Andrés Pérez de Ribas, Historia de los triumphos de nuestra santa fee (Madrid, 1645)
The first sustained printed account of the peoples of Sinaloa, Sonora and the sierra of Durango, published at Madrid in 1645 by a Jesuit who had spent sixteen years among them and says so on the page. Its title page also advertises armed victories, and its censor states that the book will justify the crown's right of conquest. Its chapter 20 records the author comparing the radical words of their languages with Nahuatl and concluding they had come from the north.
Why this wins its question: In English this book is cited at second hand, through the 1999 translation, and almost always for one thing: the mission system of the Jesuit northwest. The 1645 Madrid sheets are opened here, and they answer a different and better-posed question — what a missionary who lived sixteen years among the peoples of Sinaloa actually recorded about them, and how he knew. The comparative-vocabulary argument of page 20, with its narrow arm of sea by which men and animals could pass, is a seventeenth-century statement of the northern migration route made from linguistic evidence, and it is quoted here from the page rather than paraphrased. The counterweights come off the same sheets and are quoted with the same care: a title page that advertises armed victories, a censor who says the book will justify the crown's right of conquest, a Babel theology of language difference, and a table of chapters in which the Tepehuán rising and its punishment run for forty pages. Nothing here needs the reader to take the author's word for his own restraint — his claim to have converted without killing is marked as his claim, at reduced confidence, and set beside his own admission that he rode with the presidios.
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 book was printed at Madrid in 1645 "Por Alōso de Paredes, jūto a los Estudios de la Cōpañia", con privilegio, dedicated "A LA MVY CATOLICA MAGESTAD DEL REY N. S. FELIPE QVARTO", and its title page names the author as "EL PADRE ANDRES PEREZ DE RIBAS, Prouincial en la Nueua España, natural de Cordoua" — that is, the sitting Jesuit provincial of New Spain writing the history of his own order's missions.
The title page states the book's contents without euphemism and includes the coercion in the advertisement: it promises the customs, rites and superstitions of these peoples, their situations and climates, "las vitorias que de algunas dellas alcançaron con las armas los Catolicos Españoles, quando les obligaron à tomarlas", and the deaths of twenty religious of the Company killed in various places and at the hands of various nations. The peoples themselves are described in the title as "las mas barbaras, y fieras del nueuo Orbe".
The book's apologetic function is stated by its own censor. In the aprobación, Fr. Alonso de la Corte of the Order of St Augustine, catedrático de prima jubilado in the Real Colegio de S. Agustín of the university of Alcalá de Henares, writing by commission of the vicar general of Madrid, tells the reader that the work "darà con clarissimas experiencias justificado el derecho de nuestros Catolicos Monarcas, a la conquista y possession de las Indias", and praises the sight of "vna bien fundada Republica Christiana en lo politico, entre gentes que antes distauan poco de las fieras".
The author explains in his prologue why he called the book Triunfos de la Fe, and the explanation contains his central claim about method: that "sin desquixarar, ni quitar la vida à estas gentes fieras, se quebrantaron, y arrancaron sus costumbres barbaras, indomitas, y nunca oidas; y se introduxeron en su lugar las Christianas". The claim is his, is made about missions the same book says were accompanied by presidio soldiers, and is not independently corroborated here.
The same prologue sets out the geography of the work: the principal missions to which the others are reduced are five, the first being that of Cinaloa "por ser la mas dilatada, y la primera de que se encargò la Compañia en la Nueua España", the second Topia, the third San Andrés, the fourth the Tepeguanes; the fifth is named on the following leaf, which was not opened.
The author states his own standing as a witness at the end of his carta: "el que la escriue, es testigo de vista de mucho de lo que en ella se refiere, y lo tocò (como dizen) con las manos, porque estuuo por tiempo de diez y seis años empleado en estas Missiones, y doctrinò algunas Gentilidades dellas; acompañó a los Capitanes, y soldados de presidios, que entraron a pacificarlas, y tratò à muchos de los primeros Padres". The sentence that establishes his authority is also the sentence that records he travelled with the soldiers.
He also declares a standard of writing, quoting Lucian against the historian who lets himself be carried into panegyric — "Vnum opus est Historiæ, & vnus finis, vtilitas, quæ ex sola veritate conciliatur" — and undertaking that the history will lean on truth in a plain style "sin afectacion, ni mendigando palabras, o afeites de que para su hermosura no necesita". He then notes that the history is ecclesiastical rather than secular, and that he will not bury in oblivion what Spanish captains and soldiers "trabajaron, y ayudaron a la conquista, assi temporal, como espiritual de tantas Naciones".
Libro I is announced as a description of "la Prouincia de Cinaloa, las Naciones que la habitan, sus costumbres, y la primera entrada de nuestros Españoles a ella", and gives its measurements: the province lies three hundred leagues from Mexico City, to the north and west of it, and runs a hundred and forty leagues in length "hasta donde oy llega la doctrina del Euangelio" by forty in breadth.
Chapter by chapter the book is an ethnographic inquiry with a stated method. On page 20 the author records that he made enquiry "con particular cuidado, y no pocas vezes" among the oldest and most understanding of these Indians, asking where they had come out from and when they or their forebears had settled the places they now held; that all answered him alike, that they had come from the direction of the north, abandoning places they had held there because other nations had dispossessed them in war; and that he found the same in the reports he gathered on entradas made inland by Spanish soldiers, which he accompanied.
He supports the conclusion with comparative vocabulary, and states the migration hypothesis it led him to. Learning some of their languages he observed that in almost all of them — "q̃ son muchas y varias" — words are found, "principalmente los que llaman radicales", that either belong to the Mexican language or derive from it and retain many of its syllables, "de que pudiera hazer aqui vn muy largo catalogo"; and though their artes and grammars differ, in many of their precepts they agree. From this he infers that all these nations came out to people this new world "de la vanda del Norte", and that they found on that side a passage of terra firme and continent, or else that America is divided from the old world only "por algun angosto braço de mar, por el qual con facilidad pudieron passar, assi hombres, como fieras y animales, que en este nueuo mundo se hallan".
The frame around that observation is theological and hostile, on the same page. The variety and confusion of the languages is explained as punishment for the sins of those who tried to raise the tower of confusion against God, so that as the sins of these peoples multiplied their tongues multiplied and were confounded, the devil being "cabeça, y principe de confusion y diuision". The same page reports that the commonest languages of Cinaloa call Spaniards "Yoris, ò Doris", a word meaning valiant, which they give also to fierce beasts such as the lion and the tiger.
The book does not omit the wars, and its own table of chapters is the shortest proof. A long run of chapters between pages 609 and 651 carries the Tepehuán rising: the killing of Padre Hernando de Santarén at Tenerapa and what happened in the mines of Indehé; the rebellion spreading to pueblos of the Xixime nation; the danger to the city of Guadiana and "el castigo que aqui se executò"; the governor riding out and meeting the dead bodies of a Dominican and other Christians; four Jesuits' bodies deposited at Guadiana, "muertos a manos de infieles rebelados"; and, thirty chapters later, the Tepehuán nation finally settled at peace again.