Sahagún's Relación del autor digna de ser notada
The short appendix Bernardino de Sahagún attached to the tenth book of his Historia general, and the closest thing the sixteenth century produced to a defence of indigenous intellectual capacity written by someone who had tested it. He taught the first four years of Latin at Tlatelolco, records that Spaniards and fellow religious laughed at the attempt, sets down what the pupils could do within three years, and lists the objections raised against them once they could do it.
Why this wins its question: Sahagún is cited everywhere as the founder of ethnography and almost never quoted on the one subject he was an eyewitness to: whether Nahua students could learn Latin, and what happened to the school when they did. The Relación is three pages long, sits at the back of the tenth book, and is reproduced here from the pages of the 1830 printing with the objections and the answers both set down, including the vexations that made Indian complaint unsafe. It is deliberately kept apart from the editor's voice: Bustamante's footnotes and his peroration are registered as a separate, weaker source, so a reader can see which sentences are sixteenth-century testimony and which are a nineteenth-century Mexican politician's gloss.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Sahagún denies the Nahua had letters and asserts they had records. They had no alphabet and could not read or write, "comunicábanse por imágenes y pinturas, y todas las antigüallas suyas y libros que tenian de ellas, estaban pintados con figuras é imágenes de tal manera, que sabian y tenian memorias de las cosas que sus antepasados habian hecho y dejado en sus anales, por mas de mil años atrás, antes que viniesen los españoles á esta tierra".
He records the destruction of those books, and that it was incomplete: most of them were burnt when the other idolatries were destroyed, "pero no dejaron de quedar muchas escondidas que las hemos visto, y aun ahora se guardan". The friars who wrote up Nahua antiquity were working from what survived a burning their own order had carried out.
The Latin experiment is described as an escalation from an elementary school: the boys were taught to read, write and sing in the friars' own houses, and because that went well "procuramos luego de ponerlos en el estudio de la gramática, para el cual ejercicio se hizo un colegio en la ciudad de México, en la parte de Santiago del Tlaltelolco", to which the ablest boys of the surrounding towns and provinces were chosen and where they slept and ate without going out.
The project was mocked before it was opposed. "Los españoles y los otros religiosos que supieron esto, reíanse mucho y hacian burla, teniendo por muy averiguado que nadie sería poderoso para poder enseñar gramática á gente tan inhábil" — the derision came from Spaniards and from other clergy alike, not from one quarter.
Sahagún puts his own name to the result rather than reporting it at second hand: working with the pupils two or three years, they came to understand all the matter of grammar, to speak and understand and write Latin "y aun á hacer versos heroycos", and "yo fuí el que los primeros cuatro años trabajé con ellos, y los puse en todas las materias de la latinidad". The claim is a teacher's about his own class.
Success brought organised opposition, and he names its arguments. Once it was clear the pupils were advancing, seculars and ecclesiastics alike moved to obstruct the enterprise: that since these men were not to be priests, grammar served no purpose for them; that it put them in danger of heresy; and that reading scripture they would learn the ancient patriarchs had several wives at once, as they themselves had done, and would refuse to believe what was preached to them about marriage to one woman.
The answers he records are careful rather than triumphal. To the first objection, that the friars wanted to know by experience how far the pupils' ability extended, so as to be able to testify to it and to treat them accordingly; to the charge of heresy, that not intending it is the opposite of causing it, and that people subject to a most Christian prince could be remedied if anything of the kind appeared; to the objection about wives, the answer of the Gospel on what Christ corrected in ancient usage.
The same pages put the ordinary treatment of Indians on the record. When things worthy of reprehension are denounced from the pulpit, the offenders trace who gave the information, "y casi siempre caen con la persona, y los castigan malamente con solapacion y disimulacion, cargándoles la mano en los servicios corporales y personales, y haciéndoles otras vejaciones de que los pasientes ni se pueden quejar, ni se saben remediar" — those who complain must do it in secret, and the friars are obliged to keep silent to avoid worse.
A named product of the college was still governing when the account was written. Bustamante's footnote identifies "D. Antonio Valeriano de Azcapotzalco", whose Latin letter the editor says he read in manuscript in the Turriana library and calls a model of epistolary correspondence. The same footnotes locate the first chair of grammar in the chapel of San José at San Francisco and name San Juan de Letrán, founded by Motolinía, as gathering workshops of arts and trades.
The editor supplies a motive Sahagún does not: the contradictions the college met came, on Bustamante's reading, from "la rivalidad que hubo entre los niños indios, y los hijos de los españoles conquistadores, que se mordian al ver que los primeros les eccedian, porque no se les chiqueaba y hacian estudiar con teson". This is a nineteenth-century inference, not a sixteenth-century record, and is marked as such.
The 1830 editor reads the herbal chapters as evidence of a double Nahua competence, botanical and medical, "pues sabian aplicar las yerbas á las enfermedades conocidas", where the botanical books of his own day are perhaps confined to describing plants. He backs it with the story of a healer known as "el Doctor Indio de Valladolid de Michoacan", summoned by the Protomedicato of Mexico for punishment as an empiric, who gave the examining physicians a herb that produced a haemorrhage they could not stop, then a powder that staunched it at once.
The transmission is late, Mexican and partisan. What is printed is Bustamante's text of 1830, issued in the first decade of independence with the editor's footnotes running under the author's page; he laments the near-total loss of the Mexican language and "la terrible persecucion que ha sufrido á consecuencia de varias órdenes de la Córte de Madrid para que se extinga", and petitions the government to order a botanical expedition through the republic to reclassify the Mexican plants against Linnaean nomenclature.