acquired and their predilection for ground rents. Loans were the investments favored by convents during the 16th and 17th centuries, but in the 18th century, they opted to build or buy property and lease them, a trend that increased as the century progressed, seeking to take advantage of the population growth and subsequent demand for housing. By the end of the colonial era, the Church was the primary property owner in Mexico City.34 While 90 per cent of the convents’ investments in the mid-17th century took the form of loans, by the mid-18th century, this percentage dropped to only 40 per cent. Although real estate was a more attractive investment than loans in the 18th century, in 1744, Mexico City convents had recoverable balances amounting to 2,698,962 pesos (Table 10.1).35 5

The Chaplaincies

The chaplaincies were religious corporations founded to celebrate mass in perpetuity for the soul(s) of the person(s) indicated by their founder. Since they were non-expiring entities, the principal or endowment could not be depleted, but rather had to be invested to generate income to pay the chaplain in charge of celebrating mass. In most cases, the preferred investment option was credit. The Council of Trent, an ecumenical gathering at which the Church elevated the existence of purgatory to dogma and stressed the financial support of the clergy, boosted the founding of chaplaincies. Since the 16th century, postulants for the priesthood in New Spain were required to demonstrate that they had the means to support themselves and in this sense, income from chaplaincies proved to be ideal for promoting the ordination of priests. As a result, this explains why most chaplaincy contracts included clauses stipulating that the chaplain be a member of the founder’s family, since, in this way, chaplaincies not only conferred spiritual benefits on the founding family, but also served to safeguard its estate. 32 33 34 35

Ibid., p. 98. Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Bienes Nacionales, v. 420, exp. 10, 12, 13, 14, and 15. The figures for the San Bernardo convent are from 1656. Morales, “Estructura urbana”. Lavrin, “La riqueza de los conventos de monjas”, p. 118.

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Finance and Credit in Viceregal Mexico City table 10.1  Investments by Mexico City Convents in 1744

Convent

La Encarnación La Concepción Jesús María Santa Clara San Jerónimo Santa Catalina de Sena Balvanera San Lorenzo San Bernardo Santa Isabel Regina Coeli San José de Gracia San Juan de la Penitencia Santa Inés Santa Teresa la Nueva Santa Teresa la Antigua Total

Year founded

Credits granted (in pesos)

Real estate (in pesos)

Total (in pesos)

1593 1541 1580 1573 1585 1593 1573 1598 1636 1601 1573 1610 1598 1600 1704 1625

304,670 346,240 242,780 275,663 75,160 50,340 92,760 186 105 278 947 137 150 145 455 115 040 267,292 17,800 118,460 45,100 2,698,962

567,830 511,480 493,760 240,000 442,540 356,640 307,820 204,740 77,200 223,410 181,060 187,200 32,300 148,400 12,960 215,440 4,202,330

872,050 857,720 736,540 515,663 517,700 406,980 400,580 398,845 388,062 362,560 326,515 302,240 299,593 166,200 131,420 260,540 6,682,668

Sources: for founding dates, see Martínez, el crédito a largo plazo, p. 99; for credits granted and value of properties refer to Lavrin, “La riqueza de los conventos de monjas”, p. 118 and Wobeser, El crédito eclesiástico, p. 158

The number of chaplaincies in Mexico City increased during the last quarter of the 16th century, coinciding with New Spain’s economic growth due to large-scale mining and the secular clergy striving to win back the terrain they lost to the religious orders during the first years of evangelization. By the first decades of the 17th century, a fair number of chaplaincies had been founded in the viceregal capital, which the cathedral began to supervise. Archival records for 1621 outline 366 foundations,36 and by 1645, the total endowments of the chaplaincies registered in Mexico City Cathedral’s Juzgado de testamentos, capellanías y obras pías exceeded 2,200,000 pesos.37 There is every indication that the number of these foundations and the amount of capital they 36 37

AGN, Capellanías, v. 268. AGN, Capellanías, v. 270. Chaplaincies founded with properties are not included.

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possessed increased in the following years. Notwithstanding the vicissitudes faced by credits granted by ecclesiastical institutions in the early 19th century due to the extension to New Spain of the Royal Decree Consolidating Public Debt Securities, in 1821, Mexico City cathedral’s Juzgado de Capellanías already had accumulated debts of over four million pesos on its balance sheet.38 6

The Confraternities

Unlike the institutions mentioned above, the confraternities were secular institutions established to finance masses or other types of religious devotions and observances, enjoying a large amount of financial independence. These corporations, which had a spiritual mission as collective manifestations of faith and piety, were also at the center of daily life and promoted the welfare of their members. Many of these corporations were organized according to ethnicity, social status, or trade, carrying out charitable works, religious processions, and other types of civic and spiritual events. Some even offered their members social assistance, above all upon death. To fulfill their spiritual mission, confraternities required financial resources. Confraternities charged members an entry fee plus other occasional fees that varied depending on the corporation’s needs and its members’ financial capacity. Cofradías usually charged an entry fee of two reales, plus a weekly contribution of half a real and an annual contribution of four reales for wax, as compared to the thousand reales paid by elite corporations, such as the Congregation of San Pedro.39 In addition, they also received donations and legacies for specific purposes. For example, the archicofradía de Nuestra Señora del Rosario did not charge any fees to its members; while only the 12 members of its board paid 100 pesos and a jug of oil per year. The corporation received many legacies from individuals, which allowed it to have a great presence in the city. At the end of the viceregal period, it was managing funds that totaled around 600,000 pesos. Of these, over 300,000 pesos were devoted to providing dowries to orphaned Spanish girls, 200,000 pesos to supporting and promoting the cult of the Virgen del Rosario, 50,000 pesos to aid the poor in Acordada prison, and 20,000 to succoring the destitute in the hospital de San Juan de Dios. Furthermore, it owned 12 chaplaincies worth 39,000 pesos. The archicofradía invested these funds and financed the aforesaid activities with the

38 39

Wobeser, El crédito eclesiástico, pp. 173–186. Lavrin, “La Congregación de San Pedro”.

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interest earned.40 On the other hand, in 1805, the confraternity of Aránzazu, whose members were wealthy traders of Basque origins, had issued loans in the amount of 162,098 pesos, of which 62,400 pesos (38.5 per cent) pertained to the charities it managed, while, the same year, the confraternity of Santísimo Cristo de Burgos, whose members were also traders, had granted credits in the amount of 169,000 pesos.41 7

The Inquisition

The Holy Office began operating in North America in 1571, establishing, in Mexico City, a court whose jurisdiction extended to all the provinces of the kingdom of New Spain, the Captaincy General of Guatemala, and the Philippine Archipelago. Like the other Church institutions, the Inquisition availed itself of a regular income, most of which came from the canonships that were assigned to it in the cathedrals within its territorial domain. By 1791, for example, 56.6 per cent of its income came from this source. The interest earned on assets owned and legacies it managed was not inconsiderable, totaling 37 per cent of its revenues.42 By the 18th century, the Inquisition was one of the main credit institutions in New Spain, since, unlike the convents, it obtained most of its income from ground rents and irregular deposits.43 In 1821, the Inquisition was creditor of 1,237,857 pesos.44 In short, as of the 17th century, the Church institutions became the main sources of long-term financing for agricultural and livestock haciendas and for property owners in Mexico City and in the 18th century, for merchants and businessmen. Due to the volume of their transactions, these institutions that lined Mexico City stood out, being the richest in the viceroyalty. In 1804, the Spanish crown extended the Royal Decree Consolidating Public Debt Securities to Spanish America, obliging those who owed money to the Church to settle their debts, with the Crown then borrowing these monies and paying 5 per cent interest until the loans were paid in full. Of the 10,511,704 pesos contributed by all the dioceses in New Spain, just over 5 million pesos (48 per cent) came from the Mexican diocese.45 As Francisco Javier Cervantes Bello has demonstrated, 40 41 42 43 44 45

Moreno, “Las inversiones de la Archicofradía”. Wobeser, El crédito eclesiástico, Ch. VII; García, “Sociedad, crédito y cofradía”. Wobeser, El crédito eclesiástico, Fig. 33, p. 214. Wobeser, “La Inquisición como institución crediticia”. Wobeser, El crédito eclesiástico, Ch. VI. Wobeser, Dominación colonial, p. 195, Table 49.

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the new credit policy was a serious blow to Church institutions, one from which they would never recover. From 1804 to 1809, while the decree was in force, the Church ceased extending credit, and in 1812, the Crown ­suspended payment of interest on debt. Both decapitalized Church institutions, deprived private parties of lines of credit, and provoked a crisis of confidence.46 8

The Monte de Piedad

The Monte de Piedad in Mexico City (Sacro y Real Monte de Piedad de la ciudad de México) was the only such institution to be established in Spanish America during the colonial period.47 Its founder, Pedro Romero de Terreros, was a rich Spanish-born businessman, mine developer, and landowner who made a large fortune in New Spain. Probably the richest man of his day, he was granted the title of Count of Santa María de Regla in 1768. In 1767, Romero de Terreros received permission from viceregal and Spanish authorities to found the pawnshop of Monte de Piedad, which he inaugurated on 25 February 1775, endowing it with a capital of 300,000 pesos and placing it under royal patronage. The new establishment’s organization and bylaws were modeled on those of the Monte de Piedad in Madrid. Viceroy Antonio María de Bucareli allocated as its headquarters the College of San Gregorio and its chapel, which had belonged to the Society of Jesus before being expelled from New Spain in 1767.48 As envisaged by its founder, and in line with other institutions of this type, Monte de Piedad was conceived of as a charitable institution whose underlying mission was to grant credit to the needy and finance masses for the founder and his relatives. Monte de Piedad’s bylaws stipulated that the minimum loan amount was two pesos and that all loans had to be underwritten by pledged objects: jewels, unused clothing, or textiles, which was valued by the institution’s appraiser. The bylaws also stipulated that the pawned object had to be worth more than the loan requested—at least three pesos for a two-peso loan—and was redeemed when the debt was paid. The maximum pledge period was six months, and if it expired, the pledger could ask for a six-month extension. Otherwise, the object was auctioned to the highest bidder. Like its counterpart in Madrid, the Mexican pawnshop did not initially charge interest on its loans. 46 47 48

Cervantes, “La consolidación de vales reales”. Solano, “La beneficencia privada”; Cabrera and Escandón, Historia del Nacional Monte de Piedad; Francois, A Culture of Everyday Credit, Ch. 2. Ibid.

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However, beneficiaries of loans could make a voluntary donation or alms when redeeming an object to cover operating expenses, staff salaries, or pay for masses for the souls of the deceased. Yet, the amount of the donations or alms received was far below expectations. Since 1782, customers were required to pay a quarter of a real or cuartilla (8.5 maravedis) per peso (272 maravedis), which amounted to a rate of 3.125 per cent for six months, or 6.25 per cent for one year. In 1815, this amount doubled to half a real (17 maravedis) per peso, increasing the rate to 6.25 per cent for six months or 12.5 per cent for one year, a rate that would remain unchanged for several decades.49 In addition to granting loans on pledged objects, the pawnshop auctioned off unredeemed items and accepted deposits from private parties and judicial authorities. Monte de Piedad paid no interest on the deposits but was obliged to return them when requested by the depositor.50 In the first years after its founding, Monte de Piedad serviced 30,000 customers each year and granted loans to the tune of 500,000 to 600,000 pesos (Tables 10.2–10.3). table 10.2  Transactions Carried Out by Monte de Piedad between 1775–81

Year

Days pawned

Number of customers pawning items

Loans (in pesos)

Alms offered (in pesos)

Auctions (in pesos)

Deposits and returns on sales (in pesos)

1775 1776 1777 1778 1779 1780 1781 Total

166 143 141 143 144 145 118

24,728 31,146 32,258 36,103 33,361 33,138 30,305 222,032

501,489 577,069 606,080 603,365 595,805 627,908 573,402 4,085,118

6,334.2 13,457.3 14,290.4 15,348.3 13,314.6 12,948.3 11,652.1 87,349.2

12,744.2 54,673.6 50,347.3 47,173.1 50,537.0 52,019.3 34,720.6 302,035.7

36,645.3 30,863.3 28,420.5 20,664.0 20,364.4 24,296.7 15,473.6 174,759.0

Table based on Solano, “La beneficencia privada”, p. 189.

49 50

Cabrera and Escandón, Historia del Nacional Monte de Piedad. Solano, “La beneficencia privada”, and Cabrera and Escandón, Historia del Nacional Monte de Piedad.

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table 10.3  Redemptions, Expenses, and Returns at Monte de Piedad between 1775–81

Year

Days pawned

Number of customers pawning items

Amounts redeemed

Expenses incurred

Deposits refunded and returns on sales

1775 1776 1777 1778 1779 1780 1781 Total

123 144 143 141 143 140 121

12,888 28,190 28,782 32,387 31,014 30,202 27,321 190,784

254,751.7 504,583.2 533,629.5 564,629.7 547,446.3 564,663.3 521,939.2 3,491 643.6

26,236.1 14,441.2 13,561.1 13,713.1 13,362.5 14,325.5 11,233.2 107,363.2

3,689.1 18,179.4 28,884.1 27,088.7 18, 545.1 27,187.7 27,187.7 142,475.0

Table based on Solano, “La beneficencia privada”, p. 189.

9

The Banco de Avío Minero

Of all the productive activities in New Spain, mining required the most investment and capital. However, as we have seen, apart from the partial support provided by the Crown, such as mercury on credit, the mining sector relied for its financing on credits and loans provided by businessmen, who, given the inherent risks, offered loans and credits with very unfavorable payment deadlines and interest rates. In the 18th century, the Banco de Avío Minero (Mining Development Bank) was established in Mexico City to promote the exploitation of minerals. It was the first industrial finance bank in the Americas and forerunner to the development banks established after Mexico gained independence.51 To operate, the bank counted with an endowment fund consisting of eight grains for each mark that entered the Mint for coining and based on this arrangement, its projected annual income was 200,000 pesos. Of this sum, 50,000 pesos was set aside to cover the administrative costs of other institutions—Tribunal de Minería, Seminario de Minería, and Banco de Avío—that were established during this period. The remaining 150,000 pesos served as collateral for 3 million pesos in loans obtained from Church institutions and private financial groups, which were offered 5 per cent interest per annum.52 51 Flores, El Banco de Avío. 52 Ibid. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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The bank would advance money and supplies to mining companies, which the latter would pay for with the silver they produced, and charge a moderate interest or premium for each silver mark, which was set according to several factors—the type of credit, cash vs. goods, productivity of the company, frequency of silver dispatches, and loan amount. According to Eduardo Flores Clair, the interest on cash loans was between one and four reales per mark (between 1.5 and 5.9 per cent), with most mining companies paying between 4 and 5 per cent on amounts in cash, plus a surcharge of between 1.5 and 3 per cent on goods. As already mentioned, these rates were much lower than those offered to the mining sector by merchants and other lenders. Premiums were used to pay back loans that the bank obtained from private parties and corporations, and for capitalization purposes. However, the bank faced serious difficulties in fulfilling its mission since it was unable to collect on the loans and supplies it provided. As a result, the bank could only provide financing to mining companies for eight years (1784–92), for a total of 1,527,587 pesos, while running debts in the amount of 945,399 pesos or a 61.8 per cent deficit.53 To the bank’s financial woes, we can add the Spanish Crown’s increasing demands for donations and loans. Between 1777 and 1810, the bank granted loans to the Spanish Crown for almost five million pesos, either proceeding from its coffers or borrowed from private parties and Church corporations.54 Ultimately, it was forced to use almost its entire endowment to meet its commitments, to amortize its capital, and service its debt, undermining its original mission and bankrupting it.55 10

The End of an Epoch

The Crown’s demand for resources reached its tipping point between 1780 and 1810 with the collection of 30 million pesos in loans and five million pesos in donations, as well as over ten million pesos in the first decade of the 19th century with the enforcement of the Royal Decree Consolidating Public Debt Securities. These amounts were sent to Spain, resulting in the decapitalization of the colony, as well as the consequent contraction of working capital and diminished availability of cash credits.56 Ecclesiastical institutions, ­landowners, merchants, and businessmen who had loans with the Church were negatively 53 54 55 56

Ibid. Méndez, “La quiebra del Tribunal”, Table 1, pp. 59–60. Ibid. To these numbers, we must add the growing amounts of ordinary and extraordinary tax revenues that were sent to Spain and to other parts of the empire in the form of subsidies during this period. Carlos Marichal estimates that between 1780 and 1810, the Royal Treasury extracted 250 million pesos from New Spain. See Bankruptcy of Empire by Marichal. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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impacted, with the mining sector losing institutional financing.57 The financial difficulties faced by different economic sectors that were heavily indebted to the Church, with agriculture being but one, and the increasing problems caused by the independence movement, dealt a hard blow to the economy of New Spain.58 After Mexico’s independence from Spain, the Church did not completely stop granting credit. However, it no longer played the key financial role that it had in prior centuries. The merchant elite took a different shape: foreign firms merged with the remaining local ones, and speculators and outsiders appeared on the scene.59 Although Mexico City remained the main commercial and financial center, it faced competition from regional oligarchs to control the silver market and foreign trade. The capital eventually lost its monopoly in coining money as other mints were established, while the new tax structure put an end to fiscal centralization that typified the colonial period. Bibliography

Primary Sources



Secondary Literature

AGN

Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Mexico

Assadourian, C.S., El sistema de la economía colonial. El mercado interior, regiones y espacio económico, Mexico City, 1983. Bakewell, P.J., Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico-Zacatecas 1546–1700, London, 1971. Brading, D.A., Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico (1763–1810), London, 1971. Borchart de Moreno, C.R., Los mercaderes y el capitalismo en México (1759–1778), Mexico City, 1984. Cabrera Siles, E. and Escandón, P., Historia del Nacional Monte de Piedad, 1775–1993, Mexico City, 1993. Cervantes Bello, F.J., “La consolidación de vales reales en Puebla y la crisis del crédito eclesiástico”, in M. del Pilar Martínez López-Cano and G. del Valle Pavón (eds.), El crédito en Nueva España, Mexico City, 1998, pp. 203–228.

57 58 59

Wobeser, Dominación colonial; Marichal, Bankruptcy of Empire; and Valle, Finanzas piadosas. Cervantes, “La consolidación de vales reales”. Meyer, “Empresarios, crédito y especulación”.

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Dehouve, D., “El crédito de repartimiento por los alcaldes mayores, entre la teoría y la práctica”, in M. del Pilar Martínez López-Cano and G. del Valle Pavón (eds.), El crédito en Nueva España, Mexico City, 1998, pp. 151–175. Flores Clair, E., El Banco de Avío Minero novohispano. Crédito, finanzas y deudores, Mexico City, 2001. Francois, M.E., A Culture of Everyday Credit: Housekeeping, Pawnbroking, and Governance in Mexico City, 1750–1920, Lincoln, 2006. García Ayluardo, C., “Sociedad, crédito y cofradía en la Nueva España. El caso de Nuestra Señora de Aránzazu”, Historias 3 (1983), pp. 53–68. García Berumen, E.I., Riqueza, poder y prestigio. Los mayoristas de Zacatecas en la segunda mitad del siglo XVII, Zacatecas, Conaculta, 2014. Hamnett, B.R., Politics and Trade in Southern Mexico, 1750–1821, London, 1971. Hassig, R., Trade, Tribute, and Transportation: The Sixteenth-Century Political Economy of the Valley of Mexico, Norman, 1985. Hoberman, L.S., Mexico’s Merchant Elite 1590–1660: Silver, State, and Society, Durham, 1991. Hoberman, L.S., “El crédito colonial y el sector minero en el siglo XVII: aportación del mercader de plata a la economía colonial”, in M. del Pilar Martínez López-Cano and G. del Valle Pavón (eds.), El crédito en Nueva España, Mexico City, 1998, pp. 61–82. Huerta, M.T., “Los Retes: prototipo del mercader de plata novohispano en la segunda mitad del siglo XVII”, in A. Garritz (ed.), Los vascos en las regiones de México. Siglos XVI-XX, vol. 3, Mexico City, 1997, pp. 71–85. Kicza, J.E., Colonial Entrepreneurs: Families and Business in Bourbon Mexico City, Albuquerque, 1983. Lavrin, A., “La riqueza de los conventos de monjas en Nueva España. Estructura y evolución durante el siglo XVIII”, Cahiers des Amériques Latines 8 (1973), pp. 91–122. Lavrin, A., “La Congregación de San Pedro, una cofradía urbana del México colonial, 1640–1730”, Historia Mexicana 29:4 (1989), pp. 562–601. Loreto López, R., “La función social y urbana del monacato femenino novohispano”, in M.P. Martínez López-Cano, La Iglesia en Nueva España. Problemas y perspectivas de investigación, Mexico City, 2010, pp. 237–265. Marichal, C., Bankruptcy of Empire: Mexican Silver and the Wars between Spain, Britain, and France, 1760–1810, Cambridge, 2007. Martínez López-Cano, M.P., El crédito a largo plazo en el siglo XVI. Ciudad de México (1550–1620), Mexico City, 1995. Martínez López-Cano, M.P., La génesis del crédito colonial. Ciudad de México. Siglo XVI, Mexico City, 2001. Martínez López-Cano, M.P., “Los mercaderes de la ciudad de México en el siglo XVI y el comercio con el exterior”, Revista Complutense de Historia de América 32 (2006), pp. 103–126.

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Martínez López-Cano, M.P., “La venta de oro en cadenas. Transacción crediticia, controversia moral y fraude fiscal. Ciudad de México, 1590–1616”, Estudios de Historia Novohispana 42 (2010), pp. 17–56. Martínez López-Cano, M.P. and Valle Pavón, G. (eds.), El crédito en Nueva España, Mexico City, 1998. Méndez Pérez, J.R., “La quiebra del Tribunal de Minería de la Nueva España vista mediante el financiamiento a la actividad bélica de la Corona española y su herencia en la deuda pública mexicana”, Revista Mexicana de Historia del Derecho 36 (2012), pp. 25–68. Meyer Cosío, R.M., “Empresarios, crédito y especulación (1820–1850)”, in L. Luldow and C. Marichal (eds.), Banca y poder en México (1800–1925), Mexico City, 1985, pp. 99–117. Morales, M.D., “Estructura urbana y distribución de la propiedad en la ciudad de México en 1813”, Historia Mexicana 25:3 (1976), pp. 363–402. Moreno Campos, R.J., “Las inversiones de la Archicofradía de Nuestra Señora del Rosario en la ciudad de México (1680–1805)”, M.A. thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 2004. Pérez Herrero, P., Plata y libranzas. La circulación mercantil en el México borbónico, Mexico City, 1988. Rubial García, A. (ed.), La Iglesia en el México colonial, Mexico City, 2013. Sánchez Santiró, E., Corte de caja. La Real Hacienda de Nueva España y el primer reformismo fiscal de los Borbones (1720–1755). Alcances y contradicciones, Mexico City, 2013. Solano, F., “La beneficencia privada en Ciudad de México: Fundación y primeros tiempos del Sacro y Real Monte de Piedad (1775–1820)”, Revista de Indias 54:200 (1994), pp. 181–190. Valle Pavón, G., “El Consulado de comerciantes de la ciudad de México y las finanzas novohispanas, 1592–1827”, doctoral dissertation, El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 1997. Valle Pavón, G., “Expansión de la economía mercantil y creación del Consulado de México”, Historia Mexicana 51:3–22 (2002), pp. 517–557. Valle Pavón, G., Finanzas piadosas y redes de negocios. Los mercaderes de la ciudad de México ante la crisis de Nueva España, 1804–1808, Mexico City, Instituto Mora, 2012. Wobeser, G., “La Inquisición como institución crediticia en el siglo XVIII”, Historia Mexicana 39:4 (1990), pp. 849–879. Wobeser, G., Dominación colonial. La consolidación de vales reales 1804–1812, Mexico City, 2003. Wobeser, G., El crédito eclesiástico en la Nueva España. Siglo XVIII, Mexico City, 2010. Yuste, C., “Comercio y crédito de géneros asiáticos en el mercado novohispano: Francisco Ignacio de Yraeta, 1767–1792”, in M. del Pilar Martínez López-Cano and G. del Valle Pavón (eds.), El crédito en Nueva España, Mexico City, 1998, pp. 106–130. Yuste, C., Emporios transpacíficos. Comerciantes mexicanos en Manila, 1710–1815, ­Mexico City, 2007.

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CHAPTER 11

Uneven Chances

Education in Colonial Mexico City Enrique González González De cien personas que encuentres en las calles, apenas hallarás una vestida y calzada […] en esta ciudad se ven dos extremos diametralmente opuestos: mucha riqueza y máxima pobreza; muchas galas y suma desnudez; gran limpieza, y gran porquería […] Ponen gran cuidado, aun la gente pobre, en enseñar a leer y escribir a sus hijos e hijas, confundiendo en esto la desidia común que hay en España.1 Fray Francisco de Ajofrín

∵ 1

The Head of the Kingdom

The viceregal capital was much smaller than present-day Mexico City. The great city of Tenochtitlan occupied the largest of a series of islands in the lacustrine valley. Europeans destroyed the ceremonial centers and palaces, building the Spanish city over Tenochtitlan, designing the traza with 13 or 14 streets running in a north-south direction, intersected by six or seven streets running eastwest, in addition to the causeway of Tacuba. The Mexica were forced to leave this privileged zone and settle in two parcialidades, with each one organized into several pueblos y barrios—that of San Juan Tenochtitlan, which bordered the traza on the east, south, and west, and that of Santiago Tlatelolco, flanking its north edge.2 Unlike rural congregations, those in Mexico City had no arable

1 Ajofrín, Diario de un viaje que hizo a la América, vol. 1, pp. 77, 82. I thank my colleagues and friends, M.T. Álvarez Icaza, L. Pérez, and V. Gutiérrez, for their comments and suggestions. 2 Lira, Las comunidades indígenas frente a la ciudad de México; O’Gorman, “Reflexiones sobre la distribución urbana colonial de la ciudad de México”, pp. 11–40.

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land to sustain themselves.3 Indians instead survived by serving the conquistadors. Within this social and geographic context, education was made manifest. Strictly speaking, only the Spanish and their children, who owned land within the traza, constituted the city per se, as they were deemed residents, were entitled to vote, and were elected to seats on the city council, which was established in 1522.4 However, since they depended on Indians and other “service” providers from the parcialidades for goods and services, a noisy throng of peons, servants, slaves, merchants, and trajineros swarmed through the streets and even slept in them, thus linking the Spanish city with the immense area that surrounded it. The interaction between the two territories was clear, but despite their geographic proximity, they were legally and socially worlds apart. The intermediaries between Spaniards and Indians were initially the señores naturales (Indian lords or caciques), who assigned tasks to indios del común or maceguales (lower-ranking Indians), who were legally classified as miserables.5 In other words, they were people without legal autonomy forced into Spanish tutelage and excluded from holding important positions. These people served the caciques, but the latter’s power waned at the end of the 16th century when Indian cabildos and corregidores de indios (agents of the king) arose. The cabildos had certain rights: they were entitled to implement justice at the local level and had the right to set aside cash surpluses in community coffers. On the other hand, mestizos, negros, and mulattos were not classified as miserables and had almost no legal rights.6 Like Indians, negros had to pay tribute.7 Hence, Francisco de Ajofrín’s opening quote, who wrote of “two diametrically opposite extremes … great riches and dire poverty; lots of finery and extreme nakedness; great cleanliness and great filth”, is especially relevant. Mexico City was a complex human panorama where the different races and classes mixed every day, but their legal status marked social and political boundaries that were difficult to transcend. Who, and how, would educate these polar extremes? 3 Fray P. de Gante to Charles V, 15 February 1552: the Indians “siendo en tiempo passado señores, é mandado toda la tierra, son agora esclauos […], y como estos sirvan a toda la cibdad […], padecen neçessidad”; while the husband works for the Spaniards, “su mujer le busca la comida para ella y para él y sus hijos, y para tributar […] Y como no tienen tierras donde sembrar, del trabajo de sus manos lo van a comprar […]”. Cartas de Indias, p. 98. 4 Unless otherwise indicated, “Spaniards” or “Spanish” in this chapter refers to race rather than to place of birth. Criollos denotes Spaniards born in the New World. 5 Strictly speaking, miserables was a term that denoted helplessness and extreme poverty and was applied to Indians, even if some were wealthy. The term also had legal and political implications. It allowed Spaniards to declare Indians legally dependent and by extension, subject to Spanish tutelage. 6 Mestizos were outcasts and considered to be potentially dangerous. Over and above biology, social class was the determining factor. 7 Sánchez Santiró, Corte de caja, pp. 140–146. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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As of 1535, Mexico City was home to a viceroy who ruled over a geographic territory that stretched from Guatemala to the vast territories of California and Florida, as well as being the seat of the Audiencia Real, the main royal court, and the Royal Treasury. Furthermore, the city’s first bishop, appointed in 1528, was enthroned as archbishop in 1545, with authority over all the dioceses in New Spain (see Rubial García, this volume).8 Mexico City was also home to the Holy Inquisition, which operated with enormous immunity and whose jurisdiction extended to the Philippines. These institutions competed with the city council, a political body who represented the interests of conquistadors, landowners, and merchants, but not without growing restrictions. Friars soon occupied the recently conquered territories and those that remained to be conquered. In places with large populations, they founded churches and monasteries. In less populated areas, they established capillas de visita (rural parishes), which were supervised by the monastery. Each religious order established a geographic domain for religious instruction, which was governed from Mexico City.9 Clinging to their privileges, the friars refused to bow to and often clashed with any authority, whether episcopal, city council, or even royal. It can be argued that the ongoing rivalry between the friars and the cathedral authorities, and between the regular and secular clergies, was a leitmotif in the history of the Church throughout the period of Spanish rule, leaving an indelible mark on the history of education (see Rubial García, this volume).10 How could Spanish authorities supply the governors and other officials needed to ensure their dominion over densely populated and constantly expanding territories? The Crown acknowledged the need to appoint those born in the Indies to aid in the imperial project, but only allowing them into the lower and middle strata of the political pyramid. In the first half of the century, the Crown appointed both American-born sons of Spaniards and Indian lords. Schools were required to train both groups. In 1539, the first printer, the Brescian Giovanni Paoli, arrived in Mexico.11 Maintaining trade with Sevillian merchants, Paoli provided a regular supply of the books that were in demand by an increasingly complex society: liturgical books, devotional works, catechisms, literacy manuals, Latin grammars, philosophical treatises, books on law, medicine, and theology, and books for casual 8 Gil, Primeras “Doctrinas” del Nuevo Mundo. 9 First, each religious order governed from Mexico City, but later they were divided into provinces. However, in many aspects, they continued to depend on the capital. 10 Rubial García (ed.), La Iglesia en el México Colonial. By secularization, I mean when one or more doctrinas of friars became parishes of the secular clergy, or when a school run by friars passed on to clerics or lay people. In the second instance, it refers to Enlightenment efforts the laity carried out to have a broader control of society. 11 Sandal, Giovanni Paoli da Brescia e l’introduzione della stampa nel Nuovo Mondo (1539–1560). - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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reading.12 Paoli’s press immediately started printing books and pamphlets not only in Spanish and Latin, but also in several indigenous languages that were just beginning to be transcribed in the Latin alphabet, contributing to the process of evangelization. For a century, the printing press operated only in Mexico City, overseen by the viceroy, archbishop, and Inquisition. It does not do justice to the capital, however, to reduce it to a strict social and geographic boundary. The capital depended on the outlying neighborhoods and nearby towns for supplies, while the power of its religious and secular authorities extended over vast territories that were ultimately ruled from Madrid. To speak of educating Indians and criollos in Mexico City implies acknowledging its ties to its many areas of influence. 2

Educating the Indigenous Population: Maceguales and Lords

Spanish cities—above all Mexico City—played a strategic role in the colonization process, acting as enclaves that ensured the control of vast areas. After first being subjected by direct or indirect force, Indians were made tributaries of the Spanish. Around 1589, the criollo Juan Suárez de Peralta wrote that the purpose of the conquest was to provide Indians with a Christian life “more befitting human nature”, and also to reward the Spanish. Scarcely had Mexico been conquered when Cortés “began to distribute the land, placing Indian peoples under the charge of Spanish conquistadors for their exploitation”.13 Certain missionaries feared that the excessive burden would decimate the indigenous populace as in the Caribbean “and that, in exchange for thirty or forty years of service, [the Spanish] would lose the land forever, since, without Indians, it is worthless”.14 In one way or another, Indians either served as warriors to conquer other people or as servants of the conquerors, who became encomenderos, and to whom Indians were assigned in the form of an encomienda. Soon the king opposed this framework not only because it would lead to the extinction of native peoples, but also because he wished to reap the benefits of exacting Indian tribute. As late as the 18th century, the Crown’s second largest source of revenue still derived from tribute from Indians, negros, and free mulattos.15 Those who refused to pay tribute were classified as “savages” who had to be subdued “with blood and fire”; if captured, they were enslaved. In 12 13 14 15

González González, “Libros de Flandes en la Nueva España”, pp. 188–189. Suárez de Peralta, Tratado del descubrimiento de las Yndias, p. 137. Gante to the emperor, 15 February 1552, Cartas de Indias, p. 95. Sánchez, Corte de caja … , p. 128.

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short, conquest was synonymous with the domination or enslavement of Indians by the victors, and evangelization was introduced to promote Indian submission to the king and adopt the new religion’s rites and customs. Two irreconcilable approaches guided the evangelization and catechization of Indians.16 For some, like the Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente, also known as Motolinía, it sufficed to introduce Indians to the faith through mass baptisms without any need for extensive catechization. He believed that God miraculously converted them in an instant via the sacrament. For Motolinía, thousands—even hundreds of thousands—of Indians joyously accepted Christianity.17 On Sundays and feast days, those who lived near a monastery went in masse to church and its atrium, where they listened to sermons, and heard mass and other ceremonies, preferably with song. Those living in more distant places were given a day off from work to listen to the doctrinero friars who preached in the iglesia de visita. Either voluntarily or under duress, they ended up partially adopting the new religion, but in the end, most of the indoctrination fell on deaf ears since many friars did not know or barely spoke indigenous languages and knew even less about the Indians’ worldview. They preached to them, in a mixture of Spanish and Latin, about the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary, and the obligation to remain monogamous. Some members of their congregations melded these ideas with their pre-existing polytheist, polygamist mindsets, while others did not. Under these circumstances, Indians found it difficult to view virginity and immaculate conception as virtues. On the other hand, friars like Bernardino de Sahagún insisted on the need to become familiar with indigenous languages, cosmovision, and pagan rituals in order to extirpate all vestiges of idolatry.18 They were aware that Indians remained pagan after mass baptisms and sermons, and they believed that baptism needed to be preceded and followed by catechism if the new faith was to take root. While praiseworthy, this approach was utopian. Although the conquest was justified on the grounds of spreading the faith, how could it be preached by so few priests to millions of pagans, especially when encomenderos refused to give their Indians time to listen to the itinerant friars?

16

17 18

On colonial education, even if outdated, see Becerra, La organización de los estudios en la Nueva España. For the 16th to 17th centuries, see Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Historia de la educación en la época colonial: El mundo indígena and Historia de la educación en la época colonial: La educación de los criollos y la vida urbana. For the Enlightennment period, consult Tanck de Estrada, Pueblos de indios y educación. On the debates about Motolinía, see Dyer, prologue to Memoriales. Fundamentally, consult Bustamante, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún; more recently, Ríos Castaño, Translation as Conquest.

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Eventually a social compromise was reached between friars and encomenderos. Around 1570, the Franciscans declared to the king that it was harmful to teach the faith to “the children of laborers and plebs, who should simply learn the basic tenets of Christian doctrine and, having done this, learn their father’s trade from an early age”.19 The friars argued that, “children of lower-class status should not attend school or learn to read and write, since only the sons of the Indian nobles should be permitted to do so”. Some missionaries, they argued, “have taught many sons of laborers and commoners, enabling them to move above their station, so that they now govern many towns, having cast down and subdued the principales”. It sufficed, they added, for the maceguales to learn to recite the Per signum crucis (“By the sign of the Cross”), the Pater (Lord’s Prayer), the Ave Maria, the Creed, and the Salve Mater (“Hail Mary, Mother of Mercy”). Since not all of them managed all this, to receive confession and be married, they had to “know how to make the sign of the cross and recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, and to make a confession of faith”.20 In this way, the gente baja, or commoners, gave themselves to manual labor as soon as possible, and the social order remained unchanged. In contrast, “[the friars] try to gather the sons of the principales, the equivalent of our gentlemen and nobles, in schools […] where they learn, among other things, to read and write, […] in order to prepare them to govern their peoples and serve the church”.21 In fact some early sources report that these young nobles were lodged, either willingly or under duress, in “rooms” adjoining the monastery churches. They were separated from their parents so they would “forget” their old “heathen practices” and convert to Christianity. They learned to read, write, and sing liturgical chants, and the most skilled preached in the city squares and in their own communities, while also denouncing any secret practices by their parents, relatives, or acquaintances.22 On the western side of Mexico City, the Franciscans built the enormous “chapel” of San José de los Naturales, with a large courtyard, capable of accommodating thousands, where Indians received religious instruction. At the same time, they lodged between 600 and 1,000 Indian youths (the sources might be exaggerating) in the adjacent monastery school to provide them with

19 20 21 22

For this quote and the following ones, see García Icazbalceta (ed.), Códice franciscano, pp. 54–56. Ibid. It is important to remark that, until the mid-18th century, whenever sources mention teaching Indians to read and write, they are referring exclusively to the sons of ­caciques—a subtlety sometimes neglected in the historiography. Ibid., p. 55. Gante to the emperor, 31 October 1532, Cartas de Indias, pp. 51–53.

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instruction befitting their social station.23 Each monastery would adopt this practice, begun, in 1528, by Fray Pedro de Gante (1480–1572), who, in his letters, praised the progress achieved but lamented the growing misery of the Indians, including their principales. They could not feed themselves and their families, serve the Spanish, “buy” their tribute “every 80 days”, and go to school.24 Once the original experiment was deemed a success, it was duplicated. In 1536, the viceroy founded a royal college next to the Franciscan monastery of Santiago in Tlatelolco, which lay to the north of the city. Sixty youths, the most outstanding from noble families, entered the school, where they learned Spanish and Latin.25 Although some sources claim the school a failure, it nevertheless educated children of indigenous nobility for half a century.26 Their mastery of Spanish and Latin enabled them to assist friars to learn Nahuatl and other indigenous languages, to produce grammars and lexicons of them, and to print books in native languages. The students also learned European music from illustrations in choirbooks.27 The royal inspectors who visited the school between 1572 and 1582 inventoried their assets, including its library with holdings of 60 to 80 volumes, almost all in Latin. These included: Latin dictionaries and Latin-Spanish and Spanish-Nahuatl glossaries; Latin grammars by Antonio de Nebrija, Despauterius, and Erasmus, and two printed in Mexico (Fray Maturino Gilberti’s Latin grammar and Vives’ Dialogues); classics such as Cicero, Quintilian, Virgil, Plautus, Sallust, and Plutarch; the Christian poets Decimus Ausonius and Battista Mantuano; Plato and other Greeks translated into Latin; treatises on logic, natural philosophy, and cosmography; and, more noteworthy, bibles, an ecclesiastical glossary, and works of the Church Fathers. Only two or three works were in Spanish, indicating that the language was taught orally. In 1572, the teacher and the repetidor were salaried Indians who taught Latin to 65 boarders and 35 students in a classroom that contained a lectern, desks, benches, and a bookshelf. Additionally, a student taught reading and writing to the children of the

23 24 25

26 27

Gómez Canedo, La educación de los marginados … , pp. 132–136. Gante to the emperor, 15 February 1552, Cartas de Indias, pp. 93–102, 98. González González, “Los usos de la cultura escrita en el nuevo mundo”, pp. 91–110. According to the Códice franciscano … (1570), Tlatelolco “is autonomous and has its own mayor and system of government, being set apart [from Mexico City], though right next to it”, p. 7. The school lay outside the traza. Ricard, La ‘conquète spirituelle’ du Mexique, Ch. VII. The inventory for 1574 lists punches and binding materials. “Códice de Tlatelolco”… , vol. II, pp. 241–280, 262; González González and Gutiérrez Rodríguez, “Una biblioteca de latinidad para indios caciques”, pp. 199–223.

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parcialidad.28 This data, recorded four decades after the school was founded, gives the impression that it was a fully functioning institution. Although Latin grammar was the main subject of instruction at Tlatelolco, the students also had books on philosophy and theology. Nevertheless, they were barred from the priesthood and its offices, unable to become chaplains, spiritual advisers, bishops, or members of ecclesiastical councils. Also, for over a century, the university refused to admit them.29 It bears reiterating that the colegio de Tlatelolco never set out to train Indian priests or elevate them to the same level as the Spanish; rather Indians were taught to serve as caciques who favored the interests of the conquerors, and their training made them ideal mediators between Spanish authorities and the maceguales.30 In their dual capacity of caciques and mediators between indigenous communities and the Spanish, they transmitted orders and organized the compulsory tasks performed in both times of peace and war. They also helped to catechize their fellow Indians, appointed the workers charged with building churches and monasteries, and chose the friars’ servants. The teaching of Latin came to an end in Tlatelolco when indigenous leaders became politically irrelevant and when their numbers diminished due to epidemics and other crises. Since 1600, teachers were limited to teaching catechism and basic reading and writing to students from the barrio. Afterwards, only the Society of Jesus would consider Indian Latin education. The second archbishop, Alonso de Montúfar (1554–72), wanted to halt the dissemination of biblical texts translated into indigenous languages, which therefore made preaching more difficult. When the Spanish Inquisition arrived in Mexico in 1571, restrictions increased and thousands of books were banned. While it is unknown what occurred in the capital, The Imitation of Christ was confiscated, in 1588, in a visita to Puebla by the Inquisition.31 Of the 215 readers named in a list from Puebla, none were reported to be Indian, while a black slave lost three books, only one of which was forbidden. The ban on reading included the indigenous populace, which only increased illiteracy rates, as 28 29

30 31

Codex Mendieta … , pp. 253–269, 254. The university’s 1551 founding charter asserted that it was to admit “the Indians (naturales) and the sons of Spaniards”. Viceroy Velasco allowed the caciques (Indian lords) to learn grammar, but asserted “for now, it is not convenient to teach them other things”, and this policy remained unchanged until the late 17th century. Carta al rey, 7 February 1554, Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), México, fols. 13, 19. Against the assertion of Ricard and his many followers, González and Gutiérrez, in “Una biblioteca de latinidad … ”, argued that the school did not set out to train Indian priests. For Ricard’s assertion see, La ‘conquète spirituelle’ du Mexique. In Libros y libreros en el siglo XVI, Fernández del Castillo (ed.), published a catalogue of books confiscated in 1573. See pp. 471–495.

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witnessed by 200 recently published wills by Indians in Mexico City and the Valley of Mexico during the 16th and 17th centuries.32 Only one of the testators, an Indian noble from Xochimilco, bequeathed, in 1650, 15 unidentified books.33 While illustrating that Indians were rich enough to own and confer property, these wills also bear witness to the fact that even the nobles had ceased to learn how to read; one can only imagine the situation among the lower classes. The policies regarding catechism tended to curtail goals. The first ecclesiastical boards and the First Provincial Council (1555) ordered two primers produced—“one brief and without notes” and “the other with a substantial declaration of the articles of faith and the commandments […], to be translated into many languages and printed”.34 Archbishop Zumárraga (1540–47) produced many voluminous catechisms in Spanish for “beginners” and “proficient” students. In 1546, the Franciscan Alonso de Molina published Doctrina christiana breve in Nahuatl and Spanish, and his fellow Franciscan, Fray Pedro de Gante, published Doctrina christiana en lengua Mexicana of which the 1553 edition, with 328 pages all in Nahuatl, is extant. Fray Maturino Gilberti published many works in the “language of Michoacán”—above all, the 600page Diálogo de doctrina christiana (1559), which had no Spanish version. The Dominicans also published both short and extensive bilingual texts.35 Soon after being enthroned as archbishop in 1574, the ex-Inquisitor, Moya de Contreras, promoted a short catechism and ordered all the parish priests and vicars to “have and teach Christian catechism to all in their charge […] and to not teach any other so as to avoid confusion”, under the penalty of ten pesos.36 Furthermore, he also “entreated” catechists and bishops to use it. The 1576 bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish edition consisted of 16 pages, to which the Augustinian Melchor de Vargas added a section in the Otomi language, expanding it to 28 pages.37 It sufficed for the faithful, without distinction, to memorize prayers and rules. When they reached Spanish America in 1572, the Jesuits wanted to establish schools to teach grammar and theology to principales, and to ordain them as 32

33 34 35 36 37

In 1576, the Inquisitor Bonilla wrote: “ … those books were not confiscated because they were forbidden, or because there was anything bad in them, but so as to prevent the lower classes from falling into error”. Ten years later, he reiterated: “ … they are prohibited for other reasons conducive to the good government of the Christian republic”. See González González and Del Ángel, “La santa ignorancia”, pp. 77–78. Rojas Rabiela (ed.), Vidas y bienes olvidados, vol. 3, p. 242. Martínez and Cervantes (eds.), Concilios provinciales mexicanos. See García, Bibliografía mexicana. Ibid., p. 277. Bustamante, “Doctrina Christiana muy vtil … de 1578”, pp. 33–44.

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priests. However, their proposals were unanimously rejected not only in Madrid and Rome, but also in Mexico, where Moya’s policy of minimal education for Indian nobles held sway.38 “It is not advisable”, he wrote, “that they learn Latin, rhetoric, philosophy or any other subject other than the mechanical arts”.39 This was due, according to protests of Tlatelolco’s remaining caciques studying Latin, that Spaniards only wanted to see Indians “with the burden on their backs engaged in service”.40 Therefore, in the 1580s, the Jesuits founded the colegios de San Martín not far from the city, in Tepotzotlán, and San Gregorio next to Mexico City’s Colegio Máximo, albeit with the prohibition of teaching Latin to their students, even if they were caciques. San Gregorio survived until the mid-19th century, still remaining linked to the Indian population.41 In 1585, Moya, who was both archbishop and viceroy, chaired the Third Mexican Provincial Council, insisting on a single, concise catechism, excommunicating all those who persisted in “using all the others that were published before” or afterwards. He also ordered the parish priests to found schools to teach Indians to read and write, but only in Spanish and without stipulating how teachers were to be paid. The attempts to establish schools tended to flounder when their pro� moters died. In 1771, the Fourth Provincial Council confirmed the resolution of the Third Provincial Council mandating a basic catechism. However, in keeping with the prevailing trends of the time, it insisted on a Spanish-only version. In the 18th century, with the change of dynasty and the introduction of the Enlightenment-inspired Bourbon Reforms, education came to be seen as a vehicle of social progress. Finally, in 1766, authorization was given for the sons of caciques “to be admitted to the Church, educated in schools, and promoted to positions in the Church and public office in accordance with their merits and abilities”.42 The charter once more took up the previous measures in favor of Indians and mestizos that had been decreed since the time of Philip II but were never implemented. An attempt was made to breathe new life into the colegio de Tlatelolco, and it was decreed that a quarter of all the scholarships awarded by the conciliar seminary go to Indians. Various caciques, laymen, and members of the clergy set out to found schools for Indians, with mixed results. Indeed, the number of Indian priests in the archbishopric increased.43 According to this new vision, Indians would progress by learning Spanish, abandoning their “barbarous” languages unsuited for expressing the truths of 38 39 40 41 42

Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Historia de la educación …, El mundo indígena, pp. 153–162. AGI, México, 336B, 176. Ciudad Real, Tratado curioso y docto, vol. I, pp. 15–17. A vision of the college is discussed in Gómez Canedo, La educación de los marginados. Lanning (ed.), Reales cédulas de la Real y Pontificia universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, pp. 170–175. 43 Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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their new faith. While policy in the 16th and 17th centuries favored evangelizing in indigenous languages, a Spanish-only approach prevailed in the 18th century, leading to resistance and serious conflicts. During his long tenure, Archbishop Manuel Rubio y Salinas (1749–66) established 237 schools in the archbishopric to teach Spanish to Indians. Unlike his predecessors, Rubio provided these schools with funding, financing them from the coffers where each community deposited its surpluses. In 1808, at least 30 per cent of the schools opened by Rubio were still running, and Mexico City’s two parcialidades, comprising 17 pueblos de indios, had schools in Spanish instruction.44 On the eve of Mexican Independence, an idea that prevailed and, in part, continues to this day, centered on the belief that Indians needed to be “de-Indianized” in order to “progress” and become “civilized”. 3

The World of the Criollos

While Indians and different castas were denied access to education, criollos were taught to read and write at home, either by private tutors or by their parents, who, according to the traveler Francisco de Ajofrín, “made a big effort, even the poor, to teach their sons and daughters to read and write”.45 By 1709, teachers of Spanish stock were complaining because “in this city and its environs there are all kinds of men—Spaniards, negros, mulattos, and Indians— in the streets and houses, offering to teach children how to read, write, and count”.46 Besides these door-to-door teachers, there were few schools for children subsidized by city government, parish priests, local monasteries, or funded by a pious inheritance. In the so-called amigas school, an elementary school for girls, they learned catechism, domestic skills, and sometimes, how to read and write. In 1749, the municipal-government inspectors visited 34 elementary schools and 12 amigas, without counting the “community” schools in the parcialidades.47 Since 1601, there were ordinances stipulating that only Spaniards who were cristianos viejos (old Christians) could teach in schools, but “harmful tolerance” prevented its application; a practice wide and broad.48 To teach, instructors used a cartilla which contained the alphabet, vowels, and consonants, and important prayers, such as the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail 44 45 46 47 48

Álvarez, “Las lenguas de la fe (1749–1765)”. Ajofrín, Diario de un viaje que hizo a la América, vol. 1, pp. 77, 82. Gonzalbo, “Los primeros siglos de la Nueva España”, p. 68. Ibid., p.72. Ibid., pp. 67–72. See also: Tanck de Estrada, “La Enseñanza de la lectura y de la escritura en la Nueva España 1700–1821”, pp. 49–93; Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Historia … , La educación de los criollos, pp. 25–42; and Tanck de Estrada, La educación ilustrada. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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Mary in Spanish, and perhaps also in Latin or Nahuatl.49 The users of these cartillas pulled pages from them, and unfortunately only a few examples of these can still be found. Before long, their printing was regulated and only institutions holding a royal license could produce them—the Cathedral of Toledo in Castile (1583) and the hospital de Indios in Mexico (1553).50 The hospital’s registers include payments from printers for the cartillas published. A systematic study of these payments would allow us to better evaluate the access of people to rudimentary reading and writing. Recent research gives us an idea of the publications that circulated in Spanish, both printed in Spain and Mexico, which included comedies, novels, and above all, devotional texts.51 Although questioned by the Inquisition in the 16th century, these publications became very popular in the 18th century, where women were key consumers of “light” and devotional literature. Girls’ education was limited to basic literacy.52 As Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–94) tells us, after attaining a rudimentary education in an amiga school, she paid for private grammar lessons and became a nun to continue her studies. She expressed regret at being unable to enter the university, remarking that her only instructors and companions were books. She also defended the right of women to learn to read and write.53 Sor Juana was an exception to the rule in a world where women were excluded from literary life. Other nuns read and wrote, but only under the supervision of their confessors, rather than as independent authors. Much of the same applied to lay males with no formal studies. They had to be authorized by letrados who would supervise them, or they ran the risk of being prosecuted. The situation was worse for mestizos, mulattos, and castas. The files of the Inquisition bear witness to the fate of various unlettered “idiotic” men and women who went beyond their station.54 Once boys learned to read and write, they could go on to study Latin, which differentiated the educated from the uneducated, conferring on the former the status of letrado.55 Latin was the official language of the Roman ­Catholic 49 50 51 52 53

54 55

Only one exemplar of the 16th-century Cartilla para enseñar a leer remains extant. Viñao Frago, “Aprender a leer en el Antiguo Régimen”, pp. 149–191; Tanck de Estrada, “La Enseñanza de la lectura ... ”, pp. 50–51. Bello Baños, “De l’alphabétisation des mexicains”; Moreno, Las letras y el oficio; and Suárez Rivera, “El negocio del libro en Nueva España”. Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Las mujeres en la Nueva España. Cruz, “Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz”, Obras completas, vol. IV, pp. 440–477; Alatorre, “Sor Juana y los hombres”, pp. 7–27; Ratto, “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora en el episodio novohispano de la ‘Querella de las mujeres’”; and Mayer (ed.), Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, vol. II, pp. 151–177. Chocano Mena, La fortaleza docta; Rubial García, Profetisas y solitarios. Today, the term letrado refers to an attorney. Here it is used to refer to a person trained in Latin.

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Church and was also the language of instruction in grammar schools, seminarios tridentinos (Tridentine Seminaries), and universities. Students spoke Latin in classes and debates, and textbooks and treatises on science were also printed in Latin. Mastering the language was a prerequisite for those wishing to occupy high-ranking positions. From 1528, the capital was home to teachers such as bachiller Blas de Bustamante, who taught both friars and laymen. In 1553, he began teaching at the university, a post he held for 35 years until his retirement.56 Depending on their methodology, teachers taught either grammar or grammar and classical texts written in Latin, as was the case in Tlatelolco. Bustamante’s methodology, however, remains unknown. There were other figures such as bachiller Gonzalo Vázquez, who was a teacher in Archbishop Zumárraga’s cathedral school in 1536, as well as Martín Fernández.57 Diego Díaz founded a school in 1552 and was still teaching in 1572.58 Another outstanding figure was the humanist and devotee of Erasmus, Francisco Cervantes de Salazar (c.1514–75). Shortly after arriving in Mexico in 1551, he lectured on grammar and the humanities and, in 1553, was awarded a chair in rhetoric at the university; his library contained upwards of 500 books.59 But grammar alone did not suffice to be deemed a letrado. Before embarking in the study of canon or civil law, medicine, or theology, one also need to be versed in philosophy. The cycle of study lasted three years and was under the guidance of a single teacher, teaching logic or Súmulas in the first year, advanced logic and metaphysics in the second, and natural philosophy and ethics, according to Aristotle, in the third. In the mid-16th century, Spaniards had options to study grammar, but there were no formal courses in philosophy or “higher” studies. At first, the monasteries filled this gap, but it was difficult for them to create and consolidate their programs. Although they were meant to train future friars, they also accepted laymen. Little is known about the Franciscans, who arrived in 1523, but who soon began training novices from the areas surrounding the city.60 The Dominicans arrived in 1526, and by 1535, they 56 57 58 59 60

Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Ramo Universidad, vol. 4, fol. 21. See also Pavón, Universitarios y Universidad en México, pp. 401–403. González González and Gutiérrez Rodríguez, “Los catedráticos novohispanos y sus libros”, pp. 83–102. In priuata schola, & preçepta & autores emendate nimium exponit (in private schools, they teach rules and letters); Cervantes de Salazar, Commentaria in Ludovici Vives, pp. 252v– 253. Also by Cervantes de Salazar, see México en 1554 y Túmulo imperial, pp. 24–25, 86. González González, “A Humanist in the New World”, pp. 235–258; González González and Gutiérrez Rodríguez, “Los catedráticos novohispanos … ”. For greater understanding of the Franciscans, see Méndez, La Real y pontificia Universidad de México, pp. 19–23; for comprehension of the Dominicans and Augustinians, respectively, also consult Méndez, pp. 24–31, 32–39.

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were teaching the arts and theology. The Augustinians, arriving in the capital in 1533, also devoted themselves to study, with a secular priest teaching them grammar in 1540. That same year, Fray Alonso de la Veracruz taught a course in the arts in Michoacán, later publishing it in Mexico City. As early as 1540, the archdeacon, Juan Negrete, taught theology in the cathedral.61 But who taught the preparatory courses in the arts? Applicants for government and church positions had to prove their qualifications. The universities, which offered grados de bachiller, licenciado, and doctor, were the best places to obtain the required certification. Indeed, they were the only places where students could graduate from, which is one reason why municipal councils and both the lay and religious authorities wanted to establish a university in the city. Stressing pragmatic motives, they desired to prepare the sons of the conquerors and the rest of the city’s inhabitants for honorable employment. Indeed, when the Crown forbade encomenderos Indian laborers, they saw the university as an alternative that would enable their sons to occupy mid-level government positions. Furthermore, the viceroy, Audiencia, and the friars insisted on the importance of letras y virtud for the growing criollo and mestizo populations, arguing that they would have less time to conspire if they devoted themselves to learning. For their part, bishops wanted to assert their authority. However, despite the Crown’s support, this was a slow and difficult process due to the lack of tithes, the initial weakness of the bishops and clergy, and above all, the shortage of priests.62 While the religious orders trained plenty of friars in their novitiates, the bishops lacked analogous institutions, explaining their eagerness to establish a university from which students would opt for the priesthood.63 Even for friars, graduating from a university was a great benefit for professional advancement, both inside and outside their religious order.64 In 1537, Bishop Zumárraga made the first request for a university. Two years later, the city council joined him, with viceregal support. All agreed that a university was needed, but it had to overcome significant obstacles: acquiring a location, teachers, books, students, and financing.65 Viceroy Mendoza asserted that it was the Crown’s duty to support the university and its founding, and in 1550, the king agreed to finance it with 1,000 pesos. In 1551, the royal decree 61 62 63 64 65

Ibid., pp. 72–78; González González, “El arcediano de México don Juan Negrete (siglo XVI)”, pp. 11–52. Pérez Puente, Tiempos de crisis. Although there were some people who argued that Indians should have access to the priesthood, it was decided that only Spaniards and mestizos could be ordained. Ricard, La ‘conquète spirituelle’… , Ch. 7. For another viewpoint, see La Iglesia en el México Colonial. The Franciscans were reformed in the 16th century and left the universities. González González and Gutiérrez, El poder de las letras. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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founding the university was issued, but which did not arrive in Mexico until 1553.66 The university opened immediately thereafter and continued to operate until 1833, when it closed for the first time. The new university was an autonomous institution given its royal decree. However, the financial grant was small, which made things very difficult from the start. The university was governed by an academic staff, who elected its rector in meetings known as claustros, and graduated students in the five traditional faculties: the arts, theology, canon law, civil law, and medicine. Although its teachers and students were mainly clerics, it was not an ecclesiastical institution. But, despite its autonomy, the king and his officials, bishops and members of the cathedral chapter, and the religious orders intervened in its affairs, leading to periodic friction between external powers and its senate. The royal decrees charging the viceroy and the Audiencia with supervision of the university were ambivalent. As the university’s vice patrons, they wielded considerable power: the oidores (judges of the Audiencia) received their doctorates from the university and controlled its senate from within, while also helping to strengthen it. Viceroy Martín Enríquez, who had arrived in Mexico in 1568, took decisive steps to overcome the crisis stemming from its scarce funds, resulting in a sustained recovery. He worked to provide the university its own building to avoid paying rent, and in 1580, he ordered the oidor Pedro Farfán to draw up its bylaws. The viceroy also reopened previously-closed professorships (cátedras) and requested from authorities in Madrid an additional 3,500 pesos to establish a total of 20 cátedras. When Enriquez was transferred to Peru, Viceroy-Archbishop Moya de Contreras continued support of the university, issuing new bylaws and laying the cornerstone of the institution’s permanent headquarters. However, the university paid a great price for the support from viceroys and the Audiencia, resulting in greater interference from both. For example, from the time of Enríquez, the rector was an oidor, a policy which the archbishop and a group of learned clerics disliked. In 1594, the viceroy and the university senate sent the doctor of theology, Juan de Castilla, to Spain as the university’s representative. As a criollo secular cleric, Castilla was educated in New Spain and belonged to a group that opposed the oidores. A skillful negotiator, he resolved the university’s inadequate endowment, obtaining the 3,500 pesos that Enríquez had requested. 66

Pavón Romero and González González, “La primera universidad de México”, pp. 39–56; González González, “Two phases in the Historiography of the Royal University of Mexico (1930–2007)”, pp. 339–404; Peset, Obra dispersa; Pavón, El gremio docto; Pérez Puente, Universidad de doctores; Aguirre Salvador, El mérito y la estrategia; and Aguirre Salvador, Por el camino de las letras. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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While this amount would not increase, it would neither diminish, thus ensuring the institution’s stability and completion of its building and the endowing of 20 cátedras. He also managed to procure autonomous status for the university, granting a jurisdiction royal chart to the rector, a symbolic privilege which, albeit of scant practical value, made it legally independent.67 Having solved the university’s financial concerns, Castilla achieved a drastic turnaround in its internal politics. Promoted by Castilla, successive decrees prohibited oidores from becoming rectors or faculty members. Although the Audiencia’s rejection was categorical, in 1604, the first rector belonging to the faculty was elected. From that moment, the roles were inversed: archbishops and the ecclesiastic chapter had the upper hand. Once the oidores, all born in Spain, had been excluded, the balance of power favored criollo academics, including secular clerics such as Castilla. Soon thereafter, they gained control of the main cátedras, which by extension, limited the positions held by friars. The university was consolidated into a space for the intellectual development of criollos in all faculties and provided access to the degrees of bachiller, licenciado, and doctor, which were indispensable for their social ascent. If the university admitted all the criollos and a good many mestizos, students from outside the capital, lacking economic means, could not attend, and by extension, graduate. The fees for the grado de bachiller ranged between 15 and 40 pesos, while a grado de licenciado cost 600 pesos, thus making it prohibitive to many. The cost for a doctoral degree, besides having limpieza de sangre and coming from an honorable family, exceeded 3,000 pesos. Thus, a doctorate denoted not only one’s education, but also socioeconomic status. With very few exceptions, holders of doctoral degrees belonged to the economic, political, or ecclesiastical elite. It is interesting to note that Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, the most prominent scholar of the 17th century, lacked the means to pay the fees required for the grados mayores of licenciado and doctor, and may not even have obtained the grado de bachiller. Very few members of the small group of Spaniards and criollos who studied Latin graduated, and there was only one grado mayor (of licenciado or doctor) for each 25 bachiller (Table 11.1). Castilla failed to resolve a bitter conflict: Should the university adopt the same bylaws as the University of Salamanca, those proposed by the oidor Farfán in 1580, or those championed by Archbishop Moya in 1586? In 1645, Juan de Palafox, Bishop of Puebla and also a royal inspector, had new bylaws approved without settling the conflict. Ratified by the king in 1649, the bylaws 67

González González, “Entre la universidad y la Corte”, pp.151–185.

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Uneven Chances table 11.1  Grados Menores and Mayores in Mexico, 1553–1775

Years 1553–1668 1669–1775 1553–1775

Menores

Mayores

Total

11,683 18,169 29, 852

392 770 1,162

12,075 18,939 31,014

Table by author. Based on the prologues to the Mexican Constituciones of 1668 and 1775.

became the undisputed rules governing the university, and continued in force until Mexico’s independence, with only small amendments, exemptions, and incidence of disobedience. As the university was solidifying, new protagonists appeared. The Society of Jesus, starting in 1572, began educating hundreds of young criollos in its colleges. While secular students were the exception to the rule in the monastic schools, most of the Jesuit’s pupils were laymen. With their Jesuit education, criollos could become priests, providing bishops with more clergy. Some prelates established schools entrusting criollos to the Jesuits, soon discovering that the institutions were run in accordance with the interests and policies of the Company of Jesus, which did not allow bishops to interfere in the training of their future priests.68 In Mexico City, the Jesuits founded the Colegio Máximo, their only house of teaching. In addition, they promoted the foundation, via private benefactors, of colegios-residencias, or convictorios—boarding schools where communities of lay students lived and studied under the supervision of priests. The Jesuits trainees studied either at the Colegio Máximo or the university, or both. During the 16th century, several colegios-residencias co-existed, but in 1619, they merged with the colegio de San Ildefonso, which came under royal patronage. Endowed by a benefactor, these schools did not belong to the Jesuit Order, although the latter administered them and managed their income. The boarders, especially those from outside the city, received room and board in order to study. Moreover, the convictorios gave their guests a beca, an insignia which was a mark of prestige. The other religious orders also had schools in the province and colleges in the capital: the Augustinians founded the colegio de San Pablo in 1575; the Dominicans established Porta Coeli in 1605; and the Franciscans inaugurated San Buenaventura in 1667. 68

Pérez Puente, Los cimientos de la iglesia.

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At the same time, there were also secular institutions. Outstanding among them was the colegio de San Juan de Letrán, established c.1547, for mestizos, which was governed by the Audiencia and soon became españolizado. Some students learned crafts; others studied grammar and the arts. More aristocratic, the autonomous real y mayor convictorio of Santa María de Santos, established in 1572, took bachilleres to earn grados mayores and by extension, access to prominent positions. Not only did it have a library, but its students also learned from each other during internal academic events.69 Finally, the main secular college was the conciliar seminary, established in 1697, which will be discussed in the pages that follow. In key cities, depending on its wealth and the number of Spaniards, colleges were administered by the Jesuits, other Orders, or the secular clergy.70 In Mexico City’s Colegio Máximo, lessons began with grammar in 1574, followed by the arts and then theology. It soon sought to confer degrees, alarming the university. When Archbishop Moya dared to propose to the king that the institution be transferred to the Jesuits, he was met with strong opposition, especially from the viceroy and the Audiencia; the plan eventually fell through. By 1600, the Crown allowed the Jesuits to continue teaching the disciplines of grammar, arts, and theology, but reaffirmed that only the university could award degrees.71 Not only did the tension abate once the university’s monopoly to grant degrees had been reaffirmed, its influence also grew. Under the old regime, no single entity regulated education. Each institution, from primary to university, established its educational policies according to its financial resources, interests, regulations, and licenses. However, the curriculum was analogous for each institution in Spain and Spanish America. Therefore, following the precedent established by Colegio Máximo, thousands of provincial criollos studied grammar, the arts, and to a lesser extent, theology or law. Those with financial means went to the capital to take an exam and have their degrees conferred. Mexico City became a place of academic pilgrimage for non-residents in search of degrees that would allow them to compete for secular or ecclesiastical 69 70 71

Greenleaf, “San Juan de Letrán”; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, “El Colegio novohispano de Santa María de Todos Santos”, pp. 381–395. Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Hidalgo Pego, “Bibliografía sobre colegios novohispanos”, pp. 105–114. Ramírez González, “La Universidad de México y los conflictos con los jesuitas en el siglo XVI”, pp. 39–57. In 1624, the Jesuits established a university in Mérida but opposed the 1676 founding of the Royal University of Guatemala. This did not affect the royal university of Mexico City, but the founding of a university in Guadalajara in 1792 did, since it attracted students from northern Mexico.

