ARRICIVITA, JUAN DOMINGO

Franciscan missionary and historian; b. Toluca, Mexico, 1720; d. Querétaro, Mexico, April 16, 1794. He entered the Franciscan Order at the Mission College of the Holy Cross in Querétaro in 1735. A reliable friar and a good priest, he spent most of his years in posts of secondary importance: as missionary in the San Sabá region of Texas (1748–50) and procurator of the missions of his college from 1757 to 1767, when he helped make arrangements for the Franciscans to replace the expelled Jesuits in their former missions in Sonora and lower Arizona. As part of this plan, he went to Spain in 1768 to recruit more missionaries. In 1770 the Inquisition named him censor of books for the Querétaro region and in 1778 his friend, Juan Ignacio de la Rocha, Bishop of Michoacán, requested him to head a group of friars to give missions in Colima and its environs. On Oct. 29, 1787, Arricivita was named official historian of Querétaro College to continue the work of Isidro espinosa, who had published the first part of the history of the college in 1746. The work had been neglected by the official historians in favor of other books, so Querétaro's achievements were sometimes bypassed as the chroniclers of the other colleges in Mexico published their accounts. Arricivita worked rapidly and his Crónica seráfica y apostólica del colegio de Propaganda fide de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro was sent to the press in 1791. Historians have generally considered Arricivita's work inferior to that of Espinosa even though its merits are substantial, chiefly because Arricivita knew the mission area so well and had taken an active part in many of the enterprises he described.

[l. g. canedo]