Tardes americanas (Mexico, 1778): a history of the Indies argued between an Indian and a Spaniard
A Franciscan printed a history of Mexico in Mexico in 1778 and put it in the mouth of two speakers, an Indio and an Espanol, credited on the title page as its authors. The Indian holds the position, presses for the source and refuses an argument he has not read; the Spaniard quotes the bibliography. The prologue mocks curates who sit before Indians like the Sultan, and the hospitals of Michoacan become a dispute about evidence. It is also a friar's ventriloquism.
Why this wins its question: Tardes americanas is cited in the scholarship as a footnote in the creole-patriotism literature and is almost never quoted; the English-language web has essentially nothing on it. What is actually in the book is more interesting than its classification: a title page that assigns authorship to "un Indio, y un Español", a prologue whose second speaker opens by mocking curates who sit before Indians like the Sultan and the Tsar, a running dialogue in which the Indian asks the questions, and a set-piece dispute over the hospitals of Michoacan in which the Indian holds the attribution to Fray Juan de San Miguel and refuses to yield it to a book he has not read. This entry quotes those pages from the 1778 Mexico imprint, checks the life of Quiroga it argues against against that book's own printing of 1766 — where the chronicler the dialogue calls "Larrea" is Alonso de la Rea, and where Moreno is indeed found setting an archival censo deed against a chronicler's silence — and then states, from the same pages, that the Indian is a friar's device and hands him the friar's own commonplaces. Neither the celebration nor the debunking is available anywhere else at claim level. The entry is tiered secondary rather than primary although its spine is an original 1778 imprint read from the page, because the one claim that checks the dialogue against the book it argues with cites an eighteenth-century devotional life registered here at secondary, and the label follows the weakest source cited rather than the best.
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 announces its form on its own title page, and the form is the point. "TARDES AMERICANAS: GOBIERNO GENTIL Y CATOLICO: BREVE Y PARTICULAR NOTICIA DE TODA LA HISTORIA INDIANA: Sucesos, casos notables, y cosas ignoradas, desde la entrada de la Gran Nacion Tulteca á esta tierra de Anahuac, hasta los presentes tiempos. TRABAJADAS POR UN INDIO, Y UN ESPAÑOL." The man who "sacalas a luz" is named underneath as Fr. Joseph Joaquin Granados y Galvez, ex-definidor of the province of Michoacan and former guardian of the convents of Xiquilpan, Valladolid and Rioverde; the imprint is "MEXICO: En la nueva Imprenta Matritense de D. Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, calle de la Palma, año de 1778". The authorship on the title page is assigned to the two speakers and the friar presents himself as the man who brings their work to light.
The dedication names the reader the book was aimed at. It is dedicated "Al Excmô. Sr. D. JOSEPH DE GALVEZ, Caballero de la Real distinguida Orden de CARLOS III., del Consejo de Estado, Gobernador del Supremo de las Indias, y Secretario del Despacho universal de ellas" — that is, to the minister then running the government of the Indies, and a man of the author's own surname. This is not a book smuggled past authority; it is a book offered to it.
The prologue stages the meeting and, in its third sentence about the Indian, prints a criticism of the clergy. The author walks out "Acompañado de un Paisano" to the banks of the Alaja and they meet "un Indio, sócio en mis honestas diversiones, soledades, y retiros", greeted "con aquellas cariñosas demostraciones de quien le amaba tiernamente"; and the companion, "como admirado de la llaneza del Indio", says in a low voice and close to the ear: "Curas conozco, que ostentan con esta especie de gentes tanta magestad y soberanía como el Gran Señor en su Diván, y el Tzar de Moscovia en su Gavinete." The remark that curates carry themselves before Indians like the Sultan and the Tsar is printed on the opening page of the book's own introduction, with a licence, in Mexico, in 1778.
The alternation is real and runs through the body of the work, not only its frame. On printed page 508 the two speakers work through a chain of questions on the Church, each paragraph headed "Indio." or "Espanol.", with the Indian putting the questions — "Porqué dice Christo que ningun otro fundamento, fuera del que estaba puesto, se había de poner en su Iglesia?" — and closing the chain himself with "Pues ahora bien", and then: "como podrá faltar la Fé y la Religion en un Edificio que Christo es el escudo, la piedra, el fundamento, y Herrero divino que le ha echado fuertes cerraduras para defenderlo?" The Indian is not a pretext in a preface who then falls silent.
