Chota Valley Spanish 9783954871995

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Sandro Sessarego Chota Valley Spanish

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Lengua y Sociedad en el Mundo Hispánico Language and Society in the Hispanic World Consejo editorial / Editorial Board: Julio Calvo Pérez (Universitat de València) Anna María Escobar (University of Illinois) Luis Fernando Lara (El Colegio de México) Francisco Moreno Fernández (Universidad de Alcalá) Juan Sánchez Méndez (Université de Neuchâtel) Armin Schwegler (University of California, Irvine) José del Valle (The Graduate Center, CUNY) Klaus Zimmermann (Universität Bremen) Vol. 33

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Sandro Sessarego

Chota Valley Spanish

Iberoamericana - Vervuert - 2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sessarego, Sandro. Chota Valley Spanish / Sandro Sessarego. pages cm. -- (Lengua y Sociedad en el mundo Hispanico = Language and Society in the Hispanic World) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-936353-18-7 -- ISBN 978-8484897576 -- ISBN 978-3-9548731-0-4 1. Spanish language--Dialects--Ecuador--Chota River Valley. 2. Chota River Valley (Ecuador)--Languages. I. Title. PC4894.C4S47 2013 467’.98661--dc23 2013022677

© Iberoamericana, 2013 Amor de Dios, 1 – E-28014 Madrid Tel.: +34 91 429 35 22 Fax: +34 91 429 53 97 [email protected] www.ibero-americana.net © Vervuert, 2013 Elisabethenstr. 3-9 – D-60594 Frankfurt am Main Tel.: +49 69 597 46 17 Fax: +49 69 597 87 43 [email protected] www.ibero-americana.net ISBN 978-84-8489-757-6 (Iberoamericana) ISBN 978-3-95487-310-4 (Vervuert) ISBN 978-1-936353-18-7 (Iberoamericana Vervuert Publishing Corp.) Depósito Legal: M-17652-2013 Diseño de la cubierta: Carlos Zamora Impreso en España Este libro está impreso integramente en papel ecológico blanqueado sin cloro

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of figures............................................................................................ List of maps.............................................................................................. List of tables ............................................................................................ Dedication............................................................................................... Acknowledgments ...................................................................................

8 9 9 11 13

Chapter 1: Introduction 1.0. General introduction..................................................................... 1.1. Objectives of this study................................................................ 1.2. Organization of the volume.......................................................... 1.3. Data collection and methodology.................................................

15 15 16 16

Chapter 2: A sociohistorical account of slavery in Ecuador 2.0. Introduction................................................................................... 2.1. Afro-Hispanic contact varieties and the relative scarcity of Spanish creoles........................................................... 2.2. A sociohistorical sketch of slavery in Ecuador............................. 2.2.1. First phase (1530-1680)................................................................ 2.2.2. Second phase (1680-1770)........................................................... 2.2.3. Third phase (1770-1964).............................................................. 2.3. Chota Valley.................................................................................. 2.3.1. The indigenous phase (until 1610)............................................... 2.3.2. The transition phase (1610-1680)................................................. 2.3.3. The Jesuit phase (1680-1767)....................................................... 2.4. Conclusions................................................................................... Chapter 3: Phonetics and phonology 3.0. Introduction................................................................................... 3.1. Phonetic account of Ecuadorian Spanish...................................... 3.2. Phonetic account of Chota Valley Spanish................................... 3.3. Conclusions...................................................................................

19 19 23 26 30 34 37 37 37 41 53 57 57 59 68

Chapter 4: Morphosyntax 4.0. Introduction................................................................................... 69 4.1. Noun Phrase................................................................................. 69

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4.2. Verb Phrase................................................................................... 4.3. Prepositional Phrase..................................................................... 4.4. Phrase-level constructions............................................................ 4.5. Conclusions...................................................................................

75 79 80 82

Chapter 5: Lexicon 5.0. Introduction................................................................................... 83 5.1. Lexical items................................................................................ 83 5.2. Conclusions................................................................................... 85 Chapter 6: The status of Chota Valley Spanish 6.0. Introduction................................................................................... 6.1. On Monogenesis........................................................................... 6.2. On De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute.......................................... 6.3. Schwegler’s (1999) hypothesis: CVS as a decreolized Afro-Portuguese creole............................. 6.4. McWhorter’s (2000) hypothesis: CVS as a missing Spanish creole. 6.5. A few sociohistorical remarks....................................................... 6.6. The linguistic nature of present-day CVS..................................... 6.7. A closer look at the ‘monogenetic’ features.................................. 6.8. Early Afro-Hispanic linguistic insights from De Instauranda...... 6.9. Conclusions...................................................................................

87 88 91 92 94 97 99 100 103 109

Bibliography............................................................................................ 111 Appendix: Pictures of Chota Valley.......................................................... 121

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 3.1. Spectrogram of de ants ‘of before’....................................... Figure 3.2. Spectrogram of ayere ‘yesterday’......................................... Figure 3.3. Spectrogram of todu ‘all’...................................................... Figure 3.4. Spectrogram of lo[z] amigo ‘the friends’............................. Figure 3.5. Spectrogram of Iba[ř]a ‘Ibarra’........................................... Figure 3.6. Spectrogram of los pa[tʃ]ón ‘the owners’............................. Figure 3.7. Spectrogram of [ž]egue ‘to come’........................................ Figure 3.8. Multiple early-aligned peaks and minimal downstep across non-exclamatory non-focused declaratives...............

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60 61 61 62 64 65 66 67

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LIST OF MAPS

Map 2.1. Slave trade routes to Ecuador................................................ 27 Map 6.1. The Afro-Hispanic linguistic areas reported by Schwegler (1999).............................................. 93 Map 6.2. Main African departing ports as indicated by Sandoval in De Instauranda............................................ 106

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1. Percentage of slaves sold in Popayán with respect to Cartagena’s sales.......................................... Table 2.2. Slaves sold in Popayán 1690-1789 (% according to their age). Table 2.3. Kingdom of Quito’s population in 1781............................... Table 2.4. Kingdom of Quito’s population in 1784............................... Table 2.5. Ecuador’s black population evolution from 1784 to 1957... Table 2.6. Jesuit land acquisitions 1615-1645....................................... Table 2.7. Jesuit land acquisitions 1688-1728....................................... Table 2.8. Number of slaves in the Jesuit haciendas by 1767 (from Coronel Feijóo 1991:88)............................................ Table 2.9. Number of slaves in the Jesuit haciendas by 1767 (from Bouisson 1997:47)..................................................... Table 2.10. Number of slaves in the Jesuit haciendas by 1767 (from Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego 1959:222).. Table 2.11. Demographic figures for the Corregimiento de Ibarra around 1784.......................................................................... Table 2.12. Demographic figures for the Corregimiento de Otavalo around 1784.......................................................................... Table 2.13. Enslaved population in the Jesuit haciendas (1782-1783).... Table 2.14. Enslaved families with two or more children in the Jesuit haciendas (1782-1783).....................................

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31 32 35 35 36 38 42 44 46 46 48 49 51 51

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Table 3.1. /s/ realizations in Ecuadorian dialects Table 3.2. Word-final realizations of /n/ in Ecuadorian dialects Table 6.1. Granda’s (1988) monogenetic features

63 66 90

LIST OF PICTURES

Picture 1: Picture 2: Picture 3: Pictures 4-6:

Juana Chalá and her nieces Billboard commemorating Afro-Choteños’ resistance A group of friends from Concepción Don Cristóbal showing local youngsters how to make a bomba drum Don Cristóbal playing the bomba drum Picture 7: Teenagers practicing the bomba dance Picture 8: Pictures 9-12: Traditional dances Pictures 13-16: Traditional tresses

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121 121 121 122 123 123 123 124

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DEDICATION

This poem and the present book are dedicated to Amanda, Marino, Gianna, Simona, Marina, Adolfo, Emy, Mario, Lina† and to all Afro-Choteños. Concepción, levanta tu cabeza, clava el arado en tu piedra con vigor, abre tu pecho y lanza tu promesa de ser un nuevo edén del Ecuador. by Abrón Chalá

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work would not have been possible without the support of several people. I owe my gratitude to all of them. My deepest gratitude goes to Fabio Lazzaro, Mikela Lazzaro, Olga Palacios, Paola Palacios and Anahí Landazuri, who hosted me in Chota Valley and helped me carry out fieldwork during winter 2011. I am also extremely grateful to Geovanny Cañar and his family (César, Ana, Suzy, Annabelle and Noelle Matilde), Andrés, Pilar, Alejandra, María Elisa, Viviana and Sandro (mi tocayo) for their help and assistance during my Ecuadoran trip. I would also like to thank Armin Schwegler, John Lipski, Donald Winford, John Singler, Jeff Siegel, Johannes Kabatek and John McWhorter for their feedback on several ideas that came to form this book. In particular, I am grateful to Armin, who took the time to review all of the manuscript and provided me with constructive feedback. Several other academics that provided me with great support during the writing of this work are Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, Terrell Morgan, Rafael Orozco, Gaëlle Ulvoas, Manuel Díaz-Campos, Manuel DelicadoCantero, Melvin González-Rivera, Morena Lanieri, Guido Borghi and Claudio Ferrari, who have always been there for me in a variety of circumstances. Very special thanks go to the linguistic team of the Spanish and Portuguese Department of the University of Wisconsin – Madison for their spirit of solidarity and camaraderie: Fernando Tejedo, Grant Armstrong, Rajiv Rao, Diana Franzen and Cathy Stafford. This work also has benefited from our students’ feedback and from the input they gave me during our Linguistic Circles. I am thankful to Maurizio Bagnoli, Alessio Bianchi, Ermanno Timossi and their families (Angela, Francesca, Matteo, Antonella, Sandrino, Mariangela and Valentina), Bill Cudlipp, Grace Bloodgood, Lucy Ghastin, Tammi Simpson, Sean Goodroad, Kate Fanis, Sarli Mercado, Juan Egea, Ksenija Bilbija, Loredana Comparone, Aaron Tate, Alicia Cerezo, Víctor Goldgel, Marcelo Pellegrini, David Hildner, Pablo Ancos, Daniele Forlino, Aria Cabot, Gaetano Fossi, Cralo and Paola Forte, Sergio and Carlo Paolessi, Magda Davoli, Giovanni Cristina, Lorenzo Sangiacomo, Chiara Risso, Daniela Nebbione, Paolo Moras, Cristian Emilio, Arturo Busca, Massimiliano Parisi, Simone Lolli, Ilaria Tassi, Marco Petrini, Roberto Berritta, Eugenio Daviso, Nicola Di Fiore, Massimiliano

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Gambardella, Marta Tallone, Gianluca Garrone and Luca Sessarego, for the time spent together in Madison, Chicago, Rome and Genoa and for showing interest in my research. Also, I would like to thank the University of Wisconsin, the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program, the A.W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for the Humanities and the Spanish and Portuguese Department for their financial support, which made this publication possible. Finally, I wish to thank Klaus Vervuert, Rebecca Aschenberg, an anonymous reviewer and the publishing team of Iberoamericana/Vervuert for their professionalism and help with the publication of this study. Last but not least, I am grateful to all Afro-Choteños, who warmly welcomed me into their communities. Thank you!

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Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION

1.0. General introduction Until recently, Afro-Hispanic contact varieties received only marginal attention by most dialectologists, philologists and general linguists with an interest in Hispanic studies. Over the last few decades, the research focused on these languages has grown substantially, to the point that in any subfield of linguistics one can find active scholars willing to explore the grammatical aspects of these language varieties. From a strictly linguistic point of view, what is fascinating about these languages is their richness in constructions that would be considered ungrammatical in standard Spanish. Nevertheless, such structures form the core grammar of these less prestigious, but equally efficient linguistic systems. A comparative analysis of certain grammatical phenomena in these contact varieties may be used as a powerful testing ground for formal hypotheses, which usually have been built on standardized language data (Kayne 1996; Sessarego 2012a). From a historical perspective, the grammar of these languages can provide valuable insights about the conditions characterizing the African Diaspora to the New World, since the morphological reductions and the second language acquisition traces found in these varieties may provide clues about the sociodemographic scenario characterizing the plantation settings. This book will consider the linguistic and sociocultural aspects of one of these Afro-Hispanic varieties: Chota Valley Spanish (CVS). CVS is spoken in Chota Valley, located on the borderline of the Carchi and Imbabura Provinces, Ecuador. This dialect is spoken by approximately 12,000 people (INEC 2001), the descendants of the slaves taken to this region to work the Jesuit sugarcane plantations during colonial times. 1.1. Objectives of this study This work has two main goals. The first objective is to provide a linguistic description of CVS. For this reason, this study will explore several aspects of the gram-

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mar of this language by paying close attention to its morphosyntactic patterns, its phonetics and phonology and its lexicon. The second goal is to assess the origin of CVS and its implications for Afro-Hispanic creole studies. In particular, I will test whether the sociohistorical and linguistic conditions for a creole language to emerge were in place in Chota Valley (cf. Schwegler 1999:240; McWhorter 2000:10-11) or if a different scenario was characterizing the region. 1.2. Organization of the volume Chapter 1 offers a general overview of the goals of this work. It introduces the present study’s objectives, as well as the methodology employed to collect and analyze the data. Chapter 2 is an analysis of the sociohistorical conditions under which Afro-Hispanic contact varieties developed in Latin America; it includes the main debates and argumentations concerning the relatively reduced number of Spanish creoles. In this context, it situates Chota-Valley Spanish in space and time by focusing on the sociohistorical scenario which characterized the evolution of this Afro-Hispanic contact variety. Chapter 3 discusses the phonetics and phonology of CVS by highlighting the features which differentiate this variety from the surrounding Ecuadorian Spanish dialects. Chapter 4 focuses on the morphosyntactic features of CVS. Chapter 5 is a description of the lexicon of CVS; in particular, it focuses on some lexical items identified by the informants as particularly relevant to the local Afro-Choteño identity. Finally, Chapter 6 is a reflection on the importance of Chota Valley Spanish and its implications for Afro-Hispanic creole studies. 1.3. Data collection and methodology The data presented in this book was collected during a visit to Chota Valley in the winter of 2011-2012. More than 50 speakers participated in this study. All of them were residents in the communities of Tumbabiro, Carpuela, Chota, Santiago, Chalguayacu, Chamanal, Concepción, Caldera and Cuajara, nine villages in the Provinces of Imbabura and Carchi, Chota Valley, Ecuador. The informants were native speakers of the Choteño dialect; they did not speak any other language spoken in the region, such as Quechua. The interviews were conducted by allowing the speakers to talk about any topic of their liking and by asking them follow-up questions, in line with the principle of Tangential Shift (Labov 1984:37). Only later was the same informant asked for grammaticality judgments. This was done in order not to affect the results of the interview by telling the speaker in advance about the nature of the phenomena under analysis.

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Introduction

17

While grammaticality judgments can provide us with good insight into the abstract idealized language of the informant, only a comparison of such information with empirical data can help us build a robust, fine-grained generalization. In fact, responses to acceptability judgment tasks rely at least in part on explicit, prescriptive notions held by the speakers (Cornips and Poletto 2005). For this reason, when studying socially stigmatized dialects like Chota Valley Spanish, a comparison of grammatical intuitions and naturalistic data can be very helpful. Nevertheless, not all linguistic phenomena analyzed are equally suitable for the same exact methodology. In fact, while certain cases of morphosyntactic variability may be approached by recurring to statistical tools, for more abstract and less frequent constructions only data based on grammatical introspections can be used. Similar methodological adjustments were also created for phonetic analyses. The majority of the phonetic data presented in this work was recorded by using an MP3 recorder with a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. While for the study of certain phenomena free speech interviews were used, in other cases more sophisticated elicitation techniques had to be created. In particular, for certain experiments informants were asked to read aloud a controlled set of stimuli. Therefore, while a comparison between naturalistic data and inducted elicitations has been fundamental in the study of Chota Valley Spanish grammar, this work also considers necessary methodological adjustments imposed by the nature of the different phenomena under analysis.

