The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico by Robert Ricard (review)

Reviews 69 can’t wear them and as he skips homeward barefoot over the cool cobblestones, he wonders why the “gente de razon” wear shoes at all. The festival, an important part of Mexican life and culture, is viewed through the eyes of the youngest and the oldest of the children. Five-year-old Angela considers her being chosen to portray Bernadette in the parade as her personal miracle. Fourteen-year-old Beatrice encounters the first stirrings of love and premonitions of womanhood at the Feria. Although the format is that of a children’s book this is one of those ageless books that adults would enjoy. The southwestern artist, Ted D Grazia, has given the book just the right touch in his sensitive drawings of the Mexican family. A n n e S m ith , Utah State University The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico. By Robert Ricard. Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson. (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966. 423 pages, $10.00.) After more than thirty years of waiting, a translation of this brilliant essay, first published in French in 1933 and now recognized as a classic, is available to English readers. The eminent scholar Lesley Byrd Simpon has harnessed his many skills— those of being historian, editor and author — and with great precision as to detail and depth of meaning has rendered Ricard’s work into careful, yet highly readable English. Throughout his translation, he has also been able to maintain the lucid, concrete style — along with the calm and detached voice — that is always present in Ricard’s work. While Mr. Simpson’s English text follows closely the original one in French, it has at times been necessary for him to edit a few passages, or to clarify them as a device for saving space. All this the translator has accom­ plished most skillfully. Most of Simpson’s editing occurs in the notes, which in the main have been reduced to bibliographical references. The trimming of the notes in this way brings up the one reservation I have to make about this distinguished translation: it has caused some of Ricard’s discerning com­ mentary to be omitted from the English edition. However, scholars will be pleased to find that the English edition does contain Ricard’s vital “Essay on Sources.” Along with his classified bibliography, it is a veritable encyclo­ pedia on the methods and resources of investigation open to scholars working in many different fields of Mexican civilization, but especially to historians, anthropologists, folklorists, and sociologists. Ricard’s Conquéte Spirituelle du Mexique concerns, as its English sub­ title: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendi­ 70 Western American Literature cant Orders in New Spain: 1523-1572 indicates, the procedures employed by three Orders — the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians — to found and organize the church in Mexico during its embryonic period. To demon­ strate the profound revolution that took place in Mexican life during the allimportant sixteenth century, and to establish his thesis that this century was “in the religious domain, as in the others, . . . the period in which Mexico was created, and of which the rest of her history has been the almost inevita­ ble development,” Ricard offers a penetrating analysis of the initial trans­ formation of the native Mexican religions into the Christianity brought by the Roman Catholic Church of New Spain. Ricard gives scope to all his findings concerning the founding and stabilizing of the Church in Mexico by relating this information to the issue at hand: the impact Christianity made on Mexican history. To accomplish this task, he investigates such complex topics as the internal dissensions of the Church, the resistance of the natives to Christianity, and the effect that the early evangelization offered by the three Orders had upon the religious evolution of Mexico. And then, with the clarity and skill of a decidedly un­ biased approach, he offers his own conclusions to each question he has presented. It was a large order that Ricard set out in 1923 to fill. But supported by the ten years of investigations he conducted in the archives of Europe and Mexico, and by his mastery of an impressive array...