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positions. Of the 6,714 of people who obtained the grado de bachiller in arts between 1701 and 1738, 1,437 (21.4 per cent) studied at the university, 550 (8.2 per cent) in the city’s colleges, and 4,727 (70.4 per cent) at foreign institutions.72 4

Education and Bourbon Reforms

As previously mentioned, the new Bourbon dynasty brought significant changes vis-à-vis Spanish America, and particularly in the second half of the 18th century. The hallmark of these changes was the secularization of education. After much hesitation, in 1753, the Crown ordered the friars to leave their parishes, or Indian doctrinas, which were placed under the charge of the secular clergy.73 The conciliar seminaries received unequivocal royal approval with a view of “spreading the ideas of the clerical enlightenment and perfecting the important education of the clergy, which both benefits the Church and brings tranquility to the State, so as to instill principles of probity in the peoples”.74 A Church that promoted social order was indeed needed for the “tranquility of the State”. While the Jesuit colleges marginalized the archbishop, in the conciliar seminaries, on the other hand, he defined their bylaws, which disciplines were to be taught, stipulating which authors were to be studied, and the kind of priests to be trained. The conciliar seminaries very soon attracted young students, who were granted grace-and-favor scholarships for their upkeep. Moreover, if the archbishop acknowledged them, he might support their application for a parish or some other position, or give them a post in the ecclesiastical courts. Bourbon secularization of education included the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. Although their property was transferred to the king, the colegios-convictorios, who had the right to rental income, soon reopened and were entrusted to the secular clergy. For this reason, in 1768 (a year after Jesuit expulsion), the colegio de San Ildefonso for criollos reopened, establishing its own cátedras, and which was later followed by San Gregorio for caciques. Once the conciliar seminaries were reinforced, the former Jesuit colleges secularized, and the royal university functioning, the religious orders lost their 72 73 74

Pavón Romero, Álvarez, and Quiroz, “Las tendencias demográficas de los artistas en los siglos XVII y XVIII”, pp. 119–158. The three decisive charters were those of 4 October 1749, 1 February 1753, and 23 June 1757. AGN, Reales Cédulas, fols. 69, 103; 73, 13; 77, 77. Charter of 14 August 1768, Novísima Recopilación de las Leyes de Indias, Law I, Title 11, pp. 91–95. For its origins and implications for the New World, see Pérez Puente, Los cimientos de la iglesia; Pérez Puente, “Instrumentos del poder episcopal en Indias”, pp. 169–198.

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influence, be it in schools, colleges, or from the pulpit. The regular clergy, with ample riches and privileges, both in practice and in legal terms, wielded enormous power. The members of the secular clergy, on the other hand, who were answerable to the king and easy to control since the government could either promote or punish them, depended on their loyalty. Hence, for this reason, the secular clergy were more likely to support royal absolutism. At the end of the century, the Crown, wishing to encourage Enlightenment ideas and disciplines, founded four utilitarian, educational lay institutions in the city. In 1768, it established a chair in anatomy in the Hospital Real de los Naturales. With the arrival of Spanish academics, the university’s medical theory and practice was modernized, which still clung to the theories of Galen. In 1788, the university reluctantly established a chair in botany, introducing the Linnaean classification system on the grounds that a better knowledge of plants would benefit public health by improving pharmaceutical practice. The Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos was founded during the same period to teach mathematics, drawing, engraving, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Finally, 1792 saw the opening of the mining tribunal and college, and for the first time, physics and natural sciences were formally studied. The aim of this institution was to promote the mining industry, which was an important source of income for local elites and the king. Opportunities for women also increased with the opening of boarding schools such as La Enseñanza, in 1754, administered by nuns from the Company of Mary, and the lay college of Saint Ignatius or “Las Vizcaínas” in 1767. Indigenous women attended Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, which opened in 1753 and was under the administrative purview of San Gregorio. However, none of these institutions went beyond teaching reading and writing, elementary arithmetic, and domestic crafts. These new institutions led to animosity between Spanish-born officials and learned criollos. Some rejected the new scientific and ideological thinking (see Archim, this volume), while others feared losing professional privileges, but nearly all resented the haughty gachupines. The university quietly resisted royal reforms but a repudiation of them, in support of learned criollos, could have resulted in the gradual loss of the king’s support.75 While the colleges in Mexico City—San Ildefonso, the conciliar seminary, and San Juan de Letrán—welcomed students who were keen on learning new authors and disciplines, as those in the provinces, the older corporation—the 75

Tanck de Estrada, “Tensión en la torre de marfil”, pp. 23–111; Peset, Ciencia y libertad; and González González, “La reedición de las constituciones universitarias de México (1775) y la polémica antiilustrada”, pp. 57–108.

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university—was reduced to dispensing degrees. Its diplomas were in higher demand, but perhaps less useful as more and more Spanish-born officials occupied positions previously filled by criollos. The tensions of this highly stratified society grew as Spain took more measures to access the viceroyalty’s riches. The struggle of European powers to control their colonial empires and quell local discontent, precipitated, since 1810, a series of wars that culminated in Mexican independence in 1821. The slow, turbulent building of the republic that came about in 1824 brought radical educational reforms but did not diminish the long-standing inequalities. For good or ill, much of what was new was built on the foundations of three centuries of Spanish rule. Bibliography

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Ajofrín, F. de, Diario de un viaje que hizo a la América en el siglo XVIII, 2 vols., Mexico City, 1962. Cartas de Indias, Madrid, 1877. Cartilla para enseñar a leer, ed. P. Ocharte, Mexico City, 1569; facsimile, Mexico City, 1977. Cervantes de Salazar, F., Elucidationum in Ludovicum Viuem Linaguae Latinae exercitatio, Mexico City, 1555. Cervantes de Salazar, F., Tumulo imperial de la gran Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico City, 1560. Cervantes de Salazar, F., México en 1554 y Túmulo imperial, ed. E. O’Gorman, Mexico City, 1978. Ciudad Real, A. de, Tratado curioso y docto de las grandezas de la Nueva España, 2 vols., Mexico City, 1976. Códice franciscano, ed. J. García Icazbalceta, Mexico City, 1941. Códice Mendieta. Documentos Franciscanos siglos XVI y XVII, 2 vols., ed. J. García Icazbalceta, Mexico City, 1892. Concilios provinciales mexicanos. Época colonial, eds. M.P. Martínez, F.J. Cervantes, et al., Mexico City, 2004, digital version. Cruz, S.J.I. de la, “Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz”, Obras completas, vol. IV, Mexico City, 1976, pp. 440–477.

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Libros y libreros en el siglo XVI, ed. F. Fernández del Castillo, Mexico City, 1914. Mendieta, G. de, Historia Eclesiástica Indiana, 2 vols., Mexico City, 1997. Reales cédulas de la Real y Pontificia universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, ed. J.T. Lanning, Guatemala, 1954. Sahagún, F.B. de, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, 2 vols., Madrid, 1998. Suárez de Peralta, J., Tratado del descubrimiento de las Indias y su conquista, Madrid, 1990. Vidas y bienes olvidados. Testamentos indígenas novohispanos, 5 vols., eds. T. Rojas Rabiela et al., Mexico City, 1999–2004.



Secondary Literature

Aguirre Salvador, R., Por el camino de las letras. El ascenso profesional de los catedráticos juristas de la Nueva España. Siglo XVIII, Mexico City, 1998. Aguirre Salvador, R., El mérito y la estrategia. La carrera de clérigos, juristas y médicos en Nueva España. Siglo XVIII, Mexico City, 2003. Alatorre, A., “Sor Juana y los hombres”, Estudios 7 (1986), pp. 7–27. Álvarez Icaza, M.T., “Las lenguas de la fe. Una etapa de quiebre tras un largo debate (1749–1765)”, in M.P. Martínez and F.J. Cervantes (eds.), Expresiones y estrategias: la Iglesia en el orden social novohispano, Mexico City, 2017, pp. 295–334. Alberro, S., “El Imperial Colegio de Santa Cruz y las aves de rapiña: una modesta contribución a la microfísica del poder a mediados del siglo XVI”, Historia Mexicana 64:1 (2014), pp. 7–64. Bustamante, J., Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. Una revisión crítica de sus manuscritos y de su proceso de composición, Mexico City, 1990. Bustamante, J., “Doctrina Christiana muy vtil … de 1578, una obra antigua rescatada por Pedro Moya de Contreras”, Boletín del Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas 7:1–2 (2002), pp. 33–44. Becerra López, J.L., La organización de los estudios en la Nueva España, Mexico City, 1963. Bello Baños, K., “De l’alphabétisation des mexicains. Les premiers rudiments et les usages de la lecture et de l’écriture à Mexico (1771–1867)”, doctoral dissertation, EHESS, 2014. Chocano Mena, M., La fortaleza docta. Elite social y dominación colonial en México (Siglos XVI y XVII), Barcelona, 2000. Dyer, N.J., “Introducción” a Fray Toribio de Benavente Motolinía, Memoriales, Mexico City, 1996, pp. 19–91. García Icazbalceta, J., Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI, Mexico City, 1954. Gil, F., Primeras “Doctrinas” del Nuevo Mundo, Estudio histórico-teológico de las obras de fray Juan de Zumárraga (†1548), Buenos Aires, 1993. Gómez Canedo, L., La educación de los marginados durante la época colonial, Mexico City, 1982.

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Gonzalbo Aizpuru, P., Las mujeres en la Nueva España. Educación y vida cotidiana, Mexico City, 1987. Gonzalbo Aizpuru, P., Historia de la educación en la época colonial. El mundo indígena, Mexico City, 1990. Gonzalbo Aizpuru, P., Historia de la educación en la época colonial. La educación de los criollos y la vida urbana, Mexico City, 1990. Gonzalbo Aizpuru, P. and Staples, A., Historia de la educación en la ciudad de México, Mexico City, 2012. González González, E., “La reedición de las constituciones universitarias de México (1775) y la polémica antiilustrada”, Tradición y reforma en la Universidad de México, Mexico City, 2000, pp. 57–108. González González, E., “Entre la universidad y la Corte. La carrera del criollo Don Juan de Castilla (ca. 1560–1606)”, in A. Pavón (ed.), Universitarios en la Nueva España, Mexico City, 2003, pp. 151–185. González González, E., “Two phases in the Historiography on the Royal University of Mexico (1930–2007)”, History of Universities 24 (2009), pp. 339–404. González González, E., “Libros de Flandes en la Nueva España”, in W. Thomas and E. Stols (eds.), El libro flamenco en los territorios de la monarquía hispánica 1500–1800, Antwerp, 2009, pp. 183–198. González González, E., “La expulsión de los jesuitas y la educación novohispana: ¿debacle cultural o proceso secularizador?”, in M.C. Torales (ed.), Ilustración en el mundo hispánico: preámbulo de las independencias, Mexico City, 2009, pp. 255–275. González González, E., “Por una historia de las universidades hispánicas en el Nuevo Mundo (siglos XVI-XVIII)”, Revista Iberoamericana de Educación Superior (RIES) 1:1 (2010), pp. 77–101. González González, E., “Los usos de la cultura escrita en el nuevo mundo, el colegio de Tlatelolco para indios principales (siglo XVI)”, Estudis. Revista de historia moderna 37 (2011), pp. 91–110. González González, E., “Colegios y universidades. La fábrica de los letrados”, in N. Vogeley and M. Ramos (eds.), Historia de la literatura mexicana desde sus orígenes hasta nuestros días., vol. 3, Mexico City, 2011, pp. 104–127. González González, E., “El arcediano de México don Juan Negrete (siglo XVI): entre el oficio y la disipación”, Histórica 36:1 (2012), pp. 11–52. González González, E., “A Humanist in the New World: Francisco Cervantes de Salazar (1518–1575)”, in T. Kircher et al. (eds.), Neo Latin and the Humanities: Essays in Honor of Charles Fantazzi, Toronto, 2014, pp. 235–258. González González, E. and Del Ángel, H., “La santa ignorancia. Lectores y lectura de libros prohibidos en Puebla (s. XVI)”, in F.J. Cervantes (ed.), Libros y lectores en las sociedades hispanas: España y Nueva España (siglos XVI-XVIII), Mexico City, 2016, pp. 57–115.

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González González, E. and Gutiérrez Rodríguez V., “Los catedráticos novohispanos y sus libros. Tres bibliotecas universitarias del siglo XVI”, in A. Romano (ed.), Dalla Lectura all’e-learning, Bologna, 2015, pp. 83–102. González González, E. and Gutiérrez Rodríguez V., “Una biblioteca de latinidad para indios caciques: Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco (México s. XVI)”, in G. Angelozzi et al. (eds.), Universitá e formazione dei ceti dirigenti. Per Gian Paolo Brizzi, pellegrino dei saperi, Bologna, 2015, pp. 199–223. González González, E. and Gutiérrez Rodríguez V., El poder de las letras. Por una histo�ria social de las universidades de la América hispana en el periodo colonial, Mexico City, 2017. Greenleaf, R.E., “San Juan de Letrán: Colonial Mexico’s Royal College for Mestizos”, in E.W. Andrews (ed.), Research and Reflections in Archeology and History: Essays in Honor of Doris Stone, New Orleans, 1984, pp. 113–148. Gutiérrez Rodríguez, V., “El Colegio novohispano de Santa María de Todos Santos. Alcances y límites de una institución colonial”, in C. Ramírez and A. Pavón (eds.), La Universidad novohispana: corporación, gobierno y vida académica, Mexico City, 1996, pp. 381–395. Gutiérrez Rodríguez, V. and Hidalgo Pego, M., “Bibliografía sobre colegios novohispanos”, in L. Pérez (ed.), De Maestros y Discípulos. México. Siglos XVI-XIX, Mexico City, 1998, pp. 105–114. Lira González, A., Las comunidades indígenas frente a la ciudad de México. Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco, sus pueblos y barrios, 1812–1919, Mexico City, 1983. Méndez Arceo, S., La Real y pontificia Universidad de México. Antecedentes, tramitación y despacho de las reales cédulas de erección, Mexico City, 1990. Moreno Gamboa, O., Las letras y el oficio. Novohispanos en la imprenta. México y Puebla, siglo XVIII, Mexico City, 2018. O’Gorman, E., “Reflexiones sobre la distribución urbana colonial de la ciudad de México”, Seis estudios históricos de tema mexicano, Xalapa, 1960, pp. 11–40. Pavón Romero, A., Universitarios y Universidad en México en el siglo XVI, doctoral dissertation, Valencia, 1995. Pavón Romero, A., El gremio docto. Organización corporativa y gobierno en la Universidad de México en el siglo XVI, Valencia, 2010. Pavón Romero, A. and González, E., “La primera universidad de México”, Maravillas y curiosidades. Mundos inéditos de la universidad, Mexico City, 2002, pp. 39–56. Pavón Romero, A., A. Álvarez, and R. Quiroz, “Las tendencias demográficas de los artistas en los siglos XVII y XVIII”, in E. González (ed.), Estudios y estudiantes de filosofía. De la facultad de artes a la facultad de filosofía y letras (1551–1929), Mexico City, 2008, pp. 119–158. Pérez Puente, L., Universidad de doctores. México. Siglo XVII, Mexico City, 2000. Pérez Puente, L., Tiempos de crisis, tiempos de consolidación. La catedral metropolitana de la ciudad de México, 1653–1680, Mexico City, 2005.

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Pérez Puente, L., Los cimientos de la iglesia en la América española. Los seminarios conciliares, siglo XVI, Mexico City, 2017. Pérez Puente, L., “Instrumentos del poder episcopal en Indias. Cuatro seminarios ­tridentinos del siglo XVI”, Relaciones 133 (2012), pp. 169–198. Peset, J.L., Ciencia y Libertad. El papel del científico ante la independencia americana, Madrid, 1987. Peset, M., Obra dispersa. La Universidad de México, Mexico City, 2011. Ramírez González, C., “La Universidad de México y los conflictos con los jesuitas en el siglo XVI”, Estudis: Revista de Historia Moderna 19 (1993), pp. 39–57. Ratto, C., “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora en el episodio novohispano de la ‘Querella de las mujeres’”, in A. Mayer (ed.), Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Homenaje: 1700–2000, vol. II, Mexico City, 2002, pp. 151–177. Ricard, R., La ‘conquète spirituelle’ du Mexique [ … ] 1523–24 à 1572, Paris, 1933. Ríos Castaño, V., Translation as Conquest: Sahagún and Universal History of the Things of New Spain, Madrid, 2014. Rubial García, A., Profetisas y solitarios. Espacios y mensajes de una religión dirigida por ermitaños y beatas laicos en las ciudades de Nueva España, Mexico City, 2006. Rubial García, A. (ed.), La Iglesia en el México Colonial, Mexico City, 2013. Sánchez Santiró, E., Corte de caja La Real Hacienda de Nueva España y el primer reformismo fiscal de los Borbones (1720–1755). Alcances y contradicciones, Mexico City, 2013. Sandal, E., Giovanni Paoli da Brescia e l’introduzione della stampa nel Nuovo Mondo (1539–1560), Brescia, 2007. Suárez Rivera, M., “El negocio del libro en Nueva España: los Zúñiga Ontiveros y su emporio tipográfico (1756–1825)”, doctoral dissertation, UNAM, 2013. Tanck de Estrada, D., “Tensión en la torre de marfil”, in Ensayos sobre la historia de la educación en México, Mexico City, 1981, pp. 23–111. Tanck de Estrada, D., “La Enseñanza de la lectura y de la escritura en la Nueva España 1700–1821”, Historia de la lectura en México, Mexico City, 1988, pp. 49–93. Tanck de Estrada, D., Pueblos de indios y educación en el México colonial, 1750–1821, Mexico City, 1999. Tanck de Estrada, D., La educación ilustrada, 1786–1836. Educación primaria en la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, 2005. Tanck de Estrada, D., “La ciudad durante tres regímenes 1768–1838”, in P. Gonzalbo and A. Staples (eds.), Historia de la educación en la ciudad de México, Mexico City, 2012, pp. 117–174. Taylor, W.B., Magistrates of the Sacred. Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, Stanford, 1996. Viñao Frago, A., “Aprender a leer en el Antiguo Régimen: cartillas, silabarios y catones”, in A. Escolano Benito (ed.), Historia ilustrada del libro escolar en España. Del antiguo régimen a la segunda república, Madrid, 1997, pp. 149–191.

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CHAPTER 12

Medicine and Municipal Rights in Viceregal Mexico City Paula S. De Vos 1 Introduction As colonial institutions in the Viceroyalty of New Spain developed over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, Mexico City had central place with regard to the regulation of medical training and practice. Throughout the entire colonial period, the majority of doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries trained and licensed according to Spanish law resided and practiced in Mexico City, with far fewer numbers in such regional cities as Puebla, Querétaro, Guadalajara, Veracruz, and the mining centers of Guanajuato and Zacatecas. In 1546, the University of Mexico, located in Mexico City, established a medical school where students could receive medical degrees within the viceroyalty. Beginning in 1528, the cabildo of Mexico City also established regulatory measures requiring practitioners to be properly trained and licensed and stipulating that regular inspection of pharmacies be performed by appointed Protomedicos, or “first physicians” in the city. Later legislation expanded this office to a Tribunal with regulatory and judicial powers, with jurisdiction extending throughout the viceroyalty—but with its seat firmly established in Mexico City, to which all practitioners had to travel for examination and licensing. It would appear, therefore, that Mexico City constituted the center of gravity for medical regulation, training, licensing, and practice throughout the colonial period. Historians of the Protomedicato have argued for the strongly centralized nature of the Protomedicato in New Spain, especially compared to its Castilian counterpart.1 The Castilian Protomedicato, which dated back to the 13th 1 See Gardeta Sabater, “El nuevo modelo de Real Tribunal del Protomedicato en la América española”. See also: Campos Díez, El Real Tribunal del Protomedicato castellano, siglos XIVXIX; Parilla Hermida, “Apuntes históricas del protomedicato”; Iborra, “Memoria sobre la institución del Real Proto-Medicato”; and Clouse, Medicine, Government, and Public Health in Philip II’s Spain, pp. 211–230 for more general bibliography on the ­Protomedicato. A special issue of Dynamis, vol. 16, in 1996 includes many very useful essays, including: Campos Díez, “El Protomedicato en la administración central de la Monarquía Hispánica”, pp. 43–58;

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century, was a royal institution that had to contend with constant challenge from municipalities of Castile, (and later Aragón, Navarre, and Valencia) that had a long tradition, born out of the Reconquest, of local oversight over medical matters by city magistrates and professional guilds, confraternities, and colleges. These municipalities enjoyed a variety of fueros or special rights and privileges to self-governance to which the Castilian monarchs, in exchange for loyalty and settlement, had promised. The Mexican Protomedicato, appointed by the viceroy, tied firmly to the faculty of medicine at the University of Mexico, with its seat in the powerful capital city, and without having to contend with medieval fueros, thus appears to present a very different model for regulation, allowing it to escape or easily override municipal challenge.2 Indeed, according to published legislation, Protomedicato power in Mexico City does appear to have been firmly established and growing over the course of the colonial period, particularly under royal decrees in the 17th and 18th centuries that expanded its jurisdictional reach. However, a series of archival documents concerning lawsuits brought against the Mexican Protomedicato by various Novohispanic cities in the late 18th century demonstrate that this central institution faced a number of challenges that would effectively inhibit its power and jurisdiction. In mounting these challenges, local practitioners, city officials, and Audiencia judges invoked earlier Castilian law and laws of the Indies that had resulted from the medieval fueros. They demonstrate the ways in which viceregal Mexico City had to contend with local rights, a contest of power that arguably divided the viceroyalty along geographic lines in a way that foreshadowed the centralist-federalist debates of the new nation. Such divisions would have exacerbated other lines of ethnic and class divisions that inhibited national unity and led to such a protracted fight for independence. As such, it is an important area of study for colonial and 19th-century historians.

López Terrada, “Los estudios historicomédicos sobre el Tribunal del Protomediacto y las profesiones y ocupaciones sanitarias en la Monarquía Hispánica durante los siglos XVI al XVIII”, pp. 21–42; Gentilcore, “Il Regio Protomedicato nella Napoli Spagnola”, pp. 219–236; and Gentilcore, “All that Pertains to Medicine”, pp. 121–142. For bibliography on the Protomedicato in Mexico and the Americas, see: Lanning, The Royal P­ rotomedicato; Sabater, “Agonía y muerte del Protomedicato de la Nueva España, 1831”, pp. 35–50; and Rodríguez, “Legislacón sanitaria y boticas novohispanas”, pp. 151–169. 2 See the arguments, for example, of Gardeta Sabater, “El nuevo modelo de Real Tribunal del Protomedicato en la América española”.

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2 The Castilian Protomedicato: Establishment, Practice, and Jurisdiction The Royal Protomedicato of New Spain, located in Mexico City, was built upon Castilian precedent. It derived its authority from the Royal Protomedicato of Castile, and was later modeled after it, with the same basic structure, organization, jurisdiction, responsibilities, and function. The Protomedicato of Castile was centuries in the making and was a product of the centralizing policies of Castilian monarchs in the late Middle Ages who sought to consolidate power by inserting royal authority into municipal governance. This assertion of royal authority in local matters was in direct confrontation with longstanding tradition in the Iberian hinterlands of the Reconquest, where Christian settlers had successfully wrangled various rights and privileges, or fueros, ensconced in city charters, from kings in exchange for their loyalty and settlement of frontier areas through the founding of cities and towns.3 Governance of these early cities often followed Arabic precedents, particularly in the adaptation of the office of the muhtasib, or almotacen, who was charged with oversight of many aspects of civic life, including public health practices and regulation of medicine and the medical professions.4 Thus, medical regulation was generally a matter of municipal oversight in medieval cities. 3

Reconquest Iberia: Aragón and Castile

Throughout the late medieval period, Castilian leaders sought to increase royal presence throughout the kingdom, an effort that culminated in the policies of the Catholic monarchs, who successfully inserted a “corregidor”, or co-­ governor, into each city of Castile.5 These policies were in part the product of a return to Roman law in the late Middle Ages as a model for governance in contrast to earlier Arabic models. Another area for the assertion of royal authority was medical regulation and the creation of a royal Protomedicato, also based upon Roman models. The result was the creation of two competing systems of medical regulation, one stemming from the municipal, local level 3 Powers, “Frontier Municipal Baths and Social Interaction in Thirteenth-Century Spain”; Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish-American City. 4 Glick, “Muhtasib and Mutasaf”, pp. 59–82; Hamarneh, “Origin and Functions of the Ḥisbah System in Islam and its Impact on the Health Professions”, pp. 157–173; and Vernia, “The Muhtasib of Valencia and Pharmacy in Aragon”, pp. 89–93. 5 Lunenfeld, Keepers of the City.

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and representing long-held and fiercely defended fueros, and another representing the centralizing, “top-down” authority of royal sovereignty. In keeping with the royal turn to Roman law and institutional precedents, the Protomedicato of Castile was modeled upon the Roman system of medical regulation and oversight by protomedicos, the “first physicians” of the emperors. These protomedicos, selected to “bring order” to the medical profession and root out unqualified practitioners, had enjoyed great prestige and privilege as doctors to princes and were considered to be as “princes among the doctors”.6 Regulation was confined to and carried out in the city of Rome itself, where 16 protomedicos were placed at strategic locations throughout the city and were selected according to their performance on a medical exam, these stipulations being recorded in the Justinian code.7 The exact date of the formal establishment of the Castilian Protomedicato is unknown, but later commentators declared it one of the oldest councils in Spain, and as such deserving of great honor, privilege, and respect.8 The first laws in Castile naming protomedicos occurred in the Siete Partidas of Alonso el Sabio in the 13th century, which stated that “the king must bring along with him very good doctors … to cure men of illness and maintain health”.9 The laws also contained several references to the regulation of potent, potentially poisonous medicines. The 15th century saw further formalization and consolidation of royal control over public health matters. In 1422, Juan II created a tribunal with “special jurisdiction, in the case for all sanitary matters throughout all the kingdom” to conduct examinations, issue licenses, and investigate and prosecute unlicensed medical practitioners.10 Ferdinand and Isabella continued to formalize these duties: in 1477, they ordered Protomedicos and royally appointed examiners to examine medical practitioners including doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries as well as embalmers, spicers, herbalists, “and anyone else who in whole or in part is employed in these capacities”.11 The practitioners would be required to obtain from their examiners “letters of approval” as well as a license to practice, without which they would be subject to fines. Practitioners were also required to present themselves to the Protomedicos when demanded.12 In addition to licensing and examination requirements for medical practitioners, the 6 Muñoz, Recopilación de las Leyes, pp. 32–36. 7 Ibid., pp. 32–33. 8 Ibid., pp. 48–50. 9 Ibid., p. 39, Law V, Title IX, Part II. 10 Quoted in Clouse, Medicine, Government, and Public Health, p. 17. See also Muñoz, Recopilación de las Leyes, pp. 40–48. 11 Novísima Recopilación, Book VIII, Title X, Law I, p. 73. 12 Ibid.

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Protomedicos were to oversee inspections of apothecary shops throughout “our Kingdoms and Estates”.13 They were ordered to “look over and inspect the shops and pharmacies of apothecaries and spicers, and anyone else who sells medicines and spices”, and any medicines found to be in poor condition were to be burned publicly.14 In all of these duties, the Protomedicos and examiners derived power expressly from the Crown, and as such their jurisdiction extended to “the Kingdoms and Estates” of the Catholic kings.15 In conjunction with Ferdinand and Isabella’s efforts to centralize and consolidate royal authority throughout the Iberian Peninsula, the Protomedicato was thus not centered on municipal authority, but rather based upon royal authority and bound up with the extent of its jurisdiction. Their legal authority and right to try medical malpractice cases similarly derived from royal authority, “according to the rights and privileges [fuero y derecho] of our our Kingdoms and Estates, according to our will and favor”.16 The expansion and consolidation of the Castilian Protomedicato continued over the course of the 16th century, with key legislation under the reign of Philip II. A royal order of 1588 stipulated that the Protomedicato would be composed of a Protomedico and three permanent examiners, named by the king, who were to carry out the same duties as their predecessors.17 In 1593, Protomedicato personnel expanded further to include a tribunal of three Protomedicos “named by Us”, along with three examiners who would step in to substitute any one of the three in case of absence.18 In addition to its other duties, the tribunal was ordered to formulate a standardized pharmacopoeia that would be followed by apothecaries throughout the kingdom. Pharmacy colleges throughout Aragón had already completed such a task, but despite the order, a standard Castilian pharmacopoeia did not appear until 1739.19 4

Persistance of Medieval Fuero Limitations

By the 17th century, the Castilian Protomedicato had become a full-fledged institution with a number of different responsibilities and significant authority 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Ibid. Ibid., Book VIII, Title XIII, Law II, p. 107. Ibid., Book VIII, Title X, Law I, p. 73. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., Book VIII, Title X, Law V, p. 76. Ibid., Book VIII, Title X, Law V and VI, pp. 75–79, and Book VIII, Title X, Law VIII, pp. 80–82. Philip II expanded upon the kinds of examinations to take place and the material to be examined, both practial and theoretical. Ibid., Book VIII, Title XIII, Law III, pp. 107–108. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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regarding medical regulation. Despite the expansion of its powers and consolidation as a formal institution, however, the Protomedicato still faced significant limits with regard to its jurisdiction. These limits derived from a concurrent system of medical regulation that had developed out of the context of the Reconquest and the responsibilities given to the local muhtasib that were bound up in the town charters, its fueros. Muhtasib responsibilities in the fueros often included overseeing matters of public health: among other duties, these included insuring that medical practitioners were properly trained and licensed, inspecting pharmacies, and prosecuting cases of malpractice. Over time, the personnel involved in carrying out these duties evolved into professional guild and municipal colleges of medicine, pharmacy, and surgery that played a key role in regional medical regulation, especially in Aragón and Valencia.20 Their long-held rights to regulate the medical professions were jealously guarded and provided a bulwark against the encroachment of royal authority, so that seemingly innocuous events such as medical examination and licensing, or the inspection of local pharmacies, became sites for contests between “town and crown”—between local authority and the perceived encroachment of centralizing royal authority. Within this context, the formation of the Castilian Protomedicato constituted a clear example of royal incursion into municipal jurisdiction. Local authorities understood this, and the Protomedicato confronted challenges from these authorities anytime it moved beyond the immediate confines of the royal court, no matter the wording of royal decrees.21 The legal record, in fact, bears evidence to their success. Municipal fueros continued to hold sway through most of the early modern period, particularly those limiting the Protomedicato’s jurisdiction to the immediate environs of the royal court. From the 1430s, the Castilian Cortes, a representative body with delegates from different cities who met periodically with the king to voice concerns and grievances, successfully negotiated the right to oversee their own medical affairs without Protomedicato intervention. Representatives for the Cortes convened in Zamora in 1432, for example, complained vociferously about a royal order giving royally-appointed medical examiners “the power to examine all others in their fields”, including local practitioners outside the 20

21

See: Fernández Doctor, “El control de las profesiones sanitarias en Aragón”, pp. 173–186; Zarzoso, “Protomedicato y boticarios en la Barcelona del siglo XVIII”, pp. 151–171; Danón Bretós, “Protomédicos y Protomedicato en Cataluña”, pp. 205–218; Sánchez Álvarez and Gil Sotres, “El Protomedicato Navarro”, pp. 187–204; and Jordi González, “Relaciones de los boticarios catalanes con las institutions centrales”. Clouse explains this well for the reign of Philip II. These kinds of disputes were common in other Euopean systems of medical regulation as well. See Clouse, Medicine, Government, and Public Health. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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court.22 These officials were also allowed to issue punishments to those who did not comply or acted outside the law.23 This, the Cortes argued, was “a breach of the Privileges possessed by the said Cities and Towns” and meant that the king’s subjects were being “mistreated”.24 In response, the king claimed that he had revoked these rights and practices in support of the fueros, but the practices persisted, for in 1435 the case reppeared. Local officials again claimed that the king’s medical officials were acting “in breach of the Privileges and Fueros and customary practices that the said Cities and Towns have had” and that such practices violated local customs.25 They “humbly” asked that the king restore the traditional privileges and prevent these royally-appointed inspections of local shops and examinations of local practitioners, and leave such matters to town governance.26 They asked instead that “when in the Cities, Towns, and Places of your Kingdoms some exam of a [medical] practitioner is necessary, ... it be carried out by the Justice and Aldermen of the City”.27 Subsequent legislation also indicates the success of local municipal authority in limiting the Protomedicato’s jurisdiction to within 5 leagues of its seat at the royal court. For along with the 16th-century orders consolidating and expanding the Castilian Protomedicato were a series of stipulations that clearly confined it to conducting examinations, trying lawsuits, and inspecting pharmacies to within 5 leagues of the “court”. Although they had the right to require all practitioners in the royal domains to be examined and licensed, they were prevented from venturing outside this area, requiring practitioners to come to them rather than sending out officials to regional areas. A 1513 order prevented Protomedicato examiners from venturing beyond 5 leagues of the royal court to conduct exams, stating that “they cannot send any person whatsoever outside of the five leagues”.28 A more explicit order in 1539 threatened substantial penalty for Protomedicato officials who violated the 5 leagues’ jurisidcton, stating that “If our Protomedicos send any officials outside the 5 leagues of our Court, our Justices will apprehend them and send them as prisoners to the jail in our court, and there they will be punished”.29 This limitation extended to the Protomedicato’s judicial responsibilities and continued into the 18th century: 22 Muñoz, Recopilación de las leyes, pp. 43–44. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 44. 26 Ibid., pp. 45–47. 27 Ibid., p. 47. 28 Novísima Recopilación, Book VIII, Title X, Law II, pp. 74–75. 29 Ibid., Book VIII, Title X, Law III, p. 75.

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if a malpractice case occurred outside 5 leagues of the court, the Protomedicato was required to have approval by the King’s Council to proceed.30 This same limitation was imposed on the Protomedicato’s jurisdiction over pharmacy inspections. Although in 1477, Ferdinand and Isabella had ordered the regular Protomedicato inspection of pharmacies in “any city, town, or place within our Kingdoms and Estates”, later legislation limited it to the 5 leagues around the court. The law of 1588 ordered that Protomedicos “inspect all together the pharmacies of this Court”, and that “the pharmacies that are within 5 leagues are to be inspected in person by the Examiners”. 31 Inspections outside Protomedicato jurisdiction, however, were to be conducted by a local examiner, usually the doctor who had practiced longest in the area.32 More specific rules for inspections appeared in 1593: shops located “in our Court and its district” were to be inspected every two years; those outside the court would take place every year, conducted by local physicians. Thus, the Protomedicato had to take local officials into account and cooperate with them under penalty of law; and local fueros continued to be upheld, even in the face of dramatic expansion of royal authority. 5

The Protomedicato of New Spain: Regulation in the Capital

Royal supervision of the medical professions in the Americas was set up early on in the colonization process, though initially with more limited jurisdiction associated with key cities. Over the course of the 16th century, Protomedicos were appointed in Santo Domingo, Mexico City, and Lima. The first Protomedicos of Mexico City, appointed in 1527, came with apparent approbation of the Castilian Protomedicato, but were formally approved by the Mexico City cabildo. On 11 January 1527, the cabildo members “viewed a petition from Licenciate Pedro López with certain cedulas and powers of His Majesty’s Protomedicos ... ”33 The cabildo thus “received him as protomedico according to the said powers” to regulate the medical professions “of this New Spain”.34 Over the next five years, the cabildo passed a series of resolutions naming subsequent protomedicos, establishing the need for examination and licensing of ­medical 30 31 32 33 34

Ibid., Book VIII, Title X, Law IX, p. 83. Ibid., Book VIII, Title XIII, Law I, p. 107. Ibid. Actas de Cabildo de la Ciudad de México, vol. 1, 11 January 1527, p. 115. Ibid.

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practitioners, and requiring regular inspections of ­pharmacies and other establishments that sold medicines. On 22 January 1528, the cabildo declared that “It has come to our attention that many people who are not examined doctors or surgeons are curing people, and because they do not know what they are doing ... they kill them and often cause more harm and illness”.35 Thus, the cabildo ordered that “no one who is not an examined doctor or surgeon with a title dare to cure” under penalty of fines.36 In 1529, the cabildo also instituted regular pharmacy inspections: two licensed physicians were to “inspect the pharmacies of this city and others wherever there are any medicines or drugs in order to see if the medicines are good”.37 Four years later, in 1533, the cabildo named two formal inspectors for Mexico City, due to “complaints made by the people every day about the apothecaries who practice in this City without being examined or having a title for the said office; and about the medicines they sell in this City, which are not what they should be”.38 The inspectors were to “look them over, so that there is no fraud”.39 In this way, the 1520s and early 1530s saw the cabildo taking the responsibility of naming Protomedicos and inspectors to root out fraudulent and unlicensed practitioners. With the appointment of Antonio de Mendoza as first viceroy of New Spain, however, medical regulation increasingly came under royal control. Royal authority was thus very much in evidence in a series of laws concerning medical regulation. A royal decree of 1535 prohibited anyone from practicing medicine, surgery, or pharmacy in the Indies who was not eligible to according to the laws of Castile.40 A decree of 1538 also put control over naming inspectors firmly in the grasp of the viceroy, stipulating that “viceroys, presidents [of Audiencias], and governors manage the inspection of pharmacies in their districts ... and to pour out or throw away any spoiled medicines so that no one is able to use them due to the harm they can cause”.41 The most significant legislation, however, was Philip II’s appointment in 1570 of a “General Protomedico of the Indies” in the person of Francisco ­Hernández, whose authority was to take precedence over that of the local Protomedicos when Hernández was in residence.42 In addition to the usual regulatory 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Ibid., 22 January 1528, p. 158. Ibid. Ibid., 24 January 1530, p. 30. The decree was reissued 24 January 1530. Quoted in Fernández del Castillo, “La inspección de medicamentos en la Nueva España durante el siglo XVII”, pp. 10–11. Ibid. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, Book V, Title VI, Law V. Ibid., Book V, Title VI, Law VII. Ibid., Book V, Title VI, Law I.

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r­esponsibilities of a Protomedico, Hernández was also tasked with studying the natural history of the Indies and its medicines, duties to which he devoted himself with rigor. Even with his expansive power and royal appointment, however, Hernández’ jurisdiction was limited to the 5 leagues’ rule. When in residence in a particular city, Hernández was to “exercise his office in that City, with five leagues surrounding, and not outside them”. 43 Similar to the law in Castile, he could “examine and give licenses to people in the said Provinces” but practitioners had to “come of their own accord to the place where the Protomedico resides”.44 A 1579 law followed up that no Protomedicos in the Indies issue medical licenses to any practitioner “unless they have appeared personally before the Protomedicos to be examined”.45 Hernández spent most of his time as General Protomedico in Mexico City where his authority was confined to Mexico City and its environs. A 1646 law, however, appeared to challenge the 5-leagues jurisdiction. This law has received substantial attention from historians of the Protomedicato because it established a tribunal of Protomedicos in Mexico City and ordered that the primary Protomedico be chosen from among the medical faculty of the University of Mexico.46 However, the law also included important wording as to Protomedicato jurisdiction, stating that “its jurisdiction extends to Puebla de los Angeles and the Port of Veracruz with all the rest that is understood in the name of New Spain”.47 The Protomedicos, in addition, would be named by the viceroy.48 Two years later, however, yet another law stated that all medical professionals in the Indies needed licenses from the Protomedicato—but only “in Spanish places and not Indian ones”.49 These laws indicate, therefore, some ambivalence about the extent of the Protomedicato’s jurisdiction—whether it extended beyond Mexico City, whether that jurisdiction would apply to inspections as well as examinations and licensing, and whether it was to apply to medical personnel outside the Spanish cities of the urban colonial core. In 43 44 45 46

47 48 49

Quoted in Gardeta Sabater, “El nuevo modelo de Real Tribunal del Protomedicato en la América española”, p. 240. Ibid. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, Book V, Title VI, Law VI. For a general history of medical institutions in New Spain, see: Martínez Hernández, La medicina en la Nueva España, siglos XVI y XVII; Lanning, Royal Protomedicato; Gardeta Sabater, “El nuevo modelo de Real Tribunal”; Campos Díez, El Real Tribunal del Protomedicato castellano; Ortiz Monasterio, “Agonía y muerte”; and Rodríguez, “Legislación sanitaria”. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, Book V, Title VI, Law III. This law also included information about the Protomedicato in Lima. See also Sabater, “El nuevo modelo de Real Tribunal”, p. 241. See the order in Fernández del Castillo, “La inspección de medicamentos”, pp. 11–12. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, Book V, Title VI, Law IV.

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the face of expanding royal and Protomedicato authority in the 18th century, municipal authorities in New Spain would take advantage of this ambivalence to argue in favor of local control, using the 5 leagues’ jurisdiction legislation to bolster their cases. 6 The Royal Protomedicato in the 18th Century: Increasing Jurisdiction and Authority The 18th century saw further efforts on the part of the Crown to increase control and centralize royal power in both Spain and the Americas. With the accession of the Bourbon ruling dynasty to the throne, a new ethos of absolutist rule influenced to a certain degree by Enlightenment ideals led to a series of sweeping administrative and economic reforms throughout Spain and the empire. As part of Bourbon efforts to consolidate power in Spain, Philip V revoked the municipal fueros in Aragón and Valencia. In a series of Decrees of Nueva Planta issued between 1707 and 1716, he sought to bring all regions of Spain under one consistent code of law without the individual sets of rights and privileges accorded to each city. Philip V stated that: I have judged it right … to entirely abolish and annul, as from now on will be abolished and annulled, all the said fueros, privileges, practices, and customs observed until now in the said kingdoms of Aragón and Valencia; it being my will that these [kingdoms] follow the laws of Castile, and the practices and form of governing that are used there and in its Tribunals without any difference whatsoever … 50 As part of these efforts, the Castilian Protomedicato received increasing royal patronage and favor. In 1749, Ferdinand VI declared himself “Protector of the said Tribunal” in order to support an institution that was “so useful for the public health”.51 The Protomedicato was also given the authority to annex Aragonese and Valencian medical institutions, the municipal colleges, and establish “sub-delegations” in Aragón and the Americas.52 50 Decreto de Nueva Planta de Valencia, 29 June 1707. 51 Muñoz, Recopilación de las Leyes, pp. 69–70. 52 See discussion in Muñoz, Recopilación de las Leyes, Chapter XXIII, p. 375, in which he declares that “verdaderamente, en el Reyno de Valencia no huvo proprio Protomedicato … Pero huvo una semejanza de Protomedicato en los examines, y visita, y en la formación de los Colegios de la Capital del Reyno”.

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In this climate of increasing royal power and patronage, the Castilian Protomedicato was also granted wider powers of jurisdiction. A royal decree of 1737 declared that everything to do with medical examinations and licensing was “proper and exclusive to the Royal Protomedicato, without any appeal or resource whatsoever to the Council or any other Tribunal”.53 The Protomedicato was also completely and solely in charge of prosecuting malpractice, in that “everything with respect to offenses and excesses committed by physicians, surgeons, apothecaries and anyone else with licenses to cure illness” was “exclusive and unique to the jurisdiction of the Protomedicato”.54 With regard to inspections, however, the 5-leagues jurisdiction was still in place. Any inspection taking place beyond the 5 leagues of the royal court required the approval of the Council of Castile. Four years later, however, this limitation too was revoked. In 1743, Philip V issued a landmark decree stating that inspectors for each kingdom in Spain would be named by the Protomedicato and could expect full cooperation from local officials, who were not to interrupt the proceedings in any way.55 The inspector was to be accompanied by a notary, but no other local official could be involved in the inspections. Philip began by arguing that “correcting abuses and repairing damage inflicted by the poor quality or faulty elaboration of medicines” was “the principal responsibility of this Tribunal and the only way to preserve the health of the public”.56 As such, the Protomedicato would name “the inspectors for the examination and inspection of the Pharmacies in the Cities, Towns, and Places of these my Kingdoms”.57 Protomedicato examiners had to carry the inspection out and local officials were expressly ordered not to interfere in any way whatsoever as this had led to “innumerable serious problems” throughout the process.58 Indeed, Philip V stipulated that all local officials cooperate and support the effort, offering “the help and favor necessary for the satisfactory fulfillment and execution of the commission”.59 These decrees, aimed at reducing local interference in medical regulation, represent one facet of Bourbon efforts to revoke rights deriving from the medieval fueros and to consolidate and systematize codes of law governing medical 53

Novísima Recopilación, Book VIII, Title X, Law IX, p. 82. The only exception to this was in cases of proving limpieza de sangre. 54 Ibid., p. 83. 55 Muñoz, Recopilación de las Leyes, pp. 192–199. A copy of the 1743 law is also included in Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Protomedicato, vol. 4, exp. 3, 1802, fs. 7r–14r. 56 AGN, Protomedicato, vol. 4, exp. 3, fs. 8v–9r. 57 Ibid., f. 8r. 58 Ibid., fs. 9r–10v. 59 Ibid., fs. 13v–14r.

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practice. Similar trends also appear to have been taking place in New Spain. The decree of 1646 had challenged the 5 leagues rule by claiming that Protomedicato jurisdiction extended throughout the entire viceroyalty. In 1792, Viceroy Revillagigedo appears to have upheld this ruling (though city officials later argued that it only applied to examinations),60 and an edict of 1799 sought to extend Protomedicato jurisdiction to non-Spanish areas by requiring all barbers, surgeons, and phlebotomists—many of whom bled patients and extracted teeth but had undergone no formal training or examination—to hold licenses from the Protomedicato.61 7 Effects in New Spain: Increasing Privileges, Increasing Municipal Challenges Given these decrees and edicts seeking to increase the centralized control of the Protomedicato in Spain and New Spain, it appears that the Protomedicato was benefiting from Bourbon reform efforts. However, when the Protomedicos in Mexico City tried to put these new orders into practice, they encountered significant resistance from municipal authorities outside the capital. City officials, like their earlier counterparts in Spain, understood the potential threat to their authority that these new rules represented. If the Protomedicos were allowed to travel throughout the viceroyalty conducting examinations and inspections—if they had unfettered jurisdiction, in other words, throughout the viceroyalty, they would not have to contend with local authority, cooperate with local officials, or take local needs into account. In this way, medical practices and policies in New Spain would be dictated by the needs and context of the capital only, with the capital as sovereign and taking precedence over regional concerns. Mexico City would hold the seat of power and be able to regulate local affairs outside the capital. Local authorities thus argued vociferously against such jurisdiction in a series of lawsuits challenging Protomedicato involvement in their affairs. Much of the controversy revolved around the naming of inspectors in cities and towns located in central Mexico. Between 1794 and 1806, at least seven lawsuits resulted from disputes over the Protomedicos’ right to name inspectors and initiate inspections outside their 5-leagues jurisdiction—in Celaya, Zacatecas, Sombrerete, Aguascalientes, Puebla, Real de los Catorce, and Querétaro. Those 60 61

Ibid., vol. 4, exp. 1, fs. 8r–9r. Ibid., vol 3, exp. 8, f. 157v.

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protesting Protomedicato incursions into local authority took full advantage of the ambiguity of the law with regard to Protomedicato jurisdiction, and invoked rights based upon the precedent established by the medieval Spanish fueros. In so doing, they were arguably successful in circumventing Protomedicato consolidation of power. By 1806, there was such a backlog of cases that the viceroy suspended the Protomedicato’s authority to name inspectors until the issue had been resolved.62 These arguments also may also foreshadow later struggles between centralists and federalists in the new nation following Independence. The inspections called for by the Protomedicato in the 1790s and early 1800s were made necessary, according to the Protomedicos, due to a general state of disorder in the medical practices in the different cities. Inspections were necessary in Querétaro, for example, to root out the “false doctors” and curanderos practicing without licenses, and to counteract the lack of expertise evident in the city’s pharmacies.63 Virtually none of the medical practitioners or local city council members protesting the Protomedicato’s rights to oversee inspections outside the capital questioned the need for the inspections, or their usefulness to and importance in Novohispanic society. However, they argued that the inspections did not fall within the jurisdiction of the Protomedicato on a number of grounds, all of which revolved around geography and the jurisdictional reach of the capital versus the provinces. In the first place, they argued that the Protomedicato had only “limited jurisdiction” within the viceroyalty.64 ­Authorities accepted the Protomedicato’s right to require examination and licensing throughout the viceroyalty, but only in Spanish areas. In rural areas, there simply were no licensed practitioners, so the law could not be enforced. As such, this requirement “is upheld only with regard to Spanish places, and not Indian ones”.65 Referring to the law of 1646, furthermore, they argued that practitioners living outside Mexico City had to travel to the capital for examination and licensing, of their own accord. Protomedicos were banned from traveling outside the 5 leagues surrounding Mexico City to conduct examinations, and were similarly prevented from sending out representatives to administer exams—with an important exception, granted in 1799, for phlebotomists.66

62 63 64 65 66

Ibid., vol. 4, exp. 4, fs. 13v–15v. Ibid., vol. 2, exp. 3, f. 1r. and vol. 4, exp. 1, f. 4r. Ibid., vol. 4, exp. 6, f. 37. Ibid., vol 3, exp. 8, f. 156r. Ibid., fs. 177r–178v.

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In the case of inspections, Protomedicato jurisdiction was also limited, protesters argued, to 5 leagues within the “Corte” of Mexico City. When the ­Protomedicato appointed Miguel Chacón to inspect pharmacies in Querétaro in 1784, two apothecaries refused to cooperate, arguing that “the Protomedicato did not have the right to inspect [their pharmacies]: because its ­jurisdiction according to the Law, was fitted to the Corte and its five leagues”.67 Similar claims were made for proposed inspections in Celaya, Puebla, and Real de los Catorce, where local authorities argued that the Protomedicato did not have the right to “give these commissions” or “confer these Titles of Inspector”.68 The issues, according to a Puebla apothecary, could be divided into two main categories or powers, “which are the power to examine and the power to inspect”.69 With regard to the former, he said “there is no dispute that they are the only ones [to administer exams] because the doctors go from wherever they come from to take an exam with the Royal Tribunal”, and in this way their jurisdiction was understood to extend throughout the kingdom, though the Protomedicos could not venture from the capital.70 With regard to inspections, however, “in no way does the law or decree authorize them to carry out inspections outside the five leagues”.71 Citing the Castilian law of 1539 threatening imprisonment for any Protomedico who violated the five leagues rule, he argued for the containment of Protomedicato power within its seat of authority, and in so doing invoked the long-held rights and privileges of the municipal fueros.72 “We must not confuse the examinations of doctors, surgeons, apothecaries, and barbers”, he concluded, “with the inspection of pharmacies … [the Protomedicato] has jurisdiction to examine but not to inspect”.73 Given that the Protomedicato did not have jurisdiction outside the 5 leagues, it had no right to name inspectors or call inspections in other cities. The Recopilación law of 1539 made it clear that that power lay, protesters argued, with the viceroys, Audiencia presidents, and governors. Authorities in Querétaro argued that “The powers cited in the [1539] law … designate the Most Excellent Sirs the Viceroys, Presidents, and Governors to order inspections of the pharmacies in their districts at the times they see fit”.74 Indeed, the two apothecaries in Querétaro who challenged Chacón’s inspection argued that they “know very well that doing inspections in places outside the five leagues from the Court is pecular to the Viceroy in conformity to the Law of the 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

AGN, Protomedicato, vol. 4, exp. 1, fs. 31r–33r. AGN, Protomedicato, vol. 2, exp. 8, fs. 5r–6r. AGN, Protomedicato vol. 4, exp. 6, fs. 35r–v. Ibid., fs. 34v–35r. Ibid., fs. 35r–v. Ibid., fs. 35v–36r. Ibid., f. 37. Ibid., vol. 4, exp. 1, fs. 8r–v. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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Indies”.75 When the Protomedicato named José Augustín Monroy as inspector of the pharmacies in Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, and Sombrerete in 1802,76 local officials similarly argued that this was the exclusive right of the viceroy, and that the Protomedicato should not have acted unilaterally in naming the inspector, but instead should have first consulted with Viceroy Félix Berenguer de Marquina.77 Indeed, local officials were adamant that they continue to initiate and oversee inspections in their respective cities and were undeterred by earlier rulings that appeared to extend Protomedicato authority beyond the 5 leagues. With respect to the law of 1646, a lawyer in the Zacatecas case argued that “the jurisdiction of the Protomedicato does not expressly extend” to inspections.78 With regard to the law of 1743, furthermore, he argued that other laws took precedence over it, and that when a law called into question the viceroy’s sovereignty, as the 1743 ruling did, the viceroy had to rule on it first.79 The Mexican Protomedicos vigorously protested these challenges to their authority, arguing that they indeed did have jurisdiction that went beyond the 5 leagues and that such challenges constituted a “frivolous pretext”.80 It was true, they admitted, that certain laws of the Recopilación had limited their jurisdiction to 5 leagues, but the 1646 law “stipulates the extension of Protomedicato jurisdiction to all that is understood under the name of New Spain” and was reaffirmed by Viceroy Revillagigedo in 1792.81 The 1646 law “leaves no shadow of doubt that the jurisdiction of this Royal Tribunal extends to all New Spain”.82 The Protomedicos similarly had the right, they argued, to name inspectors throughout the viceroyalty, a right they claimed to have had “from time immemorial”83 and had named inspectors in Veracruz, Puebla, Guanajuato, San Miguel el Grande, Valladolid, and Zacatecas.84 8 Conclusion Despite the Protomedicos’ arguments, by 1806 the viceroy had “suspended the Tribunal’s jurisdiction over the naming of inspectors … throughout the 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Ibid., vol. 4, exp. 1, fs. 28r–v. AGN, Protomedicato, vol. 4, exp. 3, f. 1r. The case was brought to the Audiencia, Fiscal de lo Civil, by Monroy’s father, Juan José Monroy, a procurador of the Real Audiencia. Ibid., f. 3r–4r. Ibid., fs. 4v–5r. Ibid., fs. 3r–5r. Ibid., vol. 4, exp. 1, f. 52v. Ibid., vol. 4, exp. 4, fs. 16v. Ibid., fs. 17r–v. Ibid., f. 15v. Ibid., f. 16r. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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Kingdom”, limiting it to the traditional 5 leagues around Mexico City.85 To the apothecaries of Puebla, such a ruling showed that the viceroy agreed with them that “the ordering of inspections has to do with the superior government, not the Royal Tribunal [of the Protomedicato]”.86 If the viceroy might have ultimately reconsidered his decision for the backlog of pending inspection cases, however, the possibility for major reform or overhaul of medical regulation in the viceroyalty was put on hold with the Napoleonic invasion of Spain and the outbreak of the Independence movement in Mexico. In addition, the Mexican Protomedicato had been under attack from surgeons and apothecaries who, following major restructuring of the Castilian Protomedicato in 1780, were lobbying for greater control over their professions. Indeed, the Castilian Protomedicato was dissolved and reconstituted several times during the course of the wars of Independence in favor of individual councils for medicine, surgery, and pharmacy. In Mexico, the Protomedicato was abolished in 1831, but the highly centralized nature of medical training and oversight continued its concentration in the capital. The Protomedicato was replaced by the Medical Faculty of the Federal District made up of four medico-surgeons and four pharmacists, which took over its functions and jurisdiction.87 In 1833, the Mexican Congress established a new educational system for the training of medical professionals in the Establishment of Medical Sciences in Mexico City that had professorships in anatomy, physiology and hygiene, pathology, materia medica, surgery and obstetrics, legal medicine, and theoretical and practical pharmacy.88 Here medical professionals would be trained and licensed to practice. Thus, the regional debates and challenges over such a centralized medical system were destined to continue, and they would constitute an important impediment to unity and stability in addition to ethnic and class divisions. Bibliography

AGN

Primary Sources

Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Mexico

Actas de Cabildo del la Ciudad de México, I. Bejaran (ed.), 54 vols., Mexico City, 1889–1911. Decreto de Nueva Planta del Reino de Valencia, 29 June 1707. 85 86 87 88

Ibid., fs. 17v–18r. Ibid., vol. 4, exp. 6, f. 34r. Dublan and Lozano (eds.), Colección completa de las disposiciones legislativas, p. 403. Ibid., pp. 571–572.

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Dublan, M., and María Lozano, J. (eds.), Colección completa de las disposiciones legislativas desde la Independencia de la República, Tomo II, Mexico City, 1876. Muñoz, M.E., Recopilación de las leyes, pragmáticas reales, decretos, y acuerdos del Real Proto-Medicato, Valencia, 1751. Novísima Recopilación de las Leyes de España, Madrid, 1805. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, Tomo Segundo, Madrid, 1774.



Secondary Literature

Campos Díez, M.S., “El Protomedicato en la administración central de la Monarquía Hispánica”, Dynamis 16 (1996), pp. 43–58. Campos Díez, M.S., El Real Tribunal del Protomedicato castellano, siglos XIV-XIX, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 1999. Clouse, M.L., Medicine, Government, and Public Health in Philip II’s Spain, Farnham, 2013. Danón Bretós, J., “Protomédicos y Protomedicato en Cataluña”, Dynamis 16 (1996), pp. 205–218. Fernández Doctor, A., “El control de las profesiones sanitarias en Aragón”, Dynamis 16 (1996), pp. 173–186. Fernández del Castillo, F., “La Inspección de Medicamentos en la Nueva España durante el siglo XVII”, Gaceta Médica de México 81 (1951), pp. 10–19. Gardeta Sabater, P., “El nuevo modelo de Real Tribunal del Protomedicato en la América española: Transformaciones sufridas ante las Leyes de Indias y el cuerpo legislativo posterior”, Dynamis 16 (1996), pp. 237–259. Gentilcore, D., “All that Pertains to Medicine: Protomedici and Protomedicati in Early Modern Italy”, Medical History 38:2 (1994), pp. 121–142. Gentilcore, D., “Il Regio Protomedicato nella Napoli Spagnola”, Dynamis 16 (1996), pp. 219–236. Glick, T.F., “Muhtasib and Mutasaf: A Case Study of Institutional Diffusion”, Viator 2 (1971), pp. 59–81. Hamarneh, S., “Origin and Functions of the Hisbah System in Islam and Its Impact on the Health Professions”, Sudhoffs Archiv 48:2 (1964), pp. 157–173. Iborra, P., “Memoria sobre la institución del Real Proto-Medicato”, Anales de la Real Academia de Medicina, Tomo sexto, Madrid, 1885, pp. 174–307, 387–418, 496–532, 570–592. Jordi González, R., Relaciones de los boticarios catalanes con las institutions centrales, La Bisbal, Gráf, Gispert, 1975. Kinsbruner, J., The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism, Austin, 2005. Lanning, J.T., The Royal Protomedicato: The Regulation of the Medical Professions in the Spanish Empire, Durham, 1986.

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López Terrada, M.L., “Los estudios historicomédicos sobre el Tribunal del Protomediacto y las profesiones y ocupaciones sanitarias en la Monarquía Hispánica durante los siglos XVI al XVIII”, Dynamis 16 (1996), pp. 21–42. Lunenfeld, M., Keepers of the City: The Corregidores of Isabella I of Castile (1474–1504), Cambridge, 1987. Martínez Hernández, G., La medicina en la Nueva España, siglos XVI y XVII: Consolidación de los modelos institutionales y académicos, Mexico City, 2014. Ortiz Monasterio, J., “Agonía y muerte del Protomedicato de Nueva España, 1831: La categoría socioprofessional de los medicos”, Historias 57 (2004), pp. 35–50. Parilla Hermida, M., “Apuntes históricas sobre el protomedicato: antecedentes y organismos herederos”, Anales de la Real Academia Nacional de Medicina 94 (1977), pp. 475–515. Powers, J.F., “Frontier Municipal Baths and Social Interaction in Thirteenth-Century Spain”, The American Historical Review 84:3 (1979), pp. 649–667. Rodríguez, M.E., “Legislación sanitaria y boticas novohispanas”, Estudios de Historia Novohispana 17 (1997), pp. 151–169. Sabater, J.O.M., “Agonía y muerte del Protomedicato de la Nueva España, 1831: La categoría socioprofesoinal de los médicos”, Historias 57 (2004), pp. 35–50. Sánchez Álvarez, J., and G. Sotres, “El Protomedicato navarro: itinerario de una investigación”, Dynamis 16 (1996), pp. 187–204. Vernia, P., “The Muhtasib of Valencia and Pharmacy in Aragon”, Pharmacy in History 30:2 (1988), pp. 89–93. Zarzoso, A., “Protomedicato y boticarios en la Barcelona del siglo XVIII”, Dynamis 16 (1996), pp. 151–171.

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PART 4 Special Themes

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CHAPTER 13

The Urban Plans of Mexico City, 1520–1810 Barbara E. Mundy 1 Introduction Compared to other major cities of its size in Europe, Mexico City was poorly represented in printed plans until the late 18th century. Most earlier examples were redactions of the famous plan of Tenochtitlan published in 1524 to accompany Hernán Cortés’ Second Letter to Charles V, discussed below.1 On the other hand, the city had a rich tradition of manuscript plans sponsored by the city’s government, the earliest of which are indigenous plans of the 16th century.2 This tradition reveals urban dwellers’ preoccupation with the complex water systems of the city, its spatial divisions, as well as its political position as an imperial capital, be it the Aztec empire or the kingdom of New Spain. An excellent illustrated catalog of plans of the city already exists, so rather than repeat it, this essay attempts to synthesize the motives for the creation of city plans and account for the development of their visual forms.3 Hundreds, if not thousands, of plans of smaller parts and parcels in the city were made during the period under consideration.4 Of concern here are those that show the entire city; maps of the larger Basin of Mexico will briefly be considered in as much as they inflect the development of the urban plan. The early indigenous plans establish a preoccupation with water management of the original island city, a concern carried through in the city plans made by Spanish and Creole residents in the 17th and 18th centuries. By the 18th century, attempts by the Bourbon government to organize and police an urban population notable for its size and ethnic diversity led to a rash of plans documenting different ways to divide the city into more manageable units. Thus, by 1810, on the eve of independence, Mexico City had two well-developed practices in its urban cartography: the mapping of water and the mapping of city’s social space.

1 2 3 4

Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital”, pp. 1–22. Toussaint, Gómez de Orozco, and Fernández, Planos de la ciudad de México. Lombardo de Ruiz, Atlas histórico de la ciudad de México. Alcántara Gallegos, “Los barrios de Tenochtitlan”, pp. 167–198.

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Plans and the Multi-ethnic Population

Many of the historical accounts of the 16th century emphasize the Spanish nature of the city founded upon the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. Separate juridical categories of república de indios and república de españoles operated for Spanish courts, and had correlatives in the government of the city, where a Spanish cabildo, or town council, coexisted with two indigenous cabildos, one in Tenochititlan and the other in Tlatelolco, which ruled over indigenous tributaries. But the neat dichotomies offered by administrative frameworks were rarely borne out in the urban sphere. Here, Spaniards and indigenes lived cheek by jowl in a city that was indigenous-majority through the 16th century and even more ethnically diverse in the 17th century, given growing numbers of castas, or people of diverse descents, like mestizos and mulattos, as well as the Afro-Americans and Asian-Americans who settled in the city, some of them coming from other parts of the Indies.5 In the last decades of the 18th century, scholars (extrapolating from census data) believed the city to have had about 115,000 people; about a quarter of them were members of the tribute paying república de indios.6 These points are important ones because urban plans are never simply about geographic space. Rather, they are about people, and the ways that people imagine, shape, and use urban spaces. Over the course of the five centuries that Mexico City was the seat of the Aztec empire and of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the plans created of it were indelibly shaped by the multi-ethnic character of the city’s residents, and by the 18th century, concerns about their place within the urban order. 3

Indigenous Foundations

Before the conquest, Mexico City was ruled by ethnic Mexica, who called their island city Tenochtitlan. The Mexica, along with other Mesoamerican peoples, had developed a sophisticated pictographic writing system that they used in making maps and plans.7 While no entirely pre-Hispanic plans of the city have survived, throughout the 16th century, the vast majority of plans from the city—mostly of urban house lots—were made by indigenous ­mapmakers. Their plans are among the earliest known post-conquest manuscripts and employed a varied-projection system so unlike any imported European model 5 Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination, p. 20. 6 Granados, “Cosmopolitan Indians”, pp. 171–174. 7 Boone, Stories in Red and Black; Montes de Oca Vega, Cartografía de tradición hispanoindígena.

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that there is little doubt of their pre-Hispanic origins. Entryways are shown in elevation, while the perimeter walls and plots are shown in plan. Measurements are precise, following a standard unit, which was subdivided for even more precise measurements.8 Within the island capital, fractional units are shown with the maitl (a hand symbol), the yollotli (a heart symbol), and the mitl (an arrow symbol). In Texcoco, one of the basin cities, the yollotli and the mitl were used to show two-fifths and one-fifth of the standard unit, so land measurements were accurate down to a few inches.9 The land surveys used to produce the data were probably done with ropes of a standard measure.10 Two extraordinary plans reveal both the range of mapping practices and the common concerns of indigenous plans. The first is fol. 2r of the Codex Mendoza painted c.1542 (Figure 13.1).11 It shows the city at the moment of its foundation in 1325, expressed by the indigenous year date of 2 House at upper left, the first of the 51 small squares set around the edge of the page, all colored a brilliant turquoise. In creating this plan, the maker has abstracted the known ­geography—­an island in the middle of vast, shallow lake—into the rectangular space within the year counters, defined by a blue belt to represent the lake. Blue bands quadrisect the space of the city into four triangular zones; these bands are meant to be understood as human-made canals that crossed the city. Rudimentary architecture is included: a little green thatched-roof hut is at top, while a skull-rack (tzompantli) pinions a skull at center right, showing the residue of ritual sacrifice. The early island city is unlikely to have had such an ordered appearance; instead, the artists employed the quadripartite scheme because it was conceptually and aesthetically important within the larger Mesoamerican world, where quadripartite arrangements in politics and architectural design, as well as urban spaces, were conducive to harmony in those arenas. At the center of the page, we find a concise icon representing the history of the city’s foundation. Here the eagle, the avatar of the Mexica patron deity Huitzilopochtli, is seen alighting on the nopal (or prickly-pear) cactus, a sign telling his people to found their city on that spot. Thus, as told by the Codex Mendoza, the history of the Mexica people began only with their establishment as an urban people in a carefully manipulated space, this city brought into being through being named: Tenochtitlan. The city’s distinctive name glyph, combining the symbols for “rock” and “prickly-pear cactus”, is set at the 8 9 10 11

Castillo, “Unidades nahuas de medida”, pp. 195–223; Williams and Harvey, The Códice de Santa María Asunción. Williams and Pierce, “Evidence of Acolhua Science”, pp. 147–164. Ibid. Berdan and Anawalt, The Codex Mendoza.

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figure 13.1 Unknown creator, the foundation of Tenochtitlan, Codex Mendoza, fol. 2r, c.1542

center of the page, where the cactus serves as the perch for the eagle. The city’s political elites figure prominently in the plan, which features the ten tribal leaders who founded it, each named with a pictograph. The ­diagrammatic nature of this plan is clear when compared to topographic maps of the basin.

