Chairs, becas and the colegio de San Juan Bautista at Guadalajara (1688-1742): endowed teaching in a provincial capital, and a scholarship awarded by public competition
A bishop of Guadalajara found that local talent was wasted for want of teachers and that only those who could keep themselves in Mexico City studied at all. He offered nine hundred pesos a year for three lecturers, saying openly that the money was needed by the poor but that learning was needed more. A legacy of fourteen thousand pesos endowed the chairs in 1688; a college followed, then two scholarships, one of them filled by competitive examination.
Why this wins its question: Colonial Spanish American education reaches English readers as a list of university foundation dates, so the machinery underneath - who paid a lecturer, what a scholarship was worth, how a place was awarded - is almost never shown. This object gives that machinery for one provincial city from an eyewitness chapter: a bishop's diagnosis that talent was being wasted for want of teachers, his subsidy of nine hundred pesos a year for three lecturers with the reason he gave for preferring learning to alms, a fourteen-thousand-peso legacy that made the chairs permanent in 1688, a residential college founded on the back of them with its first students named and their later offices listed, two endowed scholarships of which one was filled "por oposicion", seventy-five colegiales sorted by the colour of their becas, and, in the same chapter, the deed of 1720 by which the city's advocates constituted themselves a corporation with the approval of the audiencia. It keeps the costs in view too: the money came from alms, the teaching was Jesuit and would not outlive the expulsion of 1767, and no indigenous student is named.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The diagnosis is economic and it is stated before the remedy. Bishop Juan de Santiago de Leon Garavito "tenia advertido que los hijos de la patria malograban sus talentos por falta de maestros, y solo los que tenian posible para mantenerse en Mexico estudiaban filosofia y teologia"; he also saw "que los padres de la Compañia de Jesus apenas podian mantener corto numero de operarios, y maestros de gramatica y escuela". The problem as he framed it is not that nobody wanted to study but that only those who could pay to live in the viceregal capital could, and that the local teaching order could not afford to staff more than a grammar school.
His remedy was a standing subsidy for teachers, with a figure and a term. He "propuso la publica necesidad al provincial; ofrecio novecientos pesos en cada año para el sustento de tres sugetos que leyesen las catedras, y empeño su palabra de hacer todas las diligencias posibles para perpetuar la renta, diciendo: que esperaba en el Señor, que antes de un año habia de ver dotadas las catedras". Three hundred pesos a year per lecturer, paid by the diocesan out of his own income, against a promise to find a permanent endowment within the year - the arrangement that got philosophy and theology read at Guadalajara at all.
The cost of the decision is on the record in the founder's own words, and it is the sentence this entry exists to preserve. The chronicler reports that the bishop gave the money "y que aunque lo que daba hacia falta a los pobres, le parecia mas necesaria la ciencia, de que carecia la juventud por falta de maestros". A bishop's discretionary income in a colonial diocese was alms; what went to the lecturers did not go to the poor, and the man who made the transfer said so while making it. An account of colonial philanthropy that prints only the foundation and not this clause is telling half of it.
The permanent endowment arrived within the year, and its size is given. In the first year that Fr. Feliciano Pimentel opened the arts course, "que fue el año de 688, murio un ejemplarisimo prebendado" who "dejo catorce mil pesos para dote de dichas catedras", and the archdeacon of the cathedral, Juan Martinez Gomez, "dio cumplimiento a la fundacion". The chapter gives the capital and not the yield: at a return of five per cent, fourteen thousand pesos would produce seven hundred a year, which is within reach of the nine hundred the bishop had been paying for the same three lecturers. That arithmetic is this entry's, and nothing read here states the rate at which the legacy was invested or what the chairs cost after 1688.
The benefactor's name is printed two different ways on the same page and this entry settles neither. The text calls him "D. Simon Ruiz Conejero"; the 1870 editor's footnote attached to the asterisk beside the name reads "Copias del Sr. Garcia y archivo, Cornejo", which is the editorial convention used throughout this edition to record that the manuscript copies consulted give another reading. The corpus records both forms because a name that a nineteenth-century editor could not settle from two manuscript copies is not one a reader three centuries later should be given as certain.
A residential college followed the chairs, founded by the man who had completed their endowment. Seeing how far the scholars advanced, Martinez Gomez "fundo el celebre de San Juan Bautista, que tanto se ha ilustrado de sugetos que ha producido"; among its first colegiales the chapter names Gines Gomez de Parada, the founder's nephew and by 1742 dean of the cathedral, Ignacio de Soto Ceballos, canonigo penitenciario of Valladolid, Antonio de Mercado, prebendary of Guadalajara, Juan Faustino de Aguilera, Basilio Ramos, and Jose Valverde, "que murio obispo de Caracas".
