Fray Angélico Chávez makes a substantial contribution to the historiography of the Franciscan Order in New Spain with his profusely annotated translation of the Oroz Relación, a collection of lives of sixteenth-century Franciscan pioneers in Mexico. The work forms part of a bound collection of documents, all but four in manuscript, which is in the Latin American library at Tulane University. Father Chávez has named this collection the Oroz Codex after its compiler, the scholarly and industrious Fray Pedro Oroz. In an introductory essay, “The Life and Times of Father Oroz,” the editor brings out of obscurity an attractive figure, who with a tolerance rare in that age befriended the young Jew Luis de Carvajal and his family after they had been tried and sentenced by the Inquisition; who reluctantly abandoned “the pleasure of his books” to serve his order in high posts; and whose ambition to be published caused him to declare with an “innocent guilelessness” that he was the author of a Relación that was very largely the work of others. Although his first biographer, Fray Juan de Torquemada, stressed his “meek and peaceful” nature, Father Chávez shows that Fray Oroz was deeply involved on the creole side in the bitter struggle for dominance between the New World and Old World Franciscans in New Spain, a struggle that reached its peak with the arrival of a new commissary general, Fray Alonso Ponce, in 1584, and that Father Chávez calls “one of the most turbulent and shameful incidents, perhaps the most shameful episode, in the entire Franciscan history.” When that controversy ended, Father Oroz gladly retired to the peace of the College of Santa Cruz at Tlatelolco, where, as rector of the college, he devoted the rest of his life to teaching and literary labors.
As Father Chávez is the first to recognize, the importance of the Oroz Relación does not consist in the originality of its contents or viewpoint. The greater part of this material was “slavishly copied” by Fray Oroz from Gerónimo de Mendieta’s collection of drafts for an official report on the Holy Gospel Province and for the fifth book of his Historia eclesiástica indiana, and from an official report by Fray Diego Muñoz on the province of Michoacán-Jalisco. The prime justification for translation and publication of this highly derivative Relación consists in the fact, discovered by Father Chávez, that Mendieta and Muñoz themselves had drawn much of their biographical information from the work of an anonymous writer whom Father Chávez identifies as Fray Rodrigo de Bienvenida. By careful collation of texts the editor has shown that the Oroz Relación “is no mere copy of other heretofore well-known writings but a key and index to their original sources.” The elaborate annotation indicates textual variations and differences of style among the various versions and attempts to establish authorship on the basis of this and other evidence. The notes also correct numerous statements by Mendieta and Oroz that had gone unquestioned by previous students, and provide much biographical and bibliographical information about the authors and their subjects.
A major merit of this book is that it for the first time makes available to English readers the sixteenth-century accounts of the lives of the famous Twelve and other Franciscan missionaries in New Spain. In their acceptance of miracles, visitations of angels and demons, and other supernatural events, these recitals of Franciscan heroism and martyrdom have all the naive charm of a medieval Book of Saints. The student of the colonial period who reads these fives will gain new understanding of the intellectual climate of the Spanish Conquest and especially of the messianic, millenarian world view of the Franciscan vanguard that contributed so largely to the spiritual conquest of New Spain.
