The petition for a university at Guadalajara (1700-1742): a seminary built, a royal order to report, and the case for degrees five hundred leagues from Mexico
In 1700 Charles II ordered the audiencia of Guadalajara to report on a bishop's request to erect a university in his city, funded by the bishop himself, a three per cent levy on the rents of hospitals and confraternities, and two ninths of the tithes. Forty years later nothing had been erected, and a local lawyer set out the cost: no lawyers for the magistrates, no physicians, prisoners held ten or twelve years, and students who could not afford Mexico simply going without.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of higher education in the Spanish Indies stop at Santo Domingo, Lima and Mexico, so the ordinary provincial case - a city of a kingdom's own audiencia and bishopric that asked for a university and did not get one - is not told at all. This object gives one such file whole from an eyewitness chapter: the bishop who built the Tridentine seminary first, the royal cedula of 21 August 1700 quoted in substance with its three proposed sources of endowment, the catchment of five hundred leagues it claimed, the seventy-five colegiales of San Juan and forty seminarians already studying with nowhere to graduate, and the costs of the gap stated as administrative facts - three hundred pesos of post to fetch a legal opinion, defendants held ten or twelve years while the record was rebuilt, testaments voided by the ignorance of the judges who took them, deaths for want of physicians. It then keeps on the record the two things that make the case honest rather than heroic: the beneficiaries were defined as Spaniards "de sangre limpia", and the permanence of the scheme was to rest on a three per cent charge on the rents of the city's hospitals and confraternities.
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 petitioner is named and dated, and he is not a metropolitan reformer. The chapter opens with the death of bishop Juan de Santiago de Leon Garavito and the presentation of Fr. Felipe Galindo y Chavez, a Dominican born at Veracruz whose father, Pedro Chavez Galindo, "paso a estos reinos provisto corregidor de la ciudad de Zacatecas" and whose mother was Luisa de Pineda; he took the habit at Mexico, went "dentro de poco tiempo" to Guadalajara as lector, was prior there, twice prior of the convent of Mexico, provincial of his province and a missionary in the Sierra Gorda. The chronicler dates his presentation to a cedula of Charles II "fecha 30 de Diciembre de 696", printed in the 1870 edition without its century, and dates his death to "10 de Marzo del año de 702". The man who asked for the university had spent his career in the province that wanted it.
The seminary came first and it was finished. The chapter says the bishop "pudo entender con toda tranquilidad en obras publicas muy utiles al reino; tal fue el colegio seminario que fabrico, conforme al concilio Tridentino, con el que gasto crecidas cantidades, dejandole en corriente con sus catedras y una costosa libreria". A Tridentine diocesan seminary, with chairs and a library, built and running before any university was asked for; the request was to add degree-granting to a school that already existed rather than to conjure one from nothing.
The royal order is quoted in substance and dated, and the finance is the interesting part. The author reports "una real cedula (de 21 de Agosto de 1700), en que su Magestad dice a la audiencia: que el obispo informaba estar concluida la obra material del colegio seminario, y solicitaba se erigiese universidad, en que se leyese la doctrina de Santo Tomas, y se confiriesen grados, ofreciendo a sus expensas el sustento de colegiales y dotaciones de catedras, y que para su mayor seguridad y permanencia, proponia que los hospitales y cofradias contribuyesen con el tres por ciento de sus rentas, y se le concediesen los dos novenos, por lo que concluye la cedula, mandando a la audiencia se le informase." Three distinct sources of endowment are named - the bishop's own income, a levy on charitable corporations, and a share of the tithes - and the crown's response is neither a grant nor a refusal but an order to the local high court to report.
The argument from distance is stated with figures a reader can check against a map. From the bounds of New Spain to the Pimas Altos, "que termina la cristiandad de Oriente a Poniente, hay mas de quinientas leguas, y otras tantas de Sur a Norte, de las costas del mar Pacifico, hasta las nuevas Filipinas o provincia de los Texas"; within it lie the governments of Galicia, Vizcaya, Leon, "Extremadura o Coahuila", "Nuevo Toledo o Nayarit", "Nuevas Filipinas o Texas" and "Nueva Andalucia o Sinaloa y Sonora", and two bishoprics. This is the catchment the petition claimed, and it is most of what is now northern Mexico and Texas.
The constituency named is explicitly a racial one, and this entry prints it rather than paraphrasing it away. The people the author says would fill the university are the inhabitants of "muchos lugares y poblaciones de españoles naturales del reino, de sangre limpia, y por eso capaces de aplicarse a los estudios". Limpieza de sangre was a formal bar written into the statutes of colleges and corporations across the Spanish world, as other objects in this corpus set out from their own sources; the case made here is for the education of creole Spaniards, not for a general opening of higher study, and the chapter names no indigenous, mestizo or mulatto candidate anywhere. Other objects in this corpus carry the parallel institutions that did admit indigenous students, and the contrast is the honest way to read this page.
The cost of the alternative is put in terms of household economics rather than prestige. Those who wanted degrees "se ven precisados a extrañarse de sus patrias y pasar a la ciudad de Mexico, en donde por su opulencia hay peligros, por su magnitud muchas diversiones, y por su distancia son crecidos los costos; en los de posible se encuentran inconvenientes, y en los pobres dificultades, y asi muchos se quedan sin estudios." The sentence separates the comfortable, who find the journey inconvenient, from the poor, who find it impossible, and says plainly that the second group simply went without.
