1.1 Education Studies & Nahua Visions of Learning

The year 2024 marked the quincentennial anniversary of the so-called Spiritual Conquest of Mesoamerica and the beginning of the history of the Spanish-Colonial religious education in the Americas. Thinking of the anniversary might conjure up romanticized visions of a time when Iberian Christianity collided with Mesoamerican religious traditions in a historic clash of cultures. It might be assumed that, starting with the arrival of the first cohort of Spanish priests in 1524, Catholics used religious texts, crosses, and churches. Indoctrination, in this understanding, systematically rewrote the spirituality of the Mesoamerican countryside. Simultaneously, this anniversary reminds us to acknowledge the persistent acts of cultural expression in Indigenous Mexican communities that appear to have outlasted colonial conformity, signifying that some traditions could and did counter attempts made by colonizers to stamp out unholy practices.

These conflicting popular visions of how colonial societies are transformed by or resist conformity are influenced by the histories that have emphasized binarity in research. For instance, a century ago, in 1920s, the U.S. journalist and anthropologist, Anita Brenner, published Idols Behind Altars as a romantic study of Mexican art and history. Theorizing on depth of meaning, Brenner found Indigenous art of the past doggedly pursuing ‘the white layer at the top [of Mexican society, which] has steadily diminished, by death or flight, or by growing darker… Native symbols are carved into these churches; saints are recarved out of idols, and eventually recarved again so that they certainly do not look European’.¹ Mexicans had once secreted precolonial expressions of art in ‘habitual private places… pushed them into caves, dropped them into lakes, covered them in growing vines… The gods skulked sullenly in the hills and winds’.² This Mexican art was distinct, Brenner felt, because of its visual culture: ‘Mexico cannot be measured by standards other than its own, which are like those of a picture; and why only as artists can Mexicans be intelligible’.³ Brenner’s vision of a Christian colonial art stalked by skulking unchristian gods spurs us to study how and why scholars have continued to approach a binary framing of picturesque standards or unintelligible expressions of local identity. From 1524 onwards, people of Mesoamerica and colonizing Europeans began fashioning art, buildings, and texts based in local and nonlocal frameworks and expressing complex ideas; how might Indigenous visions in this process be better represented in the field?

To understand the complexity beyond the binary, this book will explore the period of religious conversion in Mexico while challenging the top-down vision of Spanish-Colonial pedagogy from the view of an assumed Spiritual Conquest. Rather, it will work towards reorienting our perspective to views of the pedagogues, students, and communities, and the things they made together that lie at the heart of religious education.

The first students commonly identified in this story, began their studies in 1536, with the commencement of instruction and lectures at the newly built Colegio de Santa Cruz Tlatelolco (found, today, at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City).⁴ Santa Cruz remains significant in the zeitgeist of Mexico, showcasing the cultural confluence of Mexican Indigenous heritage. It is an archaeological site, once the ceremonial centre and a thriving marketplace of the Tlatelolca Nahuas, and centuries of temple remains are currently revealed for visitors while ongoing excavations continue to delve into this first culture – an indelible northern neighbour and ally to the Mexica-Tenochca (commonly mislabelled the ‘Aztecs’). Rising above these excavations are two connected structures of the ‘Spanish’ culture: the sixteenth-century church with open-air plaza and its attached ex-convent, the remnants of the Colegio for the first Indigenous-Christian students. An act of Epiphany, 6 January 1536, witnessed the foundation of the college by Bishop Fr. Juan de Zumarraga and Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza. Remodelled over the ages, the layout and much of the artwork of the church interior speaks to Brenner’s picturesque standards, but a painted cistern not far off, dated to the 1530s, offers an open window on visions beyond the convent. On the walls of the ‘Spanish’ caja de agua, in plain sight of the public, a skulking ahuitzotl – spiritual twin of the Nahua deity Tlaloc, sacred force of rain – stalks a school of lake fish.⁵ Stepping back from the church complex and the exposed ruins, embracing the Nahua and the Spanish cultures, visitors see Modern Mexico, third culture of the plaza, which continually rebuilds the country’s past.

On its surface, this book disturbs the reflections that set those three cultures apart by identifying ripples and eddies in transitional moments from Nahua to Colonial (as well as our modern interpretations of cultural hybridity). In many initial acts of colonising religion, the first building crafted was a ‘chapel for Indians’ (capilla de indios). These wood and then stone chapels, opening on to a plaza, staked down physical places for indoctrination in Indigenous towns from Tenochtitlan to Vera Cruz. From these, lectors offered services, sermonized, catechized, and public orated from written and printed pages and referencing visual and material goods – as will be explored throughout this volume. Thousands could stand before a chapel for instruction. The college of Santa Cruz Tlatelolco refined this experience and would have taken shape as the initial structure was in use. According to official accounts, roughly 80 Indigenous-Christian youths, likely the children of elite Nahua families of the surrounding city-states, began their studies under Catholic educators. For the next several decades, students studied and produced material from this place, shaping the earliest ethnographic accounts and colonial reliquaries. The Colegio’s ups-and-downs (discussed herein) highlight a sordid history of Christianity’s first footfalls in Mesoamerica, but it was described by at least one source as falling into shambles by the 1600s.

This generation of college-trained Nahuas – trained in Erasmus and a trifecta of European grammar, theology, and rhetoric – and the works they made or inspired others to create, and the patterns of schooling experiences based in college-like places from the time lie at the heart of this book.⁶ About 500 years ago, as I hope to demonstrate, a kind of activism in material knowledge was practiced by learned people that resulted in the spread of Christianity and the preservation of local knowledge. The adaptations to adopted religious expression, by way of modes of learning, had roots in Mesoamerican education systems, too, and Tlatelolco’s students are one example of complex transformations in acculturation and indoctrination of the time.

Viewing Santa Cruz Tlatelolco and many other churches of the time in picturesque framings (similar to Brenner), Robert Ricard famously argued that Indian identity succumbed to a Christian ‘Spiritual Conquest’.⁷ Ricard’s study drew together church records and found education from the top-down, arguing that regular instruction and disruptive evangelization conquered Mesoamerican religion. Academically, up to the 1980s, others have repeated Ricard’s framing. In reference to religious education, Mexican scholar José Kobayashi proposed ‘education as conquest’ as a framing device and cast structured schooling in colleges and conventual materialism as systematized attacks on Indigenous ways of learning.⁸ Up to the present, Ricard’s sentiments seem to live on in recent studies that have both added nuanced understandings of local expressions of religion against the backdrop of a Latinized and occupied Nahua communities.

This book will show more of the material weight that might press back against a Ricardian-Kobayashi framing of educational conversion and straightforward scholasticism of Mesoamerica. It revisits and reassesses the case for conquest as education and unremitting indoctrination in consideration of the adaptivity of local responses and human-place connections that affected the top-down imposition of scholasticism. The book does identify the Spanish invasion (1519 on) as a violent and compelling phase which Spaniards coupled with a cruel and taxing campaign of religious extirpation. Acts of colonial ‘cultural trauma’ marked religious, economic, and political exchanges in irreparable ways, as others have demonstrated, and I do not argue, local adaptations in learning were innocuous and free from harm.⁹ Christians (new and foreign) targeted texts, artwork, objects, and buildings in unrelenting quests to extricate unholy practices. But, by challenging binary conquest framings and finding the place of objects in education, I highlight Indigenous and Indigenous-Chrisitan ways of learning as unconquered, resilient, and able to force change upon impositions and external pressures. This true history of the unfinished conquest of education explodes the received myth of a triumphal Spiritual Conquest and eradication of Mesoamerican culture.

This story of cultural transformations demonstrates the staying power of symbols and the conveyance of meanings through objects and buildings linked to places with heritage. Buildings, objects, and symbols had associations with the landscape and preexisting learning practices. In the case of Mesoamerica/Colonial Mexico, those associations survived even when extirpation campaigns and acts of regularized indoctrination intervened. This exposes the flaw in assuming solely one view of the epistemics of education, which I will demonstrate with a study of Indigenous students navigating the material and visual classrooms of a seemingly textbook colonial sort. This assertion adds to the discourse of interdisciplinary investigations into history, especially studies that have shown texts, art, and convents as didactic stages for ethnogenesis, what Samuel Edgerton acutely calls ‘theaters for conversion’.¹⁰

Thinking this way inspires questions of the intrepid historian, including: What was the relationship between students and the material realities of the colonial classrooms? How did this relationship appear to function before the advent of the convent and biblical text in Mesoamerica? And how might one best qualify interpretations of local, foreign, or hybrid modes of learning in this early-modern crossover? This book aims to answer these questions, among others, to help reveal more about the dynamic way humans have historically learned and adjusted to new learning practices. Its hypothesis is that learning materials intricately linked Mesoamerican knowledge to the psycho-social sense of place felt by communities or individuals. This existing connection between things, knowledge, and places seems to have aided or hindered adaptations to Colonial-Christian dispositions among Nahua communities. These place-based visions of learning were acts of Indigenous student activism that need further study.

