For centuries, the historiography of the mission enterprise in sixteenth-century Mexico drew upon a source base consisting of apologetic accounts produced by the missionaries themselves. The availability of their published sources ensured that missionary voices predominated. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the quantum leap in Mexican ethnohistory opened up new avenues for understanding Indigenous engagement with Christianity. Nevertheless, this ethnographic revision gravitated towards devotional and doctrinal texts, and mundane sources from later in the century. To understand the vital role of violence in the early mission, however, historians still had to make do with mendicant martyrology or the records of the Apostolic Inquisition. Addressing this gap, Stephanie Schmidt’s recent work, Child Martyrs and Militant Evangelization in New Spain, brings a long-needed ethnohistorical approach to this topic. Through careful and fine-grained textual analysis of a Nahua translation of an influential mendicant chronicle, Schmidt uncovers subtle but powerful Indigenous voices that have long been missing from the history of violence in the early mission enterprise in New Spain.

Schmidt’s study brings us to the Franciscan scriptoria, where friars and their polyglot Indigenous students wrote, copied, and translated narratives of conversion. Schmidt demonstrates that the urtext for Spanish and Indigenous religious texts about mission violence was a manuscript by Motolinía, now lost, that he wrote in the 1540s. Motolinía provided material for subsequent apologetic histories. He exalted Indigenous students killed while evangelizing as martyrs and defended violence against all forms of Indigenous resistance. In her analysis of Nahua translations of Motolinía, Schmidt finds native translators testing how far they could diverge from the mendicant story. It was a delicate task. The Nahua text generally reproduces “the friars’ providentialist reading” of violence, Schmidt states, but there are many telling points of “tension with the Catholic hagiographical tradition” that make possible a parallel, “second reading” (39). Schmidt outlines how what was ostensibly a project of translation became one of translocation, rendering the original mendicant narrative into a version that likely carried more meaning for Indigenous audiences.

Schmidt finds a telling divergence between Franciscan hagiography and Nahua revision in the story of Cristobalito, a monastery student murdered by his own father, the Tlaxcalan nobleman Acxotecatl. Cristobalito met this fate after brashly condemning his family’s continued observance of native religion. In the mendicant version, Acxotecatl embodies pagan evil: his “hardness of heart” is so incapable of receiving Christian truth that he murders his eldest son in cold blood. Franciscan narratives also tarnish Acxotecatl for his polygamy, alleging a lechery so implacable that he had sixty wives. In revising this story, Nahua intellectuals corrected the record and deployed Nahua metaphors to draw the text away from its hagiographic moorings. The translators rendered Acxotecatl’s polygamy less diabolical by reducing the number of his wives to three, and more significantly, they subverted the mendicant depiction of Acxotecatl’s “hardness of heart” by transposing this stone-like hardness into the epitome of constancy in the Nahua world: the precious chalchihuitl, or emerald stone. Where friars saw a demonic pagan, the translators, as inheritors of Nahua nobility, saw in Acxotecatl a devoted warrior who maintained his honor according to the codes of his passing preconquest world. The Nahua text thus inverts the story: the mendicants’ martyr Cristobalito becomes an impetuous disrupter who affronted his father and thus upended Nahua patriarchal norms of social order. For Schmidt, this Nahua revision opens up space for their audience, then and now, to question the kind of “moral education” that mendicants were teaching native students (85).

Schmidt finds a similar revision in passages discussing the violence that the missionaries’ Indigenous surrogates inflicted upon natives who resisted Christianity. Following Motolinía’s lead, mendicant chroniclers narrated the death by stoning of a native priest in Tlaxcala, Ometochtli, at the hands of the missionaries’ students. Schmidt shows that although mendicants expressed discomfort at the brazenness of their students, they pragmatically excused their native followers’ zeal and left the result to providence. “God has placed the young boys in the front guard,” Motolinía wrote (141), justifying the violence as a struggle against diabolical possession. In contrast, Indigenous histories of conversion emphasize the campaign of terror against Indigenous priests and shamans (144)—including unbaptized natives, contrary to canon law.

Schmidt’s analysis sheds light on how Indigenous intellectuals and chroniclers resisted mendicant epistemological violence. Undoubtedly, native intellectuals, many of whom had been mission students in their youth, were aware of the risks of challenging the friars. Their struggle unfolded on an epistemological terrain in which Nahua translators resisted mendicant efforts to dismiss their knowledge systems and collective memory through inference rather than overt challenge. Thanks to Schmidt’s careful work in bringing this subtle but significant revisionism to light, Indigenous testimonies of the disruption and violence of the early mission years will be silenced no longer.