The household constitution of the pueblos-hospital of Santa Fe: an elective head of family, usufruct that could not be sold, and children taught to farm as a game
Under the ordinances printed in 1766 the unit of Santa Fe was the extended household. Each of four quadrillas named a head of family whom its members could replace; house, orchard and plot were held in usufruct only, passing to married poor sons by seniority and failing them to the town's oldest married poor, inalienable for ever. Children learned letters, doctrine and farming, the last as play two days a week. The same pages fix the eldest grandfather over the household and expel the idle.
Why this wins its question: Accounts of Santa Fe stop at the six-hour day and the rotating regimiento, which are the two things a summary can carry. The household constitution is where the design actually lives, and it is not summarised anywhere in reach: heads of family named by four quadrillas and removable by their own members, houses and land held in usufruct only and descending to married poor sons or, failing them, to the oldest married poor of the town, inalienable in perpetuity with a stated theory of why commons fail, girls taught wool, linen, silk and cotton for the looms, and children taken to the field two days a week for an hour or two "a manera de regozijo, juego, y passatiempo" keeping what they raised, with a prize for the best. This entry quotes all of it from the page, and puts on the same page the second-person reproach, the office nobody could refuse and the power to expel a drunkard - which is what makes the rest usable rather than promotional.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
In these ordinances the word "hospital" means the town. The 1766 editor's first note on the first page states it plainly: hospital here is taken not only for the rooms destined to lodge pilgrims or care for the sick "sino por toda la poblacion, y vezindad de estos lugares, como que se avian congregado, y fundado para aquellas assistencias", and all the inhabitants of Santa Fe were to be called Hospitalarios even if they had other trades. A second note adds that Colegio was the name for any body of persons making a community, that each of these towns was therefore properly called a Colegio, and that in the province the other Indians called the people of Santa Fe Colegiales. Both are the editor's glosses rather than the founder's words, and are reported here as such; what the ordinances themselves do is use the two terms interchangeably for the settlement as a whole.
The unit of the settlement is the extended household and its order is explicitly gerontocratic and patriarchal. Each kindred was to dwell in its own family, "y el mas antiguo Abuelo sera el que en ella presida, y a quien han de acatar, y obedecer toda la familia, y las mugeres sirvan a sus maridos, y los descendientes a los ascendientes, Padres, y Abuelos, y Bis Abuelos, y en fin los de menos edad, y los mas mozos a los mas viejos". The stated reason is economic as much as moral: "porque assi se pueda escusar mucho de criados, y criadas, y otros servidores, que suelen ser costosos, y mui enojosos a sus amos". A household large enough to need no servants is the design, and the subordination of wives and of the young is part of the design and not an incidental of the period's prose.
Headship of a household was filled by election and could be taken away. All the poor of the hospital were divided into four parts or quadrillas, each of which was to have its father of family, and the ordinance on the election of the Principal proceeds from "quatro que de si mesmos" the quadrillas had so named. Heads of family were answerable for the excesses and disorders of their households, to be corrected in that case by the Rector and Regidores; and if the excesses arose from the incapacity or "mal recaudo" of the heads themselves, "elijanse otros, que sean habiles que mas convenga de la mesma familia por los moradores de ella", always with the concurrence of the Rector and Regidores. Office in the household, like office in the town, was therefore an appointment the members made and could unmake, inside a clerical framework rather than independently of one.
Nobody at Santa Fe owned anything in land. The orchards, the plot of ground in the best and nearest land, the houses and the families were held for recreation and help beyond what the common labour gave, but "solamente aveis de tener el usufruto de ello tanto quanto en el dicho Hospital moraredes, y no mas". On a vacancy by death, or by long absence taken without express licence of the Rector and Regidores, the holding passed to the holder's married poor sons or grandsons "por su orden, y prioridad", to hold on the same terms; failing them, to the oldest married and best Christians among the poor of the town who had no holding of their own by seniority; and those took it as usufructuaries only, for as long as they resided and obeyed the ordinances. The editor's note explains the operative word: succession runs "por la mayoria, y antiguedad".
The land was made inalienable in terms, and the reason given is a theory of what destroys a common. Nothing that is real property, whether of the hospital or of the orchards and families, could be alienated, "sino que siempre se quede perpetuamente inagenable en el dicho Hospital, y Colegio de Santa Fe", without power to alienate, commute, barter or exchange it or to let it out of the town at any time. The stated ground is that otherwise this good work and alms of poor Indians, orphans, wards, widows and wretched persons would easily be lost and could not long be sustained, "apropriandolo cada uno para si lo que pudiesse, y sin cuidado de sus proximos, como es cosa verisimil que seria, y se suele hazer por nuestros pecados, y por falta de semejante policia, y concierto de Republica, que es procurar lo proprio, y menospreciar lo comun que es de los pobres". Written as a rule for an indigenous town in New Spain, it is also, read on its own terms, a diagnosis of enclosure.