I will advance a theoretical framework for further investigations of colonized education systems. I call this theory the ‘learningscape’, which is a nominalization that may help others in describing distinct localized visions of education among people enacting or being enacted upon by acts of colonialism. It frames learning identities as shapers of perspectives on educational tools and knowledge about educating with reference to the concept of place and placeness. Building upon the theoretical framework of Arjun Appadurai and others, learningscape signifies a non-traditional, Western conceptualization of classrooms, education, schooling, and pedagogy because of the definitional stance of a ‘scape’ to highlight visual and material trappings.¹¹ Using the prefix ‘learning-’ presses at the edges of Appadurai’s ‘mediascape’ concept. His ‘ideoscape’, for instance, combines the ‘landscapes of images’¹² and, focusing on capitalist regimes in the present age, Appadurai felt compelled to highlight media forms and political ideologues because ‘many audiences around the world experience the media themselves as a complicated and interconnected repertoire of [media]’.¹³ His ideoscape, too, is a package of political identity marking terms, and by locating learningscapes of Mesoamerica in this framework, I hope to identify sophistication in early modernity from Appadurai’s Modern case studies. This helps to acknowledge the sophisticated innovations in learning created and practiced by Nahuas of the Postclassic and exemplify how these outlasted or informed Spanish-Colonial pedagogy.

Beyond proposing this thesis, I hope also to encourage a concordance for learning sciences based on amplifying Indigenous terminologies and ways of understanding the world through ethnolinguistics. One reason for this is the dominance of Western European terms used to define education, schools, classrooms, textbooks, and art in the historical literature. For instance, in Classical Nahuatl, a term that encapsulates the smallest scale of a ‘learningscape’ before Christianity is the word ithualli (pronounced ‘itˈwá.lːi’).¹⁴ In English an ithualli is either a ‘patio, interior courtyard within a house compound; atrium, churchyard’, as defined by the Online Nahuatl Dictionary (OND throughout). It is not a ‘school’ in the European sense, but education was practiced by Nahua families in their household compounds in the ithualli and the connotation helps us define the courtyard activities in line with ritual acts (Figure 1.1).¹⁵ Some of the worry about priests in Nahuas continuing to use an ithualli in the late sixteenth century included framing the architectural form as one of several ‘houses of the devil’.¹⁶ Intimately connected to Nahua houses and temples, and, later, the first Nahua-Christian houses and churches, ‘courtyards’ were learning environments. The Nahuatl term was baked into colonial ‘family’ relations, as seen in the word cemithualtin (cem + ithualli + -tin, literally ‘single-courtyard-people’).¹⁷ Family members or invited teachers used the ithualli to nemiliztia or ‘go about instructing or indoctrinating someone else’ as recorded by early grammarians.¹⁸ Categorizing this as a learningscape helps me to place metaphorical brackets around like structures, objects, and the practices that occurred, using them to honour the concept of Nahuatl visions of learning in multifaceted places. The use of the thesis helps to refocus us on the importance of place- and object-based research relating to learners to augment scholarly emphasis on Spanish-Catholic educators and European pedagogy, a la Ricard.

Figure 1.1

The Nahua ithualli (‘courtyard’). The basic cultural building block for pre-Hispanic society was the household unit. One function of the central courtyard was educational in nature.

(image based upon Lockhart, The Nahuas, 199)

There can be a tendency in colonial studies to draw clear lines between homegrown ideas and those that might be imposed from without. Scholars tend to exaggerate or undercut the nature of the Spiritual Conquest when they narrowly define learning as written texts residing on a page, or as the clergy-generated pedagogy practiced within church walls. Thus, the category learningscape might help us find the complexity in contrast to the traditional binary consideration of Indigenous vs Colonial schools. Learningscapes reference local place-identity – a community’s cognizance of their connection to an environment and built forms in that place – and moves away from schooling as a stark contrast of Christian versus non-Christian exchanges.

A core contention of my thesis is that Mesoamerican learning sciences and technologies used for instruction related to a communal sense of placeness. Stephanie Wood, a specialist in Mesoamerican memory, reminds us, ‘Systems of remembrance… are constellations that revolve around shared, group-embracing signs that can be reproduced, repeated, and recognized by multiple individuals’.¹⁹ These signs, especially when revealed in Indigenous documents and, as I will show, the ‘manuscripts’ of Indigenous-influenced Catholic art and architecture, have what Wood calls an ‘intertextuality’ which ‘gained and maintained ethnic identities in regular reenactments of social activities associated with places and things laden with meaning and usually inscribed in mnemonic devices’.²⁰ This dynamic aspect of memory perseverance demonstrates the need to understand the relationships between places, things, and knowledges. Art historian Eleanor Wake once suggested, ‘[w]hile this art and architecture is overwhelmingly Euro-Christian in iconography and form at a visual level, it is more complex at the level of meaning and function… While it is true that some [Indigenous people] accepted or assimilated to Christianity and its signs and symbols…there is considerable evidence to argue that many more did not’.²¹ Wood and Wake, in other words, advise scholars to seek out the complex multilayering of colonial knowledges through which Indigenous and mixed-ethnic peoples maintained a sense of place, memories about their places, and the practices associated with things (including written texts) that carried forth a given community’s local identity.

Ethnohistorians have made compelling cases for the importance of place-identity in understanding the past. According to Robert Haskett’s Visions of Paradise (2005), Nahuas created multilayered meanings about community history by deriving a relationship based on five basic social memory associations: toponymic, utilitarian (or based on a resource of resource management), eponymic, mnemonic, and cosmic, with the latter three (eponymic, mnemonic, and cosmic) proving to be the most crucial associations that locals use to form their sense of place-identity.²² That local visions differed in how communities observed and dictated to others about ancestral lands, which Haskett revealed in visualizations, storytelling, cartography, and charting from his case studies. For the ancestral people of Central Mexico, places themselves had (and still have) agency and this recognition of the power attached to places was expressed and negotiated by Nahua inhabitants.²³

For the most part, Mesoamerican education histories have shown that before contact with Europeans, Central Mexico was a hotbed for formal educational institutions involving both nobles and commoners, as well as informal praxis that took place in the household. For Frances Berdan, the former served the basic function of the ‘maintenance of the system of stratification’ for the ‘highly imperialistic… Aztecs’ and thus segregated society.²⁴ Seemingly, this formality primed the Nahuas for the introduction of systemic Ibero-Christianization and learning modes.

Within the walls of the sixteenth-century Colegio de Santa Cruz, Tlatelolco Native students understood the lessons of Christianity on their own terms, as did their priestly counterparts.²⁵ According to Louise Burkhart, ‘Within a single, hierarchical order, mutual misunderstandings allow[ed] conqueror and conquered to coexist’.²⁶ This way of looking at processes of cultural dialogues had previously been labelled ‘double mistaken identity’ by historian James Lockhart, an interaction ‘in which each side of the cultural exchange presumes that a given form or concept is functioning in the same familiar way within its own tradition and is unaware or unimpressed by the other side’s interpretation’.²⁷ Recently, some have challenged Lockhart’s notion of misunderstandings taking place during indoctrination and church construction, arguing that political collusion between Nahuas and religious leaders resulted in a palpable coherence.²⁸ Rather than discount Lockhart’s conception outright, in this book I argue that scholars ought to recognize place-identity within the mosaic of cross-cultural exchanges below the politicking, or what I have termed ‘double mistaken place-identity’.²⁹ Notably, these processes of cultural exchange were not static and monolithic, but they could be connected to a place and time.

