Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco (founded 1536)
The college a Spanish viceroy built and endowed at his own cost in an Indian quarter of Mexico City so that the sons of Nahua lords could be taught Latin, rhetoric, logic and philosophy. Its collegians became the translators without whom the friars' books could not have been made, and one of them governed Mexico City for nearly thirty years. The Franciscan who describes it also records who opposed it, and why the teaching had stopped by the time he wrote.
Why this wins its question: Tlatelolco usually appears in English as a half-sentence — a college where friars taught Latin to Indian nobles, closed early, no details. The chapter that is the main sixteenth-century source for it is quoted here from the page: who paid for it and out of whose pocket, how the pupils were recruited and how they slept, which friars taught them, what the graduates were used for, and the name of the collegian who governed Mexico City for close on thirty years. The same pages supply the case against — the two arguments the college's opponents actually made, the withdrawal of its royal subsidy once its founder and his successor were gone, and its historian's own statement that the serious teaching of Latin to Indians had ceased.
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 account used here is a chapter of a Franciscan history written at the end of the sixteenth century: libro IV, "CAPITULO XV. De la fundacion del colegio de Santa Cruz, que se edificó en la ciudad de México para enseñar á los indios en todo ejercicio de letras", with the printed side-note "Colegio de Santa Cruz en Tlatelulco".
The teaching began before the building. Grammar was first read to the Indians in the convent of San Francisco of Mexico, in the chapel of San José, where Fray Pedro de Gante procured to impose them in Christian doctrine and in all the arts and exercises they were being taught; the first master of grammar they had was Fray Arnaldo de Bassacio, "de nacion frances, doctísimo varon y gran lengua de los indios".
The founder was the first viceroy of New Spain. Mendieta writes that the viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza, whom he calls "padre verdadero de los indios", gave order that a college be built in a principal quarter of Mexico a quarter of a league from San Francisco, where the friars minor had a second convent with the church of the apostle Santiago and the quarter is called Tlatelulco; that the viceroy "edificó el colegio á su costa"; and that he gave it certain estancias and haciendas he had, so that the Indian collegians should be sustained from their rent.
Admission was aristocratic and deliberately spread across the country: the collegians were to be boys of from ten to twelve years, "hijos de los señores y principales de los mayores pueblos ó provincias de esta Nueva España", brought two or three from each cabecera or principal town "porque todos participasen de este beneficio", the religious of the convents being charged to choose and name in the towns where they resided the ablest for the purpose and to compel their fathers to send them. About a hundred boys were gathered for the term set.
The opening was a public act of the colony's whole leadership. The foundation "se hizo con mucha autoridad", with a solemn procession from San Francisco de Mexico at which the viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza, the bishop of Mexico Fray Juan de Zumárraga, and the bishop of Santo Domingo Don Sebastian Ramirez, president of the royal audiencia of Mexico, came together with the whole city; three sermons were preached that day, and the party dined in the refectory at the cost of bishop Zumárraga.
The description of daily life is concrete and is one of the few surviving. The collegians ate together as friars in their refectory; the dormitory was a long room with beds down each side on wooden platforms because of the damp and a passage between; each boy had a blanket and a mat, "que para indios es cama de señores", and a small chest with a key for his books and clothes; a light burned all night and guards watched over them; they said matins of Our Lady and the other hours, sang the Te Deum laudamus on feast days, rose with the friars, went in procession to church in their hopas, heard mass and returned to their lessons.
The staff was not second rate. After Bassacio the Latin was taught by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and Fray Andrés de Olmos, and the rhetoric, logic and philosophy by "el doctísimo Fr. Juan de Gaona", all of them, in Mendieta's words, excellent speakers of Mexican — the same men who were writing the grammars and the ethnographic compilations of Nahua culture.
