Mexico had many outstanding Franciscan missionaries in the sixteenth century. One of the greatest of those was Fray Francisco de Tembleque. A deeply religious man, whose every action was based on charity, Fray Francisco was at the same time a colorful figure and he merits a place of honor in the hearts of men. Little is known about him because liistorians have depicted for us only the salient chapters of his life, leaving the rest obscure. Even the date of his death has not been found in the many chronicles of his day.

As we shall see, he arrived in New Spain around the year 1540. Fr. Jerónimo de Mendieta tells us that “Fr. Francisco de Tembleque, a native of the town of Tembleque, near Toledo, came with Fr. Juan de Romanones from the Province of Castilla. Both were inseparable companions during their sojourn in New Spain. He acquired a sufficient knowledge of the Aztec language to enable him to hear confessions in that tongue. But he never was capable of preaching in that language from memory. He always read his sermons and instructions to the Indians, and that very satisfactorily.” In this regard he was no equal to his talented brother, Fr. Juan de Romanones, who, “having mastered the Mexican language, preached to the natives and labored among them for over 40 years, being an able speaker. He wrote sermons and other works and translated parts of the Holy Bible, a work of invaluable aid to both himself and to other friars in preaching to the Indians. He was one of the best linguists Mexico ever had.”

Three Weeks before the fall of Mexico City and the final victory over its conservative adversaries, the liberal government of Benito Juárez issued a law, on December 4, 1860, establishing freedom of religion in Mexico. Such a law had been a liberal objective throughout the early Reforma period and during the War of the Reform as well. In mid-1859 the Juárez government had issued a manifesto which stated that religious toleration was a requirement for national prosperity. The liberals saw toleration as an important precondition for foreign immigration—and immigration had been an established panacea for national problems since the achievement of independence in 1821. The 1860 law served to vindicate part of the Reforma program. It also sought to resolve almost four decades of debate on the relationship between foreigners, immigration, and religious toleration.

IT is well-known that the Franciscans had a very considerable influence on the history of America. From the days of the conquest up to the present time, their labors have been outstanding in the sphere of American spiritual life by their extensiveness, their intensity, and their brilliance. In the missionary field, Franciscan activity was particularly conspicuous. Up to the end of the sixteenth century, the Franciscan missions were almost as numerous as those of all the rest of the religious orders together; Franciscan primacy was maintained in the seventeenth century, and from 1767 onwards nearly all the missions among the pagans, both in North and South America, remained in their hands, once the Society of Jesus had been suppressed.

Edward Bliss Emerson, a younger brother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in 1805. Educated at Andover Academy and Harvard, he showed great promise as a scholar. Ill health plagued the young man, however, and he was forced to give up his work as a teacher. A trip to southern Europe failed to cure his tuberculosis. Next he tried to study law in Boston, but this brought on the total ruin of his health and a short spell of mental derangement.

By 1831 it was apparent that a prolongation of Emerson's life required a warmer climate than that of his beloved New England. He went first to the Danish island of St. Croix. A few months later he was in Puerto Rico, and there he remained—with the exception of one brief trip home—until his death in 1834.

WASHINGTON IRVING put together The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus too hurriedly for it to be as accurate and original as historians would like it to be. He was even inclined on occasion, perhaps to compensate for the impossibility of doing exhaustive research, to “let his imagination go completely,” reconstructing colorful scenes not only from what existing records clearly indicated had happened, but from what a knowledge of the era of discovery led him to believe might have happened. And he heightened diction, tone, and characterization to the point of inviting criticism. Nevertheless nineteenth-century historians did not laugh Columbus off. And Stanley Williams’s verdict that instances where Irving consciously invents facts or distorts what in his time was considered to be the evidence are “relatively rare” seems sound. In spite of its faults, the book proved, apparently, to be usable until more detailed studies of the subject appeared.

California has exercised a haunting fascination on men’s imaginations ever since the days of Cortés. During the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at least twenty expeditions served as a prelude to the occupation, first of the Lower California Peninsula in 1697, and then of New, or Upper, California in 1769. A complete list of these voyages and attempted entradas has not yet been made. Suffice it to say that we are far from possessing the accounts of all the efforts that were made to discover and colonize those regions from 1535 to 1769.

In 1769 New, or Upper, California was first visited by the pionéer founders of its missions and presidios. They had come from Loreto in the Lower California Peninsula, after an arduous trip of over two-hundred leagues over barren mountains. This was the famous expedition of Serra and Portolá, which marks the beginning of the Spanish colonization with the founding of San Diego and the exploration of all the coast up to San Francisco. That year records the birth of Upper California.

