The Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, is the first and oldest European school of higher learning in the Americas[1] and the first major school of interpreters and translators in the New World.[2] It was established by the Franciscans on January 6, 1536[3] with the intention, as is generally accepted, of preparing Native American boys for eventual ordination to the Catholic priesthood.[4][5] Students trained in the Colegio were important contributors to the work of Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún in the creation of his monumental twelve-volume General History of the Things of New Spain, often referred to as the Florentine Codex. The failure of the Colegio had long-lasting consequences, with scholar Robert Ricard saying that "[h]ad the College of Tlatelolco given the country even one [native] bishop, the history of the Mexican Church might have been profoundly changed."[6]
The Colegio was built by the Franciscan order on the initiative of the President of the Audiencia Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal, Bishop Don Juan de Zumárraga, and Viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza on the site of an Aztec school, for the sons of nobles (in Nahuatl: Calmecac). It was inaugurated on January 6, 1536, however, it had been a functioning school since August 8, 1533.
While Bishop of Santo Domingo, Ramírez de Fuenleal had encouraged the Franciscans to teach the sons of Aztecs grammar in their native language of Nahuatl.[7] Franciscan Arnaldo de Basccio began the task with considerable success, which gave support to the project of establishing an institute of higher learning. Ramírez de Fuenleal urged the crown to provide funds to establish and support such an institution.[8] The Franciscans had already established primary schools prior to the Colegio, one at Texcoco, established by Fray Pedro de Gante in 1523 and the other by the leader of the First Twelve Franciscans, Martín de Valencia in Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1525. Still others were founded by Franciscans in this early period.[9][10] These schools for indigenous and mestizo boys taught basic literacy, but also singing, instruction in how to help with the mass, and sometimes manual labor. The primary education of indigenous girls was also a concern and schools were established in Mexico City, Texcoco and six other locations lasting only for a decade.[11]
But not until the establishment of the Colegio de Santa Cruz were sons of indigenous men given higher education.[12] Bishop Juan de Zumárraga was a supporter of the establishment of the Colegio, but credited Fuenleal and the crown for the accomplishment.[13] The Colegio was inaugurated on January 6, 1536, the feast of the Epiphany, deliberately chosen for its symbolism of calling the gentiles to the true faith.[14] The establishment of such a school to train young men for the priesthood was highly controversial, with opposition especially coming from Dominican friars and articulated by the head of that order, Fray Domingo Betanzos.[15][16] Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún wrote a strong defense of the capacity of the Aztec, countering the opinions of those who doubted their ability not only to learn Latin grammar, but to speak, and compose in it. He went on to refute concerns about the possibility of the indigenous Mexicans spreading heresy.[17] Betanzos in his opposition to the Colegio said that Native Americans who knew Latin could expose the ignorance of the existing European priests, an argument that perhaps unwittingly did the same.[18]
The original purpose of the Colegio was to educate a male indigenous priesthood, and so pupils were selected from the most prestigious families of the Aztec ruling class. These young men were taught to be literate in Nahuatl, Spanish and Latin, and received instruction in Latin in music, rhetoric, logic, and philosophy, and indigenous medicine.[19] One student educated at the Colegio was Nahuabotanist Martín de la Cruz, who wrote the Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis, an illustrated herbal.
Actual instruction at the Colegio was by two Franciscans at a time, aided by Aztec assistants.[20] Among the teachers were notable scholars and grammarians such as Franciscans Andrés de Olmos, Alonso de Molina and Bernardino de Sahagún, all of whom have made important contributions to the study of both the Classical Nahuatl language and the ethnography and anthropology of Mesoamerica. Other Franciscans who taught there were Fray Juan de Goana, Fray Francisco de Bustamante, Fray García de Cisneros, Fray Arnaldo de Basaccio, and Fray Juan Focher.[21]Fray Juan de Torquemada also served as a teacher and administrator at the Colegio. When recollecting historical and ethnographical information for the elaboration of the Florentine Codex, Sahagún used his trilingual students to elicit information from the Aztec elders and to transcribe it in Spanish and Nahuatl and to illuminate the manuscripts.
