CLAVIJERO, FRANCISCO-JAVIER. – Mexican Jesuit, born in Veracruz in 1731, and having entered the novitiate in 1748, he taught rhetoric in Mexico and philosophy in Valladolid and Guadalajara. Exiled in 1787 with the other Jesuits from the Spanish dominions and deported to Italy, he spent the last 20 years in Bologna and then in Ferrara, where he founded an academy, devoting himself to the study of Mexican antiquities. He died in Bologna on 12 Apr. 1787. In 1949 his remains were identified, and they will be buried in the National Pantheon of Mexico (cf. Societas, 4 [1949], pp. 148–49).
His principal work is the Storia antica del Messico (4 vols., Cesena 1780–81), which went through 14 editions, 9 of them in Spanish translation, 4 in English, and one in German. The original Spanish text was published only recently, edited by Fr. M. Cuevas: Historia antigua de Mexico (4 vols., Città di Messico 1945). Fr. G. B. Colones published a Compendio della storia messicana dell'abate C. (Bologna 1781); the ethnographic section and the history of the conquest of Mexico are of particular interest, although the criticism is not always impartial. La Storia della California (posthumous, 2 vols., Venice 1799) is principally the history of the Jesuit missions in California. Three unpublished pamphlets by C. are included by Fr. M. Cuevas in his Tesoros documentales de México Siglo XVIII (Città di Messico 1944, pp. 311–98).