The obligatory rivals of colonial Spanish America were the governor and the bishop (or viceroy and archbishop, or in a lesser Spanish city the corregidor and whoever the locality's senior ecclesiastic might be). As fray Francisco de Toral intimates, the crown, which appointed the bishops, expected them to observe and report on the activities of government officials. Often a newly arriving prelate carried the mission of formally reviewing the governor's management of affairs; bishops and archbishops also served as interim governors and viceroys on occasion. All this, aside from long having been the practice, was based on the fact that bishops were highly placed members of a hierarchy as much within the crown's appointive domain as was the secular government, but quite separate from it. Spanish settlers perceived the situation in the same way. Whenever there was a conflict among them, if one party got the governor's ear, the other would run to the bishop. Disaffected government officials sought alliance with the bishop; dissident ecclesiastical groups (here the Franciscans) with the governor. The constant jockeying between ecclesiastical and secular courts over jurisdictional matters often led to governor-bishop confrontations. Everything tended to play the two off against each other as institutional opposite poles, from which beginning they not infrequently became cordial enemies as well. Inexperienced practitioners of Spanish American history often ascribe conflict of this kind to the irascibility of the individuals, but it was so standard that governors thought nothing of being excommunicated and excoriated from the pulpit.

For all these reasons, criticism of governors takes up much space in the correspondence of bishops with the crown. The present letter is an unusually pure example, launching after the briefest courtesy formulas into a detailed enumeration of the governor's faults. Though this particular battle seems a bit more entrenched than usual, the complaints registered are among the commonplaces of the literature.