The Occupation
The accounts of the conquest speak of the Europeans being greeted by natives coming out of their towns and offering them breadstuffs, fowl, and fruit. Sometimes the food was even left lying by the side of the road, and the donors absented themselves. Many of the peoples of the Americas thought of this as a gesture of peace and friendship, although one cannot help feeling that it was also an unspoken request for the army to take the food and be gone. We read of native women being attached to the European forces to make them the bread of the country, and we read the ecstatic writers who listed all the new products of the New World and made each one sound better than the last. Some are as sweet as if they had been dipped in syrup, they tell us, while others are so fragrant that they perfume entire houses. All this could lead one to believe that the Europeans, very much men of their time as far as religion and world view and everything else went, were unique for their time, or any other time, in having no food prejudices whatsoever. It would appear that they immediately and unhesitatingly accepted the foods of the New World and the way that the New World prepared them.
Appearances are deceiving. The chroniclers listing the products of the New World praised them to the heavens, but they did not demand to be served them for dinner. Many of the military dispatches were for the eyes of Charles V, a notoriously stingy monarch. The Venetian ambassadors to his court commented on the shabby liveries of his servants, shabby because Charles could not bring himself to appropriate money for new ones (Albèri 1859: 74). His own clothing, they said, was more suited to a middling prince than the great emperor he was (Albèri 1859: 342). Given this, even Cortés, a man who had discovered and conquered an enormous realm rich in treasure and population and added it to the possessions of Charles V, found it politic when writing him to stress that his conquest was carried out while living off the country, not relying on expensive European supplies expensively shipped over the Atlantic. It was only when the wave of conquest had rolled off toward the peripheries, and the conquerors had begun to metamorphose into settlers, that a more realistic picture emerges.
The conquerors were given encomiendas, groups of Indians who in return for spiritual and physical care from the conquerors rendered tribute and military service. A large part of the tribute was food. The household of Cortés, who by then had been given the title of Marqués del Valle, was in 1533 given weekly fifteen loads of maize, eighty baskets containing twenty tortillas each, ten native fowl, two Castilian fowl, two rabbits, ten quail, three native doves, and fruit, salt, chiles, firewood, and forage. For the elite Europeans native products were acceptable only if they fit into familiar categories like game, fruit, or large birds to be ceremonially served whole. The Europeans soon began agitating to have their tribute in kind changed to tribute in cash, difficult if not impossible for the Indians to obtain. This meant less native food was introduced into European houses, and this lessening of supply was reinforced by the prohibitions against Europeans and blacks in the tianguiz, the Indian markets. As the two societies, Indian and European, began ever so slowly to mix, the restrictions on such mixing increased, and many of them were based on matters having to do with food and drink.
The surviving municipal documents, the Actas del cabildo, from Mexico City, Santiago in Guatemala, Lima, Cuzco, Arequipa, Ayacucho, and Trujillo in Peru, and Quito, Ecuador, all give us a roughly similar picture of European urban life in the New World in early colonial times. They were nothing if not painstaking, those early city fathers of European America. They concerned themselves with every conceivable facet of city affairs, from the content of the Sunday sermon, to the licensing of taverns and the marital and residential status of the owners thereof, to the interminable complaints about pigs in the streets. The picture of the foodways of early colonial Latin America that emerges from the various Actas del cabildo is wholly at odds with the early and complete fusion of food traditions suggested in the first paragraph of this chapter. The Actas del cabildo depict one tier of a two-tier society, and the tier that it concerns itself with is almost entirely European, in food as in the rest of its customs.
As far as foodstuffs went, meat was the primary concern of the cabildo. The pig, that mainstay of Spanish cuisine, came first. European armies marched accompanied by herds of porkers, although Cortés, on his trek across the base of the Yucatan peninsula to Honduras, kept the pigs four days behind the soldiers to conserve his stock. Gonzalo Pizarro, on his foray to find the land of cinnamon in Peru, went escorted by swine. Pork was the first European meat to have a price set for it in Mexico City. On July 26, 1525, the cabildo set the rates that inns could charge: an arrelde, about four pounds, of fresh or salt pork or venison cost four gold reales, as did a good turkey hen or two fine rabbits (Bejarano 1889). By the next year the price of pork had dropped to a quarter of that asked for the newly available beef and mutton. The concession for supplying meat to the city was auctioned off yearly to the person who promised to sell at the lowest price retail. The auctions were held during Lent, and the contract ran from one Easter to the next. Meat had to be supplied during Lent as well, for the sick and for those who, like soldiers on active duty, were exempt from the requirement to abstain from meat.
