The Native Encounter with Christianity: Franciscans and Nahuas in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

Among the nations of the New World, Mexico is probably the country in which the Franciscans worked most intensively. Having been the first missionaries to arrive in Mexico, they covered most of its territory and worked with numerous native groups: Nahuas, Otomies, Mazahuas, Huastecas, Totonacas, Tarascans, Mayas. Their intense missionary activity is evident in the many indigenous languages the Franciscans learned, the grammars and vocabularies they wrote, the numerous Biblical texts they translated, and the catechisms they wrote with ideographical techniques quite alien to the European mind. This activity left an indelible mark in Mexico, a mark still alive in popular traditions, monumental constructions, popular devotions, and folk art. Without a doubt, in spite of the continuous growth of the Spanish and Mestizo populations during colonial times, the favorite concern of Franciscan pastoral activity was the indigenous population. Thus, Franciscan schools and colleges, hospitals, and publications were addressed to it. For their part, the native population showed the same preference for the Franciscans. To the eyes of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, Franciscans and natives appeared as an inseparable body, an association not always welcomed by the Spanish Crown. In fact, since the middle of the sixteenth century bishops and royal officials tried to separate them, assigning secular priests in the native towns and limiting the ecclesiastical authority of the friars.

This peculiar symbiosis is the topic of this lecture. My question is: how did this association occur? What sort of obstacles did both the Franciscans and the natives have to overcome to achieve such an understanding? Were there only Franciscan missionary ideals, or were there also native motivations behind this mutual and singular encounter?

I will focus this lecture on the sixteenth-century Nahuas, among whom the Franciscans worked most intensively, as can be seen in countless documents. This documentation provides the possibility of catching a glimpse of the way in which this encounter was carried out. The greater part of the information is found in documents written by the Franciscans, but it is also present in the Nahuatl texts reporting the relationship between Christian and Nahua religion. Among the Franciscan texts, I will use those that were written by the friars directly involved with the Nahua community, such as fray Toribio Motolinia, fray Jerónimo de Mendieta, and fray Bernardino de Sahagún. The Nahua texts are from the pre-hispanic and the post-conquest traditions.

The First Encounters: Understandings and Misunderstandings

Jerónimo de Mendieta, writing at the end of the sixteenth century, produced a very interesting text in which he describes the first encounter of the Franciscans with the Tlaxcalans.

When [the first Franciscans] arrived to this land of the Indies, walking on barefoot and wearing poor and patched habits, the Tlaxcalans began to exclaim, pointing at them, “motolinia,” a word which in Mexican language means poor. Fray Toribio [de Benavente] hearing repeatedly this word and wishing to learn the nahuatl language, asked for its meaning. And when he found out that it meant poor, fray Toribio said: “this is the first word that I have learned from this language; from now on I will use it as my surname so I would not forget it.”¹

As is well known, fray Toribio seldom used his last name “Benavente” and at least from 1529 on he always signed his name as “Motolinia.” But this idyllic account of the first Franciscan encounter with the Nahuas has to be compared with other narratives. One of them comes from the same Motolinia who, with particular anguish, writes about his first experiences in Mexico Tenochtitlan.

Upon their arrival in 1524, Hernán Cortés sent the Friars to four native cities: Mexico, Tlaxcala, Tezcoco, and Huejotzingo. Motolinia was assigned to Mexico. The friars used for their living headquarters one of the halls of the great Nahua ceremonial center, right in the middle of the city where the natives continued practicing their religious cult. Here is how Motolinia narrates this experience:

This land was a transplanted hell, seeing how its people would yell at night, some invoking the devil...