The story of the Colegio de Santa Cruz and early Indigenous-Christian schooling identifies the importance of looking closer at education in Colonial Mexico.³⁰ As mentioned, following the first few decades of its existence, an initial surge of instruction by European educators using texts trained Indigenous students, who would play a central role in the education particularly after 1546.³¹ This included Don Antonio de Valeriano (1522–1605), an Azcapotzalcan youth and temporary student-educator as well as an author of portions of two famed encyclopaedic texts for Nahua heritage: the Florentine Codex and Codex Aubin.³² As an Indigenous student-turned-teacher, Valeriano helped oversee the production and reproduction of knowledge. He referenced the school’s library and developed teaching materials.³³ Dozens of others worked closely with priests of perfect Nahuatl-Latin-Spanish translations of European and Indigenous manuscripts. The first grammars for European evangelists to reference came from this pregnant place. These acts included referencing archives beyond the Colegios’ walls, such as reading pictorial histories and interviewing townspeople and elders. Valeriano’s history used recognizable pictorial writing techniques to communicate in multiple languages.

The vision of collegians of Tlatelolco only offer grim glimpses of unrequited pedagogy and structural flaws. In 1555, imperial edicts declared that Indigenous graduates of Santa Cruz Tlatelolco could not become priests.³⁴ For recent graduate Pablo Nazareno – classmate to Valeriano and future lord of nearby Xaltocan – this news from the Vatican was disheartening since the collegians identified as ‘new men’ doing everything expected of good Christians.³⁵ Thirty years on, in 1584, Alonso Ponce interviewed a student of the Colegio, who explained to the Spaniard, ‘[W]e Indians of New Spain are like shrikes or magpies and parrots, which fowl can, with some effort, be taught to speak, yet quickly forget what they have been taught. And this is not said in vain, for in truth our ability is weak, and for that reason we have great need for help so that we can become complete men’.³⁶ This statement confirmed for Ponce that the Nahua students of Tlatelolco had contributed little for the first generation of indoctrination. They were merely intellectual parrots of a school’s curriculum weakly being Christian and in need of better schooling. Scholars have identified the pessimistic rhetoric of people like Ponce and the view of a failing church and defunct conversion efforts in the late sixteenth century.³⁷ Though plagued with lack of funding and disrupted by cycles of epidemic disease in the 1540s and 1570s, the college, for a time, was still a conducive space for knowledge production and this pattern can be found in other conventual experiences from the region.

Cohorts of students passed through the Colegio’s doors and before its lecterns and wrote in new and old formats to accomplish the goals of a learned society.³⁸ Did the nearby courtyard, or ithualli, play a role in the production of knowledge in the convent? When they went out and collected data for local histories, did the collegians adapt Mesoamerican practices along the way back? How did older learning environments, art, and rituals flow around or through its doors as well? Why do we so religiously adhere to the making of the building as uninfluenced by the inhabitants of these schools? Building upon the discourse of Colegio’s as contested didactic places, this book collapses the distance between the learningscapes of the Colonial Colegio and the Nahua ithualli.

1.2 A History of Education as Conquest

As noted, the last few decades have witnessed a growing exploration of the critical roles played by Indigenous allies of places such as the Colegio de Santa Cruz Tlatelolco, paying closer attention to the complex ethnic makeup and hybrid milieu that confronted learners of the day. For James Lockhart, writing in the 1990s, the clergy instigated, oversaw, and determined the production of ‘basic content’ in the first manuscripts written in alphabetic Nahuatl, but Nahua scribes and artists were ‘responsible for the fine points of the phrasing and syntax’. In shaping the new writing genres, this was ‘[o]ne of the clearest examples… that many confessionals and sermons [drew] heavily on preconquest rhetoric’ in that to shape something, the Nahua learner had existing points of reference to hang their interventions upon.³⁹ Recently, Mark Z. Christensen has added that key histories and ethnographic works included not only the labour of the collegians and friars but also the efforts of employed ‘Nahua elders and aides’, who appear to have developed instructional volumes overseen by Sahagún, among others, beginning in the 1560s. For instance, Alonso de Molina, early grammarian, and Juan Bautista found great purchase in the hands of Hernando de Ribas and, Christensen radiates, Bautista ‘openly admits’ to the significant work of many ‘aides’ for his 1606 Sermonario.⁴⁰ Famously, Sahagún commended the service of the Nahua collaborators on the Florentine Codex: ‘being knowledgeable in the Latin language, inform us of the properties of the words, the properties of their manner of speech. And they correct for us the incongruities we express [in Nahuatl] in the sermons or write in the catechisms’.⁴¹ Art historians, too, especially Diana Magaloni Kerpel, point to pedagogical knowledge dependency in modes of the Florentine Codex’s production circa 1570. Magaloni Kerpel counts individual hands of Indigenous painter-scribes (tlacuiloqueh) who painted and sketched Nahua heritage into black and white and full colour. For that volume’s Plinian genre of cataloguing knowledge, pictorial writing, purposefully and cosmologically enriched the Nahuatl text with Mesoamerican gusto and visual narratology.⁴² The Spanish text, at times, defers to empty spans where images would have tagged additional, visual information relevant to the Nahuatl. Schools of artists, art histories have demonstrated, collaborated in styles of knowledge production that would inform aesthetics to come. Denying the agency of these additional, mostly unnamed contributors to the visual and material modes of instruction ignores the diversity of voices shaping pedagogy at a critical time.

The history of Spanish-Christian education in New Spain requires an honest depiction of the pedagogical regimes before and during the Spanish colonialism from the ithualli outward. European pedagogues, their Indigenous and mixed-heritage allies, and the unofficial teachers of communities conceived of at least three categorical visions of learning in the sixteenth century. Overwriting their histories with an assumed Spanish-Catholicism coda on the impact of education as conquest has, teleologically, cut perspectives from the past from whom we might learn useful information. Additionally, this neglect prolongs some of the ugly elements of the Spiritual Conquest thesis, such as its reliance on texts and written sources from a narrow vision to signify cultural change. Rather, this book contends that exploring systems of conversion and education under Spain means first locating previous modes of learning and taking the concept of hybridization to task to focus on local histories and adaptation of ‘Colonial’ Mesoamerica.

Indigenous Studies has, for nearly a century, sought to reclaim perspectives and encourage interdisciplinary research to transform professional histories, at least since the early twentieth century.⁴³ Some of the early historians, art historians, and anthropologists sought to defy nineteenth-century logics conveyed by consensus historians, collectors, and archaeologists. It had been common to publish studies that classified groups based on scientific racism and overt nationalism. Instead, twentieth-century scholars began to adopt ethnohistorical methodologies and understudied mundane sources. This was particularly the case with the rise of Nahuatl Studies after World War II and, later, the cultural turn of the 1970s (and up to the present). These revisions helped to produce alternative, finer-grained histories, especially from the perspective of the people involved in the production of mundane records who had traditionally been neglected by consensus political and economic histories.⁴⁴

Scholars, especially ethnohistorians and art historians, have pursued this more profound analysis when studying material culture and visual media (including pictorial and three-dimensional sources). As objects created by Indigenous or mixed-heritage individuals and communities, these materials relate to more official texts and artwork produced by Nahua collegians in the sixteenth century. The interpretations of these by the forerunners of this historiographic movement could question the authenticity of previous assumptions relying heavily on Catholic hagiographies and Spanish records to tell the history of Nahua communities.⁴⁵ Today, the complexity of relationships and power dynamics of Central Mexico have been better defined, but there is still much work to be done in recovering education history. This book follows its ethnohistoric roots to understand the relationships of complex cultural ecologies via critical ethnolinguistics, intricate visual decoding, and catered Spatial Studies.⁴⁶

My work recovers visions of learning from three composed stances in the past, catenations of learningscapes that challenge older presumptions about the nature of knowledge-power and colonialism. Rather than offering the cant of binaries of Indian versus Spaniard, 1970s onwards revisionist have exposed ways that colonial communities negotiated living, learning, and dying in Spanish colonial territories. Scholars have documented shared and mitigated ‘middle grounds’, contested and Indigenous borderlands, and acts of ambivalent conquests and ineffective colonialisms that, until this movement, only the source communities knew had once existed.⁴⁷ One powerful example of this is the redirection of today’s consensus on non-Western, non-European systems of record keeping and writing, inventions of ‘lettered’ societies via colonialism, and structural constraints at the intersection of education, class, and ethnicity under the Spanish Empire.⁴⁸ By revising what early modern book culture was and how to read multivalent texts, we have exposed cracks of contingency in the dominance of logics of erasure.