The herds of European stock, which rapidly became prodigious in size, presented Indian farmers with new problems. They knew how to protect their crops from native animals and birds, but the larger, more numerous, and more destructive cattle, sheep, horses, and pigs were another matter. It was a constant source of friction, litigation, and dispute between the two populations and another reason for the authorities to physically separate them as far as possible. The Europeans went so far as to accuse the Indians of maliciously planting their crops where they knew they would be destroyed by European livestock.
A domestic animal not mentioned in any Actas del cabildo and commonly ignored during discussions of Old World imports to the New World deserves a paragraph here, although it is not generally eaten. The first archbishop of Mexico, Don Fray Juan de Zumárraga, called the attention of Charles V to the good effects which the importation of donkeys would have (Garcia Icazbalceta 1947, 3: 142). Not only were donkeys necessary to provide mules, donkeys and mules being suitable mounts for ecclesiastics like the archbishop, but the greater their numbers, the smaller would be the need for tamemes, the Indian porters. The Church and the crown worked in unison to try to discourage the exploitation of this pre-Columbian profession by the Europeans, considering it one of the causes for the precipitate decline of the Indian population.
Bulls and cows were among the more usual livestock. The bulls were necessary for another facet of European life that was an early transplant to the New World. Every festival, either a recurring one like a significant saint’s day or the celebration of some unique event, was marked by two events: the juego de cañas, a form of joust; and a bullfight. On August 11, 1529, the day of San Ipólito, the patron saint of Mexico City because it was on his day that the final capitulation of the Aztecs took place, was celebrated by a bullfight in which seven bulls were run. Two of the bulls were killed, the meat of the dead bulls going to monasteries and hospitals (Bejarano 1889). On December 31 of the same year a peace signed by France and Spain was the pretext for another bullfight, a juego de cañas, and the dispensation of two arrobas of white wine, which would add up to between five and seven of our gallons, one arroba of red wine, both wines imported from across the Atlantic, and three arrobas of candied fruit, which as a dry measure would total about seventy-five pounds of sweetmeats (Bejarano 1889). Caution, however, is in order when interpreting the weights and measures, as well as the coinage, all of which varied between localities.
The presence of cattle meant not only beef on the menu but also the birth of a dairy industry. It got off to an inauspicious start. In 1526, Luis Ponce arrived from Spain to investigate accusations of financial malfeasance brought against Cortés. Before his arrival in Mexico City he was entertained at an inn in Ixtapalapa by an underling of Cortés, and his menu began with lettuces and some manjar blanco. Manjar blanco could be made of many ingredients, whiteness being the important feature, but the usual recipe of the time included finely shredded chicken breasts cooked with milk, sugar, and rice flour, a dish served in Turkey today as a dessert and called tavuk gögsü. During Lent the chicken and milk were replaced by grated almonds and almond milk. Bernal Díaz said that the next dish was new and novel in those countries (Díaz del Castillo 1982: 564). The dish was requesones, made of milk heated with rennet and then drained of the whey, producing a form of cottage cheese. According to Bernal Díaz, Fray Tomás Ortiz, a traveling companion of Luis Ponce, refused the requesones, claiming they were poisoned. The official inquest reported Luis Ponce rejecting the requesones because he thought that they had an off taste and overindulging in manjar blanco (Anon. 1853:321). Whichever dairy product it was, Luis Ponce died a few days later, giving the enemies of Cortés the opportunity to make the obvious accusations. Fray Tomás died within the month, as did many of his shipmates, and the partisans of Cortés, including Bernal Díaz, said that they had all contracted “sleeping sickness” during their voyage. If this Fray Tomás Ortiz is the same Fray Tomás Ortiz who enumerated the reasons why the Indians were unworthy of liberty that Peter Martyr quotes (Anghera 1912, 2: 274), including the obligatory business about being cannibals and sodomites but also condemning them to slavery because they ate fleas, spiders, and raw worms and had no beards, it would be indeed ironic if he died from the aftereffects of such a very European meal as the one he had that evening in Ixtapalapa.
