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4 The Colegio Imperial de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco and Its Aftermath: Nahua Intellectuals and the Spiritual Conquest of Mexico

       Rocío Cortés

      One successful device in the colonization of New Spain was the appropriation of linguistic and cultural knowledge of and about the vencidos (defeated people). While monastic orders applied this knowledge toward their own evangelistic designs, the colonial administration also did not fail to recognize that such knowledge could be used to achieve more effective control of the conquered. The members of mendicant orders – Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians – opened schools alongside their monasteries, as soon as they arrived in New Spain. While the friars learned native languages and customs, the native youth acquired an education in Christian principles in those schools and, occasionally, literacy.

Realizing the potential that these first schools had in teaching and providing knowledge about Indigenous policies, the colonial administration gave its “blessing” for the Franciscans to establish the Colegio Imperial de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, an institution of higher education principally for noble Indigenous¹ intellectuals. This project entailed expectations that generations of well-educated Indigenous linguistic/cultural intermediaries would facilitate smoother evangelization and colonization. This extraordinary plan featured much experimentation on the part of the friars in the earlier stages, a time when the colonial design for New Spain was still being shaped by a variety of secular and religious factions that interpreted colonial methods differently. After only three years of the Colegio’s inauguration, advanced native education would be seen as dangerous to social and religious order. Opponents to a higher education for Indigenous students dreaded that knowledge would only encourage neophytes to question Christian dogma. Lack of funds owing to growing opposition to the project and a stricter royal administration, among other causes, would contribute to its decline by the 1580s.

      Despite criticism about educating the Indigenous people, and economic struggles, the Colegio became a center of linguistic and historical compilation, as well as of translation of Christian doctrinal materials. Friars and students together designed Nahuatl grammars and dictionaries, assembled a valuable corpus of pre-conquest customs, and translated doctrinal works into native languages with the intention of proselytizing the native masses. But literacy and knowledge of European systems of thought also opened a space for new forms of subaltern negotiation on the part of the students. From the Colegio emerged an educated elite that would influence, directly and indirectly, other subaltern intellectuals in the uses of knowledge as a form of social and political agency. The Franciscans’ legacy of the Colegio project would continue through the exchange of knowledge by members of other religious orders, such as the Jesuits, and by ethnically diverse intellectuals well into the seventeenth century. The narrative discourses by this ethnically and politically asymmetric group reveal a production of subjectivities through struggles of power in a “contact zone.”

      The Colonial Enterprise of Conversion through Education

      Intertwined with economic and expansionist motivations, the colonization of the Americas by the Spaniards was also driven by evangelization. With the Reconquista of the last Muslim kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula and the arrival of the Spaniards to the New World, Spain became a powerful nation. Supported by the papacy in a series of papal bulls, Spain would legitimize its presence in the new lands through a series of political theories based on the observation of Indigenous peoples’ lives and manners. Taking the European way of life and religious beliefs as the model of civilization, the colonizers developed unscientific images of the Indigenous populations. Indigenous cultural practices and beliefs that differed from the European paradigm were perceived as barbaric. But Christian principles had derived from Roman law for the Iberians. Debates emerged on the legal and moral bases to justify the conquests and “civilization” of the Indigenous people, who by natural law had the right to their own laws and practices. From different schools of thought emerged what B. Keen has called “anti-Indian” and “pro-Indian” policies (1990,108). For some, such as the Spaniard Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who negatively portrayed the Indigenous people as inferior to Spaniards for their lack of civil laws and peaceful manners, a Spanish civil superiority, gave them the right to “civilize” the Indigenous populations, even if by force. On the other hand, proponents of an Indigenous image based on the nature of human equality, represented in the ideas of the Dominican Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, proposed that, since the Indigenous people were

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