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Chapter 2: A SOCIOHISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF SLAVERY IN ECUADOR

2.0. Introduction In this chapter, the available sociohistorical evidence is examined to provide a description of the setting in which Chota Valley Spanish (CVS) developed in relation to other Afro-Hispanic contact varieties. The study consists of two main parts. The first section is an overview of the conditions under which AfroHispanic contact languages developed in Latin America. It includes the main debates and argumentations concerning the relatively reduced number of Spanish creoles. The second part focuses exclusively on the Ecuadorian scenario. It attempts to shed light on the genesis and evolution of CVS, whose exact origin is still a topic of considerable controversy. 2.1. On the scarcity of Spanish creoles in the Americas As Lipski (2005:304) correctly points out, the long-lasting debate on the origin and evolution of Afro-Hispanic contact varieties in the Americas is based on an investigation for which “the last word […] has yet to be written.” Indeed, due to several sociohistorical reasons, the number of Spanish-based creoles spoken in Latin America is highly reduced, especially if compared to the richness of creoloid varieties that developed from other European lexifiers (e.g., Dutch, French, English) (cf. Lipski 2005). The only two languages that are generally identified as Latin American Spanish creoles are Palenquero, spoken in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia and Papiamentu, spoken in Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, the Dutch Antilles. However, even for these two contact varieties, several doubts have been cast on whether they should be called Spanish creoles or instead be identified as Portuguese contact languages which were subsequently relexified with a Spanish lexicon (for a detailed account see Martinus 1989; Schwegler 1993; McWhorter 2000; Jacobs 2009). The rest of the languages that emerged from the contact between African slaves and the Spaniards involved in the conquest of the Americas have not tradition-

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ally been classified as creoles. In fact, even though they present phonological and morphological simplifications and some African lexical items, these varieties do not show the traces of more radical restructuring commonly found in creole languages. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this fact. Some authors believe that the lack of Spanish-based creoles, at least in the Caribbean, can be explained by a concomitance of social and demographic factors. Mintz (1971), for example, states that Africans in this region did not outnumber Europeans – at least not until the conversion into sugarcane plantations of the 19th century –, manumission and interracial relations were common practices and – unlike English and French colonizers – Spaniards born abroad tended to consider themselves as local creoles rather than European expatriates. This further facilitated intercultural contact and Spanish language acquisition Laurence (1974) shares Mintz’s perspective on the Spanish Caribbean. The author focuses on the Cuban context and claims that the following factors would have been the main sociohistorical conditions characterizing the evolution of Afro-Hispanic contact varieties in the region: (i) Africans did not outnumber Spaniards; (ii) the hierarchical structure of society was not as rigid as in the English and French Caribbean, often leading to coartición (self-purchased manumission) and mixed-race marriages; and (iii) plantations were introduced later in Spanish colonies; agricultural production was predominantly based on minifundios, small farms where free blacks and slaves worked side by side with poor Spaniards. The late introduction of sugarcane plantations, combined with the presence of small farms in the region, has been one of the main points put forward by Chaudeson (2001) to account for the absence of Spanish-based creoles. Until the 19th century, Africans and Europeans were working side by side in the fields. This would represent the so-called société d’habitation stage, where Africans presumably had good access to the language spoken by their masters. In Chaudeson’s view, by the 19th century, when more African-born slaves were introduced into the Spanish Caribbean to work on labor-intensive sugarcane plantations, a well-established Spanish dialect was already in place among the local population. For this reason, the new slaves and their offspring would eventually acquire that variety without radically transforming it into a creole language (cf. also Lipski 1987, 1993, 1998, 2000). The above explanations have generally been used to account for the lack of fullfledged Spanish creole languages in the Caribbean. McWhorter (2000) acknowledges that the aforementioned reasons could actually be valid for Cuba, Puerto

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Rico and the Dominican Republic; however, he claims that such an account may not provide an explanation for the rest of the Spanish colonies in the Americas, since no such société d’habitation stage ever existed in several mainland territories. In particular, the author states that if we believe this model, then the Department of Chocó (Colombia), Chota Valley (Ecuador), Veracruz (Mexico), Lima (Peru) and the Mocundo hacienda (Venezuela) would have been ideal places for a Spanish creole to emerge, but the evidence indicates that this is not the case. In his book, The Missing Spanish Creoles, McWhorter (2000) claims that a different factor must be responsible for this unexpected linguistic fact. According to McWhorter, such a factor would be the lack of a Spanish pidgin spoken on the West African coast from which a Spanish creole could subsequently develop in the New World. He believes that plantation creoles were once pidgins which expanded into fully referential languages by either children or adults (McWhorter 1997, 2000). As a result, he does not agree with Chaudeson’s (1979, 1992) and Mufwene’s (1996) accounts, which depict creole languages as transformed varieties of their European lexifiers. According to the latter scholars, the distance between certain creole languages and their lexifiers may be modeled as the result of the cyclical application of language-acquisition phases, where each new wave of slaves would end up targeting a ‘square approximation’ (cf. Chaudeson 2001:132) of the language targeted by the previous generation; thus resulting in a progressive differentiation between the means of communication used in the plantation and the European variety. This model is unacceptable in McWhorter’s view, since it would exclude the pidgin stage by presupposing a gradual drift apart from the lexifier. However, even assuming that the sociohistorical and demographic conditions reported by McWhorter (2000) for the mainland colonies were detailed and corresponded to reality, his account does not completely explain why a pidgin did not evolve in such territories or why a Portuguese pidgin previously formed in Africa did not relexify and develop into a Spanish creole, as supposedly happened in the case of Papiamentu and Palenquero (cf. Lipski 2005: ch.9). In regards to the Venezuelan case, Díaz-Campos and Clements (2008) show that the picture presented by McWhorter does not accurately reflect the social and historical reality of the colony. In fact, in describing the demographic disproportions between Africans and Spaniards in colonial Venezuela, McWhorter uses the term “Africans” to describe mixed-race segments of the population who were born in the Spanish colony and spoke Spanish natively. He also does not account for the fact that in some parts of the colony the Spanish Crown was interested in exploiting mineral resources rather that growing agricultural prod-

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ucts (2008:358). In this article, the authors clearly discuss the role of the Spanish Crown’s monopolization of the slave trade, which kept the black/white ratio relatively low in certain Spanish colonies until the end of the 18th century and thus indirectly reduced the likelihood of a Spanish creole language developing in the Americas. Another hypothesis which has often been mentioned in the literature to account for the lack of Spanish creoles is the ‘Decreolization Hypothesis.’ As defined by Whinnom in 1968, ‘decreolization’ would consist of the gradual approximation of a creole language to the superstrate lexifier from which it developed (Hymes 1971:111). This idea has been suggested in many occasions by different authors for several varieties (e.g., Bickerton and Escalante 1970; Granda 1970, 1988; Schwegler 1993, 1996; Otheguy 1973; Megenney 1993; etc.). For example, Álvarez and Obediente (1998) claimed a possible creole origin for Barlovento Spanish, a dialect spoken on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela. These authors suggest that some linguistic features encountered in the language (e.g., deletion of the copula verb, non-inverted order in questions, etc.) would be the result of a decreolization process where a language that used to be a creole gradually approximated the superstrate. The basis for this claim would be that this kind of phenomena is not generally encountered in Spanish sub-standard varieties and that they should therefore be attributed to decreolization. Such a claim has proven to be misleading by Díaz-Campos and Clements (2008), who provide an account of the sociohistorical situation in which this language developed. First of all, they show that the number of blacks in this area was not sufficient enough for a creole to emerge. Secondly, they provide an alternative account for all the features classified by Álvarez and Obediente as potentially inherited from the creole, by indicating that they are actually better explained in terms of imperfect second language acquisition, in a context in which the superstrate language was relatively available to the African slaves. Another case of possible decreolization of a pre-existing creole has been suggested by Lipski (2006a,b; 2007a; 2008) for Yungueño Spanish, who stated that “in absence of any other viable scenario, Afro-Yungueño Spanish must be viewed as the descendant of a colonial Afro-Hispanic pidgin” (2008:186). In fact, by looking at the “radically simplified VP and DP of the basilectal Afro-Yungueño dialect.” Lipski (2008a:37) hypothesizes a possible creole origin for this vernacular, which after undergoing a process of decreolization due to contact, would now be in one of its final stages, closer to the more prestigious regional Bolivian Spanish. However, also in this case, sociohistorical and linguistic evidence shows that the grammatical elements found in Yungueño Spanish can be better accounted for as the results of intermediate and advanced second language

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acquisition strategies, which do not imply a previous creole stage (Sessarego 2011a,b,c) Schwegler (1999) hypothesizes a possible creole origin for another Afro-Hispanic dialect, Chota Vally Spanish (CVS). He indicated that CVS would be the descendant of an Afro-Portuguese creole once spoken by bozal slaves in the Spanish Caribbean. Schwegler, in line with McWhorter in this respect, claims that the sociohistorical conditions for a full-fledged creole language to develop would have been ideal in colonial Chota Valley: a low black/white ratio, harsh working conditions in sugarcane plantations, massive introduction of Africanborn workers and minimal contact with the outside Spanish-speaking world (cf. Schwegler 1999:240; McWhorter 2000:10-11). In the following sections, I will provide a sociohistorical account of black slavery in Ecuador to understand the feasibility of a creole hypothesis for colonial Chota Valley. This analysis will serve as a base for further discussion in chapter 6 on the origin of CVS and its implications for Afro-Hispanic creole studies. 2.2 A sociohistorical sketch of slavery in Ecuador African slavery was introduced into present-day Ecuador at the very beginning of its colonization, in the first decades of the 16th century. It became illegal on March 6, 1854, when General José María Urbina enforced a law passed on September 28, 1852, which declared slaves free. Even after the official abolition of slavery, Afro-Ecuadorians did not experience real freedom. In fact, former slaves were bound to the lands belonging to the hacienda and continued working there for a minimal wage until the Land Reform of 1964. This system was called concertaje or huaspingo; the salary provided was so low that workers had to borrow money in order to survive. The debt was transmitted from generation to generation, so that the socioeconomic conditions of blacks did not improve upon the abolition of slavery (Chalá Cruz 2006). Hassaurek, who visited Ecuador from 1861-1865, uses the following words to describe the conditions of black peons in Chota Valley (1867:328-9): The Indians have entirely disappeared from the valley. The Negroes, who have taken their places, are concertados […]. They are slaves in fact, although not slaves in name. Their services are secured by a purchase of the debts which they owe. As long as they remain in debt, which state, thanks to the skillful management of their masters, almost always lasts till they discharge the great debt of nature, they must either work or go to prison. Like the Indians, they are ignorant of their legal rights. They are hardly ever able to pay their debts, which, on the contrary, continue to increase, as their wages of one half real to one real are insufficient to satisfy their wants. When slavery was abolished in Ecuador, the owners of the Negroes in the

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Sandro Sessarego sugar district immediately employed them to work for wages and managing to get them into debt, secured their services as debtors. Thus it may almost be said that they profited, instead of losing by, the abolition of slavery. They pocketed the compensation which the law provided for the slave owners and at the same time retained the slaves. It is true that the blacks do not work so much now as when they were bondmen, nor can their masters beat them as unmercifully as they did before; but, on the other hand, it must be considered that it is much cheaper now to purchase a Negro than it was then. Now, by paying a debt of fifty or seventy dollars which the poor fellow owes to somebody, his services may be secured, while formerly it took, perhaps, ten times that amount to purchase a slave.

Unfortunately, Afro-Ecuadorians would have to wait for the Land Reform (1964) to be completely free, which meant not having to work for the landowner and acquiring the right to receive an education and to vote. Ecuadorian slavery lasted for more than four centuries and cannot be analyzed in a homogeneous way. In this chapter, I will try to break down this delicate and unfortunate part of Ecuadorian history into three separate phases, which may help us better understand the evolution of slavery over time. The first phase concerns the Africans who arrived in the early times of colonization – during the 16th and the 17th centuries (roughly 1530-1680) – with the Spanish settlers. These Africans included both slaves and freemen, who served as military personnel or servants in the many campaigns of discovery, pacification and settlement. They mainly came from the Iberian Peninsula or from Latin American territories already colonized and presumably could speak good approximations of Spanish (Bryant 2005:35)1. The second phase (1680-1760) consisted of an increase in the number of African-born slaves introduced to the colony, who mainly were employed in mining camps, tropical plantations and as domestic servants. Finally, the third period (1760-1964) saw a progressive reduction in bozal transactions and a gradual acquisition of civil rights by the enslaved population, who officially became free in 1854, but had to work as huaspingos until 1964, year of the Land Reform. Before entering into the details of these three phases, it is important to point out that Afro-descendents in colonial Ecuador have never achieved the demographic figures seen in other Latin American coastal colonies. Two main reasons are considered responsible for this situation: (1) the geographical location of 1 When talking about Popayán, one of the main slave markets in colonial Ecuador, Bryant (2005:35) says that “though the 17th century Afro-Creoles had accounted for the majority of Popayán’s slave population. Interspersed within this group were ethnic Africans, the majority of who had emanated originally from regions within Central Africa and the Upper Guinea Coast of West Africa. Many of these ethnic Africans were ‘ladinos’, who spoke Spanish, ‘professed’ Catholicism and understood the inner working of Spanish colonial societies.”

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Ecuador, which made the importation of Africans into the colony more difficult – and therefore more expensive; (2) the relative availability of a native workforce. Tardieu (2006:167) exemplifies this situation with the words of the scientist Antonio de Ulloa, who took part in an expedition in 1748 to measure the Ecuadorian meridian: El vecindario de gente baja o común puede dividirse en cuatro clases, que son españoles o blancos, mestizos, indios o naturales y negros con sus descendientes. Este último no abunda tanto a proporción como en otros parajes de las Indias, casi porque no es tan fácil su conducción como porque en general son los indios los que se emplean en el cultivo de la tierra y demás ejercicios del campo. (Lower class or common people can be divided into four groups, which are Spaniards or Whites, mestizo, Indians or Natives and Blacks with their descendants. This last group is not as large as in other areas of the Indies because it is not easy to transport them here and because generally Indians are employed to work the land and for other agricultural tasks).

Historian Andrien Kenneth (1995:37-44) indicates that Ecuador’s slave population between 1690 and 1830 was never more than 12,000 out of a total population of 430,000 (cf. also Bryant 2005:12-13). History scholars working on black slavery in the Americas have traditionally drawn a clear line between what they consider a ‘slave society’ and a ‘society with slaves’ (cf. Berlin 1997; Finely 1980; see also Bryant 2005 for a modified terminological account). For example, in Berlin’s (1997) view, the former would be a society in which the institution of slavery represented the core of the colonial economic system, such as in some English and French Caribbean colonies. On the other hand, the Ecuadorian region and the rest of mainland Spanish colonies would be better described as “societies with slaves”, where “pockets of slaves and masters” (Genovese 1971:63; cf. Bryant 2005:13) could be encountered but the socioeconomic structure of the colony was not primarily based on the relations between slaves and their holders. This categorization, however, does not undermine the fact that Africans – even though they were a minority group – played a crucial role in the colonization, pacification and economic development of the Andean region. From the very beginning of Spanish colonial enterprise, we can find enslaved and free blacks working as active explorers, soldiers, domestic servants, farmers and in many other working positions (see for example Bowser 1974). Moreover, it must be said that in certain regions, at specific points in time, the Afro-descendant/ negroid population of Ecuador may have very well been a majority group (e.g., Guayaquil, Ibarra, Popayán) (Bryant 2005:14). While keeping in mind these considerations, we will now attempt an account of the three aforementioned phases of Ecuadorian black slavery.

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2.2.1. First phase (1530-1680) Africans played an active role in the colonization of Ecuador. Bryant (2005:1) begins his dissertation by pointing out that: Inscribed on the outside walls of Quito’s Cathedral is a list of the men who invaded, occupied and ultimately renamed the Inka city of Quito for Saint Francis on August 28, 1534. Listed among these individuals are two blacks – Juan (de color negro) and Antón (negro). Juan and Antón represented the hundreds (and perhaps thousands by this date) of black explorers, conquistadors, slaves and squires who had come to the Americas during the age of conquest (1492-1550). Although the biographical records for Juan and Antón are sketchy, sources indicate that they were freemen. One imagines that, like many of their black counterparts throughout the Americas, Juan and Antón earned the prestige of founding a colonial city the hard way – shedding blood, sweat and tears in early conquest battles. Perhaps they fought at Cajamarca or in that infamous battle against the Inka general Rumiñavi, which occurred just south of the city of Quito in Puruhá near Mount Chimborazo. In either case, Juan and Antón must have contributed significantly to the conquest effort of the north highlands because their Spanish counterparts bestowed upon them the title of fundador of the city of Quito.

For several years, during the early times of Andean colonization, the Crown gave permission to reliable settlers to import a certain number of black captives for military purposes and for the construction of public infrastructures (Bowser 1974). In order to enter the Andean region, these first blacks were not usually shipped directly from Africa, but rather imported from other American colonies or the Iberian Peninsula. The Spanish Crown’s monopolization of the slave trade played an important role in constraining the introduction of black slaves into the New World, thus keeping the black/white ratio relatively low in several regions of Spanish America (e.g., Venezuela, see Díaz-Campos and Clements 2008; Bolivia, see Sessarego 2011a,b,c). An official Ecuadorian census reporting clear percentages of blacks, whites and natives does not exist for the 16th century. Rosenblat (1955:88) attempts to provide some approximate figures; he identifies a total population of 416,500, where the overwhelming majority would be Indians (400,000), the whites would account for 6,500 individuals and the remaining ethnic groups taken together would be approximately 10,000 (blacks, mulattoes and especially mestizos). Even though demographic data is not precise, from the legal documents dating back to those years, we can ascertain that there were several serious constraints on the introduction of Africans into Ecuador. In fact, even though there were many cases of Spanish settlers asking the Royal Crown to import African slaves, oftentimes the kings completely or partially denied these petitions. Bryant (2005:35-36) mentions in this regard the cases of the high court justice

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Licenciado Francisco Auncibay, the solicitor general Juan de Rada, as well as many other settlers, who urged the Crown to send tax-free African slaves to Ecuador to provide the colony with the highly needed black workforce. Despite these numerous requests, the kings refused to support the settlers due to the risky business of slave trading. On the other hand, the Crown released asientos or ‘trading licenses’ to encourage private companies to undertake the high risks involved in shipping slaves to the Indies. Traders also had to pay the Crown almorjarifazgos or ‘import taxes’ and alcabalas or ‘sales fees’ for all slave sales in the New World (Bryant 2005:31). Blacks were taken to Ecuador through several routes. Slaves were shipped from Africa and from Spain to Cartagena (Colombia). After this strenuous transatlantic journey, they were sent to Panama, where they had to cross the isthmus. Once on the Pacific side of Panama, they were shipped again to the port of Guayaquil, present-day Ecuador and Callao, present-day Peru and then resold and distributed in the southern Ecuadorian region. Another common route to introduce slaves into the colony was to ship them from Cartagena to Popayán (an Andean town on the western side of present-day Colombia) along the Magdalena River and force them to walk over inland roads. Once in Popayán, slaves were purchased by the highest bidder who generally used them for domestic purposes or in mines and farms scattered across the coastal plains and the northern highland of the colony (Colmenares 1997; Bryant 2005). Map 2.1. Slave trade routes to Ecuador

