Читать книгу A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture - Группа авторов - Страница 41

The Franciscans’ disappointments went beyond the struggles of the Colegio project. They had started education to convert the majority of the Indigenous population. The successes of the first schools had proven the Indigenous capacity for learning, but the friars had erred in thinking that Nahuatl culture was inert clay to mold as they pleased. However, views of the conversion achievements by the monastic orders were varied. Behavior in compliance with Christian doctrine was enough for some friars, even if it was not based upon understanding on the metaphysical and philosophical levels (Buckhart 1989, 184). Even by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries some missionaries such as the Franciscans Geronimo de Mendieta (1526–1604) and Juan de Torquemada (1550–1625) overstated the successes of evangelization, perhaps contributing to an assumption of a “spiritual conquest” (Ricard 1966; Kobayashi 1996).

Other missionaries viewed the failure of conversion not in the understanding that Indigenous agency was an inherent element in the dynamics of cultural negotiation, but as an example of the Indigenous people’s negative behavior. This view perceived an Indigenous tendency to deceive and a stubbornness to accept what was good for them. Sahagún’s disappointments are explicit in his Prologue to Book IV of the Historia general. He recognizes that the first friars did not perceive that Indigenous conversion was not sincere, and so maintains the Church in New Spain was established on a false foundation (León-Portilla 1990, 61). That Sahagún did not publish the Coloquios, the dialogues between the wise men and the Franciscans, in which introduction he describes the successful efforts of conversion by the first missionaries, even when granted permission, might be an indication of his disappointments (Klor de Alva 1988, 83–92). The Dominican Diego Durán at the end of the sixteenth century recognized that Indigenous “Christian” festivals disguised ancient rites, and in the seventeenth century Hernando Ruíz de Alarcón and Jacinto de la Serna would see superstitions, vices, and barbarism (Rabasa 1993, 85). Enough research on Nahua testimonies and other sources have contributed to a reevaluation of the degrees of conversion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so as to question a “spiritual conquest” as held by Ricard in his Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (Buckhart 1989; Gruzinski 1993, 152; Klor de Alva 1982; León-Portilla 1990).