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The Americas 58.2 (2001) 300-302



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Book Review

La fortaleza docta. Elite letrada y dominación social en México colonial (siglos XVI-XVII). By Magdalena Chocano Mena. Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, 2000. Pp. 415. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. No price.

This impressive volume examines Mexico City's letrados and their dominance in the cultural, social, and political world of New Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A revised and expanded Version of a 1994 dissertation entitled "Colonial Scholars in the Cultural Establishment of Seventeenth-Century New Spain," the book provides a case study of "la ciudad letrada" that Angel Rama depicted in 1991.

For Chocano Mena, "letrados" is an umbrella term for persons who had mastered Latin rather than the more commonly employed reference to men who had ten years of university study of civil or canon law. Her broader designation includes university-educated Spaniards who were secular and regular clergy, attorneys, jurists, [End Page 300] physicians, and held selected government positions, a total of less than one percent of New Spain's population in the mid-seventeenth century.

The author provides a coherent and complex analysis of the formally educated Spanish (peninsular and Creole) elite that began to coalesce soon after the conquest of New Spain. Friars initiated and the growing number of letrados expanded a religious and intellectual divide between Spaniards and natives that had profound social and cultural implications. Most letrados believed that the natives had limited intellectual capacity and thus an inferior knowledge of Christianity. Characterizing pre-Conquest religion as satanic, Spanish clerics proceeded to lump together as idolatrous all vicios populares practiced by natives and mestizos after the Conquest. Denigrated and excluded from higher education, New Spain's non-Spanish population was largely limited to manual labor, an activity that reinforced their position at the base of society.

While letrados marginalized the native population, they simultaneously developed an educational system as the base for their cultural "fortress." Knowledge of Latin opened the door to higher education and subsequent employment, most frequently in the diocesan clergy and religious orders. Limiting natives to elementary education effectively precluded them from ecclesiastical and civil preferment. Thus letrados could monopolize clerical and a number of government positions while confirming the social value of such offices.

The author bases much of the book on works by letrados published in Mexico City from 1539 to 1700. Her analysis of more than 2,300 titles demonstrates that, although Castilian publications grew rapidly after 1600, publications in a native language were less numerous, a consequence of the dramatic decline in native population and the religious orders' loss of their initial fervor. Her close reading of the publications' dedications reveals much about patron-client relationships, relationships that most frequently involved clerics.

Through careful examination of sermons and other publications, Chocano Mena has uncovered numerous statements related to New Spain's frequent and often bitter political conflicts in the seventeenth century. Typically these are couched in the imperial and universalistic language common to the Habsburg era. Immersed in an intellectual perspective conditioned by Catholic orthodoxy, authors routinely emphasized the characteristics of a Christian king and the centrality of the Church as a support for good government and political order. From the letrados' elevated perspective, anyone who lacked their education was apt to be tainted with religious heterodoxy and an appropriate target of investigation by the Inquisition. Thus the Holy Office, itself staffed by letrados, buttressed "la fortaleza docta."

Chocano Mena has presented a convincing explanation for the emergence of a broadly defined letrado elite in New Spain and a compelling argument for its central intellectual role. While the importance of formal education for aspiring clerics and some government officials is well known, the detailed cultural and social context in which she situates the letrado elite is without precedent. Based upon extensive research in printed primary materials, particularly from the seventeenth century, and [End Page 301] a solid secondary bibliography, Chocano Mena's study is an important contribution to the intellectual and cultural history of New Spain during the...

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