{ "id": "clavijero-disertaciones-1780", "type": "entity", "name": "Francisco Javier Clavijero, Disertaciones on the land, the animals and the inhabitants of Mexico (1780)", "summary": "Nine dissertations printed with a Mexican Jesuit's history of his country, written in exile to answer Cornelius de Pauw's thesis that in America nature had degenerated entirely - in the elements, the plants, the animals and the men. Clavijero sets a witness standard against a philosopher who never crossed the Atlantic, declares he has no Indian ancestry before choosing to plead the Indian case, and is himself a polemicist. Read here in the 1826 Spanish translation.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "americas", "new-spain", "mexico", "books", "ethnography", "enlightenment", "eighteenth-century", "historiography", "indigenous-peoples", "science" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "acosta-historia-natural-y-moral-1590" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "motolinia-historia-de-los-indios" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "antonio-de-ulloa-platinum" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "noticias-secretas-de-america" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "inca-garcilaso-de-la-vega" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "colegio-de-santa-cruz-de-tlatelolco" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "misconceptions-spanish-empire" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "garcia-origen-de-los-indios-1607" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "eguiara-bibliotheca-mexicana-1755" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "del-rio-palenque-report-1787" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "hervas-catalogo-lenguas-americanas-1800" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "buenaventura-suarez-astronomo-de-san-cosme" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "cardenas-problemas-y-secretos-1591" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "fernando-de-alva-ixtlilxochitl" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "ulloa-noticias-americanas-1772" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "nicolas-antonio-censura-historias-fabulosas-1742" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "chinampas-of-the-valley-of-mexico" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "feijoo-espanoles-americanos" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "criollos-en-el-derecho-indiano" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "tardes-americanas-1778" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "landivar-rusticatio-mexicana-1782" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "marquez-due-antichi-monumenti-1804" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "velasco-historia-del-reino-de-quito" } ], "questions": [ "What were Clavijero's Disertaciones?", "Who answered Cornelius de Pauw's claim that America and its peoples were degenerate?", "What did Francisco Javier Clavijero argue about the inhabitants of the Americas?", "Was the eighteenth-century thesis of American degeneracy contested at the time?", "What is the dispute of the New World?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The dissertations are printed under a half-title that states their purpose exactly: \"DISERTACIONES SOBRE LA TIERRA, LOS ANIMALES, Y LOS HABITANTES DE MEGICO; EN QUE Se confirma en parte la Historia Antigua de aquel pais, se ilustran muchos articulos de Historia Natural, y se confutan muchos errores publicados sobre America por algunos celebres Escritores modernos\". The printed index lists nine of them, running from the origin of the population of America to the origin of venereal disease, and they occupy pages 193 to 449 of the volume.", "sources": [ "clavijero-historia-antigua-ackermann-1826-t2" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "Clavijero states his opponent's case before answering it, and states it at full strength: \"El obgeto de la obra de Mr. de Paw es persuadir al mundo que en America la naturaleza ha degenerado enteramente en los elementos, en las plantas, en los animales, y en los hombres.\" The summary that follows has the land sterile and rich in poisons, the air unhealthy, the climate \"contrario a la generacion de los animales\", the native species smaller, weaker and more stupid than those of the old world, and European species degenerating on arrival.", "sources": [ "clavijero-historia-antigua-ackermann-1826-t2" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "What was being asserted about the people is quoted rather than paraphrased, which is why the object of the reply is legible two centuries later. In Clavijero's summary De Pauw's Americans \"apenas se diferenciaban de las bestias si no en la figura\", are \"feos, debiles, y sugetos a muchas enfermedades estravagantes\", are so short of memory \"que no se acuerdan hoi, de lo que hicieron ayer\", neither reflect nor order their ideas nor are capable of improving them, and their sloth keeps them sunk \"en la imbecilidad de la vida salvage\".", "sources": [ "clavijero-historia-antigua-ackermann-1826-t2" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "Dissertation V opens by distinguishing four classes of men in Mexico and the other countries of America - those properly American, commonly called Indians; Europeans, Asians and Africans settled there; their children and descendants, called criollos by the Spaniards; and the mixed descents the Spaniards called castas. Clavijero's point is that De Pauw's climate argument insults all four, since it makes the American air degrade even resident Europeans, and he answers it with a Spanish proverb taken from the Greek: \"todo el mundo es Popayan\", everywhere is the same place.", "sources": [ "clavijero-historia-antigua-ackermann-1826-t2" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "He then puts his own interest on the record before arguing, which is the least expected move in an apologetic text. He will speak only for those properly American, \"que son los mas injuriados, y los mas indefensos\"; had passion or interest driven him he would rather have taken up the cause of the criollos, \"que ademas de ser la mas facil, es la que mas de cerca me toca\"; and he was born of Spanish parents, \"y no he tenido la menor afinidad, ni consanguinidad con Indios\".", "sources": [ "clavijero-historia-antigua-ackermann-1826-t2" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The evidentiary standard he proposes is testimony over system. Where De Pauw represents the Americans as weak and sickly, Clavijero sets against him Antonio de Ulloa, who affirms they are healthy, robust