Abstract
Formal and nonformal education in northern New Spain occurred within the context of Spanish exploration, conquest, and settlement. Conquistadores carried out these activities under the name of both the crown and the church. As historian David Weber explained, the explorers believed they could “serve God, Country, and themselves at the same time.”2 The search for gold and other riches was no less a part of Spain’s intent as it rose to international power in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although Spaniards who pushed into the American Southwest were disappointed in their quest for material wealth, they created a permanent imprint upon Native American culture. The Spanish imposed both their language in verbal and written forms and the beginnings of formalized European education. The collision of cultures, languages, and religions over three centuries produced a new people who are the ancestors of today’s Southwestern Latinos.
I have determined that schools be established where they do not exist as ordered by law and statutes; that the parents be induced, by the gentlest means and without the use of coercion, to send their children to the said schools … that the Presidentes and Audiencias look after the election of efficient teachers and the assignment of their salaries according to the population and conditions of the settlements … and that they ask the priests to persuade their parishioners with the greatest gentleness and affability, of the advantage and expediency of their children learning Spanish for their better instruction in the Christian doctrines and polite intercourse with all persons.
—Royal Orders from King Charles III, November 5, 17821
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Notes
Frederick E. Eby, compiler, Education in Texas: Source Materials, University of Texas Bulletin no. 1824 (Austin: University of Texas, April 1918), pp. 5–6.
David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in Northern New Spain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 23.
David Sweet, “The Ibero-American Frontier Mission in Native American History,” in The New Latin American Mission History, ed. Erick Langer and Robert H. Jackson (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 1–48.
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© 2004 Victoria-María MacDonald
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MacDonald, VM. (2004). The Colonial Era. In: Latino Education in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982803_2
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