A growing number of Spanish immigrants and their descendants, the creoles, who had committed their lives to the New World, found in the legend of apostolic conversions a means of reducing their emotional, cultural, religious, and eventually their political dependence on Spain. Like their British counterparts in North America, creoles in Mexico, including clerics, increasingly resented the superior airs and arrogant ways of a ruling class sent out from the homeland to be their overlords, staying just long enough to make their fortunes, putting down no roots. If the Thomas legend was to be believed, the true Mexicans, creoles and Indians alike, did not wholly owe even the gift of the true faith to their temporary governors and clerics from Spain. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Lafaye recounts, a few creole historians and investigators of indigenous culture found what they took to be signs that Mexico had been exposed to Christian teachings long before the arrival of Cortez. A cross motif appears in Aztec religious art.
Indian legends tell of a great flood that had destroyed most of the earth.
Ritual practices included confession, fasting, tonsure of priests. He, or his priest, was sometimes depicted in Aztec art in a conical cap, somewhat resembling the papal tiara, and carried a hooked staff, albeit a small one. Quetzalcoatl was a twin, and so was Thomas. With the growing pressures for Mexican independence, Thomas was put to political uses. The apostle's story survived, however, in texts of those Acts copied from time to time by monks and adapted by the Golden Legend, the lives of the saints.