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But also evident to an indigenous city resident would be the social diagram it presents: pre-Hispanic Tenochtitlan had four large wards, or parcialidades, and these persisted into the colonial period as component parts of the city ruled by the indigenous cabildo of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. By setting the founding of their city of Tenochtitlan as the necessary first step for the building of empire, a history recounted in the pages that follow this one in the manuscript, the Mexica promoted their city as the pivot of the Aztec empire, a persistent idea about Mexico City for the next three centuries. The emphasis on political authority and the control of water we see in the Codex Mendoza is also apparent in a cadastral plan known today as the Plano parcial de la Ciudad de Mexico.12 We may never know what part of the city this plan represents, nor its orientation, nor exactly how to date it, given that it was patched, added to, and repainted over time. This author believes that the original base plan dates to the pre-Hispanic period, and the plan was added to at least up to 1565.13 Most of the plan is dominated by a vast system of irrigation canals and the plots (called chinampas) that they define. In fact, water is a dominant concern in the map. Main feeder canals run diagonally across the surface of the map and they feed a grid of subsidiary canals which run parallel to the edges of the map, which in turn supply the thousands of rectilinear capillaries that irrigated the chinampas. Two pre-Hispanic style temples sit along the main diagonal canal, with another set within the chinampa zone, each temple bearing the distinctive merlons of shrines dedicated to Tlaloc, the water deity of rain. The bold presence of these shrines, considered pagan and destroyed after the conquest of 1519–21, is one reason to think that parts of the map may be pre-Hispanic. Almost all of these plots contain a glyph representing a house and a head with a pictographic name attached to identify the smallholder. Since this cadastral plan does not record precise measurements, the plots may have been a standard size. Use of plans like this one was explained by Alonso de Zorita, an oidor (judge) of the royal Audiencia (court), who wrote that local indigenous ward leaders used maps (he called them pinturas) to apportion and keep track of communal lands.14 The creators of the Plano parcial included images of political authorities in their work: a line of rulers dominates the right margin of the 12

Castañeda de la Paz, “Sibling Maps, Spatial Rivalries”, pp. 53–73; González Aragón, La urbanización indígena de la ciudad de México; and Toussaint, Gómez de Orozco, and Fernández, Planos de la ciudad de México. 13 Many scholars of the plan have held that it represents a part of Tlatelolco, given that at the center of the plan a twin temple, a known Tlatelolco feature, appears. However, close visual examination reveals this to be a patch composed of two distinct (and once separate) buildings that were pasted onto the center of the plan. 14 Zorita, Life and Labor in Ancient Mexico, p. 110.

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plan, beginning with the pre-Hispanic emperor Itzcoatl (r. 1428–40) and ending with Luis de Santa María Cipac, who served as governor of Mexico-Tenochtitlan (r. 1563–65). The extent of indigenous political authority is made visible in more subtle ways as well: many of the smallholders have the hairstyle of warriors, suggesting that their lands were the rewards that Mexica rulers meted out for their participation in successful military campaigns. Indeed, the massive coordinated creation of vast stretches of chinampas, like those seen on the Plano parcial, was also spearheaded by the pre-Hispanic state. These few examples allow us to see how the indigenous city was connected to images of its rulers, and how the control of its resources (particularly its water) shaped its cartography. 4

Early Hybrids

The manner in which the Mexica envisioned their city surfaces in the earliest printed map of the capital and surrounding Basin of Mexico. This map, identified as “TEMIXTITAN” by a legend at its center, was created by an anonymous woodblock carver to accompany the Latin version of Cortés’ Second Letter printed Nuremberg in 1524 (Figure 13.2). We are offered a view from east to west, and the region is presented as it appeared some years previous, before the terrible Spanish siege and despoilment of 1521. The map also shows the larger Basin of Mexico in plan, but most descriptive details are rendered in elevation, including images of the cities that ringed the lakeshore. These are represented following the conventions used in European maps of the time, where the visual shorthand for a city was a cluster of towers and houses. The island capital of Tenochtitlan is shown with more specificity; it is dominated by a great precinct, whose footprint was about 4,000 square meters, and at whose center rise the twin temples, one dedicated to Tlaloc, the other to Huitzilopochtli. Many other features of the Mexica city—especially those that caught the interest of Cortés—are named with Latin inscriptions, including the ruler Moteuczoma’s zoo, his gardens, and the great urban market at Tlatelolco. Also evident is the aquatic quality of the city, which was threaded through with canals as part of the vast water management system that the Mexica and other basin peoples had constructed to control the lakes (seen up close in the Plano parcial) and leading European observers to compare it to Venice. While long assumed to be a European creation, the plan, as this author has argued, was drawn from indigenous sources.15 As in the Codex Mendoza, the

15

Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital”.

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figure 13.2 Unknown creator, map of Tenochtitlan (at right) and schema of the Gulf Coast (at left), from Hernán Cortés, Praeclara Ferdina[n]di. Cortesii de noua maris oceani Hyspania ­narratio ... (Nuremberg: Friedrich Peypus, 1524)

lake is present, albeit in abstracted form, seen here as an even ring that surrounds the island city. Methods for its control are also prominent: the city is connected to the lakeshore by long elevated roadways, called causeways, that also served as dikes. At the bottom of the map, a long dike, represented like a wicker fence, cuts through the lake. Such a dike did indeed exist and its rendering by the Nuremburg artist as a rather delicate sluice may be a misreading of indigenous symbols for stone used as a shorthand for the massive earthwork. This map is particularly important, not only because it was the first European image of the great American capital, but because of its promiscuous circulation. Most plans of Mexico City printed in Europe in the 16th and 17th century are the spawn of this one. Thus, the 1524 Cortés plan had enduring impact on how Europeans imagined Tenochtitlan. A different kind of hybrid presents itself in the Uppsala Map of Mexico City (Figure 13.3).16 It is also known as the Mapa de Santa Cruz, after Alonso de Santa Cruz, a cosmographer who served the Spanish kings, Charles V and Philip II, and who once was believed to be the creator of the map. The map is not by his 16

Toussaint, Gómez de Orozco, and Fernández, Planos de la ciudad de México, pp. 135–166; Linné, El Valle y la ciudad de México en 1550; León Portilla and Aguilera García, Mapa de México Tenochtitlan; and López, “Indigenous Commentary on Sixteenth-Century Mexico City”.

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figure 13.3 Unknown creator, Map of Mexico City, c.1537–55

hand. Instead, it is an indigenous creation, most likely made within the confines of the great monastic complex of Tlatelolco. Placed in charge of evangelizing the city’s residents soon after the conquest, the Franciscans also established a school, the Colegio de Santa Cruz, in Tlatelolco that opened in 1536. It educated native elites and it was within the ambit of this school that the map was made. The map shows almost the same geographic range as the Cortés map of 1524, and like it, is oriented with west at the top. Also like its European counterpart, it aggrandizes the size of the city in relation to the surrounding basin. In doing so, it presents a visual argument for the importance of the island capital. However, dominating the center of this map are not the twin temples dedicated to Aztec gods, but the enormous Franciscan monastery of Tlatelolco, a new sacred center replacing an older one. The city is painted with a dull brown ground, and on its surface hundreds of buildings appear. Many of them, especially the numerous churches and monasteries, were recent constructions, the result of the intense building campaign of the 1530s and 1540s to rebuild the city after the war. The map’s secure terminus ante quem date is 1556, when it was dedicated to Emperor Charles V, who formally abdicated in August of that year. But it may have been composed as early in 1537 in Mexico City. Around the city is a vibrant landscape, filled with vignettes of daily life: indigenous men herd sheep; they transport loads on their backs; they fish in

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the lake and catch birds in nets. Such quotidian scenes are unknown in earlier indigenous maps, but they appear in European printed maps, making it likely that the artists of the map were exposed to European models within the walls of the monastery. Drawn on parchment, and framed with an undulating ribbon, the map can be set squarely within a tradition of European city maps. However, entirely within the indigenous tradition are the hundreds of hieroglyphic place names scattered across the map that identify cities and towns across the basin. Perhaps more important to its hybrid nature is its concern with longstanding practices of water control in the basin, an example of which we have seen in the Plano parcial. This is revealed by the enormous network of rivers precisely documented around the city. We see dozens of streams and rivers flowing into the lake, as well as careful rendering of the waterways—some of them natural rivers—that were dredged in the lakebed to ensure canoe passage during the dry season, when water levels were low. As we have seen, the water systems so carefully rendered in the Uppsala Map were an enduring preoccupation of pre-Hispanic governments across the basin, which oversaw the maintenance of dikes, causeways, and aqueducts that were crucial to the flourishing of agriculture in the basin and the provisioning of its peoples. Crown officials would inherit the responsibility of the basin waterworks, but Spanish ignorance and resulting mismanagement of the great system resulted in watery disaster by the 1550s. In one of the charming vignettes in the Uppsala Map we see one cause of the impending ecological disaster. Around the town of Cuajimilpa, indigenous men dressed in short tunics fell the trees of the forest. Needing wood pilings to shore up their urban palaces and churches in the swampy soil of Mexico City, and wood beams for roofs, the city’s new Spanish residents, Cortés first among them, demanded that huge amounts of wood be cut in the surrounding hills. Deforestation was followed by erosion, and the shallow lakes began to silt up.17 When the rainy season of 1555 arrived, the surrounding hills and the lake could not absorb the water, and the city flooded. Parts of it remained underwater for months, and Viceroy Luis de Velasco commanded thousands of men, corvée labor, to rebuild one of the two Mexica dikes that once served to protect the city. In deciding this course of action, Velasco consulted indigenous leaders in the basin and asked that they present maps to guide him in his decision. A report of the time records that they indeed brought in their pinturas, but none have survived to show us what other maps of the larger basin may have looked like.18 Our only hint comes in the extraordinarily detailed and accurate rendering seen in the Uppsala Map of perhaps two decades prior. 17 Boyer, “Mexico City and the Great Flood”. 18 Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, pp. 199–202.

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Mapping the Desagüe

While 16th-century mapping was dominated by indigenous makers, by the 17th century, interest in the control of the waters in the basin brought mapmakers trained in Europe into the city, and they introduced new cartographic practices. In addition, the ongoing importation of printed maps and city views created in Europe gave mapmakers new ideas about rendering the city. The most important spur to mapmaking in the larger basin was flood control measures that culminated in the great desagüe, a plan hatched in the wake of the great flood of 1607 to drain much of the basin. Successive viceroys called in experts to assess the problem and recommend a resolution. One expert was the German-born cartographer Enrico Martínez (born Heinrich Martin) who worked on the desagüe project from 1607 to his death in 1632.19 As John López argues, Martínez’ plan to drain the lakes was not new, but it has been made historically indelible because he created “the first flood control map made by a professional cartographer”, his Descripción de la comarca de México i obra del desagüe de la laguna of 1608, a manuscript map now held in the Archivo General de Indias (see López, this volume).20 This map’s importance was amplified by publication: printed versions based on it appeared in 18th-century books.21 The focus of Martínez’ map, like the ones drawn from it, is on the hydraulic system of the larger basin, and as such, reduces the image of the city to a mere abstract symbol, a clustering of tower-like structures in the center of the lake. While this abstracted image would seem to tell us little about the development of urban plans, it is important for representing the city as the largest and most important center in the basin, as did the 1524 Cortés plan, where the city dominates the central field of the map. In representing the centrality of Mexico City, these 17th-century maps carry forth an idea first seen in the Codex Mendoza: a Mexico City-centric territory. The desagüe maps of the basin have their own legacy, and since their rendering of the city is largely schematic, they will not be of primary concern here, except to emphasize how they cross-fertilized urban plans, particularly in attracting men with command of European surveying techniques, like Martínez, who enriched local survey knowledge. The result is visible in the most important set of manuscript plans created of the city in the 17th century. 19 20 21

Mayer, “Trasmonte y Boot”, p. 187. López, “The Hydrographic City”, p. 152; map reproduced in Lombardo de Ruiz, Atlas histórico de la ciudad de México, vol. 2, pp. 142–143. For two examples, see Lombardo de Ruiz, Atlas histórico de la ciudad de México, vol. 2, pp. 144–147.

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They were made by the Mexico City architect, Juan Gómez de Trasmonte, who was working to solve the flood crisis at the same time as Martínez, and by Adrian Boot, a Dutch engineer summoned to the city by 1614 in order to protect the city from the lake.22 Boot’s plan for urban infrastructure existed alongside the larger (and more ecologically radical) desagüe project.23 Four maps by Trasmonte are known to exist today, and they show the city oriented to the east, both in plan and in bird’s-eye, or oblique, view.24 In one, the Forma y levantado de la cuidad de México from the Biblioteca Medicea Lorenziana, the careful rendering of the grid of city streets and the contours of the island were clearly indebted to surveys as well as views captured from elevations to the city’s west (Figure 13.4). The buildings of the Spanish government (both local and viceregal) as well as the city’s religious establishments (including the university, founded in 1553) are given pride of place in this set of plans, particularly the bird’s-eye view, where they are rendered in elevation, and named in cartouches set at the bottom left and across the top. The orientation allows Trasmonte to feature a long dike that ringed the entire eastern perimeter of the city, set with openings that appear to be sluice gates to regulate the flow of canal water out of the city, and to protect it from inundations coming from the east. The dike—whose sluices seem to have been a proposal rather than a reality—is dwarfed, though, by Trasmonte’s dramatic rendering of the city’s environment, from the blue wash of the lake beyond and the dramatic forms of the mountains, including spent volcanic cones even farther east. The celebratory image of the placid island city was picked up by European printmakers, and likely via a print that drew on it, published in London in 1671, the Trasmonte prototype found its way back to Mexico, given that we find an updated version of Trasmonte’s oblique view painted on large folding screens known as biombos created in Mexico City in the late 17th century.25 And print has allowed one Trasmonte map to take on renewed influence in modern times. The Mexican scholar Francisco Paso y Troncoso had lithographic copies 22 23 24

25

Mayer, “Trasmonte y Boot”; López, “In the Art of My Profession”. López, “The Hydrographic City”, pp. 171–200. Fernando Marías identified four maps from Trasmonte’s hand, Forma y levantado de la ciudad de México and Planta de la ciudad de México held by the Biblioteca Medicea Lorenziana, Florence; and two plans both titled as Forma y levantado de la ciudad de México in the Bibliothèque National de France (Estampes VD 20–3 [P183735 and P183736]) in Bérchez and Alcalá (eds.), Los Siglos de Oro en los virreinatos de América, pp. 234–239. Ogilby, “‘Nova Mexico’ in America: Being the Latest, and Most Accurate Description of the New World ... ” (London, 1671), following p. 242. Reproduced in Lombardo de Ruiz, Atlas histórico de la ciudad de México, vol. 1, pp. 302–303. Two of the extant biombos are held by Mexico City’s Museo Franz Mayer and Museo Nacional de Historia.

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figure 13.4 Juan Gómez de Trasmonte, “Forma y levantado de la cuidad de México”, after 1628 original

made in 1907, versions of which were offered for sale at the National Museum in Mexico, thus reaching an unprecedented audience.26 As this author has argued elsewhere, the 1628 plan effectively erases all presence of the city’s indigenous past, and the considerable indigenous present. 6

Mapping Reform Proposals of the 18th Century

In the 18th century, in the wake of the Bourbon Reforms, plans of the city were vehicles for proposals addressing the variety of social ills that urban elites saw as plagues on the city.27 They revealed an underlying belief that social ills could have spatial solutions. But such an approach was belied by the socio-spatial complexity of the city. The strongest social affiliations in the 17th century were to parishes, whose members were not divided along strict geographic lines. Indigenous parishioners were segregated from Spanish ones, so next-door 26 27

Toussaint, Gómez de Orozco, and Fernández, Planos de la ciudad de México, pp. 191–192. Mundy, “The Images of Eighteenth-Century Urban Reform”.

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neighbors in the city may have headed different directions on Sunday. Among the city’s indigenous residents, parish membership reflected even earlier organizations schemes of the Mexica city into tlaxilacalli. These were local variants of the neighborhood-kin group, or ward, themselves the subject of the indigenous maps described by Zorita. New plans fomented in the 18th century attempted to divide the city along strictly geographic lines into new units called cuarteles as an antidote to social ills. Such plans can be traced as early as 1713, when the Viceroy Fernando de Alencastre Noroña y Silva, the first Duke of Linares, attempted to establish cuarteles in response to the disorder that he and city authorities saw being caused by the city’s large number of taverns (pulquerías) where intoxicating pulque was sold. Linares held that new divisions and the implantation of a system of alcaldes de corte (magistrates of the Audiencia) able to keep watch over their urban flock would successfully maintain peace in the city’s neighborhoods. Similar proposals surfaced through the century, as officials sought to replicate in New Spain the cuartel division used in Spanish cities.28 Indeed, in a royal cédula of 1743, the Crown stated its intent in “stopping the robberies, killings and other crimes” in the viceregal city by commanding that it be divided into cuarteles, which would allow justice to be quickly dispatched to miscreants by the alcalde de crimen (magistrate of the Audiencia’s criminal court) and a juez de provincia (provincial judge).29 These new divisions were expressed graphically, and 18th-century proposals to divide the city into cuarteles yielded plans in 1720, 1750–53, and 1782. The earliest of these calls for an examination of its novel graphic form. While Linares wanted the city to be divided into nine parts, the city government found itself without sufficient personnel to head each and thus proposed in 1720 a six-part division, with its alcaldes de crimen, the corregidor (district magistrate-administrator) and alcaldes ordinarios in charge of maintaining order within each of these districts. These divisions were expressed as a mapa, a rather flexible term at the time used for the resultant diagrams.30 To create each of the proposed cuarteles, the city was divided into six large quadrilateral spaces, each about four to six square kilometers. But these were not expressed on a plan. Instead, they were drawn across six pages of a manuscript book. On the page, four inscribed circles were meant to represent each cuartel; within each circle was itinerary of the landmarks that defined that boundary, so that one found a written description of boundaries that ran from the west to east, 28 Mayer, México ilustrado, pp. 82–93. 29 Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Civil, vol. 1496, fols. 142r–43v. 30 AGN, Civil, vol. 1496, fols. 148r–154r.

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the south to north, the east to west, and the north to south. Taken across its six folios, this mapa offers up the city as archipelago, a collection of insular cuarteles known by the textual description of boundaries and assigned number. To make sense of these boundaries, one needed a considerable amount of local knowledge. In this proposal, the city as a whole is never expressed as a unified image. Rather, the mapa was a document perfectly designed for another function: to establish boundaries for local officials who already knew the layout of their city. The impulse to make the city image came from the viceroys. Through the 18th century, the men appointed to this important post were sometimes outsiders, sent for a brief tour of duty. They had little of the local knowledge that would make the mapa described above legible. How would a newly arrived viceroy make sense, for instance, of a boundary marker described in the 1720 mapa as “the bridge of the six small trees”? The actions of the reformist viceroy, Juan Francisco de Güemes y Horcasitas, the first Count of Revillagigedo, are instructive. He was a Spanish-born administrator who earlier served as governor of Havana, and captain general of Cuba, before becoming viceroy of New Spain, a post he held from 1746 to 1755. He put renewed energy into the plan to divide the city into cuarteles and commissioned that plans be made such as the general plan created in 1750 by José Antonio de Villaseñor y Sánchez, who was contador de los reales Azogues, a copy of which exists today in the Archivo General de Indias. This 1750 manuscript plan also includes the itineraries of the boundary of the cuarteles, as did the 1720 mapa, but they are written in the large cartouches in the upper left and right of the plan. Three years later, in 1753, maps of the individual cuarteles were produced and three still exist in Mexico’s Archivo General de la Nación.31 After this, manuscript plans were made with increasing frequency for viceroys and used for new projects of urban reform. Consider the 1770 manuscript plan made by Nicolás de Lafora, a military engineer, now in the Museo Nacional de Historia in Mexico City, which bears on its surface evidence of three great programs of reform being carried out in the last third of the 18th century: reform of the religious institutions, reorganization into cuarteles (still unfinished business in 1770), and reorganization of the city’s canals. The plan was made at the behest of Viceroy Carlos Francisco de Croix, Marqués de Croix, a relative stranger to the city, arriving from Galicia in 1766. Oriented to the west, an orientation of its printed predecessor, it measures 126 cm wide by 87.5 cm high, and shows a precise grid of streets, albeit without names or blocks

31

AGN, Civil, vol. 1496 and Padrones 52.

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of color. The cartouche at left tells of its authorship but not its purpose. This may be surmised from internal and external evidence: it is the city’s religious establishments that are the focus of Lafora’s 1770 plan, named on the plan’s long legend which is keyed to numbers inside the plan itself; thus the cathedral is identified, but the viceregal palace is not. Why Croix’s interest? By expelling the Jesuits from New Spain in 1767, Viceroy de Croix, had riled the rest of the city’s religious establishment; the 1770 plan may have been designed with an eye to their surveillance; alternately, the viceroy may have been looking for new sources of revenue. Later, the 1770 Lafora plan was put to another use, and another hand drew upon its surface to document yet another proposal for a division into cuarteles. A third intervention on the Lafora plan’s surface shows changes in the city’s infrastructure, with particular focus on the city’s waterways, and this ties it to the water infrastructure projects of the late 18th century. Juan Vicente de Güemes Pacheco de Padilla y Horcasitas, the Second Count of Revillagigedo, like his father a particularly active reformer, commissioned the engineer Ignacio Castera to make a series of maps in 1793–94. They document Revillagigedo’s attempts to create a great canal to ring the perimeter of the city, to systematize the cleaning of streets, to pave streets, to fill in low-lying swampy areas in the city, to clear spaces for the mustering of troops, and to establish scaled property taxes on city landowners.32 The 1794 plan proposed unifying and regularizing the rather irregular loop of existing canals into a strict rectilinear form; while it was never carried out, one of the last viceroys of New Spain, Francisco Javier Venegas, did construct a rectangular perimeter ditch in 1810, setting it in the semi-desiccated lakebed.33 On the heels of the cuartel plan that was the motive for the creation of the 1720 mapa and subsequent plans, came another, more radical plan to reorganize the city’s parishes launched by Francisco Antonio de Lorenzana Butrón (1722–1804). During his consequential tenure as archbishop (1766–72), Lorenzana aimed to rationalize the overlapping networks of parishes, a project 32

33

Mexico City, Mapoteca Orozco y Berra, Ignacio Castera, Plano Ygnográfico de la Cuidad de Mexico Capital del Ymperio que demuestra el reglamento General de sus Calles…, 1794, 52 x 67 cm, ink and watercolor on paper; Seville, Archivo General de Indias, Planos de México, 2.773: Ignacio Castera, Plano Ygnográfico de Mexico que demuestra su centro principal y Barrios…, 1793; a handmade copy showing the regularization of the canals is in Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, Manuel Ygnacio de Jesús del Águila, Plano Ichnográfico de la Ciudad de México, que demuestra el reglamiento General de sus Calles ... de orden de Exmo Sr. Conde Revilla Gigedo. Por el Mtro mayor D. Ignacio Castera, año de 1794. The 1810 zanja created by Vanegas is documented in Library of Congress, Plano Topografico de Mexico. A[ño de] 18[??], of 1813.

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made possible by the Crown’s expulsion of the Jesuits and the more gradual removal of indigenous parishes from the control of the religious orders, which began in 1750 and over the next two decades put the parishes of the entire city to the direct control of the archbishop. To this end, the newly arrived archbishop called on a priest and city resident, José Antonio de Alzate, to draw up plans for the reorganization of the parishes. It was this reform effort that led to the creation of one of the most beautiful and precise manuscript plans of the city, Alzate’s Plano de la ciudad de México of 1769, now held by the Museo Franz Mayer.34 Alzate had a collection of earlier city plans at his disposal, but he also revised and updated them with new measurements he collected on the ground. In his westward-oriented plan, the anchors of the urban plan are the city’s religious establishments, as they are in Trasmonte’s, and Alzate carefully records the hundreds of names of the city’s streets, bridges, and other landmarks. In order to show the proposed parish divisions, Alzate used bold blocks of contrasting colors; paler washes of color describe the swampy surround of the once-island city. Alzate’s intimate knowledge of the city, and his careful rendering of its features make this the most important manuscript plan of the 18th-century city. 7

The City in Printed Form

For over two centuries, there were few printed plans of the city, and most were the offspring of the 1524 Cortés plan, rehashing an outdated city view. This would change in the second half of the 18th century. A print industry burgeoned in Mexico City, an industry consisting of engravers with the knowledge to engrave images onto plates and printers with the experience and equipment to print them. In 1753, a version of Villaseñor’s general plan created to divide the city into cuarteles, one that lacked the long texts describing the divisions, was engraved at the behest of Domingo de Trespalacios y Escandón, a judge (oidor) of the Real Audiencia by Francisco Rodríguez Juárez (or Xuares) and printed in 1753 (Trespalacios would also commission a large painted map of the basin as part of the drainage projects, a painting now in the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid).35 This 1753 printed plan of Mexico City, like the manuscript plan that it drew on, was oriented with west at top, so that the two of main city egresses are at top. The plan also captures both the experience of 34 35

Mundy, “The Images of Eighteenth-Century Urban Reform”. On Francisco Rodríguez (active 1754–66) in Mexico City, see Donahue-Wallace, “Prints and Printmakers in Viceregal Mexico City”, p. 89.

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the walker at street level, as well as the abstracted view of the overall city, by combining two systems of projection, as had most earlier manuscript plans. The gridded street plan (a projection guided by a uniform scale) served as the base, and within it the blocks of city buildings are shown as if in elevation. But close examination reveals that while each block is unique, the engraver has filled them with repeating variations of a few forms, reserving for the city’s most important buildings a rendering based on verisimilitude. A novel feature of this plan is stepped pattern used to represent some plots; these correspond to areas of indigenous settlement, clustering at the margins of the city and in Tlatelolco.36 The larger framing devices—the engraver has made the plan appear as if it is in the process of being unfurled as if to literally present it to its patron—and the elaborate cartouche at bottom right, where a decorous nude reclines and a small cupid surveys the city with his telescope, distance it from its pragmatic origins (a schema to organize and better police the city) and make it appear to be a disinterested city plan. When a city plan is made and printed, it establishes a base map, making it easier for subsequent cartographers. Nonetheless, it took two decades for the 1753 printed plan of the city to be followed by others.37 The most important of these was that of Ildefonso de Iniesta Bejarano, the city’s leading cartographer, engraved by Manuel Villavicencio, whose Mexico City print shop produced many images of important cult statues and paintings (Figure 13.5).38 The cartouche in the upper left situates the city for a global audience: “Mexico Tenuxtitlan Ciudad de la America la mas Hermosa, y Rica asiento de los Exmos. Sres. Virreyes de esta nueva España. Por nro. Cat. Mon el S. D. Carlos III. Dic. 24 de 1778 Anos”. The wording of the legend suggests its makers may have seen its creation as a commercial enterprise (as printed plans in other cities were), directed to both local and international markets.39 Although it may have used the 1750 Villaseñor plan as a base, the Iniesta plan signals its departure from its predecessor in significant ways: oriented with east at its top, it no longer uses the mixed-projection system that showed buildings in elevation, instead reducing most of the city to a plan, and preserving elevations for the city’s most important structures, most of them religious. As if to compensate for the lost 36 37 38 39

Carlos Vidal, personal communication, 2012. Alzate gave a copy of his plan to Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche, who published a reduced version (engraved) in Paris in 1772. Roberto Mayer, personal communication, published in Mundy, “The Images of Eighteenth-Century Urban Reform”. Donahue-Wallace, “Prints and Printmakers”, pp. 84–89. Its dedication to Luis Góngora González Maldonado, who was the attorney to the Real Audiencia, suggests that the market for printed plans was an untested one, and Iniesta needed a patron to defray the costs.

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figure 13.5 Ildefonso de Iniesta Bejarano (cartographer) and Manuel Villavicencio (engraver), with additions by an anonymous hand, “Mexico Tenuxtitlan Ciudad de la America la mas ­Hermosa, y Rica asiento de los Exmos. Sres. Virreyes de esta nueva España ... ”, 1778

experience of the street view, the creators inserted a small cartouche at the bottom right showing a view across the Plaza Mayor to the north, making visible the cathedral and the sacristy, with the Palacio Real to the right, and the towers of other churches. We do not know if the 1778 Iniesta plan was a commercial success, but a number of surviving examples reveal how it became the basis for new ways of envisioning the city space. Alzate had at least one, if not more, copies of the Iniesta plan. In 1789, he cut up, pasted over, and added to the magnificent print in order to convert it into another kind of plan, this one documenting the different indigenous neighborhoods that comprised the pre-Hispanic city. His paste-overs covered the original name and the inset view of the cathedral, and he conferred his own title to the plan: Plano de Tenochtitlan, Corte de los emperadores, a plan discussed below. Another example of the printed Iniesta plan (now at the Library of Congress and reproduced as figure 13.5) shows that it was used to show new division into 14 parishes, as it was painted over with broad fields of color, in various dilutions of ochre and red, to distinguish among them. A handwritten text was added to the left margin telling of the

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1772 edict and naming the new parishes. Yet another example shows that the printed Iniesta plan was more formally reworked in order to show the new cuartel scheme: the plate was polished down to erase the text engraved into the plate “Mexico Tenuxtitlan Ciudad de la America la mas Hermosa”; Iniesta’s hand-engraved text was set into type and moved to the left margin of the plan; and a new printed text describing the borders of the cuarteles was set into the right side. The creators intended to overprint or paint the plan with colors to designate the new cuartel divisions, but the example known to me (now in the Museo Nacional de Historia) is uncolored.40 At the end of the day, it was not Iniesta’s plan that would disseminate the new division of the city into cuarteles. Instead, his plan was reworked, reduced in size, and simplified by its original engraver, Manuel Villavicencio, and given a new title, La Nobilisima Ciudad de Mexico dividida en quarteles de orden del Exmo. S. Virrey D. Martin de Mayorga, Diciembre 12 de 1782. It was then published in a small book meant to promulgate the new orders.41 The trajectory of Iniesta’s printed plan brings several strands of the history of Mexico City’s plans to the fore. First, by the second half of the 18th century, the plan became the chosen field to visualize the city by its viceroys as well as to project new schemes for the city’s reorganization. The advent of print puts plans into the hands of more people, like Alzate, who used them for self-directed ends. At the same time, control of the creation of plan was shifted from the cartographer to the printmaker, who could rework easily available published plans, particularly his own plates. This trajectory culminates in the Diego García Conde plan, the Plano General de México, the largest printed plan of the city of the viceregal period, measuring 58 x 78 inches.42 Like many of Mexico City’s 18th-century plans, it was made at the behest of a viceroy, in this case the Second Count of Revillagigedo, whose reformist projects for the city are discussed above. To create his plan at this date, García Conde could draw on a number of well-rendered printed plans, like the Iniesta plan and a plan by Ignacio Castera printed in Madrid in 1785. But the elaborate realization was due to the presence in Mexico City of a highly skilled engraver, José Joaquín Fabregat, who was trained at the Academia de San Carlos in Valencia, and came to Mexico City in 1787 as Director of Engraving at the newly founded (1783) Academia de San Carlos (see Hamman and Widdifield, this volume). Skilled as he may have been as a cartographer, 40 41 42

Reproduced in Lombardo de Ruiz, Atlas histórico de la ciudad de México, vol. 1, pp. 332–333. Ladrón de Guevara, Ordenanza de la division de la noblisima ciudad de Mexico en cuarteles. Plano General de México levantado por el Teniente Coronel de Dragones Don Diego García Conde en el año de 1793, y grabado en el año de 1807. De Orden de la misma Nobilísima Ciudad ...

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García Condes’ work is subsumed by the skill of this master engraver, who rose to the graphic challenges inherent in the plan. One major technical challenge for a map engraved on various plates (in this case nine) is the coordination of the parts so the connections are seamless, and the weight of the ink even across the plates so the final map is visually uniform. The design choices of type, of the balance of the graphic elements and the text, are all challenging ones. In this case, Fabregat offset the grey grid of the urban plan with an elaborate frame hung with a swag of drapery in the upper right onto which text is set. The band of Roman capitals along the top of the page is balanced two small pictorial vignettes at the plan’s bottom, one showing the view out the city to the east, the other to the west, both of which create an illusionistic deep space on the otherwise flat sheet. In the course of three centuries, the advent of print meant that plans of Mexico City could escape the singular condition of the manuscript and reach larger publics. Successful printed plans (by which I mean in wide circulation) also exerted pressure on the plans that followed them, by establishing accepted conventions for the representation of the place. In the case of Mexico City, the decisions about how much of the surrounding land to include as part of the city, the scale, and projection were codified in the course of the later 18th century. It was only in the García Conde plan that printed plans were oriented to the north, thus adhering to international cartographic convention, and departing from the more typical eastern or western orientation of plans of Mexico City earlier in the 18th century, the western orientation corresponding to directions of the main entrance to the city along the Tacuba causeway. When the García Conde plan was reissued in smaller scale in London in 1811, in both French and English in 1824, and in Spanish in 1830, they confirmed the new standard.43 8

The Plans of Mexico City’s Past

The legacy of the Cortés map—reworked and published in Europe, often to accompany histories of the conquest through the 18th century—meant that plans that showed Mexico City of the past, in this case as an Aztec capital, were well known to a broad public for a long duration. In contrast, printed plans of most other European cities, like the ones found in atlases like Braun and 43

Reproduced in Lombardo de Ruiz, Atlas histórico de la ciudad de México, vol. 1, pp. 350–357.

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Hogenberg’s, showed cities in their present moment. Particularly influential among Cortés-legacy maps was the popular history of the conquest, Antonio de Solís’ Historia de la conquista de México, first published in 1684, and subsequently reprinted in various languages. To illustrate the 1704 Brussels edition, the book’s publisher, Francisco Foppens, had an engraver rework a map that derived ultimately from the Cortés map, lowering the angle of view so that the city is seen from the shore of the eastern lake.44 The same map appeared in the French edition of 1704.45 Thus, well into the 18th century, published city plans of Mexico were as often about the past city as they were the present one. The map as vehicle for history found its Enlightenment-era champion in Alzate, who, as mentioned briefly above, reworked the printed Iniesta plan to document the divisions of the pre-conquest city, carefully delimiting and naming the 69 barrios or neighborhoods of the Mexica city, whose names he listed in a pasted-on addition to the left side of the map, and inscribed upon its surface. This manuscript map is now held in the Bibliothèque National de France, and was little known until its mid-20th-century rediscovery by Alfonso Caso. Caso used it as the base for his reconstruction of the indigenous barrios of the Mexica city, which he, like Alzate, expressed as a map.46 While Caso’s work was singular in its focus on the social make-up of Tenochtitlan, since the end of the 19th century, Mexican archaeologists and historians were also using maps to reconstruct Tenochtitlan, as in Leopoldo Batres’ 1892 Plano de la Cuidad de Tenochtitlan en el año de 1519 = 1 Acatl. The mapping of Tenochtitlan continues to this day, seen best in the digital designs of Tomás Filsinger, whose work recaptures on screen the now-vanished city and reimagines the verdant, water-filled basin. 9 Conclusion In many respects, the history of the plans of Mexico City parallels that of other Hapsburg cities, where knowledge of urban surveying led to more planimetrically precise plans over time. But this positivist narrative is disrupted by the precision of indigenous surveying in the 16th century—empirical knowledge that was superior to much of what would follow, until the second half of 44 45 46

Lombardo de Ruiz, Atlas histórico de la ciudad de México, vol. 1, pp. 250–251. Ibid., pp. 252–253; Francisco Coreal’s La ville de Mexique (1722); Pieter van der Aa’s La Vieille Ville de Mexique, capitale de la Nouvelle Espagne (1729); and also derive from Solís. Caso, “Los barrios antiguo”, pp. 7–62.

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the 18th century, when we see evidence of quite precise urban surveys. Also unique to Mexico City is the broad continuities across time in using maps and plans to document water control and social space, the works made for Mexica administration coming full circle in the works of the late 18th century, when plans became once again the graphic form of choice by Bourbon administrators in their efforts to create new jurisdictions and improve revenue collection.47 Often unmentioned in studies of urban cartography is the supporting role of the religious cult image during the 18th century. Larger urban markets for prints (driven by a desire for prints of religious cult figures) allowed for dedicated workshops of engravers, who developed the skills to transform manuscript plans into printed ones, as we see with Villavicencio, who is better known as a creator of religious images than cartographic ones. And the taste of urban consumers for printed images, most clearly manifest in prints of cult images, extended to prints of maps. While the large printed plan by García Conde would have been too expensive for most consumers, the smaller editions published in London in 1811 and New York in 1830, meant to be folded into a carrying case, were widely appreciated on both sides of the Atlantic.48 In sum, what distinguished Mexico City’s plans from those of Europe and other cities of Spanish America were their indigenous roots. Once could argue that the set of plans made by Gómez de Trasmonte in 1628 grew out of an exclusively European tradition of chorographic views, but plans that concerned themselves with the control of the city’s waters, as did Trasmonte’s, had a history that predated the Spanish occupation. Indigenous plans documenting possession or usufruct rights also had a deep history, and they assigned groups of people to defined urban areas, the same impulse behind the late 18th-century parish plans. A new linkage between the indigenous past and the city’s plan was created by Alzate, whose reworking of the Iniesta Ildefonso plan would prove to be one of the most important documents to record the urban fabric of the past. Also found in this indigenous past was the Mexica determination to set Tenochtitlan at the beginning of imperial history and the center of empire, seen in the frontispiece of the Codex Mendoza. Mexica aspirations would bear fruit with Independence: while the territory when under the viceroy was called New Spain, after Independence in 1821, the whole would take on the name of its preeminent urban center, and thus forward be called Mexico.

47 48

Dym, “Administrative Cartography in Spanish America”. Plan General de la Cuidad de Mexico, levantado por el teniente coronel Don Diego Gracia Conde en el año de 1793, y gravado en miniatura en Londres por Eduardo Mogg, el año 1811.

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Dym, J., “Administrative Cartography in Spanish America”, in M. Edney and M.S. Pedley (eds.), Cartography in the European Enlightenment, History of Cartography, vol. 4, Chicago, 2020. González Aragón, J., Códice plano en papel maguey, Mexico City, 1997. González Aragón, J., La urbanización indígena de la ciudad de México: el caso del Plano en papel maguey, Mexico City, 1993. Granados, L.F., “Cosmopolitan Indians and Mesoamerican Barrios in Bourbon Mexico City: Tribute, Community, Family and Work in 1800”, doctoral dissertation, Georgetown University, 2008. Gresle-Pouligny, D., Un plan pour Mexico-Tenochtitlan: Les représentations de la cité et l’imaginaire européen, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, Paris, 1999. Hardoy, J.E., “La cartografía urbana en América Latina durante el período colonial”, in J.E. Hardoy, R. Morse, and R.P. Schaedel (eds.), Ensayos Histórico-sociales sobre la Urbanización en América Latina, Buenos Aires, 1978, pp. 19–58. Hardoy, J.E., “Urban cartography in Latin America during the colonial period”, Latin American Research Review 18:3 (1983), pp. 127–134. Hilton, S. and González Casasnovas, I., “Fuentes manuscritas para la cartografía histórica iberoamericana: guía de instrumentos descriptivos”, Anuario de Estudios Americanos 54:1 (1997), pp. 263–293. Kagan, R.L., Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793, in collaboration with F. Marías, New Haven, 2000. León Portilla, M. and Aguilera García, M.d.C., Mapa de México Tenochtitlan y sus contornos hacia 1550, Mexico City, 1986. Linné, S., El Valle y la ciudad de México en 1550; relación histórica fundada sobre un mapa geográfico, que se conserva en la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Uppsala, Suecia, new series (Statens etnografiska museum, Sweden), publication no. 9, Stockholm, 1948. Lombardo de Ruiz, S., Atlas histórico de la ciudad de México, M. de la Torre (ed.) with contribution by Y. Terán Trillo, 2 vols., Mexico City, 1996. López, J.F., “The Hydrographic City: Mapping Mexico City’s Urban Form in Relation to Its Aquatic Condition, 1521–1700”, doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013. López, J.F., “‘In the Art of My Profession’: Adrian Boot and Dutch Water Management in Colonial Mexico City”, Journal of Latin American Geography 11/S (2012), pp. 35–60. López, J.F., “Indigenous Commentary on Sixteenth-Century Mexico City”, Ethnohistory 61:2 (2014), pp. 253–275. Mayer, R., México ilustrado: mapas, planos grabados e ilustraciones de los siglos XVI al XIX, in C. Fernández de Calderón (ed.), Mexico City, 1994. Mayer, R., “Trasmonte y Boot: Sus vistas de tres ciudades mexicanas en el siglo XVII”, Anales Del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 87 (2005), pp. 177–198. Maza, F. de la, La ciudad de México en el siglo XVII, Mexico City, 1968.

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Maza, F. de la, and Pascoe, J., Adiciones a Enrico Martínez, cosmógrafo e impresor de Nueva España, Mexico City, 1992. Maza, F. de la, and Ortiz Macedo, L., Plano de la Ciudad de México de Pedro de Arrieta, 1737, Mexico City, 2008. Mendoza Vargas, H. and Antochiw, M., México a través de los mapas, Mexico City, 2000. Mendoza Vargas, H., and Lois, C., Historias de la cartografía de Iberoamérica: nuevos caminos, viejos problemas, Mexico City, 2009. Montes de Oca Vega, M., Cartografía de tradición hispanoindígena: mapas de mercedes de Tierra, siglos XVI y XVII, 2 vols., Mexico City, 2003. Mundy, B.E., “Mapping the Aztec Capital: The 1524 Nuremberg Map of Tenochtitlan, Its Sources and Meanings”, Imago Mundi 50 (1998), pp. 1–22. Mundy, B.E., “Place-Names in Mexico-Tenochtitlan”, Ethnohistory 61:2 (2014), pp. 329–355. Mundy, B.E., The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City, Austin, 2015. Mundy, B.E., “The Images of Eighteenth-Century Urban Reform in Mexico City and the Plan of José Antonio Alzate”, Colonial Latin American Review 21:1 (2012), pp. 45–75. Torre Villalpando, G. de la, Los muros de agua: el resguardo de la ciudad de México siglo XVIII, Mexico City, 1999. Toussaint, M., Goméz de Orozco, F., and Fernández, J., Planos de la ciudad de México: siglos XVI y XVII, estudio histórico, urbanístico y bibliográfico, Mexico City, 1938. Trabulse, E., Jiménez Codinach, E.G., and Moreno Toscano, A., Una visión científica y artística de la ciudad de México: el plano de la capital virreinal, 1793–1807 de Diego García Conde, Mexico City, 2002. Williams, B.J., and Harvey, H.R., The Códice de Santa María Asunción: Facsimile and Commentary: Households and Lands in Sixteenth-Century Tepetlaoztoc, Salt Lake City, 1997. Williams, B., and Pierce, J., “Evidence of Acolhua Science in Pictorial Land Records”, in J. Lee and G. Brokaw (eds.), Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives, Boulder, 2014, pp. 147–164.

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CHAPTER 14

The Desagüe’s Watermark

Cartography and Environmental Crisis at Viceregal Mexico City John F. López Today, Mexicans and tourists alike walk the Zócalo, Mexico’s most important public square, against a rich architectural backdrop of Aztec ruins and colonial buildings. Amid a cacophony of street vendors selling their goods, church bells ringing, or tens of thousands protesting, few notice Monumento hipsográfico (Figure 14.1).1 Commissioned in July 1877 by the general, lawyer, politician, and historian Vicente Riva Palacio and inaugurated in May 1881, the monument honors the 17th-century cartographer-turned-hydraulic engineer Enrico Martínez.2 German by birth, Martínez, in 1607, implemented the desagüe, a monumental engineering project intended to end Mexico City’s age-old problem of catastrophic inundation by draining the six lakes that surrounded the island settlement into the Gulf of Mexico.3 Designed and cast in the Parisian 1 Currently, and since 1925, Monumento hipsográfico sits at the southwest corner of Mexico City’s Catedral metropolitana. Yet, between 1881 and its 1925 relocation, the monument sat on the opposite side of the cathedral, at the intersection of the streets of Seminario and Arzobispado. 2 While Monumento hipsográfico memorializes colonial efforts to end flooding at the viceregal capital, we cannot overlook the fact that Riva Palacio’s commission also speaks to a late 19th-century need to achieve the same goal. That is, the monument points to a double objective: to recuperate the memory of, and mobilize, desagüe history to garner support for the Porfirian Gran canal del desagüe. 3 Publisher, Inquisition translator, and mapmaker are among Martínez’ other professional endeavors. His publishing house is readily recognized for its importance to early New Spanish print culture. Equally significant, Martínez also contributed to New Spain’s intellectual life, authoring the following: Lunario y regimiento de salud; Reportorio de tiempo e historia natural de Nueva España; Agricultura de Nueva España sobre la cria de ganados, labores, huertas, jardines; De fisionomia de rostros; Discurso sobre la magna conjución de los planetas Júpiter y Saturno acaecida el 24 de Diciembre de 1603; and the now-lost Tratado de trigonometría. In addition to these textual offerings, Martínez was a prolific cartographer, producing 33 manuscript maps not including the one examined in this chapter. Of these, 32 are manuscript copies made in Mexico City, which are based on drawings produced by Gerónimo Martín Palacios during Sebastián Vizcaíno’s 1602 expedition of the California coastline. The remaining manuscript map derives from a compilation of reports, according to historian Valerie Mathes, that would support Spain’s interests in New Mexico. For a more detailed understanding of Martínez’ life and professional endeavors, consult Mathes, “Enrico Martínez of New Spain”, pp. 62–77 and Maza, Enrico Martínez, cosmógrafo e impressor de Nueva España. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004335578_016 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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figure 14.1  Miguel Noreña, Monumento hipsográfico, 1881, bronze on marble pedestal Photograph courtesy of author

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workshop of the Mexican sculptor Miguel Noreña, an allegorical, neo-Classical figure of bronze, a woman in the bloom of her youth, representing Mexico City, rests atop a pedestal of white marble.4 With an unwavering gaze, as if looking out into the former lacustrine environment, she offers Martínez a laurel in eternal gratitude for his service to the city.5 Such a gesture of gratitude not only demands scrutiny of Martínez’ efforts to end flooding at Mexico City but also consideration of the broader implications of drainage to the city. While the desagüe has received much attention from Mexican and U.S. historians for its technical, class, and bureaucratic challenges, I want to orient the discussion of drainage towards a different set of concerns that have fallen outside the purview of desagüe scholars.6 This chapter takes as its subject of study a single map that proved to be the fulcrum for an epistemological break by the Spanish from Aztec methods for mitigating environmental disaster, and any of the colonial approaches that resembled it. Our gateway into a Spanish response to environmental crisis is Enrico Martínez’ 1608 Descripción de la comarca de México i obra del desagüe de la laguna, or Description of the Basin of Mexico and Project to Drain the Lake (Figure 14.2). Underscoring the need to bring the map under scholarly scrutiny are several important facts that deserve mention. As the Spanish looked to the desagüe to save the city, Martínez’ map represents a defining moment in Mexico City’s history because it is the first drawing made by a professional mapmaker in the service of flood control. To date and historiographically speaking, no in-depth study exists scrutinizing Descripción de la comarca de México for its graphic commentary on how Martínez proposed to end the city’s propensity to flood. While these two points speak to a lacuna in desagüe studies, in particular, and to the role that European cartography played in the trans-Atlantic interactions between Spain 4 The architect Francisco Jiménez designed the pedestal. 5 A species of laurel discovered during the colonial excavations for the desagüe, Gaudichaudia Enrico Martinezii was named in honor of Martínez. The laurel rests atop the monument’s stone votive. 6 For scholarship on the desagüe, consult Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land; “Bourbons and Water”, pp. 70–73; “The Desagüe Reconsidered”, pp. 5–39; and “Draining the Basin of Mexico”. By Hoberman, refer to: “City Planning in Spanish Colonial Government”; “Bureaucracy and Disaster”, pp. 211–230; and “Technological Change in a Traditional Society”, pp. 386–407 (later republished in Land Drainage and Irrigation, pp. 269–280). Gurría LaCroix, El desagüe del valle de México durante la época novohispana; Lemoine Villicaña, El desagüe del valle de Mexico durante la época independiente; Marley, “Adrian Boot”, pp. 74–77; Mathes, “To Save a City”, pp. 419–438; Ramírez, Memoria acerca de las obras e inundaciones en la ciudad de México. By López, consult the following: “In the Art of My Profession”, pp. 35–60 (later republished in Spanish as “En el arte de mi profesión”, pp. 26–46); “The Hydrographic City”; and “In the Midst of Floodwaters”, pp. 35–52.

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figure 14.2 Enrico Martínez, Descripción de la comarca de México i obra del desagüe de la laguna, 1608, sepia ink on paper, 42.1 x 54.9 cm Courtesy of the Archivo General de Indias

and Latin America in general, there is a third and even more significant reason why the map deserves our attention. Made under the guise of environmental concern and technological prowess, Descripción de la comarca de México aids understanding how flooding was a problem posed by New World nature to European rational cartographic analysis, where the latest technologies of mapmaking—science and mathematical abstraction—were mobilized to find a solution to Mexico City’s centuries-old problem of inundation. 1

A City Aflood

Before undertaking study of Martínez’ map, I want to establish the historical context that would be the impetus for his cartographic work. Let us begin this story of mapmaking and environmental crisis with the flood of 1607. Imagine, if you will, Mexico City’s inhabitants—Spaniards, Indians, Asians, and

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Africans, and the many other social groups that comprise its citizenry— deeply worried about the continuous rainfall that has fallen upon the basin. Concerned over the hydraulic network of causeways, dikes, and floodgates, a holdover from pre-Hispanic times, they wonder: will they withstand the force of rushing water? How many men, women, and children must fall victim to an enemy that carries no weapon, but kills many? And what of the property damage to churches, municipal buildings, and private residences? Would the city’s inhabitants once more have the resilience and fortitude to rebuild the city in the middle of the lake? These are just a handful of the many concerns that raced through the minds of the islanders. Unfortunately, for the city’s residents, their worries turned to nightmarish reality when floodwaters breached the Aztec-inspired causeways to inundate Mexico City. The 1607 flood was not entirely unexpected. Quite the contrary: while it was a deeply unfortunate event, it formed part of a longer history of environmental disasters that afflicted the island site. The flood marked the sixth colonial inundation since the conquistador Hernán Cortés founded Mexico City in 1524.7 Remarkably, in little more than 80 years, Mexico City had surpassed the total number of floods—three—that had afflicted Tenochtitlan, its pre-Columbian counterpart. What makes this comparison even more impressive is the fact that Tenochtitlan averaged a flood every 64 years while the viceregal capital inundated every 14 years. Indeed, the island city’s propensity to inundate in the colonial era was on a significant upsurge, one never before experienced throughout the historical arc of Tenochtitlan. Prior to 1607 and on three separate occasions, viceregal authorities had considered drainage as an alternative strategy to the Aztec method of causeways, dikes, and floodgates. Yet these proposals of 1555, 1580, and 1604, resulting from flooding, all had a similar outcome. They were rejected on the basis that their respective costs far outpaced that of rebuilding existing hydraulic structures or because they were deemed unnecessary when floodwaters receded. With each subsequent rejection, the colonial powers were left with no other option but to follow in the footsteps of the Aztec to reconstruct the aquatic network. However, with the flood of 1607, the second inundation to afflict Mexico City in only three years’ time, city authorities were at their wits’ end. Believing that the Aztec method was completely ineffective, Spanish authorities were now ready to implement drainage. Following in the footsteps of his father, Viceroy Luis de Velasco the Elder with the 1555 flood, Viceroy Luis de Velasco the Younger made a call for drainage proposals. In total, five schemes were presented to city authorities, but only that of Martínez concerns us here. On 17 7 It was the ninth inundation since the 1325 founding of Tenochtitlan.

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September 1607, Martínez presented a two-part plan to city officials. Phase one called for building a canal and tunnel to drain Lake Zumpango into the Gulf of Mexico.8 Phase two required construction of a second discharge canal from Lake Mexico to Lake Zumpango to achieve total drainage.9 The length of both phases was estimated at 18.6 miles with each stage costing 300,000 pesos.10 On 4 October, Spanish authorities studied Martínez’ proposal in the field. From records of several interim meetings, we learn that city officials had already begun to reconceptualize the cost of environmental disaster. Recall that earlier proposals were rejected because their projected expenditures far outpaced the cost of reinforcing the existing hydraulic web. However, this argument lost all credibility when city treasurer Diego de Ochandiano championed Martínez’ plan, arguing that it was indispensable for saving Mexico City because its cost would be “no greater than the [value of the] buildings saved”.11 Indeed, this point was not lost on the members of the city council, with Francisco de Trejo Carvajal, Francisco de Yrrazabal, and Pedro Núñez de Córdoba also in agreement.12 With the value of the city’s buildings, estimated at just over 20,000,000 pesos, factored into a financial risk assessment, the pendulum quickly swung away from the Aztec-inspired causeways and in favor of the desagüe. On 23 October, city authorities formally accepted Martínez’ drainage strategy.13 It was decided that he had correctly identified the causes for flooding (while others had not), and that his plan was financially judicious, diverted the least Indian labor from other profitable activities, and could be completed expeditiously. To build the desagüe, a tax was levied on city property, but the funds raised fell far short of the intended goal.14 With only enough money to implement the first stage of the project, the second phase was put on hold.

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 430. Martínez, “Relación de Enrico Martínez”, vol. 2, pp. 8–10. See also Hoberman, “City Planning in Spanish Colonial Government”, p. 69. Hoberman, “City Planning in Spanish Colonial Government”, pp. 70, 81. Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 430; Hoberman, “City Planning in Spanish Colonial Government”, p. 60. Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 430; Hoberman, “City Planning in Spanish Colonial Government”, p. 60. Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 432; Maza, Enrico Martínez, p. 108; and Hoberman, “City Planning in Spanish Colonial Government”, p. 66. To aid implementing the tax for the desagüe, Viceroy Velasco commissioned the architect Andrés de la Concha to produce a map of the city. Regrettably, the location of this map is unknown. Ecclesiastical property was assessed at the rate of 0.75 per cent of its value, while non-religious buildings were taxed at 1.5 per cent. With the worth of the city’s buildings estimated at 20,267,555 pesos, 304,013 pesos were raised. See Hoberman, “City Planning in Spanish Colonial Government”, p. 83.

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Martínez had not only won a fiscal battle that had derailed previous drainage schemes, but also an epistemological one. Drainage represented an innovative solution to the city’s flood problem, by finally breaking free from the pre-Columbian model and any of the Spanish undertakings that resembled it. While gaining a favorable decision was indeed an achievement, it did little to end Mexico City’s age-old problem of flooding. For Martínez, another concern needed resolution if the city was to be finally liberated from recurring environmental disaster. For Martínez, the success of his drainage strategy rested on the production of a map. 2

Mapping Nature’s Character

Located today in the Archivo General de Indias, Descripción de la comarca de México is a quill-and-sepia ink manuscript map on paper, measuring 42.1 by 54.9 cm. As a sign of his dedicated service to the Spanish Crown, Martínez signed the map, appearing in the lower right-hand corner. In the pages that follow, we will scrutinize Martínez’ epistemic concerns, representational strategies, and observational methods, whose roots we can trace to Europe and in particular, to the cartography practiced in the Renaissance. The map thus is a wonderful reminder that the early 17th-century Hispanic world was already quite global, where networks of knowledge not only circulated but were readily applied to study and solve New World environmental problems. To understand how Descripción de la comarca de México supports the task of drainage, it is crucial to analyze how the map represents the natural world. The goal, for Martínez, is one of cartographic fidelity to nature, where methods of selection and codification render the natural environment in its most idealized form. That is, to “accurately” portray the basin, the cartographer needed to make choices regarding what the basin consists of, which natural phenomena to include, and how to represent them. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Martínez positions the viewer before a relatively empty but vast landscape. Rather than overburden the map with geographic details, which would have offered little to no knowledge about how flooding occurred or, more importantly, how to implement drainage, Martínez selectively identifies only those natural elements that speak to the task at hand. Observe how large, open spaces lie bare, with no graphic description as to their geographic character, next to densely packed mountains with trees, sinuous rivers spanned by bridges, or lakes edged by settlements. Besides excising the basin’s particularities, Martínez standardizes its representation. Note how topographical

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features—rivers, mountains, and trees—are described monochromatically, devoid of any pigment save for the sepia-colored ink employed. In lieu of additional color, cartographic techniques—line, cross-hatching, stippling, and shading—are used to map nature’s character. Meticulously drawn, lakes are stippled, rivers shaded, and mountains crosshatched. And, while these methods for depicting a lakeshore or a mountainous region may seem innocuous at first sight, they are not. They exhibit how cartographic knowledge is being mobilized, elaborating the ways in which representation of the basin is being conditioned by European cartographic praxis and knowledge. In other words, what we have before us is a picture detailing specialized methods for observing and representing nature, which speaks to the application of specialized skills to produce specialized knowledge. By virtue of offering an image like Descripción de la comarca de México, Martínez demands that we conceive of environmental disaster as a force conditioned by, and set in motion by, the basin’s geological form. Importantly, while Martínez was aware of how and why Spanish social practices contributed to flooding and even increased its rate, the map squarely suggests that any disaster resulting from human habits could be overcome by technical means and cartographic analysis. With this idea in mind, notice how mountains of different shapes and sizes lie adjacent to the map’s unadorned border, indicating to the viewer that the Basin of Mexico is an enclosed hydrographic unit where water has no natural outlet. Sealed off by the surrounding mountains, a web of rivers and streams descend downward, stretching sinuously, as they make their way towards the basin floor. In doing so, Martínez draws our eye from the mountains bordering the map’s frame to the low-lying lakes, of which there are four: the interconnected lakes of Mexico and Chalco, and the individual ones of Zumpango and Xaltocan. Marked by line, shading, and stippling, Lake Mexico stands out over and above the other lakes for the immensity of its amorphous size and shape, calling attention to the enormity of Mexico City’s environmental challenge. Directly below the lake’s title “Laguna de Mexico”, we find the sole reason why the desagüe was favorably received—Mexico City. However, we immediately notice that the settlement is overwhelmed by the expansiveness of the lake and from this vantage point, we are hard pressed to see it, much less discern its architectural character. However, with the aid of modern technology, I present, Mexico City, Spain’s capital in the New World (Figure 14.3). We immediately observe that the viceregal capital is represented as a collection of building façades closely huddled together. A centrally positioned cathedral with steeple pointing towards the “I” in “Mexico” is flanked by less prominent

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figure 14.3 Enrico Martínez, Detail of Mexico City, Descripción de la comarca de México i obra del desagüe de la laguna

buildings of a similar or a lesser level of articulation. Including the cathedral’s, four crosses denote the settlement’s Christian identity.15 The island settlement rests upon a causeway and three smaller causeways can be seen stretching from the city to the mainland. Aside from this outward appearance, where the cathedral is the “face” of the capital, we are provided with very few clues as to Mexico City’s architectural character or how water was an influencing factor in its urban form and fabric. We know this to be true because Martínez’ characterization of the isle of Mexico City is one that is analogous to mainland towns. Cartographic standardization was not only applied to nature—mountains, rivers, and lakes—but also to the built environment. With but a quick glance at the rest of the map’s graphic field, we can observe the application of this nondescript cartographic vocabulary at work. Mainland settlements are also portrayed as a series of buildings clustered together in elevation, often with a church with steeple being the most recognizable feature. Even in the context of religious piety, notice how the sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios (just directly below Mexico City and located near the present-day town of Naucalpan) has a graphic presence not unlike that of the capital (Figure 14.4). Simply put, the representational 15

As with their mainland counterparts, we cannot determine the function of nearby buildings based on simple observation of their architectural form.

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figure 14.4 Enrico Martínez, Detail of the sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, Descripción de la comarca de México i obra del desagüe de la laguna

strategy employed by Martínez to depict towns on dry land and the isle of Mexico City is one and the same: all the basin’s settlements stand as cartographic symbols. 3

“The Geometrization of Space”

To better understand Martínez’ map, we must ask the following question: What is the underlying epistemic motivation for his portrayal of Mexico City within its natural environment? The answer to this question can be found on the map. However, it is not located in the realm that rivers, mountains, and lakes inhabit. Rather, we must look beyond the map’s graphic field to its unadorned border to locate two hand-written notations. Just below the words “del desagüe” in the map’s title, the cartographer provides us with the coordinate 19° 15’ N, Mexico City’s latitude. On the map’s right-hand side, we find 257° 12’, the capital’s longitude.16 While these coordinates may seem inconsequential at first thought, 16

While the former figure is accurate by modern standards, the latter is not. Martínez was off the mark by 196 miles, but his was still an impressive feat, given that at this time determining longitude was not an exact science even for royal cosmographers.

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they are not. Underpinning these numerical terms, and by extension, the map’s overarching logic is mathematical abstraction. To appreciate Martínez’ coordinates and thus his description of Mexico City within its surroundings, we must turn to European antiquity. Writing in the second century A.D., the Alexandrian Claudius Ptolemy offered in Geography, a treatise that would form a cornerstone of Renaissance geographic and cartographic knowledge, that the true nature of a place could be understood universally via a picture of the world that was ordered mathematically (Figure 14.5). While today we take for granted a system of latitudes and longitudes to determine a city’s location within a space that is organized globally, Ptolemy’s treatise proved revolutionary in 15th-century Florence once translated from Greek to Latin. Quickly gaining currency among intellectual circles, it offered, as Renaissance art historian Samuel Edgerton argued, a method for mathematically projecting the spherical surface of the world onto a two-dimensional plane.17 What is unique about Ptolemy’s method is that the “moralized geography” found in Jacopo de’ Barbari’s 1500 View of Venice or Isidore of Seville’s T-O map in the 1472 Etymologiae, to offer but two examples, has been excised (Figures 14.6–14.7).18 Gone, as historian of cartography Ricardo Padrón articulated in The Spacious Word, were the salient “historical, mythological, and theological materials” in exchange for a rational interpretation of the world.19 This shift from a moral perspective to a rational one, which Geography helped to usher into European consciousness, contributed to the “geometrization of space”, as historians Richard L. Kagan and Benjamin Schmidt have shown.20 In considering further Ptolemy’s importance to Renaissance cartography, historian Evelyn Edson maintains that his approach gave mapmakers a “systemic [method] for ordering space, based on the abstract principles of Euclidean geometry”.21 Indeed, as Ptolemy pointedly reminds us, this method for mapping the globe was based wholly on the absolute precedence of mathematical abstraction.22 Ptolemy’s system is apolitical on the surface. Yet, once we look deeper into its application, the seemingly innocent idea of employing abstract reasoning 17 Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, pp. 93–98. 18 For understanding of the concept of moralized geography, see Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice”, pp. 425–474. 19 Padrón, The Spacious Word, p. 35. 20 Kagan and Schmidt, “Maps and the Early Modern State”, pp. 661–679. On the idea of the “geometrization of space”, Kagan and Schmidt drew upon Edgerton’s discussion of Ptolemy’s method to understand the world in rational terms. For Edgerton’s argument, see The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, pp. 113–15. 21 Edson, The World Map, 1300–1492, p. 119. 22 Berggren and Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography, p. 58.

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figure 14.5 Claudius Ptolemy, World map, Ulm, 1482, hand-colored Courtesy of the Library of Congress

figure 14.6 Jacopo de’ Barbari, View of Venice, 1500, 1.3 x 2.8 m. on 6 sheets Courtesy of the Newberry Library

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figure 14.7  Isidore of Seville, T-O Map in Etymologiae, 1472 Courtesy of the Newberry Library

to mathematically locate Mexico City within a measured, global space takes on political meaning. That is, we cannot divorce Martínez’ use of the Ptolemaic system—to situate the viceregal capital within a universally known world— from Spanish colonial ambitions. Much has been written about how the rationalization of space served European imperial interests on the one hand and the deterritorialization of indigenous peoples on the other, yet it is Padrón who makes a case for inscribing this double phenomenon within a map’s latitudinal and longitudinal grid.23 Employing the “grid” as a metaphorical inroad to consider how European imperial ambitions are imbued in world maps but yet are masked under the guise of scientific objectivity, Padrón calls attention to the political function of the “grid” to constitute a global space where geographies—“those known, those dreamt of, and those yet to be imagined”—can be embodied in a map’s “positive emptiness”.24 “Positive emptiness”, as Padrón writes, “only becomes visible when we realize that it logically extends far beyond the borders of the image. It extends into the vast part of the spherical earth that is not presented ... but whose existence is presupposed by the 23

For an introductory study on Europe’s rationalization of space and how it “provided a powerful framework for political expansion and control”, see Woodward’s essay, “Maps and the Rationalization of Space”, pp. 83–87; for discussion on how ethnic and geometric subjectivities were mobilized in maps, consult Mignolo’s “The Moveable Center”, pp. 219– 258. For a more global outlook on the relationship between cartography and imperialism, see the edited volume by Akerman, The Imperial Map. 24 Padrón, The Spacious Word, pp. 35–39.

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geometry of the grid”.25 Here, we have arrived at a problem that deserves attention: Descripción de la comarca de México is not a world map where one would expect to find a system of latitudes and longitudes. Yet, as Padrón indicates, the grid presupposes a geometric relationship to the rest of the world even if said world is absent from the image. In Martínez’ map, the grid has taken on a very different form, lacking any of the graphic qualities associated with the Ptolemaic projection. Rather, the grid, while not detectable in the map’s graphic field, is quite present, embodied in the form of text. The two hand-written notations (a textual grid, if you will), giving Mexico City’s latitude and longitude, locate the viceregal capital in a measured, global space, connecting it to the other “great cities” of the world—to Paris, London, and most importantly, to the seat of Spanish power, Madrid—as Ptolemy instructed in his treatise on geography.26 In short, Martínez’ illustration of the viceregal capital and its natural surroundings is not dependent on the skills of a painter who offers pictures of chorography. Rather, Descripción de la comarca de México is a product of Renaissance geographic and cartographic knowledge that is constituted by the abstract, mathematical thinking championed by Ptolemy in European antiquity but whose value was only beginning to be fully realized with its application in the Age of Discovery. With these ideas in mind, let us consider how Martínez proposed to end Mexico City’s affliction once and for all. 4

The Talisman of Martínez’ Authority

In his seminal work, The New Nature of Maps, historian of cartography J.B. Harley made the case that a map’s “ideological significance” could be understood via analysis of its cartouche and other decorative features.27 Viewed as socially and politically charged cultural images, this type of map reading gained much currency with the emergence of critical cartography in the 1980s and 1990s and stood in direct opposition to anterior interpretations of the decorative character of maps, which viewed cartographic ornamentation as unimportant, marginal, or even as a distraction from the meaning of the map.28 Nothing could be 25 26 27 28

Ibid., p. 38. Berggren and Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography, p. 57. Ptolemy makes a distinction between “towns” and “great cities”. While the former belonged to the realm of chorography, the latter had its place in geography. For Harley’s ideas on the cartouche and other cartographic decoration, see The New Nature of Maps, pp. 73–76 and 136–140. One proponent of this older perspective was A.H. Robinson who viewed highly stylized borders, cartouches, lettering, and other decorative features as a distraction from

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figure 14.8  Enrico Martínez, Detail of cartouche, Descripción de la comarca de México i obra del desagüe de la laguna

further from the truth; no cartographic mark is without ideological intentions, claims, or expectations. If the textual grid constituted the character of Descripción de la comarca de México, then the cartouche constitutes Martínez’ method for overcoming the environmental challenges posed by the viceregal capital’s natural setting. Referred to as the pictura loquens of cartography, we must consider how the cartouche speaks (Figure 14.8).29 In the lower right-hand corner of the map, the cartographer presents us with a richly decorated cartouche. It rests upon the map’s unadorned border, whose economical frame may tell of the image’s utilitarian function.30 The cartouche is an impressive depiction of architectural space. Volutes and pinnacles, architectural details that one expects to ornament the façade of a royal palace, edge a modest double frame. Such detailing exudes a regal presence; it is a presence that is strikingly absent in Martínez’ description of the viceregal capital. With but a simple glance at the map, we notice that the cartouche is unique for another reason: it is the only pictographic understanding the function of a map. In his opinion, they drew attention away from the scientific endeavors of cartography or would cloud judgement for comprehending its intellectual concepts. See Robinson, “Cartography as a Visual Technique”, pp. 16–24. 29 Harley, The New Nature of Maps, p. 136. 30 Andrews, Maps in Those Days, p. 435. Andrews offers that one reason why maps may lack stylized decorative borders is their need to meet utilitarian and pragmatic objectives.