Indigenous writing and recordkeeping practices were (and remain) sophisticated and adaptive even under the structural pressures of Spanish colonialism.⁴⁹ What proved crucial at that juncture was a concerted drive towards interdisciplinarity, the early-modern coupling of the methodologies in archiving, design, artistry, manufacturing, geography, inuendo, and metaphor. Mesoamerican writing systems encountered a similarly dynamic way of capturing culture, but relying on the text alone has kept transatlantic education reading line by line at the cost of learning in immersive classrooms of the day. The words of Eleanor Wake capture this sense for art history: ‘ritual and image… performance and text, pervade[d] the religious architecture of Indo-Christianity… the text of the Indo-Christian sacred that is this art and architecture was written by Indigenous artist-scribes in paint and stone as the ritualized act of its own “framing”’.⁵⁰ This book finds fuel in Wake’s findings. She exemplified the knack for foregrounding interdisciplinary rigor and the need to recalibrate our vision of indigenous artistic expression, intermediation, and local contexts or ‘framed’ meanings of historical sources.

1.3 Intermediaries, Tequitqui Art-Work, and Old Media Studies

The Nahuas of Central Mexico practiced sophisticated methods of knowledge transfer, sacred and profane, from tlamatini (learned one) to tlamatini.⁵¹ These were ‘highly literate individual[s] and…scholar[s], an embodiment of wisdom contained in the painted books’ and they also taught and educated generations of community members based in distinct educational spaces.⁵² The roles played by these intermediaries, also known as cultural brokers, and the complex choices they made in times of change and adaptation helps unpack interlocution, such as Frances Karttunen’s work, or processes of acculturation defined by John Kicza (among other scholars).⁵³

These concepts of brokerage in comparison to passive acts of acculturation can highlight a tension in the motivations behind transatlantic exchanges and agency. Santa Cruz Tlatelolco’s Nahua-Christian student-teachers mediated knowledge, proving to be cultural linchpins in the opening of doorways between European-Christian and Mesoamerican knowledge. In economic arenas, as Leslie Lewis has revealed, schooled and affluent intermediaries, Tetzcoco’s indios principales, found lucrative enterprises living between two worlds.⁵⁴ When discussing similar cultural intermediaries in Anglo- and French-Indigenous encounters, Margaret Szasz poignantly clarifies that their role was often unparalleled compared to others in colonial society or back across the Atlantic.⁵⁵ She distinguished key indigenous intermediary occupations (e.g., interpreters, linguists, traders, spiritualists, educationists, and artists) who, at their core, encompassed the act of internal and external exchanging of goods, ideas, and practices in or around a ‘border region’ that delimited ethnicities and cultural groups of that region.⁵⁶

In most cases, depending on the particulars, the Nahuas of central New Spain made choices to brook communities of knowledge, accommodating or adjusting to new political and economic superstructures that could have insidious effects on the intermediary and their communities. Louise Burkhart examined the lives of early collegians, noting the tenuous and at times untenable position they held in education and reflecting on the constricting experiences had by the aides to European evangelists – foreigners to Mesoamerican systems of learning. Foreign pedagogues sought to do away with any whiff of perceived idolatry, acts which represented a distinct assault on their conversion efforts, and collegians were expected to alert their supervisors of nonconforming religious acts.⁵⁷ By choosing to support extirpation or ignoring local archives, Nahua-Christians manufactured colonialism on these informed terms.

But it is wise not to assume that collegians (nor their seemingly strident pedagogues) knew the layout of conformity. The poignant historian’s creed, the past is a foreign country, may have rung true for the most learned Nahuas of the Colegio – especially living as they were amidst deaths by the thousands with cycling diseases, resource depletions, disruptive ecological pressures, and violent landgrabs. Nahuas living and learning outside the Colegio, too, might feel a disconnect from a past only recently challenged by colonialism. Instead, a process of becoming colonial and transatlantic informed the archives they produced in the sixteenth century. In this transformative movement, how did art and built environments change before Nahua eyes and, in turn, affect how Nahua communities could enact Mesoamerican education in this new Nahua-Colonial landscape?⁵⁸

Throughout Mesoamerica, Christianized Indigenous conquistadors imbibed introduced ideologies from Spain while participating in military campaigning under the supervision of Spaniards.⁵⁹ According to Robert Haskett, these adoptions of religious sentiment by first generation converts represented act of psychosocial ‘coping’ mechanisms, which formed dynamically, not dogmatically, and resulted in the making of an ‘imperfect façade of Europeanization’.⁶⁰ Yanna Yannakakis, in her study of intermingling Nahua and Mixtec societies of Oaxaca, called these types of choices and allowances aspects of the ‘art of being in between’.⁶¹ This imperfect trade-off and the dynamism of its resultant art – materials, visuals, and texts produced by early Nahua-Christian converts – have received a mixed recognition by today’s art historians. Unfortunately, the majority of studies have discursively downplayed Nahua ethnic specificity in artworks, which has flattened the dimensions of in situ craft production and artistry. This was most apparent in early works of the twentieth century by Mexican specialist José de Moreno Villa (1942) and George Kubler (1948), and one clear outgrowth of these is a classification of the plastic arts of Mesoamerica (whether or not the intent was didactic) as being termed: primitive, Indian, native, pre-Columbian, Indo-Christian, or Tequitqui – the Nahuatl word for a ‘worker, commoner, or tributary’.⁶² The latter concept currently predominates in the field.

Coined in the forties as a useful descriptor by architectural historian Moreno Villa, tequitqui art has recently been adopted by popular studies because of its roots in Nahuatl and functional definition. The word does clarify the means and modes of production in which artworks were crafted by Nahuas, especially art and architecture resulting from tribute labour owed to lord or town council.⁶³ By producing art as tribute, the worker performed the role of an artist. Wake’s definition is, perhaps, the most nuanced. Tequitqui art, she wrote, is a ‘distinctive style… characterized by its flat, surface bevelling over a roughly hewn but deep undercutting, together with the rhythmic patterning of its crowded motifs’.⁶⁴ Moreno Villa’s adoption of the term sought to capture the attempt by Nahuas to create in a Christian artistic style. The worker lacked delineation in any specific artistic training and the works of art lacked local context. Tequitqui has now been carelessly applied to distinct art forms and non-Nahua forms of tribute by scholars for expediency’s sake, seemingly in the hope of acknowledging the labour and artistic agency of Indigenous people.⁶⁵

One assumption baked into the term’s usage is the idea that tequitqui art represents the compelled works of a conquered labour force by a foreign power and oppressive ideology (Figure 1.2).⁶⁶ The art-works are seen as subjugated depictions of Iberian and European plastic art in Indigenous hands, or the materiality of those ‘visions of the vanquished’.⁶⁷ I argue that the continued use of tequitqui for local productions of art tends to situate Nahua artistic expressions, Christian or otherwise, within a conqueror/conquered dialectic. This binary framing undercuts other ways one might identify and acknowledge local ingenuity and community agency.

Figure 1.2

Art as community tribute ‘tequitqui’. Excerpt from ‘Vita Reverendissimi Patris, Martini Sarmiento Tlaxcallae Episcopi.’ Orscelar de Marianus, Gloriosus Franciscus, 1632

Figure 1.2 Long description

In the centre, a Franciscan priest with tonsure hair, dressed in plain robes and a cloak, is depicted with a halo labelled in alphabetic letters P. Iudo ab fuersac. The priest instructs six Indigenous labourers, dressed in European attire, in the construction of angular brick walls. With his right hand, the priest hands an image of a church with a steeple to a bearded, elder figure, who carries a ruler in his left hand. The other workers use various tools, ergo hammers, spades, and chisels. The background shows a country scene featuring trees and a building.

(Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University; photograph by author 2015.)

Adopting tequitqui categorical standing (or similarly patronizing terminologies) for local material culture is anachronistic by locking art in step with European visions of expression.⁶⁸ For example, architecture historian John McAndrew once applied tequitqui to the conventual artwork produced by sixteenth-century artisans in Calpan and Huexotzinco and argued that as ‘tributary labourers’ the Calpaneca and Huexotzinca were defined as a workforce spread thin by the demands imposed upon them by Spanish priests headquartered in nearby Cholula.⁶⁹ In Cholula, the labour and resource costs for similar tequitqui construction projects weighed heavily on that Nahua-Christian town council, affecting their access to skilled labour too.⁷⁰ George Kubler, also focusing on the labour and means, argued that the onerous demands of Spaniards upon Nahuas led to simpler, more primitive and ‘Indian’ art forms. Kubler and McAndrew tended to ignore local contexts, instead defining larger processes at play in artforms.⁷¹ Kubler’s understanding of ‘tribute’ artistry identified shallow reliefs, muddled depictions based on careless modelling from European artwork (woodblock prints, paintings, and sculpture), and only an aped style that was not even invented by Indigenous artists. Rather, Kubler found tequitqui as an Iberian style imposed upon Nahua artists by supervision.