Cartagena

Panamá Bogotá

Colombia

Popayán

Ecuador

Perú Lima

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There were many cases of shipwrecks and mutinies involving black slaves along the Pacific coast and the Magdalena River. The most famous sea accident is probably the shipwreck that took place on the beaches of the present-day Esmeralda region (Ecuador) in October 1553, which eventually gave birth to the AfroEcuadorian dynasties of Alonso de Llesca, Juan de Mangache and Francisco de Arobe (1553-1867) (cf. Tardieu 2006: ch.2). Pickard (2010:31-32) indicates that the overland route and the Magdalena River navigation were likely even worse. He quotes a traveler of that time who remarked that roads around Popayán were the worst “in the world.” For this reason, traders usually did not send bozal children to Ecuador and many families were separated in Cartagena. In fact, those journeys were extremely strenuous and many casualties tended to occur amongst the slave population. Regardless of the route, the introduction of Africans into Ecuador was not an easy task. These transportation barriers inevitably resulted in a higher price for the slaves sold in the colony. As a result, acquiring African slaves was not affordable. Colmenares (1997:42-48) indicates that in the 17th century a slave purchased in Cartagena for 200-240 pesos could be sold in Popayán for 450-500. In the Kingdom of Quito, as in other Andean regions, possessing African slaves became a costly symbol of social and economic power (see also Crespo 1977 for Bolivia). For this reason, whenever possible, Spanish entrepreneurs preferred to employ the native population. Indians could not be enslaved, but they could be forced to work hard for a minimal salary through a rotational system called mit’a. The mit’a system, adopted by the Incas in preHispanic times, established that each worker would be given a working task for a specific length of time. Nobody would be asked to work again until everyone worked a shift. All these restrictions led many slaveholders to the inhumane habit of coupling slaves together to “produce” more slaves. This phenomenon, combined with the limited introduction of bozales, led to the growth of a relatively large AfroCreole population (Bryant 2005:ch.2). In fact, until the end of the 17th century, the vast majority of the Afro-Ecuadorians were not African-born slaves. For the most part, they were locally born. Bryant (2005:78) indicates that bozales represented only 25.8% of all Quito sales between 1580 and 1600. He believes that even fewer ethnic Africans reached Ecuador’s highland since the majority of those entering the colony were purchased by miners in Popayán and the slave holding elite in Guayaquil. Bryant points out that during the 17th century Ecuador-born blacks were the majority of the highland Afro-population. Central to the process were enslaved women who were “producing a good number of AfroCreole children” (Bryant 2005:79). Bryant goes on to suggest that the process leading to Afro-Creole growth began in the last two decades of the 16th century and that masters incentivized African reproduction to increase the number of

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slaves. Bryant says that these claims are further confirmed by archival data since 21 of the 116 women sold in Quito between 1580 and 1600 were sold along with their born creole children, while another one was mentioned as pregnant. The promise of more creole children was oftentimes an important requirement for slave transactions. In fact, there were sixteen cases of marriage being reported “among the conditions to purchase an enslaved male and female” (2005:79). The statistical data available suggests that bozales were not the majority, in particular in the northern highland region of the Kingdom. Tardieu reports data for the slave sales in Quito from 1582 to 1660. Out of 307 individuals sold, 130 were black bozales, 130 were black criollos and 47 were mentioned as mulattoes (Tardieu 2006:174). Cuenca records (1563-1669) showed 97 black bozales, 108 black criollos and 26 mulattoes (Tardieu 2006:273). Only Guayaquil (16281678) presented a higher number of black bozales (46), followed by black criollos (13), mulattoes (2) and zambos (1) (Tardieu 2006:231). Bryant (2005:33-34) also shows that by the turn of the 17th century slave importations in Popayán were minimal: between 1583 and 1605 only 53 slaves were exchanged, of whom 29 were described as ‘mulatos or criollos’. The author goes on to clearly state that until the end of the 1670s Afro-Creoles represented the “clear majority” of the black population in the Popayán area (Bryant 2005:63). A clear example to illustrate his point is a document listing 46 enslaved men, women and children among the holdings of two local miners; only seven were bozales while the rest were criollos. Bryant (2005:ch.1-2) indicates that during this phase slaves were sometimes in the position to purchase their freedom or the freedom of their beloved ones. Documents from the time show that blacks could work extra hours or during the festivities and in this way pocket extra money that they could use to achieve manumission (cf. Tardieu 2006:208-212, 256-261, 300-304). Slaves could also resort to legal means to find a new owner if they were mistreated by their masters (Bryant 2005). Archival data also reports cases of slaves filling lawsuits against their masters. One instance is the legal practice of Afro-Criollo Francisco against Fray Diego Rivera de Chávez on May 7, 1680, in Popayán (cf. Bryant 2005:186). In summary, the sociohistorical information available for the period spanning from the early colonization of Ecuador (first decades of the 16th century) until the end of the 1670s does not seem to indicate that a full-fledged creole language could have emerged amongst the Afro-descendent population of this region. In fact, logistic and economic restrictions did not allow for the massive introduction of bozales into the colony; therefore, blacks were overall a small minority (Andrien 1995) and the majority of them were locally born (Bryant 2005; Tardieu 2006). Moreover, the

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presence of several documents attesting to manumissions and lawsuits appears to suggest that social hierarchies were more flexible in Ecuador than in many other American colonies. These facts lead one to believe that Ecuadorian blacks during this phase could probably speak Spanish or a good approximation of it. Schwegler (PC) correctly indicates that it may be misleading to equate bozales to potential creole creators while assuming that criollos would speak Spanish, since several criollos – who already spoke a creole language – might have been introduced into the country from a different region (e.g., Colombia). Based on the demographic and socioeconomic information I was able to collect, I personally find it difficult to believe that a creole language, if ever introduced by slaves into Ecuador, might have been passed on from generation to generation at this time. Data confirms that the black population in the region was a small minority and that Africans probably had relatively good access to Spanish. Moreover, while some of the criollos might have been introduced at an adult age from different Latin American colonies, we have clear evidence suggesting that a good part of them were locally born; this was partially due to the inhumane reproduction strategy implemented by Ecuadorian slaveholders (cf. Bryant 2005). The fact of having a relatively large locally-born slave population during this early phase might have had an ulterior effect on the development of a black Spanish variety close to the Spanish spoken by the white population in the colony (cf. Mufwene 1996; Arends 2008). In the literature on creole formation, it has also been convincingly argued that the faster the locally-born population emerges, the more the resulting contact variety is influenced by the lexifier (Singler 1992:326). 2.2.2. Second phase (1680-1770) As mentioned previously, several factors contributed to deincentivizing the employment of black workers in Ecuador: the Spanish Crown’s monopoly over slave trading, the transportation impediments and the cost of Africans, which was comparatively higher than the cost of employing Indians. These factors persisted and regulated the dimensions of black slavery in Ecuador also during the “second phase” (1680-1770). Nonetheless, this period of time experienced a significant increase in the number of bozal slave imports. The reason for this can be found in two key facts: (1) a significant reduction in the Indian population, decimated by European diseases, natural disasters and the harsh working conditions imposed by the mit’a system; (2) the discovery of several important gold reserves in the Popayán area and in the Chocó region. The concomitance of these two factors led several local miners to quickly purchase African slaves to use them in their mines. Bozal imports saw their peak in the last decades of the 17th century in this region (Bryant 2005:64). Regardless of this significant

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increase, bozal introduction never achieved the demographic dimensions seen in several other American colonies (e.g., Haiti, Brazil, etc.). Colmenares (1997:34) provides a detailed account of the Popayán slave market from 1690 to 1780. He presents the percentages of slaves sold in Popayán with respect to those introduced into Cartagena. He also provides the names of the different trading companies who held the salve trafficking asientos at different points in time during the period under analysis (see Table 2.1.). Table 2.1. Percentage of slaves sold in Popayán with respect to Cartagena’s sales (from Colmenares 1997:34) Cartagena’s sales

Year

Popayán’s sales

%

Cacheu (Port.)

2,538

1699-1703

383

15.0

Guinea (Fr.)

4,251

1704-1715

320

7.5

Year

Asiento

1688-1702 1703-1713

1715-1718 South Sea Co. I (Eng.)

1,430

1716-1720

123

8.4

1722-1727

South Sea Co. II (Eng.)

3,949

1722-1728

248

6.3

1730-1736

South Sea Co. III (Eng.)

4,919

1730-1738

991

20.1

1746-1757

Moyort-Noriega (Dutch)

12,957

1746-1757

765

5.9

Total

30,044

2,827

9.4

Table 2.1. shows that Popayán received a significant percentage of the slaves imported through Cartagena. Bryant (2005:67) claims that it became “the slave market of North Andes.” In fact, the majority of the slaves introduced into Ecuador passed through this town. Table 2.1. also shows that, as of 1703, all asientos were either in French, English or Dutch hands. This fact is relevant to our research as it further reduces the possibility of a stable Afro-Portuguese creole language spoken by blacks across the Ecuadorian territory (contra Schwegler 1999), since – as it is shown by the data – as of 1703 other European powers, speaking different languages, were providing the Spanish colonies with slaves, not the Portuguese2. 2 Schwegler (PC) acknowledges that in some instances this may have been the case. However, he points out that in other occasions the slaves taken to the Americas by other European powers could have spoken some Portuguese. For example, he indicates that during the 18th century, the Dutch used to extract slaves from the Loango coast, where, by that time, a contact variety of Portuguese was already used by the local populations.

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In Table 2.2., Colmenares (1997:36) reports the percentage of criollos and bozales and the age of the slaves sold in the town from 1690 to 1780. As can be seen, even though during this period imported bozal slaves achieved a peak, almost 60% of slaves were still criollos. The sales of criollos and mulatos, in fact, were far more common here than in Cartagena, especially when the supply of African-born slaves was low: for example between 1690 and 1701, during the Succession War (1705-1710) and when there were disruptions with the supply of asientos (1715-1720, 1740-1745 and 1753-1759) (Colmenares 1997:35). Data also shows that among the bozales the percentage of children under the age of ten was minimal (only 3%). This further supports Pickard’s (2010:31-32) observation that young slaves were not sent to Popayán from Cartagena due to the strenuous journey separating the two towns3. Table 2.2. Slaves sold in Popayán 1690-1789 (% according to their age) (from Colmenares 1997:36) Ages

Criollos (1,074 cases)

Bozales (749 cases)

0-5

7.0

0.2

6-11

13.5

2.8

11-15

22.3

25.5

16-20

27.9

39.9

21-25

14.8

16.7

26-30

10

9.2

31-35

1.8

2.9

36-40

26.6

2.7

Total

100

100

%

58.9

41.1

Even if the number of bozales increased in the Ecuadorian territory, criollos were still a big community and the habit of using them to “produce” more

3 Schwegler (PC) points out that Navarrete (2012) shows how creole slaves were also numerous in the foundational period of Palenque, Colombia. He claims that there was probably no difference between that scenario and the Chota one. I do not agree with Schwegler on this point; I think that the bozal presence was probably much more marked in the surroundings of Cartagena than in Chota Valley. I believe that this difference was due to the geographical barriers and the financial constraints linked to the transportation of African captives from Cartagena to highland Ecuador.

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slaves was still a common practice. In fact, the high fertility rate of the black population in the 17th and 18th centuries was partially related to a “slave production strategy” employed by slave owners. This phenomenon has also been corroborated by Lucena Salmoral (1994a:63) who reports the existence of a letter sent in 1752 to the Bishop of Cartagena addressing this topic. The sender asked the cleric for information concerning the Governor’s complaints regarding cases of slave mistreatment. The document mentioned the presence in Cartagena of “amas de concencia tan depravada que, si la negra no pare todos los años, la venden por inútil” (masters with low morals who would sell a black slave woman for being useless, if she did not give birth every year). Lucena Salmoral (1994a:63) explains that this kind of reproduction mechanism must have been quite a common practice and probably it significantly reduced the need for bozal slaves in many regions of Spanish America. The author quotes a letter dated March 31, 1794, from the Consejo de Indias describing a fundamental difference between Spanish, English and French colonies in the Americas. The Consejo’s director of several departments (La Habana, Santo Domingo, Louisiana and Caracas) indicated that the French and the English imported on average 50,000 bozales yearly (25,000 each). This was done to maintain a constant number of workers, many of whom died from the harsh living conditions. On the other hand, Spanish colonies had relatively high birth rates and a longer life expectancy; this reduced the need for new bozales. The reduction in the number of slaves in Hispanic America was due to the relatively high manumission rate. Moreover, interethnic marriages were more common, giving birth to mixed-race individuals (castas), some of which were free (Lucena Salmoral 1994a:63): Entre los españoles se disminuye el número de esclavos por la facilidad con que se libertan, pero no porque parecen entre los rigores de un trato inhumano, pues en el fondo las varias castas, llamadas gentes de color, que deben su origen a la esclavitud. (Amongst the Spaniards the number of slaves tends to decrease because it was easier to achieve manumission, but not because slaves would die due to inhumane working conditions, this gave birth to a variety of mixed races, called colored people, who originated from slavery).

Bryant indicates that the Society of Jesus was very active in Popayán at this time. Jesuits, in fact, used to purchase slaves in this market for their extensive agro-pastoral haciendas in the Cauca Valley and in the Chota-Mira region (Bryant 2005:67). The Jesuit presence in Popayán’s slave market is further highlighted by Colmenares (1997:141) who shows that from 1731-1735 four religious orders (Santo Domingo, La Encarnación Convent, Society of Jesus and La Merced Convent) purchased a total of 137 slaves (16% of the total number sold in those years). In contrast to the previous phase, Bryant suggests

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that during this period slaves found it more difficult to amass enough capital to achieve manumission (2005:65). In summary, this second phase of Ecuadorian black slavery was characterized by the emergence of Popayán as the slave market of the North Andes in which the Jesuits played an active role. This was due to the concomitance of two facts: (1) the overall decrease in the indigenous population; and (2) the need for a new workforce to be used in the recently discovered gold mines of Popayán and the Chocó regions. This situation led to a significant increase in the number of bozal slaves sold in the region. These people, however, did not outnumber the criollo population. Criollos, in fact, represented almost 60% of slaves sold in Popayán. This was due to the fact that the flow of slaves from Cartagena to Popayán was not continuous; rather, it was often interrupted by external factors (wars, lack of asientos, etc.). Moreover, the inhumane habit of coupling slaves together to obtain more slaves was still a common practice so that overall the criollo slaves sold in Popayán from 1690 to 1780 outnumbered the bozales. Interestingly, due to the different companies involved in the transatlantic slave trade, mainly English, French and Dutch as of 1703 (Colmenares 1997:34), the bozal population was characterized by significant ethnic diversity (Bryant 2005:ch.2-3). This last factor seems to reduce the likelihood of a stable Portuguese-based creole spoken in the colony since – at that time – slaves were no longer in contact with the Portuguese traders. 2.2.3. Third phase (1770-1964) Colmenares suggests that during the last decades of the 18th century the number of bozales introduced into Popayán decreased significantly. He goes on to state that from 1780, the slave market could be “entirely supported with slaves born in the region” (Colmenares 1997:36). This fact seems to further reduce the possibility of a creole language developing during this period. This third phase of black subjugation is crucial in determining a progressive end to slave trafficking. In 1767 the Society of Jesus was expelled from Spain and its colonies so that the Jesuit properties – slaves included – were confiscated. As a result, the Crown became the major slaveholder and quickly tried to sell the slaves and the haciendas where they resided to private holders through the Consejo de Temporalidades, a council which administrated these properties until they passed to the hands of the new owners. This had a disastrous effect on the socioeconomic infrastructure of Ecuador since the Jesuits had been able to build an economic empire based on a well structured network of business activities, which fell apart after their forced departure

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(Andrien 1995). From 1820 to 1822, Simón Bolívar fought in the war against Spain which would eventually lead to Ecuador’s independence. In 1821, the ‘libertad de vientres’ law was approved by the congress of Gran Colombia and children born to enslaved women were considered free people. Nevertheless, Afro-Ecuadorians still worked as huaspingos until 1964, year of the Land Reform (Chalá Cruz 2006). Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego (1959) provide a breakdown of Ecuador’s population in 1781 (see Table 2.3.), while Lucena Salmoral (1994) provides similar data for 1784 (Table 2.4.). Table 2.3. Kingdom of Quito’s population in 1781 (Adapted from Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego 1959:224) Provinces

Population

Whites

Indians

Mestizos*

Blacks

Province of Guayaquil

31,090

4,659

9,331

14,969

2,131

Other Provinces

311,649

83,250

213,287

12,559

2,553

Total

342,739

87,909

222,618

27,528

4,684

%

100

25.65

64.95

8.03

1.37

Offspring of Whites and Indians.

*

Table 2.4. Kingdom of Quito’s population in 1784 (Adapted from Lucena-Salmoral 1994b:22) Provinces

Population

Whites

Indians

Libres or ‘free’

Slaves

Province of Guayaquil

34,298

5,641

10,303

16,255

2,099

Other Provinces

421,800

115,785

289,493

13,776

2,293

Total

456,098

121,426

299,795

30,031

4,846

%

100

26.62

65.73

6.58

1.06

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As can be observed, the data presented in Table 2.3. and 2.4. is not exactly the same. Nevertheless, both tables display consistent demographic patterns, especially if we consider that the authors consulted different sources at different points in time4. The main differences that can be noted are the labels used to categorize population groups. Lucena Salmoral uses the word libres to include non-tributary Indians, manumitted blacks and mixed races or castas. This group seems to match with what Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego call mestizos or ‘mixed race.’ Two other labels overlapping to a good extent are ‘blacks’ (Table 2.3.) and ‘slaves’ (Table 2.4.). What emerges quite clearly from this data is that at this point in time, in the Kingdom of Quito, the enslaved/black population was a small minority that did not outnumber whites. Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego (1959:223) also provide estimates for how the black population evolved from 1781 to 1957. As can be seen in Table 2.5., the black population experienced a large increase during the last 101 years 1856-1957. The authors suggest that this demographic boom was probably driven by improvements of overall health conditions from the beginning of the 20th century (e.g., eradication of malaria, access to more medicines, etc.). Table 2.5. Ecuador’s black population evolution from 1784 to 1957 (Adapted from Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego 1959:223) Year

Black population

1781

4,684

1825

6,804

1856

7,831

1957

30,200

Overall, figures suggest that colonial Afro-descendents were a very small demographic group. However, it must be said that in certain places at specific moments in time Afro-Ecuadorians might have been the majority of the population (Bryant 2005:14). One such region may have been colonial Chota Valley. In the next section, we will focus on the available sociohistorical evidence to determine the feasibility of a creole hypothesis for this area. 4 Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego (1959:224) report data collected by Luis T. Paz Y Miño (1942) and further elaborated by the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Antropología y Geografía. Lucena Salmoral (1994b:22) reports data collected in the Archivo Nacional de Historia de Ecuador e Histórico Nacional de Colombia.

