The reputation of Fr. Agustín de Vetancurt, one of the better known Franciscans of colonial Mexico, derives largely from his fame as a historian. He is the author of the monumental Teatro mexicano (1698), a historical description of the most important events of colonial New Spain. Fr. Agustín was also an accomplished scholar of Nahuatl, and published several works in that language. This essay will take a preliminary look at his life and times by focusing on a small work written by him in Nahuatl. It is a guide for the ceremony of the Stations of the Cross, celebrated throughout the year but especially on Good Friday.

In early 1515, a small Spanish expedition set sail for the province of Cumaná, located along the coast of what was then called Tierra Firme (an area spanning much of present-day Central and South America). Nominally, the squadron, led by Spanish scribe Gomez de Ribera, was sent to punish a group of “Carib” Indians who had recently attacked and killed two Spaniards on the small island of San Vicente. Once caught, these “Caribs” would be enslaved and sold in the markets of Española, Puerto Rico, or Cuba. Caribs, though speakers of the Arawakan language, were inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles and were likely culturally and politically distinct from the Taíno of the Greater Antilles. Inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles first received the ethnic label of Carib during Christopher Columbus's second voyage in 1493. Over time, Europeans exacerbated the pre-Columbian divide between Caribs and Taínos, creating a colonial dichotomy that helped the Spanish to expand the indigenous slave trade. By the third decade of colonization, or the time of Ribera's expedition, the Spanish had begun labeling all rebellious Indians as Caribs or cannibals so as to legally enslave them.

In 1549, after 11 years of slavery, and exile, an indigenous woman made it home to her people. In the time of her captivity, she became one of the most geopolitically important and well-traveled indigenous women in the Spanish Empire. Her name—or the name Spanish society gave her—was Madalena, and she returned home to Tocobaga, in what is now Tampa Bay. From bondage in Havana, she was taken to be the translator for a missionary expedition that sought to peacefully convert her people into citizens of the imagined Spanish colony of Florida. That mission, like every other European attempt to settle the region up to the nineteenth century, would fail, but this latest failure of Spanish colonialism meant that Madalena could return to life among her own people, unlike most indigenous slaves of the sixteenth century.

On September 13, 1849, Yucatecan forces at Chac Creek, near the port city of Bacalar (in present-day Quintana Roo), stopped and searched a vessel named Four Sisters, owned by the Belizean merchant, Austin W. Cox. Inside they uncovered kegs containing 73 arrobas (25-pound kegs) of gunpowder and 16 arrobas of lead. Manned by three black men, the vessel also carried a Maya on whom the search party found incriminating evidence, in the form of a letter from Cox to Maya rebel leader Jacinto Pat. The letter made it clear that the gunpowder was meant for the Maya insurgents who were fighting against Mexican authorities in the Yucatán's raging Caste War. Historians of the Caste War period have consistently recognized that the Belizean authorities ignored the munitions trade that flourished between Mexico and Belize during the conflict. Largely unexplored has been the critical role that merchants and munitions traders played in shaping the British government's attitude, and consequently its policies, toward Maya groups during this volatile period.