Villaseñor y Sánchez, Theatro Americano, Parte Segunda (Mexico, 1748)
A royal order of 19 July 1741 told the viceroyalty to describe itself. The crown's accountant for quicksilver, working from returns sent in by local officials, produced a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction survey of New Spain, printed in Mexico by a widow's press. Its second volume counts the republic of Spaniards and the republic of Indians separately, names the language each town spoke, and records where the conquest was accepted and at what cost.
Why this wins its question: The Theatro Americano is cited constantly by demographers of colonial Mexico and described almost nowhere for a general reader, so the standard English account of eighteenth-century New Spain runs on adjectives where a printed jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction survey exists. This object opens the 1748 second volume and quotes what it actually does: the royal order of 19 July 1741 that commanded it, the accountant of quicksilver who wrote it, the widow's press that printed it by the viceroy's mandate, and the form of an entry - two population counts kept separate, the república de indios with its own governor and alcaldes at two thousand families against five hundred families of Spaniards, mestizos and mulatos, and the language of the larger body named as Tarasco. It puts the costs from the same pages beside them: the chapel marking where a province submitted, the northern peoples listed as expressly outside the description, and the fact that the numbers are second-hand returns in families rather than a count of persons.
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 names its own commissioning instrument. The dedication to Fernando VI describes it as "la descripcion, que por Real Orden de 19. de Julio de 1741. mandò formar la Real Catholica Magestad, de mi amado Monaracha el Señor DON PHILIPO QUINTO", the first volume having been consecrated to that king; the author writes that he has proceeded in "amorosa obediencia á los preceptos Soberanos, que han agitado á mi rudeza calificada en el primero Tomo de esta descripció". A survey of a whole viceroyalty was ordered from Madrid, begun under one reign and finished under the next.
The title page states who wrote it, on whose order, and where it was printed: "THEATRO AMERICANO, DESCRIPCION GENERAL DE LOS REYNOS, Y PROVINCIAS DE LA NUEVA-ESPAÑA, Y SUS JURISDICCIONES ... SU AUTHOR D. JOSEPH ANTONIO DE VILLA-SEÑOR, Y SANCHEZ, Contador General de la Real Contaduria de Azogues, y Cosmographo de este Reyno. QUIEN LA ESCRIBIÓ DE ORDEN DEL EXCELENTISSIMO SEÑOR CONDE DE FUEN-CLARA, Y LA IMPRIMIÓ DE LA DEL EXCELENTISSIMO SEÑOR D. JUAN FRANCISCO GUEMEZ DE HORCASITAS ... SEGUNDA PARTE", with the imprint "En la Imprenta de la Viuda de D. Joseph Bernardo de Hogal, Impressora del Real y Apostolico Tribunal de la Santa Cruzada, en todo este Reyno. Calle de las Capuchinas. Año de 1748." The compiler was a treasury accountant and the kingdom's cosmographer; the printer was a woman running an official press in Mexico City.
The second volume is organised by ecclesiastical jurisdiction, not by narrative. Libro III opens "Que contiene las Jurisdicciones del Obispado de Michoacán. CAPITULO I. De la Ciudad de Valladolid, y Jurisdiccion de Pasquaro, y sus Pueblos", and proceeds town by town and partido by partido. The unit of description is the administrative district, which is what makes the work usable as a source of numbers rather than of anecdote.
Population is reported as two counts, not one, and the language of the second is named. Of Pátzcuaro the entry runs: "Consta su Vecindario de mas de quinientas familias de Españoles, Mestizos, y Mulatos, y la Republica de los Indios con su Gobernador, y Alcaldes se compone de dos mil familias del Idioma Tarasco." The indigenous town is counted as a corporate body with its own governor and magistrates, is four times the size of the Spanish and casta population, and is identified by the language it speaks. The two republics were an administrative fact a treasury official had to enumerate, and the enumeration is the evidence for it.
Indigenous names and meanings are carried into the description rather than replaced. The city's name is taken from the lake, which "en su Idioma quiere dezir lugar donde ay pescado", and the surviving Purépecha royal line is named in the same paragraph as the Spanish institutions: "Pedro Calzontzì, Nieto del Rey Calzontzí", a Jesuit donado in a grey habit, who "vivió Santamente en el exercicio de Maestro de Escuela, hasta que la piedad con q assistia à los enfermos en una gravissima epidemia le quitò la vida". A grandson of the last independent ruler of Michoacán appears in an official survey as a schoolmaster who died nursing the sick.
The conquest is in the book, in the landscape and in plain words. The chapel called el Humilladero stands, the entry says, "por ser el parage en que los Indios de la Provincia, se rindieron humildes à los Españoles, que emprendieron su pacificacion". The submission of a people is recorded as a site to be visited. The same pages note that the parish church served thirty years as the cathedral of Michoacán before the see and chapter moved to Valladolid, and that the Jesuit college holds "las respectables cenizas del Illmo y V. D. Basco de Quiroga, primer Obispo de Michoacán".
The survey knows the limits of what it surveys, including in the far north. Villaseñor writes that the northern part is barely settled, that the land runs untilled beyond the polar circle, that the eastern coasts from Florida northward are held by those established "en la Virginia, en la Canada, Nueva Francia, Nueva Bretaña, y Groelanda", and judges that "aun todavia son sombra las Poblaciones para lo que ofrece el territorio interno". He then lists what he is explicitly not describing, leaving it to a future narration: "las Provincias Apaches, Moquinas, Nijoras, Cocomaricopas, Quiviras, Misuries, Ilinois, Canadas, Iroqueses". A description of the Spanish north that names the peoples it does not reach is a more honest document than a map with a line on it.
Two cautions about the figures, both bearing on how far the counts can be pressed. They are given in families and vecindarios rather than persons, so converting them to population requires a multiplier the book does not supply; and the author was compiling returns sent in by local officials and clergy, not counting households himself, which is the standard weakness of every early modern survey of this kind. This object treats the numbers as what a treasury accountant was told, accurately reported, and not as a census.