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2.3. Chota Valley According to Rosario Coronel Feijóo (1991:67), the socioeconomic history of colonial Chota Valley can roughly be divided into three key phases: (1) The indigenous phase (until 1610), (2) The transition phase (1610-1680) and (3) the Jesuit phase (1680-1767). As we can see, these periods coincide – to a good extent – with the phases we identified as key for Ecuadorian black slavery. Therefore, while analyzing the socioeconomic evolution of Chota Valley, we will keep these phases in mind. 2.3.1. The indigenous phase (until 1610) Coronel Feijóo (1991:ch.1) indicates that during the 15th century Chota Valley (also called Coangue) used to be inhabited by the native population who grew coca and cotton. The territory remained under indigenous control until 1530s, when the first Spaniards entered the region. Gradually, Spaniards conquered these lands. They used an Indian workforce – through the mit’a system – and some enslaved Africans to grow olives and grapes for the production of wine. The first blacks to enter this region probably arrived around 1575. They belonged to the Tulcán cacique, García Tulcanaza. Coronel Feijóo tells us that they were purchased in Cartagena de Indias and were originally from Guinea and Angola. Around 1580-1590, due to the presence of blacks in the region and the harsh working conditions applied to the natives by the Spaniards, several Indians moved to Pimampiro. Census records report 2,350 Indians in Chapi and Pimampiro around 1582. According to the priest, Antonio de Borja, around that period in Coangue there were six Spaniards who produced wine and had some blacks working on their haciendas. 2.3.2. The transition phase (1610-1680) This period is called the transition phase because it was characterized by the Jesuits’ arrival into the region, their incremental acquisition of properties and the gradual change in the labor force used to work on their haciendas. The Society of Jesus managed to acquire a large number of the region’s lands through rebates, purchases and donations. Coronel Feijóo (1991:56-60) explains this phase of progressive expansion and reports the systematic acquisition of lands in Table 2.6.

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Sandro Sessarego Table 2.6. Jesuit land acquisitions 1615-1645 (Adapted from Coronel Feijóo 1991:143) Sellers

1 2

Land size

Total amount paid (pesos)

Census (pesos)

Year

Place

1615

Pimampiro

Hernando Salzar

_

_

_

3,037

_

1616

Coangue

_

Cacique Lucas de Alor

_

_

80

_

1615

Pimampiro

Juan Riveros

_

7

104

_

_

2

_

_

Spaniards Indians Caballerías1 Cuadras2

Villaman 1625 (Pichimbuela)

_

Cacique Luis García Alor

1625

Alor (Pimampiro)

_

Cacique Luis García

10

_

_

_

1625

Coangue

_

Cacique Lucas de Alor

_

_

15

_

1627

Pimampiro

Cura Fernando Cortez

_

8

_

_

_

1627

Valle Pimampiro

Cura Fernando Cortez

_

8

_

5,300

_

1628

_

Domingo Pereira

_

7

_

1,500

_

1645

Pilcacho (Pimampiro)

Colegio Jesuita de Ibarra

_

_

_

100

_

1645

Caldera

Antonio García

_

_

_

7,500

_

One caballería equals 38.646 hectares. One cuadra equals 6.400 m².

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During this period, conflicts between Indians and Spaniards escalated. The administration of water resources became a key issue of dispute. The Spanish Crown in 1612 became a mediator between Spanish colonists and the native population. Blacks, introduced by the Spaniards, were present in the region and participated actively in the fights over water control. Coronel Feijóo (1991:69) quotes some archival documents which say: Mayordomos, esclavos negros y propietarios a punta de piedras, látigo, rejo y palo, comienzan a imponer nuevas normas de distribución del agua sobre las antiguas reglas indígenas [...] andan con palos, rejones, perros, rodando y aguardando el agua. (Stewards, black slaves and owners impose new water distribution rules on old Indian norms; they use stones, whips, spikes and sticks […] they walk around with sticks, big spikes and dogs to control water resources).

It looks as if black slaves occupied an intermediate position between Spaniards and Indians (much like in other parts of Latin America, cf. Sessarego 2011a:2527 for Bolivia). Also, this factor indirectly suggests that blacks had relatively good access to the language spoken by their masters. Due to these conflicts and the continuous Spanish expansion, many Indian groups fled. As a result, much of the native workforce moved away from these lands. In certain villages, these migrations were massive. Coronel Feijóo (1991:71) indicates that Pimampiro in 1570 had a population of 738 tributarios or ‘tax-paying Indians’, in 1598 there were 500 and in 1667 only 21 were left. The need for a new workforce led to two solutions: (1) introducing Indians originating from other areas, mainly the highlands, into the region; and (2) resorting to new black slaves. Initially, the Jesuits implemented the first option; however, the introduction of Indians originating from colder highlands brought to the warm lands often caused their death, as reported by observers from that period: Los más indios que bajan a este Valle y río caen enfermos y mueren… he visto enterrar a muchos indios… de solo ir a los Valles. (The majority of the Indians who came to this valley and river get sick and die… I have seen the burial of many Indians… just because they went to the valleys) (Coronel Feijóo 1991:80).

As far as the second option is concerned, the introduction of a black workforce was gradual and generally combined with indigenous labor. Coronel Feijóo (1991:81) says that: Hablar de importación masiva de negros, para la época, parece sobredimensionado; difícil resulta atribuir a los estancieros de la zona un negocio de tal magnitude. (Talking about massive black importation, by that time, seems to be overstated; it is difficult to ascribe such a big business to local settlers).

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This fact is important in understanding the dimension of black slavery during this transitional phase. The presence of Spanish settlers working and fighting side by side with a contained number of blacks during the indigenous phase (cf. Coronel Feijóo 1991:ch.1-2) and the subsequent gradual introduction of slaves during this transitional period may further explain why a creole is not currently spoken in Chota Valley. According to the Founder Principle, a large proportion of the structure of today’s contact languages was determined by the vernaculars of the founder populations (cf. Mufwene 1996). Coronel Feijóo (1991:86) suggests that during the first half of the 17th century the Jesuits did not use a massive black workforce. They preferred to trade slaves to increase their liquidity in order to acquire more properties and obtain control over water resources. A case in point is the sale of 114 slaves (24 men, 24 women, 37 female children and 29 male children) in 1637 in the town of San Miguel de Ibarra5. This data seems to support the hypothesis that many of the blacks found in this region were criollos and could speak good approximations of Spanish. In fact, 66 out of the 114 slaves sold in this transaction were children and as we saw, few slaves of such a young age were imported from Cartagena to Ecuador due to the strenuous journey (cf. Pickard 2010:31-32). Moreover, in the literature on creole formation, it has also been convincingly argued that the faster the locally born population emerges, the more the resulting contact variety is influenced by the lexifier (Singler 1992:326). In 1648, there was strong Indian opposition to working for Spaniards in this warm region. Forty-three caciques met on behalf of the populations from San Pablo, Tontaqui, Cotacachi, Urcuqui, Tumbabiro, Salinas, Tulla and Muenala. After this meeting, the Governor and main cacique, Don Lorenzo Ango de Salazar, asked the King to oppose the new repartition of the Indian workforce in Ibarra. The King listened to him and in 1665 he prohibited the forced introduction of Indians from cold to warm lands (Coronel Feijóo 1991:83-84). The new limitations on the use of Indian workers, combined with the increase in the Jesuits’ liquidity, pushed the Society of Jesus to rely more heavily on an enslaved workforce, which became more predominant in the following decades. Nevertheless, as for this period of time, the possibility of a stable creole language spoken in Chota Valley appears to be ruled out. In fact, it is true that Africans could be encountered in this region as early as 1575, but their introduction occurred gradually (Coronel Feijóo 1991). Many of them participated in the 5 In this case the Jesuit Miguel XII de Madrigal sold the slaves to Captain Andrés de Sevilla. It must be said that in addition to these 114 slaves, 4 additional newborns were sold because they were born during the days the transaction took place.

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water battles against the Indians, while others were working in the haciendas belonging to Spanish settlers and religious orders. Given the era, the majority of them were probably criollos and could presumably speak Spanish. This is further supported by the high number of children reported in sales records6. 2.3.3. The Jesuit phase (1680-1767) The Jesuit phase is characterized by a subsequent enlargement of the Jesuit enterprise on the territory and by the increased use of an enslaved labor force to work mainly on sugarcane plantations. Table 2.7. summarizes the main steps in the Jesuit’s territorial expansion (cf. Coronel Feijóo 1991:144-145). Interestingly, data shows that one of the haciendas acquired by the Society of Jesus in 1728 was sold by Ignacio Brioso, a pardo or ‘mulatto’ who was the son of Cacica Rosa Pefigua (cf. Coronel Feijóo 1991:145). This shows that not all Afrodescendants present in the region were slaves and that interracial marriages happened. It also indicates a certain degree of social flexibility, since some of the Afro-Ecuadorians in this region could actually have been landlords. As far as the transition to using more of an enslaved workforce is concerned, Coronel Feijóo (1991:87) indicates that in 1700 in Cartagena, Juan Ruis Bonifacio, a Jesuit from the Society of Quito, received 36 slaves from a Dutch ship for a total number of 126 blacks. We do not know how many of them ended up in Chota Valley, how many were sold in Popayán, Guayaquil, Quito, Lima or other slave markets. Nevertheless, this indicates that the Jesuits had a prominent role in slave trafficking and sometimes acquired slaves directly in Cartagena. Coronel Feijóo (1991:93) indicates that the Jesuits probably acquired a certain number of slaves in Cartagena, Popayán and other markets during the last two decades of the 17th century and the first years of the 18th and then relied on the locally born criollo workforce (Coronel Feijóo 1991:93-94): Esto nos lleva a pensar que si los Jesuitas importaron hasta los primeros años del s. XVIII, quiere decir que a mediado del mismo siglo, ya no se trataba de negros bosales sino de una tercera o cuarta generación de criollos negros locales. (This suggests that if the Jesuits imported slaves until the beginning of the 18th century, by the middle of the same century, there were no longer African-born slaves, but rather a third or fourth locally-born generation). 6 As indicated earlier, assuming that only bozales could be creole speakers is not correct, since criollos proceeding from other Latin American regions might have introduced a creole language into the area. Nevertheless, given the high number of children, it is reasonable to assume that a good number of the criollos present in these plantations were locally born and therefore could not possibly be conductors of a creole developed somewhere else.

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Sandro Sessarego Table 2.7. Jesuit land acquisitions 1688-1728 (Adapted from Coronel Feijóo 1991:144-145) Sellers

Land size

Total amount Census (pesos) paid Indians Caballerías Cuadras (pesos)

Year

Place

1681

Hcda. Yumbaqui (Cuazara y Loma Antusumar)

Bernardino y Pedro Espinoza de los Monteros

_

_

_

22,000

_

1682

Land and mill in Santiago Valley

Thomás Fernández

_

_

_

2,500

_

_

192

_

30,258

18,742

1682

Spaniards

Bárbara se Hcda La Cerril y Diego Concepción Hernández

1684

Lands of Pisquer y Cauquer y Chiltazón, Pongo de Inguesa, others

Hrdo. De Juan de Onate y Gabriela Paredes

_

93

6.5

24,000

_

1684

Hatos de Imbiola, Palati (Yambaqui Valley)

Prbo. Joseph de la Chica

_

_

_

5,700

_

1685

Tierra y Pedro de Yepez trapiche de y Mariana de Paredes Sta. Lucía

_

_

_

5,000

11,000

1687

Estancia de Chorlaví

Juan de Ludena

_

2

1

2,000

400

_

Don Diego Pineda (Principal de Mira)

2

1

330

_

1688

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1688

Caldera

1688

_

1688

Huertas de Caldera

Different Valle periods Pimampiro

Priest from the San Augustín order

43

_

_

_

91

_

Cura de Puntal

_

_

_

120

_

P. Thomas de Villalba (Mercedario)

_

_

_

125

_

_

Indians from the region

_

_

_

_

1691

Caldera

Antonio Silva (cura de Pimampiro)

_

_

_

_

_

1696

Basan

_

Cacica Ana Vázquez

12

_

500

_

Chilcal Fco. De Sosa (Pimampiro)

_

_

_

1,000

_

1705 1708

Tierra de Carpuela

Convento Nta. Señora de la Merced

_

_

_

500

_

1728

Tierras de San Gerónimo de Lachas

_

Ignacio Brioso (pardo)

_

_

300

_

If this were the case, we may think that the number of bozales imported during these 20-30 years (1680-1710) might not have been massive enough to outnumber the total number of Spanish-speaking individuals already working on the plantations: locally-born slaves, Jesuits, mestizos, pardos, etc. – in line with Mufwene’s (1996) Founder Principle. This scenario might be further supported if we consider that the supply of bozales in Popayán from Cartagena was not constant and the sales of criollos and mulattoes increased between 1690 and 1701, during the Succession War (1705-1710) and when there were interruptions with the asientos (1715-1720, 1740-1745 and 1753-1759) (cf. Colmenares 1997:35). Two other authors who believe that the majority of the slaves introduced in the region were criollos are Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego (1959:215), who claim that: Cuando el elemento indígena se extinguió totalmente, en el valle, por la fuerza brutal e inhumana de las mitas, en todas ellas [las haciendas] y especialmente en las

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Sandro Sessarego de Chalguyacu, Carpuela, Santiago, Cachipamba, Chamanal, Tumbabiro, Cuajara y Písquer, se sustituyó, poco a poco, la escasez de brazos, con el contingente de negros esclavos, atraido ex-profeso para el laboreo de los trapiches desde Colombia, siendo, por tanto, ladinos criollos nacidos en tierras americanas. (When the Indian component became extinct, in the valley, due to the inhumane mit’a, in all haciendas and especially in Chalguyacu, Carpuela, Santiago, Cachipamba, Chamanal, Tumbabiro, Cuajara and Písquer, the shortage of an Indian workforce was gradually replaced by black slaves, who were imported purposely from Colombia to work on sugarcane plantations. For this reason, they were Creole people born in the Americas).

The reconstruction of the data at this point is a bit confusing. Different authors provide different accounts. Coronel Feijóo provides the following table indicating the number of slaves reported by the registers of the eight haciendas that used to belong to the Jesuit Society in Chota Valley before their expulsion in 1767 (Tumbabiro, Carpuela, Santiago, Chalguayacu, Chamanal, Concepcion, Caldera and Cuajara) (Coronel Feijóo 1991:88). Table 2.8. Number of slaves in the Jesuit haciendas by 1767 (Adapted from Coronel Feijóo 1991:88) Haciendas

Number of slaves

Tumbabiro

126

Carpuela

93

Santiago

123

Chalguayacu

87

Chamanal

152

Concepción

380

Caldera

95

Cuajara

268

Total

1,324

As can be observed, the total number of slaves mentioned in the official registers is 1,324. Nevertheless, Coronel Feijóo also indicates that in 1780, when the Temporalidades took the Jesuit properties under their control, the administrator Andrés Fernández Salvador stated in a document from that time that “las haciendas de su cargo tienen 1,037 cuadras de caña y 1,364 esclavos de trabajo pesado, 508 piezas de borriqueros y conductores 181, viejos y liciados 94: menores de 10 años 488” (the haciendas under your control have 1,037 sugarcane cuadras and 1,364 slaves for strenuous work, 508 supervisors and captains 181, old and crippled 94:

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younger than 10 are 488). Coronel Feijóo sums up all of these numbers to conclude that the actual total number of slaves in these haciendas was 2,615. Coronel Feijóo’s calculations have also been reported by Jurado Noboa (1992), who claims the presence of 2,615 slaves, with 1,324 used for strenuous work. The author also goes on to indicate the exact number of them in each hacienda: 760 in Concepción, 540 in Cuajara, 300 in Chamanal, 250 in Tumbabiro and 250 in Santiago. Unfortunately, when we total these numbers we get 2,100, rather than 2,615. Another curious fact about Jurado Noboa’s analysis is that all of the numbers he reported can be calculated by rounding Coronel Feijóo’s data and then multiplying the results by two7. In addition, the fact that each hacienda presents a number of slaves which is always exactly a multiple of ten appears to be an approximation rather than a real figure. The third author reporting this data is Nicholas Cushner (1982), an expert in Jesuit haciendas who wrote several books on the topic (e.g., Cushner 1976, 1980, 1983, etc.). After directly consulting the archival database of Quito, Cushner (1982:136) claims that: At the time of the Jesuit expulsion from Ecuador in 1767, the Jesuits owned a total of 1,364 black slaves, most of whom were sold at public auction. After medical examination, the council in charge of Jesuit property determined that 508 slaves were capable of heavy work, 181 were fit only to haul sugarcane, 94 were old and crippled and 488 were minors under ten years of age. Moreover, 93 were listed as troublemakers.

In my view, this seems more accurate and if we add up Cushner’s numbers we obtain a total of exactly 1,364. My impression is, therefore, that Cushner reported the correct information. Coronel Feijóo must have consulted the same sources, since some of their numbers match; however, she added up the numbers corresponding to each slave category instead of interpreting them as parts of the total. She calculated on her own a total of 2,165 slaves, which, in fact, are not mentioned in the original document. Jurado Noboa (1992) used Coronel Feijóo’s data and probably tried to figure out an approximate account of the real number of slaves employed in each hacienda, so that he provided rounder numbers in multiples of ten. A fourth account is the one by Bouisson (1997:47) who states that in those haciendas by 1767 there were 1,164 slaves (Table 2.9.)8. As can be observed, 7 Concepción, 380x2=760; Cuajara, 268→270, 270x2=540; Chamanal, 152→150, 150x2=300; Tumbabiro 126→125, 125x2=250; Santiago 123→125, 125x2=250. Note that ‘A→B’ stands for ‘A rounded to B.’ 8 Bouisson (1997:47) reported data taken from Rosaura García de Pólit (1992:167-169).

