Fray Juan de San Miguel, founder of Uruapan

The Franciscan who learned Tarascan in 1536 and spent the next decades gathering people the Spanish conquest had driven into the sierra back into towns he laid out himself — plaza, streets, orchards, a chapel per barrio, schools of letters and of music, a hospital in each. Romero reports that he defended the indigenous against the conquistadors, and that the statue they raised to him was the only memorial anyone kept.