The evangelization in our country stands as one of the most important cultural processes because of its projection in the creation of Mexico as a pluricultural nation, and of the Mexicans as a multiethnic population.

This process began from the very moment of the so-called “contact between two worlds” and implied the, peerless, challenge of having access to the “other”, the “vanquished”, up to where the sword hadn’t penetrated: the heart of its very being, with the loss of their traditions and ancestral forms of political and administrative organizations, their religion and worldview, their millenary wisdom, and their rich cultural manifestations.

Encounter between two “humanities”, two “worlds”, one of which will stay subsumed in the other from a primary condition that was imposed on the vanquisher, without which its permanence in conquered lands wasn’t justified: converting the other to Christianity. This was the mission commissioned and assumed primarily by the religious orders: “to seed the Gospel in the hearts of those infidels”.

The exhibition: Evangelization in Indigenous Languages. 16th to 18th Century presents around 50 pieces for indoctrination, between Catechisms, confessionals, and sermon books, as well as vocabularies, arts, and grammars, testimonies of the titanic labor of these missionaries who were considered the first linguists of the Americas.

*Displayed at the First Floor Gallery.