Colonial architecture specialist Constantino Reyes-Valerio, whose rich oeuvre includes several site-specific studies from across the Mexican countryside, also relied on tequitqui as a viable style.⁷² Reyes-Valerio also minted arte indocristiano (‘Indo-Christian Art’), which has been adopted by many art historians and applied dogmatically in religious art.⁷³ Much like the inaccurate nominalization of ‘Indian’ used by Europeans as a blanket term for distinct Indigenous communities, arte indocristiano ignores the friction of specific identity to occlude the complexity of the particular messages articulated by local actors and artists.⁷⁴ Indo-Christian and tribute/tequitqui art both fail to convey the nature of a given community’s endearing relationship with place-identity and local epistemics.⁷⁵

There is an obvious interplay of human agency in tequitqui discourse, one that should force art historians describing large bodies of artforms in broad strokes, while also paying credence to local influences.⁷⁶ Such a nuanced approach shows through works that move beyond culturally stunted interpretative frameworks, including Wake’s important consideration of the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley and Barbara Mundy’s work on Nahua urbanites in Tenochtitlan-Mexico City.⁷⁷ Additionally, when investigating ‘viceregal’ art and architecture, Kelly Donohue-Wallace carefully reconstructs the local history surrounding murals within ‘teaching spaces’, community-based drinking and exchange rituals, material culture, and several cases of locally minded architectural programs found across the Andes and Central Mexico. Her work reveals some of the joy in finding complex textures of Indigenous influence on supposedly ‘imperial’ art.⁷⁸ But for Donahue-Wallace, ‘tequitquí, Indo-Christian, and mestizo’ are acceptable terms, qualifying in her study that ‘indigenous sculptors… visualized Christian iconography in a form that referenced local pictorial traditions and therefore appealed to Indigenous viewers’.⁷⁹ Wake’s use of the term seems effective when referencing specific three-dimensional sculptures derived primarily from two-dimensional European visuals, thus the act of an Indigenous artist creating an ‘exact copy’ in the form of tribute to an imperial agent.⁸⁰ Instead, it would be better to redefine local craft with, as Manuel Aguilar-Moreno once opined, a ‘precise term that defines the [artists’] inventive participation in a unique, transcultural art that had its own aesthetic categories’, and thus highlights local identity and indigenous agency.⁸¹ Investigating art in local contexts helps to re-centre the discourse, and this specificity is crucial to understanding how culture influenced learning and, therefore, learningscape constructions.⁸²

Another problematic matter occupying this book includes descriptions of the confluence of religion after the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica. Traditionally, the emerging religious culture among Nahua communities resulting from the ‘spiritual conquest’ has been seen as syncretic in nature. According to Samuel Edgerton, syncretism, much like hybridity as a ‘singly defining word’ for culture, masks the fact that Nahuas of the time were actually attempting to ‘rationalize standard Christian visual symbols in terms of sympathetic similarity to their own traditions’.⁸³ Edgerton’s ‘expedient selection’, or the choices the clergy seem to have made and the responses to those choices by Nahuas, produced and reproduced forms of ‘collusion… never documented in the contemporary written records’ but which Edgerton can find embedded ‘in the extant fabric of the artifacts themselves’.⁸⁴ Grasping at those intellectual threads, I will explore ‘collusion’ within several learningscapes over time, but keep my perspective more centred on local producers and less so on visions from above.

Themes of collusion and motivations behind framing art further analysed in this book with the help of reproducing dynamic vernaculars and local characterizations of people, places, and things. Language studies on the local and regional scale can help refine definitions. James Lockhart’s excavations of ethnolinguistic adjustments as made on the part of Nahuas adopting and adapting themselves to Spanish-speaking terms exposes four stages of cultural evolution. This book’s subject matter falls within the era of Stage II, which Lockhart explained began around 1540 and lasted up to 1650 and saw a ‘mixed Hispanic-indigenous style of expression… executed by individuals still cognizant of preconquest skills and lore, buttressed by a still strong solidarity of the altepetl [Nahuatl for an ethnic state]’.⁸⁵ Language and visuals were interlocked. Wake, who valued Lockhartian methods, recognized that studies of Indigenous built forms of this Stage were continually framed by Indigenous contributions under the predominately Euro-Christian lens of colonialism.⁸⁶ She hoped scholarship could find the ethnolinguistics of visual and material culture to ‘move away from the idea that the whole artistic and architectural product’ of this period was a ‘uniquely Euro-Christian story’ and, instead, guiding us to tell a more complex vision of ‘churches and their iconography tell[ing] a very Indian story’.⁸⁷ My findings from this Stage of Nahuas and mixed-heritage students adapting Christianity while cultivating Mesoamerica is a story tied to local senses of place.

The larger project of the book is to engage the discourse of Media Studies and rethink tools of ‘visual thinking’ and Mesoamerican intellectual agency. This movement challenges the cant of the phrase ‘people without history’ and explanations of colonization based on this concept created by well-meaning but ignorant scholarship, as Eric Wolf argued, that presupposed a teleologic path to societies, from tribal to capitalistic.⁸⁸ Before and after Europeans intervened upon Indigenous American places, intellectuals and commoners of the region produced visual and material media in the form of pre-Hispanic pictorial manuscripts, an array of plastic arts, murals, and extensive architectural traditions, clearly communicating meaning unlike European forms and no less meaningful.⁸⁹ Since the first transatlantic encounters, learned Europeans (and consensus scholars regurgitating these sources) have argued that Indigenous people lacked the ‘right’ kind of culture to be fully civilized or to be truly capable human beings.⁹⁰ From the beginning, the Spanish-colonial phenomena fostered a superiority complex, involving myths that Matthew Restall has famously debunked.⁹¹

Cadres of myth-busting ethnohistorians have worked to revise Eurocentric narratives since at least the 1970s, advocating for analytical ethnolinguistics and multicultural source material.⁹² This has reshaped what was known about pre-colonial and colonial indigenous peoples because the documents have allowed those peoples to, in essence, speak for themselves. Results from revisionist approaches are evident in the now nuanced depiction of ‘local religion’.⁹³ Chauvinistic ‘White’ myths about missionary benevolence versus ‘Black’ legends about the depravity of colonizers persist to the present. More than ever, we must debunk emphasis on white and black ‘official’ perspectives and advance what we can learn from the ‘role of the peasant, the underrepresented, and the “popular”’.⁹⁴

Accordingly, this book challenges several assumptions in religious history. First and foremost, it recasts the ‘Spiritual Conquest’ as an attempted assault by Christian priests and their aides on Mesoamerican educational practices.⁹⁵ I examine Indigenous media used in pre-contact educational spaces to find the true complexity of patterns introduced by foreigners and their converted allies in the endeavour to educate non-Christians, non-Iberians. James Lockhart demonstrated that Indigenous artists participated (unwittingly or otherwise) in the operation of ‘double-mistaken identity’, the process in which cultural expressions were mutually misunderstood by both teachers and pupils, resulting in a complacency that things were the same while in fact they were different, allowing for indigenous cultural survivals under the noses of the colonizers.⁹⁶ By seeking Mesoamerican voices within the Colonial, multifaceted provincial learningscapes of Stage II, this project furthers the identification of transcultural processes carried out in and enacted upon the courtyards of Nahua communities.