What the collegians were then used for is Mendieta's answer to the charge that the teaching was useless, and it runs the other way from the usual picture of who was translating whom. The friars who learned Nahuatl well learned it perfectly through these Latinist collegians, and "con su ayuda de ellos tradujeron en la misma lengua las doctrinas y tratados que han sido menester para enseñamiento de todos los indios, y los impresores con su ayuda los han impreso, que de otra manera no pudieran". The same men helped in the examination of marriages and in the administration of the sacraments; and by that same sufficiency some were chosen as judges and governors in the republic, "y lo han hecho mejor que otros, como hombres que leen y saben y entienden".
The example named is a named man. Don Antonio Valeriano, "indio gobernador de la ciudad de México", having come out well in Latin, logic and philosophy, succeeded his own teachers in reading grammar in the college for some years, and was afterwards elected governor of Mexico City for a little less than thirty years, governing that city in what touched the Indians "con general aceptacion de los vireyes y edificacion de los españoles".
The opposition is recorded by the college's own defender, which is what makes the record usable. "Ninguna cosa hay en este mundo, por buena y provechosa que sea, que deje de tener contradiccion", writes Mendieta; the college and the teaching of Latin to Indians "siempre tuvo sus contradictores". Two reasons were given against it: that Latin learning was of no profit to the republic, and that by knowing Latin the Indians might fall into heresies and errors and be enough to raise their towns in revolt. Mendieta answers the first with the translations and the second by saying he sees no ground to judge this of the Indians more than of Spaniards or of other nations.
The funding failed within two generations, and Mendieta blames the colonial administration in plain terms. Some years, "que podemos llamar tiempos dorados", the work was favoured while its founder governed, and his successor Don Luis de Velasco the elder, informed that the college's rent did not suffice for so many collegians, reported it to the Emperor and by his order helped it each year with two or three hundred ducats. After Velasco died "ninguna cosa se le ha dado, ni ningun favor se le ha mostrado", and rather the contrary, some later governors wishing to take from the Indians what they had and apply the benefit to Spaniards, "porque parece tienen por mal empleado todo el bien que se hace á los indios, y por tiempo perdido el que con ellos se gasta".
The chapter contains an anecdote that shows the social stakes of the teaching. A priest who did not understand a word of Latin held a sinister opinion of the Indians and could not believe any of them knew Christian doctrine or even the Pater noster; he tested a collegian, who said it correctly, then "corrected" his natus ex Maria Virgine to nato ex Maria Virgine; when the Indian held firm the cleric argued, and on being asked in Latin which case nato was, could not answer and went away affronted and confused. Mendieta's moral is "cada uno trabaje de saber lo que es de su oficio, y por ser él ignorante, no quiera que los otros tambien lo sean".
By the time the history was written the experiment was over, and its historian says why. "Con todo esto ha cesado el enseñar deveras latin á los indios", the men of that time being on the one hand very much on their own account and on the other so loaded with labours and temporal occupations that no time was left them for learning or for anything of the spirit, the ministers of the Church discouraged, "y el favor y calor muerto, y así se ha ido todo cayendo". The building stood good and strong, with good halls and rooms added by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, who sustained and enlarged it as far as he could until his death. Medicine as the Indians practised it, in the knowledge of herbs and roots, was also taught there for a short time, "mas esto todo se acabó". The college then served only to teach the Indian boys of Tlatelolco to read, write and good customs.
The transmission of this evidence is itself late. Mendieta's history, written at the end of the sixteenth century, was first published at Mexico in 1870 by Joaquín García Icazbalceta, who had announced it in 1866 as the third volume of his Coleccion de documentos para la historia de México and then issued it as an entirely separate work; his advertencia is dated Mexico, 31 December 1869, and records that the first two volumes had been printed in his own house and largely by his own hands, his press having passed to other people in 1867.
What this source cannot establish should be stated beside what it does. Mendieta is a Franciscan writing the history of his own order's mission and arguing a case against the college's critics; the chapter is his testimony and no more. It gives no register of students, no curriculum documents, no examination records, and no independent measure of results beyond the examples he chooses — chiefly Valeriano. The number of about a hundred boys, the ages and the recruitment rule are his account of the founder's intention, not a surviving enrolment.