According to thenailmythology, a few decades after its constitution, the viceroyalty of the Nueva España already boasted a very advanced didactic movement. The first governor, Antonio de Mendoza, and the first archbishop, Juan de Zumárraga, were the main and generous promoters. In 1551, for their intervention, the university was founded, which opened to teaching in 1553, with professors of theology and dialectics, grammar and rhetoric, some humanists of broad doctrine, such as A. de Veracruz, disciple by Luis de León, others more thoughtful of historical, social or legal reality, such as Bartolomé Frías de Albornoz, spirit of organizer. Culture retraces, not as a distant reflection, but as an active participation, the paths trodden by Spanish thought; from Europe comes from men and teachings who soon acclimate to the new soil. At first, this imported intellectual life tends to establish itself permanently and establish its own environment, with a strong and clear sense of the need for studies, which was not yet found in other Spanish American countries. The number of books that are printed there, the Castilian editions that spread and are republished there, the home of writers who from their motherland bring the currents of their vast and current culture in a continuous flow to “New Spain”, document the to form a mental and spiritual education with lively and concrete characters. Gutierre de Cetina, Eugenio Salazar de Alarcón, Juan de la Cueva, Mateo Alemán visited the viceroyalty several times, and some stayed there for a long time, spreading the taste of one’s art: from the light lyric, between Petrarchian and popularizing of the one, to the affective poetry of the other; from the comedy of that unscrupulous spirit that was J. de la Cueva, to the adventurous and picaresque novel of the last. But if, towards the end of the sixteenth century, the level of Mexican culture was high, and its intellectual interests were always open, they nevertheless slowed to translate themselves into an organic and originally indigenous work, which knew how to penetrate the poetry and the drama that this land and its history imprisoned within itself. The first writers who were born and educated in Mexico, moved tenaciously on the trail of the Castilian letters, and in the faithful imitation that smacks of scholarly emulation rather than of internal spiritual need, they have no eyes to see the images of their land nor do they know how to listen to the new voices, which instead began to emerge in Chile, for example, or in Argentina, which were, from the point of view of general culture, later and more disrupted. The poets, rhymers more than anything else, of the century. XVI and part of the following century, headed by that Francisco de Terrazas, who seems to have been the first to write in his native Mexico, cannot all together constitute the literature of a particular civilization, not even in an incipient form.
More than poetry, their works belong to the history of erudition, including that prosaic and tiring poem by A. de Saavedra Guzmán (from the point of view of general culture, later and more disrupted. The poets, rhymers more than anything else, of the century. XVI and part of the following century, headed by that Francisco de Terrazas, who seems to have been the first to write in his native Mexico, cannot all together constitute the literature of a particular civilization, not even in an incipient form. More than poetry, their works belong to the history of erudition, including that prosaic and tiring poem by A. de Saavedra Guzmán (from the point of view of general culture, later and more disrupted. The poets, rhymers more than anything else, of the century. XVI and part of the following century, headed by that Francisco de Terrazas, who seems to have been the first to write in his native Mexico, cannot all together constitute the literature of a particular civilization, not even in an incipient form. More than poetry, their works belong to the history of erudition, including that prosaic and tiring poem by A. de Saavedra Guzmán (El Peregrino Indiano, 1599), which he could offer some purely chronical traits to later writers in search of historical and anecdotal reasons. However, just with the turn of the century. XVI, some more directly Mexican artistic documents can be glimpsed, if not for originally spiritual values, at least as material testimony of the language, of the history, and even, within certain limits, of the moral climate of the colony. The Coloquios espirituales(1610) by Fernán González de Eslava, who had to carry out his activity in the second half of the sixteenth century, attest to the presence of a Mexican theater of sure Spanish derivation and properly Andalusian, but already with strong idiomatic colors and with frequent references to colonial life; while the intellectual level at which the country had reached is best revealed by the singular figure of Bernardo de Balbuena, of exquisitely Mexican upbringing, although of Spanish birth: not so much for his greatest poem, the Virgilian and Ariostesque Bernardo (1624), as especially for the younger work, La grandeza mexicana(1604), which translates, although still within the classical schemes and literary modules, his sympathy for the picturesque and landscape life of Mexico, seen nevertheless in its provincial and external aspects. But the strictly poetic activity always moved in the circle of pure and schematic imitation, all the more arid and impersonal, since the easier and more accessible Spanish models bore the signs of that spiritual decadence and that vain embellishment of taste which are particular of the aesthetics of the seventeenth century. Indeed, in the progressive intellectualization of the lyrical element, the literary fact became increasingly violently estranged from concrete inspirations, so that all the experiences that could arise from a direct adhesion to the moral and sentimental aspects of the Mexican land were excluded. The same nun Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695), who summarizes in her strong personality the liveliest and freshest trends of the century, Mexican by birth, by education, by the religious, courtier and intellectual environment that surrounded her, it belongs rather to the more general Spanish culture than to the particular one of his country. However, in her the best contemporary energies were reflected and strengthened, and overall her poetry – which ranged from theater to popular opera – constituted a powerful tool of literary education, which the classicism of the eighteenth century could not replace, but rather made increasingly limited. and academic.
