Sebastian de Aparicio

Sebastián de Aparicio y del Pardo (20 January 1502 – 25 February 1600) was a Spanish colonist in Mexico shortly after its conquest by Spain, who after a lifetime as a rancher and road builder entered the Order of Friars Minor as a lay brother. He spent the next 26 years of his long life as a beggar for the Order and died with a great reputation for holiness. He has been beatified by the Catholic Church.

Early life Aparicio was born in A Gudiña, Ourense, in the Galician region of Spain. He was the third child and only son of Juan de Aparicio and Teresa del Prado, who were poor, but pious peasants, and spent his childhood tending sheep and cattle and in service to those of means. He learned his prayers from his parents, but had no schooling, and was not able to read or write. Despite his illiteracy, he had absorbed how to lead a pious and holy life so that he could emulate models in hagiographic texts. According to his own account, his life was saved in a seemingly-miraculous way during an outbreak of the bubonic plague in his town in 1514. Forced to isolate him from the community in quarantine, his parents built a hidden shelter for him in the woods, where they left him. While lying there helpless, due to his illness, a she-wolf found the hiding spot and, poking her head into his hiding spot, sniffed and then bit and licked an infected site on his body, before running off. He began to heal from that moment.

When Aparicio was older, he determined to seek work outside his region in order to help support his family and to provide dowries for his sisters. He traveled east to Salamanca and then as far south as Sanlúcar de Barrameda. He finally decided to improve his fortune by traveling to the Americas.

Mexico

Successful Entrepreneur Aparicio sailed from Spain in 1533, landing in Veracruz later that year. With the growth of the cattle trade introduced to the Americas by the Spanish and the landgrants offered to colonists by the Spanish government, he decided to move farther inland to Puebla de los Ángeles, recently founded by the Franciscan friar, Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, one of the Twelve Apostles of Mexico who came to New Spain in 1524 to evangelize the Indians.

Once settled in Puebla, Aparicio began to cultivate indigenous maize but also European wheat. He was one of the first Spaniards who raised and trained cattle, another European import, to use in plow farming and transportation. He got permission to ride out into the brush and round up wild cattle which he then trained to pull a cart. As a result, he is considered to be the first Mexican “cowboy” or charro. He realized the difficulty of transporting supplies in Mexico, which before the conquest had no domesticated animals to move goods and difficult terrain, which meant that transport between growing Spanish settlements impeded economic expansion. The burden the lack of decent roads fell on both the native peoples and animals forced to bear the loads on poor and uneven surfaces through the mountains cutting the countryside. He then conceived the idea of building roads from Puebla to the port of Veracruz, Mexico's main link to Spain. He recruited a fellow Spaniard as a partner in the enterprise, and they approached the colonial authorities for a grant to undertake this construction. Successful in this, they began building the roads which began to connect Spanish communities of Mexico. After several years, he promoted the building of a highway to connect the silver mining city of Zacatecas with Mexico City. The discovery of silver in Mexico in the 1540s was a major event in the economic consolidation of the colony. Aparicio established the transport system which sent agricultural products to Spain and brought necessary items to the residents of New Spain.

Aparicio prospered, becoming a wealthy man, but he decided to sell his transport business in 1552. He then bought an expanse of land (hacienda de labor) near Zacatecas, where he farmed and ranched cattle. He began to teach the native people how to use a plow for their farms. He showed them how to domesticate horses and oxen, introduced by the Spanish and unfamiliar to the indigenous population, and how to build wagons for transporting their goods, as wheels had also previously been unknown.