Francisco Morales’s book represents a modest but significant contribution to the growing body of social and quantitative history in the field of Latin American Studies. The author examines with the skill and the patience of a medieval miniaturist the more than one thousand individual cases of candidates to the Franciscan Order in seventeenth-century New Spain, in an effort to establish their ethnic and social background. The Franciscan legislation concerning the admission of candidates to the Order is described in an introductory chapter, while the body of the book explores how that legislation was applied in the Franciscan Province of the Holy Gospel, the oldest and largest Franciscan Province in New Spain. Both the numbers of individuals from different ethnic and social groups and their role and status within the Franciscans of New Spain are clarified in the course of the study. The Franciscan Order emerges as a religious-social body that rejected Indians and mestizos and “attracted principally the middle classes of the white population of the Mexican society during the seventeenth century” (p. 128).
The religious convents were well-defined, stable, and controlled samples of the larger colonial society, and can be studied to illuminate the social structures and tensions of that society. The study of the colonial convents helps also to clarify how Iberian values and institutions were transferred and adapted to the new cultural environment of the Americas. The Iberian statute of purity of blood, for instance, was used by the Franciscans of New Spain to discriminate against Indians and mestizos, although the statute was originally intended in Spain to be used against persons of Jewish and Moorish descent. The well-known confrontation between criollos and peninsular Spaniards attained some of its most dramatic and even violent moments within the walls of the colonial convents. Morales shows that the tempo of that confrontation was increased by the presence among the Franciscans of a third ethnic-social group described in the sources as “hijos de Provincia.” The “hijos de Provincia” were native Spaniards who had arrived in New Spain as youngsters and joined there the Franciscan Order. By the opening years of the seventeenth century they formed a well-defined and distinctive group, which opposed either the criollos or the peninsular Spaniards, as their own self-interest dictated. In the Franciscan Chapter of 1602 the “hijos de Provincia” were already strong enough to capture 29 offices within the Order, while the peninsular Spaniards and criollos together could only secure 33 offices. The case of the “hijos de Provincia” of the Franciscan Order is so well documented by Morales that it makes one wonder whether similar groups existed in other religious Orders and also in the secular society of New Spain. Their existence, if established by the sources, would add a new dimension to the social history of New Spain.
The value of the present study is somehow diminished by the lack of complete quantitative data in the colonial archives. A culture thoroughly permeated by individualism was obviously not too keen on preserving statistical data. The author himself recognizes that in some important cases the statistics available “are neither complete nor conclusive” (p. 108). The reader may at times have the feeling that some of those statistics, so skillfully dug out by Morales, are not even meaningful for a better understanding of the colonial society of New Spain. An introductory chapter outlining the social and ethnic problems of colonial Mexico would have provided a better historical perspective to this valuable study on the Franciscans. The book, as it stands, is a worthy addition to the Monograph Series published by the prestigious Academy of American Franciscan History.
