Fray Juan de San Miguel and the founding of Uruapan (1540)
A Franciscan who learned Tarascan in 1536, founded a string of towns in the sierra of Michoacán with a church and a hospital in each, and in 1540 laid out Uruapan himself — site, plaza, streets, orchards, schools of letters and of music, and a chapel at the end of every street, nine of which still stood in 1862. The people he gathered were in the sierra because Nuño de Guzmán had killed their king, and the same source that praises him says so.
Why this wins its question: Uruapan reaches English-language sources as avocados and the Paricutín volcano; its founder is at best a line in an article about Vasco de Quiroga, and the standard account of Michoacán's sixteenth century has room for one Spaniard only. This object reads the pages of the 1862 diocesan survey and the 1766 life that actually describe the work — the town plan drawn by hand, the chapel at the end of every street with nine still standing, the schools of first letters and of music, the hospitals put into each sierra town as a matter of course, the jícara craft that gave the town its name, and the orchard where four kinds of plantain were acclimatised. It also keeps in view what a devotional retelling drops: that the people were in the sierra because Nuño de Guzmán had killed their king, that the population estimate is hearsay and was cut down by epidemics, that the ward chapels supervised as well as served, and that the church was burnt in 1813 by the independence fighters rather than by anyone Spanish.
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 1862 diocesan survey of Michoacán records that Fray Juan de San Miguel, one of the first Franciscans to reach New Spain after the twelve apostolic men of his order, learned Tarascan in 1536 and founded the towns of Tancítaro, Charapan, Peribán "y otros muchos de la sierra", establishing in all of them "iglesias y hospitales". The hospital is treated as part of the standard equipment of a new town, not as an exceptional foundation.
The same page states why there were people to gather in the high sierra: the Tarascan Indians had withdrawn into the interior "por el horror que concibieron contra Nuño de Guzman, que habia sacrificado cruelmente al rey Calzonzin", and it was not possible to bring them to Christianity "sin gran peligro de la vida de los misioneros". The missionary enterprise here begins as a consequence of a Spanish atrocity, in the account of a writer wholly sympathetic to the missionaries.
Uruapan was founded in 1540 and planned by one man: "el mismo escojió el sitio para la ereccion del pueblo, trazó la plaza, las calles y las huertas, estableció escuelas de primeras letras y de música, levantó los templos, enseñó las artes á los indígenas y los defendió valerosamente de toda opresion por parte de los conquistadores". The last clause is the survey's own, and the protection it describes was needed against Spaniards.
The town's plan put a church at the end of each street, the chapels facing one another, one built for every barrio and fitted out for worship. Nine of those chapels were still standing when the survey was written in 1860-62. The arrangement is a piece of urban design and a piece of doctrinal supervision at once: it divides the indigenous town into wards and gives each ward a place of assembly under the friars' eye.
The size of the new settlement is reported at second hand and should be treated as such: "grande fué el número de colonos que llevó el padre San Miguel á la nueva fundacion: algunos los hacen subir hasta 20,000", a population afterwards reduced "por las terribles pestes que asolaron el país". The figure is an estimate the source attributes to others; the epidemics are stated flatly in the same sentence.
The name is indigenous and industrial. Uruapan comes from the Tarascan word "Urani", meaning jícara, "porque los indios se comenzaron á dedicar á la fábrica y pintura de las jicaras en cuya industria han sobresalido por espacio de tres siglos" — a craft economy that the survey, writing in the 1860s, reckons three centuries old.
The orchards were an acclimatisation station. According to the survey no fruit of hot or cold country failed to take in them; Quiroga had already brought the first plantains and had them planted at Ziracuaretiro, and San Miguel acclimatised four kinds of plantain at Uruapan along with mameyes, chirimoyas, oranges, limes, canes, black zapotes "y toda clase de frutas y verduras". The town is also described as fed by springs and by the river rising in the great ojo de agua beside it, water that irrigates the orchards and reaches the houses.
The plantain story has an older witness, at one remove. The 1766 life of Quiroga, citing the Augustinian chronicler Basalenque, reports that the bishop — persuaded that "el Comercio, y la labranza, son los medios mas oportunos para establecer la felicidad de un estado" and seeing that the kingdom lacked the plantain — carried plants from Santo Domingo, where his ship had stopped for water; that five reached the province and were planted at Tziriquaretiro near Taretan because its climate resembled the island's; and that "aquí fué donde se dieron los primeros Plátanos de la Nueva España, y de aquí se ha llenado toda ella". Confidence is held low: a Michoacán house is claiming a first for a Michoacán bishop, at second hand.
What the town kept of him was a statue, not a portrait. The convent he built had become a hospital by 1862, and on its facade stood "la estátua del padre San Miguel que los indios agradecidos levantaron á la memoria de su bienhechor" — the only homage, the survey says, that anyone paid him: neither the sierra towns, nor Uruapan, Acámbaro, San Miguel, Morelia or Pátzcuaro preserved so much as a portrait of him. The same passage credits him with the first college of the episcopal capital, afterwards merged into San Nicolás, with completing the town of Acámbaro and founding San Miguel el Grande, and with dying among the Indians of Uruapan.
Two later facts cut across the founding story and belong beside it. The parish itself was erected by Vasco de Quiroga, who died while making the visitation of this parish; and the church of the town was burnt in 1813 "por los independientes" — the destruction recorded here was done in the war of independence, by the insurgent side, and the building was reconstructed afterwards "conforme al gusto moderno".