The courtyard of the convent
Opened with great fanfare, the ceremony was attended by Viceroy Mendoza, Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, and the President of the Audiencia, Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal with a great crowd to view the proceedings. Fray Alonso de Herrera preached the sermon at the opening Mass. Following the religious ceremony, there was a banquet hosted by Zumárraga for guests and the first pupils, chosen from the convent of San Francisco de México.[22]
Although there was great support from many sectors (excluding the Dominicans who objected to the founding of the Colegio), the physical structure was at first quite modest for lack of funds and later a stone house was built.[23]
The first sixty male students was a small cohort of sons of noble families; there was tremendous need for many more pupils, so the Franciscans actively recruited others from important towns in central Mexico, two or three boys 10 to 12 years of age.[24] The pupils lived in the Colegio in very modest circumstances. A common eating area and sleeping quarters with beds being only a mat and a blanket placed on individual wooden platforms to keep pupils from the damp floor.[25] Some important pupils trained at the school were Antonio de Valeriano, who was the most prominent of those who collaborated with Sahagún. Spanish judge Alonso de Zorita, author of Life and Labor in Ancient Mexico: the Brief and Summary Relation of the Lords of New Spain[26] was aided by the translations of Pablo Nazareno, a former pupil at the Colegio.[27]
The Franciscans continued to teach at the Colegio, but could not afford to keep up the building or other expenses, so they turned it over to the crown shortly after the Colegio opened in 1536.[28] In 1546 the Franciscans gave up any management of the property and it was turned over to the pupils and former pupils to run. By 1550 due to poor management, the buildings were falling down and pupils had to become day students.[29] In 1555, Aztecs were forbidden from ordination to the priesthood, so that the original purpose of the school to train a native priesthood was ended. In the seventeenth century when Franciscan Augustín de Vetancurt was writing, the Colegio was a complete ruin.[30]
In modern Mexico City the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, close to the location of the Colegio, commemorates this particularly interesting part of the cultural history of Mexico.[31]
Church of Santiago Tlatelolco
Interior of the church
The Colegio today is centered around the Church of Santiago Tlatelolco, which was completed in its present form in 1609. However, the site was first dedicated as a church in 1524 with stones reused from the demolished temple buildings of adjacent Tlateloco. Bernal Diaz, in his Conquest of New Spain, records that “After we conquered that great and strong city (Tlatelolco), we decided to build a church to our patron and guide, St. James, in place of that of Huichilobos’ cue (temple) — and a great part of the site was taken for that purpose.”
To this day, a recycled stone depicting the god Tlaloc can be seen at the rear of the church's apse. St. Juan Diego was baptized in the forerunner to the present structure and was, in fact, on his way to the church when he encountered his first Marian apparition. It continued functioning after the demise of the Colegio. The austere Franciscan structure was decorated with a rich collection of altarpieces in 1763, and was fully painted in frescos. In 1861, the church's use for religious purposes ended; in the next century, it would be used for a variety of purposes, including as a winery and a military prison. The church's altarpieces and most of its frescos were destroyed during this time. It was remodeled and returned to a religious purpose in 1964. Visible remnants of the building's first use as a church include paintings of the Four Evangelists on the pendentives and a large fresco of St. Christopher on the lefthand wall. Additionally, the font that Juan Diego was supposed to have been baptized in sits directly inside the front doors of the church. The church's exterior walls are damaged by bullet holes, dating to the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968.[32][33][34]
Legacy
The Colegio was founded in the early sixteenth century in a period of great optimism about the capacity of the Indians and the prospects for their being ordained as Catholic priests. Its failure in the late sixteenth century was a serious one. According to Robert Ricard, the "error prevented the Church from striking deep roots in the nation, gave it the appearance and character of a foreign institution, and kept it dependent upon the mother country."[35] There were some Indian men ordained in the later colonial period, but they were few and never held high posts.[36] American-born Spaniards, criollos, were trained in Mexican seminaries, but there was no significant native clergy.
The training of elite young men at the Colegio in grammar, rhetoric, and theology did, however, enormously aid the Franciscans in their efforts to evangelize the Indians and to record indigenous history and culture in texts that remain fundamental to the understanding of Nahua culture.
The Colegio's extensive library was abandoned by the 17th century, however, a large portion of its collection survived and were sent to Convent of San Francisco in the 1830s. Upon the implementation of La Reforma in 1859, the Convent was required to integrate its collection with that of the new National Library. However, a significant part of the convent's collection was sold to the book dealer Francisco Abadiano, who in turn sold it to Adolph Sutro, who aspired to build a world-class research library for the city of San Francisco. Many of the books from the convent's collection burned in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, while others survived and remain in the Sutro Library.[37]
Our Lady of Guadalupe, also known as the Virgin of Guadalupe, is a Catholic title of Mary, mother of Jesus associated with a series of five Marian apparitions to a Mexican peasant named Juan Diego and his uncle, Juan Bernardino, which are believed to have occurred in December 1531, when the Mexican territories were under the Spanish Empire.
