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

Article  in  Hispanic American Historical Review · February 2001

DOI: 10.1215/00182168-81-1-151 · Source: OAI

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

Deborah Ellen Kanter

Hispanic American Historical Review, 81:1, February 2001, pp. 151-152 (Review)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/12504

Access provided by Albion College Library (25 Feb 2019 12:46 GMT)
Book Reviews / Colonial Period 151

Pueblos de indios y educación en el México colonial, 1750 –1821.

By dorothy tanck de estrada. Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Históricos,
El Colegio de México, 1999. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Bibliography. Index.
665 pp. Paper.

The persistence of native pueblos and native languages stands as one of the most
remarkable outcomes of Mexican history. Dorothy Tanck de Estrada examines a
crucial period of challenge to Indian society, the late Bourbon period, when native
Mexican communities faced repeated demands to subjugate themselves further to
the Spanish Crown. Bourbon policies sought to regularize and control pueblo
finances, religious life, and land use. Indians even found their languages under attack.
At its most strident, the Crown declared in 1770 its goal “to extinguish native lan-
guages.” This book details Bourbon policies regarding village life and the pueblos’
fight to retain their autonomy.
The volume’s title misleads in two ways. First, while pueblos de indios are
Tanck’s subject, this is hardly an ethnohistorical study. Royal policymakers and
officers stand out as protagonists; Indians themselves play little role in nearly half
of the book. Second, readers interested in Indian education may be frustrated by
detailed chapters on pueblo and cofradía finances that lack explicit connection to
schooling. Only one-third of the text focuses on the establishment and achieve-
ments of escuelas de primeras letras in Indian pueblos. These readers can move
quickly to the book’s midsection, filled with revealing vignettes of teachers, educa-
tional materials, and villagers’ attitudes toward the schools.
According to Tanck, Bourbon economic reforms were the primary motor of
change in Indian society. Fiscal policies emanating from Spain effectively stream-
lined and redirected the collection and use of community funds. Reform of the caja
de comunidad, for example, enabled the Crown to siphon off the lion’s share of local
savings. Fiscal reforms (achieved at the expense of pueblo autonomy), Tanck
argues, proved essential to the establishment of primary schools. She relies upon
the ample reports of intendants and other bureaucrats to document school funding
from Durango to Chiapas. She estimates that 26 percent of Mexican pueblos had
schools in 1803 ( p. 582).
Tanck maintains that Bourbon plans to found village schools and propagate
Spanish language succeeded for the most part. Earlier, local clergy guided escuelas
de doctrina where children mainly learned the catechism, often in their native
tongue. After 1750, royalist bishops and Bourbon officers mandated the creation of
a new kind of school in any village that could bear the cost of a teacher. With
Spanish as the language of instruction, the curriculum still included the catechism,
but also reading and, for some students, writing. Most students were male, but
some villages maintained classes or separate school for girls as well. Tanck stresses
the longevity of many schools and the continuity in their funding. She contends
that decades of schooling in hundreds of pueblos had an impact. Working with a
 152 HAHR / February

complex set of variables, Tanck reckons literacy rates as high as 9.5 percent among
Indian males in 1810 ( p. 445).
Tanck downplays native resistance to the schools. Especially when a school
was inaugurated, many pueblos thwarted plans for (what must have appeared to
them) the unnecessary expense and intrusion of a Spanish-language school. With
time, villagers often came to accept the expense as traditional. Accepting many
Bourbon reports at face value, Tanck stresses the schools’ effectiveness.
In my estimation, the Bourbons made little headway in educating the native
population. Schools may have become accepted institutions in many Mexican vil-
lages, yet escuelas de primeras letras hardly proved the panacea Bourbon officials and
church officials anticipated. At the start of the nineteenth century, despite decades
of schooling, truancy remained common, few students became literate, and Nahuatl,
Otomí, and Zapotec still reigned in the barrios and confessionals. On the eve of
independence, Archbishop Lizana y Beaumont decried the fact that a confusa Babel
de lenguas remained in America. As the past two centuries of Mexican history have
shown, this situation would change only gradually and less as the result of policy
directives, than as the eventual outcome of social and economic transformations.
Tanck seldom admits the limited role of schools in spreading Spanish.
This volume adds to a well-established literature on the late colonial pueblos
as cohesive, resourceful, and assertive entities. In addition to sections on education,
chapters outline the changing functions of cofradías, village finances, and land dis-
tribution. Tanck should be commended for treating all of Mexico; she pulls
together data and anecdotes from every region, including Chiapas and Yucatán. Yet
Tanck often fails to use secondary literature (especially socioeconomic regional
studies) to elucidate her data. A very complete index will allow scholars of specific
regions to make their own links.

deborah e. kanter, Albion College

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