Tlaltelolco: The Grammatical-Rhetorical Indios of Colonial Mexico

Abstract

s Victor Villanueva has argued, histories of American rhetorical education tend to skirt the cultural terrains of non-English-speaking peoples and to ignore those geographic territories south of contemporary U.S. borders. Indeed, practices associated with language instruction that were developed in Spanish colonial and independent Mexico and reworked in our common borderlands rarely have counted as social forces of consequence. This essay gauges the force of the grammar-rhetoric-composition program at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlaltelolco, a sixteenth-century institution of higher education for sons of the indigenous elite located in one of two large barrios in the valley of Mexico. Inaugurated in 1536 and inhabited by the century's great native and European linguists, Tlaltelolco hosted cultural translation projects under the rubric of writing instruction in what Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla would call one of many attempts to de-indianize the indio.' At this site of active desire to erase native religious and cultural practice, the colonizing European and the colonized Mesoamerican negotiated the mechanisms of contact-zone schooling over the subjects of grammar, rhetoric, history, and translation, and their practices proved untenable in the social and institutional imaginary of their time.