Vasco de Quiroga, judge and bishop in 16th-century New Spain, tried to prick Spanish official consciences into building an Indian commonwealth which would be primitively Christian and tolerantly humanist. Failing in this, he labored indefatigably and at his own expense to bring the reality two Indian communities, one on the outskirts of Mexico City and the other on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro in Michoacán, both working models of his master plan. How well he succeeded is attested to by the shrines and the rich local traditions that have preserved his memory among the Indians and which brought him to the attention of his first biographer, Juan José Moreno, in 1766. In the present century there has been a quickening interest; Nicolás León, Aguayo Spencer, and Silvio Zavala have collected archival materials and interested themselves in manifold aspects of his thought and work. Among these were his sympathy with the native cultures, his narrow concept of the role of Spaniards and Spanish dominion in the New World, and his intellectual kinship with the English humanist, Thomas More.
In English, however, there have been only scattered articles. Father Warren has performed a useful service in bringing to a wider audience the account of the now famous pueblo-hospitals and their founder. He begins with a brief bibliographical essay and a sketch of Quiroga’s life in Spain. So sketchy are the data that the author cannot even be sure whether Quiroga was fifty-seven or sixty years old when he first crossed the ocean. There follows in principally narrative form the vicissitudes of the two communities of Indians from their foundation in the 1530s until Quiroga’s death in 1565.
The principal documents upon which Father Warren depends have long been published, though somewhat faultily, and in large measures exploited by the Mexican writers. His diligent search through the Spanish archives yielded little to the materials already known, and the errors and omissions discovered in published sources result in no substantial modification of the traditional account. Moreover, because of Father Warren’s self-imposed limitation to consider only the pueblo-hospitals, Quiroga still awaits an English biographer.
Some of the unresloved problems of such a biography must hopefully depend upon the discovery of new materials, such as the almost complete void concerning Quiroga’s years in Spain before his arrival in the New World in 1531 or the testing of the chroniclers’ accounts of his seven-year sojourn in Spain from 1547 to 1554. If the details of his early life could be resolved, they might reveal that long-time influences shaped his affinity for More’s utopian ideas, as Zavala has suggested. This position seems much more plausible than Father Warren’s belief that the attraction for More came suddenly from his reading of the Utopia after arriving in Mexico.
Father Warren truncates Quiroga’s careful and lengthy discussion of slavery. For example, as a jurist, Quiroga considers the right of Spaniards to purchase Indians already enslaved by their fellows. Such purchases, he says, must be prohibited because the conditions of slavery are spelled out in Spanish law; this was not the case in Indian servitude. Hence such change in status would be unjust. This is not an argument against chattel slavery, as Father Warren would have it. Finally, the author might have saved himself considerable effort had he used John W. Meaney’s line by line comparison of Quiroga’s ordenanzas for the government of the hospitals and More’s Utopia in his “Bishop of Utopia,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, LX (December, 1949), 197-212.