The dairy industry of Mexico City recovered from this early stumble, and by 1531 the cabildo could set a price for cheese. The price for fresh milk, a “necessary provision,” the cabildo said, was fixed in the following year, with the proviso that the milk be neither sour nor watered. When a price was set by the cabildo the sellers were usually admonished to sell by weight or by measure, the former a concept that the Europeans had brought with them. Making and certifying weights, measures, and steelyards was another responsibility of the cabildo.
The only foodstuff to escape this European restructuring of trade was one of the highest status pre-Columbian trade goods and the first New World product to make a place for itself on elite European menus. On January 28, 1527, the cabildo commanded that nobody sell cacao beans without using a measure sealed with the seal of the city (Bejarano 1889). Every deception that Sahagún listed as being utilized by the cacao trade (Sahagún 1950–1982, 10: 65) must have been brought into play, because by October 1536 the cabildo had changed its tune and submitted to the Aztec way of doing things.
This day the justices and regidores said that those who sell cacao in the city have the price set by the thousand beans, and as the people complain that buying said cacao the sellers do not wish to count, or give it counted, but sell by weight, which is injurious because in every thousand they give one or two hundred cacao beans less . . . we command that all those who sell said cacao give it counted and not by weight, so that this deception ceases. (Orozco y Berra 1859: 45)
Let us return, however, to the dairy industry, which at this time had no connection with cacao because both the drink of chocolate with milk and the milk chocolate candy bar had yet to be invented. By December 13, 1549, fresh cheese, aged cheese, milk, cream, and requesones (we hope no longer new and novel in the country) were for sale (Espinosa de los Monteros 1862).
The large domesticated animals were to be kept from the Indians. Part of this was for reasons of strategic necessity—the Europeans were afraid of insurrection. They did not wish the Indians to overcome their fear of horses, and even less did they wish to see the Indians riding horses. To diminish Indian familiarity and contact with things Castilian, on May 9, 1527, the cabildo prohibited their buying and selling Castilian goods (Bejarano 1889) and on June 12, 1553, it forbade Indians to trade, slaughter, or sell pigs (Libro del cabildo n.d.). The only persons allowed to trade in pigs or pork were the European stockraisers, who were required to sell directly to the slaughterhouse.
It was not only the European animals that were to be kept from the Indians; even giving the Indians their meat was controversial. The misunderstandings between the meat-raising and meat-eating residents of the Old World and the less carnivorous inhabitants of the New World are illustrated by an episode that took place in Mexico City in 1555, when a major construction project was planned which was to use Indian laborers (Libro del cabildo n.d.: 195).
In pagan times, during the reigns of Motecuhzoma and his predecessors, the cabildo said, the precedent had been set for supplying workmen with food and other necessities. The six thousand Indians who were to repair the roads were each to be given a quartillo of maize a day for two months, which worked out to a total expenditure of 8,000 hanegas, each containing about one and a half of our bushels. The men were also, and this is what summoned a storm of indignation, to be given a pound of meat a day. This proposal affected the Europeans’ pocketbooks, a sure way to get a protest. The Indians were to do the work as part of the tribute that they owed, but the maize and the meat would have to be bought either by using a royal subsidy, which was unlikely at the best of times, or from the proceeds of a sisa, which was a sales tax paid by the probably European buyer—of meat! No wonder the Spanish court was bombarded with complaints like the following, written in 1561.
Item: whereas the natives of this New Spain used only to eat light things, and lived healthily for many years, and with the coming of the Spaniards, and the cattle they brought with them, they began to eat beef and mutton, and have become sick, weak, and short-lived, and also they have become greatly given to drinking the wine of Castile, on which they get drunk, and being so commit great crimes and enormities, with each other and with their mothers and sisters, and kill and wound each other, there must be a remedy, and we beg His Majesty that in the Indian towns there not be, as there are, butcher shops, and that in the Spanish ones they not sell meat to said Indians, because besides the profit aforesaid meat is sustenance for the Spaniards who are in the habit of eating it, and the supply will not be exhausted as they fear it soon will be, and the same should be commanded for wine, so that the Archbishop of this city could excommunicate anyone who sells wine to the Indians without interference from the Audiencia Real, because otherwise no ordinance or penalty is sufficient. (Libro del cabildo n.d.: 494)
The controversy had dragged on for five years when the cabildo of Mexico City finally received a dispatch from the Spanish court saying that the Indians could eat meat if they wished to and that it would be cruelty to deprive them of it (Espinosa de los Monteros n.d.: 7). The question of alcoholic beverages proved far more intractable.
