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The birth of a Creole’s consciousness in America has often been dated to the seventeenth century. However, the study of sixteenth-century Franciscan sources in New Spain may allow us to refine this chronology. A treatise on rhetoric was published in Perugia in 1579 by Diego Valadés, a mestizo Franciscan and former procurator of his Order to the Roman Curia. It is a proof that from the beginning of their appearance in the middle of the intense social crisis of the 1570’s, the Creole circles sought the support of the Holy See, outside the Castilian monarchy. This was an opportunity for Rome to recapture the American Churches that had escaped its power since the 1493 bulls, and offered to Creoles like Valadés a possibility to legitimate their position vis-à-vis the Crown, in the context of the enforcement of the decisions of the Council of Trent.

Se editan en este artículo varios documentos relativos a Catalina de Malcaida, la primera mujer de Hernán Cortés; la herencia de Hernán López de Ávila y una noticia de Diego Valadés.

The Catholic Monarchy is the short-lived dynastic union (1580-1640) between the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. By returning on the legal, political and pragmatic foundations of this empire which cannot be called Empire (because this name belongs to the Holy Roman Empire of the cousins of Vienna), the article tries to seize better the internal functioning of this heterogeneous political set, by adopting two points of view: that of America (how the notion of Catholic Monarchy is understood in the reynos, far from Madrid and Lisbon) and that of Rome (how Holy See reaches - or not - to exist in the heart of this space). It emerges from it that the pope and the Catholic King are natural allies (around the Roman Christianity) but not objectives (their purposes do not match), and that Rome and Mexico as well picture themselves not as margins of the Catholic Monarchy, but as real centers.