Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, Virtudes del Indio
A memorial to the king of Spain by the man whose principal office had been Protector de los Indios, arguing that the Indians of New Spain are not what the ministers say they are. It credits the resistance to the conquest, reads drunkenness as a national vice comparable to European ones, names the officials who tax the drink they condemn, and itemises what the poorest vassals of the monarchy were paying to keep the colony running.
Why this wins its question: Palafox reaches English-language readers, when he reaches them at all, as the bishop of the Puebla jurisdictional quarrel with the Jesuits, and the Virtudes del Indio is described from a distance as a work of praise — which makes it sound like a pious exercise and gives a reader no reason to open it. Read from the sheets, it is a legal-political brief by the crown's own fiscal de Indias, and the specifics are what carry it: the conquest attributed to prophecy, gunpowder and indigenous division rather than to Spanish valour, with the resistance explicitly credited; a Tarascan builder of organs offered as evidence of capacity; drunkenness placed beside the national vices of European kingdoms; the crown's own local officials accused of taxing the pulque they condemn, in the phrase "la beuida del Indio, es la comida del Iuez"; and an itemised account of what the Indians were paying to sustain the church and every visiting superior. The counterweight comes from the same pages — the Crown credited with ending idolatry and cannibalism in the sentence before the accusation — and the object states plainly that this is an interested party's brief and that the digitisation carries no imprint.
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 work is a memorial addressed directly to the monarch: the text opens with the single word "SEÑOR" and argues throughout in the second person to "V. Magestad". The digitisation read here carries no title page and no imprint — the scan runs from the binding through a blank leaf straight into the text — so the place, printer and year of this printing are not asserted here. The work is identified from its running head, "Virtudes" on the verso and "Del Indio" on the recto, and from the author's naming of his own offices on its second page.
The author's standing to write it is stated in a list of offices held. He recites having been honoured "con la plaça de Fiscal de Indias mas ha de veinte años, cuyo oficio principal, es ser Protector de los Indios", then Consejero of the same Council, then Visitador general of the tribunals of New Spain "cuyas primeras instrucciones se endereçan a aliuiar, y consolar a aquellos desamparados, y fidelissimos vassallos", then Virrey y Gobernador, then Juez de las Residencias de tres Virreyes, and elected Metropolitan of Mexico. The defence is written by the crown's own chief prosecutor for the Indies, whose principal duty the document says was to protect the Indians.
The obligation is claimed as pastoral as well as official. Few ministers, he writes, have gone to New Spain or returned from it more obliged than he "al amparo de los Indios, y a solicitar su aliuio"; and he could not forget the duty of a pastor and father of so many souls as are in his charge in the extended diocese of los Ángeles, which "quando no en la latitud, y extension, en el numero de Indios llega a tener casi la quarta parte de todo el distrito de aquella Real Audiencia de Mexico".
His explanation of why the conquest succeeded is not a claim of Spanish superiority. The Indians took the newcomers for gods because their own gods had told them that nations "hijas del Sol" would come from where it rises; because they were astonished at the arquebuses, seeing men killed "sin ver con que los matauan, por ignorar aquel secreto, y oculta fuerça, que arrojaua tan lexos aquellos pedaços de plomo"; and because they were divided. Had they not been taken by admiration and curiosity, or had they joined against the Spaniards, or had equal arms, or horses, or had they been united "y no anduuieran diuididos, y en guerras sangrientas entre si, los Tlaxcaltecas, de quien se valió Hernando Cortés, con los Mexicanos, y los Totonacos, con otras naciones, no puede negarse que el valor de los naturales fue grandissimo".
Capacity is argued from cases rather than asserted. He reports that a Tarascan Indian came to Mexico to learn organ-building, offering to pay the master; the Spaniard delayed drawing up the contract for six days, keeping the Indian in the house; in that time the master assembled an organ whose pipes were already made, and the Indian, only from watching him place, arrange and play it "y todo lo que mira al interior artificio deste instrumento", said when the contract was finally brought that he no longer needed teaching. He went home, built one with wooden pipes "y con tan excelentes vozes, que ha sido de los raros que ha auido en aquella Prouincia", then others of different metals, "y fue eminente en su oficio".
The memorial keeps an account of what the Indians pay for, and it is the part a celebratory reading would drop. Of divine worship, he writes, "ellos son quien lo sustenta, las ofrendas, y los derechos de los Curas, Doctrineros, y todos los emolumentos, ellos son los que los causan". They never go to see a superior of any rank, ecclesiastical or secular, without bringing hens, fruit, eggs or fish, "y quando no pueden mas, les lleuan flores", and they go away consoled if the gift is received and afflicted if it is refused. A poor Indian will walk fifty leagues loaded with fruit, honey, fish, eggs or cloth "solo para que se lo reciban", and to ask for something worth less than what he offers.
Drunkenness — the charge the whole argument has to answer — is neither denied nor treated as racial. He assures the king that commonly the Indians are of these natures and that with moderate care and doctrine they can be preserved in these inclinations, and that but for the vice of their drinks compounded from certain roots and herbs, to which they are much inclined, they are otherwise remote from the vices that make up "todo lo malo del mundo": pride, greed, envy, ambition, sensuality, anger, gluttony, oaths, gaming, blasphemy. The vice is framed as national rather than natural, and set beside European equivalents — "como en Europa en vnos Reynos el ser soberuios, y colericos, y en otros faciles, y ligeros: en otros pusilanimes, y mendigos: en otros dados a sensualidad: y en otros a ira, y vandos: y en otros a latrocinio: y en otros a la gula".
He then names who profits from the vice, and who supplies the thieves. Of theft: if there are thieves among them, "son los que se han criado, y viuen con los que no son Indios, sino entre nosotros, y otras naciones de Europa", and the Indians rarely steal without others of other nations to guide, conceal, promote and cover for them. Of drink: the Indians would easily give it up if the superiors whose business it is took a third of the care in removing the vice that others take in promoting it, "Pero como sobre el Pulque, Vingui, Tepache, y otras beuidas impuras, ha puesto la codicia su tributo, y la beuida del Indio, es la comida del Iuez, crece en el miserable la relajacion, al passo que en el rico la codicia."
The triumphalist frame is present in the same pages and is reported here rather than trimmed away. He tells the king that it cannot be doubted that as America owes to the Crown and to the Catholic arms of Your Majesty, and to the piety of his predecessors, "el auer desterrado della la Idolatria, y el comer carne humana, y otros abominables, y nefandos vicios", so it ought also to owe to the inferior ministers the banishing of this vice — which he says they will not undertake because they supply the illicit drinks themselves. The defence of the conquest and the accusation against its officials are made in one sentence, and the conclusion drawn is that this defect "no haze que los Indios desmerezcan la gracia, y amparo Real de V. Magestad".
What the document is limits what it proves. It is an advocate's brief, not a survey: the author is arguing a case to the monarch who can decide it, defending both a population and his own record as visitador general and bishop in New Spain, where he was in open jurisdictional conflict with the religious orders and with a viceroy he had himself displaced. Its virtues of the Indian are drawn as a set of moral qualities — humility, patience, poverty, obedience — that suit the argument being made, and the anecdotes are the author's own, unattributed and unverifiable. It is evidence of what a senior Spanish official was willing to tell his king, not an independent account of indigenous life.