This year, 1992, marks the quincentenary or quincentennial of the first voyage of Columbus to the Western Hemisphere. In 1990, as Chair of the Mexican Studies Committee of the Conference on Latin American History, I invited two of the leading scholars on Mexico during the colonial period– Professor Jacques Lafaye (Universite de Paris IV) and Professor James Lockhart (UCLA)–to help set the debate for the upcoming anniversary by delivering a 20 minute summary of the role of Spain in the history of colonial Mexico at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in San Francisco. The following essays are the result of that discussion held on December 29, 1990 in San Francisco.

On the 8th of March, 1500, a fleet of thirteen ships and caravels departed from Lisbon under the command of Pedro Alvares Cabral. Two of the caravels were destined for East Africa and the others for Calicut, on the Malabar coast of India, where they were sent to obtain cargoes of spices and other Eastern commodities, to establish friendly relations with its ruler, and to leave a factory for future trade. Vasco da Gama with his fleet had preceded; Cabral followed to reap the reward. The route was carefully selected to secure the safest and best passage to the Cape of Good Hope. The ships of the fleet were clumsy so that the course must be taken with the most favorable winds. They sailed somewhat to the west of south from the Cape Verde Islands and the coast of Brazil was reached, probably for the first time. After remaining here for about a week taking on supplies of water and wood, the main fleet continued to India. Before doing so, possession of this discovery was taken for the Crown, though it was not then known whether it was mainland or an island. A small supply ship was sent back to Lisbon carrying letters for the King, among them one by Pedro Vaz de Caminha telling of the sojourn and describing the natives, and another by the king’s astrologer, Master John. Both of these letters still exist. The date of the arrival of the supply ship in Portugal is not known but it was probably early in July, 1500. The news of the discovery was of great interest to the King and to the Portuguese people, but their chief concern was with the success of the India fleet, and Caminha’s letter reported that little of value was found in the new land during Cabral’s stay. The discovery made by Cabral was considered of sufficient importance, however, to warrant sending a second fleet for further investigation. The King and the cosmographers wished to know whether it was mainland, as they undoubtedly suspected, and if so its extent. If such were the case, they desired to claim the land for Portugal under the Bull of May 4, 1493 and the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed June 4, 1494. If it were an island, the Spice Islands farther to the west might be reached as Columbus had claimed. The merchants were interested in its commercial value particularly for obtaining pearls and dye wood and in its possibilities for the cultivation of sugar cane. In the latter of these Bartolomeo Marchioni, a wealthy Florentine, who had long resided in Lisbon and operated sugar plantations in Madeira and elsewhere, could anticipate profits, if the land were fertile and native labor adequate. The New Christians or converted Jews evidently also saw in this new land the possibility of escape from persecution in Portugal and a chance for wealth from the products which might be found there.

The Little Pueblo of Tiripetío lies at the foot of a mountain near Morelia in the state of Michoacán. Its Indian name means “place of gold”, but the adobe houses with their straw roofs plus a general appearance of shabbiness belie such a title. Tiripetío, however, was not always a ghost town. In the sixteenth century it pulsed with life and activity. The life of the place centered about a convent of Augustinian friars, with its adjoining church, hospital and school. The name Vera Cruz is closely linked with this convent and school as with many other educational activities in sixteenth century Mexico. But like Tiripetío itself, which marked the scene of his early labours, the name of Alonso de la Vera Cruz has fallen into obscurity and today counts little, even with historians of his own Order. The recent work of Oswaldo Robles, a translation of one of Vera Cruz’s philosophic treatises, the Physica Speculano, (vd. The Americas, October 1944, under article: “Fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz and the Beginnings of Philosophic Speculation in the Americas”.) is truly a step in the right direction. It can only be hoped that the relatively settled political set-up in Mexico will open the way for a more thorough search for historical data on outstanding figures like Alonso de la Vera Cruz. The present article attempts, from the sources now at hand, to synthesize the many and varied activities in the field of education in which Vera Cruz engaged and to give an interpretation of the influence he exerted in the field of learning and in the development of the philosophic thought of his day in Mexico.

The evolution of the historical literature on land tenure in northern New Spain has closely paralleled general historiographical trends of New Spain's far northern frontier. For many years, “borderlands” history focused almost exclusively upon the study of those institutions which have been stereotyped as peculiar to the frontier, the mission and the presidio; upon political and administrative history; or upon biographies of notable figures. These studies laid important foundations, but, in general, borderlands historians were slow to adopt the social science methodologies of the new social and economic history which became popular in the 1960s in most fields of historical inquiry. Well after both its Anglo and Hispanic progenitors began to be studied from a perspective which emphasized social and economic structures and relationships, did the geographical area which corresponds to the Provincias Internas (all of today's border states plus Sinaloa, Durango and Baja California) begin to receive similar attention. Thus, our understanding of the social and economic history of the region is still rudimentary, and this is nowhere more evident than in the area of landholding patterns and agrarian development.