Paso y Troncoso, Francisco Del (1842–1916)

Francisco Del Paso y Troncoso (b. 8 October 1842; d. 30 April 1916), Mexican historian. Born in Veracruz, Paso y Troncoso originally studied for a career in business. In 1867 he journeyed to Mexico City in order to pursue a career in medicine, a course of studies which led him to investigate the history of science in Mexico under the Aztecs. He never completed his degree in medicine, turning his attention completely to the study of native history and linguistics. He gathered together major chronicles and other texts and codices on the pre-contact and colonial periods, and mastered Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. Appointed director of the National Museum in 1889, he sailed for Europe in 1892 in order to search for documents relating to Mexico. He scoured archives in Spain, England, Russia, Germany, Austria, France, and Italy, where he spent the last period of his life. Though he did not return to Mexico, he was in constant contact with government officials, including President Porfirio Díaz, who were funding his projects. After the outbreak of the Revolution funding became increasingly more difficult.

After his death the repatriation of the documents collected by this major investigator proved problematic, and his complete collection was never fully restored. Nonetheless, as a result of his exhaustive labors he brought to light a corpus of works by the sixteenth-century Franciscan ethnographer Bernardino de Sahagún (ca. 1499–1590). He also prepared a monumental collection of documents known as the Papeles de Nueva España, consisting of bibliographies, geography and statistics, histories, letters, and dictionaries of native languages. Such were the volume of his findings and the detail of his inquiry that many of these projects were not published until after his death.

See alsoMexico: The Colonial Period; Sahagún, Bernardino de.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Silvio Arturo Zavala, Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, su misión en Europa, 1892–1916 (1938).

Howard F. Cline, "Selected Nineteenth-Century Mexican Writers on Ethnohistory," in Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 13 (1973), pp. 370-427.

Additional Bibliography

León Portilla, Miguel. Bernardino de Sahagún: First Anthropologist. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.

                                  Brian C. Belanger