Colegio de San Juan de Letran, Mexico City — the crown's schools for mestizo children
A school opened in Mexico City around 1547 for the mestizo sons of Spaniards, with a parallel house for mestiza girls, both under royal patronage and both still being inspected and audited by law two centuries later. The viceroy who reports the foundation states its motive in the same sentence as its charity: the emperor and empress had ordered many times that these children be gathered in, "porque andaban muchos dellos perdidos entre los indios".
Why this wins its question: The mestizo children of the first colonial generation reach English mostly as a demographic category or as the subject of a sentence about the casta paintings, and the schools founded for them are a footnote in institutional histories of the college of Tlatelolco. Here the foundation is read in the documents that carry it: a viceroy's own handover paper stating that the emperor and empress ordered the mestizo sons of Spaniards gathered in "porque andaban muchos dellos perdidos entre los indios", that a college was instituted where they learn doctrine, reading and writing, and that a house beside it takes in the girls and tries to marry them out; and the law of the Indies naming the Colegio de San Juan de Letran, auditing it with the Indian hospital as a royal foundation, and ordering annual viceregal visits to the girls' college. The counterpoint comes from the same two documents rather than from a critic: the motive is the removal of an unattached population, the girls' provision ends in marriage rather than letters, the law that endows the houses forbids the pupils their mother tongue, and the viceroy who calls it a great error to hold Indians incapable of letters refuses them ordination in the next clause and closes the item "todo es violento".
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 anchor document is a viceroy's handover paper printed at Mexico in 1867 from a manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional, headed "RELACION, APUNTAMIENTOS Y AVISOS QUE POR MANDADO DE S. M. DÍ AL SR. D. LUIS DE VELASCO, VISOREY, Y GOBERNADOR Y CAPITAN GENERAL DESTA NUEVA ESPAÑA" and running under the head "DE D. ANTONIO DE MENDOZA A D. LUIS DE VELASCO". Velasco succeeded Mendoza in 1550, which dates the handover. The attribution to Mendoza should be carried with its own evidence and no more: the editor prints a note that in another hand the manuscript reads "Es escrito por D. Antonio de Mendoza, virey de Nueva España", and that a much more modern hand has added in the margin "Letra del marqués de Mondexar". The authorship rests on later hands, not on a signature.
Item 12 of that paper, headed in the margin "Del colegio de los mestizos", states the order, the reason for it and what was built: "S. M. y la Emperatriz, nuestra señora, que está en la gloria, me mandaron por muchas veces que yo diese órden como los hijos mestizos de los españoles se recojiesen, porque andaban muchos dellos perdidos entre los indios. Para remedio desto y en cumplimiento de lo que sus Majestades me mandaron, se ha instituido un colegio de niños donde se recojen no solo los perdidos, mas otros muchos que tienen padres los ponen á deprender la dotrina cristiana, y á leer y escribir, y á tomar buenas costumbres." Two things are on the record in one paragraph: a school teaching reading and writing, and a motive of social order - children of Spaniards living unattached among Indians were a problem the crown wanted remedied.
The same item records the parallel provision for girls and the difference in what was intended for them: "Y asimismo hay una casa donde las mozas desta calidad que andan perdidas se recojen, y de allí se procura sacallas casadas." The boys are gathered in to learn doctrine, letters and good customs; the girls are gathered in and married out. The document names the men responsible - the licenciado Tejada for the women's house, the doctor Quesada for the boys' - says the viceroy asked them to take it on as a favour, and calls it "una tan santa obra y tan necesaria para esta república".
The school Mendoza describes without naming is named in a royal instrucción general printed in the same volume, which orders an incoming viceroy to attend to "el colegio de niños pobres mestizos de México, que se denomina de San Juan de Letran, para que en él se les enseñe la doctrina cristiana y buenas costumbres", to report on the state it is found in and on whether those attending profit by it, to inspect the mestizo boys in it "para que en caso de haber alguna falta ó descuido, se remedie", and to have the accounts of its rents taken - "en conformidad de lo que tengo mandado por la Ley décimotercia, título cuarto del Libro primero de la Recopilacion".