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element that does not purport to offer a visual account of the basin’s natural terrain. By virtue of being part of the map and at the same time showing no interest in portraying the geographic character of the basin, the cartouche performs a twin objective.31 In other words, it occupies two different kinds of spaces. On the one hand, the cartouche is part of the map’s cartographic field and, on the other, it is self-referencing, pointing to its ideological position. The cartouche, if you will, is the stage upon which Martínez graphically enunciates the undergirding logic of his desagüe strategy. Drawn to a different scale altogether and jeweled with architectural ornament, the cartouche calls the viewer’s attention to a simple, but important tool of cartography: the dividing compass.32 The compass holds a practical function for cartographers, speaking to a map’s method of production; I am, however, interested in how it is a symbol of an episteme, representative of a body of knowledge. To put it differently, how does the compass work as a rhetorical device? What claims does Martínez make by offering an image of a cartographic tool? How is cartographic objectivity understood in the dividing compass? Answering these questions will aid learning more of Martínez’ mapping impulse, shedding much light upon the rationale of his desagüe proposal. Upon the dividing compass, Martínez rests the claim of cartographic objectivity. Observe how (with clear, crisp lines to highlight the compass’ intricate form) its two arms, connected by a circular hinge at the top, are outstretched over a scale bar measuring ten thousand varas.33 With compass and scale bar, the instruments of recording distance, Martínez reveals the logic of his desagüe strategy, before our eyes. Much more than just a tool of cartography, the dividing compass posits the idea that the Basin of Mexico is to be mapped in purely mathematical terms that can only be attained via systematic observation and measurement. The cartouche, dividing compass, and scale bar are far from being inconsequential, ancillary, or marginal graphic elements, and they are much more than a simple, neutral exercise in aesthetics. Rather, for Martínez, art and science work in tandem to convey the idea of geometric accuracy. The talisman of 31 32

On the twin objective that cartouches perform, see Jacob, The Sovereign Map, p. 115. In addition to the cartouche’s architectural features, its size deserves mention. Save for Lake Mexico, no other single cartographic element is as visually noteworthy as this decorative panel. 33 The vara is a Spanish unit of measurement that equals 0.838 meters or just shy of 33 inches, making the scale bar equivalent to 5.2 miles. For an introduction to New Spanish weights and measures and to some of the issue that arose from the lack of a standardized metrological system, refer to Carrera Stampa, “The Evolution of Weights and Measures in New Spain”, pp. 2–24.

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Martínez’ authority, geometric accuracy speaks to a new epistemic orientation to nature, one that did not rely on any pre-Hispanic conceptions of the natural world nor upon any anterior chorographic representations of Mexico City.34 This turn towards mathematical abstraction is unprecedented in prior maps (and other kinds of images) of Mexico City and Tenochtitlan. It is precisely within this difference between those maps and this one that we can locate the new epistemic current brought forth in the name of drainage. Untainted by any social concern (and despite the proportional inconsistencies that are evident in Martínez’ map), the dividing compass inscribes in picture that the natural world, and any problems posed by it, must be understood and solved in rational terms.35 Let us now consider how Martínez proposed to employ abstract reasoning and geometric accuracy to drain the basin. Recall that he identified a network of rivers and streams that descended from the surrounding mountain ranges to flow across the basin floor. Despite the attention to the region’s waterways, the cartographer is concerned with only one river: the Cuautitlán. This waterway, the source of the capital’s flood problems, is centrally located along the map’s unadorned bottom edge. Emerging from a mountain range that is split in half, as if capturing nature’s force in action, the Cuautitlán springs forth. The river, one notes, travels northward (towards the left on the map), until reaching its destination, emptying its rain-engorged waters into Lake Zumpango. It is at this point that Martínez intends to divert nature, redirecting its course along a different path. With compass and scale bar and read in unison with the legend entitled Obra del desagüe seen in the map’s lower left-hand corner, Martínez offers full comprehension of his drainage strategy. As the map indicates, the mouth of the desagüe canal, identified with the letter “a”, sits at the northwestern corner of Lake Zumpango, opposite from where the Cuautitlán emptied its waters. From this point, Martínez called for the construction of an Indian hand-dug canal that would extend northward for 7,500 varas to the town of Huehuetoca, or point “c”. The canal would then meet a hand-dug tunnel measuring 7,670 varas in length that would breach the basin’s northern mountains to deliver the waters to the Gulch of Nochistongo, or point “e” on the map. Once water was exterior to the basin, nature would no longer be an enemy, but a friend. Gravity, the cartographer deduced, would take the basin’s waters 34 35

The idea that geometric accuracy is the new talisman of Renaissance cartography, and by extension, for Martínez, stems from Harley. In particular, see The New Nature of Maps, p. 77. The map is not geometrically accurate in the strictest Euclidean sense. However, this fact does not detract from the application of, and knowledge derived from, mathematical abstraction.

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to the Tula River, which, after meandering for some 400 miles through New Spain, flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. 5

Rupturing the Bond Between City and Water

What is unique about Martínez’ desagüe strategy is not that he championed drainage, but that he called for the wholesale discharge of water from the Basin of Mexico. Such a plan would undoubtedly serve to rupture the bond between Mexico City and water. To understand this point in greater historical context, let us turn back the hands of time to analyze the first time that the desagüe was proposed. In October 1555, a torrential downpour fell over the Basin of Mexico.36 The rainfall was brief, lasting less than 24 hours, but its effects were great. Four days later, nearly all of Mexico City was submerged.37 Two weeks after the rainstorm, Mexico City was still in the midst of flooding, with waters rising. On 25 October, Viceroy Luis de Velasco the Elder and the city council convened to initiate a plan of action, commissioning a study of the flood.38 The procurador mayor and alderman Gerónimo Rruyz [sic] was charged with offering recommendations for ending the deluge, assessing flood-related damages, and proposing how to undertake necessary repairs.39 On 30 October, Rruyz presented his findings, calling for the opening of floodgates and the closing of others, for returning rivers to their natural paths, and for repairing dikes and causeways.40 The measures proposed by the alderman are significant, because they suggest an appreciation for the work 36

37 38 39

40

Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 425; Rubio Mañé, El Virreinato, vol. 4, p. 13; Memoria histórica, técnica y administrativa, vol. 1, p. 59. A discrepancy exists as to the date of the flood. For example, Rubio Mañé states that it occurred in October, but provided no date; Mathes suggests it happened on 10 October 1555; and Memoria histórica, técnica y administrative reports it occurred on 17 September 1555. Actas de Cabildo (hereafter AC), 11 October 1555; Rubio Mañé, El Virreinato, vol. 4, p. 13; Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 425; and Memoria histórica, técnica y administrativa, vol. 1, p. 59. AC, 25 October 1555; Rubio Mañé, El Virreinato, vol. 4, p. 13; Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 425. According to Memoria histórica, técnica y administrativa, the meeting occurred on 23 October 1555 (vol. 1, p. 59). AC, 14 October 1555. According to Rubio Mañé and Mathes, an Indian-made map of the city was provided to aid Rruyz in his investigation. Unfortunately, the location of this map is unknown if it even exists today. See Rubio Mañé, El Virreinato, vol. 4, p. 14; Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 425. To be more specific, Rruyz called for repairing and closing the floodgates in the calzada de Guadalupe; for closing of gates in the calzada de Tacuba; for opening the floodgates in the calzada de Iztapalapa; for diverting water to the Chapultepec canal and to an area near Azcapotzalco; for returning the Coyoacán and Tacubaya rivers to Lake Texcoco; for rebuilding the dike of San Lázaro; for eliminating several city canals (to prevent water from

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that the Aztec hydraulic network performed. However, not all placed their faith in the Aztec method. Others were at work on a different strategy. In the midst of environmental crisis, the idea of the desagüe was born.41 On Tuesday, 26 November 1555, the vecino (resident of the city) Francisco Gudiel presented an alternative to Aztec dikes and causeways.42 Entered into the city council minutes in the form of a memoria (report), Gudiel began his proposal by highlighting his hydraulic abilities—the knowledge to weigh and measure water—and his knowledge of the basin’s geographic terrain, gained by undertaking an empirical study of the flood, lakes, and rivers, surveying more than 70 leagues.43 Gudiel correctly deduced that the Cuautitlán River was the cause of the inundation and called for diverting it northward to the town of Huehuetoca via a to-be-constructed canal two leagues in length and 60 feet wide. Once at Huehuetoca, natural crevices in the northern mountains, Gudiel reasoned, would allow floodwaters to exit the basin.44 Perhaps surprisingly, the first proponent of drainage did not champion the wholesale discharge of water from the Basin of Mexico as Martínez would do five decades later. Instead, Gudiel made the case that water was fundamental to how the city functioned, arguing that a healthy supply must always be made available for its benefit.45

41 42

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entering the capital); and for repairing the causeways leading from the island. See Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 425; Memoria histórica, técnica y administrativa, vol. 1, pp. 59–61. Candiani, “Draining the Basin of Mexico”, p. 5. Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 426; Memoria histórica, técnica y administrativa, vol. 1, p. 63. In addition to Gudiel’s proposal, Ruy González also submitted a drainage plan. González called for the lakes and rivers of Citlaltepec, Cuautitlán, Zumpango, Ecatecpec, Chiconautla, and Tecama to be prevented from entering Lake Mexico, and thus, by extension, the city (AC 26 November 1555; Gudiel, “Memoria de Francisco Gudiel, año de 1555”, p. 13). At first glance, the proposal appears to be a plan based on only rediverting water. However, it was not. The city council minutes of 29 November 1555 note that this rechanneling of water was part of a drainage strategy (AC 29 November 1555; Gudiel, “Memoria de Francisco Gudiel, año de 1555”, p. 23). In addition to the proposal, a map of the scheme was provided to the cabildo (city council) for their consideration (AC 29 November 1555; Gudiel, “Memoria de Francisco Gudiel, año de 1555”, p. 23). Regrettably, the location of the map is unknown and the minutes fail to provide a description of the path drainage would have taken. Gudiel, “Memoria de Francisco Gudiel”, p. 15. It is difficult to judge if Gudiel’s plan would have worked. We do not know enough about the region’s topography in 1555 to gauge whether the crevices that Gudiel mentions existed. If they did, were they sufficiently large to allow water to exit from the basin in the amount required to prevent flooding? Perhaps most telling as to the feasibility of the crevices is that later desagüe proposals fail to mention these as a method to expel water. In addition, the fissures left to chance the efficiency, and ultimately, the success of drainage. Gudiel’s recognition of the importance of water did not engender a vote of confidence for the hydraulic network. Nowhere in the report did he call for reinforcing the dikes and causeways. Although they aided in the defense of the city, he wrote, they could never be

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As Gudiel’s proposal argues, floodgates were key to providing Mexico City with water. Strategically located, floodgates were to be built at the end of the canal at Huehuetoca (and also at the San Cristóbal River). These hydraulic devices, not unlike those of pre-Columbian origin, would regulate the flow of water, but with one significant difference: Aztec floodgates shielded the city from floodwaters. In marked contrast, Gudiel’s floodgates were to keep water in the basin when required for the benefit of the city and its inhabitants. The Spaniard’s gates were to function on the premise that when flooding was imminent, they would be opened, allowing floodwaters to exit the basin; however, when Mexico City needed water, they would be closed, redirecting it towards the viceregal capital. With the aid of 100,000 Indian workers, Gudiel concluded his report, the desagüe would be operational before the start of the next rainy season.46 On 29 November 1555, the regidor Alonso de Mérida and treasurer Hernando de Portugal were tasked with assessing the plan’s feasibility.47 On 16 December, Mérida and Portugal gave Gudiel’s drainage proposal a favorable review.48 However, as historian of the desagüe W. Michael Mathes has shown, any hope of executing drainage was lost when the plans were tabled as too costly.49 The origin of the desagüe is multi-dimensional in scope, considering a broad range of water-related concerns, of which flooding was but a single issue.50 As we can begin to deduce from study of Gudiel’s proposal, water and drainage were never at odds. Rather, for Gudiel, it was the excess of water that proved catastrophic for Mexico City and it was only the surplus that he proposed to expel

46 47 48 49 50

a long-term solution to flooding. Gudiel conceived the hydraulic network as only providing “resistance” (resistencia in Spanish). Gudiel’s criticism of resistencia thus illuminates an important shortcoming of the hydraulic network: how to relieve the non-stop force against the dikes and causeways in times of high water. The Aztec never devised a method for alleviating such force, and as desagüe historian Louisa Hoberman noted, the city’s inhabitants would have no other option but to wait for floodwaters to recede (“Technological Change in a Traditional Society”, p. 402). Gudiel, “Memoria de Francisco Gudiel”, p. 18; Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 426; and Memoria histórica, técnica y administrativa, vol. 1, p. 66. AC, 16 December 1555; Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 426; Gudiel, “Memoria de Francisco Gudiel”, p. 22. González’ drainage plan was also studied at this time. Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 426; Memoria histórica, técnica y administrativa, vol. 1, p. 67. Mérida and Portugal also provided a map of their own (on cloth) to aid understanding their findings, but its whereabouts are unknown. Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 426. González’ plan was also rejected at this time. In addition to flooding, Gudiel’s proposal also tackled the problems of drought and pestilence. Yes, Mexico City also suffered from the scarcity of water, a topic largely overshadowed by the city’s flood problem. In her dissertation, art historian Rosario Inés Granados Salinas identified how the cult statue of Remedios was continually processed from Totoltepec Hill to Mexico City during times of drought to end this type of environmental crisis. See Granados Salinas, “Fervent Faith”.

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from the basin.51 This approach to managing water is diametrically opposed to that of Martínez’. Recall that the German cartographer championed total drainage even though he was never afforded the opportunity to implement the second stage of his proposal. Strikingly, not unlike Gudiel, Martínez also recognized the advantages that water afforded the city.52 However, for Martínez, the risk of flooding far exceeded the benefits it provided, if the lakes were to remain. In Martínez’ reasoning, Mexico City and water were incompatible. 6 Conclusion On 28 November 1607, after hearing Mass and in front of 1500 Indian laborers, Viceroy Velasco broke ground on the desagüe. By early 1608, the canal was almost complete and work on the tunnel had begun.53 In mid-March, Martínez’ canal received a satisfactory review.54 On 20 May, the canal passed its first test by draining waters from Lake Zumpango to the mouth of the tunnel, where a temporary earthen dam held the water at bay.55 Work continued on the tunnel and on 18 September, Martínez broke the provisional dam, allowing waters from Lake Zumpango to flow. The next day, water exited the Basin of Mexico. 19 September 1608 must have been a day of immense gratitude. The citizenry of Mexico City would finally be free from its age-old marauding antagonist that carried no weapon, but killed many, destroyed property, and ruined lives. The Spanish Crown could finally rest at peace. No longer afflicted by flooding, its prized capital city in the New World, the basis of its colonial enterprise, could move forward without nature’s interruptions. Except nature did not comply: Mexico City continued to flood. A new flood control approach demanded a new type of map. When environmental disaster posed a danger too unbearable for the citizens of Mexico City, Martínez could not rely on past cartographic methods to understand, and render moot, the problem of flooding. Consider, for example, the c.1550 Uppsala Map (Figure 14.9). Not unlike Descripción de la comarca de México, it is also a geographic description of the basin showing the viceregal capital. 51

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Candiani arrived at a similar conclusion through study of the desagüe historiography. My study of Gudiel’s proposal, however, explains how and why he arrived at his conclusion and technical solutions he proposed to achieve the dual objective of flood control and maintaining a healthy supply of water that the city required to properly function. López, “In the Art of My Profession”, p. 44. Mathes, “To Save a City”, p. 433. Ibid., p. 434. Ibid., p. 435.

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figure 14.9 Anonymous, Uppsala Map, c.1550, watercolor on parchment, 75 x 114 cm Courtesy of the Uppsala University Library

But where we were hard pressed to find any significant interest in Mexico City’s bond to water in the latter, this relationship is celebrated in the former. In addition to the nuanced description of how city and water intersect, the figures observed in daily-life activities in the Uppsala Map historicize Mexico City in a way that Descripción de la comarca de México simply does not.56 The evacuation of all things social in Martínez’ map speaks to the subordination of the basin’s rich human history—both pre-Columbian and colonial—to the problem of flooding. Any indication of the basin’s social and cultural history would have disrupted the scientific coherence of Descripción de la comarca de México. For the German cartographer, bringing catastrophic inundation to an end was not a product of history or of social relations, but a problem posed by New World nature to rational cartographical analysis that sheds much light on the underlying intentions of Martínez’ desagüe. In other words, Martínez’ map and drainage strategy were not only about an engineering project to end flooding, but more so a project to free Mexico City from its historical path of 56

For understanding of how the Uppsala Map articulates social and cultural practices indicative of mid-16th-century life, see López, “Indigenous Commentary on Sixteenth-Century Mexico City”, pp. 253–275.

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development by eliminating its most iconic feature: water, thereby decoupling the viceregal capital from its Aztec origins. Despite that fact that Martínez was unable to successfully implement the desagüe, the bell had been rung.57 Others would follow in his footsteps, taking up the cause that viceregal Mexico City needed to be waterless. Bibliography

Primary Sources



Secondary Literature

Actas de Cabildo de la Ciudad de México, ed. I. Bejarano, 54 vols., Mexico City, 1889–1911. Gudiel, F., “Memoria de Francisco Gudiel, año de 1555”, in L.E. Bracamontes (ed.), Obras Públicas en México: Documentos para su historia, vol. 3, Mexico City, 1976, pp. 13–25. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, Augsburg, 1472. Martínez, E., “Relación de Enrico Martínez architecto [sic] y maestro de la obra del el desagüe de la Laguna de México”, in Memoria histórica, técnica y administrativa de las obras del desagüe del valle de México, 1449–1900, Junta Directiva del Desagüe del Valle de México (ed.), vol. 2, Mexico City, 1902, pp. 5–12. Martínez, E., “Relación de Enrico Martínez, año de 1628”, in L.E. Bracamontes (ed.), Obras Públicas en México: Documentos para su historia, vol. 3, Mexico City, 1976, pp. 27–39.

Akerman, J.R., The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire, Chicago, 2009. Andrews, J.H., Maps in Those Days: Cartographic Methods Before 1850, Dublin, 2009. Berggren, J.L., and Jones, A., Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters, Princeton, 2000. Candiani, V.S., Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City, Stanford, 2014. Candiani, V.S., “Draining the Basin of Mexico: Science, Technology, and Society, 16081808”, doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2004. Candiani, V.S., “Bourbons and Water”, in J. Dym and K. Offen (eds.), Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader, Chicago, 2011, pp. 70–73. Candiani, V.S., “The Desagüe Reconsidered: Environmental Dimensions of Class Conflict in Colonial Mexico”, Hispanic American Historical Review 92:1 (2012), pp. 5–39.

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Consult López, “In the Art of My Profession”, for Martínez’ engineering miscalculations. See Hoberman, “Bureaucracy and Disaster”, for the bureaucratic challenges of the desagüe.

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Carrera Stampa, M., “The Evolution of Weights and Measures in New Spain”, The ­Hispanic American Historical Review 29:1 (1949), pp. 2–24. Edgerton, S.Y., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, New York, 1975. Edson, E., The World Map, 1300–1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation, Baltimore, 2007. Granados Salinas, R.I., “Fervent Faith: Devotion, Aesthetics, and Society in the Cult of Our Lady of Remedios (Mexico City, 1520–1811)”, doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 2012. Gurría LaCroix, J., El desagüe del valle de México durante la época novohispana, Mexico City, 1978. Harley, J.B., The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. P. Laxton, Baltimore, 2002. Hoberman, L.S., “Bureaucracy and Disaster: Mexico City and the Flood of 1629”, ­Journal of Latin American Studies 6:2 (1974), pp. 211–230. Hoberman, L.S., “City Planning in Spanish Colonial Government: The Response of Mexico City to the Problems of Floods, 1607–1637”, doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1972. Hoberman, L.S., “Technological Change in a Traditional Society: The Case of the Desagüe in Colonial Mexico”, Technology and Culture 21:3 (1980), pp. 386–407. Hoberman, L.S., “Technological Change in a Traditional Society: The Case of the Desagüe in Colonial Mexico”, in S. Ciriacono (ed.), Land Drainage and Irrigation, Aldershot, 1998, pp. 269–280. Jacob, C., The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History, ed. E.H. Dahl, trans. T. Conley, Chicago, 2006. Kagan, R.L., and Schmidt, B., “Maps and the Early Modern State: Official Cartography”, in D. Woodward (ed.), History of Cartography, vol. 3, part 1, Chicago, 2007, pp. 661–679. Lemoine Villicaña, E., El desagüe del valle de México durante la época independiente, Mexico City, 1978. López, J.F., “‘En el arte de mi profesión’: Adrian Boot y la tecnología holandesa en la Ciudad de México Virreinal”, Boletín de Monumentos Históricos 32 (2015), pp. 26–46. López, J.F., “‘In the Art of My Profession’: Adrian Boot and Dutch Water Management in Colonial Mexico City”, Journal of Latin American Geography 11/Special (2012), pp. 35–60. López, J.F., “In the Midst of Floodwaters: Mapping Viceregal Mexico City’s Urban Transformation, 1524-c.1690”, Rutgers Art Review 28 (2012), pp. 35–52. López, J.F., “The Hydrographic City: Mapping Mexico City’s Urban Form in Relation to Its Aquatic Condition, 1521–1700”, doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013. Marley, D., “Adrian Boot, A Dutch Engineer in Colonial New Spain (1614–1637)”, Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies 4–5:ii-i (1984), pp. 74–77.

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Mathes, V.L., “Enrico Martínez of New Spain”, The Americas 33:1 (1976), pp. 62–77. Mathes, W.M., “To Save a City: The Desagüe of Mexico-Huehuetoca, 1607”, The Americas 26:4 (1970), pp. 419–438. Maza, F. de la., Enrico Martínez, cosmógrafo e impressor de Nueva España, Mexico City, 1943. Mignolo, W.D., The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, Ann Arbor, 1995. Padrón, R., The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain, Chicago, 2004. Ramírez, J.F., Memoria acerca de las obras e inundaciones en la ciudad de México, Mexico City, 1976. Robinson, A.H., The Look of Maps, Madison, 1952. Rubio Mañé, J.I., El Virreinato, 2nd ed., 4 vols., Mexico City, 1983. Schulz, J., “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500”, The Art Bulletin 60:3 (1978), pp. 425–474. Woodward, D., “Maps and the Rationalization of Space”, in J.A. Levenson (ed.), Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, Washington D.C., 1991, pp. 83–87.

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CHAPTER 15

Urban Science in 18th-Century Mexico City Miruna Achim 1

Venus, the Sun, and Mexico City

The morning of 3 June 1769 found Mexican Creole scholars, José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez (1737–99), José Ignacio Bartolache (1739–90), and Antonio de León y Gama (1735–1802), in the company of students and aficionados, on the roof of the Ayuntamiento—the town hall—of Mexico City, tracking the transit of Venus over the disk of the Sun.1 The city regents had put Alzate and Bartolache in charge of the observations with the hope that data produced in Mexico City would contribute, together with that generated in other parts of the globe, to determine the distance between the earth and the Sun.2 Similar observation posts had been set up throughout North America and across the Russian Empire, in Norway and in Tahiti, and closer to Mexico City, in San José del Cabo, in the California peninsula, where an expedition led by the French astronomer Jean Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche (1722–69) and by Mexican mathematician Joaquín Velázquez de León (1732–86) had been dispatched. Given this ample international context, the scholars in Mexico City were keenly aware that measuring the heavens would simultaneously provide a different kind of measure, of their city’s scientific competence, as a participant in wide networks for the production and circulation of science. In other words, the astronomical observations in the capital of New Spain would put not just the Sun on the map, but Mexico City as well. As Bartolache wrote when accepting the commission: “On June 3, starting mid-morning, we will be making observations for the rest of the day … On this occasion, the imperial city of Mexico will give visible proof that its police [polity] is not inferior to that of other, more illustrated cities”.3

1 For a detailed description of these astronomical observations in Mexico City, see Moreno Corral, “Ciencia y arte”, pp. 11–31. 2 The mechanics behind the calculation are the following: observations in different parts of the globe yield specific times the planet Venus entered and exited the solar disk; calculating these differences would in turn produce a parallax angle (the angle from which a hypothetical observer in the center of the Sun could see the Earth’s radius), needed to calculate the distance between the Sun and the Earth (Moreno Corral, “Ciencia y arte”, p. 11). 3 Bartolache, quoted by Moreno Corral, “Ciencia y arte”, p. 14. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004335578_017 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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On 21 July, Alzate and Bartolache reported their findings to the regents, who decided to publish them. Although the whereabouts of this report or the ensuing publication (if the report ever made it into print) are unknown, Alzate and Bartolache followed up with a Suplemento a la famosa observación del tránsito de Venus por el disco del Sol, a summarized version of their observations, with engravings by José María Navarro (1742–1809), which was meant for popular consumption by non-specialists (Figure 15.1). Visually organized into three sections, the broadsheet includes, on the left, a “succinct explanation” of the astronomical observations of the transit of Venus and of the practical uses of such observations, and on the right, a granular rendition of the solar surface, which features solar spots and the trajectory of Venus from the time it entered the disk (A) to the moment it could no longer be tracked because of clouds (B). The bottom third of the publication opens up as a cartouche, to the careful depiction of the handsome Ayuntamiento building, on whose roof we can spot a gathering of people pointing their telescopes to the sky. The frame of the cartouche is decorated with a bundle of astronomical instruments—telescopes, a compass, a quadrant, and rolled up scrolls—and with Mexico City’s coat of arms. More than a scientific tract, the Suplemento is a proud affirmation of the tight bond between the sciences and the city that sponsored them. On the one hand, the city made natural knowledge and scientific practice possible—by commissioning trained experts to carry out observations, by setting up spaces and instruments for observations, and by promoting forums for the discussion of follow-up reports. In turn, science presented the city with an asset that was becoming increasingly valuable by the last decades of the 18th century: data that could be exchanged across linguistic and geographical boundaries. The prolific correspondence between scholars like Alzate and León y Gama, and scientific academies across the Atlantic furthered the image of Mexico City as a patron of the sciences.4 It is this bond, especially as it took shape during the second half of the 18th century, which I explore in this essay. In their introduction to a collection of essays on science and the city, Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund, and Andrew Mendelsohn urged scholars to leave behind rigid disciplinary boundaries in order to pursue the fertile intersections between urban and science studies: after all, they insisted, “science and the city were coproduced within the same historical processes”.5 While students of European modernity have lately begun to look into these entangled processes, there is little scholarship on the ways the city and science have shaped

4 Bret, “Alzate y Ramírez et l’Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris”. 5 Dierig, Lachmund, and Mendelsohn, “Towards an Urban History of Science”, p. 3.

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figure 15.1 José María Navarro, Suplemento a la famosa observación del tránsito de Venus por el disco del Sol, 1769, Signatura P.V. 65(6) Courtesy of the Colección Borbón Lorenzana, Biblioteca Castilla-La Mancha

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each other in colonial Latin America.6 This is all the more surprising given a strong tradition of Latin American urban studies, on the one hand, and a growing interest in Latin American science, on the other.7 As we turn to the 19th century, the picture changes considerably: there is no absence of work on the sundry alliances between scientists—from criminologists to statisticians, from hygienists to pathologists and comparative anatomists—and urban administrators, as they legitimated one another in an effort to produce expertise and authority and to impose moral and political order.8 These alliances were not built overnight, neither were the bases for their mutual legitimation, nor the increasing authority of science as an arbiter of urban politics. Yet, with very few exceptions, we lack explanations for how science and the city shaped each other in Latin America prior to the 19th century. This essay seeks to address this historiographical lacuna by focusing on a relatively short, though especially complex period in the history of Mexico City between the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 and the beginning of the War of Independence in 1810. Coinciding with the implementation of the Bourbon Reforms in Spanish America, these decades were characterized by imperial attempts to impose a more efficient political control and economic exploitation of the colonies in the New World in the face of increasing competition from other European powers. New understandings and expectations of science played an important role in the achievement of these goals. The alchemy which would make New World nature and people into profitable resources was predicated on the reorganization of natural knowledge: nature would be collected, classified, and verified according to stable, universal taxa; tacit practices, codified into new disciplines; local knowledge, translated into the language of 18th-century European science, to make it fit for exchange across geographical and linguistic boundaries, among the metropolitan centers of the Republic of Letters.9 In practical terms, this comprehensive program of study 6 Van Damme and Romano, “Sciences et villes-mondes, XVIe-XVIIIe Siècles”; Lafuente, Las dos orillas de la ciencia; Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonder; and Livingston, Putting Science in its Place. 7 For a classical study on the Latin American city, see Morse, “The Urban Development of Colonial Spanish America”. For a thorough historiographical overview of Latin American urban history, see Armus and Lear, “The Trajectory of Latin American Urban History”. Recent work on the history of Latin American science includes Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation and Bleichmar, de Vos, and Huffine, Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800. 8 See, for instance, Agostoni, Curar, sanar y educar; Barbosa and González, Problemas de la urbanización en el Valle de México, 1810–1910; and Tenorio, I Speak of the City. 9 The literature on the systematization of indigenous and local forms of knowledge in the 18th century is vast. For the Mexican case, see Achim, Lagartijas medicinales; Palomares Torres, “Alambiques, libros y metals”; and Valverde, “Underground Knowledge”.

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was carried out through the deployment of scientific expeditions, the foundation of new institutions for learning, and the promotion of novel spaces for the production and exchange of natural knowledge. The imperial origin of these endeavors, combined with their pursuit of universal criteria for the making and practice of science, has long served to justify diffusionist models of science, predicated on the opposition between centers and peripheries: according to this model, science generated in European metropolitan centers slowly reached the margins of empire, where it was accepted mostly unquestioningly; in turn, the colonies bolstered metropolitan science by providing it with data, in the form of objects, observations, and measurements. Though this stereotypical portrayal of colonial science has come under serious criticism lately, we still know little about how places like Lima or Mexico City, more than stages in a tidy network that moved knowledge along its way to centers of accumulation and validation in the European metropolis, were scientific centers in their own right, where people, objects, capital, and knowledge came together in very specific, politically-charged configurations. The first two sections of this essay map the emergence of new spaces for the production of science—institutions like the School of Mines, the Botanical Garden, the Royal Academy of San Carlos (see Hamman and Widdifield, this volume), and an increasingly dynamic periodic press—in Bourbon Mexico City and relate the development of new spatial and institutional orders to that of new orders of nature and politics. Specifically, one of the effects of the Bourbon Reforms was to bring metropolitan and local scientists together on an unprecedented number of big-scale projects, and the result was both collaboration and conflict, as scientists vied with one another to be recognized as authorities on a wide array of matters, from nature, to technology, to society. The ways in which these conflicts played out, as Mexico City itself became a fraught object of science, is the topic of the third section. 2

Natural Order, Urban Order

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) visited Mexico City as part of his extended voyage through the Americas between 1799 and 1804. He found the capital of New Spain very changed since Alzate, Bartolache, and León y Gama had carried out astronomical observations there 35 years earlier. In 1803, at the time of Humboldt’s visit, Mexico City was medium-sized, with a population of over 130,000 people,10 and it “[did not] lack in grandeur”, “owing to the 10 Humboldt, Essai politique sur la Royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne, vol. 2, p. 173.

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figure 15.2 Rafael Jimeno y Planes (drawing) and José Joaquín Fabregat (engraving), Vista de la Plaza Mayor, c.1802 Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

imposing character of its natural surroundings”: the Chapultepec forest to the west, the sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe to the north, San Ángel and San Agustín de las Cuevas (Tlalpan) with their enormous orchards to the south, and Lake Texcoco, as “beautiful as the most beautiful Swiss mountain lakes” to the east.11 Organized orthogonally, the city grew around the main plaza— lined by the cathedral, the viceroyal palace, and the Ayuntamiento—which had been remodeled a decade before, under Viceroy Revillagigedo, to get rid of its clutter and bustle, and align it with the latest neoclassical canons (Figure 15.2). Humboldt’s attention was drawn to a host of new institutions founded in the last decades of the 18th century. He went so far as to assert: “No city of the new continent, without even excepting those of the United States, can display such great and solid scientific establishments as the capital of Mexico”.12 The traveler was referring to the Royal Mint and to the Royal Academy of San Carlos, aimed at developing a young Creole’s buen gusto—that is, his taste for the forms of classical antiquity and his capacity to recognize and reproduce them, and above all, to the School of Mines and to the Botanical Garden.13 11 12 13

Ibid., p. 179. Ibid., p. 146. Deans-Smith, Matters of Taste.

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Humboldt was impressed with the School of Mines, which occupied a new “building [that] could adorn any main plaza in Paris or London”, a neoclassical structure of sober lines which was being erected by the architect Manuel Tolsá (1757–1816).14 Founded in 1792, with the mission to impose the latest technical developments in the modern sciences of chemistry and mineralogy upon mining activities in New Spain, which had taken the lead in silver production among Spain’s American possessions, the School housed some “beautiful collections of physics, mechanics and mineralogy,” and boasted prestigious faculty like Fausto de Elhuyar (1755–1833), who had taught at Uppsala and Freiberg before becoming the first director of Mexico’s School of Mines, and Andrés del Río (1764–1849), author of a celebrated mineralogical treatise, Elementos de oritognosia o del conocimiento de los fósiles (1795).15 The school was designed to facilitate the education of mining engineers that would eventually revive tapped out mines by finding lower grade ore and improve proven money-­makers, like the famed Valenciana mine in Guanajuato. Humboldt also visited the Botanical Garden, in the viceroyal palace, and he found it to be “small but extremely rich in rare natural productions” and of “much interest for commerce or industry”.16 The Garden had been established in 1788, as part of a larger program of botanical exploration, which included, on the one hand, the Royal Botanical Expeditions to New Spain (1787–1803) led by Martín Sessé (1751–1808) and by José Mariano Mociño (1757–1820), with the express purposes to “illustrate and complete the work begun by the doctor Francisco Hernández two centuries before, and to examine, draw, and describe methodically the plants of New Spain, so as to dispel doubts and curb adulterations in medicine (see De Vos, this volume), dyeing, and the useful arts, and to expand commerce and perfect the state of the sciences”.17 Indeed, the Botanical Garden and the establishment of a chair of botany in Mexico City would provide a new generation of elite Mexicans with the theoretical and practical underpinnings for an up-to-date botanical education. In 1788, the Madridtrained Vicente Cervantes (1755–1829), the first holder of that chair, inaugurated his botanical lectures, aimed at introducing Linnaean taxonomies and the most current European botanical knowledge into Mexico’s modern curriculum. All of these institutions were relative newcomers on the Mexico City scene at the time of Humboldt’s visit. They had been founded, in part to make colonial elites loyal directly to the Crown, in part to fill the educational void left by 14 Humboldt, Essai politique sur la Royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne, p. 138. 15 Ibid., p. 121. 16 Ibid., p. 123. 17 Maldonado Polo, “La expedición botánica a Nueva España”, pp. 13–15.

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the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, and finally, to introduce new forms of making knowledge, which would replace both the scholasticism that characterized university teaching and the more empirical crosspatch of local knowledge and practice, pursued by Creole scholars like Alzate and León y Gama. The latter were not especially accepting of the new approaches to the study of New World nature originated in the peninsula and embodied in new institutions. In fact, the establishment of some of these new houses of learning—and what they stood for—provoked quite a bit of drama and was often met with criticism and resistance from the local elites, as Alzate’s reactions to the inauguration of the chair of botany in May of 1788 make manifest. For the opening act, Vicente Cervantes envisaged an extravagant show of fireworks, put together by master pyrotechnician Joaquín Gavilán, to impress upon both the lay and the scholarly public gathered in the main plaza the principle of Linnaean taxonomy, based on the sexual characteristics of plants. The Gaceta de México of 6 May recorded such a detailed and precise explanation of the spectacle that it implies none other but Cervantes himself or one of his closest collaborators could have provided it: [Gavilán produced] three trees, known in this kingdom by the name of papaya, imitating the natural disposition of their leaves, flowers and fruit, and giving a clear idea of the sex of the plants, which is found separate in separate individuals in this plant. The two female trees were covered in their respective flowers and fruit of different sizes … The male tree, which lacked fruit, occupied the center, and issued forth sparks, directed to the female trees, representing with perfection the pollen which is transported through the air … in order to inseminate the female trees. At the bottom of the male tree, [the technician] had disposed decorations alluding to the lavishness of a garden, which brightened the plaza with delightful inventions and dazzling colors. Once the fire went out of the three trees, at the tip of [where] the male plant [had burnt], there appeared an inscription, written with letters of fire, which read Amor Unit Plantas, which the illustrious gentleman Linnaeus includes in his dissertation Sponsalia plantarum.18 The message of this spectacle could not have been lost on the gaping public. It made manifest, not only the credo of a new taxonomy, but also the extent to 18

Moreno de los Arcos, Linneo en México, p. 12. This book is a compilation of the different participations in the public debates on Linnaean taxonomy in the context of the inauguration of the chair of botany in Mexico City.

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which the urban authorities sponsored and legitimated the introduction of this new botany by allowing the show to be staged in the city’s main plaza, which had been reserved, over the course of centuries, for the display of political and religious power. In this case, the protagonist was not a triumphal arch erected to welcome a new viceroy or the stage built by the Holy Inquisition to celebrate an auto de fe, but science, with its promise to make knowledge universal and to make data easier to collect, classify, and, especially, circulate across geographical spaces. This would bring about the certainty that specimens collected by the Sessé and Mociño expeditions in places as far off as Nootka in the Pacific Northwest or the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in the southeast could be socialized across the Atlantic, in the Royal Natural History Cabinet, or in the Royal Botanical Garden, without risking misidentification. Alzate did not agree either with the premises or with the forms of the new taxonomy. For one, Alzate, who was a priest, rejected the more saucy and immodest overtones of the new taxonomy, which built itself on talk of love and nuptials and on public spectacles of insemination (albeit between plants)—“which nature itself keeps secret”—to the detriment of public morals and urban decency.19 Alzate’s arguments also had epistemological and ethical implications. He criticized the classifications introduced by Linnaean taxonomies because, he thought, giving new names to plants was a sure way to forget the plants’ virtues and local uses. If anything, he insisted, it was best to keep the names used by the ancient Mexicans because in Nahuatl, words signified the properties or characteristics of things: [Mexicans] expressed their pharmacy, by saying: cacaloxochitl, “the flower which is eaten by the crow”; tzoapatli, “birthing woman’s weed”, acahuatl, “knotless reed”; esquahuitl, “tree which distills blood”; tlapalespatli, “medicine for blood flow”; tianguispepetatl, “grass which grows in the form of a mat”, etcetera. In other words, through the name of the plant, one would learn its properties. If one would form a new botanical language this way, it would be of much public utility; but it is absurd to beg for Greek words forged among the glaciers of Denmark.20 The differences between the two systems of classification debated in Mexico City in the late 1780s were actually less marked than their defendants would have it, though they were not exactly negligible either. With due fairness, the followers of Linnaean taxonomy had, like Alzate, strong interests in the utility 19 20

Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 25.

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of plants, but they believed that there could be no utility without a universal system. And they did not reject the use of local names, though they did establish an important difference between botany as a specialized science and the everyday knowledge of plants. Their goal was to forge a new discipline, with fixed rules and conventions, universally applicable, without regard to origins or language. While Alzate and his fellow Creoles had no problems with the use of mathematical abstractions in their astronomical work, it was clear to them that not all knowledge could—nor was it desirable that it should—be translated into universal taxonomic systems. For Alzate, Linnaean classifications were ethically reproachable because they unjustifiably invalidated knowledge produced over centuries, in convents, villages, and local apothecaries,21 and because they excluded the vast majority of people who made use of plants and who employed local names; botany, because of its medical relevance, should be within everybody’s reach. By privileging local knowledge, as many of his Creole contemporaries did, Alzate was not being less systematic than the supporters of new universal classifications. Quite the contrary: Alzate exhorted scholars to observe and record tacit knowledge and indigenous uses and practices, to test the virtues of plants with the instruments of modern science and to circulate their findings. In other words, for the Creole scientist, the study of local nature was not a matter of discovery, but of recovery, which would ideally bring together doctors, surgeons, apothecaries, chemists, local informants, and indigenous healers, and which depended on the development and maintenance of rich networks though which objects, plants, substances, and knowledge about them could be exchanged. Implicit in these two orders of nature were different notions of social and political order and distinct uses of urban space. On the one hand, tensions between local and universal taxonomies of botanical knowledge expressed deeper tensions between Creole and peninsular scholars, exacerbated by an important professional and generational turnover: in the course of the last three decades of the 18th century, Bourbon legislation had effectively replaced local administrators, regardless of their credentials, experience, or position in Mexican society, with younger, metropolitan-born and trained officials, who were deemed to be more faithful to the interests of the Crown.22 People like Alzate, Bartolache, and León y Gama were directly caught up in these ­sweeping changes. Thus, a 55-year-old Alzate, who had been a close adviser to the viceroyal government since the 1760s, on topics as diverse as cartography, 21 22

For recent work on these other sites for knowledge production, see Pardo Tomás, “Conversion Medicine”. Tanck de Estrada and Marichal, “¿Reino o colonia?”

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mining, botany, epidemics, and hydrography, was bypassed in favor of Fausto de Elhuyar, 20 years his junior, when it came time to name a director of the School of Mines in 1792. León y Gama, who held a badly remunerated post at the Royal Mint throughout his life, had aspired to the same position. Probably nothing made marginalization manifest as much as the buildings which housed the new institutions of learning; as neoclassical constructions were going up on the stage of the older Baroque city, it is difficult to imagine that people like Alzate and León y Gama would not have grasped their meanings, both as extensions of royal power and as signals of the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. The new houses for learning were more than passive stages for the practice of science; their material configurations actively and constructively helped determine what counted as science, delegitimized other forms of knowing, helped bring people together and kept others out. 3

Science in the Streets

In recent years, markets, pubs, circuses, and freak shows have come to the attention of scholars as places for knowledge making.23 By contrast, little has been written on their counterparts in Latin America, where historians of science have tended to privilege institutional histories. Yet, it is difficult to think of places like the School of Mines or the Botanical Garden without thinking of them as strategic nodes in wider urban networks for the production and exchange of scientific facts and artifacts. The School of Mines, the Botanical Garden, the School of Surgery, and the Academy of Fine Arts were at the center of bustling scenes that brought together instrument makers, collectors of specimens, taxidermists, miners, draftsmen, students, and court officials. Travelers like Humboldt stopped by, as did the members of scientific expeditions. Plants, animals, and mineral samples were gathered there, to be measured, analyzed, and described, before they were packed and crated to be shipped to the Royal Natural History Cabinet, the Royal Pharmacy, or the Royal Academy of Medicine, in Madrid. Moreover, the presence of these institutions in Mexico City had a deep effect on the emergence of a new place for the socialization of science: the cabinet of natural history. The Church and the viceroyal court had been important ­collectors throughout the colonial period, but, undoubtedly, the later decades 23

For a classic on the topic, see Altick, The Shows of London. More recently, the topic has been addressed by Fyfe and Lightman, Science in the Marketplace, and by Golinski, Science as Public Culture.

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of the 18th century saw the rise in natural history collections by private individuals. As a 1790 article published in the Gaceta de México put it: The study [of nature] has extended to the more remote dominions and principally to our New Spain, where everyone seeks to gain [natural] knowledge, some in order to manage their mines authoritatively, others because they are interested in beautiful woods, still others because they want to know the properties of the resins and gums produced in this kingdom.24 The author was especially impressed with the cabinet that José Longinos Martínez, a Spanish naturalist associated with the Sessé and Mociño expedition to New Spain, had put together on Plateros Street, no. 89. “Arranged with method and system, [Longinos’] cabinet instruct[ed] more than all treatises on the topic”, and its more than 800 “natural productions” were organized into three pyramids, each corresponding to a natural kingdom and were further classified, according to Linnaean taxonomy, by class, order, genus, and species.25 The display included information about the specimens’ industrial and medicinal virtues and about their indigenous names and uses, as well as references to their provenance. The cabinet also included books, machines, and instruments of different types. It stayed open Monday through Thursday, from ten to one and from two to five, to “all decent people”. Following Longinos’ lead, “many people of talent, informed of the utility and deliciousness of this study [of natural history], have taken it up as diversion from their long and difficult tasks”, commented the article.26 These included: Ramón de Posada, at the Royal Treasury, who owned a collection of minerals; Bernardo Bonavia y Zapata, intendent in Mexico City, whose cabinet contained objects from the three kingdoms and some extraordinary minerals; Francisco Fernández de Córdova, superintendent at the Royal Mint, and Francisco Xavier Sarría, director of the Royal Lottery, each with collections of “curiosities”; Fausto de Elhuyar, director general of the School of Mines, with a cabinet of minerals; and Alzate, who had objects from the three kingdoms.27 Unfortunately, the article published in the Gaceta does not give a sense of how these cabinets operated: besides summary descriptions of the Longinos cabinet, we have little idea of how the objects were displayed, of the narratives 24 Valdés, Gaceta de México, p. 152. 25 Ibid., p. 153. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., p. 154.

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these collections sought to convey, of the “decent people” who visited them, and especially, of what these people might have thought about them. Up to a point, private cabinets seemed to have supplemented the activities that were being carried out by the new institutions of learning: it was often the same actors who moved between the world of formal learning and the circles of private collecting; moreover, the same official questionnaires and instructions for collection and classification at the heart of scientific expeditions served also as models for the organization of private cabinets.28 Still, it would be misleading to think of private cabinets as extensions of the School of Mines or the Botanical Garden. As María Eugenia Constantino has shown in a recent study on Longinos, his cabinet was the space where the naturalist sought to engage the public as an arbiter in a private dispute, against Sessé and Mociño, the leaders of the Botanical Expedition to New Spain.29 By the last decades of the 18th century, it was not so much in the private cabinet as in periodicals where most scientific debates in Mexico City were taking place. The proliferation of the periodical press at this time was part of the same imperial agenda, to produce useful knowledge about the colonies, which had promoted the foundation of new institutions for learning and the deployment of scientific expeditions. In earlier centuries, information about Spain’s overseas dominions was jealously kept secret: maps, natural histories, and technological treatises were shelved away in archives and often remained unpublished, but by the mid-18th century, the accumulation of useful facts found important allies in periodical papers, which began to function as spaces for the reception, exchange, and production of science. As Alzate, one of the most prolific newspaper editors of colonial Mexico, expressed in the preface to one of his papers in 1772: On various occasions, when I thought of starting up a new periodical, so very useful to New Spain, I felt overwhelmed by a diversity of thoughts. If, on one hand, I admitted that profound erudition and vast knowledge were needed to make it happen, on the other, I knew my limitations. But, at the same time, I experienced a vivid need to be useful to my ­country because I knew that we are not born just for ourselves, but also for others. I asked myself: is it possible that a kingdom so abundant in wise men, where nature has shown itself prodigious in its productions, should lack periodical papers? … Most of these bring about benefits to society, 28 29

For an interesting study of the ways in which official instructions for collecting affected (and were in turn affected by) field practices and private cabinets like Longinos’, see Constantino and Pimentel, “Cómo inventariar el (Nuevo) Mundo”. Constantino, “Discordias en el paraíso”.

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foment perseverance, stimulate science, and silence those who, lacking the necessary talents, intend to meddle with Minerva’s matters.30 Alzate would publish four periodicals throughout his life, as well as a vast number of tracts and pamphlets. His first periodical, Diario literario de México, came out in 1768, though it was closed down after a few months in an act of viceregal censorship.31 Alzate resumed his periodical production with the Asuntos Varios sobre Ciencias y Artes (1772–73), which ran side-by-side Bartolache’s Mercurio Volante, con noticias importantes y curiosas sobre varios asuntos de física y medicina (1772–73). Yet, it was not until the mid-1780s that Mexico City could boast a steady circulation of newspapers: Alzate published his Observaciones sobre la Física, Historia Natural y Artes Útiles (1787–88) and his longest-lived periodical, the Gazeta de Literatura de México (1788–95), while Manuel Antonio Valdés’ Gaceta de México ran between 1785 and 1809. By the first decade of the 19th century, new editors had emerged on the periodical publishing scene: Carlos María de Bustamante edited the daily Diario de México (1805–17), and Juan Wenceslao Sánchez de la Barquera edited his Semanario Económico de Noticias Curiosas y Eruditas sobre Agricultura y demás Artes, Oficios, etcétera (1808–10), followed up by El Mentor Mexicano. Papel Periódico Semanario sobre la Ilustración Popular en las Ciencias Económicas, Literatura y Artes (1811). As the titles of many of these papers suggest, the sciences featured prominently in most of them. Newspapers printed translations of articles that first appeared in European papers, recipes for the preparation of dyes, soaps, beauty products, and medicines, instructions for the fabrication of different kinds of machines (one can find directions for a cotton gin and for a fire extinguisher, for instance), advice for regulating spring-driven clocks, for calibrating barometers and thermometers, for crossing animal and plant species, and observations on weather or on earthly and astronomical events. Human and animal monsters, volcanoes, earthquakes, comets, subterranean thunders, and the auroras borealis observed in Mexico City in 1789, among other news, were minutely described and discussed in the press. Topics of local interest began taking up gradually more space in periodicals, as was the case with the debates that pitted Alzate against the defenders of new botanical taxonomies, or the debates sparked by the discovery, in 1791, of some very large pre-Hispanic monoliths in the city’s main plaza, which confronted Alzate, León y Gama,

30 Alzate, Obras, p. 52. 31 The incident has not been fully elucidated. See Moreno de los Arcos’ “Introduction” to Alzate, Obras, pp. XII-XIII.

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and José Ignacio Borunda (1740–1800), among others, who offered divergent interpretations as to the meaning and use of these objects in ancient Mexico. These texts exceeded the more modest goals of keeping the reading public informed about science. This went hand in hand with a larger objective, intimately tied to the implementation of the Bourbon Reforms: the replacement of Baroque urban sociability with enlightened forms of inhabiting the city.32 Carnivals, cockfights, and street theater were gradually banned to make room for polite diversions. Few things were more edifying on the reformed urban stage than spectacles of people lined up to visit cabinets of curiosities, or to have a look though the microscope and telescope set up on one of the city’s streets in January of 1807, as reported in the Diario de México: On Puente del Cuervo no. 16, the public is presented with the following machines: a telescope, to observe the mountains and seas in the disk of the moon, and proportionally, the stars, of a strange grandness; and a microscope, to see the insects [that live] in vinegar and water and observe with clarity the war between ones and the others, when drops of the two liquids come together, as those [that live] in vinegar kill those [that live] in water. One can see also a fly with two thousand eyes, covered up in a film full of colors and shades. The same way one can see the insects that live in a grain of sand, which looks like a diamond. There is also an electrical machine, whose properties will become manifest to the public, for the price of one real. These instruments will be on display day and night and a good organ will be playing various local melodies.33 Descriptions like this one in the periodical press played multiple roles: to foment public taste for scientific knowledge; to identify the practice of science with propriety, decorum, civility and enlightened elite sensibility; and to inform consumers in ways of thinking and talking about science. Ultimately, what newspaper editors like Alzate or Bartolache had in mind was more than the production of disciplined consumers: as Alzate insisted time and again, his hope was to create a community of active practitioners of the sciences, and, with this purpose in mind, offered his periodicals as receptacles for gathering and exchanging knowledge about the natural world and for debating the validity of that knowledge. Citing Tacitus, he sentenced that ex privatis odiis res publica crescit (“public good grows out of private hate”).34 As debates on 32 33 34

Viquiera Albán, ¿Relajados o reprimidos? Bustamante, “Nota”, p. 31. Moreno de los Arcos, Linneo en México, p. 65.

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diverse topics multiplied in Mexican papers, the dictum took on both a material meaning—common good and material progress are produced by discussions that test proposals and inventions—as well as an ideological one: the sum of informed personal opinions contributes to forge and reinforce public consensus.35 By the end of the 18th century, between imperial impulses to censor and imperial ambitions to gather and validate knowledge, there developed in New Spain, particularly in its capital city, new spaces which allowed for public discussion. These developments coincided with similar ones in Western European cities. There, the emergence of new urban spaces, such as cafés, salons, cabinets, museums, and lecture halls, and of new structures of social communication, such as periodicals, led German philosopher Jürgen Habermas to postulate the gradual articulation of a public sphere, where, regardless (at least in theory) of status and of corporativist allegiances, citizens could come together and exercise their free judgement. For Habermas, the European public sphere had become, by the end of the 18th century, an important political force, which regulated civil society, mediated between society and the state, and transformed the state’s arbitrary authority into a rational authority, subject to citizen scrutiny.36 By contrast, the incipient public sphere in Mexico City was apolitical, by self-proclaim. For instance, in the prologue to his first periodical, Diario literario de México, Alzate professed “a profound silence about the matters of the state, in accordance with the fact that superiors cannot be corrected by particulars”.37 Even this kind of restraint did not spare his paper from being closed down by viceroyal order. But, if political discussion was banned from periodicals and political criticism in New Spain circulated mostly though clandestine channels, spaces for the discussion of natural knowledge contributed to consolidating new forms of individual participation in the Mexican public sphere.38 4

Urban Expertise

Among the topics more hotly debated in the late 18th-century periodic press, the city featured prominently. Mexico City had been an object of study since its 35

On the relation between newspaper science and public good in 18th-century Mexico, see Covarrubias, En busca del hombre útil. 36 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 37 Alzate, Observaciones útiles, p. 49. 38 Torres Puga, Opinión pública y censura en Nueva España. See also Guerra and Lampérière, Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica.

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foundation in the 14th century, as different sciences—from astrology, medicine, and cartography to architecture and engineering—sought to make sense of its most distinct feature, the fact that it was built on a lake.39 By the late 18th century, new sciences—many of which, such as meteorology, topography, chemistry, demographics, and hygienics, would develop into scientific disicplines in the 19th century—vied with each other to intervene in the production of a new, reformed, urban environment. I have already mentioned the reforms carried out by Revillagigedo, in an attempt to bring the city, aesthetically, architecturally, socially, and environmentally, in line with neo-Classical canons which looked down on mixtures and called for stricter separation between elements, both social or natural. There were also plans, coming from advisors to the viceroyalty, to completely drain the lake (see López, this volume), in order to curb future flooding, to reclaim land for agriculture, and to prevent epidemics. Such plans reflected the latest European environmental thinking which associated humidity and the amorphous limit where water met land with negative effects: the marshy mixture of elements was thought to secrete telluric vapors, miasmas, and fermentations, and thus, to compromise public health. Alzate weighed in on these discussions. He had been writing about Mexico City since the late 1760s, often presenting practical solutions for specific urban problems: he came up with a patent for a trash-collecting cart, proposed a more durable method of pavement which would withstand the rains and carriage traffic better than that laid by Revillagigedo’s engineers, offered suggestions for commercial navigation on the Chalco lagoon, made recommendations for stocking the city with edibles during the famine of 1772, and submitted proposals for provisioning the city with drinking water from Chapultepec—and not from farther away—because it was cheaper to transport via existing aqueducts. In 1790, he was involved in an acerbic discussion with Viceroy Revillagigedo, when he claimed—by calculating food consumption—that the population of Mexico City was larger than that of Madrid.40 As for the lake, as early as 1767, in his Proyecto para desaguar la laguna de Tescuco, Alzate had envisioned an engineering project which would eliminate the city’s risk for flooding while preserving the temperament of the valley by building a system of dykes on the lake’s southern shores. During wet seasons, the dykes could be opened to allow excess water to flow towards the hollow cavities of volcanoes south of the city; the dykes could be shut at other times, to maintain adequate water levels.41 Alzate did not recommend draining the lagoon completely. Twenty years later, 39 Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land. 40 Miño Grijalva and Pérez Toledo, La población de la ciudad de México en 1790. 41 Alzate, Proyecto para desaguar la laguna de Tescuco.

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he remained faithful to this position. Between 1789 and 1792, he published in the Gazeta de Literatura de México his “Descripciones topográficas de la Ciudad de México”, his most sustained criticism of the proposals to drain the lake.42 Modeled on an old Hippocratic model for writing about places, which organized urban knowledge around the topics of water, land, and air, and based on meteorological and demographic observations he had carried out for more than 30 years, Alzate concluded that draining the lake completely would bring about unforeseen calamities of all sorts, economic, medical, and meteorological in nature. Drainage would result in the loss of fauna, such as ducks and fish, which were basic for the survival of the poorest. It would also destroy vegetation, particularly the reeds used by the poor to make baskets, which they sold in the city. Alzate displays a rare sensitivity and poignancy in his descriptions of wretched Indians who sold their wares for small sums, who would be reduced to begging in the streets without this source of income. That kind of sensitivity was to prove all too rare among 19th-century city engineers, who, inheriting the Enlightenment faith in technology, did not inherit Alzate’s prophetic ability to trace out the unexpected results of massive planning projects. While showing the lake to be indispensable to the human and natural economy of the city, Alzate attacked arguments for draining it to turn the land over to agriculture or to contain epidemics. In fact, Alzate’s studies convinced him that epidemics occurred in places where the lagoon dried up. As examples, he brought up his own observations on an epidemic among the villages on the eastern shore of the Texcoco Lake, during the 1772 dry season, when 13,000 people died in Santa Marta and Los Reyes. There had been other epidemics, almost yearly since then, and they extended as far as Iztapalapa; although, in this village, which benefited from the humidity of the Chalco lagoon, the ravages of illness had not been as vigorous. These observations led Alzate to conclude that the conservation of public health in Mexico City depended on the conservation of large surfaces of water, which kept the air moist. Draining the lagoons only left behind a caustic alkali dust, which entered the body through breathing and through the absorbing pores. Contrary to the claims of those who proposed to desiccate the lake and reclaim fertile ground to water, Alzate showed that the caustic salt left behind when the water receded could not possibly provide fertile soil for crops. Nothing could grow in this dust. His “Descripciones topográficas” led Alzate to a conclusion quite precocious for the time when he was writing: the city, its valley, and its surrounding lake formed a complex ecological equilibrium, and together supported a holistic cycle of 42 Alzate, Observaciones útiles, pp. 126–194.

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life, a material bond connecting topography to plant and animal well-being to human health. As Alzate wrote: Since certain directors of public works have sought, not just now but since 1783, to transmute and perturb the valley of Mexico, the weather has changed: is it possible that temperament has partially changed? This is why we see the seasons so different, why we experience those cloudy days and those fogs in winter, which never affected our health or that of plants; for Mexico’s soil to be healthy and fertile, it must be soaked with water.43 At stake in Alzate’s criticism towards those bent on draining the lake was more than the issue of urban reform. As was the case with his participation in the controversy on Linnaean nomenclature, his “Descripciones” were an expression of how different orders of knowledge produced different political and urban orders. Once again, Alzate confronted trends and fashions—which called, in this case, for the disappearance of marshes and lagoons—with his own detailed records of the nature of Mexico City and its lake, and with observations about the “established practices” of those who lived there. For this Creole intellectual, urban science was not a matter of applying the same universalist canons to any range of urban situations, but a cumulative process of knowledge making which allowed for participation by locals and took indigenous practice and experience into account. Ultimately, Alzate’s “Descripciones”, published at a time when the author, who had been marginalized from viceroyal politics for some decades, provided him with a space where he could fashion himself as an indispensable Creole intermediary between local secrets and local knowledge and much wider networks for the exchange of knowledge; it was on the basis of his profound knowledge of American nature and its inhabitants that Alzate sought to defend his right to intervene in the discussions on urban reform that were shaping Mexico City at the end of the 18th century.44 5 Conclusions By the second half of the 18th century, science and the city were indissolubly bound together in new and solid ways, which would prove lasting into the following centuries. Whether it was astronomy, botany, meteorology, or water 43 44

Ibid., p. 190. On local epistemologies as platforms for political participation, see Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World.

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management, science, increasingly identified with the systematic production of knowledge, was becoming an arbiter and guarantor for public truth and for urban order. The city, inasmuch as it was being imagined and shaped by experts, derived its authority from science and in turn guaranteed the practice and visibility of science. There is a temptation to flatten late 18th-century developments such as these in Mexico City as expressions of monolithic Enlightenment science, put into practice by Bourbon Reforms, which aimed at better knowledge and exploitation of the colonies. Though it is difficult to go around the consequences of both imperial politics and enlightened sciences on Mexico City, it is at the same time clear that we need more inclusive narratives, to account for the plurality of actors as they came together to exchange and negotiate different understandings of natural and urban order in the context of asymmetrical relations of power. Such narratives would expand the definition of the city beyond geography and institutions, to pay attention to the kinds of interactions that enacted science and the city: the circulation of scientific facts and artifacts in both formal and informal settings; the presence of provincial elites in cosmopolitan networks for the production of science; the effects of censorship on the sciences of empire; the manifold ways in which topography, climate, flora, fauna, and people shaped one another. The cohabitation of political, religious, and social interests, and of professional and intellectual ambitions produced, not so much a universal science, nor a universal city, but dictated the highly specific and contingent ways in which science and Mexico City configured each other at the end of the 18th century. Bibliography

Primary Sources



Secondary Literature

Alzate y Ramírez, J.A., Proyecto para desaguar la laguna de Tescuco, Mexico City, 1767. Alzate y Ramírez, J.A., Obras 1. Periódicos, R. Moreno de los Arcos (ed.), Mexico City, 1980. Alzate y Ramírez, J.A., Observaciones útiles para el futuro del reino, M. Achim (ed.), Mexico City, 2012. Bustamante, C.M. and Villaurrutia, J., Diario de México, Mexico City, 1807. Humboldt, A., Essai politique sur la Royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne, 1811. Valdés, M.A., Gaceta de México, Mexico City, 1790, pp. 152–154.

Achim, M., Lagartijas medicinales: remedios americanos y debates científicos en la ­Ilustración, Mexico City, 2008.

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Agostoni, C., Curar, sanar y educar. Enfermedad y sociedad en México, siglos XIX y XX, Mexico City, 2008. Altick, R., The Shows of London, Cambridge, Mass., 1978. Armus, D., and Lear, J., “The Trajectory of Latin American Urban History”, Journal for Urban History 24.3 (1998), pp. 291–301. Barbosa, M., and González, S. (eds.), Problemas de la urbanización en el Valle de México, 1810–1910, Mexico City, 2009. Bleichmar, D., de Vos, P., and Huffine, K. (eds.), Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800, Stanford, 2009. Bret, P., “Alzate y Ramírez et l’Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris: La réception des travaux d’un savant du nouveau monde”, in P. Aceves Pastrana (ed.), Periodismo científico en el siglo XVIII: José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez, Mexico City, 2001, pp. 123–205. Bustamante, C.M., “Nota”, in C.M. Bustamante and J. Villaurrutia (eds.), Diario de México, Mexico City, 1807, p. 31. Candiani, V., Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City, Stanford, 2014. Cañizares-Esguerra, J., How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, Stanford, 2001. Cañizares-Esguerra, J., Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World, Stanford, 2006. Constantino, M.E., “Discordias en el paraíso. Prácticas y disputas sobre las colecciones de animales novohispanos (1790–1795)”, in M. Achim and I. Podgorny (eds.), Museos al detalle: colecciones, antigüedades e historia natural, 1790–1870, Rosario, 2014, pp. 51–76. Constantino, M.E., and Pimentel, J., “Cómo inventariar el (Nuevo) Mundo. Las instrucciones como instrumentos para observar y coleccionar objetos naturales”, in L. Cházaro, N. Valverde, and M. Achim (eds.), Piedra, papel, tijera. Historias de instrumentos científicos en México, Mexico City, 2018. Covarrubias, J.E., En busca del hombre útil. Un estudio comparativo del utilitarismo neomercantilista en México y Europa, 1748–1833, Mexico City, 2005. Deans-Smith, S., Matters of Taste: The Politics of Culture in Mexico and the Royal Academy of San Carlos (1781–1821), Stanford, forthcoming. Delbourgo, J., A Most Amazing Scene of Wonder: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America, Cambridge, Mass., 2005. Dierig, S., Lachmund, J., and Mendelsohn, A., “Towards an Urban History Science”, Osiris 18 (2003), pp. 1–19. Fyfe, A. and Lightman, B. (eds.), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, Chicago, 2007. Golinski, J., Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820, Cambridge, Mass., 1992.

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Guerra, F.X. and Lampérière, A. (eds.), Los espacios públicos en Iberoamérica. Ambigüedades y problemas. Siglos XVIII-XIX, Mexico City, 1998. Habermas, J., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass., 1991. Lafuente, A., Las dos orillas de la ciencia. La traza pública e imperial de la Ilustración española, Madrid, 2012. Livingston, D., Putting Science in its Place, Chicago, 2003. Maldonado Polo, J.L., “La expedición botánica a Nueva España, 1786–1803: el Jardín Botánico y la Cátedra de Botánica”, Historia mexicana 50:1 (2000), pp. 5–56. Miño Grijalva, M., and Pérez Toledo, S. (eds.), La población de la ciudad de México en 1790. Estructura social, alimentación y vivienda, Mexico City, 2004. Moreno Corral, M.A., “Ciencia y arte en dos publicaciones astronómicas novohispanas del siglo XVIII”, Anales del Instituto de investigaciones Estéticas XXXV.102 (2013), pp. 11–31. Moreno de los Arcos, R., Linneo en México. Las controversias sobre el sistema binario sexual, 1788–1798, Mexico City, 1989. Morse, R., “The Urban Development of Colonial Spanish America”, in L. Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, Cambridge, Mass., 1984, vol. 2, pp. 67–104. Palomares Torres, E.S., “Alambiques, libros y metales: la Metalogía en la literatura minera novohispana”, doctoral dissertation, UNAM, 2014. Pardo Tomás, J., “Conversion Medicine. Communication and Circulation of Knowledge in Tlatelolco, 1527–1577”, Quaderni Storici 142 (2013), pp. 1–21. Tanck de Estrada, D., and Marichal, C., “¿Reino o colonia? Nueva España, 1750–1804”, in Nueva Historia General de México, Mexico City, 2010, pp. 307–354. Tenorio, M., I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Chicago, 2012. Torres Puga, G., Opinión pública y censura en Nueva España. Indicios de un silencio imposible, 1767–1795, Mexico City, 2010. Valverde, N., “Underground Knowledge: Mining, Mapping, and Law in Eighteenth-Century Nueva España”, in H. Wendt (ed.), The Globalization of Knowledge in the Iberian Colonial World, Berlin, 2016, pp. 247–282. Van Damme, S., and Romano, A., “Sciences et villes-mondes, XVIe-XVIIIe Siècles”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 55:2 (2008). Viquiera Albán, J.P., ¿Relajados o reprimidos? Diversiones públicas y vida social en la Ciudad de México durante el Siglo de las Luces, Mexico City, 1987.

