{
  "id": "carta-de-don-pasqual-al-mercurio-volante-1772",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "The letter of D. Pasqual Angeles de los Reyes (Mexico, 22 November 1772): an Indian town officer criticising the first medical periodical of the Americas, and the editor's own note that he suspects a hoax",
  "summary": "Six pages of the Mercurio volante of 1772 carry a letter signed by an Indian described as a cacique - a village schoolmaster, notary, alcalde, gobernador and fiscal who bought the paper in Mexico City and had his student son post him each sheet - going through its numbers one by one. He answers the paper's own excuse for American ignorance and defends the herbs of indigenous medicine. The editor printed it, then printed below the signature that he suspected a hoax.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "mexico",
    "new-spain",
    "periodicals",
    "indigenous-knowledge",
    "medicine",
    "printing",
    "republica-de-indios",
    "eighteenth-century",
    "enlightenment"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mercurio-volante-1772"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "temazcalli-en-la-medicina-novohispana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "maguey-metl-de-nueva-espana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "republica-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "colegio-de-santa-cruz-de-tlatelolco"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "alzate-gacetas-de-literatura-1788"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "first-printing-press-americas"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Did any indigenous voice appear in colonial Spanish American scientific print?",
    "Who was D. Pasqual Angeles de los Reyes?",
    "What did readers of the Mercurio volante write back to it?",
    "Did anyone in eighteenth-century Mexico defend indigenous medicine in print?",
    "How were the numbers of the Mercurio volante sold and distributed?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The letter is introduced by a second letter, from a parish priest who signs only \"N.**\" and calls himself the editor's friend, servant and chaplain. He announces \"un Cazique discreto, i no nada crítico\": D. Pasqual Reyes, \"aquel ladino que hacía de Fiscal en este Curato, quando entré yo aqui, el año de 62\". The description is precise about the career an Indian could have in a pueblo of the archbishopric — an Indian of about forty, passed through all the honours \"de República i de Curia\"; in his first age a boy of a Colegio \"donde aprendió à leer i escribir, con sus sombras i lexos de Latin\"; in his own town \"Maestro de Escuela, Escribano de República, Alcalde, Gobernador, Fiscal, como ya dixe, i muchísimas otras cosas que omito\". He has a very happy memory and a furious itch, sometimes a rage, to read whatever he finds, good or bad, without method but always with reflection, and everyone there looks on him \"como à un Séneca\"; he has taken on the local trade in loas, acrostic sonnets and letters of compliment, \"siendo à un mismo tiempo el Lope de Vega, i el Gonzalo Perez de estas gentes\".",
      "sources": [
        "bartolache-mercurio-volante-1772"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The same page carries the condescension that makes the praise legible as what it is. Nature, the priest writes, \"que no se desdeña de tener hijos Indios, le repartió una buena dosi de racionalidad, i él no se ha descuidado en cultivarse allá en su modo\"; and he closes by asking the editor and his colleague to excuse \"las faltas del generoso Cazique, sin culpar su intencion\". He also states plainly what he did to the text: the man brought it to him to correct and consulted him mysteriously, as if it were a case of conscience, about whether to send it, and \"Yo, despues de enmendar una ù otra expresion baja i trivial, le animé à la empresa\". The letter that follows has been through a Spanish priest's hands and says so.",
      "sources": [
        "bartolache-mercurio-volante-1772"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The letter itself is headed \"CARTA DE D. PASQUAL\" and addressed to \"Señor Mercurista Volante, i Señor Padre Autor de los Asuntos Varios\". It opens by praising exactly the editorial policy the paper had announced in its first number: he has celebrated \"su pensamiento de hacer imprimir en la Imprenta cosas de curiosidad, i en lengua que todos entienden, para que se divierta i aproveche la gente, que quisiere comprar\". It then records how the paper actually reached a reader outside the capital. He was in Mexico the month before, taking his son Martín the student back from vacation, when the first sheets came out; being fond of reading he bought them and left the boy — who is studying there \"para ser de la Iglesia\" — charged to send him each one as it appeared every eight days; four have come, and three more, seven in all, and with the two he brought himself they are \"nueve Pliegos cabales\". His remarks, he says, are the reparos he made one by one, \"que se pueden llamar argumentos en Castilla, i Animadversiones en Latin\", written out fair after crossing out his first thoughts, and he apologises \"porque al fin Vms. han estudiado, i yo no\".",
      "sources": [
        "bartolache-mercurio-volante-1772"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "His objection to the first number is an objection to the paper's account of America, and it is the sharpest thing in the letter. He has read there that it is only two and a half centuries since light began to enter here in America, \"i me parece buena disculpa, para que no sepan tanto como en la otra vanda. Pero hai aqui buenos muchachos, i si les enseñaran como allá, havían de salir mejores con tercio i quinto, i les havian de ganar à los Franceses\"; and he wishes the editor had said so, \"que se muestra tan devoto de los Autores que tienen Monsiur, i nos cita en cada Mercurio tres ò quatro\". The paper's excuse for American backwardness is answered, in the paper, by a reader who says the material was always here and the teaching was not.",
      "sources": [
        "bartolache-mercurio-volante-1772"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "On the number treating of the pipiltzintlis he defends indigenous pharmacology against the presumption of witchcraft, and does it by an argument from natural theology. He believes there is not the hundredth part of the abuses supposed among the Indians with that seed and herb, \"la qual, si tiene su virtud natural, que Dios le dió como à las demás, para qué la han de despreciar los Dotores, pudiendo hacer algunos remedios con ella?\" Any herb, he adds, could serve for abuses if one proceeded with malice, and it would be a pity to take them all out of the apothecary's shop; better to punish the cursed sorcerers, as is always done. What is certain about the pipiltzintlis, he says, is that the curanderos and curanderas among the naturales of the pueblos give them to drink for everything there is, but to cure honestly and to be paid for the cure, \"sin acordarse unos ni otros de tal diablo\", and the same with other drinks and remedies of the poor \"acá en los despoblados donde otra cosa no se puede\".",