There is another facet to this controversy. The distaste of the American Indians for the fat of European animals is recorded over and over. From the sixteenth century, when the horrors brought by the conquest were listed by the Indians as prisons, and beatings, and basting with lard (Gómez de Orozco 1940: 11), to the twentieth, when a Lacandon Maya spurned a cup of coffee offered him by the Soustelles because he feared there might be grease in it, it is a recurring theme (Soustelle 1937: 35–36). Perhaps there is some sort of genetic difference in fat metabolism between populations of European and American Indian origin, as we know exists among other peoples for the ability to metabolize alcohol or milk.
The Indians may have found lard repulsive, but it was highly valued by the Europeans newly established in the New World. There were constant disputes with the butchers about the purity of the lard, the price of it, and whether or not the butcher was absconding with fat for his own profit. Tallow was another valuable byproduct of the slaughterhouses, and the pricing of wax and tallow candles another responsibility for the cabildo.
Unlike the highly centralized and professionally handled meat supply, the other European staple, bread, seems to have been in the hands of small producers during the early days of the occupation. The first bread to have a price set on it was “native bread,” presumably tortillas, regulated on July 26, 1525 (Bejarano 1889) at the same time that prices were established for other foodstuffs sold at inns. Two years later, on May 7, 1527, Antón de Carmona wished to have the monopoly of wheat bread (Bejarano 1889). It does not seem to have been granted to him, but it was directed that wheat bread should be white, clean, well-mixed, well-baked, and well-seasoned, without any admixture of barley or oats. It was also suggested that a cloth be stretched over the kneading area to protect the dough from spiders and dust falling from the ceiling, and that it be mixed with sweet water coming directly from an aqueduct, not transported by canoe.
Perhaps following the recommendation of Fernández de Oviedo in his household book for Don Juan, the short-lived son of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, that the bread maker be well known and trustworthy, some households made their own bread (Fernández de Oviedo 1870: 177). The establishment (it can hardly be called a household) of the first archbishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, was among them. The archbishop admitted that as a Franciscan he should cook for himself, but he was too busy baptizing Indians and had an Indian slave to cook for him and a black slave woman, Maria, to make his bread. In his will, written June 2, 1548, he freed them both, and we learn that the Indian cook, Juan Núñez, was an Indian born in Calcutta (Garcia Icazbalceta 1947: 287). We can only speculate as to the culinary hybrids produced by Juan Núñez.
Bread was a serious problem for the less prominent. The price of wheat fluctuated according to the harvest, and the cabildo was constantly readjusting the cost of a pound loaf to conform to it. The control over the bread supply was enhanced by the power to assign mill sites, distribute the water to power the mills, and accept or reject the millers themselves. Milling was another thing that could not be entrusted to Indians. On July 28, 1531 (Bejarano 1889), the cabildo required that a knowledgeable European be on hand at all times when grain was being ground into flour. Bread making was regarded as a way of providing poor women with the means to support themselves, but sometimes the women were unwilling to accept this charity, as the following extract from the first Libro del cabildo, dated Wednesday, May 5, 1529, shows:
It is said that this city is very poorly provided with bread, and the women who usually make it do not wish to make it, from which much harm is done to the inhabitants, therefore we order and command that an alcalde and a regidor go and require and order all the married and single women who have been making bread to sell, that from hence forward they make and sell bread at the fixed price, and if anyone says that they have no flour, that they go for it to the house of Antón de Carmona and he will give them flour at four reales the hanega that they will make into bread, and firewood, and that they come with said bread to said Antón de Carmona, under the penalty that if she who does not make bread is a spinster she will be publicly given one hundred lashes, and if she is married she suffers the same penalty, and she and her husband are imprisoned until they make it. And if they wish to buy wheat said Antón de Carmona will give it to them at one-half peso the hanega, and all the bread they make is to be taken out to be sold on the plaza, and if they do not wish to buy the wheat that said Antón de Carmona offers, that he loan each one thirty gold pesos, and they buy the wheat as they use it. (Bejarano 1889: 206)
There is no evidence of any sort of bakers’ guild or organization; at least none appear in the orders of march for the Corpus Christi processions, in which the tailors, the smiths, and the carpenters all participated. This lack of concern for the provision of such a vital component of the diet as bread existed in Spain as well. In 1581 the Venetian ambassador Gioan Francesco Morosini informed his superiors in Venice that the people of Spain were fighting for bread, not because of a shortage of grain, but because there was no official competent to assure a steady supply (Albèri 1861: 286).