The demand was already visible in the schools that did exist, and the numbers are given. Even without a university, "se ve el colegio de San Juan con setenta y cinco colegiales, el seminario de Señor San Jose con mas de cuarenta, sin muchos mas que en trajes seculares pueblan las clases, y mayor numero se advirtieran si hubiera catedras de derechos y medicina, y universidad en que se graduaran." Students who did reach Guadalajara stopped at theology because there was nothing else to read and no way to take a degree, and even in theology "quedan sin graduarse, por el dificil ocurso a Mexico". The figures are the author's own and no matriculation register was seen here.
The consequences he lists are administrative and medical, not ornamental, and they are the strongest part of the case. In the Spanish towns "hubiera abogados que dirigieran a los corregidores, quienes por no tener tenientes letrados perjudican al publico por su incuria, dilatan los negocios porque los remiten en asesoria a lugares tan distantes, que solo el correo suele llevar trescientos pesos, y en las causas criminales, o los reos se quedan impunes o padecen diez o doce años de prision, por ser necesario a la audiencia en materias graves, reponerlos al primer estado; cuantos testamentos se otorgan defectuosos, de que se suscitan pleitos, por la ignorancia de los jueces ante quienes se otorga por no tener quien les dirija; por falta de medicos muchos padecen y mueren." A postal bill of three hundred pesos to obtain a legal opinion, and ten or twelve years of pre-trial imprisonment because the record had to be reconstructed, are the measured cost of having no trained lawyers within a hundred leagues.
The clerical career is the fourth argument and it is documented with a specific recent case. Ecclesiastics, "aun teniendo suficiencia, por no estar graduados, no se oponen a las canongias", so when one falls vacant the field is thin; in the previous year "tres curas se fueron a graduar, atenidos a la esperanza de que uno obtuviese la canongia magistral, y quedaron empeñados aun mas por los costos del viaje, que por los del grado". Against that he sets the forty candidates who had appeared at public synods for curacies without any prospect of a degree, and asks what would follow if the reward of graduation were in sight.
The author knows he has left off narrating and says so, which is the reason to trust the passage as advocacy and not as report. Paragraph 4 begins "Mucho me he apartado de lo que es historia" - he is aware the chapter has become a memorial - and the benefits he then promises are stated as certainties: that ignorance would be banished, "el estado politico tuviera esplendor", there would be more ecclesiastical ministers, "surtieran efecto las ultimas voluntades de los testadores, que no surten efecto por la incuria de los actuantes", councils would govern their republics better, the audiencias would be less encumbered, the kingdom would populate faster, and above all there would follow "la mas copiosa conversion de los gentiles". The last item is the giveaway: the university is offered to the crown as an instrument of church and state, and that is how it was sold.
Forty years after the order to report, there was still no university, and the chapter records what had been done instead. Writing in 1742 the author argues that the report would now be easier to make, because it could be backed "con los buenos efectos que se experimentan con la fundacion del colegio seminario", whose alumni had obtained degrees "aunque a costa de trabajos y de gastos, por la distancia de cien leguas que han andado para Mexico"; and he reports that the sitting bishop, Juan Gomez de Parada, a native of Guadalajara, judging the seminary's site too small, "ha comprado nuevo sitio en que darle extension, sin duda con el fin de solicitar haya capacidad para la fabrica material de la universidad", and hoped to obtain the crown's support "aplicando sus reales novenos y vacantes". Nothing read here shows that a university was granted; what it shows is a forty-year file still open, with the local church buying land against the day it might be.
The same chapter records an indigenous precedence suit and how it was settled, which belongs here because it shows the two Indian pueblos of the city acting as corporations with standing. At the proclamation of Philip V on 25 July 1701, "los caciques de los dos pueblos de Analco y Mexicalcingo litigaron la preferencia; y los unos pretendian, como mexicanos, ser mas antiguos; los otros, como nativos de la Galicia, decian deber ser los primeros a quienes tocaba dar testimonio de su lealtad"; the president had both acclaim the king "a una voz", "con lo que quedaron gustosos de no ser los unos preferidos de los otros; y asi, ha quedado indecisa la controversia, como la que tiene Toledo y Burgos". The chronicler's own comparison is to the unsettled precedence of two Castilian cities in the Cortes, which is the standing he is implicitly granting the two pueblos.
The counterpoint that a triumphalist reading would drop is in the financing clause of the cedula itself. The permanence of the proposed university was to rest partly on "el tres por ciento de sus rentas" taken from "los hospitales y cofradias" - that is, on the endowments that paid for hospital beds, burials and the relief of the poor in the same city, including the royal hospital whose finances another object in this corpus sets out, and the confraternities of Indian and mixed-descent artisans among them. A university for creole Spaniards was to be part-funded by a standing charge on charitable income. The chapter neither notices the transfer nor defends it, and the crown never had to decide it, because the university was not erected.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 427 to 430 of the 1870 Mexico printing of a manuscript finished at Guadalajara in 1742, by a lawyer of that city's audiencia who wanted the university and says so. The cedula of 21 August 1700 was not seen in any archival copy, and neither was the audiencia's answering report, which is the document that would show why nothing happened; the dates printed without their century, "696" and "702", are given as the edition prints them. The seventy-five colegiales, the forty seminarians, the three hundred pesos of post, the ten or twelve years of prison and the hundred leagues to Mexico are all his figures and none was checked here against a register or an account. Nothing read here establishes when, or whether, a university was finally erected at Guadalajara, and this entry asserts nothing about that.