And it was our legacy an Aesop Fable: interpretations of freedom in the Náhuatl Fables in the Indigenous School of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco

Abstract

The article intends to analyze Aesop’s Fables in Nahuatl collected by the manuscript Cantares Mexicanos in the context of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco School which was founded by the Franciscans in New Spain as an institution for training the children of the main indigenous people. Through the analysis of the production context of the fables in the sixteenth century as a rhetorical exercise, the article addresses the rewriting of some of these fables, those that elaborate their moral in the key of freedom in an environment of political education at a time when the role that the Amerindian population had to develop in the incipient society, created by the colonial power, was being debated with intensity.