The Library at Tlatelolco
We begin our study of the incorporation of the Advertencias into libraries and collections during the colonial period with the library at the Colegio Imperial de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, Mexico. 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, 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. In his introduction to Mathes' book, Miguel León Portilla describes the library, writing, "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). For León Portilla, this textual mixing marks a polyphonous moment at the onset of contact between Nahua and Spanish communities, one that would ultimately ossify into more rigid cultural norms.
The collapse of this polyphonic pedagogical project is reflected in the history of the library at Tlatelolco. When the Colegio closed, the library was abandoned, or as Mathes puts it, "for many years forgotten and tragically robbed." In around the mid-seventeenth century, what survived of it was incorporated into the library at the Convento de Santiago Tlatelolco, where it remained until 1834. At this point, it was acquired by the bookseller Francisco Abodiano. Abodiano later sold the collection to the 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 Advertencias, however, does not appear in the catalogue for the Sutro collection. Whether it was sold, destroyed, or never acquired, the absence of this book marks the decay of the coherence of this collection.
Arguably, this brief historical sketch illustrates the longer history of Mexican colonial artifacts, many of which were held by churches, decimated by public disregard, purchased by private collectors, and ultimately acquired by U.S. institutions.