Calle de Fray Bernardino Sahagún
Recalls the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún (c. 1499-1590), the friar from León who documented the indigenous culture of Mexico in Nahuatl.
The name suits the district: in Nueva España the streets evoke figures of colonial Mexico. It honors a Franciscan born around 1499 in the León town of Sahagún, from which he took his surname. At the College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco he taught Latin grammar to young men of the old Mexica nobility and learned Nahuatl thoroughly.
In that language he undertook his life’s work: decades of questioning indigenous elders and priests, with a method of questionnaires that modern ethnographers recognize as their own. From it came the General History of the Things of New Spain, twelve books on the conquest told from the defeated side. Much of what is known today about Tenochtitlan before Cortés comes from the words this friar gathered across the ocean.