Drought-driven falling levels of Chiapas‘ Grijalva River have presently revealed the mid-16th century Temple of Santiago. Normally drowned in 100 feet of water, the church was built in 1564 by Friar Bartolome de las Casas. He was the celebrated advocate of the abolition of slavery in the Americas. In 1966, when the Mexican government created the NezaThualcoyotl reservoir, the Dominican temple and surrounding villages, towns and historically valuable archaeological sites all disappeared.
The re-appearance of the Dominican-created temple and surrounding communities stirs historic memories of the disaster of Spanish subjugation of Mexico’s indigenous population, which saw it as a “divine desertion.”
That time also calls up Fray Diego Duran’s keen perception of the psychic and material destruction of the Aztec capital, today’s Mexico City. Yet that disaster of the “cosmic undoing” of the world was little noted by the Spanish occupiers.
Born in Spain around 1537, Duran was brought to Mexico as an infant by his family. Tetzcocan Nahuatl was quickly added to his childhood vocabulary. By the time he was ten, he found the ruined city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan a vast educational playground. He soon became a child-aged ethnographer at a time when written Spanish history, especially about this new world, tended to be lazy, egotistic and woefully uninquisitive. He became a young historian of a people his race and class was taught to despise, pillage and slaughter. As an adult, he became a Roman Catholic priest who knew more about pagan philosophies, rituals and the psychology of New Spain than most men – then and now.
His empathetic nature gained the confidence of native people who did not share their stories with Europeans. They described the realities of Moctezuma’s Empire with previously unrevealed information that enriched Duran’s later literary works.
The most captivating contradiction of his life was an interior one: He was so double-cultured that his allegiance to his race, class and calling was repeatedly fragmented by a fascination with the people Spaniards had come to the New World to exploit, convert and slaughter. Caught between two cultures, two peoples, two worlds, Duran became a friend of the Nahuas, and thus a splintered being. By some he was considered ill-equipped to be a man of the Church. Many in the Church hierarchy considered him eccentric, too comfortably knowledgable of the ways of indigenous Mexico – about which they knew little.
Which at moments almost became true. Duran’s unique experiences in exploring the streets of Tetzcoco – where his family first settled – with Mejica children were more instructive than he, or his family, realized. Tetzcoco had once been the “Athens of the Western World.” Now those Mejica (Aztec) temples were smashed to rubble, the great library destroyed, its many scholars either slain or in hiding.
While attending the Franciscan School of Tetzcoco, founded in 1523, Duran, filled with the irrepressible curiosity of the young, spent hours with indio companions. He climbed ruined buildings, visited the homes of his new friends, talked and dined with their families. Always absorbing more about this devastated, fascinating world.
His childhood was spent among the points where the Aztec and Spanish empires collided. Sites such as the Shrine of the Martyrs (later the Church of San Hipolito, patron saint of Mexico City), where Hernan Cortes had lost most of his men, and Los Remedios, the hill where Cortez rested in his hour of defeat.
Spain’s richest colony in the mid-1500s was often described as “unstable and motley.” Thus, Duran’s youth was spent among Spanish soldiers of fortune, thieves, slaves, stunned indios and gamblers. There were Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars, mixed with whores, aging conquistadores, petty viceregal officials, and muleskinners. And thousands of half breeds – illegitimate offspring of Spanish adventurers and Indian women.
This is the first of a series.