Missionaries in the Classroom: Bernardino de Sahagun, John Eliot, and the Teaching of Colonial Indigenous Texts from New Spain and New England

Until last year's Ibero/Anglo-Americanist Summit (organized by Ralph Bauer and others) for those of us situated in English departments, the language difference between Spanish-speaking colonies and English ones stood as a more or less fixed barrier in our research and teaching. With a few exceptions, the work of Ibero-colonialists and Anglo-colonialists has largely proceeded along parallel tracks; even as colonial Native Americanists on both sides of the Anglo/Ibero divide tackle issues that make the language split seem ludicrous, we have doggedly kept to our respective corners, independently working out the politics of translation into and from indigenous languages; exploring cross-cultural transmission of notions of religion, state, and individual identity; coming to a sense of the multiple forms of indigenous expression hitherto either ignored or oversimplified. Having recently perused some of the fine work of my Ibero-Americanist colleagues, though, it has become abundantly clear to me that maintaining these borders, while a wonderful mechanism to prevent us all from going mad from overwork, has been to the detriment of our scholarship and our teaching.

And so in the spirit of the recent summit, from my perspective as an Anglo-colonialist teaching New England Native texts, I will survey some recent publications focusing on colonial Nahuatl literatures. My goal here is not to provide a definitive analysis of the field-I am hardly in a position to do anything of the sort-but rather to provide some avenues for comparative work in the classroom, in the hope that we will continue the wonderful dialogue that has so enriched those of us who participated in the summit. Above all, I look forward to hearing the variety of interpretive strategies my Ibero-Americanist colleagues could bring to the North American materials with which I am more familiar as we continue to develop our academic exchange.

The first thing that strikes the teacher more familiar with English colonial materials is the sheer mass of Spanish texts relating to the colonial encounter between the people commonly known today as the Aztecs (or Nahuas) and the Spaniards. Written by soldiers (Hernán Cortés, Bernal Díaz, etc.) and priests (Diego Durán, Bernardino de Sahagún, etc.), histories and descriptions of the Nahuas abound. What is even more extraordinary is the mass of information based on credible Native sources about the history and culture of the Nahua people, as well as about the colonial world of New Spain. Unlike the relatively scattered fragments of Native writing produced in New England in the first few years of English colonization, New Spain's indigenous people apparently produced (usually under the direction of missionaries) voluminous Spanish-sanctioned Nahuatl histories, religious tracts, poems, and songs in the form of codices, books containing elements of indigenous painting/pictographs as well as Spanish and Nahuatl text in alphabetic print. This substantially changes not only the kind of scholarship that Ibero- and Anglo-colonialists engage in, but the teaching opportunities that are available as well.

The question of how to read the role of missionaries like Bernardino de Sahagún in the creation and transmission of Nahuatl codices-as either the "father of...