Juan de Zumárraga, OFM was a Spanish Basque Franciscan prelate and the first Bishop of Mexico. He was also the region's first inquisitor. He wrote Doctrina breve, the first book published in the Western Hemisphere by a European, printed in Mexico City in 1539.
Bernardino de Sahagún was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer who participated in the Catholic evangelization of colonial New Spain. Born in Sahagún, Spain, in 1499, he journeyed to New Spain in 1529. He learned Nahuatl and spent more than 50 years in the study of Aztec beliefs, culture and history. Though he was primarily devoted to his missionary task, his extraordinary work documenting indigenous worldview and culture has earned him the title as “the first anthropologist." He also contributed to the description of Nahuatl, the imperial language of the Aztec Empire. He translated the Psalms, the Gospels, and a catechism into Nahuatl.
Aztec codices are Mesoamerican manuscripts made by the pre-Columbian Aztec, and their Nahuatl-speaking descendants during the colonial period in Mexico.
The Florentine Codex is a 16th-century ethnographic research study in Mesoamerica by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún originally titled it La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España. After a translation mistake, it was given the name Historia general de las Cosas de Nueva España. The best-preserved manuscript is commonly referred to as the Florentine Codex, as the codex is held in the Laurentian Library of Florence, Italy.
Juan de Torquemada was a Franciscan friar, active as missionary in colonial Mexico and considered the "leading Franciscan chronicler of his generation." Administrator, engineer, architect and ethnographer, he is most famous for his monumental work commonly known as Monarquía indiana, a survey of the history and culture of the indigenous peoples of New Spain together with an account of their conversion to Christianity, first published in Spain in 1615 and republished in 1723. Monarquia Indiana was the "prime text of Mexican history, and was destined to influence all subsequent chronicles until the twentieth century." It was used by later historians, the Franciscan Augustin de Vetancurt and most importantly by 18th-century Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero. No English translation of this work has ever been published.
Joaquín García Icazbalceta was a Mexican philologist and historian. He edited writings by Mexican writers who preceded him, wrote a biography of Juan de Zumárraga, and translated William H. Prescott's Conquest of Mexico. His works on Colonial Mexico continue to be cited today.
The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire was a pivotal event in the history of the Americas, marked by the collision of the Aztec Triple Alliance and the Spanish Empire, ultimately reshaping the course of human history. Taking place between 1519 and 1521, this event saw the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, and his small army of soldiers and indigenous allies, overthrowing one of the most powerful empires in Mesoamerica.
Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal was bishop of Santo Domingo and president of the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo from 1528 to 1531. He was also president of the second Real Audiencia of Mexico from January 10, 1531, to April 16, 1535. Later he was a member of the Council of the Indies.
Alonso de Molina was a Franciscan priest and grammarian, who wrote a well-known dictionary of the Nahuatl language published in 1571 and still used by scholars working on Nahuatl texts in the tradition of the New Philology. He also wrote a bilingual confessional manual for priests who served in Nahuatl-speaking communities.
The Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis is an Aztec herbal manuscript, describing the medicinal properties of various plants used by the Aztecs. It was translated into Latin by Juan Badiano, from a Nahuatl original composed in the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco in 1552 by Martín de la Cruz that is no longer extant. The Libellus is also known as the Badianus Manuscript, after the translator; the Codex de la Cruz-Badiano, after both the original author and translator; and the Codex Barberini, after Cardinal Francesco Barberini, who had possession of the manuscript in the early 17th century.
Andrés de Olmos was a Spanish Franciscan priest and grammarian and ethno-historian of Mexico's indigenous languages and peoples. He was born in Oña, Burgos, Spain and died in Tampico in New Spain. He is best known for his grammar, the first in the New World, of the Classical Nahuatl language.
Arthur James Outram Anderson was an American anthropologist specializing in Aztec culture and translator of the Nahuatl language.
Antonio Valeriano was a colonial Mexican, Nahua scholar and politician. He was a collaborator with fray Bernardino de Sahagún in the creation of the twelve-volume General History of the Things of New Spain, the Florentine Codex, He served as judge-governor of both his home, Azcapotzalco, and of Tenochtitlan, in Spanish colonial New Spain.
Martín de Valencia was born in Valencia de Don Juan, in the bishopric of Oviedo, Spain, ca. 1474. He died Tlalmanalco, Mexico, 21 March 1534. He was a Spanish Franciscan missionary, leader of the Twelve Apostles of Mexico, the first group of mendicants in New Spain.
Domingo Betanzos was a Spanish Dominican missionary to New Spain, who participated in the "Spiritual Conquest", evangelizing the indigenous.
