Utopia

No one has ever read Thomas More’s De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia in such a delirious state of pragmatic fervor as Vasco de Quiroga. It had been scarcely two years since the lawyer arrived in tumultuous New Spain, and he was already establishing the Indian hospital-town of Santa Fe outside Mexico City, whose ordinances—or what remains of them, which isn’t much—can conclusively be counted as the foundational text of the long and lavish history of plagiarism in Mexico.

Thomas More had written a political essay disguised as a book of fantasy about how a society might work if stripped of the constitutive vice of greed. The volume was a sardonic meditation on the miseries of life in the England of Henry VIII: a political cartoon. Such a cartoon, in fact, that it described a place called Nolandia (or “No hay tal lugar,” according to the still-unmatched Spanish translation by Quevedo); a Nolandia that was bathed by the river Anydrus—“Nowater”—and whose ruler was known as Ademus, or “Peopleless.” Utopia was an exercise, a Renaissance humanist game that was never intended to be put into practice. But Vasco de Quiroga saw something else in it.

New Spain and Nueva Galicia were places, but places that were more like no-man’s-lands, because Hernán Cortés and Nuño de Guzmán had more experience kicking down what they found than putting the pieces back together. They were never statesmen, because they had come to Mexico to become millionaires. Most of the members of the conquistador generation started businesses; others, some of the best of them, built churches. Zumárraga built pyres and a library. Vasco de Quiroga judged it the natural thing to build a utopia.

In the hospital-town of Santa Fe, built around a home for the elderly and sick, the highest authority, Vasco de Quiroga, decreed that no money would circulate. As closely as it could within the bounds of reality, the town followed the non-instructions set forth by the London humanist for the functioning of Utopia: it was divided along two axes that intersected at the hospital and the church, and in each quadrant there were multifamily houses belonging to four different clans. These clans were administered by a council of elders, and each had its own representatives; they all reported to the director of the hospital, which was the only post that was required to be occupied by a Spaniard. To support itself, Santa Fe was founded with artisan families specializing in different practices: potters, carpenters, and featherworkers in one quadrant; bricklayers, pipefitters, and cacao merchants in another; and so on. All were organized into a system of masters and apprentices from the same family. The inhabitants of the village spent part of their time working in their specialty and another part sowing and harvesting on the village’s communal land. Anything produced on the land or in the workshops that wasn’t consumed locally was collected at the rectory, to be sent for sale in the markets of the capital.

Vasco de Quiroga must have thought that he was an economic genius and Thomas More a visionary, because Santa Fe was a dazzling success and soon became a production center supplying the capital not only with useful objects—tools, musical instruments, construction rods, and luxury goods such as polychrome statues of saints and virgins, or feather ornaments made according to the ancestral techniques of the Nahua featherworkers—but also with basic agricultural products: corn, squash, legumes, honey, flowers. It didn’t occur to Quiroga, of course, that the model worked because the society that More proposed and he had orchestrated was a production system similar to the one that the Indians in the Valley of Mexico already had in place before the arrival of the Spaniards; it was the same scheme that the Indians had periodically tried to revive, for which Zumárraga would burn them at the stake.

In 1536, between burning indigenous books that today would be exceedingly valuable and printing treatises in Latin that are still available and that no one bothers to consult, Bishop Zumárraga pulled strings at the Spanish court to get the Vatican to recognize Mexico as a new region so that he could be promoted to Archbishop of New Spain. His maneuverings were successful—the king could deny him nothing—and in 1537 his conversation partner and lawyer friend, Vasco de Quiroga, was hurriedly ordained priest and became the first bishop of Mechuacán.

There, in the old Purépecha capital of Tzintzuntzan, Quiroga founded a second Indian hospital-town; and while he was at it, the next year he founded a full Indian utopian republic on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro, in which each town specialized in the manufacture of some useful product and all the land was communal.

If there was a Wimbledon of dead humanists, Vasco de Quiroga would play in the final against Erasmus of Rotterdam and he would win by a landslide. Never was a man so comfortable in the role of designing a whole world to his own specifications. And if ever there was, no one did it so well. The utopian communities of Lake Pátzcuaro were the orchard of New Spain for three hundred years; the descendants of the Indians who founded them almost five hundred years ago still speak Purépecha, still govern themselves to a certain degree through councils of elders (I witnessed one in Santa Clara and another in Paracho), still live in enchantingly lovely towns protected by more or less untouched ecosystems, and still make the products that Tata Vasco thought would sell well enough to ensure the community’s survival. I am not exaggerating. Yesterday, at my corner deli in New York City, I bought a couple of perfect avocados grown in the orchards of Mechuacán by the descendants of Quiroga’s Indians. Two letters are all that have changed. Today we call the place Michoacán.

The letter from Pope Paul III inviting the bishop of Mechuacán to the meetings of the Council of Trent arrived in Pátzcuaro, so it was an Indian who brought it to Tzintzuntzan, where Quiroga was handling hospital business and trying to resolve a dispute between the families of local Purépecha cloth producers and Mexica featherworkers. Tata Vasco was in a meeting with Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin when the letter from the pope arrived.