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PART 5 The Arts

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CHAPTER 16

A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City Kelly Donahue-Wallace Printed texts and images were as ubiquitous in viceregal Mexico City as they were in early modern cities throughout the Atlantic world. Typographic books, woodcuts, and engravings were seen and owned by New Spain’s elite colonists and indigenous laborers alike. They were hung on walls and shelved in libraries, carried in pockets and worn under clothing, displayed and hidden, disseminated for official and unofficial purposes, promoted for orthodoxy and censored for heterodoxy. As print permeated daily life, residents of New Spain spoke about it, and pictured it in works of art. Collectors wrote with pride about scooping their peers with particularly elusive purchases. Viceregal authorities, recognizing the impact of print, simultaneously voiced concerns over its persuasive powers and championed its ability to reach a wide audience. Artists, too, pictured books in portraits and printed images in offices and homes. This broad discourse reveals that print’s worth rested in what Adrian Johns calls the “cognate attributes associated with printing”, or what I am calling the idea of printed-ness.1 While the images or words stamped on the paper were undeniably significant and meaningful, the object itself and the power of the qualities of printed-ness that resulted from practices, experiences, and rhetoric gave the works meaning. These included cheapness, ephemerality, multiplicity, authority, truthfulness, and cognitive efficacy. And yet the notion of printed-ness differed for Mexico City’s diverse populations, a fact that made print both a tool and a threat to viceregal society and its institutions. The present essay examines how people in viceregal Mexico City perceived imprints. In doing so, it shifts attention away from the well-known colonizing role of logographic writing. Although the printed book shares writing’s responsibility and blame for colonization, as richly and productively studied by Walter Mignolo, my focus specifically on imprints considers the very object itself: the print and the book. Following a brief summary of local print history, the essay offers a new way of studying printed images and texts that were made in or travelled to the viceroyalty by examining the era’s perceptions of print’s intrinsic and associated characteristics. It does so through visual 1 Johns, The Nature of the Book, p. 2. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004335578_018 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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representations—pictures of printed materials—bolstered by archival records and period texts. An underlying assumption in this essay holds that visual and textual representations of printed books and images were laden with meaning; they communicated widely and not-so-widely shared beliefs about printed materials. By reading these signs, we may learn about a culture of print in colonial Mexico City. Printed texts and images arrived in Mexico City with the conquistadors and the mendicant clergy who followed them into the Mexica capital. In his conquest chronicle, Bernal Díaz del Castillo explains that as Hernán Cortés made his way to Tenochtitlan in 1519, he replaced native temple sculptures with woodcut prints of the Virgin Mary.2 Soon thereafter, friars brought printed bibles, catechisms, and prayer books to support their evangelical efforts. They used these texts, printed in Europe in Latin and Spanish, to minister to the local population, eventually assembling large libraries at urban monasteries and outlying mission complexes. Local printing got underway soon thereafter. The need for books published in Nahuatl and other indigenous languages spurred Bishop Fray Juan de Zumárraga and Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza to establish a printing press in the viceregal capital. In 1538, a shop owned by Seville printer Juan Cromberger and run by Juan Pablos opened in Mexico City. Operating under a royal monopoly for the next 20 years, the new press’ earliest surviving book was a 1539 doctrinal manual published for missionaries in Spanish and Nahuatl.3 Subsequent imprints included a baptismal manual and a tract on religious processions for the same audience. Other early imprints were intended for native readers. These included the 1546 Doctrina christiana breve traduzida en lengua Mexicana by Fray Alonso de Molina, written for “the children and youths of the indigenous of this New Spain” to learn for their salvation.4 When Pablos’ monopoly ended, more printers established themselves in Mexico City, with a handful of firms competing for business by the end of the 16th century. Religious tracts and images remained most common among their offerings, but government documents, secular texts, playing cards, and heraldry also occupied Mexican presses. Printing in Mexico City soon expanded, as more than a dozen shops operated throughout the 17th century. The breadth of their typographic efforts increased, as amply illustrated festival books, biographies of exemplary clergy, religious tracts by local theologians, and academic treatises produced by 2 Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, p. 62. 3 García Icazbalceta, Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI, p. 1. 4 Ibid., p. 72.

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university faculty like Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora emerged from the local presses. These imprints served the growing lettered elite, consisting principally of the regular and secular clergy associated with educational institutions, as well as members of the viceregal bureaucracy. Imported works continued to arrive from Europe at the same time, including the printed images that had a profound impact on local artists. Mexican painters Juan Correa, Cristóbal de Villalpando, and their peers serving the same lettered elite drew inspiration from engravings after European Old Masters. At the same time, local printmakers produced woodcuts and engravings for a broad audience, working either freelance or employed within typographic printing firms. The 18th century not only experienced ongoing growth in the printed medium, especially in the number of printmaking shops operating in the viceregal capital, but also saw the introduction of newspapers into Mexico City’s print culture. The Gazeta de México had two runs, first in the 1730s and again from 1784 to the early 19th century. It was joined most significantly by the Mercurio Volante published by José Ignacio Bartolache from 1772–73, the Gazeta de literatura de México edited by José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez from 1788–95 (see Achim, this volume), and the Diario de México beginning in 1805. These papers became the locus of Mexican intellectual exchange, as the intelligentsia, merchants, nobles, and bureaucrats turned to them for information and debates on matters from scientific discoveries to European politics. The newspapers furthermore provide an additional window onto Mexico City’s print culture. Shipping records and bookshop advertisements published in the periodicals reveal that imported books and prints streamed into the capital, some pre-sold by subscription and the rest destined for book dealers and merchants. Mexican printmaking shops also sold their wares in the newspapers, advertising engravings of religious and secular themes. At the close of the colonial era, these shops used their presses in support of or against Mexican independence, and the early 19th century saw royalist tracts, seditious pamphlets, scathing broadsheets, and biting caricatures published in Mexico City. Print’s ubiquity in colonial life is pictured in the visual arts, albeit in idealized, normative ways. Typographic books were depicted in the earliest local images—codices, mission mural paintings, and feather mosaics—while imported prints served as sources of inspiration for many of these same local arts. As the Mexican urban painting school matured, books and a few prints appeared in images of the doctors of the church, martyr saints, founders of religious orders, Christ, and the Virgin Mary. Among secular genre, books and prints were most frequently depicted in portraits. Sitters, particularly clerics but also laymen, were shown accompanied by relevant typographic and visual imprints, from engravings tacked to the wall and small, handheld prayer books

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to sheets of music and massive, multi-volume treatises. Books and prints also appear in the so-called casta paintings, images depicting the viceroyalty’s multi-racial society. The representation of printed objects in Mexican visual arts follows certain conventions that aid their identification as imprints distinct from other materials. Typographic books appear in leather bindings with meticulously trimmed pages. Printed books also sometimes display metal clasps, stamped gilded lettering or ink writing on the spine, and pages with colored fore-edges. When shown open, the typography inside—even if illegible—is regularly sized and spaced, precisely aligned with justified borders and broad margins, and printed in one or two columns, as seen in Miguel Cabrera’s portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Figure 16.1). When legible type appears in Mexican colonial images of books, it is the standard roman typeface popular in Spain and Mexico after the mid-16th century. These characteristics are of course shared with European early modern representations of manuscript texts as seen in well-known images of Saint Jerome in his study or the Annunciation to a reading Mary. These European works rely for their recognition as manuscripts on the long history of handwritten tomes and on the visual tradition of representing them. The American context, however, lacked a tradition of images of manuscripts presaging the visual qualities of later printed books. Native artists in Mesoamerica had produced screenfolds, not bound codices. Nor did handwritten manuscripts travel across the Atlantic in large numbers following the creation of the viceroyalty, and relatively few bound manuscript codices were made in the colonial era.5 The association of pictured bound volumes in the Mexican experience was consequently more thoroughly tied to printed books than to manuscripts. Hence, even when Mexican painters intended the books they represented to reference manuscript texts, such as in the hands of the 6th-century Pope Gregory I, their viewers likely saw them as printed works. Painters keen to police the distinction placed quill pens in the subject’s hand to make emphatic the book’s manuscript, rather than typographic, aspect. Representations of printed images in paintings are more easily distinguished from other visual media. Prints are identified by their black-and-white inking concentrated within the shape of the block or plate from which they were printed; the blank space sometimes also includes inscribed text (Figure 16.2). This leaves broad, un-inked paper borders; in some cases, the indented plate mark where the paper is embossed by the intaglio roller press’ intense pressure 5 See González Rodríguez, “Lectura e ideas”, p. 41.

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figure 16.1 Miguel Cabrera, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1753 Courtesy of the Museo Nacional de Historia, México/Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia

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figure 16.2 Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez, Saint Peter, 1701–1710 Courtesy of the Museo de América, Madrid

is also depicted. Also differentiating prints from paintings is the emphatically described materiality of their paper support, with tears, curling or ripped edges, obvious folds, and general flexibility. Usually depicted unframed, prints are frequently shown tacked to the wall with nails or wax, sometimes with a corner loose. The visual manifestations of a Mexican culture of print began with the imagery produced by native artists soon after the Spaniards’ arrival. Several contact-era manuscripts by indigenous artists picture typographic books. They

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figure 16.3  Anonymous, Codex Telleriano-Remensis (detail), 16th century Courtesy of the Bibliotheque National, Paris

do so, however, exclusively in the hands of friars. On folio 46 of the early colonial Codex Telleriano-Remensis, an Aztec artist pictured a mendicant cleric holding an oversized rosary and a printed book (Figure 16.3). The latter attribute is identifiable by the regular hash marks denoting typographic text and the shaded border suggesting the book’s colored fore edge.6 Other manuscripts similarly picture friars holding or otherwise accompanied by typographic books. These include the Codex Tlatelolco and Diego Múñoz Camargo’s Historia de Tlaxcala. In each case, only the friars, not the Spanish conquistadors or government officials represented nearby, possess books; these secular figures are instead identified by batons of power, thrones, and beards. Typographic books may thus be considered attributes of clerical identity added to the local glyphic lexicon, a kind of pictographic sign to aid in the identification of these characters along with their tonsured hair, rosary beads, and robes. 6 Quiñones Keber, Codex Telleriano-Remensis, p. 237.

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That indigenous artists represented the friars of Mexico City and its environs by printed books comes as little surprise. As Roberto González Echevarría writes, “The conquest of America was carried out by the first modern state and with the aid of the printing press”.7 And the clergy were the first to deploy the press in the Americas. Native viewers were of course accustomed to the relationship of religious faith and writings from the sacred texts kept and read by the priestly class. They witnessed early mendicants equating these familiar pictographic texts with the printed books missionaries identified as their substitutes. Jaime Lara goes so far as to suggest that native viewers appreciated the resemblance of the black- and red-ink printed books and the “stories in red and black” from the local tradition.8 As with pre-Hispanic codices, printed books were not distributed in great numbers to native believers. The exceptions were the young indigenous men training for the clergy who, according to Jerónimo de Mendieta, kept their books under lock and key at the new Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco when it opened in 1536.9 Even if most were not privy to this type of direct contact with typographic books, indigenous Mexicans saw the friars’ reverential treatment of the imprints: revealing them for religious lessons, placing them on the altar during Mass, and restricting access to them otherwise; friars even went as far as keeping them on their person. Mendieta explains in his history of New Spain’s missions that even when native laborers carried the rest of their material needs, friars insisted on carrying their breviaries and other printed texts in a satchel slung across their bodies.10 Fray Diego de Valadés’ text on Franciscan evangelization likewise pictures a friar standing amongst native peoples with a small, printed book hanging from his belt.11 But religious books were not the only significant printed texts for native artists and viewers. As Tom Cummins notes, the 1537 printed papal bull known as Sublimus Dei had the effect of prohibiting enslavement of Amerindians, demonstrating that printed texts had “real or temporal consequences in terms of the people’s suffering”.12 Certainly being freed from the threat of enslavement made clear the power of print, but so too did Bartolomé de las Casas’ 1552–53 imprints decrying the abuse of native Americans, the multiple editions of the Recopilación de leyes de Indias that governed daily life, and even the 17th-century imprints addressing the Virgin of 7 González Echevarría, “America Conquered”, p. 289. 8 Lara, Christian Texts for Aztecs, p. 9. 9 Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana, p. 415. 10 Ibid., p. 617. 11 McKee, “How Print Culture Came to be Indigenous”, p. 164. 12 Cummins, “The Indulgent Image”, p. 208.

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Guadalupe that crafted this cult into a pan-American devotion celebrating its native roots.13 Unlike the typographic books the friars kept to themselves, printed images were distributed in abundance during the early evangelical era. As Serge Gruzinski describes, conversion of native people was largely “laid down in terms of images”, as Cortés and the friars who followed him distributed images, especially printed ones, throughout the 16th century.14 Valadés proudly proclaimed in Rhetorica christiana that the Franciscans developed the practice of teaching with “calcographic” or engraved images.15 The late 16th-century confession manual by Fray Juan Bautista likewise advised that native converts be shown printed images while hearing confessional examples; it was even better “if each Indian had [the print] in his house, because each time he sees it, he will remember and think that the same will happen to him”.16 Documentary evidence similarly testifies to an abundance of images distributed by the mendicants. Their efforts were in fact so thorough that through the 17th and 18th centuries, Mexican Indians, mixed-race castas, and criollo colonists alike kept and displayed prints, and attributed to them miracles from aid in childbirth to finding lost animals.17 The distribution of prints supported not just religious instruction but artistic training as well. Fray Pedro de Gante gave burgeoning native artists prints to copy at the school of San José de los Naturales, so that his charges would learn European formal qualities and iconographic conventions. Likewise, native painters were provided with European prints to reproduce on the walls of new missions or in the feather mosaics used for liturgical garments and wall hangings. The mendicants additionally taught native artists to make woodcut images, praising their ability to craft these into “perfect figures”.18 Their ability to do so was considered a barometer of evangelical success and the friars’ creation of what Gruzinski calls a “new man” who abandoned pagan ways thanks in part to his engagement with printed images.19 The native-made woodcuts moreover placed Mexican Indians within what Tom Cummins has called a “common culture between Europe and the Americas”.20 13 Gruzinski, “Images and Cultural Mestizaje”, p. 62. 14 Gruzinski, Images at War, p. 37. 15 Valadés, Rhetorica christiana, p. 237. 16 Cited in Chocano Mena, La Fortaleza docta, p. 56. 17 See Taylor, Marvels and Miracles in Late Colonial Mexico and Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images. 18 Motolinía, Historia de los Indios de la Nueva España, p. 169. 19 Gruzinski, “Images and Cultural Metizaje”, p. 56. 20 Cummins, “The Indulgent Image”, p. 210.

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The association of early colonial missionaries with printed material was visualized in the 1547 edition of Doctrina christiana en lengua Mexicana by Fray Pedro de Gante. Its title page woodcut vignette features the author holding a book and saying in the native language: “This is the word of God”.21 The image creates a self-referential loop: the physical book in which the image appears, the pictured book, the printed depiction of the spoken words pictured in the image, and the actual spoken words as Gante or another reader described the image for his audience. It had the effect of reinforcing four-fold the association between friars and their sacred books for native viewers. So, too, did Gante’s more lavishly illustrated 1553 edition, which includes the same illustrated title page, plus an additional small woodcut titled “Evangelization”, featuring a friar holding a book and standing among childlike figures. This association of missionaries and printed books with Gante himself was pictured in two portraits painted later in the colonial era. The first, now in the Museo Nacional de Historia in Mexico City, represents Gante with one arm around a native boy and the other holding an open, printed book. That Gante’s intention for the book in this painting—a goal shared by his mendicant colleagues—was to transfer its physical ownership as well as its content to his native charges is imagined in an anonymous 17th-century painting (Figure 16.4). More than a pictographic attribute of his clerical profession, the books here act additionally as a sign of the transmission of knowledge. More specifically, the books represented for Gante’s fellow Franciscans the transfer via writing—and more exactly, printing—of predictable and exactly repeatable and repeated doctrinal information, in contrast to what Gante and his peers saw as the native mutable and inexact form of pictographic writing and its spoken interpretation.22 Its recipient, the native child, personifies for a clerical viewer the entirety of New Spain’s indigenous populations, who the friars routinely described as childlike.23 In the painting pictured here, the friar speaks to indigenous visitors while a native boy, dressed in the European style, reads from a printed book. Like the clothing, the transfer of the book from the friar’s hands to the Amerindian’s signifies the efficacy of conversion and the concomitant epistemological change; the knowledge embodied in the printed book has transferred to the boy. This transfer, as Stuart McKee notes and both paintings picture, was unidirectional, and the imprint moves only from cleric to native, revealing to modern 21 See García Icazbalceta, Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI and Hernández Triviño. “Fray Pedro de Gante”, pp. 36–38. 22 Mignolo, “When Speaking was not Good Enough”, p. 317. 23 Baudot, “Amerindian Image and Utopian Project”, p. 389.

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figure 16.4 Anonymous, Pedro de Gante, 17th century Courtesy of the Museo Nacional de Historia, México/Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia

viewers the restrictions placed on indigenous engagement with printed materials in colonial Mexico City.24 The 1555 provincial council decreed that only 24

McKee, “How Print Culture Came to be Indigenous”, p. 164.

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abbreviated printed catechisms and handwritten, translated copies of selected sermons could be given to Indians; the same council forbade distribution of printed Bibles in native languages.25 Later decrees took away other translated materials from native readers, including books of hours.26 Indigenous learning and agency in the production of knowledge via printed materials was thus limited. Early efforts to publish Nahua texts to support a nascent indigenous clergy consequently declined dramatically over the course of the late 16th and 17th centuries. As Magdalena Chocano Mena explains, evangelization by this point was kept at its most basic level, eschewing more complicated concepts requiring fuller textual support.27 Perhaps as a result, later images of native people very rarely place printed books in their hands. An anonymous 18th-century painting of a Capuchin nun illustrates how Mexican visual arts pictured the control white-skinned ecclesiastics had over native access to printed information (Figure 16.5). The locutorio grill through which she reads to the native man serves not just as a sign of her cloistered status, but also signals the barriers to his education and the church’s mediating role in native intellectual development. Other images reinforce the connection between printed books, native conversion, and the mediating role of the clergy, such as a portrait of Father José Antonio de Flores Ribera at the Museo Nacional del Virreinato in which the sitter stands before his book-laden shelves, resting one hand on a printed text and another on the head of a kneeling Amerindian, and an early 19th-century engraving of Fray Miguel Tellechea offering his Tarahumara grammar text to stereotyped indigenous figures. The native men reach for the proffered text, which they are not quite given by the cleric. By keeping the potent printed book out of the native hand, the print of Tellechea, the painting of the Capuchin nun, and others like it embody Ángel Rama’s assertion that in the lettered city, the viceroyalty’s literate elite produced the conditions that kept themselves at the apex of a colonial society that equated knowledge and power.28 This restrictive culture of print was what was pictured in works produced for Mexico City’s lettered, art-buying population. On the other hand, printed images were routinely painted into depictions of natives’ belongings throughout the colonial era. They operate most commonly as a sign of poverty, as the owners are pictured so poor as to only own a paper 25 Chocano Mena, Fortaleza docta, pp. 91–92. 26 Gruzinski, Images at War, p. 110. See also González Rodríguez, “Lectura e ideas”, p. 40. 27 Chocano Mena, Fortaleza docta, pp. 96–98. 28 Rama, The Lettered City, pp. 22–24. The exceptional 18th-century painting of Córtes’ so-called humiliation by José Vivar y Valderrama, in which a native man holds a book above the prostrate conquistador taking communion, is less a testament to Amerindian literacy than evidence of the humbled Spaniard.

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figure 16.5 Anonymous, Capuchin Nun, c.1750 Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Dr. Robert H. Lamborn Collection, 1903–33

print. Their careless display with torn edges and loose corners acts as metonym of the print’s cheapness and ephemerality. But the prints also signal a normative Catholic piety and the fruitful results of evangelization. An example from

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a parish church in Tlaxcala seems to illustrate Fray Juan Bautista’s recommendation that native people possess a print to emulate. In the painting, a dying Amerindian gives his final confession gazing upon a printed image of Saint Joseph and the Christ Child hanging on his humble wall.29 Likewise, several of the casta paintings place a religious print hanging on the wall behind the family unit.30 While not all prints in casta paintings depict religious subjects, a point to which I shall return later, the religious prints painted in the casta series pictured how the Church, as Gruzinski notes, “attempted to extract maximum benefit from the use of the image while still trying to maintain control over it”.31 The evangelical benefit of printed texts and images communicated by these representations was, more specifically, their efficacy as tools of instruction and the perceived indelibility of information learned from printed sources. As William MacGregor explains in the European context, print technologies became “a powerful set of metaphors to explain the abstract, invisible workings of perception and cognition; to conceptualize, that is in terms of printmaking, how sensations get recorded in the mind and retrieved from memory as discrete units of knowledge”.32 The association of printed-ness with cognition was not confined to written metaphors, as the language of cognitive indelibility derived from printing in turn reaffirmed the authority of real printed texts and images. In her study of early printmaking, Elina Gertsman concurs, “The chain of imprints and incisions that begins with the woodcutter’s knife” and the type founder’s graver, “and continues with impressions on paper, the eye, the brain, the memory, and the heart, culminates in the imprinting and transformation of one’s entire soul”.33 The viewer who read a printed text or gazed upon a holy print had this image and the truths it represented made indelible in his mind. Mexican viewers understood that to estampar, grabar, or imprimir knowledge on one’s heart or mind was to make it permanent. In 1579, Valadés explained that, “By means of images that imprint themselves in different areas [of our minds], we can learn by what we find in those spaces”.34 Fray Jerónimo de Mendieta likewise relied on the language of printed-ness to refer 29

This painting is illustrated in Lara, Christian Texts for Aztecs, p. 74. Saint Joseph came to be associated with “good death” in colonial New Spain. See Rubial García, “Icons of Devotion”, p. 51. 30 For example, the painting De Sambaigo e India, Cambujo in the collection of the Denver Art Museum pictures a small print of what appears to be Saint George just inside the door of the family’s home, its gray tones and wide, un-inked margin identifying it as an engraving. 31 Gruzinski, Images at War, p. 102. 32 MacGregor, “Authority of Prints”, p. 404. 33 Gertsman, “Multiple Impressions”, p. 330. 34 Valadés, Rhetorica christiana, p. 237.

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to the indelibility of acquired knowledge among his native charges, writing that doctrine “imprint[ed] in their memories from a tender age”.35 This metaphoric process is visualized in a 1701 Peruvian funeral book for Charles II (Figure 16.6), with an illustration featuring the king’s name printed onto two hearts by a platen letter press. The closing couplet in the accompanying sonnet declares that “when he is taken from their eyes, Charles remains printed on their hearts”.36 A particularly charming example of the slippage between metaphoric printed-ness and real print is the 1782 printer’s proof from Mexico City’s Nueva Madrileña Press. It features an engraving of the Virgin of Sorrows and typographic passages in various fonts and sizes. Each merges actual print (in the typeface letters), printing metaphors, and religion, referring to Mary as a book, a press, and a printer for her holy son. Her soul was prepared to receive the imprint of sacred history, her heart was imprinted with Christ’s pain, and her press, or physical body, did not fail in the face of intense suffering. For his part, Christ in the proof is the book printed by God with “Royal Privilege”, a play on typographic approvals and monopolies.37 The representation of printed texts and images in Mexico City’s culture of print thus exceeds simply signifying poverty or evangelical efforts, as the very material of the prints pictured made them efficacious tools of indoctrination. Ink, paper, and printing signified internalized learning that survived forever, allowing us to see Gante’s young reader as forever impacted by the learning the missionaries provided New Spain’s indigenous population, even when the books were accessed only via clerics like the Capuchin nun who read through the locutorio’s bars. The perceived potency of printed texts and images was a double-edged sword for Spanish religious and secular authorities.38 Mexico City’s printers labored under Spanish laws seeking to control their imprints. The viceregal government approved all local texts for printing, while books addressing the Americas required the approval of the Council of the Indies in Spain to insure that texts unflattering to Spain’s efforts in the Americas did not circulate. ­Religious texts followed an additional, parallel course, securing both civil and ecclesiastical approval for the sake of religious orthodoxy. Printed images initially escaped this pre-publication scrutiny until a 1672 decree demanded that Mexican printers submit any printed item for approval, thereby expanding the law to include all images as well. The archival record reveals, however, that while book printers generally complied with Spanish law from the outset, print 35 Mendieta, Historia ecclesiastica Indiana, p. 27. 36 Portocarrero Lasso de la Vega, Parentación real, n.p. 37 See Garone Gravier, “De las fuentes como fuentes”, pp. 191–192. 38 See González Rodríguez, “Lectura e ideas”.

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figure 16.6 Anonymous, Sonnet, 1701 Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

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publishers never did. Printed images consequently escaped review before publication for the most part, seeking authorization only in cases where churches or shrines held monopolies on the sacred figures print publishers sought to reproduce. In these cases, the question was less about the decorum or orthodoxy of the printed reproduction and more about revenue. In addition to laws governing production, the local branch of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, founded in 1571, censored printed materials already in circulation. The Inquisition’s proscriptive Index of Prohibited Books, which banned entire printed works or parts therein, vexed local book sellers as early as 1547. The Index likewise prohibited printed images—for example, in 1551, it banned images that insulted or mocked holy figures, and in 1640, prohibited lascivious images. Other Inquisitorial edicts addressed specific printed representations of, for example, the so-called China Poblana and the controversial Bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza. From local Inquisition investigations of faulty imprints, we may appreciate the darker power Church officials attributed to printed materials as they simultaneously championed their efficacy in conversion and education. As Serge Gruzinski notes regarding a 1571 investigation of a heretical woodcut by émigré blockcutter Juan Ortiz and his boss, printer Pablo Ocharte, “These Frenchmen were even more dangerous for their prominence in the little world of Mexican printing”.39 That is, the potency of print multiplied the foreigners’ seditious potential, which Inquisition records bear out. In 1773, after examining and banning an image critical of King Charles III, Inquisition authorities declared that these imprints “perturb[ed] the consciences of the timid and foolhardy who believe to be true and holy all that is printed and stamped with a mixture of our Sacred Religion”.40 On another occasion, Inquisitors concluded that “the simple people, in whose hands this type of imprint commonly falls” were unable to distinguish heretical prints from “true” images.41 In fact, the Inquisitors repeatedly referred to print’s power to confuse, seduce, and fool the masses. Thus, the same powers that made imprints effective didactic tools could be subverted to make faulty information indelible as well. Their associated power combined with their intrinsic qualities of reproducibility, relative

39 Gruzinski, Images at War, p. 153. See also González Obregón, Libros y libreros en el siglo XVI, pp. 85–244; Donahue-Wallace, “Prints and Printmakers in Viceregal Mexico City”, pp. 134–141; and Chocano Mena, Fortaleza docta, pp. 351–352. 40 Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico (hereafter AGN), Edictos de la Inquisición, t. 2, fol. 27r (1773). 41 AGN, Inquisición, vol. 699, exp. 7, fol. 339v.

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cheapness, and easy concealability to make the imprints dangerous and provide them with great, and uncontrollable, power. An example from Puebla seems to prove the Inquisitors’ point. When María Narvaez’ brother lay dying in 1753, the Jesuit clerics who came to hear his confession and administer last rites refused to do so until she removed a prohibited printed portrait of Bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza from the wall above his bed. María refused, the priests would not relent, and the brother died without confessing his sins or receiving last rites.42 Fray Bautista’s promotion of printed images in the home to encourage good Christian living consequently becomes more complicated in the uncontrolled environment of Mexico City’s print market, where orthodoxy took a backseat to profit and personal sentiment and interpretation of religious doctrine unleashed thousands of unsanctioned images into the market. Needless to say, unorthodox uses of printed materials were not regularly recorded in colonial paintings. Instead, the visual culture that emerges out of this civil and religious concern for the production and circulation of printed material neutralized the threat and placed the culture of print within socially accepted roles. This is particularly true of portraits. The famous likenesses of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz previously examined, with shelves filled with books, are exceptionally abundant in printed materials, particularly for a woman. The portrait of Sor María Ana Teresa Bonstet (Figure 16.7), with a small prayer book in her hand, three larger volumes on her desk, and an engraving on the wall beside her is more typical in its relatively modest array of imprints; most nuns are pictured with only a single prayer book. Bound, printed volumes likewise flank male clerics in their portraits as evidence of their erudition. While modern scholarship on these works has consistently noted that the books accompanying these sitters signify their learning and lives dedicated to producing or consuming knowledge through printed texts, we may now appreciate that knowledge as particularly efficacious in its ability to teach and to promote retention, as well as its indelibility once learned. They moreover signify the privileged position of these sitters, whose ownership of and direct engagement with books sets them visually apart from Mexico City’s native and mixed race populations. Printed images appear less frequently than books in painted portraits, but similarly signify ideas beyond their immediate referent. Engravings like the image of Our Lady of the Pillar shown tacked to Bonstet’s cell wall, as I have argued on another occasion, represent the nun’s dedication to poverty and humility, visualizing Saint Theresa of Avila’s famous declaration that “it seemed

42

AGN, Inquisición, vol. 945, exp. 12, fols. 56r–56v. See also Rubial García, La santidad controvertida, pp. 203–250. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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figure 16.7 Anonymous, Sor Maria Anna Teresa Bonstet, c.1757 Courtesy of the Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán

like poverty to me to have [no image] but one on paper”.43 Bonstet’s engraving furthermore denotes more personal associations, as it represents her individual cell where the print hung and her identification with this advocation from her hometown of Zaragoza, Spain. Other clerics pictured with printed representations of favorite advocations are similarly placed within their specific institution, cell, or office. Thus, the print in the clerical painted portrait operates as a convenient signifier of vows, heritage, and corporate identity as member of an order, physically and temporally present at this or that convent.

43

Cited in Portús and Vega, La estampa religiosa, p. 185. See Donahue-Wallace, “Picturing Prints”, pp. 339–341. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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Just as significantly, the printed materials in secular and clerical portraits signify a complicated and contradictorily dizzying idea of time in the Mexican culture of print. In the examples with ample painted libraries, the bookshelf is covered by a curtain temporarily pulled back to reveal its contents. Their owners are caught in the act of reading, with a finger inserted between the pages of the temporarily closed devotional book; when the portraitist is finished capturing the likeness, reading will resume or the curtain will fall. The portrait in this way captures a moment. In both cases, however, that fleeting moment of active readership or displayed library is contradicted by the books themselves. These take advantage of print’s ability to preserve and disseminate texts written at another time, including antiquity in the case of Sor Juana’s library with titles by Virgil, Quintilian, Martial, Seneca, and Cicero; the clock resting nearby, in its role as memento mori, reifies this awareness of temporality. Sor Juana will die but her books, including those she wrote, survive, as she and the other authors are immortalized by the printing press, a sentiment echoed by Felipe Santoyo in his 1714 sonnet to the recently deceased Sor Juana, when he wrote that her fame lived on “when they print her writings”.44 Yet, at the same time, printed materials in Mexican paintings force the viewer back to the present since printing was a recent invention. In a 1790 presentation to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, José de Vargas y Ponce declared that printing was an invention of the modern age, unknown to antiquity, a point made two centuries earlier by Diego de Valadés. The printers’ and printmakers’ efforts made the medium an “inseparable ally of the present philosophical century”.45 Hence, José de Ibarra’s famous painting in the Puebla cathedral of the Christ Child appearing before saints holding an engraving of his mother locates this sacra conversazione in the modern age, even if the Christ Child lived earlier. It evokes all of the poetic metaphors referenced in the printer’s proof discussed here: the Virgin Mary as the book, the plate, and the imprint for Christ’s suffering. A similar anachronism appears in a c.1710 series of apostles by the Mexican painter Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez. Once again the painting of Saint Peter, with his papal regalia to one side and his cross to the other, includes an angel holding a large engraving.46 The single-sheet print, depicted as if engraved with superior technical skill, pictures Peter’s martyrdom, with a barely legible inscription below the grisaille image. Other paintings from the series picture prints bound in large portfolios recalling the period’s luxury imprints 44 45 46

Castorena y Ursúa, Fama, y obras posthumas del fénix de México, p. 306. Distribución de los premios, p. 73. A similar anonymous series from San Luis Potosí pictures the martyred apostles being shown engravings by angels.

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produced in Paris, Antwerp, and Rome. Interestingly, only the doubting apostle Thomas interacts with the printed material, slipping the fingers of his left hand between the pages, much as he probed Christ’s wound in Baroque paintings. What did the print in the painting prove to the doubting Thomas, in this case, or signify within Mexico City’s culture of print? The printed materials depicted in these paintings cross time, providing the apostles proof that their sacrifices bore fruit, with cults that persisted to an age of glorious luxury imprints used to disseminate and demonstrate devotion in the 18th century. Thomas’ doubtfulness is eased as he handles the printed proof of his success. The viewer is similarly assured that the cult of saints is a modern one, proven by the angel pointing to the efficacious didactic tool and the authoritative imprint of the apostle’s sanctity. As much as a biblical scene painted in modern dress, the printed image moves the apostles forward to be relevant in the current age. By the early 18th century, the print in the painting reveals that the cult is fixed and indelibly stamped into the Catholic heart. Whereas this painting, as a singular object, might decay and disappear, the many printed images of Saint Peter and the rest guarantee their persistence. The scale and quality of the painted print in Rodríguez Juárez’ paintings moreover demonstrate the richness and sophistication of the modern cult and the institutions that promoted it. These are not cheap woodcuts with simple line drawings, but large, expensive engravings executed with technical mastery. They display all of the qualities of the best academic, reproductive prints of their era: precise and illusionistic designs executed with complex linear syntaxes to create tonal variation recalling painting’s coloristic qualities. Prints and luxury books of this size and technical proficiency were yet not made in Mexico City in the early 18th century.47 The simulated prints in the paintings therefore referenced travel across the Atlantic and embodied for viewers the printed medium’s wide dissemination, tying this cult to Europe and establishing Nicólas Rodríguez Juárez’ participation in the common culture of artistic currents. Printed materials in the so-called casta paintings, on the other hand, signify more local concerns. The urge to paint the sociedad de castas in series of up to 16 canvases likely rested at least in part with the Creole elite’s desire to identify and maintain racial distinctions while simultaneously promoting to local

47

By mid-century, Mexico City had a nascent reproductive engraving industry promoted by painter Miguel Cabrera and engraver Baltasar Troncoso y Sotomayor, but even these works were yet to display the visual qualities Rodríguez Juárez simulated in his painted engraving. Not until the foundation of the Royal Academy of San Carlos in 1781–83 were these illusionistic pictorial qualities found in local prints.

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and European viewers New Spain’s social harmony and economic abundance.48 Printed images appear painted in at least 15 paintings from 10 of the series created in the second half of the 18th century; printed books appear in still more. In each, the imprints support the artists’ and patrons’ attempts to construct the world of New Spain’s diverse peoples. Printed books on tables and engravings hanging on the walls of the castas’ homes craft the physical and social settings for the figures; they complement dress and occupation to assign social status. In several cases, printed images designate poverty, for example, as a damaged landscape print hangs loosely alongside functional items on a wall. Yet prosperous families are similarly painted with a print tacked to the walls of their homes. That these families would also own a print and tack it to the wall is supported by evidence from throughout the colonial era. Advertisements in the bi-weekly Gazeta de México routinely offered “persons dedicated to the noble arts” printed books, individual engravings, or subscriptions for print series.49 This was the same population of “persons of taste” invited in a 1784 notice to purchase a new, illustrated edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, not unlike the volume pictured in José Magón’s casta painting, De español e india, mestizo.50 The books and engravings in these casta paintings signify social distinction in this culture of print. Not surprisingly, books are shown exclusively in the hands of Spaniards, as learning from books was as much a sign of elite privilege in the casta paintings as it was in the works already discussed. The printed images are presented as objects displayed in the home for their thematic and visual qualities; that is, as art. In fact, it is clear that from the outset Mexicans thought of prints as art, rather than just didactic instruments. Even as early as 1572, printmaker Juan Ortiz employed indigenous Mexicans to hand color and frame his prints of the Virgin of the Rosary on taffeta.51 Similarly, a 1665 Inquisition edict referred to printing on cloth, and prohibited imprints on taffeta, and Cristóbal de Villalpando’s painting of Mexico City’s Parián market ­pictures a vendor offering printed images mounted on red fabric to augment their aesthetic value.52 As I have argued elsewhere, the print-owning castas represented in the paintings therefore display the works as art—made emphatic by the secular themes of most legible prints in these paintings—and shared in a polite art-buying society

48

See García Saiz, Las castas mexicanas; Katzew, Casta Painting; and Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain. 49 Gazeta de México, 1, no. 29 (25 January 1785), p. 240. See Donahue-Wallace, “Picturing Prints”, pp. 342–349. 50 Gazeta de México, 1, no. 20 (6 October 1784), p. 166. 51 Fernández del Castillo, Libros y libreros, pp. 235 and 238. 52 Gruzinski, Images at War, p. 156. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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figure 16.8 Anonymous, De español y Mestissa produce Castizo, 18th century Courtesy of the Museo de América, Madrid

like the “persons of taste” mentioned in the Gazeta advertisements.53 The prints on the walls of the castas’ homes in the paintings therefore signified not abject poverty, but relative poverty, and signaled the castas’ participation in or emulation of the rituals of high (or at least higher) society. At the same time, however, the culture of print pictured in the art of colonial Mexico City delimited social status, much as the colonial mimicry studied by Homi Bhabha allowed colonized Others to be “almost the same, but not quite”.54 Associating imprints with the indelibility of knowledge, faith, or identity led the prints represented in the casta paintings to signify the indelibility of race and social status. This is visualized in an anonymous casta series now in the collection of the Museo de América (Figure 16.8). In each of the canvases, the text identifying the specific racial categories is painted as if printed, with typographic letters and wide, un-inked borders surrounding a clear plate mark. Their status, to borrow from the era’s language of printed-ness, was permanently imprinted by those who controlled Mexican presses and policed access to its products. The castas may have mimicked their social betters by collecting art, but their aspirations to social improvement were securely limited by the position into which they were born. By picturing the imprinted categories, the 53 This portion of the essay comes from Donahue-Wallace, “Picturing Prints”, pp. 348–349. 54 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 85–92. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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colonial elite again deployed notions of printed-ness to preserve the lettered city for themselves, conditions that would unfortunately persist even after Mexico gained its independence from Spain. Bibliography

AGN

Primary Sources

Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Mexico

Castorena y Ursúa, I., Fama, y obras posthumas del fénix de México, Madrid, 1714. Díaz del Castillo, B., The Conquest of New Spain, trans. J.M. Cohen, London, 1963. Distribución de los premios, Madrid, 1790. Gazeta de México, 1, no. 29 (25 January 1785), p. 240. Gazeta de México, 1, no. 20 (6 October 1784), p. 166. Mendieta, J., Historia eclesiástica indiana, ed. J. García Icazbalceta, Mexico City, 1870. Motolinía, T., Historia de los Indios de la Nueva España, Mexico City, 1973. Portocarrero Lasso de la Vega, M., Parentacion real al soberano nombre e immortal memoria del Catolico Rey de las Españas y Emperador de las Indias el serenissimo senor don Carlos II, Lima, 1701. Valadés, D., Rhetorica christiana, ed. E.J. Palomera, Mexico City, 1989.



Secondary Literature

Baudot, G., “Amerindian Image and Utopian Project: Motolinía and Millenarian Discourse”, in R. Jara and N. Spadaccini (eds.), Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus, Minneapolis, 1992, pp. 375–400. Bhabha, H., The Location of Culture, London, 2004. Carrera, M., Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings, Austin, 2003. Chocano Mena, M., La fortaleza docta: elite letrada y dominación social en México colonial (siglos xvi-xvii), Barcelona, 2000. Cummins, T., “The Indulgent Image: Prints in the New World”, in I. Katzew (ed.), ­Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, Los Angeles, 2011, pp. 203–225. Donahue-Wallace, K., “Picturing Prints in Early Modern New Spain”, The Americas 64:3 (2008), pp. 325–349. Donahue-Wallace, K., “Prints and Printmakers in Viceregal Mexico City, 1600–1800”, doctoral dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2000. Fernández del Castillo, F., Libros y libreros en el siglo XVI, Mexico City, 1914. García Icazbalceta, J., Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI, Mexico City, 1886.

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García Saiz, M., Las castas mexicanas: un género pictórico americano, s.l., 1989. Garone Gravier, M., “De las fuentes como fuentes: La historia de la tipografía y el estudio material del libro”, Primer Coloquio Argentino de Estudios sobre el Libro y la Edición, La Plata, 2012, pp. 188–198. Accessible at http://coloquiolibroyedicion. fahce.unlp.edu.ar/actas. Accessed 30 October 2015. Gertsman, E., “Multiple Impressions: Christ and the Winepress and the Semiotics of the Printed Image”, Art History 36:3 (2013), pp. 310–337. González Echevarría, R., “America Conquered”, Yale Review 74 (1985), pp. 281–290. González Obregón, L., Libros y libreros en el siglo XVI, Mexico City, 1914. González Rodríguez, J., “Lectura e ideas”, Revista Complutense de Historia de América 23 (1997), pp. 39–74. Gruzinski, S., “Images and Cultural Mestizaje in Colonial Mexico”, Poetics Today 16:1 (1995), pp. 53–77. Gruzinski, S., Images at War: Mexico From Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019), Durham, 2001. Hernández Triviño, A., “Fray Pedro de Gante (1480?-1572): la palabra y la fe”, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Historiografía Lingüística 9 (2014), pp. 29–46. Johns, A., The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago, 1998. Katzew, I., Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, New Haven, 2004. Lara, J., Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico, South Bend, 2008. MacGregor, W., “The Authority of Prints: An Early Modern Perspective”, Art History 22:3 (1999), pp. 389–420. McKee, S., “How Print Culture Came to be Indigenous”, Visible Language 44:2 (2010), pp. 161–186. Mignolo, W., “When Speaking was not Good Enough: Illiterates, Barbarians, Savages, and Cannibals”, in R. Jara and N. Spadaccini (eds.), Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus, Minneapolis, 1992, pp. 312–345. Portús, J., and Vega J., La estampa religiosa en la España del antiguo régimen, Madrid, 1998. Quiñones Keber, E., Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a­ ­Pictorial Aztec Manuscript, Austin, 1995. Rama, Á., The Lettered City, Durham, 1996. Rubial García, A., La santidad controvertida, Mexico City, 1999. Rubial García, A., “Icons of Devotion: The Appropriation and Use of Saints in New Spain”, in M. Nesvig (ed.), Local Religion in Colonial Mexico, Albuquerque, 2006, pp. 36–61. Taylor, W., Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reforma, Albuquerque, 2010. Taylor, W., Marvels and Miracles in Late Colonial Mexico: Three Texts in Context, ­Albuquerque, 2011.

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CHAPTER 17

Novohispanic Baroque Poetry A Lyric Chronicle of Mexico City Martha Lilia Tenorio To be precise, the Americas conquered by Spain never consisted, legally speaking, of “colonies”, but rather of viceregencies of the Spanish crown with a mostly non-Spanish population dominated by a Spanish or criollo minority. There was, however, a “colonial” situation in the modern sense of the word. Thus, one can speak of a “colonial culture”, a concept that encompasses the shaping of society and its daily makeup to artistic manifestations: “… after religion, a second principle that guided colonial society was its intellectual and artistic culture, which was deemed to be the pinnacle of social life, just as saintliness was the crowning glory of individual life”.1 The early establishment of the printing press in Mexico City, in 1539, and the founding of its university, in 1553, bear witness to an interest in literature and culture. A fundamental part of this cultural formation was literature, especially poetry, which at all times adhered to the canons and traditions of Spanish poetry of the Golden Age. New Spain began to participate in European culture without any warning; without any preamble, its cultural manifestations became part of the history of ideas of the Western world: There is no mestizaje or vacillation in its poetry [of New Spain], nor hesitation; between two worlds—one of ashes and ruins and one that already shows the seeds of its own destruction in the midst of its splendor—the Novohispanic poets take root through a language and art that make them contemporaries of the Renaissance universal man.2 Although Novohispanic poetry cannot be said to have been born modern, it flowered into modernity. Very soon, Mexico City left its mark on Novohispanic poetry. Spanish poets residing in New Spain felt the need to inform their compatriots in Spain about their discoveries in the New World. Although he only lived in the city from 1 Henríquez Ureña, Las corrientes literarias en la América hispánica, pp. 45–46. 2 Pacheco, La poesía mexicana del siglo XIX (Antología), p. 9.

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1574 to 1577, Juan de la Cueva (1543–1612) recounts the novelties he found in a lengthy epistolary poem written for Laurencio Sánchez Obregón, the first corregidor (chief magistrate) of New Spain. Ninety of the 649 verses are devoted to Mexico City, in which the poet describes the city as an “American Venice”, a logical metaphor, not unlike the one employed by the conquistadors, to describe the monumental city built within a lake: “¿Consideráis que está en una laguna / México, cual Venecia edificada / sobre la mar, sin diferencia alguna?”.3 This image is not completely realistic; for example, following convention, the city’s stone buildings become opulent marble structures: Los edificios altos y opulentos, de piedra y blanco mármol fabricados, que suspenden la vista y pensamientos.4 The poet does not describe the supposed magnificence of the new landscape or the recently constructed city, but rather reflects the poetic tradition to which he belongs, limiting his amazement to the aesthetics and rhetoric of his time. His description of Indians is more faithful; he does not hesitate to express his utter perplexity, incomprehension, and even disgust: “La gente natural sí es desabrida, / digo los indios, y no de buen trato”. He continues by describing the monotony of their music: “Dos mil indios, ¡oh extraña maravilla!, / bailan por un compás a un tamborino / sin mudar voz, aunque es cansancio oílla”5. He also refers to the length of Indian festivities: “De su hemisferio ven la luz primero / ausente, que se ausenten del mitote / en que han consumido el día entero”. He additionally writes about their fiestas continuing until dawn, with them completely drunk: “De aquí van donde pagan el escote / a Baco y donde aguardan la mañana / tales, que llaman al mamey, camote” (the “escote a Baco” is the tribute they must pay Bacchus for their drunkenness in the form of a hangover).6 He follows by writing about their bilingualism: “Hablan la lengua 3 “For centuries, the most important element in Mexico City was the lake, an enormous natural body of water without any natural outlet, measuring 120 kilometres from north to south and 65 kilometres from west to east” (Rubial, Monjas, cortesanos y plebeyos, p. 13). 4 Tenorio, Poesía novohispana, p. 169. 5 Ibid., p. 170. 6 This must have been an important social problem since the early years of the viceroyalty. In the 17th century, the writer and scientist Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora wrote a treatise on the harm caused by pulque. In a Christmas carol, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz describes a male Indian stumbling into church, ambiguous about whether his condition is due to drunkenness or malnourishment. In the 18th century, the sale of pulque to Indians was banned.

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castellana / tan bien como nosotros la hablamos / y la suya propia mexicana”.7 Clearly, there is nothing idyllic or decorative about his description, which is unflattering but sincere. This portrayal of the Indian is quite different from those offered by chroniclers. When chroniclers were friars, they tended to highlight Indian positive values and virtues. However, when they were soldiers, they generally tended to emphasize cruelty and barbarity. For example, the poet, Juan de la Cueva, lyrically writes about the social realities that he observes, depicting them without any political or ideological bent, while not refraining from value judgments. Being an artist, he stresses the colorfulness and variety of fruit: “Mirad aquesas frutas naturales: / el plátano, mamey, guayaba, anona, / si en gusto las de España son iguales ... ”;8 he then pauses to speak of native food and its flavors, seemingly taking pleasure in pronouncing the exotic and suggestive phonetics of the names of the different dishes: “un pipïán es célebre comida / que al sabor de él os comeréis las manos”.9 Likewise, his artistic sensibility enables him to recognize, over 50 years after the conquest, the Indians’ grief at the loss of their world, the death of their emperor, Moctezuma, and the treason of Malinche: “En sus cantos endechan el destino, / de Moctezuma la prisión y muerte, / maldiciendo a Malinche y su camino; / ... y llorando de esto cuentan / toda la guerra y su contraria suerte”.10 The case of Eugenio de Salazar is more interesting. Born in Madrid around 1530, he arrived in New Spain in 1580, living 20 years in Mexico City and holding various positions. Salazar was a prolific writer whose collected works appear in Silva de poesía, of which the second part is entirely devoted to Mexico and its history, featuring a description of Mexico City, folkloric local references, and colloquialisms (i.e., “Mexicanisms”, before the term was coined). I will highlight only one of his compositions, entitled “A Bucolic Description of the Lake of Mexico”, in which, predating Balbuena, he creates his own “Mexican Grandeur”, describing the physical surroundings of the city, including the lake:

7

8 9 10

Shortly afterwards, towards the end of the 16th century, Bernardo de Balbuena, in his Grandeza Mexicana, refers to the “ugly Indian” who extracts gold and silver from the mines, loading them onto the ships destined for Spain (Tenorio, Poesia novohispana, p. 280). Almost a century later, a “Mexican” poet, born in Mexico City, whose splendors he praises, describes the Indian in very similar terms: “They are born in New Spain / wretched people, / short, surly, / and with an almost strange way of thinking” (Ribera, Descripción poética de las funerales pompas, n.p., verses 1223–1226). Tenorio, pp. 170–171. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid.

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En el distrito rico de occidente donde los francos montes su riqueza y su oculto caudal hacen patente con gran dulzura y natural largueza, y dan en abundancia a nuestra gente de sus profundas venas la fineza: allí está aquella población famosa, Tenuxtitlán, la rica y populosa.11 The lake is special, because within it, Indians “con tierra a mano y con labor galena / en el agua hacen milpas bellas”, or cultivate vegetables that have never been seen before, produce that is unknown to the Renaissance Spanish reader who is familiar with Garcilaso de la Vega. Salazar describes these novelties just as he sees them, qualifying them with references from classical literature: Allí el bermejo chile colorea y el naranjado ají no muy maduro; allí el frío tomate verdeguea, y flores de color claro y oscuro, y el agua dulce entre ellas que blanquea haciendo un enrejado claro y puro de blanca plata y variado esmalte, por que ninguna cosa bella falte.12 This mélange culminates in the mythological founding—based on Greco-Roman, rather than Mexica mythology—of the famous city of Tenochtitlan, nestled in the middle of a lake. Salazar attempts to situate the city’s foundation and its physical setting within a Western mythological tradition, enabling Neptune—who dwells with his court of Tritons in these new lands that are proud to welcome such a famous visitor—to enter the Lake of Mexico. This passage is a prolongation of the West’s illustrious affinity with the rustic nature of the New World. To this end, Salazar creates small altarpieces that give shape to the discovery and naming of “the new”: unusual vegetables such as the chili, tomato, and bell pepper are portrayed next to the poetic lake that frames them within an “enrejado claro y puro de blanca plata y variado esmalte”, or the painting of Chapultepec Hill, beautifully illuminated by the classic and conventional Apollo, rather than the Aztec god, Huitzilopochtli. 11 Tenorio, Poesía novohispana, p. 243. 12 Ibid., p. 247.

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The conception of “Bucolic” is inspired by the idea of making conventional mythological characters, such as Neptune, Jupiter, Pan, dryads or wood nymphs, mermaids, and newts, into inhabitants of this recently discovered and unconventional geographic space. Salazar creates a poetic synthesis of his experience as a letrado who is educated and trained in the classical tradition of the Old World, but profoundly marked by New World nature. Transcending the work of other portrayals of the American landscape, he goes beyond the description of a naturalist, or of banal or trite “exoticism”, making the Novohispanic environment a new point of reference, worthy of being exalted in the highest poetic language—one filled with elegant paraphrases and mythological references. For example, in the following passage, Neptune sails into a “beautiful freshwater lake” where: vio tres peñoles verdes y hermosos, y parecióle (bien mirando en ello) serían más lucidos y vistosos cercados de agua; y luego dio en hacello ciñendo los tres cerros deleitosos del agua fresca, con que la frescura de ellos creció, y la gracia y la verdura. Tecpeccingo llamó al peñol primero, que un cerro algo pequeño significa, y Tepeapulco al que es peñol postrero, porque en el agua y aire se amplifica. Xico al que entre los dos es medianero, en quien nombre del medio verifica; de cazas tienen Tepeapulco y Xico mucho contento y copia y caudal rico.13 By the 17th century, astonishment had passed. Poetry ceased to praise the novel and began to turn its attention to the urban landscape and everyday life of Mexico City. In the words of Amado Alonso, Novohispanic Baroque poetry became “a social way of life”.14 Not only traditional lyric poetry, but also a ­substantial portion of high-culture poetry, was distributed in print form 13

14

Ibid., p. 245. When the Aztec founded Tenochtitlan, Peñón de Marqués, Peñón de los Baños (referred to as Tecpeccingo—Tepalcingo), Peñón de Tepeapulco, and Cerro de la Estrella rose above lake levels. Xico probably refers to the volcano of Xico in the municipality of Chalco. Alonso, “Biografía de Fernán González de Eslava”, p. 247.

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(possibly not reaching readers), or recited either at private gatherings in churches, ­academies, schools, and universities, or during festivities or literary competitions. Almost all Novohispanic lyrical verse is collective and civic, committed to describing and praising the festivities to which it is linked. In this way, it records all that was important to society. For example, Father Pedro Morales’ 1579 Carta del padre Pedro de Morales de la Compañía de Jesús. Para el muy reverendo padre Everardo Mercuriano ... gives us a vivid idea of the almost superstitious religiosity of men and women of the day.15 Father Morales informs us that in 1578 the Jesuits organized one of the most famous and important public celebrations of the 16th century, commemorating the arrival in Mexico of several relics given to the Society of Jesus by Pope Gregory XIII. The celebration included the customary poetry competition, which was announced with a poster affixed to the ayuntamiento “with much drums and trumpets and all rejoicing”.16 Here, we have what was the great Baroque formula: celebration, which presupposes social cohesion and ideological intent, and poetry, which, in turn, implies a certain degree of cultural cohesion—a literature created by few, but enjoyed and celebrated by many. The practice of holding literary competitions during welcoming celebrations for viceroys, archbishops, and other key figures was intensified during the 17th century. Religious and civil authorities constantly requested poems to enhance or commemorate just about any event or celebration. Verses, thus, constituted a sort of collective memory, in which the circumstantial became essential. What were the circumstances? In 1618, Pope Paul V forbade public discussion of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, a Marian cult that was declared dogma until 1854, although its theological dispute dates to the 13th century. The “conceptionist” faction, headed by Duns Scotus, argued that Mary, and only Mary, was free of original sin, while the “anti-conceptionist” faction, represented by Thomas Aquinas, asserted that, being mortal, Mary was conceived in original sin. This debate was just as impassioned in New Spain as it was in the rest of the Catholic world.17 The Novohispanic conceptionists saw Pope Paul V’s ban as a triumph for their cause and decided to celebrate the papal decision lavishly: luxurious altars were erected throughout the city; the street of San Francisco, where the silversmiths’ guild was located, was adorned; 15 Morales, Carta del padre Pedro de Morales de la Compañía de Jesús. Beatriz Mariscal published a modern edition in 2000. 16 Morales, Carta del padre Pedro de Morales de la Compañía de Jesús, p. 9. 17 The debate was so impassioned that teachers and students of the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México had to sign their votes in favor of the conceptionist doctrine in blood.

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and a procession, from the church of San Francisco to the university, along with bullfights and a poetry competition, was organized. These events are recounted in the Relación breve de las fiestas que los artífices plateros celebraron a la Virgen María el día de su Inmaculada Concepción.18 It is very likely that Paul V’s decree inflamed the quarrelling parties even more, dragging the silversmiths into the dispute. Irving A. Leonard writes: “The reluctance of the Dominicans in Mexico to accept this matter of faith precipitated a scandal that shook the viceregal capital. Members of the Order protested loudly, circulating a series of satirical sonnets and songs which proved far more exciting, if not more aesthetically inspired, than the prize-winning poems”.19 The competition was canceled due to the vitriolic nature of the compositions; then, sonnets and songs were used as projectiles, with many of them passing from hand to hand until they reached the Inquisition. The following sonnet satirizes the preachers who argued in favor of the Immaculate Conception: Anduvo el dominico recatado, siguiendo sin extremo su camino; de lomos un discurso peregrino el franciscano trajo a lo engrasado.20 El agustino anduvo arrebatado, sin seguir la doctrina de Agustino; del carmelita el tema fue sin tino, con textos de Mahoma confirmado. Del mercenario fue el cultor famoso Juan Latino, sermón de sombras lleno;21 fue el teatino [jesuita] molesto y perezoso; para hablar Rentería es sólo bueno. Y al fin, el arzobispo a lo piadoso se dejó los doctores en el seno.22 18 Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Inquisición, vol. 485, exp. 1, no. fol. 19 Leonard, Baroque Times in Old Mexico, p. 133. 20 The idea expressed in the first quatrain is that the Franciscan’s sermon, in favor of the Immaculate Conception, was heavy, contrived, and odd. 21 Juan de Sessa (1518–96), a descendent of African slaves, was a humanist and poet of the Spanish Renaissance. There is no praise and the comments are tinged with racial undertones since the poet mentions Juan Latino’s complexion rather than his academic prestige, referring to a sermon that was “de sombras lleno” and “plagado de argumentos oscuros”. 22 AGN, Inquisición, vol. 485, exp. 1.

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This singular episode in Novohispanic literary history shows how everyday life shaped art. In this case, making poetry set aside its solemnity, developing a sharp satirical edge, and becoming polemical. We can see this incursion of day-to-day events into the domain of poetry in the competition entry by Fray Juan de Alavés, entitled Relación historiada (1633), and dedicated to the canonization of Saint Peter Nolasco. That same year, the city suffered at the hands of a terrible flood, raining so much that “large amounts of soil were washed into the lake, breaching a dike, and leaving the city almost underwater for five years”.23 The downpour began in early September and lasted for 36 hours, with the water reaching a height of two and half varas, requiring canoes for transportation. Many convents were abandoned, and of the 2,000 families that lived in the city, only 400 remained. Of the capital’s 300 taverns, only 27 were left standing.24 In view of this dire situation, one portion of the competition was devoted to poems requesting Saint Peter Nolasco to take pity on the afflicted city and to collect “las aguas atrevidas que le aguan sus antiguas glorias y placeres”:25 Si alguna vez al cielo lágrimas llegar pueden, y gemidos del afligido suelo: Prestad, Nolasco, atentos los oídos, mientras que en este canto un mar lloran mis ojos y otro tanto... México a vuestras plantas, hecha mar de agua y piélago de penas, como a quien glorias tantas resolvió el cielo en débiles arenas, os lo ruega postrada, en lágrimas y en ondas anegada... Padre sois amoroso de esta ciudad que a vuestros pies postrada el triunfo más glorioso os celebra, que vio la edad pasada, ofreciendo entre tanto nueva laguna en piélagos de llanto.26 23 24 25 26

Rubial, Monjas, cortesanos y plebeyos, p. 16. Una ventana al siglo XVII. Relación historiada, ms., fol. 26r. Ibid., fols. 27v–28r.

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We cannot lose sight that competitions were public events and that prize-winning poems were read out loud. The fact that these verses were heard by all gave place to people’s tumult and anguish, making them feel part of a larger social structure that did not forget them. Ultimately, it was an effective way of warding off outbreaks of social unrest. With undisguised scorn, Fernando Benítez asserts that the spoken word had a profoundly seductive effect on the spirit of the criollo, that with it “levantó esos huecos edificios, verdaderas tumbas donde el verbo se pudre en horribles retorcimientos barrocos”.27 He refers to the poetry of triumphal arches, funeral processions, festive relationships, and to all lyrical circumstances with which Mexico City celebrated remarkable events and itself. This was a poetry inevitably linked to power, but the modern pruritus respective the intellectual and power did not exist at that time. Simply put, poets were craftsmen, lacking economic resources, who worked for whoever would pay them. One of the great festive events in New Spain was the arrival of a new viceroy. Since it took several weeks for the viceroy to arrive in the capital after disembarking in Veracruz, there was ample time to raise expectations and stir enthusiasm among the citizenry and authorities, who organized parades, processions, bullfights, and erected triumphal arches. Triumphal arches were ephemeral constructions adorned with paintings and poems, extolling the feats and lineage of the new viceroy. Poets and artisans worked together to create visual and literary works, whose central goal was to produce an allegory between the new viceroy and a mythological figure. This analogy was key to understanding the composition of the triumphal arch and the poetic texts that adorned it. The reception of the Viceroy Diego López de Pacheco, Duke of Escalona and Marquis of Villena, was particularly sumptuous. López de Pacheco was not just a noble but was also related to the royal family. As a result, a splendid parade was organized, along with fireworks, bullfights, and theatrical performances. For this occasion, the poetess María Estrada de Medinilla composed a poem in which she recounts all the details of the viceregal reception to a fictitious cousin, a nun who is cloistered: Quise salir, amiga, más que por dar alivio a mi fatiga, temprano ayer de casa, por darte relación de lo que pasa. 27 Benítez, La vida criolla en el siglo XVI, p. 297.

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Prevenir hice el coche, aunque mi pensamiento se hizo noche, pues tan mal lo miraron, que para daño nuestro pregonaron que carrozas no hubiera.28 She shares with her cousin that she could not go to the event in her carriage because they were prohibited due to the size of the crowd, adding that she had to push her way through the throng, which was so dense that she could not wear her voluminous crinoline skirt. She describes how she walked to the cathedral, where the cathedral chapter received incoming viceroys, and where the triumphal arch was located. She continues that the arch was so magnificent that it was on par with the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus or the temples of Solomon or Apollo. She adds, telling her cousin, that all the balconies along the avenue were “a garden of Venus, temple of Diana”, due to the flowers that adorned them and the ladies who had ventured outside to watch the festivities, and comments about the parade, which ended with the long awaited arrival of the viceroy mounted on a fiery steed: Llegó la gran persona del valeroso Duque de Escalona en un alado bruto que fue de los de Febo sustituto.29 The account of this spectacle is very entertaining, with the bustle giving off sparks, metaphorically speaking. She explains that she was so lost in her admiration of the viceroy’s horse that she barely managed to dodge a stone that nearly split her face open, and remarks that her heart almost leaped out of her chest from the shock. But then, the viceroy passed by, sumptuously dressed, gallant and handsome, like a dazzling sun: llevada del fervor y la viveza, quise, bebiendo rayos, sembrar alientos y coger desmayos; y cuando cerca llega, flamígero furor mi vista ciega;30 28 Tenorio, Poesía novohispana, p. 395. 29 Ibid., p. 399. 30 Ibid., p. 401.

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… whereupon the excited crowd shouted: “¡Dios te guarde; qué lindo y qué galano!”; las viejas: “¡Dios te tenga de su mano! ¡Qué bien que resplandece; al mismo Rey de España se parece!”31 When the viceroy, described as “honor maravilloso … del américo suelo”, reached the arch, “a noble senator met him at the cathedral door and gave him the keys [to the city]”. Finally, Archbishop Feliciano de la Vega led the viceroy inside the ornate cathedral. Outside, the “rabble” enjoyed the fireworks, which are described as griegas invenciones (“Greek inventions”). Among the accounts of public festivities, a curious case is the poem by Juan Antonio Ramírez Santibáñez, entitled Piérica narración de la plausible pompa con que entró en esta imperial y nobilísima ciudad de México el excelentísimo señor conde de Paredes, which describes the entrance of Viceroy Conde de Paredes into the city.32 Given that the permits authorizing the printing of the aforesaid work are dated the 4 and 5 of December and the viceroy entered the capital on 30 November, Ramírez Santibáñez must have written his 770-verse poem in the span of only three days. Unlike other compositions of this type, the poet adopts a lighter tone, eschewing the “official” practice to use the popular five-line stanza. Along with the most magnificent events, such as parades or viceregal welcoming processions, the poet also describes events for the general populace, such as the ­bullfights and the baile del volador in a series of vignettes: En Chapultepec le ofrece a su Excelencia una quinta que ser pintada merece de mi Musa, pues parece que ya con acierto pinta... por ellos [los montes] con demasía, según su cariño fragua, toda su riqueza fía, pues a la ciudad envía líquida plata como agua. Aquí, pues, yace un palacio, cuya arquitectura es 31 32

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envidia del arte, pues es, viendo su hermoso espacio, un mexicano Aranjuez.33 In this case, “Your Excellency” is the Marquis de la Laguna34 and the “quinta” is a country house where the viceroys went to relax on Sundays and was built where an Aztec palace once stood. The festivities included a sumptuous banquet (“De ningún modo podré / los manjares describillos”), theatrical performances, and bullfights: Corriéronse toros que a muchos amedrentaban, con ira atemorizaban, y, estando picados, de verse corridos bramaban. El que a pie pretendía, osado, aguardar el golpe, al ver su furia, estaba cuitado, mas el toro le hacía ser de encogido, desgarrado. Pero el que sin embarazos valiente osaba esperarle, pasaba dos mil fracasos, pues veía que sin matarle le hacía el toro mil pedazos.35 Midway through the festivities, which lasted several days, the viceroy became ill:36 su Excelencia, ¡qué desdicha!, de un achaque repentino se vio combatir, que vino juntamente con la dicha lo infelice de un destino.37 33 Tenorio, Poesía novohispana, p. 712. 34 “Miércoles 30 [octubre, 1680], entró a comer el virrey nuevo en Guadalupe, y a la tarde pasó a Chapultepec donde lo aguardó el señor arzobispo” (Robles, Diario de sucesos notables, vol. 2, p. 289). 35 Tenorio, Poesía novohispana, pp. 715–716. 36 On Friday, 8 November 1680, “amaneció el virrey malo de la orina y lo sangraron, con que se dilató la entrada” (Robles, Diario, vol. 2, p. 290). 37 Tenorio, Poesía novohispana, p. 716. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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When the viceroy recovered, the festivities continued, including the parade and the sumptuous ceremony that concluded at the arch, where he received the keys of the city: Un arco bien levantado la ciudad, sin interés, aquí le tuvo formado, que alabándole, cortés, no dejó de estar aindiado.38 Ramírez Santibáñez is referencing the arco del ayuntamiento commissioned by the city council, which, designed by Sigüenza y Góngora and described in his Teatro de virtudes políticas, was decorated with effigies of Aztec emperors. This is why the poet says that, although he was Cortés (a play on the name of the conqueror of Mexico, juxtaposed with the word Moctezuma, and the adjective “polite”), Sigüenza y Góngora was aindiado (“Indian-like”). Besides the arco del ayuntamiento, the cathedral chapter commissioned Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to design a second arch, featuring an allegorical Neptune (Neptuno alegórico) since the viceroy was the Marquis de la Laguna, and according to the poet una “cómica” declamó los versos sorjuaninos: Su autor bien será que cuadre, pues la Madre Juana fue, cuya armonía no descuadre, porque se vio que el mar de Neptuno salió de Madre. Una cómica explicó la montea con elocuencia, a quien el víctor se dio; mas, con todo, su Excelencia fue quien la loa se llevó.39 The chronicling of daily life is not limited to accounts of festivities; other kinds of poems also record life in the city. Perhaps the best example of this is José López Avilés biography in verse of Fray Payo Enríquez de Ribera (?-1684), who was archbishop of Mexico City from 1668 to 1681, and viceroy of New Spain

38 39

Ibid., p. 720. Ibid., p. 722.