Tlatelolco was a pre-Columbian altepetl, or city-state, in the Valley of Mexico. Its inhabitants, known as the Tlatelolca, were part of the Mexica, a Nahuatl-speaking people who arrived in what is now central Mexico in the 13th century. The Mexica settled on an island in Lake Texcoco and founded the altepetl of Mexico-Tenochtitlan on the southern portion of the island. In 1337, a group of dissident Mexica broke away from the Tenochca leadership in Tenochtitlan and founded Mexico-Tlatelolco on the northern portion of the island. Tenochtitlan was closely tied with its sister city, which was largely dependent on the market of Tlatelolco, the most important site of commerce in the area.
The Twelve Apostles of Mexico, the Franciscan Twelve, or the Twelve Apostles of New Spain, were a group of twelve Franciscan missionaries who arrived in the newly-founded Viceroyalty of New Spain on May 13 or 14, 1524 and reached Mexico City on June 17 or 18, with the goal of converting its indigenous population to Christianity. Conqueror Hernán Cortés had requested friars of the Franciscan and Dominican Orders to evangelize the Indians. Despite the small number, it had religious significance and also marked the beginning of the systematic evangelization of the Indians in New Spain.
Tlatelolco is an area now within the Cuauhtémoc borough of Mexico City, centered on the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. Its archeological history extends to remains from the 15th and 16th centuries, as well as more recent colonial structures.
Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, also known simply as Juan Diego, was a Nahua peasant and Marian visionary. He is said to have been granted apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe on four occasions in December 1531: three at the hill of Tepeyac and a fourth before don Juan de Zumárraga, then bishop of Mexico. The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, located at the foot of Tepeyac, houses the cloak (tilmahtli) that is traditionally said to be Juan Diego's, and upon which the image of the Virgin is said to have been miraculously impressed as proof of the authenticity of the apparitions.
↑ Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico. Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson. Berkeley: University of California Press 1966, pp. 217-235.
↑ See Brand, p. 63; for the argument that it was not founded with this intention, see Estarellas, Juan: "The College of Tlatelolco and the Problem of Higher Education for Indians in 16th Century Mexico". History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Dec., 1962) pp.234-243 at pp.236f.
↑ Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico. Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson. Berkeley: University of California Press 1966, p. 208.
↑ Georges Baudot, Utopia and History in Mexico: The First Chronicles of Mexican Civilization, 1520-1569. Translated by Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1995, p. 105.
↑ Bernardino de Sahagún quoted in Ricard, Spiritual Conquest, p. 226-27.
↑ Ricard, Spiritual Conquest p. 226, quoting Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Códice Franciscano, vol. 2 of Nueva colección de documentos para la historia de México, Mexico: 1886-1892, p. 71.
↑ Alonso de Zorita, Life and Labor in Ancient Mexico: the Brief and Summary Relation of the Lords of New Spain. Translated by Benjamin Keen. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 1963.
Baudot, Georges. Utopia and History in Mexico: The First Chronicles of Mexican Civilization, 1520-1569. Translated by Bernardo R. Ortiz de Montellano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano. Boulder: University of Colorado Press 1995.
Brand, Donald, D., "Where is the Oldest University in the New World?", New Mexico Anthropologist, vol. 4, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1940), pp.61–63
Estarellas, Juan: "The College of Tlatelolco and the Problem of Higher Education for Indians in 16th Century Mexico". History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Dec., 1962) pp.234–243
Gómez Canedo, Lino. La educación de los marginados durante la época colonial: Escuelas y colegios para indios y mestizos en la Nueva España. cap. IV "Enseñanza superior: Tlatelolco". Mexico: Editorial Porrúa 1982.
Mathes, Michael, 1985, "The Americas' first academic library Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco", Sacramento, California State Library
Maxwell, Judith M, and Craig A Hanson, 1992, "Introduction" Of the Manner of Speaking That the Old Ones Had: Arte Para aprender la Lengua Mexicana 1547. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
Ocaranza, F.El imperial colegio de indios de Santa Cruz de Santiago Tlatelolco. Mexico, 1934, n.p.
Ricard, Robert. 1966. The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523-1572. Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson. Berkeley: University of California Press 1966. Originally published in French in 1933.
SilverMoon. 2007. The Imperial College of Tlatelolco and the emergence of a new Nahua intellectual elite in New Spain (1500–1760). Doctoral Dissertation. Duke University. ProQuest.
Steck, F.B. El primer colegio de América, Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. Mexico: Centro de Estudios Franciscanos, 1944.
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