The Colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola of Mexico City, whose constitutions barred the Church and barred Indian girls
A college for women founded in Mexico City by Basque merchants, approved by Carlos III in 1753, and governed - unusually for its century - entirely by laymen, with no vows, women officers elected each year, and total inhibition of ecclesiastical authority. The same constitutions required its pupils to be legitimate Spanish daughters and not Indians or other castes. Both sentences come from the same page, and both are quoted here.
Why this wins its question: The college survives and is usually described in one line as the oldest school for girls in the Americas still working, which tells a reader nothing about what it was. What is actually interesting is constitutional and is quoted here from the 1853 Mexican Diccionario universal: a women's institution whose government was declared entirely secular with total inhibition of the ecclesiastical and subject only to the king, which could not be turned into a convent, whose rectora and other officers were elected annually, and whose unpaid twelve-member lay board had to pay twelve pesos a year for the privilege. The same page carries the sentence that the pupils had to be legitimate Spanish daughters and not Indians or other castes, and the money - 33,618 pesos for the site, 583,118 spent by 1767, 1,815,453 in all - is corroborated line for line by Orozco y Berra's 1867 official Memoria. No general account of colonial Mexico puts the charter, the exclusion and the accounts in front of the reader together.
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 origin is told as an anecdote and is repeated here as one. The 1867 Memoria says that it is said that one afternoon in 1732 three rich Spanish merchants - Ambrosio Meave, Francisco Echeveste and Jose Aldaco - walking past what was then a rubbish tip, found some wretched girls idle and using indecent words, asked whether there was any school thereabouts, were told there was none, and resolved to build and endow a house of education at their own expense. The source itself introduces the story with "Dicese que", and no more weight is put on it than that.
What is not anecdote is the site and the date, because two independent nineteenth-century sources give the same figures. The ground measured 150 Castilian varas east to west by 163 north to south, an area of 24,450, and cost 33,618 pesos; the first stone was laid on 31 July 1734, the feast of Ignatius of Loyola, after whom the college was named.
Both sources also give the same construction figure: 583,118 pesos had been spent on the building by 1767. The 1853 article carries the accounting further and sets the sum of all the outlays - fabric, endowments, chaplaincies and the rest - at 1,815,453 pesos, with a further 168,717 pesos in repairs and enlargements down to 1852. The 1867 Memoria, counting only construction with its later repairs and additions, puts the cost at close to two million pesos.
The endowment is itemised in the 1853 article and the items say what the founders thought they were building. Each colegiala was to be endowed with 3,000 pesos and the fund for that came to 468,694; the college's common funds reached 181,758 and its obras pias 186,630; the public classes or schools for the townspeople, kept separate from the colegialas, were endowed with 34,000 pesos; chapels and a department for the Ignatian exercises cost 71,635; and 66 chaplaincies were founded with capitals of 3,000, 4,000 and 6,000 pesos, 256,000 in all, their patronage given to the confraternity.
The crown approved it late and approved it whole. A cedula of Carlos III of 1 September 1753 approved the foundation and the constitutions and granted the patronage and direction to the old confraternity of Nuestra Senora de Aranzazu, founded by Basques in the Franciscan convent of Mexico, taking the establishment under the immediate royal protection of the king and his successors. The confraternity is where the college got the name by which it is better known, las Vizcainas.
The constitutional point is the one that makes the institution unusual, and the 1853 article states it flatly: the government and principal direction of the college is entirely secular, with total inhibition of the ecclesiastical, and was subject only to the king. The constitutions provided that the establishment serve to feed and instruct widows and unmarried women and that it could not be converted into a monastery or any other institute binding its members by solemn or simple vows. In a city whose colleges and hospitals were overwhelmingly under religious orders or episcopal authority, a chartered women's institution explicitly closed to ecclesiastical jurisdiction is the fact worth knowing.
The internal government was in women's hands. A rectora, a vicerrectora and other women officers under various titles were elected annually by the mesa of the confraternity, re-election being frequent. The ecclesiastical administration - which is to say the chaplaincy, not the governance - was entrusted to two chaplains, also elected each year by the same lay mesa, and ordinarily re-elected, so that they became in practice life appointments.
The governing mesa was twelve people, renewed by halves every two years, the incoming members named by the outgoing, with two seats for each of the Basque provinces and Navarre, two for Mexico and two unattached. A rector and a treasurer were named from among them, the treasurer in practice permanent. It met when the rector called it and ordinarily every two months. Its members drew no salary or gratification of any kind; on the contrary they were obliged to contribute twelve pesos a year each, and the source says it was very rare for one not to add some further monthly sum to complete the food of the poor girls.
The cost is in the same paragraph as the achievement and is not softened here. The constitutions required that the colegialas be precisely legitimate Spanish daughters and not Indians nor of other castes. Being Basque or of Basque descent was not required and gave only preference in the nominations made by grace; any girl could be admitted provided her maintenance, reckoned at ten pesos a month, was secured. So the bar the college actually enforced against the population of the country it stood in was one of ancestry, not of money, and the document says so in its own words.
Colegialas had to be unmarried women or widows; married women were not admitted on any account, not even in deposit - the legal custody in which a wife could be placed during matrimonial litigation. The refusal is worth noting because it cuts against the institution's own charitable rhetoric: the women likeliest to need shelter from a husband were the ones the rule excluded.
It outlived the order that made it. By 1866 the college was giving free public primary and secondary teaching to girls, maintaining a considerable number of resident pupils and admitting fee-paying boarders besides, and it ran two amigas - small neighbourhood schools - in which 310 girls were taught. Mexico City that year counted 133 schools with 9,345 pupils, of which 69 schools with 4,584 pupils were for girls, so the two amigas of one college were about seven per cent of all the girls at school in the capital.
After the confraternity was extinguished the college passed to a governing junta that filled its own vacancies, the appointments being approved by the government under whose protection the establishment stood. From September 1862 it also housed the pupils of two suppressed colleges, Belen and the Colegio de las Ninas.
Those absorbed pupils came from something older still. The Colegio de Santa Maria de la Caridad, commonly called the Colegio de las Ninas, had been founded in 1548 by the archconfraternity of the Santisimo Sacramento for the shelter and education of poor unmarried girls, and was governed and administered by that same confraternity; its property, built up from legacies and pious donations, was very large, and the building alone was valued at more than 120,000 pesos when sold. Almost all of it was alienated in 1861 and the college, left without funds, ceased to exist, its pupils going to the Vizcainas in September 1862. Lay confraternity schooling for girls in Mexico City is thus two centuries older than the Vizcainas, and it was nineteenth-century disentailment, not the colonial regime, that closed it.
The 1853 article is unusually frank about why such foundations existed at all, and the sentence is worth keeping rather than paraphrasing away. Rich people, it says, in health or on their deathbeds, devoted part of their fortunes to these establishments, ordinarily satisfying their own piety and good inclination, and sometimes perhaps the restitution demanded of them by scruples of conscience about the way some parts of those fortunes had been acquired - religion converting beneficence, or remorse, alike into the good of humanity.