Pueblos de indios y educacion en el Mexico colonial, 1750-1821 (review)

From 1810 until the declaration of independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico exploded into a series of local and regional revolts that looked more like jacqueries, interethnic feuds, and family vendettas than a revolutionary struggle of national liberation. The intensely localized flavor of most of these rebellions seems to be partially accounted by the reforms the crown began to enact in 1766 regarding "pueblos de Indios," of which there were four thousand in the viceroyalty of New Spain. Enlightened Bourbon crown officials thought they could quickly "civilize" Indian pueblos by scrutinizing their municipal finances, funneling monies away from the plethora of religious festivities, with which Indians had customarily celebrated their corporate identity, into newly founded communal schools, where the Indians would finally shed off their benighted ways and be taught Spanish. Worse, the monies that Indians had traditionally collected through the cunning entrepreneurial usufruct of communal landholding (fundos) wound up financing various imperial wars and fiscal deficits or simply in the hands of corrupt officials. Such enlightened utopia, to be sure, drew the ire of both Indians and the church. To the church, the reforms heralded a loss of power, for the new schools brought a new broker into the countryside, namely, the teacher, poised to offstage and undermine the parish priest. Moreover, priests saw an important source of their income threatened when bureaucrats diverted Indian monies away from local religious festivities. Indians also sought to reign in the new authorities, and in this they proved far more successful than the church. Pueblos aggressively went to court to fight the crown at every step, transferred their communal landholdings to private sodalities (and under this guise kept on throwing parties to their gods, the santos), and turned the new schools into institutions that worked for them. Pueblo members constantly sought to veto teachers appointed by distant bureaucrats, learned to write and read in Spanish (some 10 percent of males and females were literate by the late eighteenth century) as a stepstone to gain positions in the clergy (5 percent of all parish priests in Mexico at the end of the eighteenth century were Indians), and often appointed their own as teachers. On the eve of the wars of independence, many of these schools were using indigenous vernaculars as language of instruction, not Castilian. But despite the cunning and somewhat successful indigenous opposition to the Bourbon municipal reforms, Indian pueblos brewed with resentment. Under the leadership of parish priests, such as Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and José Maria Morelos, many pueblos would finally bring their grievances and hatred into the open in 1810.

Tanck de Estrada offers an excruciatingly detailed study of the events I just outlined. The amount of research that went into the making of this book is impressive; the author has simply left no archival stone unturned. Tanck de Estrada offers an exhaustive analysis of the operation of the schools and of the finances of the pueblos, region by region, painstakingly surveying all twelve intendancies of the viceroyalty of New Spain. The book is fully packed with tables that must have taken years to compile. Pueblos de indios y educación unearths a vast amount of archival sources on the financial operation of late-eighteenth-century intendancies and Indian communities that are bound to attract the attention of historians and ethnohistorians alike.

That said, the book, however, is somewhat ungainly. Without an introduction and signposts to help the reader navigate the book, one is left to plow through two densely long chapters on the nitty-gritty of municipal reform and pueblo finances to begin to see the sketch of a larger narrative. The book thus seems not to be aimed at a wide readership, but to a coterie of specialists, who would nevertheless require stamina to see through this very rich yet unwieldy monograph.