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from 1673 to 1680.40 A lengthy poem, it contains over 2,000 verses and is accompanied by almost 900 glosses or explanatory notes. The poet speaks of Fray Payo’s illustrious lineage, his noble origins, predilection for literature, religious vocation in the Augustinian Order, and positions held.41 Although Fray Payo was named archbishop of Michoacán in 1668, he never occupied his post because he was appointed archbishop of Mexico City upon the death of Fray Marcos Ramírez de Prado. López Avilés portrays this episode in a very original way: ¿Qué más haría Michoacán sin gozarle un solo día? ¿Cuándo con dicha tan feliz se topa Valladolid la rica del Europa? Es verdad que nos dice desde luego: “He sido, en esa suerte, como el ciego que no supo qué es ver; si bien extraño que, siendo ya mi obispo en todo un año y viniendo en mi busca peregrino por ásperas barrancas de un camino tan intricado, peligroso y largo, no mereciera yo verme a su cargo y abrazase de México la Corte?”42 On the subject of Michoacán, in the pertinent notes, the poet cites verses 740–741 of Book II of the Aeneid, where Aeneas recounts that he lost his wife in the confusion of the sack of Troy and that he never saw her again: “And nevermore have my eyes seen Creusa”, just as Michoacán never set eyes on Fray Payo. He goes on to quote a passage from the Life of the Blessed Fulgentius.43 From this moment, the second most important character of the story, after Fray Payo, is Mexico City. The central part of the poem is a lyrical chronicle describing the capital’s religious ceremonies, festivals, floods, the never-ending hydraulic works (the desagüe, bridges commissioned by Payo, and the 40 41 42 43

López Avilés, Debido recuerdo de agradecimiento leal. The poet leaves out an inconvenient detail about Fray Payo, who was the illegitimate son of Fernando Afán de Ribera and Leonor Manrique de Lara. López Avilés, Debido recuerdo de agradecimiento leal, p. 99. Vita B. Fulgentii, at the beginning of Ch. 15, emphasizing the sentiments of the two sees. On the one hand, Mexico City, which anxiously awaits the arrival of its newly appointed archbishop, and on the other, Michoacán, who was also excitedly awaiting its new archbishop, who never arrived.

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diversion of streams and canals in Chalco, etc.), the building of new churches and convents, work on the cathedral, and the construction of the Guadalupe, San Cosme, Tacuba, and Los Arcos causeways. We read how the city was planned, urbanized, and constructed, while at the same time we learn of its inhabitants and, in some instances, of their story, as is the case of a colorful character that asks for alms: ... entre muchos, alguno que, delgado en ingenio, caudal, carnes y estado, con agudo gracejo le decía, cuando misas de cuarta le pedía: “Ni cuartilla ni cuarto yo no tengo, sin un cuarto a la cuarta, señor, vengo”.44 History and anecdotes arise from the poem. Five years after becoming archbishop, Fray Payo is once again struck by a lightning bolt from heaven (“para la nueva ficción coge el cielo”): ... en lamentable y triste desconsuelo del trece helado de diciembre, día y fiesta de Lucía, en que a todos nos abrió los ojos, al cerrarlos un duque, hecho despojos de la Parca veloz que de repente le pasó del oriente al occidente.45 The poet refers to the death of Pedro Nuño de Colón, Duke of Veraguas, on 13 December 1673, four days after becoming viceroy, whereupon Fray Payo was chosen to replace him.46 As archbishop-viceroy, Fray Payo proclaimed the “milagro de los panecitos de Santa Teresa”, an anecdote that kindled “magical religiosity” until it challenged the ability of the ecclesiastical authorities to distinguish between trickery and divine revelation. It turns out that, during the first half of the 17th century, the Carmelite nuns of Puebla propagated a very special devotion to Saint Teresa, baking panecitos (bread rolls), on which they stamped the image 44 45 46

Ibid., p. 121. Ibid., p. 127. Apparently, he was stricken with diarrhea upon reaching the port of Veracruz and died en route to Mexico City.

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of the saint before blessing, and distributing them throughout New Spain on her feast day (15 October). The devotion grew with such fervor that the nuns could not satisfy the demand for the panecitos. In Mexico City, the nun Andrea de la Santísima Trinidad began baking them to distribute them among the sick, since they were easy to swallow when crumbled in water. In 1648, the scribe Juan Pérez de Ribera developed an illness that paralyzed his hands, which was the worst thing that could happen to a member of his profession. Sister Andrea gave Pérez de Ribera’s wife, María de Poblete, some crumbled panecitos so that she could feed him. To her surprise, when María placed the panecitos in water, instead of dissolving, they rejoined to form the image of Saint Teresa. Occurring for the first time on 17 November 1648, this miracle continued for more than 30 years, having very spectacular consequences among the population, but with little practical effect: Pérez de Ribera died after five years of illness. Since the rejoining of the crumbs was still happening in 1677, Fray Payo decided to proclaim it a miracle: ... ya en un auto que su celo expresa (de la doctora mística Teresa declarando los panees milagrosos), donde en altos renglones fervorosos explica los favores que a su Esposa, cordera religiosa, el divino Cordero y Dios, pan de los cielos verdadero, en panes concedió.47 We should remember that María de Poblete was a widow who had to fend for her five children. Hence, the witnesses reported that she said: “Now I’ve given you your bread, give me some money for my chocolate”, each time the panecitos rejoined due to her intercession. Once the miracle was proclaimed, several detractors accused her of fraud. The case eventually reached the Inquisition, and after going through the formal procedures of an inquisitorial trial, María was found guilty but when she was about to be arrested, she conveniently died. López Avilés does not mention what happened after the miracle, since it cast doubt on Fray Payo’s good judgment. However, the fact he included this episode in his poem despite the accusations of fraud, and notwithstanding the 47

López Avilés, Debido recuerdo de agradecimiento leal, p. 143.

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fact that the case had reached the Inquisition, says much about Novohispanic society. The story of María de Poblete is a revealing example of the mentality and milieu of the men and women of New Spain. On the one hand, it was a society hungry for miracles, with clergymen who were not only ready to provide them, but also to legitimize them. But on the other hand, if they felt that their authority was being challenged, the same clerics “controlled popular manifestations and thwarted any pious initiative that did not abide by the norms of official religiosity”.48 López Avilés’ poem tells us that religion was not so limiting, nor the Inquisition so zealous or dreadful; that, in effect, while religion intervened in nearly all spheres of Novohispanic life, some people found advantages in this religiosity. María de Poblete took advantage of the proclivities towards miracles, exploiting a real need and a willingness of the society to be easily seduced by any kind of marvel or miracle. When all is said and done, María de Poblete performed a miracle: she survived widowhood, raised five children, and gained a reputation as a saint that extended beyond the borders of New Spain.49 Ultimately, María was a widow and a relatively insignificant member of Novohispanic society that managed to stir the emotions of ordinary, everyday citizens, while at the same time demonstrated the fallacy in Church logic. First, she convinced ecclesiastical authorities to proclaim the miracle, and then she forced the same clerics to disavow it. When Fray Payo entered Mexico City as archbishop on 27 June 1668, he found the Virgen de los Remedios (Our Lady of Remedies) on display in the cathedral. Why does the poet highlight this seemingly banal fact? In fact, his mention of Remedios was not trivial at all. Throughout the viceregal period (and to date), the city suffered from rain-related problems—floods or droughts. The cults to the Virgins of Remedios and Guadalupe were highly venerated when it came to issues related to rainfall or the lack thereof. The citizenry of Mexico City prayed to Remedios for rain, and to Guadalupe to ward off flooding. The fact that the Virgen de los Remedios was in the cathedral when Fray Payo entered the city, rather than in her shrine in Toltepec (north of the city), was an ominous sign. Remedios’ presence in the cathedral indicates the need for rain, or else crops would be lost and famine would ensue: celebrando a Dios fiestas y a María ... ya implorando su auxilio por los medios de la imagen, que dije, de Remedios, 48 49

Rubial, La santidad controvertida, p. 13. It bears mentioning that she received requests for her panecitos from as far away as Madrid and Lima.

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y novenarios dos bien celebrados por sí mismo, de misas, convocados los cristianos en grave desconsuelo de las aguas que a lluvias nos dio el cielo.50 If we are to believe the poet, Fray Payo succeeded in proclaiming the miracle of Saint Teresa’s panecitos and in disseminating the cult of Our Lady of Remedies, who hailed from Spain.51 Having the darker-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe, favorable to Indians, was key to Payo’s success in consolidating the cult. Even so, one of the most splendid liturgical events in Mexico City was the procession of Our Lady of Remedies from her shrine to the cathedral. The literary accounts of these events almost always begin with an explanation of why the image of the virgin was transferred to the cathedral, as well as a description of the procession, and generally end with a miracle: the portrayal of how the virgin brought rain.52 Indeed, so great was the virgin’s power that “pearls poured” (“se derramó en perlas”) when Fray Payo removed Remedios from her altar at Toltepec to transfer her image to the “sick city that longed for rain from heaven”, or “ciudad enferma y deseosa / de la lluvia del cielo”.53 In other words, it rained! Various passages of the poem speak to floods and the problems regarding drainage (see López, this volume). López Avilés recounts the various occasions that Fray Payo personally inspected the drainage works and the meal he organized and paid for to inaugurate the desagüe: Ya en su pronta obediencia siempre justa y, por obsequios a su real corona, repetidas visitas que en persona hizo al desagüe: cual galante Asuero a sus propias expensas y dinero disponiendo convite regalado al ilustre doctísimo senado.54 50 51 52

53 54

López Avilés, Debido recuerdo de agradecimiento leal, pp. 109–110. Legend has it that during the famous Noche Triste of 1519, when the defeated Spaniards were retreating to Popotla, the virgin appeared and protected them, throwing dirt in the eyes of the Indians that surrounded them. There are numerous examples of these accounts in the poem. Still extant are approximately 15 Visitas de la Virgen de los Remedios, with the first occurring in 1576 due to an outbreak of the plague, and the last in 1696, requesting the virgin succor the fleet against the pirates. Like most of these accounts, both are anonymous. López Avilés, Debido recuerdo de agradecimiento leal, p. 111. Ibid., p. 155. Fray Payo is like Ahasuerus, because, according to Esther 1:3–4, this king of Persia organized a large banquet with all the Persian princes and their families.

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In his treatise on the desagüe, Fray Manuel de Cabrera, who was in charge of the drainage works since 1665, refers to this meal: Salió su Excelencia [fray Payo] de esta ciudad con toda la Real Audiencia el día 3 de julio, y llegaron a hacer noche al desagüe, y al día siguiente se hizo la vista de ojos de esta obra, y aunque había determinado el estar este día y el siguiente en esta fábrica y salir de ella el sábado 6 de dicho mes a comer al pueblo de Cuautitlán, hubo mudanza en esta determinación, que la ocasionó el haber llovido este día 4 de julio por la tarde; y por haber ido de crecida los arroyos del pueblo, que encaminaron con lo nuevamente obrado a que con grande perjuicio cayesen en el desagüe, causando en él grandes destrozos de caídas y derrumbes.55 Ironically, although López Avilés does not mention it, Fray Payo did not arrive at the desagüe’s inauguration due to a flood (as we can see in the verses transcribed below). Thus, Payo’s inability to arrive at the inauguration suggest that the drainage system was ineffective. The reality was that Payo made a grave mistake when he removed Fray Miguel de Cabrera from his position as supervisor of the drainage works in 1674 and put the prosecutor, Martín de Solís, and the engineer, Pozuelo de Espinosa, in charge of the desagüe, who had submitted a proposal to upgrade the tunnel and to complete the project within a year, but at double the cost due to an increase in the number of workers.56 They indeed finished the project in less than a year, but, as we have already seen, fraud was evident from the day of the inauguration. Notwithstanding this error by Fray Payo, in another passage of the poem, López Avilés describes the bravery of the archbishop-viceroy during the floods: A mexicanos tristes naturales, cuyas chozas postraran los raudales de las aguas que bajan de Tacuba, a que su celo fervoroso adyuva, sacando a salvo viejos naufragantes y en brazos de sus madres los infantes.57 55

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Verdad aclarada y desvanecidas imposturas con que lo ardiente de una pluma poderosa en esta Nueva España, en un dictamen mal instruido, quiso persuadir haberse acabado y perfeccionado el año de 1675 la fábrica del Real Desagüe de la insigne Ciudad de México (cited from Rubio Mañé, Introducción al estudio de los virreyes de Nueva España, vol. 4, pp. 121–122). Rubial, La plaza, el palacio y el convento, p. 52. López Avilés, Debido recuerdo de agradecimiento leal, p. 147.

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The notes to these verses complement the praise, especially the third one about children in their mother’s arms, which quotes a passage from Book IV of Virgil’s Georgics: “To her the mother, her soul smitten with strange dread, cries: ‘O bring him, bring him to us; lawful it is for him to tread the threshold divine’”.58 The passage refers to Cyrene’s anguish upon hearing the wails of her son, Aristaeus, who has lost all his beehives. The comparison is very felicitous, describing maternal anguish over children in danger. Floods, tempests, and earthquakes are all described in López Avilés’ poem, with some curious, at times contrived, coincidences with the life of Fray Payo. The poet tells us that, on 23 June 1681, when Fray Payo bid farewell to the members of the cathedral chapter before leaving for Spain, “ardió el sol, sopló el viento, cayó lluvia y tembló la tierra”;59 “en México, viendo su infortunio ... / aire y nubes (de celo al sol ardiente / mirando) se concitan de repente ... ”.60 In short, the city was orphaned: ¡Don fray Payo se fue! ¡Válgame el cielo!, clamoreando repite nuestro suelo. ¡A embarcarse bajó!; ¡ya está embarcado! ¡Del puerto [Veracruz] sale ya nuestro prelado!61 Thus, the Mexican people lamented the departure of their Fray Payo, and to highlight their sadness, López Avilés quotes Gregorio Nacianceno (De animae sua calamitatibus):62 “¡Qué penas pueden ser iguales a nuestros males; qué luto puede ser suficiente. Nadie lloró así a su compañero de tálamo, a sus queridos padres o los tristes destinos de su estirpe”.63 We have already examined Ramírez Santibáñez’ descriptions of the triumphal arches by Sigüenza y Góngora and Sor Juana de la Cruz to celebrate the entry into the capital of the viceroys, the Marquises of Laguna. Although López Avilés’ poem could not pass over such an important event, he only 58 Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, p. 254. 59 “Hubo tempestad ... Ese día tembló la tierra fuertemente a las seis de la tarde, habiendo llovido antes; duró como tres credos” (Robles, Diario, vol. 2, p. 299). In a ten-line stanza dedicated to Fray Payo, the poet, Diego de Ribera, also links the Mexican people’s grief to nature’s fierceness: “Faltándole tal pastor / a vuestra Iglesia querida, / razón es que enternecida / llore y tiemble de dolor: / cielo y tierra a su clamor / mueven cristales y rocas ... ” (Ribera, Carta que escribe el bachiller Diego de Ribera, fols. 270v–271r). 60 López Avilés, Debido recuerdo de agradecimiento leal, p. 189. 61 Ibid., p. 190. 62 “Of the Calamities of the Soul”, author’s translation. 63 López Avilés, Debido recuerdo de agradecimiento leal, p. 190.

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mentions Sor Juana’s Neptuno alegórico for two reasons: first, it was Fray Payo who ­convinced the cathedral chapter to entrust the commission of the arch to Sor Juana, and second, Fray Payo and Sor Juana had close ties, which explains why the reference to the nun was full of praise: “¡Oh Neptuno erudito, / quién pudiera ponerte por escrito!”.64 It was impossible to describe the grandeur and erudition of Neptuno alegórico, as the note makes clear, citing Ovid’s Letters from the Black Sea: “Even though I lack the strength, yet the will is praiseworthy; with this, I divine, the gods are content”.65 The texts that I have presented here clearly show that Baroque poetry, particularly in Mexico City, chronicled noteworthy events, and sometimes, unremarkable ones too. In attractive, evocative compositions, the poets objectified their world: New Spain, with its anecdotes, its joys, its pains, and its ideas; a moment, a gesture, a banal detail that takes on dramatic significance thanks to the Baroque nature of the poem. Unlike romantic or modern poetry, Baroque poetry is not the soliloquy of unhappiness and suffering, but rather, a civic conversation, a public art, a dialogue between the inner self and the world; its twists and turns, scrolls, and flourishes does not conceal truth, but, instead, reveals it, that of others, and of the surrounding world. If we trace that very rational network of analogies and connections that these picturesque and memorable poets present, we can witness an epiphany and understand how a piece of history—of reality—appears before our eyes. In the opinion of Giovanni Getto, Baroque poetry speaks of things that will not last.66 Indeed, Baroque poetry is the poetry of fleeting moments. Bibliography

AGN

Primary Sources

Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Mexico.

Cruz, Sor J.I. de la, Obras completas, in A. Alatorre (ed.), Lírica personal, vol. 1, Mexico City, 2009. González de Eslava, F., “Coloquio XVI”, in J. García Icazbalceta (ed.), Coloquios espirituales y sacramentales y poesías sagradas (1st ed. 1610), Mexico City, 1877. López Avilés, J., Debido recuerdo de agradecimiento leal (1st ed. 1684), ed. Martha Lilia Tenorio, Mexico City, 2007. 64 Ibid., p. 192. 65 Ovid, Tristia. Ex Ponto, Book 3, Elegy 4, verses 79–80. 66 Getto, Barocco in prosa e in poesia.

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Morales, P., Carta del padre Pedro de Morales de la Compañía de Jesús. Para el muy ­reverendo padre Everardo Mercuriano ... (1st edition, 1579), ed. Beatriz Mariscal, Mexico City, 2000. Relación historiada de las solemnes fiestas que hicieron en la Ciudad de México al ­glorioso san Pedro Nolasco, ms., Mexico City, 1633. Ribera, D., Carta que escribe el bachiller Diego de Ribera, Mexico City, 1681. Ribera, D., Descripción poética de las funerales pompas, Mexico City, 1666.



Secondary Literature

Alonso, A., “Biografía de Fernán González de Eslava”, Revista de Filología Hispánica 2 (1940), pp. 213–319. Benítez, F., La vida criolla en el siglo XVI, Mexico City, 1953. Getto, G., Barocco in prosa e in poesia, Milan, 1969. Henríquez Ureña, P., Las corrientes literarias en la América hispánica, Mexico City, 1945. Leonard, I.A., Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-Century Persons, Places, and Practices, Ann Arbor, 1959. Ovid, Tristia. Ex Ponto, trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler, Cambridge, 1924. Pacheco, J.E., La poesía mexicana del siglo XIX (Antología), ed. J.E. Pacheco, Mexico City, 1965. Reyes, A., Letras de la Nueva España (1st edition, 1946), Mexico City, 1992. Robles, A., Diario de sucesos notables (1665–1703), Mexico City, 1946. Rubial, A., La plaza, el palacio y el convento. La Ciudad de México en el siglo XVII, Mexico City, 1988. Rubial, A., La santidad controvertida, Mexico City, 1999. Rubial, A., Monjas, cortesanos y plebeyos. La vida cotidiana en la época de Sor Juana, Mexico City, 2005. Rubio Mañé, J.I., Introducción al estudio de los virreyes de Nueva España, Mexico City, 1963. Tenorio, M.L., Poesía novohispana. Antología, Mexico City, 2010. Una ventana al siglo XVII: Homenaje a Edmundo O’Gorman, P. Chinchilla (ed.), CD, Mexico City, 2001. Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, trans. Henry Rushton Fairclough, Cambridge, 1935.

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CHAPTER 18

Music and Literature in New Spain

The Politics of Buen Gusto in 18th-Century Mexico City Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell 1 Introduction For decades, the words “splendor” and “pomposity” have characterized New Spanish music—and music culture—in the historical imagination.1 More often than not, people associate these two words with composers like Tomás Luis de Victoria, Cristóbal de Morales, Hernando Franco, and Francisco López Capillas, whose music is virtually identified with the elaborate rituals of magnificent cathedrals. Today, works by these composers are considered the best representation of the Spanish music renaissance. For even composers like López Capillas (who worked as chapelmaster in Mexico City cathedral, ­1654–73), wrote music in a style that, while initially developed during the 16th century, was considered the basis of a Spanish school of music thought until the 1700s in the Americas. However, such historical notion of “splendor” (along with its Spanish overtones) gained weight only as studies in cultural, social, and art history focused their attention on 18th-century New Spain. There are several reasons for this; the fact that this music continued to be played throughout this period is only one of them. First, documental information about New Spanish music is more abundant (and more clearly written) in primary sources from the 1700s. Second, mining and trade became highly developed activities in this century, which greatly transformed New Spain’s local economy and its cultural landscape. These changes formed part of a series of reforms that the new monarchy (under the House of Bourbon) implemented in America in order to administer the Spanish kingdom more efficiently. During the first half of the 18th century, religious orthodoxy and dogmatism permeated every aspect of social life in New Spain: superstition, symbolism, and physical mortification characterized popular acts of devotion that the clergy promoted through a spiritual economy based on alms and private cash investments on real estate controlled by the church.

1 The topic covered in this chapter is treated in more depth in my book Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain, published by Oxford University Press. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004335578_020 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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Overall, the Bourbon Reforms of the 18th century (the name given to the series of policies and changes implemented by the Spanish Crown during this time) not only reconsidered the involvement that the church should have in social, economic, and political affairs in New Spain. The new legislations ­ultimately reorganized and reshaped society and social space according to the principles of order and rationality of the Enlightenment (a political project that promoted the idea of socio-cultural and material progress according to modern Western European ways of thinking, as well as by the new tastes and sensibilities that people associated with these transformations). Among other things, activities of “good taste” became highly sought-after, not only because pleasure and beauty were coveted aspects of music, poetry, and art of the 18th century. Most importantly, these activities could “ennoble” the individual, an attribute that designated a person’s “Spanish” condition in New Spain’s racial hierarchy. In Mexico City, individuals of Spanish descent comprised a political class, which promoted its attitudes and behaviors not only through the endorsement of an orderly and beautified design of public space, but also of the very acts of sociability that defined what it meant to be “Spanish”, according to the principles promoted by the Crown. While not all Spanish people were privileged, all of those who were privileged were certainly Spanish. The luster of personal credentials (e.g., institutional employment, rank, personal connections, corporate memberships) was specifically important for this reason, as perceptions of one’s profile enabled a person to claim a position of respectability. This was not so much a preoccupation for people whose wealth secured for them the titles and prerogatives of the Spanish nobility (the circle that was closest to receive the king’s favor). The issue was particularly important to educated members of the middle class, for whom education, degrees, institutional employment, and rank were means to aspire for privilege. In early modern Mexico City, privilege did not refer merely to socioeconomic improvement. Rather, privilege referred to the exclusive rights and distinctions that a person had in light of his or her qualities (i.e., the credentials that made up his or her profile), which ultimately “ennobled” him or her socially. This type of ennoblement was known as nobleza de privilegio (nobility of privilege), a social condition derived from personal accomplishments and social advancement. As the Enlightenment gained force, aspects of self-industry and achievement increasingly defined the place of people in society, and thus, nobility of privilege grew more important. Considering the rampant claims of nobility that existed in 18th-century Mexico City, it is not surprising, therefore, that every Spaniard thought himself or herself to be noble, and that more people claimed being “Spanish”. This became even more important for people of mixed race who tried to cleanse their descent through credentialism. Mestizos

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and mulattos, for example, argued Spanish ancestry to join the university and church. Membership with the latter was especially important because, being the spiritual leader of New Spain, the church gave people a desired political standing. Thus, individuals of mixed race competed with Spaniards for rights, privileges, and social position on the basis of their “Spanish” profiles. As part of the profiling process, credentials informed perceptions of a person’s social circle, as well as of his or her attitudes and behaviors among Spaniards. Matters of taste and sensibility greatly influenced such perceptions, especially during a time of social and cultural change, when new aesthetic ideas shaped preferences in music, art, and literature. These activities were considered artes de ingenio (ingenious arts), because of the intellectual and creative aspects that they required. The ingenious arts characterized “noble spirits” in the Spanish imagination, as they were guided by human feeling and good taste (buen gusto), aspects that could be perceived only by cultivating secular attributes, such as grace and refinement, which along with order and reason were part of the aesthetic ideology that the Bourbon monarchy promoted in the Siglo de las Luces (Age of Enlightenment) in New Spain. Given this context, the notion of splendor (along with its “Spanish” overtones) perennially promoted by music studies comes under scrutiny in light of the conflicting musical narratives of “Spanishness” that arose in the second half of the 18th century. The present chapter explores this tension focusing on music as an institutionalized activity that enabled musicians to seek social mobility. Literature—and more specifically, poetry—was an important component of New Spanish music culture because it provided an affectual backdrop for music that resonated with new enlightened Spanish values. Poetry gave music an erudite and cultivated character among the elite, which in turn elevated the status of musicians. This phenomenon allowed individuals of mixed race to negotiate their social position as they catered to Spanish enlightened sensibilities of “good taste” that grew during the period of Bourbon Reforms. The chapter pays particular attention to the conflicts that this phenomenon caused with other musicians who, using their credentials, established their own claims to Spanish privileges. Ultimately, the chapter highlights how, amid the rationalist changes of the Enlightenment, such claims show that the perpetuation of racism and colonialism remained central to the establishment of social order in New Spain. 2

Buen Gusto

For the most part, the rhetoric of buen gusto was associated with the promotion of models from classical antiquity in New Spain. It is true that the curriculum of Royal University (the institutional hinge for the academic and intellectual - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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characterization of buen gusto among Spaniards) remained influenced by Aristotelian scholasticism all through the 18th century.2 Yet, while Cicero, Ovid, and Horace were the means of approaching rhetoric and oratory, newer trends in philosophy did reach New Spain through Descartes, Voltaire, and Rousseau.3 In art and architecture, buen gusto became a trope buttressed by Greco-Roman models that aimed to redress the Baroque conglomerations featured in the urban landscape.4 Music experienced similar aesthetic shifts, as Renaissance polyphonic models gave way to music showcasing clear and balanced melodic lines over harmonic accompaniment. Music works were meant to be “brief and of delicate taste”, as longer and older polyphonic compositions became unsuited to the taste of the time.5 Above all, buen gusto was part of the Bourbon reformist agenda, and as such it aimed to spread in New Spain the ideals of reason, order, balance, and sobriety in all educational and artistic endeavors. These ideals, the monarchy hoped, would become revisionist antidotes to the Counter-Reformation values promoted by the Church. There was not a specific set of criteria that defined buen gusto in New Spain’s social imagination. Contrasting terms such as “old” and “new” or “modern” were the clearest terms used in the valuation of literature, art, and music. At best, buen gusto was an abstract term that acquired contextual definition in the tastes and sensibilities of the Spanish elite. However, if the rhetoric of buen gusto was strongly associated with art in the latter part of the 18th century, it was because the Real Academia de San Carlos (the first art academy in America, founded in 1781) became the institution through which the Crown officially promoted its aesthetic ideology (see Hamman and Widdifield, this volume).6 Among people, buen gusto related to the ability to recognize aesthetic value in objects and activities that cultivated taste according to notions of social appropriateness and decorum.7 The operation and cultivation of taste (good taste), therefore, acquired social definition beyond the walls of the Academia, even when it had literate associations. Buen gusto had to be, and was, publicly affirmed through collective exchange and agreement, because taste was intimately bound to social distinction. Individuals with social aspirations actively sought a host of social opportunities to engage with and nurture buen gusto in their appreciation of art, music, and literature. Such opportunities 2 Becerra López, La organización de los estudios, p. 189. 3 Turrent, “Los actores del ritual sonoro”, p. 188; Rivera, Principios críticos, pp. 219, 228. 4 Niell, Buen Gusto and Classicism, p. xv. 5 Archivo del Cabildo, Catedral Metropolitana de México (hereafter ACCMM), Actas 44, fol. 200v; 52, fol. 111r. 6 Donahue-Wallace, “A Taste for Art”, p. 95. See also Donahue-Wallace, “El grabado en la Real Academia”, p. 60. 7 Niell, Buen Gusto and Classicism, p. xxiv. - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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included evening gatherings at the houses of notable individuals (called tertulias), where people from distinguished confraternities and elite organizations discussed art, literature, and enjoyed musical performances. Similar to these tertulias were saraos, which happened outdoors and invited for music performances with bigger ensembles. In addition to these events, the avid reading of the newspaper Gazeta de México, the first newspaper in New Spain, published interruptedly in 1722, 1728–39, and 1784–1810, allowed people to define what buen gusto was, which helped to make this term an intrinsic element of elite group consciousness.8 It was perhaps because buen gusto was intimately related to the ingenious arts (artes de ingenio) that the appreciation of art, literature, and music was thought to ennoble the individual. The execution of these activities reflected the cultural endeavors and social pursuits of “noble minds”, which shaped perceptions of Spanishness.9 Erudition and literary education were the bases of this perception, which through the university acquired institutional relevance and social legitimacy. This cross-reference between the arts, buen gusto, institutions, Spanishness, and nobility was indeed important to those seeking social mobility. As mentioned before, a growing number of people in the middle classes claimed Spanish lineage to have access to institutions in order to develop careers. More than an effort to appear “Spanish” (by those from mixed racial descent), institutional careers reflected interests to rank above others, especially by those proficient in ingenious arts. For example, even before 1781—that is, before the foundation of the Real Academia de San Carlos— there had been precedents of painters trying to establish an academy that, just like the university, would require proof of Spanish descent to be admitted. An academy, painters hoped, could bestow on them a corporate Spanish identity that would dissociate them from carpenters, carvers, gold and silver workers, whose manual trades (mechanical, rather than ingenious) were organized in guilds. The interest to establish such an academy derived from the notion that painting was a noble art due to its intellectual foundations and affinities with other liberal arts.10 More specifically, painters recognized the connection between art and poetry as the intellectual and erudite basis of their profession. The motto that painters used to represent this connection was ut pictoria ­poesis (as is painting so is poetry), which made them “professors of the very

8 Donahue-Wallace, “A Taste for Art”, pp. 99–100. 9 Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain, pp. 49–50. 10 Deans-Smith, “This Noble and Illustrious Art”, pp. 70–71.

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noble arts of painting and sculpture”.11 Ut pictoria poesis was also a referent that writers and literate people used to discuss the work of New Spanish artists in the Gazeta de México. In the middle of the economic, political, and cultural changes happening in New Spain the university was the institutional centerpiece of aesthetic transformations, and this was because of the value that education and erudition had among Spaniards, especially among those seeking social mobility. Since the 17th century, people had used Greco-Roman allusions to characterize the university. These neo-Classical overtones aligned the “imperial, pontifical, ever August Mexican Athens” (and its efforts promoting literature and higher education) with the Bourbon reformist agenda. For musicians, this connection was significant (as it was for painters) in that it allowed them to align modern aesthetic trends in music with literature (specifically poetry), and thus, with notions of buen gusto. In the early modern Hispanic world, music had maintained a relationship with poetry through the villancico, both a musical and literary genre that featured several stanzas of text (coplas), each framed by a refrain (estribillo) at the beginning and at the end. While the villancico started to make way to music in “modern style” (estilo moderno, as it was called) during the 18th century, New Spanish poetry continued to draw inspiration from older lyrical forms (see Tenorio, this volume). In Mexico City, poetic competitions at the university were rituals that cemented the relationship between music and poetry. These events were an homage that the university paid to Euterpe, the Greek muse of lyric verse, giver of pleasure, and also the muse of music.12 Although poetry continued married to older lyrical models (like the literary villancico), it nonetheless remained the basis through which artists and musicians deployed creative impulses that reflected refinement and grace, main traits that informed buen gusto. The music chapel of the cathedral of Mexico, for example, participated in one of the most important literary events of the 18th century. This was a poetic competition held in 1760 to celebrate the coronation of Charles III, King of Spain. In this competition, the winning literary entry would be set to music by the cathedral chapelmaster, Ignacio Jerusalem. Thus, music served as the backdrop of an enlightened poetic sensibility that the Bourbon monarch promoted through the university, the institutional site of education, literacy, and reason. Ultimately, music became the modern aural realization of poetic expression, and therefore, of buen gusto. 11 Ibid., pp. 77–79. 12 Leonard, Baroque Times, pp. 130, 136–140.

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Buen Gusto, the Noble Arts, and the Quest for Social Status

For institutionalized musicians (i.e., those with employment in an institution, such as the church) the connection between music, the university, and buen gusto served to legitimize their claims to Spanish corporate benefits, and to higher place over others. The connection between music and academic erudition had always been present in New Spain and it had served institutionalized musicians to claim status. Being a church musician, for example, reflected a social profile that placed a person higher than a music freelancer or amateur. Institutionalization reflected years of academic study (especially if the musician was reared in the church) in Latin grammar, philosophy, as well as in instrumental performance and music theory. The last subject was particularly important because it gave notions of music knowledge an academic character due to the pedagogical literature used for these purposes. Having “music knowledge” meant knowing music from a theoretical base, as well as having a critical capacity to understand and explain concepts of music composition and performance.13 Such capacity referred mostly to polyphonic music (music with different melodic lines in four or five voices singing simultaneously), which as mentioned before was a type of music developed in the 16th century, and was usually sacred. This paradigm shifted with the incursion of modern trends in music making, especially as these trends (which had nothing to do with older models of music theory) started to align with secular, enlightened attributes such as refinement and grace, proper of buen gusto. A secular sensibility for poetry and literature provided academic underpinnings to a new notion of what music knowledge ought to be in modern music. This shift caused conflicts among musicians who, endorsing previous notions of music knowledge, claimed privileges based on their rank as music professionals. Institutionalization was very important to these claims, as institutional careers reflected a respectable social profile. In New Spain, the metropolitan cathedral of Mexico was perhaps the most coveted institutional venue for employment by musicians. In addition to a steady salary, the cathedral offered corporate benefits such as leaves of absence with pay (either to attend personal business or due to illness) and financial incentives to pursue higher education. However, one of the most important privileges that cathedral musicians received was the exclusive right to perform (and charge for their performance) at parishes and convents that were surrogate to cathedral authority. By law from the high court, no other music ensemble could play at any 13

For in-depth information on this topic, see Chapter 4 of Ramos-Kittrell, Playing in the Cathedral.

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of these venues unless the cathedral allowed it. Performing at a parish or ­convent implied providing music for rituals such as marriages, burials, professions of nuns, and masses. The music ensemble usually divided the paid amount among musicians in equal percentages, although always in relation to their respective salaries. This meant that if musicians were entitled to a 5 per cent payment from these performances, those making 300 pesos a year received more than those making 200 pesos (the first received 15 pesos, which was 5 per cent of their salaries, and the latter received 10 pesos. Sometimes, those with very low salaries received close to nothing under this scheme). All of these rituals were different and the number of musicians needed for each varied. That is why cathedral musicians were divided in three groups or turns. These groups rotated so that all musicians could have a chance to perform at high paying events. In this way, all musicians received equal treatment in the distribution of labor and benefits, and this is what became a source of trouble during the 18th century. As new aesthetic trends influenced music practices the cathedral began to employ musicians who were proficient in modern styles. Some of these musicians came from different cities and even different nations (some from France, others from Italy). For them, the orthodox way of teaching music (according to the rules of older polyphonic music) was not entirely relevant. This was more apparent in singers who aimed to be competent in modern singing approaches derived from opera. Musicians reared under the older paradigm of music learning (some of whom had devoted their life to musical and academic study, raising through the ranks and every time earning more money) disliked the fact that these other musicians (who lacked the music knowledge that they had, and who had not spent their lives developing a career in the church) entered the cathedral earning high salaries, sometimes equaling the salary of those who had a record of decades of institutional service. Disputes erupted within the cathedral ensemble over performance privileges at events in parishes and convents. Some musicians argued that newcomers were entitled neither to a big starting salary (in lieu of institutional trajectory) nor to a high percentage payment from these rituals (in lieu of their lack of “music knowledge”). These frictions moved some musicians to start contracting performances independently at these venues so that they would not have to share the payment with other cathedral musicians. Such behavior went against the corporate rules of the cathedral music ensemble, and the cathedral clergy did not hesitate to dismiss those who were insubordinate. While the cathedral had strict guidelines to regulate the institutional behavior of musicians, it did not have clear principles about appropriateness of music style in religious ceremonies. In fact, cathedral clerics thought that music was in a very advanced state in the 18th century, and quite different from past times.

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This recognition, however, was left at the surface, and the ­cathedral clergy never established a clear policy for the recognition of merit and compensation among musicians in light of new trends that were effecting changes in ways of thinking about music (and therefore, of what music knowledge was). Those who were dismissed were well aware of the aesthetic value that modern music had among the enlightened Spanish elite and did not waste time in trying to appeal to their sensibilities to gain their favor and patronage. These musicians regrouped in an ensemble that became the music chapel at the parish of the Casa Profesa. This small church was the favorite venue of the New Spanish aristocracy. In here, the titled nobility celebrated baptisms, marriages, first communions, and masses to honor dead wealthy patrons. The music chapel of the Casa Profesa was not only comprised of former cathedral musicians (all of whom were of European descent). The music director (Antonio Rafael Portillo y Segura, a skilled singer, although without experience ­conducting or composing) also welcomed freelance musicians of mixed races who were competent instrumentalists, regardless of their social class. It was because of their ability in modern music trends that the musicians of this ensemble received the protection of important personalities in Mexico City. These included noble miners and merchants, the city mayor, court judges, the rector of the royal university, and even the viceroy. Some social pundits lamented that these musicians dared to wear European wigs and even clerical-styled frocks (the official attire among church musicians). On February 1772, for example, critics observed that in this ensemble people could see “slackers, street vendors, convent acolytes, and amateurs, none of which had received the tonsure”.14 Overall, this was a motley group of musicians from different races that aimed to appear publicly as “Spanish”, and the support from notable Spanish individuals was of good help. Because of their lack of Spanish lineage, the ensemble aimed to use modern music to appeal to Spanish taste and sensibility, and thus, to a Spanish mode of noble sociability and acculturation permeated by buen gusto. Elite personalities responded favorably to this initiative. Individuals like Miguel de Berrio y Zaldívar (marqués de Jaral de Berrio and conde de San Mateo Valparaíso) and Ambrosio Eugenio de Melgarejo Santaella (mayor and court judge in Mexico City) actively promoted the employment of the entire chapel in important convents (such as the Convent of Capuchin Nuns). The Melgarejo Santaella family also took Antonio Rafael Portillo y Segura (music director of the ensemble) as its protégé. Even Viceroy Carlos Francisco de Croix (marqués de Croix) tried to persuade the cathedral clergy in 1768 to hire Portillo back 14

ACCMM, Actas 51, fol. 163v.

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due to his talent, especially because “there is not a single good voice in the ­[cathedral] choir”.15 It was because of these proofs of endorsement that the clergy at the Casa Profesa continued to support the sporting of wigs and frocks, lest the formality and social appearance of these musicians would be compromised among the elite.16 Portillo and his group, therefore, saw no obstacle in competing for the privilege to work in parishes and convents within cathedral jurisdiction. According to Portillo, the social profile of his musicians was equal (if not better) than that of cathedral members. They were institutionally bound to an elite church and openly received the favor of socially notable people, and this entitled them to social privilege. Needless to say, cathedral musicians were appalled by this intrusion. According to them, the period of 1768–69 had proven to be “the most tortuous and critical [time] … full of debates, challenges and pretentious disdains”. Cathedral musicians came to see Portillo as “the most subtle, astute … favored, protected, and intrepid” individual because of the elite protection that he enjoyed.17 For Portillo, however, the status of his musicians among Spaniards—and their right to privileges—derived from the important credentials that they had accrued (i.e., institutionalization in an elite church and the sponsorship of its benefactors). Portillo’s ensemble buttressed these credentials with their proficiency in modern music trends, which had a direct connection with the literary tastes and rituals of sociability of buen gusto among the aristocracy. As mentioned before, literature and poetry were the basis of this connection, which was institutionally (and therefore, socially) legitimized through the university. It was for this reason that on November 1768 Portillo attempted to go even further in his quest for “Spanish” status. Under the protection of Antonio Eugenio Melgarejo Santaella (son of the mayor and judge Ambrosio Eugenio), rector of the royal university, Portillo wrote directly to Charles III, King of Spain, to allow him to establish a music chapel at the university under his direction (practically moving the music chapel of the Casa Profesa to the university). In his letter, Portillo observed that this chapel “shall enjoy—as chapel of your majesty’s university, and thus, as royal chapel—all of the privileges, honors, and prerogatives that the royal chapel in Madrid has, for which [this chapel] may attend events at any church or convent … without obstacles from any prelate, organization, or person of any rank or hierarchy”.18 15 16 17 18

ACCMM, Acuerdos de Cabildo 4, not foliated. ACCMM, Actas 51, fol. 163v. ACCMM, Acuerdos de Cabildo 4, not foliated. Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Universidad 24, fol. 207v. See also Torres Medina, “La capilla de música de la catedral de México”, p. 237.

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For quite some time Portillo’s chapel (made up of different types of musicians and from different racial descent) had been competing with the cathedral ensemble (made up of Spaniards in its majority) for work venues. This fact was in direct relation to the destabilization of the caste system in New Spain. Individuals of mixed race were seeking institutionalization to compete with Spaniards in their quest for status. In this specific case, however, it was not the claim of Spanish lineage that mestizos and mulattos in Portillo’s group were using to seek membership in a Spanish institution. It was the aesthetic connection that modern music had with elite notions of buen gusto that enabled these individuals to engage in Spanish modes of sociability, which during the 18th century became more important through the promotion of enlightened royal policies for the improvement of social life. The quest for status became, therefore, imbued with the importance of social mannerism in relation to taste, refinement, and grace, diametrically opposed to the relevance of academically oriented professions in previous perceptions of Spanishness. In light of this ideological tension, the anxiety among cathedral musicians to maintain their social position as the quintessential Spanish music ensemble in the viceroyalty was understandable. The profile of the cathedral’s chapel derived not from the fact that the group was associated with the most important religious institution in New Spain. It actually stemmed from the fact that, due to their credentials (e.g., an academically influenced notion of music knowledge, years of service in the church, and in some cases, the pursuit of university degrees and priesthood), cathedral musicians articulated a social profile of respectability with elements that influenced perceptions of what it meant to be Spanish. For this reason, cathedral musicians arduously fought every instance in which others attempted to trespass their rights and privileges. In several occasions musicians asked for the support of the cathedral clergy in the litigation of cases against freelance musicians playing at venues that were under cathedral jurisdiction. With Portillo, the situation was quite different, however. He and his group enjoyed the protection of important personalities in the city and the clergy did not want to make enmities. Cathedral musicians, therefore, had to be quite strategic. Sometimes, events in parishes and convents coincided with cathedral services and it was hard for the cathedral ensemble to cover all performance needs; this was precisely when Portillo attempted to move in. In order to avoid losing a venue to Portillo, cathedral musicians were divided in three groups. In that way, there could always be a group of musicians available to cover whatever needs, in and outside of the cathedral. Upon the arrival of cathedral musicians to the venue, Portillo’s group had to disband (that is, if the ritual had not started yet) and lose a paying job. In some cases, people like ­Melgarejo Santaella (the elder) and Miguel de Berrio y Zaldívar even put

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pressure on the nuns at some of these convents so that they would hire Portillo and his group permanently. In light of these tensions, Portillo’s letter to the king had clear intentions: to obtain approval from the highest Spanish authority for the affiliation of his chapel with the Spanish institution at the center of literary infused notions of buen gusto, to thus, debase the position of cathedral chapel as the most important music group in the viceroyalty. For cathedral musicians, this was the drop that spilled the glass, and promptly drafted an appeal (dated 6 December 1768) that they sent to the king. In it, cathedral musicians carefully outline their social attributes, all of which buttressed their respectable Spanish profile, which made them worthy of the privileges Portillo attempted to overtake. Specifically, musicians said that they were a group of criollos of known Spanish lineage, who before being admitted to the cathedral gave full information about their legitimate birth and Christian descent.19 Their group, they argued, was comprised of presbyters (i.e., full priests) and of musicians who had been summoned by the cathedral clergy. Others had found employment only after a rigorous examination of their dexterity, as well as of their life and good customs.20 With this letter cathedral musicians attempted to position themselves as the foremost ensemble in New Spain, politically parallel to the king’s royal chapel, and therefore, of higher status than any other group. In order to legitimize this position, the ensemble was careful to mention the credentials that placed it indisputably above Portillo’s group, alluding to their Spanishness (the mention of clerics—who could only be Spanish—being carefully emphasized). In addition, cathedral musicians argued that Portillo was not qualified to be a music director because he lacked proper music knowledge; mostly, Portillo sang by memory and merely marked the beat in his chapel.21 All of these elements (his lack of knowledge, institutional background as someone dismissed from the church, and the racial background of some of his musicians), cathedral musicians argued, pointed to the lack of social merit in Portillo’s group. This body of evidence was enough for the royal council to deliberate in favor of the cathedral. In the royal decree issued on 29 April 1769, the king disapproved the rector’s intromission of housing Portillo’s chapel in the university, and ordered him to dissolve it immediately.22 After this episode Portillo’s competition continued for approximately six years, although in minor form. For 19 Criollo was the term used to designate a person born in New Spain, whose parents were Iberian. 20 ACCMM, Acuerdos de Cabildo 4, not foliated. 21 ACCMM, Actas 49, fol. 187r. 22 Lenning, Reales cédulas, pp. 225–227.

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the most part, his activity remained relegated to small events at places where he still enjoyed the favor of elite personalities, like the Melgarejo family and Berrio y Zaldívar. After this, his name disappears from primary sources, and one wonders if this is because he died or because musicians finally deserted him. This altercation with Portillo was the most dramatic conflict that cathedral musicians faced but it was largely because of the corporate (and therefore Spanish) character of his intentions. This was not so much a dispute for work and wages as much as it was a tug war for institutional legitimacy and social position. This contestation shows the competing paradigms of Spanish belonging that musicians articulated during a time of sociopolitical and cultural change. As an institutionalized activity, music was highly susceptible to these transformations in terms of how music styles (older polyphony, modern trends) were tied to different and changing social perceptions of literacy, knowledge, and aesthetics. If strategies to claim privileges in Spanish society differed among musicians it was because the very elements that people relied on to claim Spanishness were changing as well, and with them, the very notion of what it meant to be Spanish during the 18th century. 4 Conclusion In retrospect, one might be inclined to lament Portillo’s failed attempts. By abiding on principles of self-industry, he tried to get ahead in a social system that privileged Spanish individuals. Portillo’s cleverness lied in his perception of ideological and aesthetic changes in the assessment of intellectual and artistic value among Spaniards. He realized that appealing to new tastes and social sensibilities was a strategy to claim social status and privilege. And for this a person did not have to be Spaniard. As a matter of fact, there were musicians in the cathedral of Mexico who were not Spanish, and yet, claimed Spanish status in light of the corporate identity that they constructed through their affiliation with a Spanish institution. This is why, when outlining their credentials to the king (when they appealed Portillo’s attempt to establish a royal chapel at the university), musicians carefully alluded, at the very top of their letter, to the Spanish corporate character of the cathedral ensemble. They started by saying that the musicians in the group (at least half of them) were Spanish, of “known lineage”, with proven testimony of their origin. They also mentioned the clerical profile of some members (those who were priests), thus adding weight to the Spanish character of the ensemble. The “Spanish” profile of other non-musicians derived from their membership with this group, although only after passing a rigorous examination of their abilities and an investigation of

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their lives and customs. Perhaps it was due to the fact that aesthetic changes had imposed demands on approaches to music performance and composition that cathedral authorities were not so concerned with the non-Spanish origin of musicians; after all, they were not to become priests (for which proof of Spanishness was required). Yet, the mention of Spaniards and clerics as members of the ensemble had specific intentions. It was due to their presence that the cathedral ensemble was considered a Spanish corporation, actually the most important music corporation in New Spain, as it was affiliated to the most important Spanish institution, the cathedral of Mexico. This was because individuals used music study—based on older theoretical principles—to undertake a life-long process of institutional development that enabled people to claim a Spanish profile of respectability, and that allowed some to claim nobility of privilege. The mention of these individuals was, therefore, important to legitimize the claims of privilege of the music chapel as a Spanish corporate group. Affiliation with Spanish institutions was indeed a basis for social merit and Portillo was quick to capitalize on this opportunity. By appealing to new aesthetic sensibilities in modern music (and to its connection with poetry and literature) he was able to secure the support of important personalities; of these, the rector of the university, Antonio Eugenio Melgarejo Santaella, was perhaps the most important. Through him, Portillo attempted to land on the literary and academic institutional epicenter of Mexico City. For, if modern music had become the aural realization of enlightened literary thought, Portillo’s chapel (a royal chapel, as he intended) was to become the institutionally legitimate voice of that realization in Spanish society. As a result, mestizos, mulattos, and other of different racial mixtures could claim a Spanish corporate identity, just like non-Spanish cathedral musicians. Ultimately, this evidenced the unstable state of the racial caste system by the second half of the 18th century, and the impact that the Bourbon Reforms had on that structure of social organization. While this case study might initially suggest that socially disenfranchised individuals (like those in Portillo’s music chapel) were able to upset the odds of racial discrimination, the ultimate outcome calls for more careful scrutiny. At the beginning, this chapter mentioned that people of mixed race increasingly competed with Spaniards for merit and privilege in the middle classes. The way they did that was by claiming Spanish lineage through one of the parents (in the case of mestizos and mulattos). Also, mentioning the institutional credentials of the father and his rank of employment helped to characterize someone’s lineage as Spanish (for example, the child of a mestizo father, who through the lineage of his own Spanish parent was able to move into the Spanish caste). The case of Antonio Rafael Portillo y Segura is an example of the

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ways in which mixed-race individuals competed in this fraught social terrain, although with one exemption. Unlike other mestizos and mulattos, some of the musicians in Portillo’s group used music to negotiate their class and the racial character of their status. Corporate employment gave them—even if for a short time—the possibility to claim a Spanish form of status, which could have been firmly corroborated if the university chapel had been established. It was the liminal nature of music that allowed for that, as it was an ingenious art closely connected to the creative and “noble” attributes of Spanish minds. This notion enabled Portillo and his musicians not to transcend race, but to claim privilege according to a logic based on the reproduction of racism and colonialism. Along these lines, music was not necessarily emancipatory. Rather, it was an activity that, permeated by the racist tinge of its time, was an active element in the production of colonial society in America. Bibliography

Primary Sources



Secondary Literature

ACCMM AGN

Archivo del Cabildo, Catedral Metropolitana de Mexico Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Mexico

Becerra López, J.L., La organización de los estudios en la Nueva España, Mexico City, 1963. Carrera, M.M., Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings, Austin, 2003. Deans-Smith, S., “‘This Noble and Illustrious Art’: Painters and the Politics of Guild Reform in Early Modern Mexico City, 1674–1768”, in S.D. Smith and E.V. Young (eds.), Mexican Soundings: Essays in Honour of David A. Brading, London, 2007, pp. 67–98. Donahue-Wallace, K., “A Taste for Art in Late Colonial New Spain”, in P.B. Niell and S.G. Widdifield (eds.), Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910, Albuquerque, 2013, pp. 93–113. Donahue-Wallace, K., “El grabado en la Real Academia de San Carlos de la Nueva España, 1783–1810”, Tiempos de América 11 (2004), pp. 49–61. Leonard, I.A., Baroque Times in Old Mexico, Ann Arbor, 1959. Niell, P.B., and Widdifield, S.G., Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910, Albuquerque, 2013. Ramos-Kittrell, J.A., Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain, New York, 2016.

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Rivera, A., Principios críticos sobre el virreinato de la Nueva España y la revolución de independencia, vol. 4, Lagos, 1888. Tate Lenning, J. (ed.), Reales cédulas de la Real y Pontificia Universidad de México de 1551 a 1816, Mexico City, 1946. Torres Medina, R.H., “La capilla de música de la catedral de México durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII”, doctoral dissertation, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2010. Turrent, L., “Los actores del ritual sonoro catedralicio y su ámbito de autoridad: el prelado, el deán y el arcedeán en la Catedral de México”, in L. Tourrent (ed.), Autoridad, solemnidad y actores musicales en la Catedral de México (1692–1860), Mexico City, 2013, pp. 23–54.

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CHAPTER 19

The Royal Academy of San Carlos, 1781–1800 Amy C. Hamman and Stacie G. Widdifield 1

Founding the Royal Academy of San Carlos

On 4 November 1785, artists, administrators, benefactors, and students gathered at the Royal Mint in Mexico City to celebrate the formal inauguration of the Royal Academy of San Carlos (RASC).1 Launched from the former School of Engraving, the RASC became the third Fine Arts academy established in the Spanish Empire.2 Like its sister schools found in Spain, the RASC received support directly from King Charles III (r. 1759–88) and later his son, Charles IV (r. 1788–1808). In contrast to the academies in Spain, the formation of the RASC marked a sudden and radical departure from colonial art traditions. In New Spain, guild organizations managed the professional activities of artists and artisans. Often displaying inventive ornamentation and stylistic complexity, the works created by guild members bear witness to a persistent, regional fondness for a style typically characterized as the Baroque.3 The RASC, for its part, countered colonial art traditions and responded with an aesthetic based on order, regularity, and restraint—a style typically characterized as neo-Classical. Promoting neo-Classicism had the end goal of homogenizing colonial art and matching it to imperial standards. Given this ideological platform, the emergence of the RASC is best understood in relation to the Bourbon Reforms of the late 18th century. 2

An Institution of the Bourbon Reforms

The accession of Philip V to the Spanish throne in 1700 marked the rise of the Bourbon monarchy. Inheriting an empire many believed to be in decline, the Bourbon kings sought to revive their kingdom through policymaking. The phrase, “Bourbon Reforms”, therefore refers to a wide-range of legislation 1 Charlot, Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, p. 24. 2 Previous Spanish Fine Arts academies included the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, established in 1752, and the Academy of San Carlos in Valencia, established in 1768. The Academy of San Luis in Zaragoza, established in 1793, was heralded as the fourth Spanish Fine Arts academy. 3 For more information on the colonial Baroque, see the foundational, Toussaint, Pintura Colonial en México. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004335578_021 - 978-90-04-33557-8 Downloaded from Brill.com04/20/2023 06:51:39PM via Western University

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drafted under Bourbons leadership and directed at political, economic, and cultural stimulus.4 The Bourbon Reforms had a profound impact on Spanish America. Much of the legislation in fact aimed to redefine the relationship between Spain and its colonies. Policies endeavored to centralize colonial administration, to extract a greater share of colonial wealth, and to identify new sources of overseas capital. In the effort to gather detailed information about the colonial economy, Charles III sent emissary José de Gálvez y Gallardo to New Spain. At the close of a six-year tour conducted between the years 1765 and 1771, Gálvez y Gallardo submitted strategies for promoting fiscal development. His recommendations were carried out by royal administrators beginning in the last quarter of the 18th century. The Crown’s approach to fiscal reform stemmed from theories about economic liberalism developed during the Enlightenment as an alternative to mercantilism and feudalism. One of the earliest proponents of liberal economics was Spanish Professor of Theology and Benedictine monk Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro. Published in 1726, Feijóo’s nine-volume work, Teatro crítico universal, described how an ideal sovereign supported research in the arts and sciences and helped to enrich his subjects by protecting commercial interests.5 Later advisors to the Crown, such as economists José del Campillo y Cossío and Bernardo Ward, set the course for a modern economic program by promoting the development of industry. While economic projections looked good on paper, their feasibility required something far more practical: money. At mid-century, Spain lacked a steady flow of capital in specie throughout the empire. Consequently, Charles III found it necessary to grease the wheels of commerce by minting more coin.6 He tasked the Royal Mint in New Spain with producing its share of the work and appointed a new Director of Operations to oversee quality control. Gerónimo Antonio Gil, skilled engraver and alumnus of the Academy of San Fernando, filled the position. The demand for currency unquestionably played a role in the emergence of the RASC. Not only did numismatics guide its future Director-General, Gil, to New Spain, it also brought focus to both provisional schools preceding the RASC: the School of Engraving (1778–81) and the Provisional School of Fine Arts (1781–83). Economic exigencies aside, the origination of the RASC additionally responded to Spain’s need to cultivate human capital. While stimulating 4 The literature on the Bourbon Reforms is extensive and best addressed topically. For example, on government, see Brading, “Bourbon Spain and Its American Empire”; on economic reforms, Arcila Farías, Reformas económicas del siglo XVIII en Nueva España; and on society, see Brading, Church and State in Bourbon Mexico. 5 MacLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New World, pp. 67–70. 6 Lombardo, “Las Reformas Borbónicas en el arte de la Nueva España (1781–1821)”, p. 18.

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agricultural and industrial activity buoyed commerce, it failed to provide a viable means of improving the labor force or nurturing individual talents. In the midst of the scholarly ethos of the Enlightenment, Spanish policymakers found a solution in education.7 Public education braced the empire by upskilling workers and creating a specialized labor force. Indeed, the rise of government-sponsored academies in Europe and Spanish America testifies to the importance administrators placed on institutional learning as a means of civic betterment.8 By way of schools such as the RASC, the monarchy took control of education. Royal patronage also ensured that programming supported Spain’s economic agenda. Common expectation was that the RASC would train artists and artisans capable of producing consumer goods à la mode. With domestic needs met, the Crown hoped the rate of foreign imports would fall, and in the process, staunch the flow of money and interests out of the Empire. 3

Arrival of Gerónimo Antonio Gil

On 5 December 1778, Gil debarked at the Gulf Coast city of Veracruz and made ready for the final leg of his journey to the viceregal capital. Six months prior, Charles III selected Gil to replace former Senior Engraver of the Royal Mint, Francisco Casanova, whose eyesight forced him to resign in 1773. For five years, Deputy Engraver Alejo Bernabé Madero managed operations. An honorary engraver by trade, Madero lacked a formal arts education. In the estimation of Charles III, this shortcoming made Madero unsuitable to serve as Senior Engraver.9 Alternatively, Gil was a Spanish academician who possessed an impeccable reputation. As a celebrated graduate of the Academy of San Fernando, Gil was involved in a number of state projects. For, example, he served as a founding member of the 1763 Royal Company of Printers and Bookmakers. The mission of this organization, “to restore the art of printing, an endeavor considered indispensable to the encouragement of industry and to the growth of commercial enterprise”, perfectly encapsulated the spirit of Bourbon reformism.10 Consequently, when the king surveyed the field of candidates, Gil’s professional accomplishments made him a logical choice for assignment.11 7 8

Ibid., pp.17–18. For general information about the development of other kinds of academies in New Spain at this time, see, Brown, La Academia de San Carlos, vol. II, pp. 34–35. 9 Báez Macías, Historia de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, p. 23. 10 “… deseando restablecer y mejorar el importantísimo arte de imprenta, y fomentar las fábricas y multiplicadas ramas industriales …” quoted in Illona Katzew, “Algunos Datos Nuevos Sobre el Fundador de la Real Academia de San Carlos, Jerónimo Antonio Gil”, p. 33. 11 Ibid., pp. 32–33.

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Gil brought with him to New Spain a cargo of trunks. Beyond personal effects, he transported the objects needed to support his occupation. These included engravers’ tools, instruments, and chemicals, as well as a collection of plaster casts, drawings, prints, medals, and coins.12 In addition to these implements, Gil also moved a sizeable library, which contained a number of manuscripts traditionally used to teach the principles of drawing. Andreas Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body; Francisco Pacheco, Art of Painting; Antonio Palomino, The Pictorial Museum and Optical Scale; and Albrecht Dürer, Symmetry of the Human Body, offer just a few examples of the kinds of resources forming the bulk of the library.13 Also among the book collection was a bound copy of the bylaws of the Academy of San Fernando—the first and flagship school of art instruction in Spain. Art historian Eduardo Báez Macías sees Gil’s transportation of the statutes as evidence of premeditation; in other words, Báez suggests that even before setting foot in New Spain, Gil may have entertained the idea of establishing a Fine Arts academy, perhaps even with verbal approval from the Crown.14 4

The Royal Academy of San Carlos

Records show that Gil wasted no time in setting up a drawing school. Within three days of arriving to Mexico City, he initiated the School of Engraving. Housed at the Royal Mint, this school operated from 1778 to 1781.15 The success of the School of Engraving prompted Superintendent of the Royal Mint, Fernando José Mangino, to petition Viceroy Martín de Mayorga y Ferrer (r. 1779–83) for a charter to establish a Fine Arts academy. Convinced of the utility of arts instruction to the public and to the Empire, Mayorga gave tentative approval for the project on 12 September 1781. For the next few years, officials resolved administrative details, such as the institution’s chain of command, funding, and political structure. While this occurred, Gil simultaneously contracted with local artists Francisco Clapera, José de Alcíbar, and others, who served as temporary faculty until positions for Spanish academicians could be negotiated. On Christmas Day of 1783, Charles III endorsed the academy, and on 4 November 1785, the school held a ceremony to celebrate its inauguration.

12 13 14 15

Báez Macías, Jerónimo Antonio Gil y su traducción de Gérard Audran, pp. 15–16; Báez Macías, Historia de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, p. 23. Ibid. Báez Macías, Historia de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, p. 23. Báez Macías, Jerónimo Antonio Gil y su traducción, p. 16.

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In honor of Gil’s service, Charles III appointed the engraver lifetime Director-General of the RASC.16 Before the school officially got underway, the Crown instructed Gil to design a commemorative medal for distribution. Gil submitted preliminary drawings to the Council of the Indies in 1784; yet, for unknown reasons, the medals were not executed. His preparatory sketches nevertheless offer a revealing glimpse into the institutional priorities of the RASC. Based on the drawing, the anterior of the medal was to feature a stately, profile portrait of Charles III. Placed in the center of the composition, the honorific image approximates the look of an ancient Roman coin. Wrapping around the exterior border, and encircling the monarch’s image, Gil planned the following inscription: “Charles III King of Spain Emperor of the Indies Savior and Protector of the Sciences and the Arts”.17 The reverse was to feature a more complicated arrangement. The center displays a cameo bust of the school’s namesake, Saint Charles Borromeo. Gil drew the cameo situated upon a floating bed of clouds, which additionally supports three female figures. Draped in flowing garments, the figures personify the three Noble Arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture—the same branches of study offered at the school. Although never stamped, the design models the idealized beauty of classical art; it furthermore captures the curricular mission of the RASC. By promoting Fine Art, as opposed to the minor arts, and advancing classicism, in contrast to the Baroque, the school paved the way for a new course in the history of colonial art. 5

Teaching Neo-Classicism: Discourse, Text, and Objects

Characterized by balance, order and restraint—ancient Greco-Roman art employed a visual language in harmony with the ideals of the Enlightenment. In Spanish America, classicism, or more accurately neo-Classicism, additionally provided a medium through which to convey perspectives on economic reform and social revitalization. These ideas did not manifest spontaneously, nor unaided. The RASC was responsible for manufacturing a cultural tour de force. The school took patrons’ prevailing appreciation for the Baroque and recalibrated it into a newfound taste for the classical. Responses 16 17

Brown, La Academia de San Carlos, vol. I, pp. 65–100. The inscription reads: “CARLOS. III. REY. DE ESP. EMP. DE. LAS. INDIAS. EL. SAVIO. PROT. DE. LAS CIENCIA. Y. ARTES”. Quoted in Báez Macías, Historia de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, p. 32; see this resource for additional information. The illustration is reproduced, here, as well.

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to neo-Classicism included the substitution of marble and bronze in place of mirrors and dark wood, the decline of polychrome decorative techniques, and an approach to drawing and composition guided by classical sensibilities.18 5.1 Discourse Colonial residents’ fondness for neo-Classicism lagged behind that of overseas consumers. In Europe, a strong middle class drove demand for objects fashioned in the new style. Following trends set by the aristocracy, these consumers renounced the Baroque for its decadence and embraced the classical as a conservative alternative. Europeans furthermore appreciated Greco-Roman art for its ability to recall the grand civilizations of Western Europe, and used its visual language to express the perceived ideals of those cultures: reason and rationality. In New Spain, neither the economy nor social hierarchy supported a comparable consumer base. Upper class patrons in Spanish America tended to support artisan crafts produced by local guilds. Operating at the nexus of commercial exchange, daily life, and organized labor—guilds, such as the Guild of Masons and Architects maintained a powerful presence.19 Also, because the Mexican Church dominated patronage, the colony’s most skilled artists typically worked in service of the Church; meanwhile, less-accomplished artists often satisfied utilitarian or secular demands, or both.20 Set against this backdrop, appreciation for a style that recalled the heritage of Western Europe was a learned response; it was incumbent upon the RASC to teach those cultural lessons. Through curriculum, faculty, and the production of art and architecture, the school shaped ideas. In opposition to the Baroque, described as ugly, disproportionate, and deformed, faculty touted neo-Classicism as beautiful, decorous, and as a style embodying “good taste”.21 Supporters of neo-Classicism furthermore promoted the aesthetic as a means to display personal refinement and social grace, i.e., a class-defining niche.22 Indeed, as

18

19 20 21 22

The term “neo-Classicism” did not come into use until the 19th century; prior to this point, patrons in Spanish America simply referred to an aesthetic evocative of Greco-Roman art as “good taste” (buen gusto). For more information on classicism in Spanish America, see, Bargellini and Fuentes (eds.), Clasicismo en México, and Niell and Widdifield (eds.), Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Culture of Latin America. On the guilds, see Carrera Stampa, Los gremios mexicanos. Lombardo, “Las Reformas Borbónicas”, pp. 22–26. For a discussion of buen gusto in colonial Mexico, see Deans-Smith, “Manuel Tolsá’s Equestrian Statue of Charles IV”; Donahue-Wallace, “A Taste for Art”; and Ramos-Kittrell (this volume). Brown, La Academia de San Carlos, vol. I, p. 40.