What the teaching produced by 1742 is listed by office, and the list is not only clerical. The chapter claims for the Jesuit college and its chairs the education of the sitting bishop Juan Gomez de Parada and of Fr. Antonio Lopez Guadalupe, bishop of Honduras, of "otros muchos lectores ya jubilados y maestros en sus sacratisimas religiones, priores, guardianes y provinciales, y otros catedraticos en el colegio seminario de Señor San Jose, capellanes de todos los conventos de monjas; abogados en las reales audiencias, y muchos politicos republicanos que deben a la Compañia de Jesus su educacion". Bishops, friars, chaplains, advocates practising before the royal courts, and men in municipal office: a provincial college supplying a province's professional class.
Two scholarships were endowed to make the colleges compete, and one of them was filled by public examination. "Y para que mas se emulasen los colegios, doto una veca el Dr. D. Antonio de Arriola, magistral de la iglesia de Guadalaxara, la que se provee por oposicion; otra el Dr. D. Diego Gonzalez de Arriola, canonigo de dicha santa iglesia." A perpetual scholarship awarded to whoever won a public competition, endowed by a cathedral dignitary in a provincial city of New Spain in the decades around 1700, is a merit instrument of exactly the kind that standard accounts of colonial education assume did not exist outside the great universities. The chapter says nothing about who was eligible to compete, and this entry asserts nothing about it.
The college's size and its uniform are described, and the uniform was an incentive scheme. "Hallase hoy dicho colegio con setenta y cinco colegiales, entre gramaticos, filosofos y teologos, vistiendo todos mantos azules, y los gramaticos se distinguen en tener vecas encarnadas, color que indica el rubor que les hace empeñarse por las vecas verdes que visten los demas; y las dos de oposicion, son la una de terciopelo azul, y la otra morada, por las que anhelaban todos los colegiales, por el credito de obtenerlas por oposicion." Seventy-five students in one provincial college, sorted by a visible ladder of colours, with the two competitive scholarships at the top of it and the standing they conferred stated as the reason they were wanted.
The teaching staff did other work, and the chapter itemises it. With three more men, the Jesuits of the house "sin faltar a las catedras, asisten a los confesonarios, carceles y hospitales, enseñando en unos y otros, reglas para mudar de vida y disposiciones para la muerte, no solo a los niños en las clases, sino a los rusticos en las plazas, y por las calles enseñan la doctrina cristiana", and "cada dos años sueltan la red con las misiones de su instituto". The same men who read philosophy and theology also taught in the streets and attended the jail and the hospitals, which is how a house of eight or nine could stand in for a school system.
The same chapter dates a chapel at Guadalajara to a man better known for what he did next. "El año de 695, el primer apostol de la California, el padre Juan Maria de Salvatierra, fabrico, al costado de la iglesia, una primorosa capilla", placing in it an image of Our Lady under the title of Loreto, whose miracles "a pedimento del padre Antonio Rodero, su prefecto, se autenticaron". The chronicler's epithet is the whole point of recording it: the man he calls the first apostle of California was building a chapel at Guadalajara, and giving it the title that the California mission would later carry, before he went. Nothing read here dates the California foundation, and this entry asserts nothing about it; the corpus carries that mission's own sources elsewhere.
The chapter closes with something close to a bar association, constituted by deed and approved by the court it practised before. "Siendo dicha Señora abogada universal de los hombres, los abogados, en obsequio de la proteccion que experimentan, han querido rendirle especiales cultos desde el año de 720, que la eligieron por su patrona, obligandose con escritura aprobada por la real audiencia, a celebrar anualmente su titular fiesta"; the office of prefect rotated among them, and at the function "en las bancas del cabildo secular tienen asiento los abogados", who then distributed flowers by the prefect's hand from the president down to the most junior advocate. A body of practising lawyers, self-constituted by notarial instrument, its rules approved by the audiencia, with a rotating head and a place of its own in the city's ceremonial order, is a professional corporation whatever its stated object was.
The counterpoints belong beside the achievement. Every peso in this chapter is ecclesiastical or private - a bishop's income, a prebendary's legacy, an archdeacon's foundation, two canons' scholarships - and none of it is public revenue, so the teaching survived only as long as the endowments and the Society did; the Society was expelled from the Spanish dominions a generation after this chapter was written, as other objects in this corpus set out from their own sources, and nothing here speaks to what became of the chairs. The subjects taught were grammar, philosophy and theology, and the chapter names no chair of law or medicine, which is precisely the gap the same author complains of two chapters later. No indigenous, mestizo or mixed-descent colegial is named anywhere in the list, and the chapter gives no admission rule from which to judge whether any could have been. And the whole account is written by a lawyer of the city, about the schools of his own city and the confraternity of his own profession.
The limits of this entry. All of it is read from pages 418 to 421 of the 1870 Mexico printing of a manuscript finished at Guadalajara in 1742. No foundation deed, chaplaincy account, college constitution, matriculation book or notarial escritura was seen here; the nine hundred pesos, the fourteen thousand pesos, the seventy-five colegiales and the dates printed without their century - "688", "695", "720" - are as the edition gives them. The five per cent yield in claim c4 is this entry's arithmetic and not the chapter's. Nothing read here shows how the competitive scholarship was actually judged, who sat on the board, or whether the competition was real in practice rather than in the deed.