Earlier in this path, we used marcas de fuego to identify the libraries where the
Advertencias was distributed during the early colonial period. In this page, we offer a complimentary approach by considering the history of a single library: the library at the
Colegio Imperial de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, Mexico. This approach allows us to understand how the
Advertencias fit into a broader intellectual culture.
As we know from the title page of the
Advertencias, the book was printed at a press at Tlatelolco sometime around 1601. It seems likely that the library at the Colegio Imperial de Santa Cruz, which was collocated with the press and which
Michael Mathes describes as the "first academic library of the Americas," would have been one of the first collections to hold a copy of the Advertencias.
Tlatelolco had been a Mexica altepetl (a word frequently translated as "city state") located in what is now Mexico City, not far from the capital city of Tenochtitlan. After the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan in 1521, Tlatelolco became a Spanish municipality. By the early 1530s, it was the site of a convent and a school, the celebrated
Colegio Imperial de Santa Cruz (officially inaugurated in 1536). The archaeological site and church can be visited today in the
Cuauhtémoc borough of
Mexico City.
The history of the Colegio Imperial de Santa Cruz illustrates the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of the Franciscan missionaries to construct an autonomous indigenous Christian society in Mexico. The school was built on the site of a Nahua calmecac (school); its purpose was to provide the sons of indigenous nobility with a traditional Christian education with the goal of producing an indigenous clergy.
After the death of many of these students from disease in the 1540s, along with with the execution for idolotry of the student Carlos de Texcoco, this project was abandoned and the school was redefined as a center of research into indigenous linguistics and culture. During this time, it hosted a number of influential scholars of indigenous life, language, and culture, including
Fray Bernardino de Sahagún,
Andrés de Olmos, and
Alonso de Molina. Importantly, the school was also home to the young Nahua men who would inform - and often write - the indigenous-language texts produced in these scholars' names. By 1600, however, when the
Advertencias was printed, Spanish support for indigenous intellectual culture had waned, and the Colegio had been reduced to a primary school.
In
Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco: La Primera Biblioteca Académica de Las Américas, Mathes describes the importance of the Colegio at Tlateloco in the history of American libraries. The Colegio's library, established soon after its opening with the support of Spain and of the Bishop Zumárraga (who donated a number of books from his personal collection) was vital to the school's pedagogical mission. By examining the collection of books found in this library, we can start to understand the intellectual culture fostered at the school, one marked by colonial hybridity. As Miguel León Portilla writes in his introduction to Mathes' book, "
los libros, traídos de España, con la herencia de Grecia, Israel y Roma, se hallaron juntos en la biblioteca del Colegio con los impresos en México, varios en náhuatl como el Arte y el Vocabulario de Molina… y también muy cercan estuvieron las transcripciones en náhuatl, los textos de los que hoy se nombran Códices Matritenses y Florentino. Colegio y biblioteca fueron así por varios años verdadero semillero" (9). Like many other historians of this period, León Portilla sees the hybrid textuality of the Tlatelolco library in a generally positive light.
The
Advertencias is a part of this intellectual culture, and yet its date of publication places it well after the height of the Colegio as a center for intellectual thought. Perhaps this is why more copies of the
Advertencias survive than any other books printed during this period. Thanks to changes in Spanish and Viceroyal law, by the time it was printed, its audience - the students and missionaries who met at Tlatelolco - had moved on.
Tlatelolco's Legacy
The long history of the books held at the library at Tlatelolco help us to understand the legacy of the Colegio. Mathes dates the end of the major intellectual work at Tlatelolco to the death of the Nahua scholar Antonio Valeriano in 1605. By the mid-seventeenth century, he writes, the Colegio was abandoned and in ruins, "for many years forgotten and tragically robbed." At this point, what survived of it was incorporated into the library at the Convento de Santiago Tlatelolco. It remained there until 1834. when the church was occupied by military forces who, in Mathes' words, used the books as mattresses ("
lo que evidentemente perjudicó el material bibliográfico" (41)). What remained was incorporated into the library at the Convento de San Francisco in Mexico City, where it was broken up and incorporated into the thematically-organized collection.
On August 12, 1856, Mexican president Ignacio Comonfort nationalized all Franciscan property and liquidated the library at the Convento de San Francisco. Although the library's collection was intended for the Biblioteca Nacional, many of the books were lost, stolen, or sold in transit. This is exactly what happened to the books that had once belonged to the Colegio, which were acquired by the bookseller Francisco Abodiano. Abodiano's son, in turn, sold the collection to the North American book collector Adolph Sutro, whose
library was partially destroyed in San Francisco during the earthquake of 1906. What survived is now held by the
California State Library at San Francisco.
The Sutro collection contains mostly European imprints; the
Advertencias, like other American books printed at Tlatelolco, does not appear in Sutro catalogue. Mathes speculates that these books were sold elsewhere before the earthquake, but they haven't been located. Regardless, their absence from the collection marks the shifting values of bibliophiles and historians, and the decay of the coherence of the Sutro collection.
The story of the Tlatelolco
Advertencias is a common narrative for Mexican antiquities. The
Primeros Libros were affected by war and natural disasters, shifting political priorities and changing economic circumstances. The wars of independence and the Mexican Revolution, in particular, were moments that often led to the destruction or dispersal of historical documents abroad. These stories will be explored further in the "
Acquisition" path.
