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4 4 f r i a r t o r i b i o d e b e n a v e n t e “ m o t o l i n í a ” a n d t h e “ c o u n t e r f e i t ” h i s t o r i e s o f d a n c e unfaithful imitation Two On January 25, 1524, Friar Toribio de Benavente (ca. 1490–1569) joined a delegation of eleven other Franciscan missionaries and left Spain for the New World. They arrived near Veracruz, Mexico, on May 13, and shortly thereafter traced the steps of the conquistadors to Tenochtitlan, where they arrived on June 18. Along the way, Friar Toribio had a lifede fining conversion. When natives saw the barefoot friar in threadbare clothes, they purportedly shouted “motolinía” at him. Learning that motolinía in Nahuatl means “poor” or “unfortunate one,” Friar Toribio declared: “That shall be my name for my entire life.”¹ Given that Indians were forced to adopt Spanish names upon being baptized, taking the name “Motolin ía” was a reverse baptism of sorts. Indeed, by adopting a Nahuatl name, Motolinía hoped to bridge the Old and New Worlds in religious terms. For instance , the anecdote about his name recalls that of Saint Francis of Assisi, the thirteenth-century founder of Motolinía’s missionary order. Saint Francis ’s father, a merchant, affectionately changed his son’s name from Giovanni to Francesco (“the French one”), in hopes that his son would return to the land where he had made his wealth. In a similar gesture, though with an opposing connotation, Motolinía took a foreign name to embolden his vow of poverty. Furthermore, according to Motolinía, the twelve friars departed on January 25, the feast of Saint Paul’s conversion. Thus, by taking the name “Motolinía,” he became the embodiment of both Saint Paul and Saint Francis in the New World, which he hoped to convert into “a new Jerusalem in America.”² Motolinía traveled widely throughout New Spain, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Between 1524 and 1527 he was the guardian of the monastery of San Francisco in Tenochtitlan, a position he would later hold in Texcoco and Huejotzingo. In 1536 he was appointed guardian in Tlaxcala, where for six years he performed an investigation into native religion and customs. His research primarily consisted of gathering oral histories from native elders and, when possible , consulting with indigenous pictorial codices. Motolinía mentions that he had seen five different types of pictorial books, each dealing with a different aspect of indigenous history, divination, or ceremony . His research also relied on that of Andrés de Olmos (ca. 1480–1568), a missionary who had arrived in the New World in 1528 along with Friar Juan de Zumárraga, the first appointed bishop of New Spain. In 1533 Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal, the president of the second audencia of New Spain, ordered Olmos to study the ancient customs of the indigenous communities of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlaxcala, an order that Baudot calls the “birth certi ficate of the Mexican chronicles.”³ Based on these multiple streams of research, Motolinía wrote two works now extant: History of the Indians of New “ m o t o l i n í a ” a n d t h e “ c o u n t e r f e i t ” h i s t o r i e s o f d a n c e 4 5 Spain (Historia de los indios de la Nueva España) (ca. 1536–1541) and Memoriales (ca. 1556–1560), preliminary “rough drafts” or “notes” for another volume.⁴ Concurrent with conducting his ethnographic investigation , Motolinía actively taught, preached, and administered the sacraments of confession and baptism . His mission was fueled by a millenialist fervor that had gripped the Franciscan order in the New World, where their writings and actions were distinguished by a “radical primitivism, messianic militancy , apocalyptic reformism, and medieval mysticism .”⁵ Franciscan friar Géronimo de Mendieta (ca. 1528–1604), a disciple of Motolinía’s, characterized the Franciscans’ dream as a wish to convert the New World into a Christian utopia wherein the Indians would become “the purest Christians and the best behaved in the whole world.”⁶ Motolinía shared this vision. By 1526, he had begun to administer the sacrament of confession to the Indians. In fact, he instructed Indians to write or...

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