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Bouisson’s analysis is much more in line with Cushner’s than with Jurado Noboa’s and Coronel Feijóo’s. Table 2.9. Number of slaves in the Jesuit haciendas by 1767 (Adapted from Bouisson 1997:47) Haciendas

Number of slaves

Tumbabiro

112

Carpuela

110

Santiago

101

Chalguayacu

56

Chamanal

123

Concepción

302

Caldera

96

Cuajara

264

Total

1,164

A fifth account of the slaves used in these Jesuit haciendas is provided by Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego (1959:222) in Table 2.10. Table 2.10. Number of slaves in the Jesuit haciendas by 1767 (Adapted from Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego 1959:222)

Chota Valley Spanish.indd 46

Haciendas

Number of slaves

Tumbabiro

224

Carpuela

160

Santiago

168

Chalguayacu

122

Chamanal

349

Concepción

171

Caldera

200

Cuajara

77

Pisquer

52

Cachiyacu

168

Total

1,769

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Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego’s recompilation resulted from studying several documents put together after a long search to analyze the dimensions of the Chota Valley enslaved workforce. For this reason, their numbers present some discrepancies with Cushner and Bouisson’s data. However, the authors’ overall figures are quite similar, especially if we consider that their sources are not the same and that they account for different years (Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego and Bouisson for 1767; Cushner for 1780). Lucena Salmoral’s (1994b) account for the Kingdom of Quito population around 1784 reports a total of 1,073 slaves in the Ibarra region and 263 in Otavalo (see Table 2.11. and 2.12.). He (1994b:39-40) suggests that the racial categories were probably calculated differently in these two jurisdictions. In fact, he mentions as surprising the fact that the category libres (free) made up only 0.45% of the inhabitants of this corregimiento or ‘Indian district’, in a region were ‘slaves’ were a significant part of the population (6.61%). On the other hand, the Corregimiento de Otavalo showed a libre population which was too large with respect to the enslaved one. Lucena Salmoral (1994b:39) explains that most likely libres in Otavalo did not represent the number of manumitted slaves; rather, it consisted of mestizos or non-tributary Indians (who were free from paying taxes). If we take these considerations into account, we can see that even in these two jurisdictions blacks did not outnumber the white/mestizo population. Moreover, by 1784 the Jesuits had already left; this suggests that the white population was bigger in the past9.

9 At this point, I think it is correct to remind the readers that this data is obviously not perfect and that in certain communities/haciendas the black population probably – almost certainly – outnumbered the white/mestizo population. As Schwegler (PC) points out, this was likely the case for the villages at the bottom of Chota Valley, where the black inhabitants formed a cohesive and uniform community. Schwegler classifies these villages, especially the village called ‘Chota’, as “a world apart”, similar to Palenque in Colombia. With this being said, the goal of the data presented here is to provide the most detailed demographic account I could find to describe the racial composition of the Chota Valley population by the end of the 18th century, shortly after the Jesuit expulsion. Moreover, Schwegler claims that the variety spoken in the village of Chota during his last visit (more than twenty years ago) was remarkably more radical than the dialect used in the rest of the valley. I have to say that, during my visit in winter 2011, I could not find any linguistic phenomena which radically differed from those encountered in the surrounding communities.

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Sandro Sessarego Table 2.11. Demographic figures for the Corregimiento de Ibarra around 1784 (Lucena Salmoral 1994b:38)10

Jurisdictions

Population

Whites

Indians

Libres or ‘free’

Slaves

Villa de Ibarra (including also Cuajara and Santiago)

4,750

2,748

1700

74

228

Caranqui

1,477

681

796

0

0

Pimampiro (including also Carpuela, Chalguayacu and Caldera)

531

226

125

8

172

Mira (also including Chamanal)

1,979

584

937

2

456

Puntal

1,465

515

949

1

0

Tusa

1,175

348

827

0

0

Guaca

126

52

74

0

0

Tulcán

1,101

359

742

0

0

San Antonio

1,867

842

1023

0

2

Caguasquí

628

201

424

0

3

Inta

335

40

295

0

0

Salinas and Lachas

792

397

179

4

212

Total

16,226

6,993

8.071

89

1,073

%

100.00

43.09

49.74

0.45

6.61

10 Please note that, as indicated in the first column, table 2.11. provides information on the overall composition of the population living in Pimampiro and Mira, where the haciendas Carpuela, Chalguayacu, Caldera and Chalmanal were located.

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Table 2.12. Demographic figures for the Corregimiento de Otavalo around 1784 (Lucena Salmoral 1994b:39)11 Councils

Population

Whites

Indians

Libres or free

Slaves

Asiento de Otavalo (also including Concepción)

8,841

473

7,146

1,194

28

Cotacache

5,405

255

4,440

705

5

Urcuquí

3,109

233

2,142

726

8

Tumbabiro

1,349

333

648

230

138

Atuntaqui

2,828

526

1,556

668

78

San Pablo

3,774

187

2,944

643

0

Cayambe

6,471

310

5,215

944

2

Tabacundo

1,610

322

1,045

240

3

Tocache

1,333

156

884

293

0

Total

34,720

2,795

26,020

5,643

262

%

100.00

8.05

74.94

16.25

0.75

If we look at Jurado Noboa and Coronel Feijóo’s data, we see that 18.7% of the total population was children (488 out of 2,615), while if we analyze Cushner’s report, we can observe that the population under the age of 10 accounts for 35.7% (488 out of 1,324). In any case, this suggests that the fertility rate was high. Moreover, in the memories of Choteños (cf. Lipski 1986:158) and in the writings by several authors (Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego 1959; Chalá Cruz 2006), the existence of criaderos12 is reported at the Chalguayacu hacienda. Taking into consideration what Bryant (2005) and Lucena Salmoral (1994a) indicated previously about the reproduction strategies employed by slave owners in colonial time; it may be possible that the Jesuits incentivized the reproduction of slaves to obtain more of them. This is also testified by the claims of an old Choteño interviewed by Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego (1959:229), who says: 11 Please note that, as indicated in the first column, table 2.12. provides information on the overall composition of the population living in Otavalo, where the hacienda Concepción was located. 12 A criadero is a place where women were held captive and forced to have sex with black men to “produce” new slaves.

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Sandro Sessarego Me contaba mi agüelito, se les mandaba a los lavaderos de oro del río Mira a las minas de sal de la hacienda Cachiyacu o a Chalguayacu, de cuidadores de las doncellas negras allí guardadas para casarlas con los morenos más vivos e inteligentes y sacar buenas crías… (My grandfather used to tell me that they were sent to the place where gold-bearing sands were washed in the Mira River, to the Cachiyacu hacienda salt mines or to Chalguayacu, to supervise young black females, who were kept captive there to marry the strongest and smartest black males and to get good offspring…).

Bouisson (1997:48-49) indicates that Jesuits did their best to incentivize local growth and create nuclear families among the slave population. Men and women were generally in equal numbers in each hacienda; each couple had a house with a piece of land on which to grow their own food. This strategy had two goals: 1) to give the slaves the material means to support themselves and therefore reduce the hacienda’s expenses; 2) to create a link between the slaves, the land and their families to prevent revolts or attempted escapes. Bouisson (1997:51) claims that slaves could work on these parcels during their time off. They were not actually the owners of such fields, but they could keep the harvest for themselves and sell it on the local market to save some money and eventually purchase their manumission. This fact has also been highlighted by Coronel Feijóo (1991:111), who adds that Jesuits might have given the least productive fields around the hacienda to the slaves. Once the lands were cleaned and more productive, they would have been incorporated into the hacienda. This would have provided the Jesuits with an additional advantage: their plantation enterprise could grow faster thanks to the work of slaves incentivized to work hard for their own benefit. Soon after the Jesuit expulsion, a Temporalidades official13 reported that some blacks leased their own lands to white people: Los muchos negros que hai en ellas no sólo siembran en sus cuasi pongos, sino que arriendan tierras y hacen sus partidos entre los blancos, y siembran porciones de algodón, maís, trigo y demás frutos. (There are many blacks who not only work those lands as sort of peons; they also lease lands and work side by side with white people, they grow cotton, corn, wheat and fruits) (Coronel Feijóo 1991:110).

This comment provides us with another important detail about the social conditions in which these people used to live. In fact, it may suggest that some social flexibility and relatively high interracial contact existed. Bouisson (1997:48) shows that the men/women ratio was generally well balanced (Table 2.13.) and that families were numerous (1997:49). Table 2.14. pro-

13 The Temporalidades council was the organ in charge of selling administrating former Jesuit properties until they passed to the hands of the new owners.

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vides a picture of the families with at least two children in some of the Jesuit haciendas shortly after their expulsion. As can be seen, several families had more than five children. Table 2.13. Enslaved population in the Jesuit haciendas (1782-1783) (Adapted from Bouisson 1997:48) Haciendas

Men

%

Women

%

Total

Caldera

54

56.8

41

43.2

95

Carpuela

49

51.6

46

48.4

95

Chalguayacu

43

53.7

37

46.2

80

Chamanal

79

54.5

66

45.5

145

Concepción

180

52.2

165

47.8

345

Total

405

53.3

355

46.7

760

Table 2.14. Enslaved families with two or more children in the Jesuit haciendas (1782-1783) (Adapted from Bouisson 1997:49)

Haciendas

Families with 2 children or more

With 2 children

With 3 children

With 4 children

With 5 children or more

Caldera

11

4

2

4

1

Carpuela

10

5

2

–

3

Chalguayacu

8

1

1

3

3

Chamanal

22

5

8

6

3

Concepción

47

13

10

8

16

Bryant (2005:181) indicates that by 1786, hacienda records show a variety of African-born individuals, classified in the records as: Mina, Congo, Arara, Caravalí and Mondongo. He states that all these bozales lived with and married AfroCreoles, who formed the overwhelming majority. This piece of information suggests that bozales were a minority and that coupling them with criollos might have been a strategy adopted by the Jesuits to further facilitate their adaptation to the new environment. Documents from the time testify to the organization of similar Jesuit haciendas in other parts of Spanish America. Macera (1966) illustrates the management of Jesuit sugarcane plantations in Peru. Besides provid-

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ing additional evidence concerning the Jesuits’ support of nuclear families and slave reproduction14, Macera tells us something about the religious and human side of the Jesuit enterprise. All slaves were given Sundays and Christian festivities off, they were fed, clothed and instructed in the faith. Everybody had a task in teaching the Christian doctrine: the primary role of the eldest slaves was to pray aloud during religious ceremony, while criollo slaves catechized bozales (1966:41). This last detail may indicate that Spanish language learning was facilitated through religious indoctrination. Even if the Jesuit management was family-oriented and incentivized local population growth, it is important to remember that the working and living conditions in these haciendas were quite harsh. Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego describe the exhausting workload taken on by slaves in the trapiches ‘mills’ (1959:225) as well as the tremendous punishments applied to those who refused to obey or tried to escape. Slaves often received back lashes and salt in their wounds. In some extreme cases, for example if they attempted to run away several times, they were starved, beaten and mutilated (1959:229). Paradoxically, after the Jesuits left, the living conditions of Afro-Choteños did not improve. On the contrary, they remained under the control of private landlords who oftentimes did not even preserve the integrity of their families. In fact, soon after the Jesuit expulsion, the Crown assigned the administration of these haciendas to the Temporalidades council, the organ in charge of selling former Jesuit properties. Lucena Salmoral (1994a), Bouisson (1997) and Bryant (2005) report many cases of black resistance and revolts to keep their families and communities together. The struggle against private landlords was first alleviated by the libertad de vientres law in 1821, which guaranteed the freedom of the children born to slave mothers. Another key step in black civil rights acquisition was represented by the abolition of slavery in 1854, when General José María Urbina declared that “a partir de esa fecha en adelate no habrá más esclavos en Ecuador (art. 38)” (from this moment there will no longer be slaves in Ecuador (art. 38)) (cf. Bouisson 1997:57). Nevertheless, Afro-Ecuadorians would live as huaspingos until 1964, when the Land Reform turned them into small land owners by providing them with small parcels of land which previously belonged to the haciendas. In summary, the data encountered for the Jesuit phase (1680-1767) is a bit contradictory in that different authors provide different demographic figures. 14 Macera (1966:38) says: “Con el equilibrio de sexos lo que se pretendía, como es evidente, era favorecer las uniones matrimoniales y aumentar los nacimientos” (An equal male/female ratio was an obvious prerequisite to favor marital unions and increase the number of births).

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Nevertheless, it seems to suggest that the conditions for a creole language to develop – or being preserved – were probably not in place: census data for 1784 indicate that the black population was overall a minority outnumbered by the white/mestizo group (even though in certain haciendas it might have been otherwise). A good number of criollo slaves probably were already working in the region before the “massive importation” – if it ever existed – took place. Slaves who arrived from 1680 to 1767 were not exclusively bozales. Actually, if we look at the Popayán slave market at that time, we can see that 59.8% of sales concerned criollos. The presence of criollos is further supported by the high number of children encountered in the plantation and by the existence of criaderos. In addition, the living conditions for blacks may have been different from those of slaves in other plantation settings throughout the Americas, particularly since social relations may have been more flexible: even though harsh working conditions and physical punishments were present, the Jesuits were mainly concerned with supporting indoctrination, nuclear families, slave reproduction and self-maintenance. The managerial practices adopted to achieve these goals may have favored the acquisition of Spanish by the enslaved population. All these elements combined seem to weaken the hypothesis that colonial Chota Valley was the ideal place for a creole language to develop. 2.4. Conclusions This chapter offered an overview of the evolution of Afro-Hispanic contact varieties in the New World and situated CVS in space and time within such a context. Findings appear to discourage the idea that a full-fledged creole language could have emerged or have been preserved in Ecuador. A variety of geographic, demographic and commercial factors appear to have favored the acquisition of Spanish by the slaves and reduced the probability of a creole language formation and transmission. None of the records analyzed lead to the conclusion that a full-fledged creole language ever existed in Ecuador during the four-century time span of slavery, including all three of the phases identified (1530-1680; 1680-1770; 17701964)15. Nevertheless, some demographic records seem to suggest an overall 15 Schwegler (PC) points out that prior to 1970, there were no records whatsoever that Palenque had a creole either. Such a “fact” (the existence of a creole in the Valley) simply would not have been picked up by “official” documents or by occasional reports or travel accounts. He thinks that the absence of evidence really is not very meaningful in Chota Valley and for similar cases. I do not want to exclude the possibility of the existence of a previous creole language in Chota Valley a priori; however, I do not agree with the unconditional assumption of its existence, especially when no data whatsoever supports such a claim and the information we have indicates the opposite.

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higher introduction of bozales during the second phase. These people, however, did not appear to outnumber the overall Ecuadorian Afro-Creole population. As far as Chota Valley is concerned, the present research casts doubts on claims identifying this region as a place with the ideal characteristics for a full-fledged creole language to develop: a low white/black ratio, harsh working conditions in labor-intensive sugarcane plantations, massive introduction of African-born workers and minimal contact with the outside Spanish-speaking world (cf. Schwegler 1999:240; McWhorter 2000:10-11). First, in none of the three phases analyzed for Chota Valley (until 1610; 1610-1680; 1680-1767) was there data showing that black bozales were introduced massively. In fact, even in the Jesuit phase (1680-1767), we saw that slaves were a minority significantly outnumbered by the white/mestizo population (Lucena Salmoral 1994a) and blacks were overwhelmingly criollos (Bryant 2005; Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego 1959; Coronel Feijóo 1991). Second, we observed that during the indigenous phase (until 1610) and the transitional phase (1610-1680), Afrodescendants were probably in an intermediate position between whites and Indians. They participated in the water conflicts against the natives and worked on the Spanish farms before the Jesuit arrival (Coronel Feijóo 1991). We saw that during the Jesuit phase harsh working conditions were in place (Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego 1959), however we could also observe that a certain degree of social flexibility was present and that the Jesuits did their best to preserve the integrity of slave families and to incentivize local demographic growth (Bouisson 1997). Moreover, we could see that religious and marriage practices may have facilitated Spanish-language learning (Macera 1966; Bryant 2005)16. Third, a massive introduction of African-born slaves is doubtful. On the contrary, we observed that the overwhelming majority of the slaves encountered in the Kingdom of Quito until 1680 were locally born (Bryant 2005) so that the blacks found in Chota Valley until this point could probably speak Spanish. Moreover, we saw that even though bozal importation increased during the 1680-1770 phase, 60% of slaves sold in Popayán were not bozales (Colmenares 1997). Additionally, we know that the habit of coupling slaves together to produce more slaves was a common practice in the Kingdom of Quito (Lucera Salmoral 1994a), the Jesuits had criaderos (Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego 1959) and a large percentage of the population was under the age of ten (Cushner 1982). All these elements combined indicate that many locally born criollos were present in these plantations. Fourth, contact with the outside 16 Schwegler (PC) indicates that this fact should not be seen as an argument against the creation of a creole language. In fact, in Palenque, slaves could speak Spanish. However, they used Palenquero as an in-group means of communication, an identity symbol.

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world may not have been intense, however, there are documents indicating that blacks in some cases leased their small parcels to whites and sold their products in local markets. It is also noteworthy that in 1728 a ‘pardo’ was reported as one of the landlords who sold his hacienda to the Jesuits (Coronel Feijóo 1991). Based on the overall picture emerging from the available data, serious doubts have been cast on claims suggesting colonial Chota Valley as the ideal environment for a creole language to develop.

