Chapter 4 focuses on the role of intermediaries in the Valley of Mexico and further afield, homing in on the early sites of evangelization and extirpation. An inciting incident continues the discussion on placebreaking, here exposing attacks led by Dominicans at the ritual sanctum associated with the Tetzcoca ruler Nezahualcoyotl, Tetzcotzinco. Moving to identifying the tools or modalities of education in early colonial learningscapes, it then locates the materials produced by Nahua ‘collegians’ that comprised a visual and material culture curriculum. Here, regimented education that was introduced by priests and, quickly after, transformed by collegians became a nascent pedagogy. It was intended to unteach precolonial intellectual and cultural systems, whilst relying on informants to best suit the learning needs of the student body. The chapter references several studies to describe the state-of-the-field on colonial religion and conversion studies and explores key case studies in colonial education, including early catechist texts and Christian doctrinas, songs and plays, and oral traditions and histories. Architectural designs are also highlighted, with descriptions of utopian educationist schemes of the early colonial decades. In identifying new tools, the chapter also offers context on the persistence of Mesoamerican rituals within the new ways of learning. The chapter examines rhetoric in sermons and didactic materials. Educationists are seen as active, creative, and effective catalysts for change. It points to aurality and music as inspiring cross-cultural exchanges whilst being part of a spiritual economy of Christian performance.

The classic notion of translatio (imperii, studii, etc.) can be advantageously deployed to examine the narrative construction of space and its bearing on identity formation. The concept covers the displacement of people, the political and spiritual changes wrought by such movements, and the renderings of these events in various media. In New Spain, such transitions were represented, in both visual and alphabetic texts, by migrations (the wandering Aztecs, the sea-fearing missionaries, the forlorn creoles) and urban foundations (the legendary Tollan, the otherworldly Puebla, the all-encompassing Mexico-Tenochtitlan) in which past, present, and future, as well as myth, history, and literature, overlap. This chapter will consider the representation of several key migrations and foundations that illustrate transitions from images to words and from myth to history, and back again, in New Spanish literature to highlight the role of place in the identity-formation processes that lead from pre-Hispanic Anahuac to modern Mexico.