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Báez Macías observes, the RASC functioned like a well-tuned instrument.23 It was capable of both mediating the production of art and setting high the bar for social prestige. One example of the invective against prior, colonial art traditions comes from Gil. According to the engraver, artists in Mexico discredited the profession. He attributed their incompetency to ignorance and lack of sophistication.24 Yet, verbal condemnation, alone, was not bold enough. Faculty actively sought to censor work produced outside the purview of the school. Article 29, paragraph 3, of the school’s founding statutes, for instance, states that: “No court, judge, magistrate, or council shall grant title or faculty to assess, measure, or fabricate [a building], to any person who is not a Director [of architecture] or Academician of Merit”.25 This ruling enabled the RASC to monopolize new construction and to eliminate what faculty perceived as the “monstrosities” that “disfigured” the streets of Mexico.26 Regulatory agencies, such as the Junta de Policía del Ayuntamiento or the Municipal Police Board, furthermore worked hand in hand with the RASC to collaborate on city beautification projects and to adjudicate rogue builders. Neither builders nor local painters escaped scrutiny. School officials petitioned the viceregal government, demanding that painters close shop until acquiring formal approval from the RASC to remain in operation.27 In this manner, members of the academy aggressively defended the school’s interests. They promoted neo-Classicism as a learned style, one connected to the interests of Crown. 5.2 Text A good object lesson on the school’s brand of neo-Classicism is found in a late18th-century portrait of Gil (Figure 19.1). Painted by Director of Painting Rafael Ximeno y Planes, the three-quarter-length portrait presents a careful life study. Clothed in a nattier, blue jacket, embroidered vest, and white undershirt, with lace trimming visible at the wrists and neck, the ensemble (whether selected by Gil or Ximeno y Planes) puts elevated status on display. The naturalistic handling additionally enabled Ximeno y Planes to capture qualities of character, i.e., Gil’s (ostensibly) steely gaze, and to accredit the sitter with the traits of 23 Báez Macías, “La Academia de San Carlos en la Nueva España como instrumento de cambio”. 24 Charlot, Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, p. 50. 25 “Ningún Tribunal, Juez, Magistrado, ni Ayuntamiento ó Comunidad, podrá conceder Titulo ó facultad para tasar, medir, ni dirigir fabricar á persona alguna que no sea Director, ó Académico de merito de Arquitectura”. “Real Estatutos de 1784”, p. 66. A facsimile of this manuscript is found in Báez Macías, Historia de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. 26 Carrillo y Gariel, Datos Sobre La Academia de San Carlos de Nueva España, vol. II, p. 93. 27 Charlot, Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, pp. 51–52.

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figure 19.1 Rafael Ximeno y Planes, Portrait of Jerónimo Antonio Gil, c.1800

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an 18th-century academician, i.e., fortitude, wit, and unapologetic confidence. Props and staging furthermore relay information about Gil’s professional activities. To the left of the sitter, a large window opens onto indistinct forms suggesting a building issuing smoke. It has been suggested that this may refer to the Royal Mint, whose very enterprise required the services that Gil brought to New Spain.28 Prominent references to his engraving practice are also found in the press, carved with the royal insignia and located at the base of the window, the die in Gil’s right hand and the stamped medal coin in his left hand, as well as the tools arranged on the table. Also found on the table is a plaster cast head that depicts the eldest son in the three-figure Hellenistic sculpture, Laocoön and His Sons, c.200 B.C. Subject matter, iconography, and execution model the principles of neo-Classical instruction. Consequently, it is somewhat ironic that the most meaningful emblem embedded in the portrait is also the one least prominently displayed. Beneath Gil’s right arm, rests a slim volume labeled with: “Es. D.L.R. ACADEM. D.S. CAR.D.N.E”.29 Worn and bookmarked, the text represents the published statutes of the RASC. Written in 1784, the statues were mass printed in 1785 at a local printing house managed by Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros.30 The original, handwritten disquisition included an eight-page preamble followed by 67 pages discussing the school’s 30 bylaws. These bylaws define governing offices and bodies, academic appointments and departments, the chain of executive command, the school’s curriculum and procedures, and members’ prohibitions and privileges.31 In the portrait, Gil is shown with his right hand resting protectively, paternalistically atop the book. Modern audiences might find an amusing pun in this arrangement as the gesture speaks volumes to the importance of the publication. A more concrete indication of the primacy of this text comes from Viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid (r. 1785–86), who, on 1 July 1785, commanded that the RASC’s printed statutes be disseminated to top leadership throughout the colony: The Secretary of the RASC will authenticate a certified copy of these Statutes, which shall be printed at the expense of the academy, in as many copies as deemed necessary, and distributed among the Presidents and 28 29

Esther Acevedo, personal communication, May 2016. The abbreviation reads: Estatutos De La Real Academia De San Carlos or the Statutes of the Real Academy of San Carlos. The statutes adopted by the RASC were based on statutes of the Academy of San Fernando, which in turn, were modeled on the statutes of the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. 30 Charlot, Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, p. 26. 31 “Real Estatutos de 1784”.

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Trustees. Special editions will be circulated to the Royal Courts and other tribunals of the capital, so that these judicial bodies may understand and observe [the statutes] with regard to their offices. Additional copies shall also be presented to the Archbishop and to the Bishops of New Spain, as well as all ecclesiastical and secular governing committees, until ultimately, [the statutes] having bridged mountains to reach all magistrates of this Kingdom.32 Hence, it was literally through the publication and tactical circulation of the statutes that officials write the RASC into being. Communicated to administrators near and far, this text publically legitimized the school, validated its educational programming, and authorized its legal rights. The school, or the “lettered” academy, to borrow an expression coined by literary critic Ángel Rama, also commanded a taste for neo-Classicism.33 The phrase, “lettered” academy, cues to Rama’s premise; which is to say, in Latin America writing and literacy confirmed administrative power due to the perceived permanency, intelligibility, and self-validating qualities of the written word. Consequently, in addition to circulating its statutes, a second way the RASC asserted cultural hegemony is found in acts of recordkeeping. Indeed, the architects of the school clearly saw value in building institutional presence through documentation. Article 5 of the founding statutes, for example, specifically tasks the school’s secretary with maintaining an archive and conserving related “books, government documents, and seals”.34 Recordkeeping, in short, established a method of authorization; it delivered a systematic means to invest authority in the school and to draw a return on its neo-Classical programming. From transcripts and records, one observes a virtual paper trail, e.g., library catalogs; inventories of casts, prints, paintings, and drawings, correspondences; etc., documenting how faculty commanded an appreciation for neo-Classicism and how they measured students’ successful assimilation of the aesthetic.35 By way of illustration, classical texts, instructional manuals, art treatises, and other resources filled the school’s library. It is worth noting, that the library actually predated the academy. The bulk of its materials came from Gil’s personal collection, which the engraver entrusted to the Provisional School of 32 Ibid. 33 Rama, The Lettered City. 34 “libros, papeles, de Govierno, y los sellos de la Academia”, “Real Estatutos de 1784”, p. 15. 35 Two examples are Bargellini, Guía que permite captar lo bello, and Fuentes Rojas, La Academia de San Carlos.

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Drawing when he arrived to Mexico City in 1778. Yet, the demand for authoritative texts was greater than what Gil supplied. Four years into his appointment, the future Director-General of the RASC contacted colleagues at the Academy of San Fernando to request additional books. Three trunks-worth of materials arrived in 1790, increasing the RASC’s holdings to roughly 100 volumes.36 An inventory conducted the same year shows a collection emphasis in “enlightened” philosophy and classical literature, as well as Renaissance art and architecture, mathematics, and anatomy.37 The persistent effort on the part of the faculty to grow holdings reveals the perceived usefulness of these resources to classical arts instruction. Also indicative of the role books played in teaching new aesthetic principles is Gil’s personal effort to translate well-known European art treatises—for example, Gérard Audran’s The Proportions of the Human Body, originally published in French in 1683. Shortly before embarking on his journey to New Spain, Gil completed this project. It was published in Spain two years later.38 Gil’s translation contains an introduction to art theory and 30 drawings of the most famous examples of Greco-Roman statuary known at that time. It also provides scaled measurements that delineate the values required to replicate classical proportions. Interestingly, no less than six of the manual’s 30 illustrations depict different views of the Laocoön and His Sons—a sculpture considered by many individuals as one of the great masterworks of antiquity. It is certainly not by coincidence that the portrait of Gil painted by Ximeno y Planes displays a recognizable plaster replica of the head of the Laocoön’s eldest son. 5.3 Objects Print materials of all types supported the school’s neo-Classical program. In addition to library resources, students learned about neo-Classicism through a formal education comprised of readings in history, architecture, and art, as well practice in computation and studio practicums. As dictated by the school’s statutes, artists and artisans wishing to learn new skills or refresh tired ones were admitted indiscriminately to day and evening classes. Once enrolled, students chose their paths of focus, i.e., any one of the three Noble Arts, engraving, or simply a concentration in drawing to be refined at a later date. Each month, faculty from the departments of painting and sculpture, architecture and mathematics, and engraving met to evaluate student work. The committee voted on 36 37 38

Báez Macías, Historia de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, pp. 232–233. For the titles of books found in Gil’s personal library at the time of his death, see Katzew, “Algunos Datos Nuevos”, pp. 61–64. A facsimile of the volume is reproduced in Báez Macías, Jerónimo Antonio Gil y su traducción.

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whether or not to advance individuals from elementary design, to plaster cast drawing, and eventually, to live model studies. It was during the third stage (live model study) that students refined their talents under the tutelage of specific professors.39 While the length of the program differed depending on students’ individual abilities, the typical path to graduation took 12 years.40 Compared to modern academic standards the RASC’s curriculum might appear to be somewhat unformed; however, it did offer specific benchmarks of achievement. For example, a brief sampling of the standards for student advancement in the area of painting and sculpture (c.1796) included: the skill to draw “eyes, ears, feet, hands, heads copied from the best plaster casts”; the knowledge to make treaties on geometry and figure drawing, the five orders of classical architecture, human anatomy, and proportion; and the ability to portray naturalistic draping.41 Similar to art instruction today, painting students learned color theory and application techniques only after having first mastered the art of drawing, or as the faculty articulated, when the student had demonstrated his ability to faithfully copy any object.42 From this curricular snapshot, two issues leap from the page. First, drawing lay at the core of the RASC’s program. In other words, among the many skills taught at the academy, draftsmanship ranked as most important. Second, the method for perfecting students’ drawing skills was found in copying the most celebrated artworks of antiquity.43 Of course, the lack of classical art in New Spain posed an initial pedagogical problem. While European students had ample access to surviving ruins or newly excavated objects, students in New Spain lacked firsthand exposure to Greco-Roman art. With no preceding tradition of classicism, colonial residents knew little about the canon. Their limited familiarity derived primarily through prints and cameo reliefs.44 Even Inspector José de Gálvez—a bureaucrat, not an art professional—recognized the scarcity of resources. In 1776, he ordered the Academy of San Fernando to prepare and ship a collection of art to Mexico. However, this mandate was not fulfilled. Two years later, as Gil made ready to relocate to New Spain, Gálvez again intervened. In the name 39

The processes of enrollment and advancement are discussed in Brown, La Academia de San Carlos, vol. II, pp. 47–60. 40 This number is based on the annual renewal of student scholarships determined by the school’s statutes. See “Real Estatutos de 1784”, p. 47. 41 “ojos, oejas, pies, manos, cabezas, copiados de los mejores modelos de yeso que conserva esta Real Academia … ”. El Archivo de la Antigua Academia de San Carlos, Doc. 910, reproduced in Báez Macías, Historia de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, p. 257. 42 Báez Macías, Historia de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, p. 258. 43 For examples, see Bargellini, Guía que permite captar lo bello. 44 Fuentes, “Art and Pedagogy”, p. 231.

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of the king, he commanded the academy to furnish Gil with “all the materials necessary in order to found a school of printmaking in Mexico. Immediately, without delay”!45 This time, perhaps due to the urgency communicated in the mandate and the influence of Gálvez’ title as Minister of the Indies, he got results. The faculty at the Academy of San Fernando prepared for Gil a collection comprised of a dozen heads and busts, as well as white paste miniatures.46 While this collection met the needs of the Provisional School of Drawing it lacked the breadth and polish to serve a reputable Fine Arts academy. Expressing his belief that the school was only as good as the resources it managed, Gil wrote to the Junta Superior de Gobierno or the top governing committee of the RASC in 1790 to request additional teaching aids: … in all Art Academies instruction is based on the admirable works of Antiquity existing in Rome and elsewhere … collected and conserved, these materials [plaster casts and replicas] incite youth to follow in the footsteps of the masters—those [artists] who left their names to posterity and those [whose accomplishments] have forever been the wonderment of all time.47 Gil’s plea prompted the Junta to approve funding for a large order of Greek, Roman, and Renaissance plaster casts. Once again, the Academy of San Fernando obliged by preparing the collection. This time, however, the shipment included 192 pieces of full statues, torsos, busts, heads, and reliefs. The artworks traveled by wagon from Madrid to the port of Cádiz. They were then shipped to Cuba aboard the merchant vessel Santa Paula and onward to Veracruz via the frigate Florida Blanca. After making the overland journey to Mexico City, the artworks arrived in 1792.48 Valencia-born Spanish sculptor Manuel Tolsá accompanied the cargo and oversaw its safe transit. Having attended the 45 “todos aquellos materiales necesarios para la fundación de una escuela de grabado en México”. Quoted in Brown, La Academia de San Carlos de la Nueva España, vol. I, p. 48. 46 Fuentes, “Art and Pedagogy”, p. 230. 47 “… en todas las del mundo [academias de arte] éste ha sido el principal objeto […] consiguiendo por este medio bien cumplidos sus nobles designios, en la producción de célebres artífices que sucesivamente han dado a luz otras Academias [de] baciados de admirables estatuas de la Antigüedad que hay en Roma y otras partes […] cuyas obras recopiladas en una Academia incitan a los jóvenes, a seguir las huellas de aquellos que por dejar su nombre la posteridad han sido siempre el pasmo de los siglos”, quoted in Bargellini, Guía que permite captar lo bello, p. 25. 48 Brown, La Academia de San Carlos, vol. II, pp. 12–13.

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Academy of San Carlos in Valencia and the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Tolsá came to Mexico to fill the position of Director of Sculpture. A consummate professional in all regards, Tolsá made molds of the precious artworks prior to their 15-month journey. With the addition of a proper art collection, the RASC’s reputation soared; only then was it equal to the European academies.49 According to art historian Thomas Brown, faculty displayed the plaster casts in the school’s gallery where the collection could simultaneously support student instruction and elicit public admiration (Figure 19.2). Lined up and artfully arranged, the artworks must indeed have been breathtaking. Evidence that the community held them in high esteem comes from the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who visited Mexico City in 1803. Upon touring the RASC, Humboldt was “astonished” by the artworks he encountered there, for instance, casts of the Apollo Belvedere and Laocoön. Commenting on the academy’s nonpareil collection, he thought it “a much finer and more complete collection of casts than [was] to be found in any part of Germany”.50 It is worth noting that Alexander von Humboldt published his observations in a four-volume series, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, in 1811. This manuscript circulated widely in Europe, and consequently, informed audiences abroad of the treasures conserved by the colonial academy. 6

Experiencing Fine Art and Bourbon Imperialism

From the Iberian Peninsula to Spanish America, all Fine Arts students created work in accordance with the rules of “good taste” and in agreement with imperial agenda. In New Spain, the contributions of students and faculty had the additional effect of transforming the art and architecture of Mexico City from colonial and Baroque to imperial and neo-Classical. Residents as well as travelers witnessed these changes. Impressed with what he saw as the “progress of the arts in the last thirty years”, Humboldt, for example, remarked that the “palaces” (hotels) of Mexico City left him “in a recollection of grandeur”.51 Just as the physical landscape of the colony reflected Bourbon imperialism, so too did the institutional landscape of the RASC. True to the spirit of the Bourbon Reforms, positions of leadership were reserved for peninsular-born Spaniards. This illustrates the Crown’s “will-to-order” and its desire to rein back 49 Fuentes, “Art and Pedagogy”, pp. 231–232. 50 Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, vol. I, p. 212. 51 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 30–32.

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figure 19.2 Plaster Cast of Michelangelo’s Moses, late 18th century

colonial autonomy through royal bureaucracies that cloned Bourbon power.52 The RASC’s general admission policies and occupational courses furthermore addressed the Crown’s need to grow human capital out of what it regarded as an uncultivated surfeit of colonial subjects. 52

Widdifield, “Manuel Tolsá’s Equestrian Portrait”, p. 64.

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7 Students From 1778 to 1821, approximately 4,000 students attended classes at the RASC. The student body consisted of predominately poor artisans who took basic drawing courses in hopes of polishing their trade skills or to acquire other professional knowledge, such as arithmetic. Indeed, an admission record dated 1795 verifies pupils’ interests in learning occupational skills rather the expertise required of a career artist. According to the report, out of the 80 students admitted to the RASC that year, 27 stated their desire to learn only the rudiments of drawing; likewise, almost 30 individuals enrolled in basic math courses. Scarcely any students, just three or four, requested admittance to the painting program, and only one individual desired to study architecture. As art historian Jonathan Brown observes, the RASC’s commitment to artisan and miscellaneous trade skills development coincided perfectly with the mission of the school, which was to increase individual and national productivity by spreading “useful and practical knowledge”.53 Although thousands of students attended the RASC, very few graduated from the program and went on to become professional artists. Those who did complete the course of study were generally pensioned students who received an annual stipend of about 400 pesos up to a period of 12 years.54 In total, the school granted 16 pensions to economically-challenged students whose remarkable talents warranted underwriting. The 16 pensions were distributed evenly across the four departments—with one-quarter of the scholarships going to Amerindian students, exclusively.55 While care in the distribution of pensions to Amerindian students might read as progressive, this measure had its basis in the Crown’s desire to integrate, and thus control, indigenous groups. At the close of the 18th century, prevailing attitude still held that Amerindian populations were backwards and in need of cultural assimilation. Contemporary scholars take notice of this attitude in a late 18th-century portrait of Viceroy Gálvez, Chief Patron or Vice-Protector of the RASC.56 Juxtaposing a towering full length portrait of the royal benefactor with two groups of child-size art students (the latter are also ethnically- and economically-differentiated), the

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Brown, La Academia de San Carlos, vol. 2, p. 44. A good example of a pensioner that carried forward the legacy of the RASC was Pedro Patiño Ixtolinque, a sculpture student who went on to serve as Director of Sculpture (appt. 1824–34) and Director-General (appt. 1826–34). Brown, vol. 2, p. 60. See also, “Real Estatutos de 1784”. This painting is held by the Museo Nacional del Virreinato, in Tepotzotlán, Mexico. For a discussion of it, see Brown, “Portrait of Don Matías de Gálvez”.

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painting uses hierarchy of scale to illustrate the paternalistic ideology that lay at the core of Spanish colonialism. On a separate note, the ethnic inclusivity of the student body did offer something of an anomaly. In Spanish America, social privilege was traditionally determined by race; pureblood Spaniards occupied the top of the social ladder and Amerindians occupied the bottom of the ladder in the company of mixedrace persons.57 Consequently, the fact that Amerindians studied indiscriminately alongside Spaniards at the RASC struck observers of this phenomenon as newsworthy. For instance, during his 1803 visit to the school, Humboldt noted: In this assemblage (and this is very remarkable in the midst of a country where the prejudices of the nobility against the castes are so inveterate) rank, color, and race is confounded: we see the Indian and the Mestizo sitting beside the white, and the son of a poor artisan in emulation with the children of the great lords of the country.58 In addition to providing professional development to the colonial population at large, all students of the RASC could aspire to the degree of Academician of Merit, a title equivalent to today’s Doctor of Fine Arts. By special order of Charles III, this distinction conferred nobility on its beholder regardless of birth status—meaning that a talented, low-born Amerindian artist could become the social equal of a Spanish nobleman.59 By all accounts, faculty lavished attention on pensioners, treating the latter as an investment in both the future of the school and the state of the arts in New Spain. Fabregat, for example, noted two types of students who attended the RASC: regular ones and pensioned ones. Regarding pensioners, he stated that these individuals were “determined to pursue their careers in art until they had achieved perfection”. For this reason, he justified the “special” and “careful” attention faculty gave them.60 But if student records suggest ethnic inclusivity, management of the RASC did not. Run as any royal bureaucracy, the school placed peninsular-born Spaniards in positions of power over Creoles and other locals. To explain how the chain of command at the RASC exemplified Bourbon

57

For more information about race, ethnicity, and social hierarchy in Spanish America, see Katzew, Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. Spaniards brought sub-Saharan Africans to the colony in the early 16th century to serve as slave labor. 58 Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, vol. 1, p. 161. 59 Charlot, Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, p. 54. 60 “están determinados a seguir sus carreras en el arte hasta lograr la perfección”. “ … atención cuidadosa y especial”. Quoted in Brown, La Academia de San Carlos, vol. 2, p. 61.

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bureaucracy, it is necessary to review top leadership positions and the social qualifications required to hold office. 8

Administrators and Faculty

In compliance with all Spanish art academies, the RASC was managed by a protector, president, and four committees. These committees included the Junta Superior de Gobierno, Junta Ordinario, Junta Publica, and the Junta ­General. As historian Susan Deans-Smith notes, the two most influential of the four were the Junta Superior and the Junta Ordinario.61 The Junta Superior, or supreme committee, consisted of the viceroy as vice-protector, the president, a secretary, anywhere from five to nine councilors, and several honorary ­academicians. Having the viceroy at the helm of the RASC ensured that the school received protection and sponsorship from the Crown. In order to hold the position of president, an individual needed to be a high-ranking member of colonial society; a professional connection to the king improved one’s candidacy. The résumé of peninsular-born Spaniard, Ramón de Posada y Soto, who served as President of the RASC from 1788 to 1793, exemplifies the typical social props required to fill this position. In addition to his appointment at the school, de Posada was also employed as the Royal Attorney for the Court of Mexico City. The office of secretary, like the office of the president, required its holder to possess high status. Scientist, mathematician, and assayer at the Casa de Moneda, José Ignacio Bartolache, for example, performed the duties of the RASC’s first secretary from 1782 to 1785. Council seats on the Junta Superior were reserved for delegates representing the interests of the Mining Tribunal, the Merchant’s Guild, and the Mexico City Council. Importantly, these seats gave voice to the most powerful corporations in New Spain. Honorary ­academicians filled the remaining positions. Candidates to these posts were selected based on their political connections or potential to fundraise, or both.62 The Junta Ordinario, or regular committee, included members of the Junta Superior plus the school’s director-general, department heads and their assistants, and Academicians of Merit. Just as the Junta Superior included some of the most influential individuals living in the colony, so too did the Junta Ordinario. Aside from members of the superior board, the chief officer of the 61 62

Deans-Smith, “A Natural and Voluntary Dependence”, p. 280. Ibid., pp. 280–281. For a list of officeholders, see also Báez Macías, Historia de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, pp. 253–255.

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regular committee was the director-general of the RASC. With the exception of Gil, who held this position until his death in 1798, the three-year duty rotated among department directors. Because the duties of department directors held implications at the micro and macro levels, e.g., steering respective programs, contributing to the Junta Ordinario, and possibly serving as director-general of the RASC—selection of personnel to these posts prompted great deliberation. According to the Junta Superior, artists born and trained in New Spain were unqualified to serve in this capacity because they lacked education and expertise.63 As a result, the school found it necessary to recruit graduates from academies in Spain. In 1786, the Spanish faculty began to arrive. Chosen to lead the painting program were Andrés Ginés de Aguirre (appt. 1786–1800) and Cosme de Acuña (appt. 1786–89). Newly-appointed Director of Sculpture Manuel José Arias Centurión (appt. 1786–88) and Director of Architecture Antonio González Velázquez (appt. 1786–1810) accompanied the painters from Madrid. In Mexico City, the imported faculty joined Gil (appt. 1778–98), who continued to oversee the department of engraving, and military engineer Miguel Constanzó, who led the department of mathematics (appt. 1785–90). Spanish academician José Joaquín Fabregat joined the faculty one year later (appt. 1787–1807). Fabregat managed the department of metal plate engraving. Differences of opinion, unmet expectations, and death (of natural causes) led to staff turnover.64 Two of the most notable academicians to subsequently come on board were Ximeno y Planes, as director of painting (appt. 1796–1825), and Tolsá, as director of sculpture (appt. 1791–1810). 9

Power and Presence

Further insight into the flow of executive power comes from a funding request submitted by Tolsá in 1795. Going before the Junta Superior, Tolsá petitioned the council for permission to create additional plaster casts from the molds he made of the school’s art collection in 1791.65 Voicing his concern that someday the valuable artworks would begin to deteriorate, Tolsá pinpointed the rub in the RASC’s situation; which is to say, he recognized the school as being perpetually dependent on the Academy of San Fernando for its teaching materials— not to mention faculty. According to Tolsá, the vitality of the Mexican program 63 64 65

Deans-Smith, “A Natural and Voluntary Dependence”, p. 283. Ibid., pp. 283–287. See also Brown, La Academia de San Carlos, vol. 1, pp. 151–172. Brown, La Academia de San Carlos, vol. 2, p. 18.

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hinged on will of administrators abroad, persons who haphazardly decided when and what to apportion to the satellite institution. He therefore urged the council to take action and cited three reasons why the Junta should allow him to make the copies. First, doing so eliminate the need to transport spare bits and pieces from Spain. Second, professors would be able to keep copies in their studios. And third, the RASC could gift artworks to deserving citizens who might “adorn their homes” with them.66 Tolsá claimed the school’s ­generosity would be paid back in spades. By supplying residents with replicas, the school might educate the public on the principles of Fine Art. From the tone of his request, it is clear that Tolsá regarded his proposal as outreach, since he added to the record, “currently, this is foreign to them”.67 For reasons unspecified, the Junta Superior denied Tolsá’s request.68 Although one can only speculate as to why the committee refused him, it seems logical that authorities rejected the proposal for the same reason Tolsá fought for it. The board conceivably wished to strengthen, not sever, the school’s attachment to Madrid. In this case, the compulsory subordination of the RASC to the flagship school of San Fernando, offers an excellent example of the parallels between colonial government and bureaucratization. In addition to imparting information about imperial power dynamics, Tolsá’s plea sheds light on yet another issue: lack of public appreciation for neo-Classicism. By “public”, it is meant the general public or persons outside the direct scope of the RASC. Hence, the question that springs to mind is: where and how did colonial audiences, separate from the academy, learn about Fine Art? One way taste shaping occurred was through residents’ physical experiences of Mexico City. Referred to as “builders of neo-Classicism” by art historian Elizabeth Fuentes Rojas, the RASC’s students and faculty frequently applied their expertise to projects beyond the school.69 The sum of their labors helped to transform the art and architecture of Mexico City from local and idiosyncratic to imperial and uniform. This makeover remedied what some observers described as the unruliness of prior, colonial constructions, i.e., builders’ “lack of adherence to the Rules of their Art”.70 Contemporary accounts of architectural multiplicity and visual disharmony suggest that together with the introduction of the

66 “para adornar sus casas”. Quoted in ibid. 67 “por el momento son ajenos a ellas”. Quoted in ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Fuentes Rojas, La Academia de San Carlos. 70 “La ninguna sujeción de los Maestros de Arquitectura a las Reglas de su Arte”. Quoted in ­Carrillo y Gariel, Datos Sobre La Academia de San Carlos de Nueva España, vol. II, pp. 33–34.

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RASC came a newfound awareness of aesthetic styles. Evidence shows that this awareness likewise fed a collective discourse on colonial art and architecture. 10

The Equestrian Monument of Charles IV

No visual example speaks more strongly to changing aesthetic values of the viceroyalty than Tolsá’s bronze equestrian monument dedicated to Charles IV (Figure 19.3). Commissioned in 1795, the sculpture was completed and installed in the Plaza Mayor on 9 December 1803. Known today as el caballito or “the little horse”, this colossal statue measures almost five meters in height and weighs roughly six tons.71 The idea to erect a monument honoring Charles IV originated with Viceroy Miguel de la Grúa, Marquis of Branciforte (r. 1794–98). In 1795, Branciforte penned a letter to Manuel Godoy, Prime Minister of Spain, requesting permission to construct the statue. According to the viceroy, gazing upon the countenance of the monarch would bring comfort to his loyal vassals. The proposal sat well with Charles IV, and Godoy responded with approval.72 One imagines the plan sounded all the more attractive given the anti-royalist climate in neighboring France and the recent execution of French King Louis XVI, which occurred just two years earlier. Tolsá’s monument offered to the colonial public a studied discourse on the iconography of imperialism and the principles of neo-Classicism. Majestically towering above viewers, horse and rider sit upon a large pedestal. Tolsá rendered the steed, a breed of Mexican-Andalusian horses, in midstride.73 Head forward, ears alert, and legs moving in a diagonal pair, the animal demonstrates a cadenced trot or an advanced dressage step known as the piaffe. Viewers widely understood the display of man-over-nature mastery as analogous to the command that the rider or sovereign exercised over his people. The studied use of Roman imperial iconography furthermore suggests that Tolsá intended the sculpture to provoke rumination on Spanish colonialism. Clothed in a cloak and cuirass, the king wears the battle regalia of a Roman general. Other symbols of strength are seen in the laurel leaf crown, the baton of power extended in the king’s right hand, and the quiver of arrows—a visual

71 72 73

Today, the statue ornaments the Plaza Tolsá in Mexico City, which is located between the National Museum of Fine Art and the Palace of Mines. Bargellini, “La Lealtad Americana”, p. 210. For a discussion of the significance of this breed to ideas relating to colonial criollismo, see Widdifield, “Manuel Tolsá’s Equestrian Portrait”, pp. 67–69.

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figure 19.3 Manuel Tolsá, Equestrian Monument to Charles IV, 1796–1803

trope representing Spanish America—placed precariously underneath the horse’s right, rear hoof. In the tradition of equi magni, or equestrian portraiture, Tolsá’s design for the monument mirrored the ancient equestrian sculpture dedicated to Marcus Aurelius (c.175 A.D.), which featured as the centerpiece of the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome. As a trained academician, Tolsá’s familiarity with this artifact is certain. Assuredly, he also possessed knowledge of contemporary

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renditions of equestrian portraiture, for instance François Giradon’s equestrian portrait of Louis XIV, created 1683–92.74 Taking everything into account, it seems logical that Tolsá may have regarded the commission (at least partly) as an opportunity to educate the public on classical art. In other words, referencing the long tradition of equestrian portraiture enabled Tolsá to install, in the symbolic heart of Mexico City, the physical embodiment of a classroom lesson on neo-Classicism—in addition to serving the Crown and demonstrating his artistic virtuoso. It bears noting that Tolsá received the commission the same year he went before the Junta Superior complaining of the public’s lack of cultivation.75 Evidence that direct experience of the equestrian monument resonated positively with residents comes from a contemporary witness who noted that the presence of the sculpture “inspires and teaches us”.76 When finished, the bronze sculpture was to be placed in Plaza Mayor or the main plaza of Mexico City.77 Housing the viceregal palace, cathedral, town hall, and two marketplaces—the Parían, a luxury emporium, and an unnamed, foodstuffs market—the Plaza Mayor, more than any other location in the city, embodied imperial authority. Just before Branciforte took office the plaza underwent a rigorous renovation.78 Some of the changes it received included pavement, removal of the foodstuffs market, a thorough cleaning, and the rousting out of the homeless, as well as itinerant businesses like roving pulque sellers. Seeking to put his mark on the plaza, Branciforte hired Director of Architecture Gonzaléz to design a grand enclosure for the equestrian monument at its center. Gonzaléz planned an elliptical parapet, which featured four stately gates and a marcato of balusters topped with finials rendered in style of an ancient Etruscan vase. Inside the enclosure, a pattern of radiating pavers converged on the site where officials intended to place the monument. Oriented toward the east, horse and rider would face the viceregal palace in a model show of deference to Charles IV.

74 75 76 77 78

Bargellini, “La Lealtad Americana”, pp. 219–220. Brown, La Academia de San Carlos, vol. 2, p. 18. For example, according to contemporary observer José María Beristain y Sousa: “obra de las virtudes que ella nos enseña e inspira”. Quoted in Bargellini, “La Lealtad Americana”, p. 214. For a thorough discussion of the unveiling of the temporary statue, see Bargellini, “La Lealtad Americana”. Viceroy Juan Vicente de Güemes Pacheco de Padilla y Horcasitas, the Second Count of Revillagigedo (r. 1789–94), predecessor to Branciforte, made it a personal mission to remedy the neglect and disrepair of the Plaza Mayor. To help accomplish his goals, Revillagigedo hired guild-trained architect Ignacio Castera. For a description of the renovation see Salazar Híjar y Haro, Los Trotes del Caballito, pp. 39–48.

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figure 19.4 José Joaquín Fabregat, View of the Plaza Mayor, 1796

The redesign of the Plaza Mayor issued a powerful statement on Spanish imperialism and the changing artistic tastes of the colony. Both aspects are observable in a commemorative illustration drawn by Ximeno y Planes and engraved by Fabregat in 1796 (Figure 19.4). Made available to the public for purchase via subscription, the print shows what the plaza would look like once the permanent, bronze monument was installed. In this case, medium—a black and white print—offers a persuasive vehicle to communicate the radical transformation of the plaza. The local colorant of this location, i.e., Baroque architecture and spatial disorder are extirpated in this carefully-crafted vision of tasteful austerity and neo-Classical aesthetics. The engraving furthermore presents a lucid expression of the source from which Gonzaléz and Tolsá derived inspiration: the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome designed by Michelangelo in 1546.79 Like the Italian piazza, which exhibited the acclaimed equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, the Plaza Mayor in Mexico City bore its own monument to civilization. Unlike the piazza in Rome, however, this equestrian statue represented a golden age of Bourbon art, culture, and imperialism. As art historian Clara Bargellini notes, similarities between the plaza and the piazza were deliberate. In addition to delivering an eloquent expression of 79

One author who discusses design similarities is Uribe, Tolsá, Hombre de la Ilustración, pp. 62–69.

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“good taste” (and allegiance to the Crown), the renovation cast Mexico City as a symbolic New Rome. In other words, like the eternal city of Rome, which audiences universally admired as caput mundi or capital of the known world— staging the viceregal capital as nuvum caput mundi (new capital of the known world) proclaimed Mexico City the modern vanguard of classical grandeur.80 While the Plaza Mayor offered arguably the most visible example of neo-Classicism applied to the civic environment, it was not the only location where residents experienced cultural indoctrination. Throughout the city, the “builders of neo-Classicism” applied this aesthetic to everything from structural façades to water fountains and road markers. To give some indication of the flurry of activity, Tolsá—prolific sculptor and designer—contributed to scores of new constructions. Some of the most important commissions he handled included: final additions to the Mexico City Cathedral (1792), renovation of the Convento de Regina Coeli (1796), design of the Palacio de Minería (1797–1813), and plans for the Convento de Santa Teresa in Querétaro (1797). Of course, Tolsá was not the only neo-Classical practitioner at work; the RACS literally produced legions of discípulos or disciples.81 Preserved in the Archivo de la Antigua Academia de San Carlos, for example, are hundreds of architectural drawings drafted by student hopefuls. According to data compiled by Fuentes, their output surged during the years 1797, 1806, 1807, and 1809.82 Indeed, branching out across the colony to reach cities such as Puebla, Querétaro, and Morelia. Students and faculty of the RASC reshaped colonial visual culture. Deriving institutional authority from the RASC, they imposed on the physical and cultural landscape a classical aesthetic that simultaneously carried the stamp of imperial majesty. 11 Conclusion On 19 November 1803, the long-awaited, bronze equestrian monument embarked on its four-day journey across Mexico City. Taking to the streets at 10:30 that morning, the effigy traveled just less than three-quarters of a mile in four, long days.83 While on the one hand, the “enlivened” sculpture represented the omnipotence of the monarchy, on the other hand, Tolsá’s creation—­evoking 80 81 82 83

Bargellini, “La Lealtad Americana”, pp. 219–220. See also Deans-Smith, “Manuel Tolsá’s Equestrian Statue of Charles IV”, p. 14. “Real Estatutos de 1784”. Fuentes Rojas, La Academia de San Carlos, p. 61. Salazar Híjar y Haro, Los Trotes del Caballito, pp. 78–79.

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the spirit of Roman triumphus—sanctified the success of the RASC and heralded a bright future for Mexican art and culture. Residents gaped in wonder at horse and rider. “An artist who knew how to give movement to bronze”, wrote one observer; a creator whose name “will bury in oblivion those of Phidias, Praxiteles and Myron”, communicated another; author of a “modern marvel” that made Mexico “the theatre where all the tastes of Athens and Rhodes will be revived”.84 These were the terms in which audiences expressed admiration. While the groves of academe are inspired settings, they are ­(unfortunately) seldom conceived as the loci of dynamic social change or permutation; this is not true of the RASC. Throwing light on the operation of the school, its pedagogy and political functions, shatters misconception; it brings attention to the liveliness of the school and the buoyancy of its mission. Bibliography

Primary Sources



Secondary Literature

Humboldt, A. von, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, trans. J. Black, vol. 1, London, 1812.

Abelardo Carillo y Gariel, A., Datos sobre la Academia de San Carlos de Nueva España, Mexico City, 1939. Arcila Farías, E., Reformas económicas del siglo XVIII en Nueva España, Mexico City, 1974. Báez Macías, E., Historia de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1780–1910, Mexico City, 2009. Báez Macías, E., Jerónimo Antonio Gil y su traducción de Gérard Audran, Mexico City, 2001. Báez Macías, E., “La Academia de San Carlos en la Nueva España como instrumento de cambio”, in Las Academias de Arte, II Coloquio Internacional en Guanajuato, Mexico City, 1985. Bargellini, C., Guía que permite captar lo bello: yesos y dibujos de la Academia de San Carlos, 1778–1916, Mexico City, 1989. Bargellini, C., “La Lealtad Americana: el Significado e la Estatua Ecuestre de Carlos IV”, Iconología y Sociedad: Arte Colonial Hispanoamericano, Mexico City, 1987, pp. 209–220. Bargellini, C., and E. Fuentes Rojas (eds.), Clasicismo en México, Mexico City, 1990. Brading, D., “Bourbon Spain and Its American Empire”, in L. Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America: Colonial Latin America, Cambridge, 1984, vol. 1, pp. 389–440. 84

Quoted in Deans-Smith, “Manuel Tolsá’s Equestrian Statue of Charles IV”, p. 14.

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Brading, D., Church and State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoacán, 1740–1810, Cambridge, 1994. Brown, J., “Portrait of Don Matías de Gálvez”, in D. Pierce, R. Ruiz Gomar, and C. Bargellini (eds.), Painting a New World, Denver, pp. 246–249. Brown, T., La Academia de San Carlos de la Nueva España, vols. I-II, Mexico City, 1978. Carrera Stampa, M., Los gremios mexicanos; la organización gremial en Nueva España, 1521–1861, Mexico City, 1954. Charlot, J., Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, 1785–1915, Austin, 1962. Deans-Smith, S., “‘A Natural and Voluntary Dependence’: The Royal Academy of San Carlos and the Cultural Politics of Art Education in Mexico City, 1786–1797”, Bulletin of Latin American Research 29:3 (2010), pp. 278–295. Deans-Smith, S., “Manuel Tolsá’s Equestrian Statue of Charles IV and Buen Gusto in Late Colonial Mexico”, in P.B. Niell and S.G. Widdifield (eds.), Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910, Albuquerque, 2013, pp. 3–24. Donahue-Wallace, K., “A Taste for Art in Late Colonial New Spain”, in P.B. Niell and S.G. Widdifield (eds.), Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910, Albuquerque, 2013, pp. 93–113. Fuentes Rojas, E., “Art and Pedagogy in the Plaster Cast Collection of the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City”, in R. Frederiksen and E. Eckart Marchand, Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting, and Displaying, Berlin, 2010, pp. 229–247. Fuentes Rojas, E., et al., La Academia de San Carlos y los Constructores del Neoclásico, Mexico City, 2002. Katzew, I., “Algunos Datos Nuevos Sobre el Fundador de la Real Academia de San Carlos, Jerónimo Antonio Gil”, Memorai del Museo Nacional de Arte 7 (1998), pp. 31–65. Katzew, I., Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, New Haven, 2004. Lombardo, S., “Las Reformas Borbónicas en el Arte de la Nueva España (1781–1821)”, in E. Uribe (ed.), Y Todo … Por Una Nacíon: Historia Social del la Producción Plástica de la Ciudad de México, 1781–1910, Mexico City, 1987, pp. 31–65. MacLachlan, C., Spain’s Empire in the New World: The Role of Ideas in Institutional and Social Change, Berkeley, 1988, pp. 67–70. Rama, Á., The Lettered City, trans. J. Chasteen, Durham, 1996. Salazar Híjar y Haro, E., Los Trotes del Caballito: Una Historia para la Historia, Mexico City, 1999. Toussaint, M., Pintura Colonial en México, Mexico City, 1965. Uribe, E., Tolsá, Hombre de la Ilustración, Mexico City, 1990. Uribe, E., et al., Y Todo … Por Una Nacíon: Historia Social del la Producción Plástica de la Ciudad de México, 1781–1910, Mexico City, 1987. Widdifield, S.G., “Manuel Tolsá’s Equestrian Portrait of Charles IV: Art History, ­Patrimony and the City”, Journal X 8/1 (2003), pp. 61–83.

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Index 5-leagues jurisdiction. See also Royal Protomedicato of Castile, Royal Protomedicato of New Spain, medical regulation authority beyond 297 decree, 1646 294 inspections within 293 limited to 296, 297 travel prohibition external of 295 A Bucolic Description of the Lake of Mexico. See also Eugenio de Salazar abandoned children 96 Abbé Prévost Histoire Generales, 1754 46 Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture 448 Acapulco 121, 123 Acuña, Cosme de 458 adobe 51, 57, 69, 103 adolescence 98 adulthood 99 Aeneas 415 Aeneid 415 Afán de Ribera, Fernando 415 Afro-Mexican confraternities dissolvement of 91 identity formation 80, 88 integration into urban life 86 royal ordinance 91 subversion by 86 Afro-Mexicans Africanity 79 associations to wildness and primitivism 89 Christian life 84 comparision to Indian and Spanish republics 78 healing 82 identity formation 70, 84 marriage 79 population of 78, 80, 86 prohibitions of 77, 86, 91 slaves and servants 82

Spanish anxiety of 83, 88 Spanish ideas about occupations 77 Aguascalientes 294, 297 Aguiar y Seijas, Francisco de 152, 154 Aguilar, Francisco de 31 Aguirre, Andrés Ginés de 458 Ahasuerus. See also Payo Enríquez de Ribera Ajofrín, Francisco de 257, 258, 267 Alameda 99, 101, 109, 157, 222 Alava 200 Alavés, Juan de Relación historiada, 1633 flooding in poetry 409–10 Albornoz, Bernardino de alliance with Pedro Moya de Contreras 147 founding of a recogimiento 147 founding of the Convent of Regina Coeli 147 founding of the Order of the Immaculate Conception 143 quarrel with Alonso de Montúfar 143 alcalde de crimen (magistrate of the Audiencia’s criminal court) 315 alcalde ordinario (magistrate) 239 alcaldes mayores (head magistrates) 123 alcaldes ordinarios 315 Alcíbar, José de 443 Alencastre Noroña y Silva, Fernando de, 1st Duke of Linares arrival of 125, 226 commemoration of victories 126, 131 concern over criollo loyalty 225 funerary honors 117 metaphor of 127 urban reform 315 Alfonso VIII 173 alley 56, 57, 69 Almansa victory at 120–123, 125, 127 victory celebration 131 almotacen 284 Alonso el Sabio 285 Alonso, Amado 406

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468 altepeme. See also altepetl Mesoamerican city-states 32 Mexica 53 plural of altepetl 66 altepetl. See also altepeme deities of 64 Mexica 58 political organization of 68 Álvarez de Toledo, Antonio Sebastián, 2nd Marquis of Mancera 152, 153 Alzate y Ramírez, José Antonio de astronomical observations 353, 357 cabinet of curiosity 364 cartographic methods 318 collection of city plans 318 correspondence of 354 creation of scientific community 367 criollo ethnicity 360 criollo intellectual 229 debates on pre-Hispanic monoliths 366 desagüe. See also under Enrico Martínez Proyecto para desaguar la laguna de Tescuco 369 scientific argument against 368–371 Descripciones topográficas de la Ciudad de México 370, 371 Diario literario de México 366 editor of newspaper 365, 367 Gazeta de México 379 link between indigenous past and maps of Mexico City 324 mapping as a vehicle of history 323 maps for reorganization of parishes 318 patent for trash-collecting cart 369 periodicals of 366 Plano de la ciudad de México, 1769 318 Plano de Tenochtitlan, Corte de los emperadores, 1789 320 professional implications of Bourbon Reform 363 reaction to inauguration of the chair of botany 360 rejection of Linnean taxonomy 360–362, See also Carl Linneaus reworking of Ildefonso de Iniesta Bejarano’s map 320, 324 Royal School of Mines and Mining of the Royal Court. See also Royal School of Mines and Mining of the Royal Court

Index bypassed for directorship of 362 Suplemento a la famosa observación del tránsito de Venus por el disco del Sol 354 amigas school attendance by Juana Inés de la Cruz 268 elementary school 98, 267 Amilpas 145 Angola 76, 79, 91 Anonymous Conquistador 36, 44 Antwerp 397 Apodaca, Juan Ruiz 232 Apollo 115, 116, 405, 411 Apollo Belvedere 453 Aquinas, Thomas 407 Arabic models of governance contrast to Roman law 284 muhtasib and almotacen 284 Aragon annexation of medical institutions 292 municipal medical regulation 287 pharmaceutical colleges 286 revocation of fueros 292 Arana, Ignacio 108 Archconfraternity del Cordón 205 Archconfraternity of Nuestra Señora del Rosario 201, 248 Archconfraternity of the Holy Trinity 149 Archdiocese of Mexico City 238 Archduke Charles of Austria 120, 121, 223, 224, See also Charles III Archivo de la Antigua Academia de San Carlos 464 Archivo General de Indias 312, 316, 334 Archivo General de la Nación 316 Arias Centurión, Manuel José 458 Aristaeus 421 Aristotle influence on political community 163 natural philosophy and ethics of 269 scholasticism of 427 Army of the Three Guarantees 6 Arteaga, Nicolás de 196 artes de ingenio (ingenious arts) noble spirits 426 relationship to buen gusto 428, See also buen gusto asiento 114 Asunción, María de la 186 Asuntos Varios sobre Ciencias y Artes 366

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469

Index Atzacoalco 55 Audiencia abuses of 141 ambivalence of royal decrees 270 Colegio de San Juan de Letrán 274 disagreement with city council 230 disregard of a rumor of Black king and queen 88 founding of 217 interference from 271 letras y virtud 270 location of 226 medical regulation 283, 296 Mexico City 259 opposition to Pedro Moya de Contreras’ proposal 274 president of 218 rejection of 272 ruling in favor of cathedral and convent 148 suspension of Holy Week processions 91 viceregal government 232 Audran, Gérard The Proportions of the Human Body 450 Augustinians clash with First Provincial Council 142 Colegio de San Pablo 273 importance of 156 opposition to the Mercedarians 146 Parish of San Pablo Teopan 145, 155 Payo Enríquez de Ribera 415 relationship to Luis de Velasco the Younger 156 religious instruction 141 study of Nahuatl 145 support of 145 teaching of grammar 270 transfer of convent to 156 Aurelius, Marcus 461, 463 Austrian Alliance defeat at Brihuega 125 defeat at Villaviciosa 125 defeat of 121 departure from Madrid 126 enemy of 114 occupation of Madrid 126 Partition Treaty 120 second occupation of 126 shift in war 125 War of the Spanish Succession 129

Ave Maria 262 Axayacatl 43 ayuntamiento building of 354 Confraternity of Saint Catherine of Alexandria 186 governance of 160 poetry competition 407 remodel of 358 San Isidor Labrador 173 town hall 353 triumphal arch of. See also triumphal arch under Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora Azcapotzalco 345 Azoca, Luis López de 89 Aztacualpa 56 Aztec. See also Mexica accusation of idol worship, cannibalism, and sodomy 39 altepeme of 32 artist 383 colonial perception of 38 description of human sacrifice 40 justification for colonization 38 metropolis of 30 modern perception of 48 Orientalizing of 32 pantheon of 310 place of 413 religion 38 Triple Alliance 58 Aztec Empire discovery of 32 myth of 53 Spanish claims about 42 Tenochtitlan 192 Aztec hydraulics appreciation for 345–346 causeways, dikes, floodgates 332 floodgates 347 reconstruction of 332 Spanish belief of ineffectiveness 332 Bacallar y Sanna, Vicente 120 Bacchus 403 Báez Macías, Eduardo 443, 446 Baghdad 1 baile del volador 412 Balbuena, Bernardo de Grandeza mexicana, 1604 2, 404

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470 Banco de Avío Minero administrative funds 252 founding of 237, 252 industrial finance bank 252–253 Barbari, Jacopo de’ 338 Barcelona 120, 122 Bargellini, Clara 463 Baroque architecture of 463 art of 150, 397 artists of 208 celebrations 407 neo-Classical tensions 363, 427, 440, 444 poetry of 406, 422 processions of 182 retablos of 186 urban sociability 367 Barquera, Juan Wenceslao Sánchez de la 366 barrio Arabic-influenced term 59 as ethnic and religious communities 59 Candelaria Ometotixtlan de los Patos 61 colonial condition of 70 complaint against secular clergy 145 concentration of workers 62 in maps 323 religious composition 63 settlement of immigrants 59 shape of 57 Bartolache, José Ignacio assayer 457 astronomical observations 353, 357 commission of 353 editor of newspaper 367 Mercurio Volante, con noticias importantes y curiosas sobre varios asuntos de física y medicina, 1772–73 366, 379 professional implications of Bourbon Reform 362 report of findings 354 Suplemento a la famosa observación del tránsito de Venus por el disco del Sol 354 Basin of Mexico desagüe 344 enclosed hydrographic unit 335 in maps 334 mapping of in mathematical terms 343

Index rainfall 345 Basque community in New Spain 201 Confraternity of Our Lady of Aranzazu 195 culture and devotion in New Spain 201 devotion of 196 identity 200 landscape 196 region of 195 Batres, Leopoldo Plano de la Cuidad de Tenochtitlan en el año de 1519 = 1 Acatl, 1892 323 Battista Mantuano 263 Bautista, Juan 385, 390, 394 beef 63 Beijing 1 Bellini, Gentile 182 Benguela 78 Benítez, Fernando 410 Berenguer de Marquina, Félix 297 Berrio y Zaldívar, Miguel de 432, 434, 436 betrothal 102, 103 Bhabha, Homi 399 Biafara 78 Biblioteca Medicea Lorenziana 313 Bibliothèque National de France 323 biombo Hispanization of byōbu 11 Japanese folding screen 222, 313 Biombo de la Conquista de México y vista de la ciudad de México 11 Black Madonnas 200 bling 203 Bonaparte, Joseph 7, 231 Bonaparte, Napoleon alliance with 231 armies of 231 invasion of Spain 6, 298 Bonavia y Zapata, Bernardo 364 Bonstet, María Ana Teresa 395 Boot, Adrian 313 Bordone, Benedetto 45 Borunda, José Ignacio 367 Bossy, John 184 Botanical Garden buen gusto 358, See also buen gusto chair of botany 359 establishment of 359

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Index production of science 357 scientific node 363, 365 visit by Alexander von Humboldt 359, See also Alexander von Humboldt Bourbon monarchy absolutism 116 accession of Philip V 440 celebration of 130 change in appointment of viceroy 115 cult of 116 legitimacy of rule 131 opposition to 115 Bourbon Reform. See also Enlightenment absolutism 292 administrative implications 362 attack on guilds 106 buen gusto 426, 427, See also buen gusto ecclesiastical implications 160 economic liberalism 441 Enlightenment conception of power and reason 228 Enlightenment education 266 Enlightenment science 372 fiscal policies 441 goals of 130 impact on New Spain 425 impact on society 437 implications for governance 224, 424 implications for science 357 implications for viceregal power and influence 225 legislation of 440 limitation to size of retinue 225 medical regulation. See also Royal Protomedicato of Castile, Royal Protomedicato of New Spain, medical regulation challenges to 294–297 expansion of jurisdiction 294 implications of 292–294 revocation of fueros 293 privileges for peninsular-born Spaniards 453 rationale for mapping Mexico City 303 regulation of clothing 106 replacement of Baroque urban sociability 367 role of maps 314–317 role of maps for parish reform 317–318

471 role of science 356 Royal Academy of San Carlos (Mexico City) 440, See also Royal Academy of San Carlos (Mexico City) secularization of education 275, 277 spirit of 442 urban reform 227–229, 314–316 Bouttats, Gasper 196, 200 Bracamonte, Juan Diaz 123 Bran 78 Braun and Hogenberg Civitates orbis terrarum, 1572–1617 323 bread 63, 65, 208 Breviarium apostolorum 127 Brihuega celebration of victory at 131 commemoration of 126 victory at 120 Britain 223, 230 Brotherhood del Divino Salvador 157 Brotherhood of Charity 142 Brotherhood of Guadalupe 150 Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary 204 Brotherhood of Saint Catherine 143 Brotherhood of San Pedro 149, 154 Brotherhood of Santísimo Sacramento y Caridad 207 Brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament 142, 143 Brotherhoood of the Vera Cruz 140 Brown, Jonathan 455 Brown, Thomas 453 Bucareli, Antonio María de 228, 250 bucolic poetry 406 buen gusto. See also under Bourbon Reform aesthetic value, taste, and decorum 427 aesthetics of 453, 445 alignment with poetry 429 castas 432, 434 corporate benefit 430 development of 358 importance in Bourbon Reform 427 in art and architecture 427 in art, music, and literature 427 in music 427, 429 in New Spain 427 neo-Classicism 445 notion of 435 Plaza Mayor 463, See also Plaza Mayor

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472 buen gusto. (cont.) promotion of classical models 426 relationship to artes de ingenio (ingenious arts) 428, See also artes de ingenio (ingenious arts) relationship to social distinction 427 rhetoric of 427 role of the Gazeta de México 428, See also Gazeta de México secular sensiblity 430 social mobility 428 villancico 429, See also villancico Burke, Peter 171 Bustamante, Blas de 269 Bustamante, Carlos María de 366 Caballero, Diego 102 caballeros (hombre de bien) 102 cabildo advocate for Creole population 164 appointment of medical inspectors 290 constitutional right 164 election of members 163 Great Flood of 1629 169 importance of 164 in Lima 171 independence of 163 medical regulation 282, 289, See also Royal Protomedicato of New Spain, medical regulation members of 163 minutes of 175 on patron sainthood 165 political leadership 164 recognition of 164 role of 163, 164 root of Spanish rule 163 selection of San Felipe de Jesús as patron saint 165 structure of 163 taxes 164 Virgin of the Remedies 69 vote of 167 cabildo de naturales 67 Cabrera, Manuel de desagüe. See also under Enrico Martínez removal as desagüe supervisor 420 treatise on 420

Index Cabrera, Miguel commissions of 185 engraving industry 397 painter 1 portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 380 cacique assignment of tasks 258 Indian lord 264 mediator between Indian community and Spanish 264 prohibition of Latin 266 sons admitted to the Church 266 Cádiz 452 calcographic images 385 Calderón Quijano, José Antonio 215 Calderón, Antonio 154 California 259, 353 calpulli 205 calpultin 59 calzada de Guadalupe 416, 370 calzada de Iztapalapa 155, 345 calzada de Los Arcos 416 calzada de San Cosme 416 calzada de Tacuba 140, 141, 157, 257, 322, 416 calzada de Tepeyac 144 calzada de Tlacopan 140 Camargo, Diego Múñoz Historia de Tlaxcala 383 Campillo y Cossío, José del 441 canals acequia real 55 at Huehuetoca 347 colonial existence of 51, 57 crisscrossed the city 55, 101 diversion of 416 for the desagüe 333, See also under Enrico Martínez of Chapultepec 405 perimeter ring around city 317 places of courtship 96 reorganization of 316, 317 separation between Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco 56 water management system 308, 313 Cañas, Matías de 83 Candelaria Ometotixtlan de los Patos 61 Cañeque, Alejandro 115 cannibalism 38

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Index Cano Moctezuma sisters. See also Moctezuma granddaughters of Moctezuma 147 Cano, Juan 31, Cantares Mexicanos 1 Cape of Good Hope 9 capillas de visita (rural parishes) 259 Capuchins 153 Caracas 122 Caribbean 38, 260 caritas 208 Carmelites 146, 153, 154, 156, 416 Carnaval 116 Carta del padre Pedro de Morales de la Compañía de Jesús. See also Morales, Pedro cartilla 267, See also under Castile cartography Indian maps commissions of 303 house lots 304 method of surveying 305 Nahua mapmakers 304 pictographic writing system 304 pinturas (also known as) 307 units of measurement 305 water management 311 print industry importance to maps 318–322 printed maps of Mexico City 318–322 theory of positive emptiness 340 water management 303 Carvajal, Francisco de Trejo 333 Casa de Moneda 457, See also Royal Mint Casa Profesa. See also Jesuits founding of 146 funerary honors 117 music chapel of 432, 433 sermon for funerary honors 119 support for musicians 433 casa recoleta (community of contemplative life) 155 Casanova, Francisco 442 Casas, Bartolomé de las 384 Caso, Alfonso 323 casta painting. See also castas De español e india, mestizo 398 depiction of castas 380 depiction of prints 390

473 print culture 398, See also print culture racial distinction 397 racialization of Mexican society 189 castas. See also casta painting art collection 399 demographics of 304 material culture 398, 399 moral influence 122 print culture 377, 385, See also print culture sistema de castas 90 social mobility via credentialism 425 Castel, Juan Antonio 105, See also informal unions Castera, Ignacio 317, 321, 462 Castile cartilla 267, See also cartilla court of epicenter of empire 219 model for 220 move to Madrid, 1561 219 law, 1539 296 pharmacopoeia, 286 return to Bourbon rule 121 Castilla, Juan de 271, 272 Castilla, Luis de 144 Castilla, Miguel del 126–27 Castro y Figueroa, Pedro de, 1st Duke of la Conquista 226 catafalque 118, 123 Catalonia 121, 219 cátedras 271, 272 Cathedral of Toledo 268 Celaya 294, 296 census 18th century 59 arrival of slaves 189 ecclesiastical, 1777 60 Mexico City, 1753 103 population control, 1753 228 Cerda, Tomás Antonio de la, Conde de Paredes, Marquis de la Laguna 412, 413, 414, 421 Cerro de la Estrella 406 Cervantes Bello, Francisco Javier 249 Cervantes de Salazar, Francisco 2, 269 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 398 Cervantes, Vicente 359, 360

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474 Chacón, Miguel 296 Chalco 68, 416 Chapel of Aranzazu. See also Confraternity of Our Lady of Aranzazu, Virgin of Aranzazu artwork 196 completed in 195 Villalpando painting analysis 220, See also Cristóbal de Villalpando Villalpando program for 201 Chapel of San Cosme 155 Chapel of Santa Veracruz 143 chaplaincies 246 Chappe d’Auteroche, Jean Baptiste 353 Chapultepec 141, 358, 369, 405 Charles I 119 Charles II 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 124, 129, 131, 391, See also Duke of Alburquerque association with the catafalque 118, See also catafalque death of 223 establishment of military funerary honors 116 Charles III 116, 117, 121, 129, 393, 429, 433, 440, 441, 442, 443, 444, 456, See also Archduke Charles of Austria Charles IV 116, 231, 440, 460 Charles V 13, 31, 36, 39, See also Uppsala Map chatting 38 child birth 95, 96 Chimalpahín Quauhtlehuanitzin, Domingo de San Antón Muñón 90, 205 China 58 China Poblana 393 chinampas 56, 57, 60, 307 chinoiserie 10 Chocano Mena, Magdalena 388 chorography 168 Christ 151, 379, 390, 391, 396, 397 Christ of Totolapan 145 Christianization Indian conversion 64 process of 140 urbanization of 137 Church of la Redonda 149 Church of Nuestra Señora de la Bala 157 Church of San Bernardino de Siena 205

Index Church of San Felipe Neri 154 Church of San Francisco 408 Church of San Miguel 186 Church of Santo Domingo 87, 186 Church of the Hospital of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception and Jesus the Nazarene 116 Church of the Santísima Trinidad 154 Cicero 263, 396, 427 Cistercians 153 Ciudad de México, época colonial: Bibliografía 5 civitas 54, 58, 68, See also urbs civitates 53, 70 Clapera, Francisco 443 claustros 271 clergy feuds 138 cochineal 243 Codex Mendoza frontispiece abstracted lake 309 analysis of 307 city-centric territory 312 foundation of Tenochtitlan 305 Mexica as urban people 305 Mexica imperial history 324 water management 307 Codex Osuna 139 Codex Telleriano-Remensis 383 Codex Tlatelolco 383 Cofradía de la Preciossa Sangre de Cristo Señor Nuestro 87 Cofradía de los Morenos de San Benito 87 Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de la Merced 89 Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios 87 Colegio de Belén 156 Colegio de la Caridad 142 Colegio de Niñas 207 Colegio de San Gregorio 157, 146, 275 Colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola. See also Colegio de Vizcaínas Colegio de San Ildefonso 146, 273, 275, 276 Colegio de San Juan de Letrán 274, 276 Colegio de San Martín 266 Colegio de San Pablo 145, 156, 274 Colegio de San Pedro y San Pablo 146 Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. See also education under Indian

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Index attempt to revive 266 contents of library 263 education of Indian elites 310 founding of 144 Latin instruction 264, 269 print culture 384 Colegio de Vizcaínas. See also Colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola archival records for José Juárez commission 207 Colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola (also known as) 195 library of 201 Villalpando painting 196 Colegio Máximo 266, 273, 274 colegios-convictorios 273, 275 colegios-residencias 273 Company of Mary 276 Concepción, María de la 85 conceptionist conceptionist vs. anti-conceptionist debate between 407 view of Pope Paul V 407 vote in blood 407 Concha, Andrés de la 333 confraternal art 185 confraternity membership 79 organization of 86 confraternity historiography 185–86 Confraternity of la Soledad 147 Confraternity of las Ánimas del Purgatorio 205 Confraternity of Our Lady of Aranzazu. See also Chapel of Aranzazu, Virgin of Aranzazu architectural and visual program 200 Basque organization 195 celebration of feast of 200 Confraternity of Saint Catherine of Alexandria 186 Confraternity of San Benito 189 Confraternity of San Benito de Palermo 187 Confraternity of Santísimo Cristo de Burgos 249 Confraternity of the Holy Cross 185 Confraternity of the Merced 84, 87, 89 Confraternity of the Virgin of Guadalupe 187

475 confrères 209 Congo 76, 79 conjugal debt 106, See also marriage Conover, Cornelius 169 Conquest of Mexico as biography of Cortés 29 distortions of 43 exaggeration by Cortés 55 narrative of 43, 51, 54 conquistador gaze 32, 37, 42, See also Díaz del Castillo, Bernal Constantino, María Eugenia 365 Constantinople 1, 34, See also Istanbul Constanzó, Miguel 458 Consulado de Comerciantes financial agent of the Crown 243 location of 238 warehousers. See also merchants members of 240 Convent of Corpus Christi 225, 245 Convent of Jesús María 147, 245 Convent of la Encarnación 148, 245 Convent of la Piedad 156 Convent of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe 245 Convent of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Enseñanza Nueva) 245 Convent of Nuestra Señora de la Balvanera 152, 246 Convent of Nuestra Señora del Pilar (de la Enseñanza Antigua) 246 Convent of Porta Coelli 156 Convent of Regina Coeli 147, 245, 464 Convent of Saint Bernard 153 Convent of Saint Catherine 148 Convent of Saint Claire 144 Convent of San Agustín 84 Convent of San Bernardo 245 Convent of San Felipe de Jesús 153, 245 Convent of San Francisco de México 87 Convent of San Jerónimo 245 Convent of San José de Gracia 152, 245 Convent of San Juan de la Penitencia 148, 245 Convent of San Lorenzo 148, 245 Convent of San Sebastián 156 Convent of Santa Brígida 245 Convent of Santa Catalina de Sena 245 Convent of Santa Clara 147, 148, 245

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476 Convent of Santa Inés 148, 246 Convent of Santa Isabel 149, 246 Convent of Santa María la Redonda 87 Convent of Santa Teresa (Querétaro) 464 Convent of Santa Teresa la Antigua 245 Convent of Santa Teresa la Nueva 154, 245 Convent of Santa Teresa y San José 153 Convent of Soledad y Santa Cruz 156 Convent of the Immaculate Conception 245 Convent of Tlatelolco 141 convents in the Mixteca 156 Córdoba 32 Córdoba, Pedro Núñez de 333 Córdova, Francisco Fernández de 364 Corinthians 209 Corn Riot, 1692 118, 221 Corpus Christi 116, 142, 207 Correa, Juan 185, 205, 379 corregidor appointment of 163 approval of cabildo members 163 chief magistrate 403 king’s representative 163 return to Roman law 284 corregidores de indios 258 Cortes Castilian Cortes 164 comparison to Mexico City cabildo 164 defense of municipal medical rights 287 role in political structure of monarchy 177 Cortes de Cádiz 231 Cortés, Hernán arrival of 140 attribution of Nuremberg Map 36 civil lawsuits 38 conquest of Tenochtitlan 54 death of 38 deforestation 311 description of Tenochtitlan 29 distribution of land and Indians 260 founding of brotherhood 143 founding of Hospital de Jesús 140 founding of Mexico City 332 Hospital de la Purísima Concepción 181 investigation of 37 journey to Tenochtitlan 378 justification for conquest 39 literary trope of Tenochtitlan’s destruction 54

Index map provided by Moctezuma 36 myth about conquest 57 mythical piety 38 mythologizing of 129 narrative about Tenochtitlan 14, 31, 32, 34 orders for invasion 38 perceptions of Tenochtitlan 40 play on name 414 refuge at Totoltepec 140 relationship with Franciscans 140 residence of 37 Second Letter 36, 42, 303, 308 Spaniards with 42 statue of the Virgin of the Remedies 166 surrender of Moctezuma 43 Tlaxcalteca allies 43 use of religious images 385 view of Tenochtitlan 37 Council of the Indies 121, 218, 391, 444 print culture. See also print culture Council of Trent 145, 246 Count of Fuenclara 224, 226 Count of Galve 117, 118, 119, , 120, 121, 123, 127, 130 Counter Reformation 189, 427 Countess of Paredes, María Luisa Manrique de Lara 222 courtship breach of agreement 103 class difference 101 expression of manliness via weapons 101 formal procedures 100 implications of goat tattoo 100 risk of pregnancy 102 role of fashion 101 social spaces 101, See also saraos, paseo use of magic 100 Covarrubias, Luis 46, 47 Coyoacán 156 Coyoacán River 345 credit. See also merchants, ecclesiastical finance against pawned items 242 description of uses 237 for mercury 237 importance of Mexico City 239 institutions Banco de Avío Minero 237, See also Banco de Avío Minero