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Chapter 3: PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

3.0. Introduction The following sections provide a description of the main phonetic and phonological patterns characterizing Chota Valley Spanish (CVS). Chota Valley is geographically located in the Ecuadorian highlands (la sierra); for this reason, CVS shares several features with Serrano dialects. At the same time, this vernacular differentiates itself from surrounding Spanish varieties in that it presents some patterns that can also be found in several past and present Afro-Hispanic languages. In order to better account for CVS phonetics and phonology, I will first provide an overview of the main features encountered in the rest of the Ecuadorian dialects. Lipski (1986) was the first to contrast Choteño patterns with those encountered in other regions of Ecuador and to provide some qualitative and quantitative measurements of such differences. In this chapter, I will present and discuss Lipski’s data and complement it with the results of my own fieldwork. 3.1. Phonetic account of Ecuadorian Spanish Ecuadorian Spanish has traditionally been divided into several regional dialectal varieties, each of which presents a certain number of characterizing phonetic traits (cf. Boyd-Bowman 1953; Toscano Mateus 1953; Canfield 1981; Lipski 1986, 1994). Lipski (1986:162-164) divides Ecuador into six main dialectal zones: Coast, Northern Sierra, Central Sierra, Southern Sierra, Cañar and Azuay Provinces and Oriental region. He acknowledges, however, that this subdivision is approximate and significant variation can be found in each region. Moreover, in certain parts of Ecuador, especially in the Oriental side, Spanish is only a marginal language, not commonly used by the native populations. For the sake of convenience, we will adopt Lipski’s useful classification, which will provide us with a general overview of the main dialectal differences at the phonetic and phonological levels.

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1. Costa (Provinces of Esmeralda, Guayas, El Oro, Manabí) Aspiration and elision of /s/ in syllable-final and word-final positions. The sound /r/ is pronounced as a trill [r]. The phonemes /l/ and /λ/ are pronounced as [ʝ]. Partial neutralization of /l/ and /ſ/ in syllable-final position. These sounds are often elided if encountered at the end of a sentence. e) Frequent lost of intervocalic /d/.

a) b) c) d)

2. Northern Sierra (Province of Carchi) a) b) c) d) e)

/s/ retention in all positions. /λ/ is realized as [λ]. The sound /r/ is pronounced as a trill [r]. The phoneme /y/ tends to be realized as [ž]. Unstressed vowels are not reduced.

3. Central Sierra (From Imbabura to Chimborazo) a) /s/ retention in all positions and voiced pronunciation [z] in word-final position before a vowel (los amigos [lo.za.‘mi.ɣos] the friends). b) Unstressed vowel reduction, especially when in contact with /s/. c) /r/ is often pronounced in a fricative way, [ř]. /ſ/ is pronounced similarly when it is in syllable-final or sentence-final position. d) /λ/ is pronounced as [ž] and /ʝ/ is pronounced as [ʝ]. e) The cluster /tſ/ is pronounced in an alveolar and affricated way, similar to [t͡ ʃ]. 4. Provinces of Cañar and Azuay In this area, the main phonetic patterns resemble those encountered in the Central Sierra. What differentiates these two zones is that in the Province of Cañar and Azuay /λ/ is usually pronounced as [λ] and /s/ in word-final position before a vowel is not usually realized as a voiced [z]. 5. Southern Sierra (Province of Loja) a) /s/ is retained in all positions; it is not usually voiced in word-final position. b) Unstressed vowels are not reduced. c) /r/ and /ſ/ are pronounced as [r] and [ſ] respectively. 6. Oriental Region (The Amazon) Lipski does not report any features for this area because Spanish is a marginal variety here, spoken mainly as a second language.

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The author also points out that /n/ in word-final position is usually velarized [ŋ] across all Ecuadorian regions, except for the northern part of Carchi, where there is variation between the velar and the alveolar realizations. 3.2. Phonetic account of Chota Valley Spanish Chota Valley is located on the borderline of the Carchi and Imbabura Province. The main phonetic patterns found in CVS are those reported above under the third group: Central Sierra. Nevertheless, we will see that some phonetic features commonly found in Afro-Hispanic languages are also present in CVS and differentiate this variety from the surrounding Ecuadorian dialects. (I) Unstressed Vowel Reduction Chota Valley Spanish, in line with Serrano Spanish, presents instances of unstressed vowel reduction (UVR). UVR is a case of vowel weakening ranking from partial devoicing to elision. It has been reported for Spanish dialects of the central Plateau region of Mexico (Lope Blanch 1963) and for the Andean regions of Bolivia (Gordon 1980; Sessarego 2013), Peru (Delforge 2006, 2008) and Ecuador (Lipski 1990a). Several phonetic studies on non-Hispanic languages, like Japanese and Korean (Beckman and Shoji 1984; Jun and Beckman 1993), have shown that UVR tends to affect high vowels the most, due to their short duration, while in the case of Spanish varieties, the most affected vowel is /e/ due to its status as the default vowel and its high frequency next to voiceless /s/ (Lipski 1990a; Delforge 2008). Sessarego (2011d) provided an analysis of UVR in Afro-Bolivian Spanish. Results indicate that this phenomenon is almost absent in the speech of the eldest speakers (61+) (2.0%), it is a distinctive linguistic feature of middle-aged individuals (36-60) (4.6%) and it is more reduced in the speech of the youngest generation (21-35) (3.1%). The factor ‘generation’ showed a significant effect on the data analyzed (χ2 (df 2, n 2030) = 7.156, p=.028), especially when results were contrasted from the old and the middle groups (χ2 (df 1, n 1365) = 7.034, p=.008). Preliminary results on the presence of UVR in CVS do not suggest such a generational pattern. Rather, if we exclude the youngest group (21-35) which presents UVR to a minimal extent, the oldest and the mid-generations show very similar levels of vowel reduction. (1) a. Yo jugaba con mis perrits [perritos]. ‘I played with my little dogs.’ b. Nosotrs [nosotros] hemos tocado. ‘We have played.’ c. Usted quiere hablar de la vida de ants [antes]. ‘You want to talk about the life we had in the past.’

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Sandro Sessarego Figure 3.1. Spectrogram of de ants or ‘of before’

(II) Paragogic vowels Unlike the rest of the Serrano dialects, but in line with several Afro-Hispanic varieties, CVS sometimes presents word-final paragogic vowels (ayer → ayere; ser → sere). This feature is also encountered in Afro-Bolivian Spanish (Lipski 2008:73; Sessarego 2011a:46); and in several other present and past Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Lusitanian dialects like Afro-Mexican Spanish (Lipski 2009a), Angola-Portuguese (Leite de Vasconcelos 1901) and many Afro-Lusitanian creoles (Barrena 1957). As we will see in more detail in chapter 6, there is some controversy in the literature concerning the status of pronominal ele in Chota Valley Spanish. While Lipski (2009b) claims that it corresponds to a case of paragogic vowel (él → ele), Schwegler (1999:240) describes it as an Afro-Portuguese creole pronoun (with singular and plural values), which would testify to the validity of the Monogenetic Hypothesis and therefore to the previous existence of a Portuguese-based creole in colonial Chota Valley1. However, given the sociohistorical evidence and the lack of other linguistic features which could potentially support a previous creole stage for CVS, the paragogic account to me appears to be the most likely one. During my sociolinguistic fieldwork, several other instances of paragogic vowel were encountered (2).

1 Schwegler claims that ele acts as a singular/plural genderless pronoun and shows, on phonetic bases, that the plural form cannot be explained by recurring to a paragogic process. In fact, he claims that Spanish ellos/ellas ‘they’ could not give rise to Palenquero/CVS ele (Schwegler 1999:243-5). In the following chapter on CVS morphosyntax, I will provide an alternative hypothesis, where I suggest that the cases of ele – analyzed by Schwegler as plural pronouns – may be better explained as instances of topic markers, commonly found in Highland Spanish dialects and not traceable back to Afro-contact varieties.

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(2) a. Ana se fue ayere con su esposo. ‘Ana left yesterday with her husband.’ b. Encontré a mi mujere en la fiesta. ‘I met my wife at the party.’ c. Una mujere y un hombre. ‘A woman and a man.’ Figure 3.2. Spectrogram of ayere or ‘yesterday’

(III) Raising of unstressed mid vowels In Chota Valley Spanish unstressed /e/ tends to be raised to [i], while unstressed /o/ is usually pronounced as [u]. Even though this feature was not pointed out by Lipski (1986) in his categorization of Ecuadorian varieties, it must be said that such a phonetic pattern is common to all Spanish dialects in contact with Quechua and/or Aymara, languages which have a three vowel system (/a/, /i/, /u/). (3) a. Nusotru somos di Caldera. ‘We are from Caldera.’ b. Pedro lo ha comptadu todu. ‘Pedro bought it all.’ c. Estuvi trabajando en casa. ‘I was working at home.’ Figure 3.3. Spectrogram of todu or ‘all’

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Another contemporary Afro-Hispanic dialect showing the rising of mid vowels is Afro-Bolivian Spanish, which is in contact with varieties of Spanish influenced by Aymara. (4) a. Tanto qui ti conoce. ‘That he knows you.’ (Lipski 2008:74) b. Porque muchu año estuvi yo al hospital. ‘Because I spent a lot of time at the hospital.’ (Sessarego 2011a:120) (IV) /s/ retention In line with Central Sierra Spanish, CVS retains /s/ in all phonological contexts. In the word-final position, when followed by a vowel, /s/ is pronounced as voiced [z]. (5) a. Compra lo[z] altos. ‘Buy the tall ones.’ b. Lo[z] amigos di Marcelo están allá ‘Marcelo’s friends are there.’ c. Henry tiene do[z] amigas má[z] altas que vos ‘Henry has two friends taller than you.’ Figure 3.4. Spectrogram of Lo[z] amigo or ‘The friends’

This behavior of /s/ is particularly significant from a dialectological perspective since CVS can be considered as an exception within the realm of the AfroHispanic varieties, in which syllable-final /s/ is often aspirated as [h] and/or lost [Ø]. Lipski (1986:166-168) ran statistical analyses to quantify the degree to which CVS /s/ realization differs from the rest of the Ecuadorian dialects. Results indicate that the speech of black Choteños closely resembles the surrounding Spanish varieties in this respect. The only noticeable difference is a higher tendency to reduce /s/ when it is in sentence-final position. Lipski sug-

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gests that this difference may be due to coastal influence. However, he points out that such an influence must have old roots and might be due to the introduction of slaves into the region from Colombia during colonial times as nowadays the contact between the coastal region and Chota Valley is almost non-existent since roads connecting these two regions are in very poor condition. Table 3.1. /s/ Realizations in Ecuadorian dialects (from Lipski 1986: 167) sC

Chota

s

h

ø

s

h

ø

s

z

h

ø

s

z

h

ø

87

10

3

81

13

6

90

2

8

49

48

3

0

66

20

4

10

29

1

25

19

77

63

27

5

(N=4638) 2

69

(N=5544)

99

1

98

Ibarra Azuay/

0

90

98

2

0

95

1 (N=562)

7

3

0

93

5

3

100

99

1 (N=890)

(N=471)

0

2

100

0

0

98

93

2

0

10

100

0 (N=501)

(N=1473)

2

0

90

0

5

56

44

0

0

93

99

1

0

(N=133)

60

35

3

4

0

(N=331) 0

21

74

1

4

(N=820) 0

45

(N=189) 0

0

(N=370)

(N=232)

(N=664) 0

10

(N=163)

(N=1137) 2

0

(N=133)

(N=532)

(N=1299) 0

4 (N=786)

(N=1953)

(N=885) 99

(N=3402)

(N=1051)

(N=1407)

Cañar Loja

2

74 (N=1266)

(N=892) Quito/

s#V̌

ø

(N=1213) Carchi

s#Vˊ

s##

h

(negro) Emeraldas

s#C

s

50

0

5

(N=351) 0

97

1

0

2

(N=301)

ˊ = vocal tónica; V̌ = vocal átona; # = contorno de palabra; ## = contorno de frase C = consonante; V

Lipski (2009b:107-108) suggests that sporadic word-final /s/ deletion in plural noun phrases is not driven by phonological processes, as in the case of Coastal Ecuadorian dialects; rather, it has more to do with morphosyntax, as we will see in chapter 4. (V) Rhotic sounds Rhotic sounds are known for the considerable phonetic variations that they exhibit across languages (Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996; Ladefoged 2001). In the Spanish-speaking world, many of them have been reported and several phonetic studies have been conducted to analyze the variants occurring in different Peninsular and Latin American dialects. In particular, fricativization/assibilation in the realization of the phonemic trill has long been identified as a defining feature of several Spanish dialects (cf. Bradley 2006a,b; Colantoni 2001, 2006; Díaz-Campos 2008; Lastra and Butragueño 2006; Willis 2007; Sessarego 2011e; etc.). In line with Highland Ecuadorian Spanish (Bradley 2006a), CVS also presents fricative rhotics (carro → [‘ka.řo] ‘car’; roto → [‘řo.to] ‘broken’).

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Sandro Sessarego Figure 3.5. Spectrogram of Iba[ř]a ‘Ibarra’

In traditional CVS, word-final /ſ/ is oftentimes elided (amor → amó ‘love’; dolor → doló ‘pain’); especially when occurring in infinitive verb forms (tomar → tomá ‘to drink’; cantar → cantá ‘to sing’; ir → í ‘to go’; decir → decí ‘to say’). Moreover, intervocalic /ſ/ is oftentimes confused with /d/ (toro → todo ‘bull’; cada → cara ‘each’). This is in line with other Afro-Hispanic varieties throughout Latin America. (6) a. Nojotro va trabajá. ‘We go to work.’ (Afro-Bolivian Spanish, Lipski 2008:71) b. Hablá. ‘To talk’ ; Helbí. ‘To boil.’(Barlovento Spanish, Megenney 1999: 74) c. Doló. ‘Pain’; Caló. ‘Heat.’(Afro-Mexican Cuijla Spanish, Aguirre Beltrán 1958:208) d. Le gusta bailá bomba con botella. ‘She likes to dance bomba with a bottle.’ (Chota Valley Spanish) The cluster /tɾ/ is pronounced as an alveolar affricate similar to [t͡ʃ]; this is a phonetic feature encountered in other Highland Ecuadorian varieties, not generally found in Afro-Hispanic dialects. (7) a. Fuimos a con[t͡ʃ]atar con él. ‘We went to negotiate with him.’ b. [t͡ ʃ]abajamos con tíu di Francisco. ‘We work with Francisco’s uncle.’ c. Cua[t͡ʃ]o horas. ‘Four hours.’ d. Había que [t͡ʃ]abajar para los pa[t͡ʃ]ón. ‘One had to work for the owners.’

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Figure 3.6. Spectrogram of los pa[tʃ]ón or ‘the owners’

(VI) Palatal sounds In line with other Andean Spanish varieties, there is a distinction in the pronunciation of palatal /λ/ (written ll) and the phoneme /ʝ/ (written y). However, unlike the majority of the Highland Bolivian and Highland Peruvian dialects, where /λ/ is pronounced as [λ] and /ʝ/ as [ʝ], (polo → [‘po.λo] ‘chicken’; maya → [‘ma. ʝa] ‘Maya’), in CVS and Highland Ecuadorian Spanish, /λ/ is pronounced as a palatoalveolar fricative [ž] (Argüello 1978, 1980; cf. Lipski 1994: 248). This distinction makes CVS a žeísta dialect. This feature further assimilates CVS with Highland Ecuadorian Spanish and – at the same time – distinguishes this vernacular from the rest of Afro-Hispanic contact varieties, which usually merge the two sounds; a clear example is Afro-Bolivian Spanish, the only yeísta dialect in Bolivia (Lipski 2008:71; Sessarego 2011a:45-46). This difference is particularly interesting; especially if we consider that the black-populated Ecuadorian region of Esmeralda is yeísta too. Moreover, in Esmeralda, there is a tendency towards losing [ʝ] when in contact with /i/ (gallina → gaína; allí → aí) (cf. Boyd-Bowman 1953:226), a phenomenon also encountered in the Pacific coast of Colombia (Flórez 1951:244) and in Northern Peru (Murrieta 1936:122, 129). (8) a. Mataron ga[ž]ina el día di Navidá ‘They killed some hens on Christmas.’ b. ¿La [ž]ave de la casa? ¡En el cajón! ‘The house key? In the drawer!’ c. El va[ž]e del Chota se [ž]ama. ‘It is called Chota Valley.’ d. Ojalá [ž]egue Fabricio. ‘Let’s hope Fabricio arrives.’

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Sandro Sessarego Figure 3.7. Spectrogram of [ž]egue or ‘to come’

(VII) Nasals sounds Word-final /n/ is velarized or occasionally elided, leaving behind a nasalized vowel. This phenomenon, as indicated in the previous section, is common to all Ecuadorian varieties. Lipski (1986:170) quantified the variation in nasal velarization among Ecuadorian dialects (see Table 3.2.) and concluded that there is no significant difference between CVS and the other Spanish varieties spoken in the territory. No prenasals are found in CVS, contrary to what can be encountered in other Afro-Hispanic contact languages, such as Palenquero. However, Schwegler (PC) mentions that Palenquero Spanish does not have them either, thus suggesting that Spanish and Palenquero could coexist in the same environment without too much mixing (Schwegler and Morton 2003). Table 3.2. Word-final realizations of /n/ in Ecuadorian dialects (from Lipski 1986:170) n#V

Chota (negro)

n##

n

ƞ

V̌

n

ƞ

V̌

15

78

7

2

95

3

(N=1.742) Esmeraldas

2

94

(N=1.070) 4

1

(N=552) Carchi

46

49

5

71

(N=432) Quito/ Ibarra

11

74

8

88

15

2

16

71 (N=361)

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27

2

87

11

(N=411) 4

2

(N=488) Loja

3

(N=319)

(N=577) Azuay/Cañar

96 (N=430)

90

8

(N=332) 13

1

97

2

(N=303)

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/f/: The phoneme /f/, when followed by a vowel, may be variably realized as [hw]. This is a phenomenon that can be found also in other highland rural varieties of Ecuadorian Spanish (cf. Lipski 1994:249). (9) Nosotros hwuimos [fuimos] al río. ‘We went to the river.’ Decía que tenían que salir ahwuera [afuera]. ‘He said that they had to go outside.’ (VIII) Intonational patterns Chota Valley Spanish suprasegmental characteristics sharply differentiate this language from the surrounding Serrano dialects and align it with other Afro-Hispanic varieties. In fact, CVS presents multiple early-aligned peaks and minimal downstep across non-exclamatory, non-focused declaratives. This intonational pattern is typically not found in other Spanish varieties. However, Afro-Hispanic dialects seem to show these features consistently. Willis (2003) identified similar patterns in Black Dominican Spanish, Hualde and Schwegler (2008) reported them for Palenquero, while Lipski (2007b) provided a list of examples of this kind from Afro-Hispanic dialects in Mexico, Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Cuba. Figure 3.8. Multiple early-aligned peaks and minimal downstep across non-exclamatory non-focused declaratives

H

H

H

H

H

H

H

H

H

H

La última vez que tocaron esta canción de las tres Marías fue en las fiestas de la madre. ‘The last time they played the tres Marías song was during Mother’s day.’

