Research on schooling in indigenous towns in New Spain provides the opportunity to revisit recurrent issues of European Colonial education, particularly in contexts where ethnic and linguistic diversity and the racialization of relations between the governing classes and the governed were crucial factors. My particular interest involves the way colonized peoples were able to appropriate literacy in the dominant language, as a “weapon of the weak” (Scott, 1987), and insure its reproduction through local schooling while at the same time resisting Colonial control of the educational process. In this paper, which is part of ongoing research on indigenous literacy, I will report on a brief period in the history of the indigenous region of Tlaxcala, in New Spain.
Under the Bourbon monarchy in Spain during the 18th century, royal authorities increased their efforts to spread literacy and fluency in Spanish to all Pueblos de Indios (Indian townships) of New Spain. They did this by gaining control of communal funds (income from communal property and other sources), and regulating their use to establish elementary schools in each town (Tanck 1999). However, indigenous resistance to these ordinances was also strong, and many strategies were used to undermine or deter the royal decrees.
In this paper, I discuss how this process was played out in indigenous towns that apparently resisted the ordinances, by examining a document that reports on indigenous towns in Tlaxcala. The document details data on the existence of communal funds, teachers and students, and sheds light upon the colonial governing practices and relationships. Where community funds were unavailable or restricted, authorities were to order parents to pay the teacher’s salary if necessary. Most townships visited by the governing delegation in 1773 denied the existence of communal property, but at the same time claimed to be paying a teacher for the children, and reported relatively high figures of enrollment (of both girls and boys). This suggests a strategy of compliance with resistance, which is common in Colonial governing relationships.
In the discussion, I place this analysis in the context of a broader interpretation, which suggests that resistance to the control imposed by the Colonial governing structures did not prevent the appropriation of literacy and schooling by indigenous peoples, always on their own terms (Rockwell 2006). This dialectic has been studied in other contexts of Spanish Colonial rule as well, including Colombia and Peru (Salomon 2004, Rappaport and Cummins, 2012), and contributes to general literature on Colonial Education and the appropriation of literacy (cf. Novoa, Depaepe and Johanningmeier, 1995).
