IN their essays on the congregation of Indians in New Spain, Lesley Byrd Simpson and Howard F. Cline advanced information on the general characteristics and legal bases of this royal policy. Essentially, the kings of Spain wanted to gather the Indians into towns for purposes of religious training and in order to facilitate fiscal and political administration. According to Simpson and Cline, the application of these laws in New Spain toward the latter part of the sixteenth century was largely ineffective and, apparently, the congregation program affected only a small portion of the native population. One of the main reasons for this partial failure was the fact that the Indians already had villages, and it was very difficult for them to move to newly established locations. The documentation of these socio-political processes is avowedly incomplete; investigators have not gone beyond 1606 and have not examined the intrinsic land tenure implications. Except for a case history presented by Cline in 1955, other social aspects of this policy have hardly been studied.

Nowhere in the western hemisphere is the wealth of monumental architecture of the period of colonization still extant as great as it is in Mexico. Spanish in its derivation, transplanted at first almost bodily from the mother country and modified only in certain details by indigenous labor and by the exigencies of distance and circumstances, it remained for two centuries essentially and romantically Spanish.

In the average Spanish American colonial town, there was demonstrated a greater solicitude for public works and social welfare than was typical in the English settlements of North America. On the local level, two institutions were mainly responsible for Spanish welfare projects in the New World, the Church and the cabildo, or town council. In spite of the much commented upon lack of harmony between the Church and higher institutions of civil administration, a surprising rapport existed between Church and cabildo in providing for the welfare of town inhabitants.

The Franciscan Province of the Holy Cross was the first major administrative unit organized by the Franciscans, or by any religious, in the Americas. Begun at the relatively early date of 1505, this province faced the task of aiding in the establishment of the Church in a new world inhabited by only several thousand Europeans and hundreds of thousands of other people so completely unknown that the Europeans could not even call them by their proper name.