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3.3. Conclusions The previous sections have shown that the phonetic features of CVS do not diverge greatly from Central Sierra Spanish. In fact, CVS shares most of its phonetic patterns with the local variety, which is in sharp contrast with other AfroHispanic languages. Nevertheless, CVS appears to show phonetic traits shared by other black vernaculars. In particular, the presence of paragogic vowels, the elision of word-final /ɾ/ and the intonational patterns of CVS differentiate this language from its surrounding dialects and make it more similar to other AfroHispanic dialects spoken across Latin America.

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Chapter 4: MORPHOSYNTAX

4.0. Introduction While the phonetic features of Chota Valley Spanish are for the most part in line with Serrano Spanish, the morphosyntax of this language departs more sharply from other Ecuadorian Spanish varieties. Conversely, certain morphosyntactic patterns of CVS can be encountered in several other Afro-Hispanic dialects and are also quite common in second language varieties of Spanish. 4.1. Noun Phrase (I) Number Agreement In contrast to standard Spanish, traditional CVS does not mark number features redundantly across the noun phrase (cf. Lipski 2010). For this reason, nouns and adjectives do not carry the plural morpheme -s, while the only element conveying number (singular/plural) is the determiner. Number is indicated through possessives (1a), demonstratives (1b), definite (1c) and indefinite articles (1d) by plural -s morphology; moreover, quantifiers (1e) and numerals (1f) can express plurality inherently without resorting to -s. In this respect, traditional CVS parallels AfroBolivian Spanish, where DP number expression is conveyed in the same way (cf. Sessarego 2010, 2011a, 2012b; Delicado-Cantero and Sessarego 2011)1. 1 Schwegler (2007) argues that in Palenquero number valuation is purely contextual and not syntactic because the usual marker ma may be absent, leading to number underspecification, which is resolved through the context. The case of CVS is arguably different. When an overt D is present, plurality is always conveyed in such a functional element. When D is not overt (e.g., bare nouns, usually not occurring in the subject position), the covert determiner encodes a variety of type-shifting functions (à-la Partee). Bare nouns in Chota Valley Spanish and Afro-Bolivian Spanish seem to obey certain specific syntactic and pragmatic constraints, which ultimately determine the semantic interpretation of their unpronounced D-categories. A fine-grained analysis of such constructions is beyond the scope of the present study; please refer to Gutiérrez-Rexach and Sessarego (2011) for a more detailed account of bare nouns in Afro-Bolivian Spanish.

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(1) a. Mis hermano joven. ‘My young brothers.’ b. Esos hermano joven. ‘These young brothers.’ c. Los hermano joven. ‘The young brothers.’ d. Unos hermano joven. ‘Some young brothers.’ e. Mucho hermano joven. ‘Many young brothers.’ f. Cuatro hermano joven. ‘Four young brothers.’ However, due to contact with Serrano Spanish, redundant plural marking is developing cross-generationally across the CVS DP. This language is therefore gradually approximating the fully redundant configuration encountered in the variety of Spanish spoken in the region. This process of gradual shift is oftentimes found in communities speaking stigmatized varieties which happen to come into contact with more prestigious ones. The result of such a process has often been called ‘(post)-creole continuum’ (DeCamp 1971) where varieties with different degrees of proximity to the standard coexist in the same speech community. Instances of number agreement mismatches are a common feature of all AfroHispanic dialects and, more generally, of all contact varieties, where inflexional morphology tends to be lost. Some Afro-Hispanic examples are reported in (2). (2) a. Las cosas eran pacífica[s]. ‘Things were peaceful.’ (Chocó Spanish, Ruiz García 2001:77) b. Tán chiquito puej mij nene[s]. ‘My kids are so little.’ (Afro-Mexican Oaxaca Spanish, Mayén 2007:117) c. Ele a-tené ndo muhé [Él tiene dos mujeres]. ‘He has two wives.’ (Palenquero, Schwegler 1996:262) (II) Gender agreement Traditional CVS is morphologically poorer than Serrano Spanish, not only for number feature marking but also for gender agreement. In fact, not all DP categories appear to be specified for gender features. Fieldwork conducted by means of grammaticality judgments and oral questionnaires uncovered the presence of at least two different DP gender agreement configurations for which the informants interviewed had clear grammatical intuitions. Some speakers indicated as ‘grammatical’ the constructions reported in (3), which present gender agreement in all DP categories (adjectives, demonstratives, articles, weak quantifiers) except for strong quantifiers.

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(3) a. Todo la cerveza fría. all-M. the-F. beer-F. cold-F. ‘All the cold beer.’ b. Mucha/ esta/una cerveza fría. much-F./this-F./a-F. beer-F. cold-F. ‘Much/this/a cold beer.’ The rest of the Choteños interviewed, on the other hand, had grammaticality judgments in line with standard Spanish, where gender is marked redundantly on all DP elements, including strong quantifiers. (4) a. Toda la cerveza fría. all-F. the-F. beer-F. cold-F. ‘All the cold beer.’ b. Mucha/ esta/ una cerveza fría. much-F./this-F./a-F. beer-F. cold-F. ‘Much/this/a cold beer.’ A comparison between these grammaticality judgments and the data collected by means of sociolinguistic interviews leads to the expected finding that almost everybody who claimed to use agreement on certain categories was found to be lacking it during the free speech interview, sometimes with rates of gender agreement mismatch as high as 30-40% (5). (5) Todo la familia se iba con los all-M.SG the-F.SG. family-F.SG. refl. go-past. with the-M.PL. amigo, con toda la gente de friend-M.SG. with all-F.SG. the-F.SG. people-F.SG. of Concepción; cuando yo era pequeño mucha persona Concepción when I be-past. small much-F.SG. person-F.SG. rezaba, mucho devoción tenían los pray-past. much-M.SG. devotion-F.SG. have-past the-M.PL. afro. African-M.SG. ‘The whole family used to go with friends, with all the people from Concepción; when I was young many people used to pray, Africans used to be very devoted.’

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As in the case of number features, variable gender agreement is widely encountered in many Afro-Hispanic varieties, as shown in the examples in (6). (6) a. Nuestro [nuestra] cultura antiguo [antigua]. ‘Our former culture.’ (AfroBolivian Spanish Lipski 2008:89) b. Gente branco [blanca]. ‘White people.’ (Cuban Bozal Spanish, Álvarez Nazario 1974:189) c. Quieren cosa ligero [ligera]. ‘They want light things.’ (Chocó Spanish, Ruiz García 2001:77) (III) Bare nouns Determinerless nouns deprived of plural markers can be found in CVS in contexts that do not allow for their presence in standard Spanish; namely, in object position with a plural non-specific/generic reading. (7) a. Mario quiere comprar galleta. ‘Mario wants to buy cookies.’ b. Lorenzo come naranja. ‘Lorenzo eats oranges.’ This data, extracted from sociolinguistic interviews, was subsequently presented to Choteño speakers, who had clear intuitions on the grammaticality of such constructions in their language. Lipski (2010:32-33) also reports some examples of bare nouns appearing in the subject position (8); nevertheless, my corpus does not contain examples of that kind and my informants judged them as ungrammatical. (8) a. Porque [el] próximo pueblo puede ser Salinas. ‘Because the next town could be Salinas.’ b. Pero [el] finado patrón Darío nos daba. ‘But the late landowner Darío would give us.’ Bare nouns are also common in a variety of other Afro-Hispanic languages of Latin America (cf. Gutiérrez-Rexach and Sessarego 2011 for Afro-Bolivian Spanish; Schwegler 2007 for Palenquero; Kester and Schmitt 2007 for Papiamentu). (IV) Pronouns The first scholar to identify the use of ele as a personal pronoun in CVS is Schwegler (1996:282), who sees a parallelism between CVS and Palenquero. Schwegler (1999) reports more examples of ele for Chota Valley Spanish and

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claims that this element may represent the vestigial trace of an Afro-Portuguese creole from which these two languages might have derived. Lipski’s (2009b) fieldwork, on the other hand, indicates that his informants do not recognize this element as a pronoun; rather, they associate it with a common interjection used in Highland Ecuadorian Spanish to express “surprise, alarm or other strong emotions” (Lipski 2009b:113). Lipski, nevertheless, admits that in a couple of his recorded examples, ele is used in a pronominal way (9). He ascribes such sporadic cases to the result of a paragogic process of vowel insertion; a phenomenon found across several other CVS lexical items (ayer → ayere ‘yesterday’; ser → sere ‘to be’). (9) a. Ele ya puso una escuela aquí. ‘He put a school here.’ (Lipski 2009b:113) b. Cuando eli ya venía nusotro sabíamos estar sentado eli ya iba llegando teníamo que pararno, sacarse el sombrero. ‘When he used to come we knew how to stay sit, he was coming we had to stop, take off the hat.’ (Lipski 2009b:113) Results from my own fieldwork appear to confirm Lipski’s account, thus supporting the paragogic vowel hypothesis (cf. example 2, chapter 3, present book). Moreover, a closer look at Schwegler’s (1999:244) data seems to suggest that the real function of CVS ele is the one of a topic (and maybe also a focus) marker, rather than a pronoun (10). (10) a. ELE, él ta allí. ‘He, he is there.’ b. ¡Yo! ¡Con ELE no fuera! ‘I! With him, I would not go!’ c. ELE el guagua se torció el pie. ‘He, the kid twisted his ankle.’ d. ELE ese ya le canco al puerco. ‘He, this one already killed the pig.’ e. ELE ellas se van a pasear. ‘They, they are going for a walk.’ f. ELE no les quiero dar. ‘To them, I do not want to give it to them.’ g. ELI los pescados se han muerto. ‘They, the fish have died.’ Examples (10 a, c, d, e, f, g) are all dislocated topics. In fact, ELE appears at the left edge of the sentence, most likely with some kind of ‘comma intonation’ that separates it from the rest of the sentence. Its function, in these cases, is to indicate that there is someone about whom the speaker is going to make a statement. This person (or group) has almost certainly been mentioned at a previous moment in the discourse or is readily identifiable in the context (perhaps by pointing or by shared knowledge between the speaker and listener). When used in this way, ELE can refer to any grammatical position in the sentence that it is dislocated from, for this reason, it may take on both a plural and a singular read-

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ing and at a first glance it may look like a pronoun. Examples (10 a, c, d, e, f, g) were presented to my informants who confirmed the aforementioned analysis, thus confirming the topic properties of this element. On the other hand, in example (10b), ELE appears to be the focus of the sentence. That is, it introduces new information that can generally be thought of as an answer to a question. In (10b), we could think of the sentence as an answer to the question: “Who wouldn’t you go with?” Answer: Yo, con ELE no fuera. This can be paraphrased in English with clefts: “As for me, it is with HIM that I would not go.” Nevertheless, while all my informants had clear intuitions on the topicalizing functions of ELE, I could not find the same positive reactions for its focalizing properties. As a result of this, I am not in the position to provide a full account for it. Example (16b), however, is the only one presented in Schwegler’s (1999) study which diverges from the topic pattern; it would be interesting to see whether the author possesses more data of this kind to better understand under which conditions it may appear. As far as other pronouns are concerned, it should be noted that black Choteños employ the voseo, so that the second person singular pronoun is vos, rather than tú, which is commonly used in the coastal regions of the country. As Hidalgo Alzamora (1981:159-160) pointed out (cf. also Lipski 1987:170), the second person singular is formed with vos plus verb with stressed final syllable (e.g., vos comés ‘you eat’). Lipski (1986:171) added that variation is present, so that constructions like vos comes can be heard as well. In CVS, subject pronouns tend to be used with a higher frequency than most dialects of Spanish, a feature which is also found in other Afro-Hispanic varieties. This strategy is oftentimes encountered in contact varieties to compensate for a weaker inflectional morphology on the verb stems. Nevertheless, putting aside a few sporadic instances of subject-verb agreement mismatch, the CVS inflectional paradigm is quite robust. This may indicate that CVS verbal morphology used to be weaker and developed over time. The high frequency use of overt pronouns might be a reflection of such an evolution. In regards to direct and indirect object pronouns and object clitics, CVS presents constructions that are more in line with other contact varieties of Spanish and Portuguese than with the rest of the Ecuadorian dialects, so that oftentimes an object pronoun preceded by a preposition is used instead of a preverbal object clitic. (11) a. Los de ciudad no ayudaban a nosotros. ‘The people from the city did not help us.’ b. Cuatro hombre pegaron a él. Mi abuelo se escapó. ‘Four men beat him. My grandfather ran away.’

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c. Con yerba de campo curaban a nosotros. ‘They cured us with grass from the field.’ (Lipski 1987:163) (V) Adjectives Besides noting that sometimes adjectives do not show number and gender agreement, some other peculiarities of this lexical category should be pointed out. In this regard, it is worth mentioning that the adjective mucho can be encountered where the adverb muy would be used in other Spanish dialects. (12) a. El profesor vive mucho lejos de aquí. ‘The professor lives very far away from here.’ b. Tenía dolor di cabeza mucho fuerte. ‘I had a very bad headache.’ Moreover, possessive adjectives like mío, tuyo, suyo, etc. are often substituted by periphrastic constructions: de mí, de ti, de él. (13) a. La bomba de mí la tocaba mi hijo. ‘My son played my bomba.’ b. La madre de nosotros vive a San Lorenzo. ‘Our mother lives in San Lorenzo.’ This feature bares clear similarities with other Afro-vernaculars (14). However, such periphrastic constructions are not only encountered in Hispanic black speech; rather, we can also find them in several varieties of Latin American Spanish (Rosenblat 1946:141-142). (14) a. Ella tomó en casa de mí. ‘She drank in my house.’ (Barlovento Spanish, Megenney 1999:112) b. En la tierra de nosotros. ‘In our land.’ (Afro-Venezuelan Oriente Spanish, Megenney 1999:182) c. Di mí también es. ‘It is mine, too.’ (Afro-Bolivian Spanish, Lipski 2008:88) 4.2. Verb Phrase (I) Subject-Verb Agreement: CVS verbal inflection is – for the most part – identical to the inflectional system of standard Spanish. The only differences encountered consist of instances of a lack of subject-verb agreement, which are exceptional and usually only found

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in the speech of the eldest informants. In such cases, default verb forms (third person singular forms) can be found. The majority of my speakers, however, do not seem to be aware of such constructions. Even if in my transcripts cases like (15) can be encountered, many of the people interviewed, when presented with such examples, do not consider them grammatical. (15) a. Ellos dijo que iba al campo. ‘They said they were going to the field.’ b. ¿Vos habla inglés? ‘Do you speak English?’ c. Nosotros sacaba el agua con vaso medio roto. ‘We took the water with a broken glass.’ d. Cuando yo tuvo uso de razón. ‘When I became able to think.’ Only a few elderly Choteño Valley residents admit that examples in (15) are possible constructions, which in the past, used to be heard more often. In my corpus, I could not find a single case of disagreement between a first person singular subject and a present verb (e.g., Yo come or ‘I eat’). In similar studies of subject-verb agreement development on Helvécia Portuguese (Baxter 1997) and Afro-Bolivian Spanish (Sessarego 2009), first person singular subject-verb agreement in present verbs has been shown to be the first to emerge. The lack of CVS disagreement in this case further suggests that Chota Valley Spanish is linguistically closer to Spanish than other present and past black contact vernaculars spoken in the Americas (e.g., Afro-Bolivian Spanish). (16) a. Yo sabe [sé] ‘I know’; yo tiene [tengo] ‘I have’; yo no pue [puedo] ‘I cannot.’ (Afro-Puertorican Álvarez Nazario 1974:194-195) b. Yo no entiende [entiendo] eso de vender jrutita. ‘I do not understand that [business] about selling fruit.’ (Afro-Bolivian Spanish, Lipski 2008:108) c. Yo quiele sé diputá. ‘I want to be a deputy.’ (Afro-Peruvian Bozal Spanish, Lipski 2005:253) Due to regional Quechua influence, sometimes CVS speakers use gerundive constructions rather than conjugated forms (17). For the most part, black Choteños do not speak Quechua; these constructions should be seen as part of the popular Ecuadorian dialect spoken in the sierra region. (17) a. Dame pasando el vaso. ‘Pass me the glass.’ b. Dame sirviendo la comida. ‘Serve me the food.’ c. Dame comprando unas espermitas. ‘Buy me some candles.’ (Lipski 1987:170)

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(II) Ser and estar The use of the verbs ser and estar sometimes overlap; moreover, sometimes copulas are omitted. (18) a. Mi hijo es a Quito. ‘My son is in Quito.’ b. Estamos seis en casa, con mi abuela siete. ‘There are six of us at home, seven with my grandmother.’ c. Usted (es) joven. ‘You are young.’ Confusion between ser and estar and copula omission have been reported for several other Afro-Hispanic communities. (19) a. Porque no es [está] tan lejos. ‘Because it is not far away.’ (Barlovento Spanish, Megenney 1999:100) b. Yo soy[estoy] mucho [muy] enjuermo. ‘I am very sick.’ (Afro-Bolivian Spanish, Sessarego 2011:54) c. Poto Rico Ø [es] una oveja. ‘Puerto Rico is a sheep.’ (Afro-Puerto Rican Álvarez Nazario 1974:158) (III) Focalizing ser Focalizing ser is a characteristic of CVS that can also be found in other varieties of popular Spanish (20). (20) a. Este hombre vino es a pie. ‘This man came walking.’ b. Unos se vestía es con falda. ‘Some people used to wear a skirt.’ c. Yo soy es de Tumbabiro. ‘I am from Tumbabiro.’ Focalizing ser, therefore, is not a quintessential feature of CVS. It is encountered in the rest of the Ecuadorian sierra and is quite common in certain Colombian dialects. Méndez-Vallejo (2009) studied the phenomenon in Bucaramanga Spanish. She argues that focalizing ser does not act as a copulative form or as an auxiliary verb. It does not show any verbal function; it only appears to intensify the focused element. The data collected for CVS seems to indicate that focalizing ser in CVS behaves similarly to the element reported by Méndez-Vallejo for Bucaramanga Spanish.