and strong, and asks which of the two deserves more credit - the writer who set himself to philosophise in Berlin about Americans without knowing them, or the naval officer who saw and dealt with them for many years across South America. He then concedes the weakness in his own witness, calling Ulloa \"poco favorable a los Indios\" but a man who set out to write what he believed true rather than to build a system, and leaves the question to impartial readers.", "sources": [ "clavijero-historia-antigua-ackermann-1826-t2" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The method is itemised refutation rather than assertion: he lists the six grounds on which De Pauw argues American physical debility - among them that the first Americans carried to Europe went mad on the voyage, that adult men in many parts of America have milk in their breasts, and that the least vigorous European beats any American in a wrestling match - and takes them in order, denying the first as absolutely false and tracing it to De Pauw's reliance on the Fleming Dapper for the fate of the Indians Columbus brought to Barcelona in 1493.", "sources": [ "clavijero-historia-antigua-ackermann-1826-t2" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "He is an advocate and reads like one, which belongs in any honest account of the book. The Al Lector calls De Pauw \"un filosofo a la moda\", a man learned in matters where ignorance or silence would suit him better, who lifts his discourses with buffoonery and slander, ridicules what is most sacred in the church of God and bites at everyone he meets with no respect for innocence or for truth. The dissertations are a reply in kind, not a neutral inquiry.", "sources": [ "clavijero-historia-antigua-ackermann-1826-t2" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "The argument reached British readers within seven years. The Critical Review noticed Charles Cullen's English translation in 1787 - \"The History of Mexico. Collected from Spanish and Mexican Historians, from Manuscripts, and Ancient Paintings of the Indians ... To which are added, Critical Dissertations on the Land, the Animals, and Inhabitants of Mexico\", two guineas in boards, printed by the Robinsons - and called the History \"copious and entertaining\" while judging it \"sometimes debased by a little superstition\". The same notice shows the argument was only half received: its reviewer still describes the Mexicans as \"surrounded, almost entirely, by untutored savages\", and misplaces the author, saying he visited South America and resided there forty years.", "sources": [ "critical-review-1787-clavigero" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "The dissertations were the second thing the book became rather than the first. Trabulse reports, on Maneiro's authority, that Clavijero's initial plan in Bologna was a dictionary of pre-Hispanic antiquities, and that a friend persuaded him to write a whole history instead; then De Pauw's Recherches Philosophiques sur les Americains reached him - one of the most formidable denigratory attacks made on the peoples, the cultures and the nature of the New World - and beside the historian there emerged the polemicist of the Disertaciones.", "sources": [ "trabulse-epilogo-clavijero-1826-facsimil" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "What was actually read for this entry is stated plainly, because it is not the first edition. The original is the Italian Storia antica del Messico, printed at Cesena in 1780 and 1781; no full-view copy of it could be reached. The sheets quoted here are the Spanish translation published by Ackermann in London in 1826, tomo II, opened in the modern facsimile issued by the Gobierno del Estado de Puebla with a prologue by Luis Gonzalez and an epilogue by Elias Trabulse. Every quotation is therefore a translator's Spanish, one remove from the author's Italian, and the entry is tiered accordingly.", "sources": [ "clavijero-historia-antigua-ackermann-1826-t2", "trabulse-epilogo-clavijero-1826-facsimil" ], "confidence": 0.9 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "English coverage of the eighteenth-century dispute over America runs through its European side - Buffon, De Pauw, Robertson - and mentions the American answer, if at all, as a sentence about creole patriotism. This entry quotes the reply from the printed sheets: the opposing thesis in Clavijero's own summary of it, the four classes of men, the choice to plead for the least defended rather than for his own class, the witness standard set by naming Ulloa and then conceding Ulloa's bias, and the six itemised grounds he takes in order. Beside them stand two things that make it credible rather than triumphal - his own advocate's tone, quoted, and a London reviewer of 1787 who praised the book while still calling the Mexicans untutored savages and misplacing their historian by a continent.", "confidence": 0.8, "last_verified": "2026-08-10", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/clavijero-disertaciones-1780", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/clavijero-disertaciones-1780.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Francisco Javier Clavijero, Disertaciones on the land, the animals and the inhabitants of Mexico (1780)", "description": "Nine dissertations printed with a Mexican Jesuit's history of his country, written in exile to answer Cornelius de Pauw's thesis that in America nature had degenerated entirely - in the elements, the plants, the animals and the men. Clavijero sets a witness standard against a philosopher who never crossed the Atlantic, declares he has no Indian ancestry before choosing to plead the Indian case, and is himself a polemicist. Read here in the 1826 Spanish translation.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/clavijero-disertaciones-1780", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-10", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Francisco Xavier Clavigero, Historia antigua de México, tomo II (Ackermann, London 1826), containing the Disertaciones sobre la tierra, los animales, y los habitantes de Mégico", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=5Sl6AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA193" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Elías Trabulse, epílogo to the facsimile of Clavigero's Historia antigua de México (Ackermann 1826), tomo II", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=5Sl6AAAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA14" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Notice of Charles Cullen's translation, The History of Mexico ... By Abbé D. 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