1.4 Framing Places in Mesoamerican Conquest History

Several scholars have studied elements of the concept of Mesoamerican ‘framing’. James Maffie proposed the concept ‘time-place’ to rationalize how Nahuas (or ‘Aztecs’) framed their philosophy of space and time. Time-place, Maffie argues, helps interested scholars imagine Indigenous understanding of places, which were local, concrete, and both terrestrial and non-terrestrial. Maffie continues, ‘[t]he Valley of Mexico [was] part of the unfolding of teotl. As such, it [was] animated and charged with power’.⁹⁷ Before him, mid-twentieth century Romanian religious historian and theorist Mircea Eliade set the tone for this type of study, proposing analytical approaches that remain useful when defining the concepts undergirding Mesoamerican sacred centres. What he called ‘architectonic symbolism of the Centre’ involved essential sacred centres comprised of three cosmograms, or universal symbols: the sacred mountain, the ideal temple or palace derived from that mountain, and the community that surrounds and identifies with both of these. The community’s orientation to these three cosmograms was a combined axis mundi or a ‘meeting point’ between the sacred and the profane, links in society to place, and place to what the community holds sacred.⁹⁸ In Mesoamerica and elsewhere, human societies have often tended towards establishing attachment to home and their sense of place. Pierre Bourdieu termed this phenomenon as one’s habitus – how humans identify themselves within environments, including the referencing of a home place, networked neighbouring places, and distant landmarks in the landscape. Inhabited, these sacred architectures are ritualistically conversed with by the place-attached.⁹⁹

The study of place and memory in conjunction with the grand nature of Mesoamerican cosmos has revealed intriguing aspects about how indigenous people oriented themselves in place-time. Enrique Florescano explained that Mesoamericans sought order and the orderly ‘placing’ of well-defined component parts of the universe that surrounded them. The basic ‘map of the world’ could be conceived of as relations between five points: the centre and the four cardinal directions.¹⁰⁰ The east was masculine, red, and related to the Reed sign; north was the Stone sign, black, and death; west was the House sign, white and feminine; and the south was tied to the Rabbit sign, the colour blue, and life.¹⁰¹ Because east was the place associated with the rising sun at the moment of creation, Florescano argued, it was the ‘guide direction’ to the others and that all Mesoamerican societies cosmogony purposefully used the moment of creation in the ‘mythic’ past as their basis for ordering of life and sacred city planning.¹⁰² In the case of the Triple Alliance, its members appear to have adopted the existing mythic cosmovision and adjusted their rituals to fit that seasonal/temporal schema. They ‘integrated’ important rites and religious obligations into the cardinal makeup throughout their calendar year, and, according to Florescano, even demarcated their home city, Tenochtitlan, along a quadripartite pattern, placing themselves at centre.¹⁰³ The result was the fastening of historical memory and religious practice with directions that anchored the practitioners in place and time, or to a grander ‘sacred’ and ‘superhuman order’ under the Triple Alliance’s ‘system of political and ideological domination’.¹⁰⁴ That the Triple Alliance tapped into and legitimated their rule using existing spiritual and cultural anchors seems likely (and the process appears to have presaged the practices of colonizers to come), but it is wise not to concede too much power and influence to superhuman forces. Furthermore, Florescano’s interpretation tends to undercut the agency of place in the matter and the study obscures some of the ways that local knowledge and religion negotiated identity on the ground level.

Theory-rich investigations into the roots of Mesoamerican placeness have revealed significant geo-cultural concepts that will recur in the present study. Davíd Carrasco, an adherent and preacher of Eliade’s theories, graphed the latter’s model onto a study of Mesoamerican city/urban formations, highlighting place and space as well as time, in Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire (1982).¹⁰⁵ He identified the usages of key symbolism employed throughout the region, documenting archetypes, the hero Quetzalcoatl, for instance, and the Ur-symbology of Mesoamerican sacred spaces, the city of Tollan. Tollan is thought to have been the real Toltec city by the same name (today Tula), but was more likely an imagined, ‘Place of Reeds,’ an archetype altepetl (Nahua ethnic state) and possibly tied to the early urban environs of Teotihuacan. For Carrasco, both the hero and the place are traceable throughout the Mesoamerican zeitgeist in the Classic Period and have been recapitulated, with augmentation, in societies ever since.¹⁰⁶ Recently, ethnohistorians and others have drawn upon Eliade’s elaborations to better understand sacred space and place creation. Robert Haskett, for one, noted its usefulness in navigating loaded value judgments, assumptions implied when others have contrasted ‘real’ versus ‘mythical’ stories.¹⁰⁷ Spatial analysis allows for a fuller development of indigenous ‘visions’ of learning environments.¹⁰⁸

Others have argued against the romanticized cosmological approach to Mesoamerican place-identity formation, especially Michael E. Smith’s Aztec City-State Capitals (2008). Unswayed by cultural archetypes and symbolic Ur-urbanism, Smith believed that functionalism played the greater role in determining what constituted a city’s identity.¹⁰⁹ Smith’s study is invaluable because of his concerted effort to approach archaeological evidence within the framework of Amos Rapoport’s discourse on the meaning of man-made environments. Rapoport’s thesis, a sociological construction that inspires many, is a three-tiered schema of how meaning was constructed: high-level architecture, or specific and esoteric knowledge; middle-level, or examples of how humans express power, status, and identity; and low-level, or individual and local ‘visual coherence’ of towns.¹¹⁰ Smith superimposes Aztec cities and towns over this three-tiered understanding to demonstrate how they expressed urbanism on the local, regional, and macro scales, and he grounds his approach in political economy theory, seeking to highlight materialism.¹¹¹

This approach is most effective in the attention granted to the wider matrix of communities, those sub-altepemeh (pl. of altepetl) beyond the often-romanticized sacred centres of Carrasco’s studies, especially Tenochtitlan, and Smith’s groundbreaking work. Its relevance to the present study is evident in the following pages.¹¹² He sheds light upon the basic reality that at the heart of each sub-altepemeh, not solely in the context of dominant urban centres, Nahuas incorporated palaces alongside temples and that their building placements reveal a less than romantic ‘chaotic situation’ as far as astronomical cosmovisions are concerned.¹¹³ Thus, he reminds us, in the end, that place-identity was composed through cosmology and politics.¹¹⁴ I find that this point – a pushback against Eliade’s universalisms and cosmovisionaries writ large – does not entirely undercut Carrasco’s findings. Certainly, it admonishes scholars to take care in piecing together the pragmatic realities of Central Mexico’s socio-ecology and challenges the assumption of supremacy of primary written sources from Tenochtitlan. His hardnosed functionalist approach to the Post-Classic matrix of economic exchange is useful. Significantly, colonial land records seem to agree with a more cautious vision of orientation. Staunch adherence to cardinal directions is not clearly indicated by the plots Nahuas built in daily life, at least not as they appear on paper manuscripts. For instance, James Lockhart found that multi-structure plots in the Valley of Mexico favoured eastern, western, and sometimes northern settings around the ithualli (‘courtyard’) space, and that the east-west axis proved to be the most common arrangement.¹¹⁵

Under Spain, Nahua visions of places and ancestral lands appear to have been tied to real and imagined key identifiable markers, but not necessarily to grander cosmologies or politics. For that reason, recent ethnohistories have demonstrated fascinating links between ancestral landscapes, the mapping of places, the preservation of memory, and boundary descriptions tied to landmarks. Haskett’s findings from Cuernavaca’s Nahuatl language primordial titles – in some ways the alphabetic translations of pre-contact-style cartographic histories – reveal that social memory did have a physical component.¹¹⁶ He argues that memories of historical figures and incidents expressed in descriptions of a community’s purported territory shed light on how ‘[t]here is history and sacred power in the landscape’.¹¹⁷ Haskett asks scholars to seek out a dynamic vision of Indigenous material culture, explaining it ‘represent[s] a kind of collective memory obeying intellectual conventions rooted in enduring Mesoamerican traditions, ways of conceiving of the past and its meanings that are just as valid, just as much true history, as those created by Western chroniclers and scholars’.¹¹⁸ I adhere to this philosophy in this project, seeking more of the ‘just as valid’ evidence about indigenous knowledge based in places.

My interest in seeking a re-assessment or alignment of how Nahua place-based practices and visions of learning environments is necessary for the fields of Indigenous and spatial theory studies. As fields of research primarily borne out of European intellectual traditions, their philosophies share a history with settler-colonialism, the historical process by which non-indigenous settlers have to varying degrees displaced – in the real and/or metaphorical sense – indigenous populations to enslave, exploit, or otherwise intervene upon natural or societal resources.¹¹⁹ As a descendant of U.S. settler-colonial legacies with a vested interest in decolonizing academic discourse as much as possible, I find it productive to reassess the important theories that still hold value and disrupt dominant paradigms. Early place and space theorists, as well as modern psychologists and sociologists before them, quite often disregarded American native peoples because they have considered them as being without a place. This belief arose from particular kinds of ethnocentric interpretations of the centuries of disenfranchisement and displacement of ‘others’ that began when Europeans first documented and differentiated Indigenous people in their historical records. Rationalizing the superiority of imperial placeness, European chroniclers mapped and categorized things as they saw fit. They most often disregarded and devalued concepts that felt too alien in relation to their own understandings of the world. The rise of modern philosophy further distanced Indigenous people from placeness because they were believed to be too backward to share the same worldviews and incapable of forming equally valid ones to those theorists held dear.