Another branch of the bakers’ profession were the men who baked pies, the pasteles and hojaldías, which the prince who was to become Philip II consumed in what the Venetians considered “intemperate” amounts (Albèri 1853: 234). The first kind of pie, the pastel, usually synonymous with the empanada, was baked in either a crust like our pie crust or a bread dough crust, although we never hear of any bread-making woman baking pies. The other kind of pie came wrapped in flaky pastry, hojaldre. There seems to have been no difference between the types of fillings the various crusts could contain, but cheating on the quantity and the quality of the fillings must have been incessant, because the cabildos constantly inveighed against it. On January 12, 1551, the cabildo of Lima, Peru, then called Ciudad de los Reyes, ordered that pies be made only by specialists, in clear sight of the passersby, and immediately be put into an oven also in plain sight, so as to eliminate the possibility of any funny business in the back room (Lee 1935). The pie makers of Lima seem to have doubled as medical specialists, because on the same date they were forbidden to administer sarsaparilla, apply ointments, or cure those sick with buboes (Lee 1935). Alfonso de Villalón of Lima then thought up a better combination of professions and on May 16, 1552, applied for a license to sell pies, first required of Limeño pie sellers in that year, and also for a license to sell wine, thus setting up what might be the first eat-and-run establishment in the New World. Having the host serve pies and pour wine seems more salubrious than having him alternately working dough and anointing buboes (Lee 1935).
In Mexico City at least some of the pie makers used materials provided by the customers. Presumably this gave the consumer more confidence in the contents of the finished pie.
And as some people wish to make pies for sale it shall be understood that giving meat and things to make it they charge for making a pie of a quail or a chicken a quartillo of a silver real, and if a larger respectively, and if it is a large native fowl they can charge for a pie containing the whole bird one real, and if it is cut up and made into more than one pie they cannot charge more than one real, and if made of Castilian fowl they can charge for a pie containing a hen half a real, and if the bird is made into several pies they cannot charge more than said silver half real, all of which is a legally fixed price, and must be observed on pain of legal penalty. (Libro del cabildo n.d.: 205)
Meat and fowl were not the only possible fillings for pies. In December 1556 the cabildo of Mexico City set the prices on a long list of foodstuffs, starting with pork lard and beef fat and ending with imported wine, oil, dried fruit, and confections. The prices for three fish pies are given in the middle of this list. They are called empanadas, and a good bread dough crust is specified. An empanada of tuna, presumably imported from the Mediterranean preserved in salt, with proper spicing and a good crust, was to cost half a silver real, as was a pie filled with Panuco dried fish. A pie with the same quantity of filling, half a pound, of local lake fish, pescado de Mestitan, the name of the Aztec capital having as many spelling variants as Shakespeare’s, cost twice as much. Manjar blanco is recorded as having been used as a filling, and small empanadillas, possibly filled with sugar and ground almonds as described by Ruperto de Nola (1982), were sold by the confectioners, to whose contributions to the food of early elite colonial Latin America we now turn.
In those days confectionery was not viewed as self-indulgence. Sugar was considered medicine as well as food: it was good for fevers, it was cleansing and digestive, and it prepared the humors for evacuation. It could be used in the form of syrups, but sugar-coated almonds were also good for the sick, and so were confits, sugar-coated anise and coriander seeds (Lobera de Avila 1952). When in 1558 Doña Ana Pizarro of Trujillo, Peru, refused to provide sugar and confituras, which could have been either candied fruit or fruit in heavy syrup, it was an antisocial act “considering that at present there are many sick and poor people who need sugar and confituras for their illnesses” (Actas del cabildo 1969: 287). The cabildo felt that they had the right to order Doña Ana to supply the goods, and when she did not, they sent Alonzo Mateos the alguasil to her sugar mill at Chicama to get them. Doña Ana had Alonzo Mateos arrested because he had forced the door, but the cabildo, because he had done it under their order, set him free. The wrangling continued for months, with sugar and sugar products being brought in from the outside to satisfy the needs of the poor and sick of Trujillo.