Children were taught letters, doctrine and farming, and the method prescribed for the farming is deliberate pedagogy rather than child labour dressed up. Agriculture was to be the common office of all "desde la ninez", taught to the children of the hospital "juntamente con las letras del A B C, y con la doctrina Christiana, y moral de buenas costumbres". The manner is set out in its own ordinance: after the hours of doctrine they were to be exercised two days a week, taken to the field by their master or another deputed for it, to land near the school set aside for the purpose, "y esto a manera de regozijo, juego, y passatiempo, una hora, o dos cada dia"; each with his coa or implement; what they raised was to be for themselves, harvested together and then divided among themselves "no como ninos, sino cuerda, y prudentemente, segun la edad, y fuerzas, y trabajo, e diligencia de cada uno", with an advantage promised to whoever did it best. Two days out of the week, one or two hours, the crop theirs, and a prize.
The 1766 editor recognised the method as the one Europe was then crediting elsewhere, and said so. His note to that ordinance calls it an "admirable maxima para suavizar el trabajo a los pequenos, y acostumbrarlos insensiblemente a el", adds that these are the stratagems practised in France for the education of youth which have made Rollin and Pluche venerated as masters in the matter, and ends: "Comunmente se juzga que estos grandes hombres son Authores originales de ellos. Pero justo es que a cada uno se le de lo suyo." The priority claim is the editor's, made by an interested party in a book published by Quiroga's own college, and this entry does not endorse it: nothing here shows Rollin or Pluche knew of an unpublished sixteenth-century Michoacan draft, and the resemblance is as likely to be independent. What it does show is that a Mexican reader in 1766 could hold his own local text up against the fashionable European pedagogy of his day and think it stood comparison.
Girls were trained to a distinct and named set of trades, and to field work as well. They were to learn in their parents' households "los oficios mugeriles dados a ellas, y adoptados, y necessarios al pro, y bien suyo, y de la republica del Hospital, como son obras de lana, y lino, y seda, y algodon, y para todo lo necessario, accessorio, y util al oficio de los telares" - and, the ordinance adds, they were to break ground for sowing on returning to their houses. The list is worth keeping whole: silk and linen alongside wool and cotton means European fibres and Mesoamerican fibres taught in the same workshop, and the loom is named as the trade the whole sequence serves.
Marriage was regulated by age, by circle and by form. Boys were to marry from fourteen years upward and girls from twelve, with the daughters of the other households of the hospital and, failing them, with the daughters of poor neighbours of the district; always in the order of the Holy Mother Church of Rome and not clandestinely, "sino si possible es con la voluntad de los Padres, y Madres naturales, y de su familia". The ages are given without comment and nothing in the pages read compares them with the practice of other towns, so no claim is made here that they were unusual; what the ordinance contributes in its own right is the circle - marriage within the hospital's own households first - which is what kept the holdings and the labour inside the town.
The cost of the design is on the same sheets and belongs next to it. The ordinances are addressed throughout in the second person to the Indians of the town by the Spanish bishop who founded it, and they reproach as much as they provide: the exhortation to the common work is not to hide from it or excuse oneself "vergonzosa, perezosa, y feamente, como lo soleis hazer", and the addressees are told they are "mui defectuosos" in the good order the ordinances supply. Office could not be refused: no one was to solicit the offices, and no one to whom they were given might decline them, "y puedan ser compelidos a ello". And the town could expel: anyone doing something foul or of bad example, turbulent, scandalous, a bad Christian, who got drunk, was excessively idle, or would not keep the ordinances and was incorrigible in it, was to be thrown out at once and to restore what he had profited from the town, executed by the Principal and Regidores "con parecer del Rector". A commons with elected heads, secure succession for the poor and schooling for the children was also a commons with compulsory office, compulsory labour and a power of banishment, exercised under a resident priest.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from the appendix pages of the Mexico 1766 imprint, opened as page scans on 2026-08-30, and it is a reading of a normative text: it establishes what the ordinance said, never that any household at Santa Fe lived by it. The companion entry on the transmission of this text records the 1766 editor's own statement that the notebook he printed was a late draft never put into observance, and that qualification applies to every claim above. Nothing here establishes how many households either town held, how the quadrillas were constituted, whether the succession rule was ever applied, whether any expulsion took place, what the schools taught in practice or in what language, or how the arrangements stood by the eighteenth century. Where a claim rests on a footnote of 1766 rather than on the ordinance, it says so in its own text.