A case in point is provided by the works of preeminent spatial studies scholars, such as Edward Relph and Edward Casey, and the more recent urban design scholarship that has pushed back against them. For Relph, writing in the early twentieth century, a ‘place’ could essentially lose its placeness, and become inauthentic, when its intentionality and meaning had been removed. This Western philosophical and foundational theorist ignored Indigenous conceptions of space and geographies or, in the least, considered these ‘placeless’ and not constitutive of an authentic place constituted because it interfered with an ease of westward migration and settler-colonial logics.¹²⁰ This logic prescribes Eurocentric assumptions about territory upon Native American land tenure and customary practices, placing Indigenous connections under a manufactured hierarchy, below European civilized societies – conceptions of placeness that ‘yokes ethnicity to mobility’ in a positivist sense.¹²¹ Relph’s Spatial Studies, akin to Ricard’s spiritual tabula rasa, saw a sparsely peopled territory and a clean cultural slate in phenomenology of placeness; newcomers could write easily upon this landscape at will.¹²² Edward Casey, in the 1990s, focused on the experiential nature of placeness. He argued three basic psychological mannerisms, called ‘cases’, determined an individual’s sense of place: non-movement, or ‘staying in place’; ‘moving within a place’; and ‘moving between places’.¹²³ Casey’s ideas ought to have been tethered to particular cultural underpinnings and locations, as well as recognize the asymmetrical relationships that transformed bodies in motion when colonial urbanism began moving people in new directions towards global places.

This book’s entanglement in Spatial Studies will seek to displace the traditional wisdom that colonizers started, managed and ‘completed’ a top-down annihilation of Nahua place attachment. By having Mesoamerican temples destroyed and ordering this rubble to be made into the likeness of Colonial-Christian churches and courtyards, Europeans may have believed local connections severed from places and a seemingly tractable Indigenous population.¹²⁴ This assumption can be found in colonial actions and purposeful placements. Spaniards would superimpose Christian built environments on the sites of sacred springs and on mountaintops, some precontact sites with minimal architecture before contact with Europeans, in an effort to coopt meaningful natural landmarks.¹²⁵ Spaniards then chronicle an erroneous spiritual conquest whose initial steps were education in the very re-fashioned places to finish the job of unlearning habitus. In this volume, I call this phase a period of ‘placebreaking’ to attempt a physical reshaping of Mesoamerican place-identity.¹²⁶

In my work, I find useful the overlay of Place-Identity Theory to locate patterns in learning environments. This helps to identify socially constructed layouts of places and place-identity missed when simply locating churches on maps. I reference relevant urban design methodologies, for example Kevin Lynch’s general schema, to understand how participant’s engagement with and experience a given place’s distinct ‘image’. I do so to add Lynch’s composition of key place elements, including: paths, edges, nodes, landmarks, and districts (Figure 2.1). Lynch identified these elements as help to strengthening a participant’s ability to access and engage with the sense of place attachment, which he believes to be a universal human mode of ‘wayfinding’. For Lynch, individuals and groups orientate their psychology with a place and reflect upon a ‘imageability matrix’. like a place postcard, that inhabitants can think of to capture their attachment to a neighbourhood, town, and city at a static moment in time.¹²⁷ Adopting ‘imageability’ of learning environments in the context of Nahua and Nahua-Christian architecture and urbanity and the theoretical integration of schools in reference to residents’ visions helps rethink top-down education. This exercise, I will show, furthers Smith’s study of meaning in the Postclassic and helps frame ethnospatial readings of architecture.¹²⁸ In doing so, I hope to situate the envisioned imageability of Nahua learning as place-based.

Figure 2.1

Imageability of the ithualli. The basic paths, edges, and central node of an indigenous family’s learningscape.

Figure 2.1 Long description

The icons are arrayed beneath the blueprint and include an extended arrow to show Paths, criss-crossed and circled arrows for Nodes, a cluster of triangles at the centre of which is a tall-peaked one to show Landmarks, a set of sequential rectangles aligned on one side of a flat rough-edged diamond to indicate Edges of urban spaces, and a mid-level pitched perspective of a 3 d townscape to identify Districts. In the blueprint, paths are placed entering and exiting between buildings of the courtyard, a Node is placed at the courtyard centre, and Edges are marked along the backs of two buildings at the top left and centre-right.

(image by author)

This act of rethinking placeness in Nahua country adds to the valuable work of my colleagues. For example, Louise Burkhart’s analysis of gender-specific training on the pre-contact Nahua ‘home front’ explains the lessons Nahua mothers taught their daughters during the early period of childrearing. Burkhart believes, ‘[i]t was in that smoky interior [of the home and its hearth] that the Mexica infant developed its orientation in space and time. It learned that space is quadrilateral and has a central point’. Apparently aligned with Carrasco’s discourse, she argues that the city and its arrangement of teocalli (temples) was replicated in the quadripartite nature of the house as ‘symbolic center’, and that Nahua women were weavers of space and time.¹²⁹ Adding to this type of analysis, I hope to shed light on how educators and schools helped to recreate space and time beyond the home front. Colonial learning environments and indigenous learning modalities were inextricably entangled in complex pre-contact spatial orientations.¹³⁰ These useful theoretical imports aside, my analysis also seeks a grounded approach to sources and attention to social and political networks, and when possible, I map real ecologies of Nahua networks and built forms in the hopes of developing a dynamic set of architectural designs and capturing the persistent use patterns of communities.

Strong evidence has revealed that older notions of space survived in central New Spain even when Spaniards had obliterated pre-contact sacred places, often ‘topping’ them with new Catholic edifices and courtyards. Wake’s argument that indigenous painters, writers, and artisans were able to ‘frame’ the Catholic sacred with their own conceptualizations of place and the cosmos calls more traditional interpretations into question.¹³¹ Barbara E. Mundy’s tour-de-force study of Tenochtitlan before and after the Spanish invasion, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, The Life of Mexico City, ably deploys spatial theory and practice. She parses the works of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre to better understand what she sees as a triad of spatial spheres that Mesoamericans produced on three basic scales: perceived, conceived, and lived spaces.¹³² It is Mundy’s focus on the latter that sets her work apart. Her interpretive framework combines Lefebvre’s understanding of how societies create representations (perceived space) and conceptualizations (conceived space) of cities with Certeau’s view that the essence of a city was found more so in the practice of daily life.¹³³ The latter exposes the agency of a city’s occupants, in Mundy’s case Tenochtitlan’s pre- and post-contact cosmopolitans, and she is able to convincingly ‘find that historical continuities, rather than ruptures, reveal’ the ways that indigenous knowledge undergirded the city’s planning and how it ‘offered its indigenous residents comforting reminders of their seamless integration into a larger cosmic order’ even after they came under Spanish political domination.¹³⁴

Mundy argues that though Spanish writers beginning with Hernando Cortés emphasized the complete destruction of the Mexica capital, ‘[w]hile rulers can die, spaces cannot. And while ethnic communities are conquered or ravaged by disease, spaces endure’. Like Haskett’s vision from primordial titles, Wood’s ‘intertextuality’ of memory devices, and Carrasco’s cosmic drivers, Mundy finds that the Mexica sense of ‘place memory’ went ‘beyond the physical monument’. She continues, ‘[C]ollective rituals make their mark on lived space and contribute to the social nature of space…, [and to] shape future action [that] has to do with the memory of urban dwellers’¹³⁵ Not directly challenging scholars in the vein of Smith, Mundy’s contention asks us to pay attention to the agency of places and the deeper meanings that humans place upon them. My intention is to continue this investigative spur, adding more cases of places and place-identity formation to best understand indigenous art and education. Place mattered for indigenous peoples because it aided and abetted the survival of ideas and culture on the local level. Pre-colonial Nahua knowledge persisted and was adapted to the new, not only by those Nahua scholars working with friars to create didactic materials in Nahuatl and other indigenous languages, but also by the Indigenous artists, artisans, and students who built and studied in colonial learningscapes. This is testimony to the capacity of origin beliefs and cosmological constructions to rebuild indigenous place-identity in ways that may not have been recognized by Spaniards at the time, and by later generations of scholars who approached this subject from a ‘Western’ perspective and bias.¹³⁶