      "sources": [
        "bartolache-mercurio-volante-1772"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The letter is also a report from a working economy. On the paper's notice of new carding machines he says that in Puebla nobody will buy carded cotton, at any price far below the hand-cleaned kind, that they know it a league off and say it is no good for spinning long and fine but only for drawing wick; he offers a mechanical explanation — that the cards break the filaments into short fibres, so that carded cotton mats and breaks when spun on the malacate — and concludes in the paper's own idiom, \"Pero bueno será hacer algunas experiencias, i nada se pierde\". He adds that cotton seed serves for cooking \"nuestro pitzotlmóle, que sale mui sabroso, i lo venden allá en México las Almuerzeras\". On another number he reports having seen in his compadre's shop a mouse killed by fumigating a sulphur match through the trap's little window, and having then wondered whether a larger match in proportion could suffocate a man by accident.",
      "sources": [
        "bartolache-mercurio-volante-1772"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The letter closes with a place, a date and a name — \"En este Pueblo à 22. de Noviembre de 1772 … B. L. M. de Vms. su mui rendido, i afectuoso, i seguro servidor, que les venéra = Pasqual Angeles de los Reies\" — and the editor then printed his own doubt directly beneath it. The NOTA reads: \"Si este D. Pasqual es un verdadero Cazique de carne i hueso, no me cansaré de admirarlo. Su candor, su ingenuidad, su discrecion, i la templanza con que escribe, le recomiendan infinito. Pero à mi se me trasluce algo de supercheria, i asi lo declaro con la vénia de mi Amigo íntimo D. N.**\". Whether the correspondent existed is therefore undecided by the source itself: the paper prints the letter, prints the priest's admission of having emended it, and prints the editor's suspicion that the whole thing is a contrivance. This object claims the letter as printed and claims nothing about the man behind it.",
      "sources": [
        "bartolache-mercurio-volante-1772"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The same page settles two bibliographical facts about the paper that its own opening numbers do not give. Below the nota stands the announcement of the next sheet — \"El siguiente llevará este Título = Uso i abuso del Pulque para curar enfermedades = Saldrá el dia 9\" — and below that the imprint: \"EN MEXICO CON LAS LICENCIAS NECESARIAS, i privilegio concedido al Autor por este Superior Gobierno, en casa de D. Felipe de Zúñiga i Ontiveros, calle de la Palma\", with the sale notice \"Se vende en el Cajoncillo de Libros frente del Portal nuevo de Mercaderes, à medio real cada Pliego\". The printer, the privilege, the shop and the price are on the sheet that carries the Indian correspondent's letter.",
      "sources": [
        "bartolache-mercurio-volante-1772"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "What this letter is evidence for, and what it is not. It is direct evidence that a Mexican scientific paper of 1772 printed six pages of criticism attributed to an Indian officer of a pueblo, framed by a priest and doubted by the editor — that is, evidence about what was publishable and what the publishers thought their readers would accept. It is not evidence that indigenous readers commonly wrote to the press, nor that this one did: no register, licence or archival trace of Pasqual Angeles de los Reyes was consulted here, and none is cited. The pages opened are the covering letter, the letter and its close; nothing outside this volume was used.",
      "sources": [
        "bartolache-mercurio-volante-1772"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "The Mercurio volante is cited in English almost exclusively as a label — the first medical periodical of the Americas — and where its readers are mentioned at all it is to say that some pieces came from correspondents. This object reads the six pages that carry the most unusual of them: a letter signed by an Indian described as a cacique, with the parish priest's covering note listing the offices he had held and admitting to having emended his phrasing, his answer to the paper's own excuse that light had only been entering America for two and a half centuries, his defence of the pipiltzintlis against the assumption of sorcery, his account of buying the sheets in Mexico City and having his student son post them out weekly, and the editor's printed note that he suspects a hoax. Sources that celebrate the paper do not quote the nota; sources that dismiss the letter as a literary device do not quote the letter. Both are printed here, with the uncertainty left where the 1772 sheet leaves it.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-16",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/carta-de-don-pasqual-al-mercurio-volante-1772",
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  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "The letter of D. Pasqual Angeles de los Reyes (Mexico, 22 November 1772): an Indian town officer criticising the first medical periodical of the Americas, and the editor's own note that he suspects a hoax",
    "description": "Six pages of the Mercurio volante of 1772 carry a letter signed by an Indian described as a cacique - a village schoolmaster, notary, alcalde, gobernador and fiscal who bought the paper in Mexico City and had his student son post him each sheet - going through its numbers one by one. He answers the paper's own excuse for American ignorance and defends the herbs of indigenous medicine. The editor printed it, then printed below the signature that he suspected a hoax.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/carta-de-don-pasqual-al-mercurio-volante-1772",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-16",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Mercurio volante, con noticias importantes i curiosas sobre varios asuntos de fisica i medicina, por D. Josef Ignacio Bartolache, doctor medico del claustro de esta Real Universidad de Mexico",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=_q1jAP-UEgQC&pg=PA1"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "The letter of D. Pasqual Angeles de los Reyes (Mexico, 22 November 1772): an Indian town officer criticising the first medical periodical of the Americas, and the editor's own note that he suspects a hoax"
  }
}