That law can be read in the Recopilación itself, and it puts the college inside the crown's own accounting. Libro I, título IIII, ley xiij is headed "Que las cuentas del Colegio de San Juan de Letran y Hospital Real de México se tomen por los Contadores de Cuentas", dated in the margin "D. Felipe IIII en Madrid á 26 de Junio de 1624", and orders that when the accounts of the mayordomos of the Colegio de San Juan de Letran of the city of Mexico and of the Hospital Real de los Indios of that city are to be taken, the viceroy shall have them taken by the accountants of the audit office or a senior official of it, "pues estas Casas son de nuestro Patronazgo". The college is audited in the same law as the Indian hospital, and both are treated as royal foundations.
The girls' side has its own law in the preceding título. Libro I, título III, ley xviij is headed "Que los Vireyes visiten cada año el Colegio de las Niñas de México, y le favorezcan en la forma que se ordena", with the margin "El Emperador D. Cárlos y el Principe Gobernador en Monzon de Aragon á 18 de Diciembre de 1552". It orders the viceroy in person one year and an oidor of the audiencia of Mexico the next to visit the Colegio de las Niñas Recogidas, to see that it has the doctrine and enclosure it needs and people to watch over the girls, and to know "en que y como se gasta la limosna que se hace á la Casa". The law immediately before it recites that a house was founded for "Mestizas huérfanas" for their enclosure, maintenance and doctrine.
The cost of the policy is printed in the same título as the endowment, and it is a cost in language. Ley xviiij, "Que se hagan y conserven Casas de Recogimiento en que se crien las Indias" - margin "D. Felipe III en S. Lorenzo á 10 de Junio de 1612. cap. 14 de Instruccion. D. Felipe IIII en Madrid á 8 de Junio de 1624. cap. 14 de Instruccion" - orders viceroys to find out what such houses exist, how they are governed and how they are sustained, to found them where there are none with "Matronas de buena vida y exemplo", and to charge them to put much care and diligence into teaching these girls "la lengua Española, y en ella la Doctrina Christiana y oraciones, exercitándolas en libros de buen exemplo, y no les permitan hablar la lengua materna". The same rulebook that endows the schools forbids their pupils their first language.
The item that follows the colegio in Mendoza's paper is the one that shows what the argument of the 1540s actually was, and it argues both ways in a single paragraph. Of the college of Indians at Tlatelolco he writes that they have proved well in letters, that it would have shown more clearly had the recent pestilence not carried off most of the ablest, that "envidias y pasiones han sido parte para que esto no haya crecido tanto cuanto debiera", and that his successor should favour them, "porque es gran yerro de los que los quieren hacer incapaces para todas letras ni para lo demás que se puede conceder á otros cualesquier hombres". He then withholds the priesthood from them however learned and virtuous they may be, "porque esto se debe reservar para cuando esta nacion llegue al estado de policía en que nosotros estamos"; and he ends the item: "lo que se hace se sostiene con gran fuerza, porque todo es violento."
What the sources do and do not establish. Both are printed texts read as page images: a nineteenth-century edition of viceregal papers, which is a witness to the manuscripts and not the manuscripts themselves, and the 1791 fourth impression of the Recopilación, which is a witness to the law as it stood in print. Together they establish that a college for mestizo boys existed in Mexico City by 1550, that a house for mestiza girls existed beside it, that a college called San Juan de Letran was under royal patronage and audited with the Hospital Real de los Indios by a law of 1624, and that viceroys were still being instructed to inspect it in the eighteenth century. That the school of Mendoza's item 12 is the institution later called San Juan de Letran is an inference from those texts rather than a statement in any of them. No enrolment figure, no curriculum beyond doctrine, reading and writing, and no outcome for any pupil is claimed here.