The First Audiencia of New Spain, headed by Nuno de Guzman as President, was dismissed in disgrace not long after its creation for various impolitic actions, but above all for dispensing patronage with too little regard for the rights of the conquerors. Ever since, the First Audiencia has had a consistently bad press with historians. The present personal letter from one of its members indeed demonstrates blatant awarding of office to relatives for profit, as well as the judge's large-scale economic ventures on his own behalf. But in truth, Audiencia members in later times acted quite similarly, though more under wraps and with greater limitations on them, as competing interests grew more numerous and more watchful. When viceroys came to rule in Mexico and Peru, Audiencias there lost some of their patronage (in areas such as Guatemala and Quito, however, the Audiencia under its president was still the governing body and retained full appointive power). Judges of later years tended to limit their visible participation in the economy to real estate and indirect investment; their favorite means of public penetration into society was the marriage of their children into locally prominent families. Even in the later period high court judges may have continued active business enterprise privately, as don Luis de Velasco (Letter 30) suspected.

Licenciate Delgadill∼ goes into some detail here about the entourage which judges as well as governors brought with them to the Indies. In doing so he illustrates the toll that disease sometimes took of new arrivals from Spain. And though he singlemindedly takes his judgeship as a business operation, throughout the letter he evinces a liveliness of mind as well as, in the second part, a tangible homesickness for Seville, his friends there, and even his mule, to whom he sends greetings. Delgadillo was no monster, but a complex human being whose ambitions and activities were like those of other government officials of his time. If his outspokenness seems a little unusual, his thoroughness in pursuing his ends was less so, and his manner of using the family tie not at all.