The confectioners of Mexico City are first mentioned on May 7, 1527, when they were selling sugar conserves, sugar, and candied almonds (Bejarano 1889). By June 25, 1538, the price was being set on white and muscovado sugar, as well as anise and coriander confits, which cost one and a half silver reales a pound. Marzipan, candied citron, and almonds and hazelnuts plain and candied cost two reales per pound (Orozco y Berra 1859). On July 3, 1545, there were complaints that the prices of sweets were set too low; no one would sell them to the sick and other people who needed them. The range was impressive, including quinces, peaches, and lemons candied or in syrup, as well as eggplants, carrots, lettuce cores, and something called calabazate, unclear in this context whether New World Cucurbita or Old World Lagenaria, prepared in the same way (Espinosa de los Monteros 1862). The first use of a New World product in confectionery appears at this time, with squash seeds being prepared as confits. Today hulled squash seeds are still being used in Mexico to make pralinelike confections. In the early days of their introduction to the dessert service the cabildo warned that the buyer must be apprised that they were purchasing a cheap substitute for almonds, not the real thing.
The importation of Old World fruits and vegetables into the New World was a process that began with the second voyage of Columbus. In other words, hardly had the Europeans discovered all those new things when they began to replace them with the old familiar ones. Five years after the conquest the price was being set in Mexico City on cardoons, members of the cabbage family, lettuces, radishes, broad beans, turnips, and carrots. On June 5, 1528, the cabildo discussed the necessity of planting grapes, and because Fernando Damiano had been the first to import plants and cuttings he was given permission to plant them on Chapultepec hill, provided the ground was not worked or inhabited by Indians (Bejarano 1889). Among his many recommendations to root the European settlements more permanently in the soil of the New World, Archbishop Zumárraga was adamant that as many European fruit trees as possible should be planted immediately (Garcia Icazbalceta 1947: 292). When the colonists longed for the old country, he said, what they longed for most was the taste of the old country fruit.
By pack train over the mountains, first from the Atlantic ports and later from the Pacific ones, came ginger, cumin, caraway, and sesame seeds, as well as saffron, cinnamon, cloves, and black pepper. The last four were sold separately, or as a mixture of equal parts by weight. Perhaps this was the spice that stepped up the tuna empanadas in Mexico City. Ruperto de Nola, cook to King Ferdinand of Naples in the late fifteenth century whose Libro de cozina was published in a Spanish version in 1529, gives several such spice mixtures. Spices for a common sauce consisted of three parts cinnamon, two parts cloves, one part ginger, one part pepper, with the addition of a bit of well-ground coriander seed and a bit of saffron. The spice for peacock sauce, one of the three crowns of culinary art as far as Ruperto de Nola was concerned, was four ounces of cinnamon, one ounce cloves, one ounce ginger, and enough saffron to color (Ruperto de Nola 1982). How were the chile peppers brought as tribute by the Indians used in the Europeans’ kitchens? Did they stay in the servants’ quarters when confronted by these expensive and status-laden rivals?
All the ingredients for European cuisine were packed in over the mountains. Capers, different varieties of olives and raisins and herrings, prunes, dates, and figs all came this way. Wine and olive oil were imported as well, and the perpetual shortages constantly worried the cabildo. The vigor of the European campaign for sobriety among the Indians must have been enhanced when it resulted in more of the limited wine for the Europeans.
The Europeans wanted to have a very selective process of acculturation take place. The Indians might acquire certain profitable arts and skills, but even in these cases some European masters refused to teach them, saying that they would work too cheaply. When the Aztecs were discovered counterfeiting European coins it must have added impetus to the arguments for separate societies, as did the frightening advent of strategic thinking among the conquered, who were recorded as regretting that they had not hamstrung the horses, blown up the powder magazines, and burned the boats Cortés had had built on the lake. Some of the higher ranks of Indian society were co-opted into the European nobility, and the remainder were pushed into a world apart, where as long as the new religion was nominally observed and the tribute forthcoming, they could cultivate their own crops and eat their own foods. From the European missionaries begging for maize tortillas at the doorways of the Indian huts the scene changed to the Indians begging for wheat bread at the gateways of the monasteries. Reading the Actas del cabildo one would think that all the achievements of the original inhabitants of the New World had become invisible.