Lesson 8 logo is Father Las Casas

As we noted previously, in their zeal to impose their will on the conquered peoples of the Americas, the Spanish attempted to suppress all manifestations of the earlier cultures and religions. Since most of the pre-Columbian literature was passed on orally, it was not simply a matter of burning books and destroying libraries. The oral tradition survived in many cases, with poems and stories being re-told time and again out of the hearing of the new Spanish authorities and settlers. And in a few cases these traditions were written down in Spanish by Indigenous and mestizo story-tellers who had learned how to read.