The Education of Natives, Creole Clerics, and the Mexican Enlightenment

Abstract

In this article, I explore the parallel responses of two groups of colonial subjects who were confronted with the institutional changes that occurred in the context of Enlightenment ideas in eighteenth-century Mexico: creole clerics headed by the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero; and native religious men who petitioned to colonial authorities and the Crown for additional spaces for the education of indigenous men. I explore some of the interactions between creole clerics—often referred to as creole patriots—and native elites in the schools of central Mexico, and efforts by indigenous noble men to broaden the opportunities for natives to join the ranks of the Church and to receive a higher education. To this end, I build on the scholarship that has made evident how the hegemonic program of Bourbon reforms, which was inspired by the Enlightenment, was not a top-down plan implemented successfully and equally across the continent but rather a series of contested interpretations. This article contributes to the recent shift in the scholarship on the Enlightenment that acknowledges cross-cultural global exchanges by arguing that certain groups of natives in central Mexico, and a particular group of American-born clerics, participated actively in building a pragmatic version of the Enlightenment that responded to their local realities and contributed to a globalized understanding of enlightened ideas.

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