Many studies have been written concerning the mission. Generally, these choose the areas where the mission was relatively successful. This article is interested in one area, where the mission was not successful: eastern Peru. Neither Spain nor the Catholic Church was able to gain the permanent allegiance of the natives of that region. Certainly the failure cannot be totally ascribed to a lack of effort. Members of every religious order, Augustinian, Dominican, Franciscan, Jesuit, and Mercedarian, were employed by the crown. None reported more than the most modest and temporary successes. The Franciscans tried most of all and lost more than seventy-eight priests at the hands of the natives. For that reason, they are singled out in this study. Failures sometimes can teach as much as successes.

For the English, as well as for the Spanish of the sixteenth century, the first vision of America was highly paradisical and full of promise: this new land was without doubt the best of the world. The Indian who inhabited this land was the beautiful and docile “noble savage” of the Renaissance, favored with the highest physical and ethical qualities. The English at first defended the Indian, using all the niceties of expression and representation then in vogue. Even though the Indian was innocent, he was civilized: that is to say, he was outside the scheming, egoistical, harsh world of Europe. This stereotyped image was accepted by such writers as Le Moyne, De Bry, and White, who embellished and poetized the gentleness and goodness of the redskin; but it was not sufficient to assure the Indian a place in the Protestant spiritual milieu since it did not measure up to the biblical and predestinarian model. The first attempts at evangelization, for instance, the identification of the Indians as human, were carried out by simple Anglican colonists. These men, lacking true evangelical spirit, soon forgot about their earlier mission and instead of impressing spiritual ideas on the hearts of the Indians, they dedicated themselves almost exclusively to exploiting them and to demanding temporal riches of them without giving them in exchange the necessary doctrinal truths. However, since the Protestant God was much less patient and casuistic than the God of the Catholics, He soon became angry and the divine punishments were so terrible that the Anglican colonizers were wiped out in the sixteenth century. The English explanation for the failure was a spiritual one and not a material one. In reality the men of that age seemed to be able to find an excuse for their failures only from a religious point of view.

Colonial Spanish America would have found the idea of publishing a periodical directed toward a feminine audience alien. Yet the colonial period was not long over when such periodicals began to appear in Mexico. Typical of those published in the period 1841–1855 were El Semanario de las señoritas mejicanas (3 vols.; México, 1841–1842) and La Semana de las señoritas mejicanas (5 vols.; México, 1851–1852). They have been examined in detail to determine what appeal the fledglings tried to make to Mexican society. El Album mexicano (2 vols.; México, 1849), La Camelia (México, 1853), El Album de las señoritas potosinas (San Luis Potosí, 1865) and, as examples of a later type, El Album de la mujer (Mexico, 1883–1890) and El Correo de las señoras (México, 1883–1893) have been used to supplement the information. While none of them achieved the success of Godey’s Lady’s Book which by 1860 claimed a circulation of 150,000, they did show that in the nineteenth century some publishers in Mexico were concerned with woman’s edification, education, and entertainment through reading.

After a border skirmish at the Rio Grande on April 25, 1846, A Mexico and the United States were at war, and within a few months Zachary Taylor’s troops had overrun the north, reaching Monterrey and Saltillo. At the same time an expedition under Winfield Scott landed at Vera Cruz and pushed inward along the ancient road of conquest, reaching the gates of Mexico City by August, 1847. Mexican resistance was heroic and determined in spots, but disorganization and poor leadership played havoc with any attempt at national defense. The capital fell and was occupied by the invaders, the Mexican government fled to Querétaro, and an ignominious peace treaty was negotiated and accepted by the helpless Mexicans, though not without serious opposition from the radical (puro) element which favored a last-ditch resistance. With the rapid subjection of the country and the loss of more than half its territory, the once proud and optimistic nation of Iturbide was left stunned; and it turned to bitter reflection upon its paralyzed condition and its flagrant display of weakness when faced by a small and not too efficient force of invaders.

The very independence of Mexico was now threatened. Such an easy victory by a powerful neighbor would mean that Mexico might at any time be absorbed by the United States, especially when there was a movement for that purpose already afoot north of the Rio Grande. The easy optimism of the early days of the republic had now vanished. The shock of military disaster, after the dismal decade of mediocrity and humdrum military revolutions, accentuated a crisis in Mexican thought. Both liberals and conservatives now saw the necessity of imposing radical changes upon the course of independent Mexico. Since the overthrow of the radical Gómez Farias government in 1834, the country had been allowed to drift, and when the Americans invaded, its vigor appeared to be gone. In spite of the presence of a sizable moderate party, the factions became sharply differentiated as they had never been before in the history of the republic, except perhaps for the year 1832. Liberals and conservatives appealed to their traditional programs for solutions to Mexico’s crisis of 1847, and the seeds were sown for a great conflict.

Among the many books destined for children, the one preferred in America during the colonial period was the Fables attributed to the Phrygian slave, Aesop. Translated into Spanish, it was found in the hands of travelers and colonists throughout the Spanish empire. The simplicity of the tales and the morals which they point out made them the delight not only of children but also of adults, who explained the precepts with purposeful wit.

Aesop was one of the authors most read in the New World, according to what we can deduce by consulting the numerous lists of books which were sent to various parts of the American continent. His fables were also circulated in Latin and Greek, surely for pedagogical purposes. In Spain there was no lack of poets who devoted part of their work to fables, such as the Archpriest of Hita with his Enxiemplos, up to the culmination in the eighteenth century with Félix María Samaniego and Tomás de Iriarte, whose works it is logical to suppose were brought to the New World with many others of various kinds. By that time the shores of America were being swept by other ideas, distinct from those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which brought unrest to the minds of the people, ideas foreign to the calm and well-being of the two previous centuries.