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477

Index Inquisition 249, See also Inquisition Monte de Piedad 237, See also Monte de Piedad lack thereof for mercury 240 relationship to investment 240 types of 237 Creed 262 Creole. See also criollo Creusa 415 criados mayores (senior servants), 217 criollo animosity between peninsulars and criollos 276 attendance at Colegio de San Ildefonso 275 Colegio de San Pedro y San Pablo 146 curriculum for 274 definition of 144, 435 education of 222, 267 homes of 222 importance of letras y virtud 270 income of 155 intellectual development of 272 Jesuit education 273 minority of 402 mother nuns 153 new privileged class 218 political relationships with 225 population of 160, 146 print culture 385, See also print culture racial distinctions 398 spirit of 410 study of Latin 272 cristianos viejos 267 Cristóbal (Black Creole slave) 83, 84 Croix, Carlos Francisco de, 1st Marquis de Croix commission of maps for urban reform 316 expulsion of the Jesuits 128, 131, , 317 funerary honors 117, 128 petition to cathedral clergy 433 Cromberger, Juan 37 Cruz, Josepha de la 85 Cruz, Mateo de la 85 Cuajimilpa 311 cuarteles antidote to social ill 315 in maps 316, 317, 321 jurisdiction of 160

organization into six quadrilateral spaces 315 organization of 316, 318 urban reform 315 Cuautitlán River 344, 346 Cuba 30, 44, 452 Cuepopan 56, 139, See also Santa María Tlaquechiuhcan Cueva, Juan de la 403, 404 Cummins, Thomas 384, 385 Curacao 122 curandero 295 Curcio-Nagy, Linda 115, 116 Cuzco 3, 139 Cyrene 421 De ortu et obitu partum 127 Deans-Smith, Susan 457 Deary, Terry Angry Aztecs 40 Decimus Ausonius 263 Denver Art Museum 390 Derramamiento de la sangre de christo, y de la Virgen María 87 desagüe. See also under Enrico Martínez Descartes, René 427 Descripción de la comarca de México i obra del desagüe de la laguna, 1608. See also under Enrico Martínez Despauterius 263 Diana 411 Diario literario de México 366, 367, 368, 379, See also under José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez Díaz del Castillo, Bernal as metaphor 29 conquistador lens 29 description of Cortés’ journey to Tenochtitlan 378 description of Tenochtitlan 29, 31, 37, 43 disbelief, wonder, and fear 30 distortions of Tenochtitlan 36 gaze of 37, See also conquistador gaze Maudslay translation, 1910 30 original manuscript 31 popularity of the passage 30 True History of the Conquest of New Spain 29, 31 Díaz, Diego 269 Díaz, Porfirio 328

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478 Diego (elderly slave) 89 Dierig, Sven 354 dike of San Lázaro 346 Diogenes 12, 22 Discalced Carmelites 90 Discalced Franciscans 146 Discalced of San Diego 90 disease death of ruler 57 return of, 1730s 58 smallpox 44, 57 Doctrina christiana breve traduzida en lengua Mexicana, 1546. See also Alonso de Molina Doctrina christiana en lengua Mexicana. See also Pedro de Gante doctrinal devotions Corpus Christi 116 Immaculate Conception 125 markers of ethnicity and class 195 Trinity 195 doctrinas (Indian parishes) 139, 275 doctrinero friars 261 Dominicans administration of 156 arrival of Alonso de Montúfar 142 bilingual texts 265 convent of 156 floating parish 59 founding of convents 148, 156 Indian language skills 156 intrusion by the Convent of la Encarnación 148 Oaxaca region 148 Porta Coeli 274 religious instruction 141 reluctance of 408 teaching of arts and theology 269 ties to the Virgin of the Rosary 204 Don Quixote. See also Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra dryads 406 Duchess of Aveiro 222 duende (spirit) 83, 84 Duke of Alburquerque 121, 122, 123, 123, 125, 127, See also Charles II Dukes of Alburquerque family of viceroys 220

Index Dürer, Albrecht Symmetry of the Human Body 443 ecclesiastical finance convent transactions 246 decapitalization 250 decline of 254 ground-rent contracts 244 haciendas as estate sureties 245 interest 244 irregular deposit certificates 244 long-term loans 243 real estate sureties 244 Echanez, Margarita 147 Edgerton, Samuel 338 Edson, Evelyn 338 el grito de Dolores 6, See also Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla El Mentor Mexicano. Papel Periódico Semanario sobre la Ilustración Popular en las Ciencias Económicas, Literatura y Artes, 1811 366 Elementos de oritognosia o del conocimiento de los fósiles, 1795 359, See also Andrés del Río Elhuyar, Fausto de cabinet of minerals 364 faculty 359 Royal School of Mines and Mining of the Royal Court. See also Royal School of Mines and Mining of the Royal Court director of 357 emparedamiento (shelter) of Santa Mónica 146 employment Indian exclusion of 61 Indian jobs 59 Indian trades 61 encomenderos. See also encomienda daughters of 147 definition of 218 descendents of 148 education of sons 270 former conquerors 260 trade 242 encomienda 260, See also encomenderos enconchados (mother-of-pearl inlays) 10

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479

Index England 114, 174 Enlightenment. See also Bourbon Reform Crown support for 276 economic liberalism 441 faith in technology 370 ideal official 232 ideals of 292 in New Spain 426 order and rationality 425 place in society 425 policies of 229 rationalist changes 426 relationship to neo-Classicism 444, See also buen gusto scholarly ethos 442 science 372 Enríquez de Ribera, Payo appointment to viceroy 416 bishop 157 comparison to Ahasuerus 420 death of Pedro Nuño de Colón, Duke of Veraguas 416 departure from New Spain 421 desagüe. See also under Enrico Martínez commission of hydraulic works 416 grave mistake 420 inspection of 419 doubt of judgment 417 entrance into Mexico City 418 founding of hospital, college, and convent 157 illegitimate son of 415 Juana Inés de la Cruz. See also Juana Inés de la Cruz commission of triumphal arch 422 Michoacán 415 miracle of the panecitos (bread rolls) 416, 417, 419, See also Saint Teresa poem by Diego de Ribera 421 poem by José López Avilés 414, 420 Virgin of Guadalupe 419, See also Virgin of Guadalupe Virgin of the Remedies 419, See also Virgin of the Remedies Enríquez, Martín 145, 186, 271, 272 enslavement of indigenous people 44 Erasmus 263, 269 Escalante, Tomás 118, 123

Escamilla González, Iván 115, 114 Escoiquiz, Juan de 98 Escudero de Rosas, Antonio 83 Espinosa, Pozuelo de desagüe 420, See also under Enrico Martínez Establishment of Medical Sciences 298 Estrada de Medinilla, María 410 Etymologiae 338 Euterpe 429 Extremadura 139, 140, 144 Fabregat, José Joaquín. See also Diego García Conde academic appointment 458 engraving of Plano General de México 321 engraving of Plaza Mayor 463 students at the Royal Academy of San Carlos (Mexico City) 456 Fagoaga, Francisco de 196 famine, 1772 369 Farfán, Pedro 271, 272 Feast of the Holy Cross 183 Feijóo y Montenegro, Benito Jerónimo Teatro crítico universal, 1726 441 Ferdinand II 385, 289 Ferdinand VI 116, 292 Ferdinand VII 231 Fernández de la Cueva, Francisco, 10th Duke of Alburquerque 223, 226 Fernández de la Cueva, Francisco, 8th Duke of Alburquerque 152 Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo 32 Fernández, Martín 269 festivals altars for 101 in poem 415 miraculous images 151 moros y cristianos 99 religious 99 socialization of gender 100 Tenochtitlan 40 toys and games 99 transvestism 101 Filgueira Valverde, José 29 Filsinger, Tomás 323 First Provincial Council 142, 288, 265, 387

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480 flood control desagüe. See also under Enrico Martínez plan to drain Basin of Mexico 312 European maps for 312 rebuilding hydaulic system 311 flooding number of and average of at Mexico City 332 number of and average of at Tenochtitlan 332 of 1555, 1580, 1604 332 of 1607 331, 332 of October 1555 345 Flores Clair, Eduardo 253 Flores Ribera, José Antonio de 388 Flórez, Antonio 229 Florida 259 Florida Blanca (frigate) 452 Foppens, Francisco 323 Forma y levantado de la cuidad de México 313. See also Juan Gómez de Trasmonte Foucault, Michel Of Other Spaces 8 Fourth Provincial Council 266 France 114, 116, 121, 223, 323, 431, 460 Franciscans arrival of 139, 139 clash with the First Provincial Council 142 complaints of 143 curtails on religious instructions 262 educational training of novices 269 establishment of Indian parish churches 56 founding of the Convent of San Juan de la Penitencia 148 from Extremadura 139 from Flanders 139 general commisioner for the Indies 143 impact on urban landscape 140 Indian education 141, See also education under Indian jurisdictional control 147 location in Mexico City 117 mission to Honduras 140 opposition to idolatry 144 petition by the Galván sisters 147 petition to supervise convent 143

Index presence in Mexico City 155 reinventing Christianity 66 religious instruction 141 sacred geography 64 San Buenaventura 274 San José de los Naturales 262 spritual guidances 140 stigmata 189 supervision of convents 148 supervision of the Convent of Santa Clara 147 welcome by Cortés 140 Francisco (elder Black man) 82 Francisco (slave) 82 Franco, Hernando 424 Francois, Marie 242 fuego sacro (erysipelas) 157 Fuentes Rojas, Elizabeth 459 fueros Bourbon Reform 293 city charters 284 continuation of 289 invoking of 295 limiting powers of the Royal Protomedicato of Castile 287 medical regulation 287 monarchial revocation of 292 municipal defense of 285 special rights and privileges to selfgovernance 283 support for 288 gachupines 276 Galen 276 Galicia 316 gallina ciega 99 Gallo, Rubén 2 Galván sisters 144, 147, See also under Franciscans Gálvez y Gallardo, José de 441 Gálvez y Madrid, Bernardo de 448, 455 Gálvez, José de 227, 230, 441, 451 García Conde, Diego Plano General de México 321, See also José Joaquín Fabregat García de Leonardo, María José Cuesta 117 Gaudichaudia Enrico Martinezii. See also Enrico Martínez Gavilán, Joaquín 360

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Index Gazeta de Literatura de México 366, 370, 379 Gazeta de México 229, 360, 364, 366, 398, 399, 429 See also José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez Gelofe 78 Gemeinschaft 52 Gemelli Careri, Giovanni Francesco 181, 182, 184 gender and family adolescence 97 female 97 female purity 97 male 97 motherhood 104 pre-adolescence 97 responsibilities of 103–104 spatially defined 97 views on 96, 105 Geography. See also Claudius Ptolemy Georgics. See also Virgil Germeten, Nicole von 189 Gerónima, Petronila 182 Gertsman, Elina 390 Gesellschaft 52 Getto, Giovanni 422 Gibraltar 119 Gil, Gerónimo Antonio 18th-century portrait of 446–447, 450 alumnus of the Royal Academy of San Fernando (Madrid) 441, 442, See also Royal Academy of San Fernando (Madrid) appointment to Director-General of the Royal Academy of San Carlos (Mexico City) 444 arrival of 442 cargo of trunks 443 commemorative medal design 444 death of 458 founding member of Royal Company of Printers and Bookmakers 442 hiring of local artists 443 library of 443 petition to Junta Superior 452 School of Engraving 443 Spanish academician 442 translation of art treatises 450 Gilberti, Maturino Diálogo de doctrina christiana, 1559 265

481 Latin grammar 263 Giradon, François 462 Girava Tarragonez, Jeronymo 44 Godoy, Manuel 231, 460 González Cruz, David 123 González Echevarría, Roberto 384 González Velázquez, Antonio 458, 462, 463 González, Cristina Cruz 84 González, Ruy desagüe proposal, 1555 348, See also desagüe under Enrico Martínez Goycoechea, Juan de 120, 123–125, 127 Gran canal del desagüe 328 Granada 32 Granados Salinas, Rosario Inés 347 Grandeza mexicana. See also Bernardo de Balbuena Great Flood of 1629 58, 150, 152, 153, 186 griegas invenciones 412 Grijalva, Juan de 205 grooming 192 Grúa, Miguel de la, 1st Marquis of Branciforte 460, 462 Gruzinski, Serge 40, 385, 390, 393 Guadalajara 282 Guanajuato 242, 283, 297, 359 Guatemala 123, 152, 259 Gudiel, Francisco desagüe proposal, 1555 345–348, See also desagüe under Enrico Martínez Güemes Pacheco de Padilla y Horcasitas, Juan Vicente de, 2nd Count of Revillagigedo acerbic discussion with José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez 369 commission of Plano General de México 321, See also Diego García Conde engineers of 369 medical regulation 294, 297, See also medical regulation place in Mexican history 232 Plaza Mayor redesign 358 Royal Palace redesign 358 urban reform 317, 369 urban space 228

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482 Güemes y Horcasitas, Juan Francisco de, 1st Count of Revillagigedo urban reform 316 viceroy appointment 224 Guevara, Baltasar Ladrón de 229 Guevara, Isabel de 147 Guild of Masons and Architects 445 Guinea-Bissau 78 Guipuzcoa 195, 196, 200 Gulch of Nochistongo 344 Gulf Coast 30, 442 Gulf of Mexico 328, 333, 345 Habermas, Jürgen 368 Habsburg monarchy 58, 115, 120, 130, 167, 176 Hail Mary 262, 268 Hanke, Lewis 215 Harley, J.B. The New Nature of Maps 341 Haro, Simón de 153 Hassig, Ross 238 Havana 122, 316 hay 61 Hercules 119 Hermitage of San Lucas 155 Hernán Cortés and the Fall of the Aztec Empire 47 Hernández, Francisco 290, 359 Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel 6, See also el grito de Dolores Historia de Tlaxcala. See also Diego Múñoz Camargo history of science cabinets of curiosity 363–365 cabinets of natural history 363 colonial science 357 diffusionist models 357 importance of scientific periodicals 365–368 public sphere 368 Hoberman, Louisa 241, 347 Holy Office 109, 238, 249, 393 Holy Sacrament 142, 143, 207–209 Holy Trinity of Mexico 85 Horace 427 Hospicio de la Misericordia 154 Hospicio de Pobres 228 Hospital de Amor de Dios 141 Hospital de Indios 141, 268

Index Hospital de Jesús 140, 181 Hospital de la Purísima Concepción 181, 182 Hospital de Nuestra Señora de los Desamparados 157 Hospital de San Hipólito 228 Hospital de San Juan de Dios 248 Hospital de San Lázaro 84, 157 Hospital Real de los Naturales 276 Hospitaller Order of Bethlehemites 157 Hospitaller Order of San Antonio de Abad 157 Hospitaller Order of San Juan de Dios 157 households 103 Huehuetoca 344, 347 Huitzilopochtli 39, 64, 166, 305, 308, 405 Humboldt, Alexander von appreciation for Mexico City’s scientific institutions 358, 359 ethnic inclusivity 456 impression of Mexico City 453 Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, 1811 453 tour of the Royal Academy of San Carlos (Mexico City) 453 visit to Botanical Garden 359 visit to Mexico City 357, 359, 363, 453, 453 Ibarra, José de 396 Iberian Peninsula 58, 164, 223, 453 Ieyasu, Tokugawa 11 iglesia de visita 261 iglesia mayor 141 Immaculate Conception 84, 125, 144, 407, 408 Indian. See also indios business activity 61 cabildos 258, 304 diet 65 education. See also Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco approach of Motolinía 261 approach of Sahagún 261 approaches to 266–267 biblical texts in Indian languages 265 compromise between friars and encomenderos 262 halting of biblical texts in Indian languages 264

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483

Index humanism 264 Latin instruction 264 maceguales and basic Christian tenets 262 prohibition of Latin 266 employment categories 61 indigeneity ancestral past 51 colonial indigeneity 51 torta metaphor 69 indigenous cosmopolitanism 65, 69–70 languages in Latin 260 population of 78 tribute abolishment of, 1810 66 as ontological levy 67 collection by merinos (indigenous officials) 67 Crown opposition to 260 marker of indigeneity 67 members in good standing 67 payment cards 67 under Bourbons 160 indios. See also Indian artisans and unskilled labor 63 bilingual 65 built environment as 57 classification of 59, 60 closer to Spanish way of life 61 colonial condition 70 concept of dependent on colonial institutions 66 differences among 59 invention of by Europeans 66 ontological difference with the Spanish 66 participation in urban activities 61 politics of colonialism 68 shared sense of citizenship 68 what it means to be 51 within Spanish city limits 68 indios del común. See also maceguales miserables 256 Inés (free mulatta) 83 Inés de la Cruz, Juana attendance at amiga school 268 Christmas carol 403 contents of library 396 exception to rule 268

Neptuno alegórico 414, 422 portrait of 380, 394 sonnet dedicated to 396 triumphal arch 421 informal unions 104, 105 Iniesta Bejarano, Ildefonso de 319, 320 Inquisition Afro-Mexican healers 81 arrest of María de Poblete 417 auto de fe 361 ban and confiscation of books 264 establishiment of 144 headquarters of 89, 156 home of 259 peyote 81 poem of 418 print culture. See also print culture censorship 393 Index of Prohibited Books 393 investigation of imprints 393 prohibition of imprints on taffeta 398 sonnets and songs 408 unlettered men and women 268 witchcraft 79, 80, 82 Isabella I 285, 289 Isidore of Seville 127, 338, 340 Isobeth 124 Istanbul 1, See also Constantinople Isthmus of Tehuantepec 361 Italy 129, 182, 184, 185, 431 Iturbide, Agustín de 6, 232 Iturrigaray, José de 231 Itzcoatl 308 Ixmiquilpan 153 Iztacalco 222 Iztapalapa 37, 370 jacales (adobe huts) 103 Japan 9 Jardín Botánico 229 Jerusalem 1, 34, 118, 137 Jerusalem, Ignacio 429 Jesuits arrival of 145, 265 Casa Profesa 117, 149, 150, 157, 203 castration of 90 celebration of relics 407 Church of San Pedro y San Pablo 157

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484 Jesuits (cont.) Colegio de San Gregorio 266 Colegio de San Martín 266 Colegio Máximo 273 colleges of 150 education of criollos 273 expulsion of 117, 128, 130, 160, 250, 275, 317, 356, 359 founding of colleges 145 Ignatian spiritual exercises 157 lack of convents 156 last rites 394 postulants 146 promotion of cults 157 San Andrés 157 support for new mendicant orders 149 Jesús de la Penitencia 147 Jesús María de México 85 Jesús, Felipe de 153 Jiménez, Francisco 330, See also Monumento hipsográfico under Enrico Martínez Johns, Adrian 377 Juan II 285 Juana (slave) 82 Juanes, Juan de 208 Juárez, José 185, 207 juez de provincia (provincial judge) 315 Junta Central 231 Junta de Policía del Ayuntamiento (Municipal Police Board) 446 Junta General 457 Junta Ordinario 457, 458 Junta Publica 457 Junta Superior 452, 457, 458, 459, 462 Jupiter 406 juras 115, See also royal oath ceremonies Justinian code 285 Juzgado de testamentos, capellanías, y obras pías 245, 247 Kagan, Richard 7, 168, 338 Kamen, Henry 125 Kant, Immanuel 12 Kimbundu 91 King Antiochus 118 King David 117, 118, 124, 127, 129 king of Persia 419 Kings of the Magi 152

Index Kuethe, Alan 130 Kuroshio Current 9 La Batalla Naval 207 La Enseñanza 276 La Nobilisima Ciudad de Mexico dividida en quarteles de orden del Exmo. S. Virrey D. Martin de Mayorga, Diciembre 12 de 1782. See also Manuel Villavicencio Lachmund, Jens 354 Lafora, Nicolás de 316 Lagunilla 186 Lake Chalco 335, 369, 370 Lake Mexico 333, 335, 346 Lake Texcoco 53, 54, 57, 395, 358, 370 Lake Xaltocan 335 Lake Zumpango 333, 344, 348 Laocoön and His Sons 448, 450, 453 Lara, Jaime 384 Last Supper altar dedicated to 207 association to Holy Sacrament 208 feathered triptych 207–208 painting of 208, 209 theme of 208 Latin distinction between educated and uneducated 268 Indian instructors of 263 Indian mastery of 263, See also education under Indian official language of the Roman Catholic Church 268–269 San José de los Naturales 141, See also San José de los Naturales study of 430 texts in 269 Latino, Juan 408 Laws of the Indies 7, 220, 283, 384 Legaria 156 Lempérière, Annick 215 León y Gama, Antonio de astronomical observations 353, 357 correspondence of 354 criollo ethnicity 360 criollo intellectual 229 debates on pre-Hispanic monoliths 367 post at Royal Mint 363, See also Royal Mint

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485

Index professional implications of Bourbon Reform 363 León, Joaquín Velázquez de 353 Leonard, Irving A., 408 Leopold I of Austria 114 letrado educational requirements of 269 educational supervisor of 268 ethnicity of 218 mastery of Latin 268 training of 406 letras y virtud 270 Letters from the Black Sea 422. See also Ovid libranza (payment order) 242. See also merchants Library of Congress 320 Life of the Blessed Fulgentius 415 Lima 3, 139, 163, 170, 357, 418 limpieza de sangre 272 Linati, Claudio 69 Linnaeus, Carl taxonomic system 276, 359, 360, 364, See also rejection of Linnean taxonomy under José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez Lipsett-Rivera, Sonya 77 Lobito 78 López Avilés, José bravey of archbishop 420 desagüe inauguration 418 mention of Juana Inés de la Cruz’ Neptuno alegórico 421 miracle of the panecitos (bread rolls) 417, See also Saint Teresa poem 418 poem for Payo Enríquez de Ribera 414, 415, 421 quote from Gregorio Nacianceno 421 López Capillas, Francisco 424 López de Gómara, Francisco 31, 37, 43 López de Legazpi, Miguel 9, See also Manila López de Pacheco, Diego, 7th Duke of Escalona, 7th Marquis of Villena 410, 412 López, Isabel 146 López, John F. 312 Lord’s Prayer 262, 267 Lorenzana Butrón, Francisco Antonio de 160, 317

Los Reyes 370 Losada, Teresa de 84 Louis XIV 114, 462 Louis XVI 460 love magic 82 Luanda 78 Lucia (mulatta slave) 82 Luzuriaga, Juan 200 Maccabees 118, 126, 128 maceguales 262, See also indios del común MacGregor, William 390 Madero, Alejo Bernabé 442 Madrid artwork 452 court departs from 122 enemy forces 121 general commisioner for the Indies 143 lack of bishop 172 native tutelary saint 172 occupation at 120 painters from 458 panecitos 419 rejection of Jesuit proposal 266 request of authorities in 271 Royal Academy of Medicine 363 Royal Academy of San Fernando 459 seat of royal court 174 second occupation of 126 Magón, José 398 maitl (hand symbol) 305 maize dietary staple 51 price of 68 production of 61 reliance of 65 Spanish appreciation for 70 Malinche 404 Mangino, Fernando José 443 Manhattan 44 Manila 9 Manila Galleon 9 Manrique de Lara, Leonor 415 Manrique de Zúñiga, Álvaro, 1st Marquis of Villamanrique 148 Manso y Zúñiga, Francisco 153 Mapa de Santa Cruz. See also Uppsala Map Mapeté (el Cardonal) 153 Marian icon 201, 204

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486 Mariana de Austria 170 Mariscal, Beatriz 407 Marquis de las Amarillas 226 Marquis of Croix 230 Marquis of Gelves 219 Marquis of Montesclaros 218 Marquis of Valero 224, 225 Marquis of Villena 219 Marquises of Cadereita 220 marriage amasiato (living together) 103 excuses for sexual relations 107 religous role model 105 sexual norms 106, See also conjugal debt Martial 396 Martina, Juana 105 Martínez, Enrico born Heinrich Martin 312 cartographer-turned-hydraulic engineer 328 desagüe canal from Lake Mexico to Lake Zumpango 333 desagüe canal 344 drainage of Lake Zumpango 333 historical context of 331–334 historiography of 430 in poem 415–416 lacuna in desagüe studies 330 plan of 312 plan to drain Basin of Mexico 328 proposals of 1555, 1580, and 1604 332 provisional dam 348 satisfactory review 348 scholarly attention 330 support for 333 tax on city property 333 Descripción de la comarca de México i obra del desagüe de la laguna, 1608 analysis of 312, 334–336 analysis of cartouche 341–344 analysis of desagüe strategy 344–345 cartographic fidelity 334 cartographic objectivity 343 comparison to Uppsala Map 348 coordinates as textual grid 341 evacuation of all things social 349 first professional map in service of flood control 330

Index geometrization of space 337–341 ideological position of cartouche 343 Mexico City’s coordinates 337 need for scholarly scrutiny 348 new epistemic orientation to nature 344 product of Renaissance geographic and cartographic knowledge 341 technologies of cartography 331 use of Ptolemaic system 340, See also Claudius Ptolemy description of desagüe proposal and cost 333 German by birth 328 Monumento hipsográfico description of 330 in honor of Enrico Martínez 328 laurel in eternal gratitude 330 location of 328 memorialization of colonial desagüe efforts 328 professional biography 328 Martínez, José Longinos 364 Martínez, María Elena 90 Mathes, Valerie 328 Mathes, W. Michael 347 matlazahuatl 65 Mausoleum of Halicarnassus 411 Mayorga y Ferrer, Martín de 230, 443 McKee, Stuart 386 mechanical arts 428 Medical Faculty of the Federal District 298 medical regulation. See also 5-leagues jurisdiction appointment of General Protomedico of the Indies 290 appointment of medial examiners 285 challenge to 5-leagues jurisdiction 291 decree, 1579 219 decree, 1588 286, 289 decree, 1743 293 decrees, 1535 and 1538 290 Decrees of Nueva Planta, 1707–16 292 destruction of medicine in poor condition 286 development of professional guilds and municipal colleges of medicine, pharmacy, and surgery 287 establishment of regulatory measures 282

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Index establishment of tribunal 285, 286 expansion to all of New Spain 297 extention to non-Spanish areas 294 importance of Mexico City 282 inspection of apothecary shops 286 inspection of pharmacies 282, 290 legal precendent 296, 297 license and fines 285, 295 local examiner 289 muhtasib 287, See also muhtasib protomedico appointment by viceroy 291 Reconquista 173 standardized pharmacopeia 286 Medina Picazo family 157 Medina Vargas, Cristóbal de 186 Melgarejo Santaella, Ambrosio Eugenio de 432, 434 Melgarejo Santaella, Antonio Eugenio 433, 437 memoria (report) 346 Mendelsohn, Andrew 354 Mendieta, Jerónimo de 42, 46, 384, 390 Mendoza family 148 Mendoza, Antonio de appointment of 217 medical regulation 290, See also medical regulation printing press 378 support for the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México 270 Mercedarians arrival of 146 founding of church and convent 146 institutions of 156 missions in Guatemala 146 merchants almanceneros (warehousers) 239 aristocratic titles 243 commercial credit and short-term loans 240 financial relationship to Indian communities 241 libranza (payment order) 242 members of elite class 243 need for liquidity 240 post-Independence 254 purchase contracts 241 regional partnerships 242

487 relationship to Royal Mint 242 reliance on credit 239 rescate advancement of money and supplies to miners 240 case study of Francisco de Cárdenas 240 distinction from loan 240 exchange of money for silver 240 process of 240 Mercurio Volante, con noticias importantes y curiosas sobre varios asuntos de física y medicina, 1772–73 366, See also José Ignacio Bartolache mercury. See also silver Mérida, Alonso de 357, See also Francisco Gudiel merinos 67, See also tribute under Indian meritocratic elite 68 mermaids 406 Mesoamerica Orientalization of 32 political culture 53 Spanish enslavement of 43 theory of 54 mestizaje 63 mestizos becoming of 70 Colegio de San Juan de Letrán 274 confraternities for 185 education of 272 granddaughters of Moctezuma 147 orphanage for 142 population of 78, 143, 304 relationship to mulattos 63 shared sense of citizenship 68 Spanish ancestry 425, 437 Spanish corporate identity 437 Metropolitan Cathedral 186, 187, 204, 207, 430 Mexica. See also Aztec altepeme 66 altepetl 58 apart from Spanish community 68 capital as double city 53 composition of 53 Culhua-Mexica 34 defeat of 57 fixation of 40

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488 Mexica. (cont.) migration account of 53 myth about 42 occupation of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco by others 58 population of 42 socio-spatial traits of 60 Mexican constitution 66 Mexico 6 México a través de los siglos 3, See also Vicente Riva Palacio Mexico City 19th-century growth 55 alternative narrative of 51 area of 55 barrios of 63 blurred lines between Mexico City and Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco 66 built environment of 51, 55 causeways of 55 city of three polities 68 civitas cristiana 11 comparison to Venice 183 cosmopolitanism of 13, 22, 58 demise of Indian population 58 developments of 58 diversity of Indian population 59 division into quarteles 228 ecological autonomy 61 emergence of new colonial order 67 ethnic diversity 59 immigration to 59 Indian identity formation 70 Indian labor 62 Indian republics 68 indigenous condition 70 modern 46 Nahuatl no longer lingua franca of city 65 never an indigenous metropolis 58 never fully Spanish 58 patron of science 354 paving of streets 228 population of 44, 51, 52, 56, 58, 60, 61, 63, 78, 192, 357 processions 181 public services 228 relationship to Asia 8 resemblance to Tenochtitlan 51

Index sense of history 54 social unrest, 1692 68 socio-spatial organization of 60 spatial differences between Spanish and others 60 spatial organization of 56 spatial segregation of 60 traza history 60 Tres diálogos latinos, 1554 38, See also Francisco Cervantes de Salazar unharmonious place 65 Michelangelo 463 Michoacán 265, 270, 415 Mignolo, Walter 12, 377 military engineering 115 military funerary honors affirming legitimacy of monarch 118 Casa Profesa 128, See also Casa Profesa Count of Galve 118, 120, See also Count of Galve Duke of Alburquerque 120 establishment of 116, 117 hosted in Mexico City, 1694 116 inaugurated in Madrid, 1683 118 Lima 117 mass of 119 revival of 117 sermon of 118, 119 soldiers as defenders of Christendom  118 mining areas of 88 Banco de Avío Minero 252, See also Banco de Avío Minero college of 276 dependence on credit 240 economic growth due to 247 education of engineers 359 financing of 241, 253 impact on economy 424 precious metals 240 regions of 242, 282 requirement of capital 252 Royal School of Mines and Mining of the Royal Court 357, See also Royal School of Mines and Mining of the Royal Court silver banks 241 technical developments of 359

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Index miserables. See also indios de común mitl (arrow symbol) 305 Mixteca 156 Mixtecs 59 Mixuca 55, 56 Mociño, José Mariano Royal Botanical Expedition, 1757–1820  359, 361, 364 Moctezuma court of 37 daughter of 31 death of 36, 404 encounter with Cortés 181 granddaughters of 147 guests of 43 Isabel Moctezuma Tecuichpochtzin, daughter of 31 map provided to Cortés 36 Moteuczoma 308 myth of surrender 36 narrative of surrender 43 Orientalizing of 32 play on name 414 Spanish arrival 30 Molina, Alonso de Doctrina christiana breve traduzida en lengua Mexicana, 1546 265, 378 Molina, Esteban de 153 Molina, Teresa de 153 monarchial metaphor allegorical sun casting rays 117 Good Shepherd 117, 119, 120, 126 King David 117, 124, 125, 127, 129, 131 os lampadis (mouth of a lamp) 127 sun shining down on subjects 119 monasterio-recogimiento 142 Monastery of la Merced 156 Monastery of San Francisco 114 Monastery of Santiago Tlatelolco 141 Moneda Street 150 Monroy, José Augustín 297 Monroy, Juan José 297 Monségur, Jean de 224 Monte de Piedad bylaws 250 founding of 237, 250 modeled after Madrid’s Monte de Piedad 250 Montúfar, Alonso de

489 arrival of 142 construction of cathedral 149 death of 144 First Provincial Council 142, See also First Provincial Council founding of convents 146 founding of hospice for the poor and insane 143 founding of parishes 143, 145 founding of the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe 144 longstanding aim of 155 partnership with cofradías 143 quarrel with Bernardino de Albornoz 143 second archbishop 264 Second Provincial Council 142, See also Second Provincial Council successor of 144 Monumento hipsográfico. See also under Enrico Martínez Morales, Ambrosio de 177 Morales, Cristóbal de 424 Morales, Pedro 407 Morelia 464 motherhood 97 Motolinía, Toribio de Benavente 62, 140, 261 Moya de Contreras, Pedro alliance with Bernardino de Albornoz 147 appointment to archbishop 265 appointment to royal inspector 144 archbishop 146 arrival of 144 clash with Ana de Soto 147 clash with Viceroy Martín Enríquez 145 completion of term 148 consolidation of episcopal control 146 financial support for 146 founding of the Brotherhood of San Pedro 149 founding of the Convent of Jesús María 147 founding of the Convent of the Order of Saint Jerome 147 impact on urban landscape 145 Indian education 266, See also education under Indian insistence on basic catechism 266 proposal to king 274

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490 Moya de Contreras, Pedro (cont.) rebellion by Galván sisters 147 submission of the Order of the Immaculate Conception 147 support for Jesuits 145 support for new mendicant orders 146 support for university 271 ties to the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe 150 univeristy bylaws championed by 272 Moyotlan 56 muhtasib 284, 287 mulattos accusations of 68 bull riding 102 Catholicism 86 classification of 258 confraternities of 86, 87, 185 demographics of 76 employment of 77, 267 healing rituals 80 integration into viceregal society 84 labor source 78 marriage of 79 midwife 81 mulata morisca 90 musicians 438 population of 78, 304 prohibitions of 86, 91 relationship to mestizos 63 scholarly lacuna 76 shared sense of citizenship 68 slavery and servitude 82 Spanish ancestry 426, 437 Spanish corporate identity 437 tribute of 260 urban dwellers 77 wills of 84 witchcraft 82 Museo de América 399 Museo Franz Mayer 11, 318 Museo Nacional de Historia 316, 386, 387 Museo Nacional del Virreinato 388 music culture. See also musicians castas 431 competition between Spaniards and castas 434 context of 426 importance of credentialism 430

Index importance of institutionalization 430 importance of music theory 430 importance of poetry 426 notion of splendor 424 opera 431 musicians. See also music culture Casa Profesa. See also Antonio Rafael Portillo y Segura castas 434 cathedral 1768 appeal to king 435 appalled by intrusion 433 corporate rules and tension over salaries 431 exclusive right to perform 430 lack of policy governing merit and salaries 432 organization into three groups 431, 434 resistance to other musicians 434 salaries of 431 sense of Spanishness 434 tension over salary 431 view of Antonio Rafael Portillo y Segura 433 Nacianceno, Gregorio 421 Nagasaki 165 Nahuas 32, 58 Nahuatl botanical taxonomy 316 doctrinas in 265 language 65 learning of by friars 263 lingua franca of city 65 study of 262 Naples 166 Narvaez, María 394 National Museum of Anthropology 46, 47 Naucalpan 64, 336 Navarra 200 Navarro, José María 355 Nebrija, Antonio de 263 Negrete, Juan 270 neo-Classicism design for Plaza Mayor 462–464 in New Spain 459, 460, 462, 464 lack of 451 popularity in Europe 445 tensions with the Baroque 445

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491

Index Neptune 405, 406, 414 Netherlands 114 New Mexico 146, 328 New Spain capital of 58 challenging assumptions about character 51 Christian kingdom 42 economy of 62 grooming fashion 63 indigenous condition 70 nature of city and indigeneity 52, See also indigeneity under Indian population of 59 Newe Zeitung, von dem Lande, das die Spanier funden haben ym 1521 Iare genant Jucatan 32 newts 406 Nine Years’ War 116, 119 Noble Arts 430, 450 noble savage 192 nobleza de privilegio (nobility of privilege) 425 Noche Triste 140, 419 Nonoalco 55 Nora, Pierre 183 Noreña, Miguel 330, See also Monumento hipsográfico under Enrico Martínez North America 353 North Pacific Gyre 9 Norway 353 Novo, Salvador Nueva grandeza mexicana 2 Nueva Madrileña Press 391 Nuño de Colón, Pedro, Duke of Veraguas 416 Nuremberg Chronicle 34 Nuremberg Map comparison to the Uppsala Map 13 depiction of people and canoes 44–45 depiction of the Basin of Mexico 308 hybridity of 34 impact on the European imagination 309 impetus for European copies 309 legacy of 322 modeled after Indian sources 308 outdated view 318

Spanish invention of Moctezuma’s surrender 36 studies of 34 Temixtitan 308 O’Donojú, Juan 232 O’Gorman, Edmundo 63 Oaxaca 148, 156 Observaciones sobre la Física, Historia Natural y Artes Útiles 366 Ochandiano, Diego de 333 Ocharte, Pablo 393 Ogilby, John America, 1670 39 oidor (audiencia judge) 123, 283 Omaña, Gregorio de 129 Oratory of San Felipe Neri 151, 154 Ordaz, Diego de 31 Order of Saint Jerome 147 Order of the Immaculate Conception administration of the Convent of the Order of Saint Jerome 147 built environment of 149 Convent of Santa Inés 148 criolla nuns 153 founding of 143 founding of the Convent of Jesús María 147 Indian nobility 146 joined by the Convent of Regina Coeli 147 mother superior 147 nuns of 148 submission to Pedro Moya de Contreras 148 supervision of dissenting nuns 153 support for the Convent of Santa Teresa y San José 147 transferance of nuns 147 Orozco, José Clemente 1 Ortiz, Juan 393, 398 Osuna, Francisco de advice on sex and procreation 106 duties of marriage 104 treatise on family life, 1531 95 Otomi in Tenochtitlan 58 language 65, 265 Ovid 422, 427

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492 Pablos, Juan 378 Pacheco y Osorio de Toledo, Rodrigo, 3rd Marquis of Cerralvo 152 Pacheco, Francisco Art of Painting 443 Pacific Northwest 361 Padilla Aguayo, Antonia Ceferina wife of 1st Count of Revillagigedo 226 Padrón, Ricardo 338 Palacio de Minería 464 Palacios, Gerónimo Martín 328 Palafox y Mendoza, Juan de bishop of Puebla 272 controversial 393 portrait of 394 removal of Marquis of Villena 219 Palomino, Antonio The Pictorial Museum and Optical Scale 443 Pan 406 panecitos (bread rolls) 416. See also under Saint Teresa Paoli, Giovanni 259 papal bull, 1599 87 parcialidades 257, 258, 267, 307 Parían 462 Paris 397 Parish church of Tlaxcala 390 Parish of Saint Catherine 143 Parish of San Juan 64 Parish of San Miguel Arcángel 154 Parish of San Pablo 64, 145 Parish of San Sebastián 64 Parish of Santa Catarina 186 Parish of Santa María la Redonda 64, 156 Parish of Santiago Tlatelolco 64 Parra, Juan Martínez de la 119 Parral 242 paseo 101 Paso y Troncoso, Francisco 313 patente 187 Patiño Ixtolinque, Pedro 455 patria 126, 163, 166, 177 patron saints cults of 168 election of 166, 167, 168 of early Christianity 166 political nature of 164, 165 spiritual connection to Rome 167

Index Paul V 408 Peace of Utrecht 223 Pedro de Gante Doctrina christiana en lengua Mexicana 265, 386 founder of San José de los Naturales 141 from Flanders 139 naming of barrios after Roman basilicas 139 portrait of 386 print culture 385, 386, 391. See also print culture San José de los Naturales 141, 207 pelados 63 peninsulars 116, 144 Peñón de los Baños 406 Peñón de Marqués 406 Peñón de Tepeapulco 406 Per signum crucis 262 Pérez de la Serna, Juan 152, 153 Pérez de Ribera, Juan 417 Peru 3, 139 Peter of Ghent. See also Pedro de Gante pharmacopeia. See also medical regulation Philip II 145, 167, 175, 266 Philip III 167, 175 Philip IV 114, 171 Philip of Anjou 117 Philip V banishment of disloyal bureaucrats 121 battle for the Crown 131, 223 championed as military hero 127 characterization of 124 decree, 1700 114 disloyal remarks about 121 Duke of Anjou 114 el Animoso (Beloved) 120 exalted as military hero 127 flees Madrid 121 glorification of military victories 120 lack of military experience 120 legitimacy to rule 116, 123 orders 20,000 masses 129 orders funerary honors 125, 127 orders victory celebration 131 revocation of fueros 292 start of the Bourbon monarchy in Spain 440 supporters of 121

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Index victory over Austrian Alliance 114 war against Austrian Alliance 129 Philippines Asian migration from 58 home for divorced and abandoned women, orphans, and wives of officials serving in 146 jurisdiction of the Holy Office 249, 259 missionaries to 259 silver trade 239 travelers to 146 Piazza del Campidoglio 461, 463 Piérica narración de la plausible pompa con que entró en esta imperial y nobilísima ciudad de México el excelentísimo señor conde de Paredes. See also under Juan Antonio Ramírez Santibáñez Pinto, Ana de 81 pintura. See also cartography Pizarro, Francisco 3 Plano de la ciudad de México. See also under José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez Plano de la Cuidad de Tenochtitlan en el año de 1519 = 1 Acatl. See also under Leopoldo Batres Plano de Tenochtitlan, Corte de los emperadores. See also under José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez Plano General de México. See also Diego García Conde engraving of 322 expense of 324 issued in London 322 modeled after 321 north orientation 322 Plano parcial de la Ciudad de México. See also Indian maps under cartography analysis of 308–311 cadastral map 307 water management 307, 311 Plato 263 Plautus 263 Plaza Mayor embodiment of imperial authority 462 importance of 463 in maps 320 installation of equestrian monument of Charles IV 460

493 redesign of 463 remedy neglect and disrepair of 462 plus ultra 119 Plutarch 263 Pobeda, Joseph de 122 Poblete, María de 417, 418 poetry as collective memory 407 Novohispanic 402, 406, 407 on flooding. See also flooding Spanish Golden Age 402 policía cristiana 150 polyphonic music 427, 430 Pope Clement IX 170 Pope Clement X 170 Pope Gregory I 380 Pope Gregory XIII 407 Pope Paul V 407 Pope Pius V 87 Pope Urban VIII 165 Popotla 419 Porta Coeli 156 Portillo y Segura, Antonio Rafael. See also Casa Profesa under musicians aesthetic relationship to buen gusto 434 See also buen gusto appeal to new aesthetic sensibilities  437 argument against 435 music director at Casa Profesa 432 patronage from influential figures 434 perception of ideological and aesthetic changes in music 435 petition to king to establish a music chapel at the univeristy 433 role of buen gusto to maneuver social terrain 437 viceroy petition to rehire at cathedral 432 Portugal 114 Portugal, Hernando de map of 347 tasked with assessing Gudiel’s proposal 347, See also Francisco Gudiel Posada y Soto, Ramón de 457 Posada, Ramón de 457 prendas 102, See also betrothal principales 262, 265

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494 print culture. See also printed-ness approval from Council of the Indies 391 censorship of 394–396 conquest of America 384 intaglio 380 legislation of 393 market of 394 memento mori 396 Nahuatl 378, 388 perception of 377 power of 384 printing press 402 role in evangelization 391 role in Mexican independence 379 Roman typeface 380 sacra conversazione 396 taffeta 398 texts and images in 391 typographic books 379, 380, 383 visual culture of 378, 380, 385 printed-ness 377, 390, 391, 399, 400 See also print culture prostitution 108 Protestantism 85 Provisional School of Drawing 449, 452 Provisional School of Fine Arts (Mexico City) 441 provisoratos (vicar generals) 151 Proyecto para desaguar la laguna de Tescuco 369, See also under José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez Ptolemy, Claudius 338, 339 Puebla 144, 282, 295, 296–298, 394, 416, 464 pueblos de indios 267 Puerto Principe 122 Pullan, Brian 184 pulque dietary staple 51 inebriation 65 sellers of 462 Spanish appreciation for 70 taverns 56, 315 treatise on. See also under Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora puppeteers 99 Queen Anne 122 Queen Isabel 142 Querétaro 282, 294, 295, 296, 464

Index Quintilian 263, 396 quinto 38 Quito 185 Rama, Ángel 388, 449 Ramírez de Prado, Marcos 415 Ramírez Santibáñez, Juan Antonio 414, 421 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista 45 Real Academia de la Historia 318 Real de los Catorce 294, 296 Real y mayor convictorio of Santa María de Santos 274 Real y Pontificia Universidad de México academic ceremonies at 222 buen gusto 426, See also buen gusto bylaws 271 conceptionist vote in blood 407 establishment of medical school 283 faculty of medicine 283 fees for degree 272 founding of 271, 402 history of 273–275 limpieza de sangre for degree of doctor 272 prohibition of oidores 272 types of degrees 270 recogimiento 97, 146, 147, 151, 152, 154 Recogimiento de Jesús de la Penitencia 147 Recogimiento de la Madre de Dios 143, 144, 146 Recogimiento de María Magdalena 154 Recogimiento de San Miguel de Belén 154 Recogimiento de Santa Mónica 152 Reconquista 139, 173, 283, 284 Regalismo 160 regidor 163, 164 Regio Patronato 138 regula 138 Relación breve de las fiestas que los artífices plateros celebraron a la Virgen María el día de su Inmaculada Concepción 408 Relación historiada. See also under Juan de Alavés relaciones de suceso (printed pamphlets) 120 repetidor 263 Republic of Letters 356 república de españoles 60, 78, 304

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Index república de indios 51, 60, 78, 304 rescate. See also under merchants Rhetorica christiana. See also under Diego de Valadés Ribera Argomanis, José de 192 Ribera, Diego de 421 Ribera, Payo de 152 Río, Andrés del Elementos de oritognosia o del conocimiento de los fósiles, 1795 359 Riva Palacio, Vicente 3, See also México a través de los siglos commission of Monumento hipsográfico. See also Monumento hipsográfico under Enrico Martínez Rivera Cambas, Manuel 215 Rivera, Diego 1 Robinson, A.H. 341 Robles, Antonio de 102, 204 Rodríguez Juárez (or Xuares), Francisco 318 Rodríguez Juárez, Nicolás 382, 396 Rodríguez, José Manuel 129 Roman Curia 170, 173 Roman law 284 Rome 1, 53, 138, 139, 171, 266, 397, 461 Romero de Terreros, Manuel 215 Romero de Terreros, Pedro 250 Rosario de Ahumada, Luisa María del 226 Rosenmüller, Christoph 121 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 427 Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando (Madrid) 396 Royal Academy of Medicine (Madrid) 363 Royal Academy of San Carlos (Mexico City) Academician of Merit 456 administration of 457–458 buen gusto 358, 427, See also buen gusto collection of 446–450 curriculum of 276, 450–451 dependence on the Academy of San Fernando 458 emergence of 441 faculty of 457–458 fellowships 455, 456 foundation of 440, 443 library of 449–450 new spatial node 357 prints 397

495 promotion of neo-Classicism 440, 444, 446–449, 450 racial requirement for admittance 428 recordkeeping activities 449 royal patronage of 442 scientific node 363 statutes of 446, 449 student body 455–457 Royal Academy of San Carlos (Valencia) 321, 321, 440 Royal Academy of San Fernando (Madrid) 440–442, 451–453, 459 Royal Academy of San Luis (Zaragoza) 440 Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain 359, 365 Royal Botanical Garden (Madrid) 361 Royal Company of Printers and Bookmakers 442 Royal Decree Consolidating Public Debt Securities 248, 249, 253 Royal Lottery 364 Royal Mint Antonio Gerónimo Gil 442, 448 buen gusto 358, See also buen gusto founded in 238 gathering at 440 José de Retes 241 location of 238 loss of monopoly 254 minting 441 production of 239 relationship to Banco de Avío Minero 252, See also Banco de Avío Minero relationship to merchants 241, See also merchants School of Engraving at 443 superintendent of 364 Royal Natural History Cabinet (Madrid) 361, 363 royal oath ceremonies 115 Royal Palace constructed by Cortés 221 description of building layout 221 destruction of in Corn Riot 118 dissemination of aristocratic values and norms 222 home to viceroys 221 in maps 320

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496 Royal Palace (cont.) location of 358 occupation by plebian tenants 227, See also Francisco Sedano reconstruction of 226 visit by Alexander von Humboldt 359, See also Alexander von Humboldt Royal Pharmacy (Madrid) 363 Royal Protomedicato of Castile. See also Royal Protomedicato of New Spain, medical regulation, and 5-leagues jurisdiction 5-leagues jurisdiction 293, 294 annexation of municipal medical institutions 292 centralization of royal authority 284, 285 challenges from municipalities 283 decree, 1737 293 dissolution of 298 fueros vs. royal authority 285 incursion into municipal jurisdiction 287 limitations of authority 286–289 modeled after Roman precedent 284 royal institution 283 Siete Partidas 285, See also Siete Partidas Royal Protomedicato of New Spain 283, See also Royal Protomedicato of Castile, medical regulation, 5-leagues jurisdiction challenges to authority 297 comparison to Castilian Protomedicato 282–283 dissolution of 298 expansion of jurisdiction 283 importance of cabildo 289–290 lawsuits against 283 modeled after Royal Protomedicato of Castile 284 Royal School of Mines and Mining of the Royal Court buen gusto 358, See also buen gusto Fausto de Elhuyar 359 Palacio de Minería 359 scientific node 357, 363, 365 Royal Treasury budgetary limits on procession for incoming viceroy 230

Index credit for mercury 230 debt owed 240 draw pensions from 218 location of 238 Mexico City 259 Rruyz [sic], Gerónimo flood control proposal, 1555 analysis of 345–346 Rubio Mañé, José Ignacio 215 Rubio y Salinas, Manuel 267 Ruiz, Bartolomé 81 Russian Empire 353 saeculum 138 Sagrario 60 Sahagún, Bernardino de 261 Saint Anthony 84 Saint Benito 87 Saint Cayetano 85 Saint Dominic 205 Saint Francis 205 Saint Hippolytus chapel of 140 conquering of Tenochtitlan 140 feast day of 166 hospice for the poor next to chapel of 143 patron saint of Mexico City 166 Saint Ignatius of Loyola 200, 201 Saint Iphigenia 87 Saint James 126, 139, 140, See also Reconquista Saint Jerome 380 Saint Joseph 85, 105, 166, 390 Saint Juan 84 Saint Lawrence 166 Saint Nicolas Tolentino 205 Saint Paul 166 Saint Peter 396, 397 Saint Peter Nolasco 409 Saint Rose of Lima 170 Saint Teresa 84, 167, 168, 416–419 Saint Theresa of Avila 394 Saint Thomas 397 sala del Crimen 154 Salazar, Eugenio de A Bucolic Description of the Lake of Mexico 404 foundation of Tenochtitlan 405

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Index mythologizing Tenochtitlan within GrecoRoman tradition 405–406 reference to classical literature 405 Silva de poesía 404 Sallmann, Jean-Michel 215 Sallust 263 San Agustín 154 San Agustín de las Cuevas 222, 358 San Ángel 222, 358 San Benito 84, 87, 189 San Buenaventura 273 San Cristóbal River 347 San Diego 83 San Felipe de Jesús 169 advocacy for 171 beatification of 165, 169 complicates notion of Creole identity 169 cult of 168, 169, 171 feast day of 171 Franciscan 165 hagiography of 169, 170 image of 85 importance of 165 lack of appeal 168–171, 175 life of 169 sainthood of first Mexican Creole 165 unknown before beatification 173 San Gregorio 157, 266 San Isidro Labrador advocacy for 173 association to Reconquista 173 association with Spanish monarchs 168, 174 canonization of 173, 174, See also Lope de Vega cristiano viejo 173 cult of 172 disadvantage to San Felipe de Jesús 172 hagiography of 173, 173 Madrid’s advocacy for 174 memory places 173, 174 miracle of 173, 174 patron saint of Madrid 171 prayers for successful invasion of England 174 selection of 167, 168s San Joaquín 156

497 San José de los Naturales. See also Pedro de Gante founding of 141 Indian education 141, See also education under Indian location in city 142 print culture 385, See also print culture religious instruction 262 school 207 San José del Cabo 353 San Juan 56 San Juan de Letrán (orphanage) 141 San Juan de Letrán Moyotlan 139, 141, 148 San Juan Tenochtitlan bordering of the traza 257 female names 64 governors of 68 Indians affiliated with 60 indigenous polity 51 labor categories in 61 occupation by Spanish 68 people of 51 politics of colonialism 69 social unrest 68 study of 51 tributary status 69 tribute roll, 1800 60 San Luis Potosí 242 San Miguel 60 San Miguel el Grande 297 San Pablo 64 San Pablo Teopan 139, 143, 155 San Roque 87 San Sebastián 56 San Sebastián Atzacualco 139, 142 Sánchez de Tagle family 121 Sánchez Muñoz, Sancho 148 Sánchez Obregón, Laurencio 403 Sánchez, Miguel 176 Santa Ana 172 Santa Cruz, Alonso de 309, See also Uppsala Map Santa María Cipac, Luis de 308 Santa María la Redonda 56 Santa María Tlaquechiuhcan 139, 148, See also Cuepopan Santa Marta 370 Santa Paula (merchant vessel) 452 Santa Veracruz 60

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498 Santiago de Guatemala 157 Santiago Tlatelolco bordering of the traza 257 Indians affiliated with 60 indigenous polity 51 location in city 142 occupation by Spanish 68 people of 51 politics of colonialism 69 study of 51 tributary status 69 Santísima Trinidad, Andrea de la 417 Santo Ángel 156 Santo Domingo 148, 156, 289 Santo Tomás la Palma 56 Santoyo, Felipe 396 saraos 101, 428 Sarría, Francisco Xavier 364 Schmidt, Benjamin 338 School of Engraving 440, 441, 443 School of Surgery:, 363 Scotus, Duns 407 Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista 183 Scuola Grande di San Rocco 201 Scuole Grande of Venice 184 Second Provincial Council 142 Secretario del Despacho Universal 120 secular clergy 151 Sedano, Francisco 226 sede vacante 149 Semanario Económico de Noticias Curiosas y Eruditas sobre Agricultura y demás Artes, Oficios, etcetera, 1808–10 366 Seminario de Minería 252 Sempat Assadourian, Carlos 239 Seneca 396 Senegambia 78 señores naturales (Indian lords) 258, See also cacique Sessa, Juan de 408 Sessé, Martín Royal Botanical Expedition, 1751–1808  359, 361, 364 Seville comparison with Tenochtitlan 32 Juan Cromberger 378 Sicily 217 Siete Partidas 285

Index Siglo de las Luces. See also Enlightenment Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de aindiado 414 print culture 379, See also print culture Teatro de virtudes políticas 414 treatise on pulque 403 triumphal arch 410, 421 university fee 272 Silva de poesía. See also Eugenio de Salazar silver establishment of banks 241 exportation of 239 mercury 237, 240 production of 239 similitude between king and viceroy 220– 221, 227 Siqueiros, David 1 slaughterhouse 61 slave punishment 89 slave revolts 88 slave trade 77, 78, 192 social norms 96 social unrest 117, 219 soldier viceroys 230 Solís, Antonio de Historia de la conquista de México, 1684 323 Solís, Martín de desagüe 420, See also under Enrico Martínez Solomon 411 Sombrerete 294, 297 Soto, Ana de 143, 147 Spain ally with France 114 cities and towns 32 court in 39 death of Charles II 223 departure for by Payo Enríquez de Ribera 421 first global superpower 7 military victories and defeats 121 silver trade 239 war against France 114 War of the Spanish Succession 121, See also War of the Spanish Succession Spiritual Exercises 196 Statutes of S. Maria della Morte in Bologna 192 Suárez de Peralta, Juan 260

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Index Sublimus Dei 384 Súmulas (logic) 269 Suplemento a la famosa observación del tránsito de Venus por el disco del Sol 354, 355 Tacitus 367 Tacuba 58 Tacubaya 222 Tacubaya River 345 Tahiti 353 tailor’s guild of the Holy Trinity 144 Tarahumara 388 tayacatl 56, 68 Taylor, William 176 Teatro crítico universal. See also Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro Teatro de virtudes políticas. See also Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora Tellechea, Miguel 388 Temascal de los Canales 108 temascales (sweat baths) 108 Tenochtitlan. See also Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco, Tlatelolco account of 37 African and Taíno population in 30, 43 aquatic urbanism 53, 257 architectural units 56 arrival of Cortés 378 arrival of the Spanish 6 assault on 38 Aztec capital 32, 304 barrios of 59 comparison to Constantinople and Jerusalem 34 comparison to Venice 34, 53, 308 conquest of 140 conquistador lens 29 conquistador perceptions of 30, 36–38, 40, 42 cues (Hispanization of Nahuatl term for temple) 30 defeat of 6 description by Bernal Díaz del Castillo 30 description of human sacrifice 38–40, 42 design and plan of 32, 34, 53 disbelief, wonder, and fear 30 emblematic metropolis 40

499 founding of 406 frozen in time 40 in the European imagination 29, 31, 36, 42 island of 42, 44 leadership 66 Mary Celeste view of 46 modern perception of 40, 44, 48 myth of population size 44 new civitas at 54 number of and average of floods 332 Orientalization of 32, 34 place in history 1 population of 44 representation of 32 ruins of 139 ruling lineage 68 separated from Tlatelolco by a canal 56 size of 44, 53 southeastern extension 56 Spanish flight from 140 Spanish occupation of 120 Spanish preservation of ruling lineage 66 Spanish settlement at 59 Spanish transformation of 38 Temistitan, also spelled as 44 Temixtitan, also spelled as 31 Templo Mayor 32, 140 wealth of and Spanish investigation of 37 Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco. See also Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco blurred lines between Mexico City and Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco 66 colonial domination of 66 demolition of temples 62 destruction of city as literary trope 54 double city of 52 ethnically diverse city 58 impact on former territory 55 myth about conquest 54, 57 not an imperial city 53 occupation by others 58 population decline due to smallpox 57 presence of Nahuas from Texcoco and Tacuba 58 presence of Otomi 58 sacred geography 64 secular rivalry 59

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500 Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco. (cont.) size of 55 taxation and trade 238 traza at odds with spatial structure of 55 Tenorio-Trillo, Mauricio 3 Teopan 56 Teotihuacan 1 Tepeyac. See also Virgin of Guadalupe competition with the shrine of the Virgin of the Remedies 150 procession of icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe to cathedral 186 shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe at 140, 144, 150, 152 Tepito 55 Tepotzotlán 266 tertulias 428 Texcoco 32, 44, 58, 305 textile industry 57 tezontle 57 The Imitation of Christ 264, See also ban and confiscation of books under Inquisition The Repentant Ones 147 Third Franciscan Order 144 Third Provincial Council 145, 149, 266 Thompson, Krista 203, See also bling tilma 106 Tintoretto 201, 208 tlacuilo 1, See also tlahcuilohqueh tlahcuilohqueh 1, See also tlacuilo Tlaloc 64, 307, 308 Tlatelolco 53, 263, 266. See also Tenochtitlan, TenochtitlanTlatelolco architectural units 56 barrios of 59 Brotherhood of Saint Catherine 143 dedicated to Saint James 139 in maps 319 independent polity 53 marketplace 37, 308 Spanish conquest of 139 territory 55 tributary to Tenochtitlan 53 Tlaxcala 38, 43, 68 tlaxilacalli 315 tlaxilacaltin 59 tlayacame 56

Index Toledo 153, 172 Tolsá, Manuel commissions of 464 Director of Sculpture 453 equestrian monument of Charles IV 460–462, 465 Palacio de Minería 464 petition to Junta Superior 457–458 Toltepec 418, 419 Tönnies, Ferdinand 52 Torquemada, Juan de 88 Torre Villar, Ernesto de la 215 Totoltepec 140, 150, 347, See also Virgin of the Remedies trajineros 258 translatio imperii 1, See also urbs imperatoria Transubstantiation 208, 209 transvestism 101 Trasmonte, Juan Gómez de architect 313 city maps 318 Forma y levantado de la cuidad de México 313, 314 maps by 313 maps concerned with water management 324 traza Afro-Mexicans in 78 argument by Edmundo O’Gorman 63 bordering of San Juan Tenochtitlan and Santiago Tlatelolco 257 bread roll as a metaphor for 69 disruption to aquatic urbanism 55 distribution of convents within 149 immigrants outside of 60 impact on Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco 55 location of Augustinians within 141 piecemeal construction 55 Renaissance grid 55, 257 settlement outside of 56, 60 size of 55 social implications of 97 Spanish occupation of 60, 258 surrounding indigenous barrios 139, 141 Trespalacios y Escandón, Domingo de 318 Trexler, Richard 184 Tribunal de Minería 252

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Index Tridentine 165, 184, 206 Tritons 405 Troncoso y Sotomayor, Baltasar 397 Troy 415 True Cross 183 Trujillo, Pedro 146 Tula River 345 Tuscany 129 tzompantli (skull rack) 305 University of Salamanca 272 Uppsala Map. See also Indian maps under cartography analysis of 311 comparison to Descripción de la comarca de México i obra del desagüe de la laguna 348 comparison to the Nuremberg Map 13 date of production 310 historization of Mexico City 349 Mapa de Santa Cruz 309 transcultural intersections 13 water management 311 urbs 53, 55, 57, 61, 65, 68, See also civitas urbs imperatoria 1, See also translatio imperii Urdaneta, Andrés de 9 ut pictoria poesis 429 Valadés, Diego de print culture 384, 390, 396, See also print culture Rhetorica christiana 385 Valdés, Manuel Antonio 229, 366 Valencia annexation of medical institutions 292 loss of by Bourbon forces 121 municipal medical regulation 287 returned to Bourbon rule 121 revocation of fueros 292 valido 218, 220 Valladolid 297 Valle, José del 84 Valle-Arizpe, Artemio de 215 Valley of Mexico 37, 43 van der Moere, Pieter 139. See also Pedro de Gante van Der Veer, Peter 12 vara 343

501 Vargas y Ponce, José de 396 Vargas, Melchor de 265 Vázquez Bullón family 147 Vázquez de Acuña, Juan, 1st Marquis de Casafuerte 224, 226 Vázquez, Gonzalo 269 vecino (resident of the city) 346 Vega, Feliciano de la 412 Vega, Garcilaso de la 405 Vega, Lope de advocacy for San Isidro Labrador 173 Labrador de Madrid, 1617 173 Velasco the Elder, Luis de call for desagüe proposals, 1555 332 commission of study of flood 345 rebuilding of Aztec dike 311 Velasco the Younger, Luis de biombo 11 breaking ground on the desagüe 348 call for desagüe proposals, 1607 332 confessor of 156 dedication to 88 Venegas de Saavedra y Ramínez de Arenzana, Francisco Javier 317 Venice 183 Venus 353, 411 Vera, José de 192 Veracruz arrival of Gerónimo Antonio Gil 442 disembarking at 410 fortification 123 medical inspectors 290 medical professionals 282 parish of 143 passage to Mexico City 115 Veracruz, Alonso de la 145, 270 Verdi Webster, Susan 185 Vesalius, Andreas On the Fabric of the Human Body 443 Vetancurt, Agustín de Tratado de la ciudad de México 216 viceregal adjective of 215 counterpoint to colonial 215 viceregal court historiography of 216 political implications of 217 workforce of 223 viceregal government 61, 67

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502 vicereine decline of courtly life 226 importance of 221 rise in social activity 226 viceroy decline of 226–230 from the Latin, vicerex 217 power and influence of 219 titles of 218 Viceroyalty of New Spain 282, 304 Viceroyalty of Peru 3 Victoria, Tomás Luis de 424 Viera, Juan de 186, 195, 203 View of Venice 338 Villagrá, Gaspar de 39 Villalpando, Cristóbal de argument for study of confraternities via art 185 Baroque painter 1 commission for Chapel of Aranzazu 196, See also Chapel for Aranzazu compositional model for colonial Mexico 196 European printed images 379 mimetic conceits 203 painting of the Virgin of the Rosary 203, 301, See also Virgin of the Rosary portrait of Saint Ignatius of Loyola 200 retablo de ánimas for Church of San Bernardino de Siena 205 View of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, 1695 9, 63, 398 villancico 429 Villaseñor y Sánchez, José Antonio de 316 Villavicencio, Manuel creator of religious images 324 engraver 319 La Nobilisima Ciudad de Mexico dividida en quarteles de orden del Exmo. S. Virrey D. Martin de Mayorga, Diciembre 12 de 1782 321 Villaviciosa 120, 125, 126, 129 Villegas, Alonso de 172 Virgil 263, 396, 421 Virgin del Carmen 205 Virgin Mary images of 151, 195, 379 print culture 398 woodcut prints of 378

Index Virgin of Aranzazu. See also Chapel of Aranzazu, Confraternity of Our Lady of Aranzazu historiography of 200 images of 200 link between devotion and Basque identity 200 sanctuary of 195 Virgin of Carmel 156 Virgin of Consolation 155 Virgin of Guadalupe association to Mexico City 260 cult of 258, 259, 260 devotional popularity 245 expression of Creole consciousness 258 favored by Indians 419 flooding 418 guadalupismo 274 hagiography of 258 pan-American devotion celebrating native roots 384–385 patroness of Extremadura 200 patroness of New Spain 85 printed account by Miguel Sánchez  259 role of 259, 260 sermons on 258 shrine of 200, 208, 219, 220, 223, 311, 358 tilma of 274 Virgin of La Piedad 222 Virgin of Limpieza Concepción 86 Virgin of Loreto 157 Virgin of Sorrows 391 Virgin of the Affliction 85 Virgin of the Assumption 84–85, 156 Virgin of the Immaculate Conception 84, 85, 156 Virgin of the Pillar 394 Virgin of the Remedies association with the conquest of Tenochtitlan 166 cult of 169, 419 display in cathedral 418 in cabildo minutes 175 in temple of Huitzilopochtli 166 local devotion from Naucalpan 64 patron saint of Mexico City 166, 169 procession of statue into Mexico City 69 rainfall 418

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503

Index removal of altar 419 shrine of 140, 150, 152, 222, 336 Visitas de la Virgen de los Remedios 419 War of the Spanish Succession 123 Virgin of the Rosary 201, 204, 398 Virgin of the Solitude 85 Visit of a Viceroy to the Cathedral of Mexico City, 1760 227 visitador (royal inspector) 145 Vives 263 Vizcaíno, Sebastián 328 Vizcaya 200 Voltaire 427 War of Independence 356 War of the Spanish Succession annual masses 129 impetus for political crisis 223 legitimacy of Philip V to rule 116 military funerary honors 117, 120, 127 Philip as os lampadis 127 publicization of victories 123 sermon of 1786 130 Ward, Bernardo 441 Weissman, Ronald 184 Western clothing 51 wet-nurses 97 wills by Indians 265 case of José del Valle 84 case of Josepha de la Cruz 85 case of María de la Concepción 85 case of Mateo de la Cruz 85 case of Teresa de Losada 84 evidence of Afro-Mexican Christianity 86 money for prayers for the release of souls from purgatory 118 testator from Xochimilco 265 wine 208 witchcraft

adjudicated by Inquisition 80 healing practices labeled as 76, 76 materials for 82, 83 medium for building relationships 82 study of 79 Xico 406 Ximeno y Planes, Rafael 446, 450, 458, 463 Xochimilco 205 Yermo, Gabriel de 231 yollotli (heart symbol) 305 Yrrazabal, Francisco de 333 Zacatecas 242, 282, 295, 297 Zamora 287 Zapotecs 59 Zaragoza 395 Zócalo 95, 328 Zorita, Alonso de 31, 307, 315 Zuazo, Alonso de 44 Zumárraga, Juan de allowed Brotherhood of the Santísimo Sacramento y Caridad to move into cathedral 207 arrival of 141 cathedral school of 269 consecration as bishop 141 death of 144 founding of San Juan de Letrán 141 founding of the Recogimiento de la Madre de Dios 142, 143, 144 printing press 378, See also print culture production of catechisms 265 request to Crown for university 270 sponsorship of the Brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament 142 Zúñiga y Ontiveros, Felipe de 448 Zúñiga, Baltasar de, 1st Duke of Arión, 2nd Marquis of Valero 160

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