The most interesting exchange in the pages read here is an argument about evidence, and the Indian is the party demanding it. Asked who founded the hospitals of Michoacan, the Indio answers "Ninguno duda que fue el P. Fr. Juan de San Miguel, Religioso tan exemplar, que" — and is cut off. The Espanol objects that an author who wrote the life of bishop Vasco de Quiroga in 66 attributes the hospitals entirely to Quiroga; the Indio asks "Y ese Autor es anónimo, ó no conviene que sepamos su nombre?"; the Espanol declines to name him out of respect; and the Indio replies "No he leído esa obra, y así estimaré el que Vm. me haga capaz de lo que produce tan gran talento, contra una verdad que hasta aquí la he tenido por irrefragable, y nada dudosa." A colonial book stages a historiographical dispute in which the Indian holds the older attribution and will not give it up to an authority he has not read.
The Spaniard then reads the rival case out at length, and what he reads is a piece of source criticism. Chapter 12 of the anonymous life is quoted: "No adoptamos el sentir del R. P. Torquemada, quien afirma, que esta fundacion se debe al V. P. F. Juan de San Miguel::: de Torquemada, Autor que padece la excepcion de no ser de esta Provincia, tomó, como lo suele hacer en otras muchas cosas, esta noticia, el Rmô. Fr. Alonso de Larrea, Chronista de esta Provincia. ... Quantos han escrito este punto, excepto los citados, todos atribuyen esta obra de los Hospitales al Sr. Quiroga"; Basalenque is cited for "A su Señoría, dicen todos, se ha de atribuir esta obra de los Hospitales", and Grijalva for "Lo que ayudó mucho á estas fundaciones, y el principal Motor y Patron de tan santa obra, fue aquel Santo Prelado, y singular Varon D. Vasco de Quiroga". The objection to Torquemada is that he was not of the province and took the notice at second hand, which is a claim about how a chronicler got his information and not about what happened.
The life being quoted is Juan Joseph Moreno's Fragmentos de la vida y virtudes de D. Vasco de Quiroga, Mexico 1766, which this corpus holds separately, and the 1766 book does argue in exactly that manner. Its printed page 56 records that the colegio at Guayangareo was founded "por el V. P. Fr. Juan de S. Miguel, Religioso Franciscano, de cuyas heroicas virtudes haze mencion el R. P. Fr. Alonso de la Rea", and its footnote sets the chronicler's silence against a document: "Es de maravillarse vèr que el R. P. Fr. Alonso de la Rea en su historia de la Provincia de los Apostoles San Pedro, y San Pablo de Michoacàn haziendo tan larga, y honorifica mencion de las virtudes, y hechos de este Venerable Religioso, passe en silencio la fundacion del Colegio; sin embargo es incontestable averlo fundado este exemplar Varon, porque assi se dice en una escritura de censo celebrada à su favor, y que se conserva en este Archivo". Two points follow and both are limited. Moreno prefers an archival deed to a chronicler's silence, which is the method the 1778 dialogue attributes to him; and the chronicler's name in his own book is Alonso de la Rea, where the 1778 Mexico printing gives "Alonso de Larrea". The chapter 12 passage quoted in the dialogue was not located in the 1766 volume from this container, so the accuracy of the quotation itself is not established here.
The book also carries the creole case about American capacity, and it carries it as a general proposition rather than as a complaint. On printed page 396 the speaker holds that virtue, science and arms are the three gifts "que pródigo reparte el Cielo entre la variedad de criaturas racionales", and that heaven "jamás ha negado á las que habitan nuestro Septentrion en calidad de Españoles Indianos, ó que el vulgo llama Criollos", before running through a page of surnames offered as proof. The claim on this page is made for the American-born Spaniards; nothing on the pages read here extends it in those words to the indigenous population, and this entry does not extend it for them.
Silver, the thing New Spain was for, gets a hostile epigram in the same dialogue. On printed page 232 the miners are said to work "duras y obstinadas guijas de la tierra; sucediendo las mas veces, que por cabar el Idolo, labran sepulcros para su entierro", riches being "una enemiga de la amistad, inexplicable pena, mal necesario, tentacion natural, necesidad apetecida, peligro doméstico, detrimento gozoso"; and the Indio caps it with scripture, "muchos varones durmieron sus sueños sobre ellas, y ninguna cosa hallaron en sus manos". Digging for the idol, they dig their own graves: printed in the mining viceroyalty, in the year the free-trade regulation was issued.
What the book is not should be as clear as what it is, and the same pages supply it. The Indio is a character a Franciscan writes, and the register gives him away: two pages before he quotes scripture against greed he is handed the line "Sí, que ambas son hermosas" in answer to the Espanol's "Y no sabes que en nada se diferencian la muger y la riqueza?" — a commonplace of the author's world, not of any indigenous interlocutor. No indigenous person is named anywhere on the title page, the licences read here name none, and there is no evidence in these pages that any real Indian contributed a word. The book is therefore evidence of what a Mexican Franciscan in 1778 thought it was decent, publishable and flattering to a minister to put in an Indian's mouth — which is a real and under-used kind of evidence, and is not the same thing as an indigenous voice.