In the Bishop’s Shadow: Francisco Núñez de la Vega’s Use of Fray Juan de Torquemada in 17th-Century Chiapas

Francisco Núñez de la Vega, who served as Bishop of Chiapas from 1682 to 1706, presided over criminal cases in which Indigenous ritual specialists who practiced nahualism were accused of sorcery and spreading idolatry. Criminal cases from 1685 and 1696 shaped Bishop Núñez’s view of Indigenous cosmology as seen in his Ninth Pastoral Letter (written in 1698). Here, Bishop Núñez linked Indigenous healing ceremonies with idolatry and Devil worship, blending pre-Hispanic traditions with those of European witchcraft.

However, this late-seventeenth-century Dominican bishop had also been influenced by the writings of Franciscan forerunners such as Fray Juan de Torquemada and his Monarquía Indiana, first printed in 1615. In the Ninth Pastoral Letter, Bishop Núñez cites Torquemada’s Monarquía Indiana four times—including books 6, 8, and 10—to make sweeping assertions about Maya peoples like the Tzotzil, Tzeltal, and Zoque. Yet, the passages used by Bishop Núñez focused on Nahua beliefs and rituals in central New Spain among the Mexica, Totonac, and Tlaxcaltec peoples. Moreover, two of the four citations of Monarquía Indiana found in Bishop Núñez’s Ninth Pastoral Letter specifically reference Torquemada’s Franciscan predecessor Fray Andrés de Olmos, thereby transferring sixteenth-century interpretations of Nahua cosmologies to the Maya in the late seventeenth century. This presentation thus examines Bishop Núñez’s Ninth Pastoral Letter to show how Torquemada’s published work was used to conflate geographically and linguistically diverse Indigenous groups into the pejorative category of “idolatrous” Natives in need of indoctrination.