In order to understand the multifaceted ways in which people from the period discerned nature of places, learning environments, and pedagogy, ‘Unholy Pedagogy’ turns to a variety of written sources. I have interpreted Nahuatl sources whenever possible, both published and archival Nahuatl texts, to represent places based on their community’s records. These include annals, church records, and oral histories recorded in the sixteenth century, though some sources were produced later based upon sixteenth-century originals or oral accounts. Nahuatl annals and the minutes from town council meetings recorded by local notaries are frustratingly limited in the amount of descriptive details about pedagogy but surprisingly helpful in approximating aspects of local agency (at least as depicted by lettered indigenous officials). Unfortunately, the needle in the haystack of education histories has yet to be uncovered, and we lack the vision of learning that might come from a teaching manual or an equivalent to a ‘textbook’ written for a student from Calpan, Huexotzinco, Tlaxcala, or any indigenous town from the period. Thus, this study highlights genres (and the scholarly studies of those) that approximate elements of religious education, such as Nahuatl didactic plays, songs and musical performances, and descriptions of local festivals.¹³⁷ More readily available are the dozens of extant colonial imprints and handwritten copies of imprints of doctrinas, catechisms, and sermons or chronicles and travel accounts, the vast majority of which were more commonly produced by priests or their indoctrinated aides. One example discussed below is Bartolomé de Alva’s Confessionario Mayor y Menor en lengua Mexicana (1634), a primer for confessional discourse with Nahuatl-Spanish translations, which was written by a mestizo priest. These genres can be problematic on several fronts. On one hand, Spanish sources offer historians visions of Catholic educational practices especially from those seeking to affect the inculcation of Christianity and dogmas. And on the other hand, when read with a critical eye and in conversation with the relevant literature, these sources can reveal visions of educational happenings on the local level and the consternation of priests attempting to dissuade unchristian lesson plans.

Because of the lack of a locally sourced treatise on education, An Unholy Pedagogy approaches the study in a distinct fashion, drawing upon the material culture and pictorials of colonial architecture. Pictorials have been a part of modern ethnohistorical discourse since the 1950s, and my interpretations of pre- and post-contact manuscripts is informed by the body of rigorous scholarship. In turn, material cultural includes archaeology and critical architecture, especially new interpretations of ornamentation, statuary, building façades, illustrations, paintings, and other three-dimensional goods. These visual stimuli or their machinations are essential components in the investigation of the Mesoamerican and Spanish colonial education, and my art and architectural studies and surveys of these elements and places has been a crucial contribution to the study. Thus, An Unholy Pedagogy makes a unique contribution to the analysis of colonial-era religious education studies and the history of learning science.¹³⁸ This approach recovers voices from Indigenous communities, revealing more about indigenous connections to places and their vision of education on the local level. I hope it spurs further analysis of these types of sources as any thorough history that might deconstruct Nahuatl catechisms, wills, and Inquisition records might do.

1.5 Structure

Following this introduction, Chapter 2 launches the discussion about place-identity by finding it first in the pre-Christian schooling and educational practices from the Post-Classic Period (1400–1500 CE), demonstrating their complexity in the realm of the Triple Alliance. It focuses on two of the most important altepemeh in the Valley of Mexico, Tetzcoco and Tenochtitlan. These and other fifteenth-century Nahua cities featured specialized schools, often if not exclusively run by priestly teachers, that were known as calmecac (‘house of the lineage’, schools for the sons of nobles with an emphasis on military training and religion), telpochcalli (‘youth house’, the schools for commoner boys), cuicacalli (‘song house’ in which ritual practices were emphasized for boys and girls), and ritual learning spaces such as plazas and courtyards associated with temples and other kinds of structures. Significant here are a number of rich studies of formal educational practices, above all as they were pursued in the famous calmecac.

Chapter 3 investigates violent moments of invasion, colonial impositions, and attacks on Indigenous archives, places of ‘power-knowledge’, defines the term ‘placebreaking’, yet poses ways in which this place-centred concept can both explain and challenge traditional assumptions about the erasure of the past by the imposition of the new.¹³⁹ The chapter focuses on the religious and educational capital of the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley, Cholollan (Cholula) and its temple of Quetzalcoatl. Since this was the site of one of the earliest assaults upon an indigenous learningscape, the chapter examines what that process looked like, how foreigners understood it as proof of a completed spiritual conquest, and how those assessments overlooked a failure to remove traditional indigenous connections to an important sacred place.

Chapter 4 describes the role of the Nahua ‘collegians’ in the production of learning tools and curricula, and early colonial visions of ‘new’ formal education taking place under the tutelage of Catholic priests. Synthesizing previous scholarship at times, the chapter examines three basic modes of learning utilized by Nahuas and Europeans: catechisms and Christian doctrinas, songs and plays, and oral traditions and histories. As well, the chapter explores themes and moralistic stories associated with specific saints, such as the Virgin Mary, and the ways that teachers and learning tools guided new Christians in the use of sacred and profane spaces. It also reveals the persistence of pre-Hispanic rituals and identities in the guise of Catholic beliefs and practices as they were set out in Spanish-Nahuatl didactic texts. Scholars have combed through many of these official church sources, but this chapter’s emphasis on the concept of ‘place’ in the context of the sources helps produce new insights into the histories of religious instruction and learning in a multicultural colonial context.

Chapter 5 moves the discourse of the learningscape back into the provincial countryside of the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley. It introduces key figures in provincial education and the theory of An Unholy Pedagogy. It was unholy in the sense that Catholic learning environments and the lessons they inspired were not simply unencumbered sites of prescribed knowledge, but places rife with indigenous influences. The chapter follows the footsteps of Nahua collegians, church people, and visiting Franciscan and Dominican priests as they introduced the Nahua populations to Christian pedagogy, and investigates the learning environments of convents and the persistence of local knowledge alongside adopted and adapted saints. Tracking participation in the founding of churches and planning associated with new provincial learningscapes, this chapter argues that the people of the altepetl of Huexotzinco, Calpan, and Quauhquechollan did not simply sit idly by as the shape of their education was being conceived and enacted. Rather, this chapter identifies the ways in which they directly contributed to new modes of learning.

Chapter 6 then tests those indigenous designs by analysing the community level learning environments of Huejotzingo and Calpan, contextualized with some other examples from the valley, to expose the practice and composite parts of indigenous contributions to learning environments. Many of the conventos begun before 1550 were not completed until the end of the century, so that the process of construction and elaboration was a lengthy one. With this in mind, it is possible to locate both Christian and Nahua-minded lessons in church courtyards to show how place-based pedagogy informed educational practices, creating what I call partial and un-holistic pedagogy. These potentially unorthodox lessons were taught not only by word of mouth, but also through the use of architectural ornamentation and other visual media, the actual use made of educational environments in the courtyards, and the overarching vision of learning that emerged in them. This book interprets the practice and vision of education alongside Indigenous sources, demonstrating community-level influence upon supposedly ‘Catholic’ pedagogy.

In Chapter 7, the book concludes by presenting the critical top-down changes enacted by the zealous Palafox y Mendoza, beginning in the 1640s, as well as even more critical changes spurred by disease and disinvestment in the provincial learning environment. Ironically, the persistence of local knowledge led to attempts at its displacement on the part of increasingly suspicious regular order clergy and, eventually, their replacement by secular teachers. The conclusion is rounded out by some final thoughts about the legacy of the kind of locally focused studies of colonial education carried out in Chapters 5 and 6.

More generally, I hope that my findings will spark further study of local place-identity and reconsiderations of the Science of Learning at large. Humans are place-based creatures, and their language is enveloped by the places they learn in. They inhabit place and time with the understanding that they are meaningful pieces of the landscape themselves. Remembrances are part and parcel of identity perseverance, and the directed assault upon a people’s places of learning – the wilful destruction of their tools for cultural perseverance, or the disappearing of bodies of knowledge that by some accounting may be considered unorthodox or challenging of dogmas – needs our full attention. The discipline of history and history writing is better at doing justice to historic peoples when scholars contextualize texts within the larger cultural fabric of sources that helped spawn the written word. This research has helped me find agency and perseverance in places commonly perceived to be some of the sites of clear-cut cultural trauma and even genocide. As may become evident throughout the following pages, I find stories about places to be surprisingly enduring in local eyes and frustratingly hard to kill from the perspective of the colonizers, even five hundred years on.