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(IV) Progressive inversion with estar CVS also presents constructions which are typically used by Quechua speakers of Spanish. Some of these constructions are now part of Ecuadorian popular speech. One of these is the inversion of progressive constructions with estar (21). (21) a. Casado estoy. ‘I’m married.’ b. Miguel cansado está. ‘Miguel is tired.’ c. Viéndote estoy. ‘I’m seeing you.’ (Lipski 1982: 31) (V) Haber ‘to exist’ / tener ‘to have’ The verb haber is sometimes used instead of tener in negative constructions. (22) a. Yo no había estos amigo. ‘I did not have these friends.’ b. Los mayor no había esa costumbre. ‘Old people did not have this habit.’ (Lipski 2009b:105) These constructions are fairly more common in Afro-Bolivian Spanish, where tener and haber often alternate in negative constructions (cf. Lipski 2008:129; Sessarego 2011a:54). Lipski (2009b) also points out that haber is oftentimes used in negative sentences when standard Spanish would employ estar. For example, it is adopted to refer to individuals or things that are not found in the expected place or that no longer exist. (23) a. ¿Está don Carlos? ‘Is Mr. Carlos at home?’ No hay. No hay. ‘He is not here. He is not here.’ (Lipski 2009b:105) b. [Esa iglesia] ahora no hay. ‘[That church] no longer exists.’ (Lipski 2009b:105) My fieldwork also reported cases where tener can be used as an existential verb in affirmative constructions, as in Portuguese: (24) a. Tiene cuatro chancho allí. ‘There are four pigs there.’ b. Tiene mucha wawa en esa escuela. ‘There are many kids in that school.’ c. Tenía mucho bicho antes. ‘There were many insects before.’ (VI) Reflexive se Sometimes reflexive se is not employed in contexts which would prescribe its use in standard Spanish.

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(25) a. Esta persona llamaba Jesús. ‘This person was called Jesús.’ b. Últimamente la gente está dicando a la agricultura. ‘Lately people are working in the agricultural sector.’ (Lipski 1992:33) c. Mi finado papá llamaba Ángel. ‘My dear dad was called Ángel.’ (Lipski 2009b:104) Cases of non-reflexive usages have also been reported for other Afro-Hispanic languages. Some of those are Afro-Chocó Spanish, Afro-Puertorican and, more sporadically, also Afro-Bolivian Spanish. (26) a. Si no venía aquí al pueblo y taba bailar [me] quedaba bailando arriba. ‘If I did not come here to the village and I was dancing I would have danced there.’ (Afro-Chocó Spanish, Ruíz García 2000:83) b. Pa tú tambié divertí. ‘So that you will enjoy too.’ (Afro-Puertorican Spanish, Álvarez Nazario 1974:195) c. Eyus llamaban Zambo Sarvito. ‘They were called Zambo Sarvito.’ (AfroBolivian Spanish, Sessarego 2011:103) 4.3. Prepositional Phrase (I) de Prepositions in CVS are used in ways that diverge quite significantly from standard Spanish. The preposition de sometimes is omitted. (27) a. Yo vivo lejos [de] las casita. ‘I live far away from the little houses.’ b. Vino [de] Mascarilla andando. ‘He came from Mascarilla walking.’ c. Depende [de] las posibilidades del padre. ‘It depends on the father’s possibilities.’ (Lipski 1987: 163) d. Yo soy [de] abajo. ‘I am from down there.’ (Lipski 1987: 163) (II) con The preposition con is used in several ways. Not only can it be employed to substitute several instances of Spanish de (28); in many cases, it is encountered where the Spanish conjunction ‘y’ (29) would be used instead2.

2 Schwegler (PC) indicates that con also acts in the same way in Palenquero.

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(28) a. Hombre con esta edad no tiene que trabajá. ‘A man that old should not work.’ b. La mujer con ojos verde tomó mucho. ‘The green-eyed woman drank a lot.’ (29) a. Yuca con arroz, eso se come mucho. ‘Yuca and rice, this is a common dish.’ b. Yo con él fuimos al mercado. ‘I and he went to the market.’ (III) a Oftentimes a is used with a locative function (30) where standard Spanish uses en. (30) a. Mi novio vive a Guayaquil. ‘My boyfriend lives in Guayaquil.’ b. Estoy trabajando a otro campo. ‘I’m working in another field.’ In all these respects, CVS parallels Afro-Bolivian Spanish perfectly (31). (31) a. Huahua cun eje edad pesa veinte kilo. ‘A kid at this age weighs twenty kilos.’ (Sessarego 2011:54) b. Mururata cun Chijchipa, nojoto siempre fue uno nomá. ‘Mururata and Chijcipa we have always been just one.’ (Lipski 2008:132) c. Juan nació a La Paz. ‘Juan was born in La Paz.’ (Sessarego 2011:53) 4.4. Phrase-level constructions (I) Ele While there is no agreement in the literature on the systematic use of ele as a pronoun, all authors concur on the fact that there is another function in which this word is used. Powe (1998), Schwegler (1999) and Lipski (2009b) acknowledge that Afro-Choteño associates ele with a common interjection used in Highland Ecuadorian Spanish to express surprise, alarm or other strong emotions. (32) (Lipski 2009b:112) a. Ele caray. ‘Well, damn it.’ b. Ele, la María. ‘Hey, it is Maria.’ c. Ele, a los tiempo te veo. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages.’

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Morphosyntax

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In Schwegler’s (PC) view this ele is, in all likelihood, a borrowing from Kikongo (cp. Kik. ele ‘voilà’, documented in Laman (1936:145)). Additional evidence for it would be that ¡eloe!, with a similar exclamative meaning, is also Kikongo and is commonly used in Palenquero (cf. Schwegler 2002). This view on the origin of exclamative ele may be the correct one, the only doubt that might be cast on such an etymological analysis is that this word is not only used by the black communities in the region; rather, it is widely used across all of the Ecuadorian highlands, even among populations that have never had close contact with the black community (cf. Córdova Álvarez 1995). As I indicated earlier, my personal view on the status of CVS ele is that it should be analyzed as a topic – and potentially as a focus – marker. (II) Ca Another often heard particle is ca, which is defined by Lipski as an emphatic element not “possessing any intrinsic semantic content” (Lipski 2009b:105). (33) (Lipski 2009b:105) a. Yo ca no voy a ir. ‘I’m not going to go.’ b. Yo ca me voy pa mi huerta. ‘I’m going to my garden.’ c. Ella ca no sabe. ‘She does not know.’ d. El ca queriendo pegar a mí. ‘He wants to beat me.’ Lipski indicates that ca almost always follows the subject pronoun. It rarely occurs with non-pronominal subjects or in embedded clauses. The author suggests, quoting Lema Guanolema (2007:55), that it might be the result of contact with Quechua, a language in which ca behaves as a definite marker that attaches to nouns and pronouns: (34) (Lema Guanolema 2007:55) a. Ñuca-ca cushilla cani. ‘I am happy.’ b. Huasi-ca jatunmi. ‘The house is large.’ (III) Vuelta Lipski (2009b:113) points out also the presence of the particle vuelta, which would approximately mean ‘on the other hand’ or ‘in times past’ depending on the context. (35) a. Vuelta aquí voy al río. ‘On the other hand, when I am here, I go to the river.’

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b. Cuando nos tocaba, así tiempo de cosecha, vuelta era arrancar el poroto. ‘When it was time, during the harvest time, in times past we had to collect the poroto.’ (Rodríguez 1994: 30) c. Aquí vuelta lo que trabajaban les pagaban. ‘Here on the other hand they used to pay those who worked.’ (Lipski 2009b:114) 4.5. Conclusions This chapter presented the main morphosyntactic features that characterize Chota Valley Spanish. As for the nominal domain, it was observed that gender and number features present weaker agreement patterns, while bare nouns are often found in the object position and – to a lesser extent – also in the subject one. The functional properties of ele have been discussed; indicating that this element acts as a topic – and potentially focus – marker, rather than as a pronoun (in contrast with Schwegler’s analysis). In regard to the Verb Phrase, it was highlighted that subject-verb agreement is for the most part stable, even though some cases of concord mismatch are present. Moreover, the verbs ser and estar are sometimes used interchangeably, ser has focalizing properties, estar may be inverted in gerundive constructions, the use of verbs haber and tener tend to overlap and reflexive se is often omitted from constructions that prescribe its use. The employment of prepositions diverges quite significantly from the normative variety as well. In fact, de or ‘of’ might be omitted, con or ‘with’ is often used as a substitute for de or ‘of’ and y or ‘and’, while a or ‘to’ may take on a locative function, thus substituting en or ‘in’ in locative constructions. In line with Lipski (2009), some remarkable grammatical phenomena were also found at the phrase level. In particular, ele and ca appear to act as emphatic markers, while the grammatical element vuelta is found in discourse to signal a contrast that may be approximately translated as ‘on the other hand.’

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Chapter 5: LEXICON

5.0. Introduction This section provides an overview of certain CVS lexical items that have been identified by Choteños as peculiar to the region and important for the local culture. These lexical entries are the result of direct observations and interviews with members of the local communities. In order to discover lexical items which would have otherwise been overlooked, at the end of each interview, speakers were asked to provide a list of words that they viewed as particularly relevant for the local Afro-Choteño identity. 5.1. Lexical items Aguado: lemon drink. Agüelo [abuelo]: grandfather. Ambuquireño: type of dark bean covered by clear stripes. Animero: local man who prays at the door of each family at night during the Day of the Dead. He goes from house to house and the death spirits are supposed to follow him. Aventador: pain in the chest. Bomba: ‘bomb’ traditional dance performed by women dancing with a bottle on their head. Bruja: local legend. She is a witch, who can take the form of a human being or an animal. She goes to babies’ beds at night and sucks their blood until they die. In order to keep her away, a cross must be placed on the baby’s bed or the child must be washed in holy water and local herbs. Cabañuelas: rain calendar. Cabuya: plant used to produce rope. Cadejo: unit used to measure cabuya. Caja moratoria: local legend. A coffin that appears in Concepción during the Day of the Dead. The headless priest (a local legendary ghost) has been seen getting out of it.

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Carbunco: local legend. A shining animal that walks across the wood at night. It is supposed to bring good luck to those who catch it. Champú: cold drink made of local herbs. Chicha de arroz: typical drink made of rice. Chisle: said of a drink that is not thick but rather watered down. Cuche/chibudo: said of somebody who does not take baths very often. Culillucho: said of a naked person. Diablo: local legend. A local devil; he goes out at night along water canals. He is supposed to be responsible for the drought of several canals in Choteño communities. Duende: local legend. A well-dressed man who sits backwards on the horse. He appears at night. Women fall in love with him. Espanto: disease that is caused by getting scared. It is cured with cocoa oil and pig fat. Ganso de Caldera: goose from Caldera which is supposed to have curative powers. Guacho: part of soil in which the seeds are placed. Guandul: a type of bean; Castillo (1982:177-178, 1992:53-54) proposes a Kikongo origin for this word: wandu or ‘bean.’ Gueso [hueso]: bone. Huasca: whip. Jorga: group of young people. Limoncillo: typical drink made out of a local herb called yerba Luisa. Mal aire/mal viento: disease provoked by exposure to the cold air of the night. Young children are not usually taken out at night; when they are, they must be well-covered to prevent mal aire. Mal aire can be cured in two traditional ways: 1) by applying a mixture of herbs to the whole body; 2) by jumping under a black cow. Mameluco: type of trousers with suspenders. Mapalé: local dance during which dancers ask for freedom from slavery. Mimo [mismo]: same. Míster: any foreign men. Morocho: a kind of corn. Muérgano: also called bandido, pícaro and zángano, said of a man who has several women outside of his marriage. Ñaño: brother, common Quechua word also used in other Highland varieties of Spanish. Nigua: insect that burrows into people’s feet. Onde [donde]: where. Orita: game played by kids where some have to run away while others have to catch them.

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Lexicon

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Osiota: shoes made of pigskin. Padre sin cabeza: local legend. Headless priest; in Caldera, people claim to have seen him playing the church bells at night. In Concepción, he has been seen walking out of a coffin in the local cemetery. Páramo: when it is about to rain. Patisucho: person without shoes. Peineta: adornment placed on women’s head during special celebrations. Pelota de tabla: game played with a ball and a piece of wood, similar to tennis. Picadillo: soup made of beans, plantain and yucca. Picucho: traditional spicy food. San Martín: black saint famous for talking to animals. Séfiro: hard texture once used to make peons’ clothes. Seguida: diarrhea, cured with a ball of local herbs used as a suppository. Shin: shiver. Taítas: parents, common Quechua word also used in other Highland varieties of Spanish. Tuca: said of a fat woman. Tulpa: big fire. Viuda/Luteriana/Mama de monte: local legends. Female ghosts who take the form of young attractive ladies, they seduce men and take them to the mountain where they scare them to death. Zango: typical dish made of corn. ¡Ve chapá!: old expression once used as ‘look at that!’ 5.2. Conclusions This chapter provided a brief overview of some of the most salient lexical items that can be heard in Chota Valley Spanish. Some of them are not often used nowadays as they describe agricultural works, concepts or items that somehow are no longer present and/or in line with the regional lifestyle (e.g., peineta, cadejo). These items were often recalled only by the eldest informants. Other words, in contrast, have to do with more modern activities or habits that have not been lost (e.g., bomba, picadillo) and were therefore commonly mentioned by the youngest generations. All of them, nevertheless, have been identified as particularly significant to the Chota Valley community and testify, in this way, to a gradual change which not only affects the phonetic and morphosyntactic aspects of this language but also the lexical one.

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Chapter 6: THE STATUS OF CHOTA VALLEY SPANISH

6.0. Introduction This chapter attempts to classify the status of Chota Valley Spanish by shedding light on the nature of its grammatical features. In doing so, the following sections will underscore the importance of CVS for the study of Afro-Hispanic language genesis. Even though CVS does not show the radical morphological reductions and substrate influence which have commonly been ascribed to creole languages, its importance in the study of the transatlantic creole genesis has long been acknowledged by scholars working in the field of Afro-Hispanic contact linguistics (e.g., Lipski 1987; Schwegler 1999; McWhorter 2000). What makes CVS so interesting from a theoretical perspective is its similarity to standard Spanish, rather than its distance from it, even though the sociohistorical conditions which characterized colonial Chota Valley have often been identified as ideal for a full-fledged creole language to develop: a low white/black ratio, harsh working conditions in labor intensive sugarcane plantations, massive introduction of African-born workers and minimal contact with the outside Spanish-speaking world (cf. Schwegler 1999:240; McWhorter 2000:10-11). In recent years, two main hypotheses have been proposed to account for the absence of a Spanish creole in this region. Such hypotheses are rooted in two different theories of creole genesis. On one hand, as in regards to ele, Schwegler (1999:237) considers this Chota datum as “a lone but unusually valuable piece of unequivocal evidence in favor of the monogenetic pidgin/creole theory”, which would point to the prior existence of an Afro-Portuguese based creole, once used among blacks across colonial Latin America, in line with Granda’s (1970; 1988) earlier observations on the existence of such a language. Granda, in fact, argued on several occasions in support of such a contact variety underlying all Spanish and Portuguese creoles. Not only did he provide linguistic data to support his claims, he also saw historical cues in Father Alonso de Sandoval’s (1627 [1956]) treatise on slavery (De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute or ‘On restoring Africans’

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salvation’) suggesting that such an Afro-Portuguese creole was spoken among black slaves in Latin America. Schwegler (1999) revisits Granda’s hypothesis to suggest that CVS derived from that creole and eventually decreolized, so that it now approximates Spanish very closely. On the other hand, McWhorter (2000:10-11), in line with his Afrogenesis hypothesis of creole formation, claims that the sociohistorical conditions for a creole to emerge were well in place in colonial Chota Valley, but due to the fact that Spanish never pidginized on the West African coasts, the linguistic bases were missing for the establishment of a full-fledged creole language in Ecuador. The historical evidence provided in chapter 2 does not support the hypothesis that Chota Valley could be the perfect place for a full-fledged creole to emerge. For this reason, after presenting and discussing Granda’s, Schwegler’s and McWhorter’s claims, this chapter will mainly focus on the linguistic aspects of CVS which are relevant for the controversial ‘creole debate’ about its origin. Given that the so far provided historical background does not suggest the presence of a creole language in colonial Chota Valley, this chapter will explore whether the grammatical elements encountered in CVS could be related to a different development, not necessarily linked to a previous creole stage. I propose that the presence of these features in CVS is the result of processes of intermediate and advanced second language acquisition, which left room in this dialect for the morphosyntactic patterns encountered in standard Spanish. The development and crystallization of this contact variety took place in isolated rural communities, unaffected by standardization processes imposed by urban society and linguistic norms. The outcome is a vernacular – perfectly understandable by the monolingual standard Spanish speakers – which carries the undeniable trace of second language learning strategies. 6.1. On Monogenesis In several instances Germán de Granda supported the Monogenetic Hypothesis of creole languages. The Monogenetic Hypothesis, originally proposed by Schuchardt (1889) and subsequently adopted by several other scholars (cf. Voorhove 1953; Taylor 1961; Thompson 1961; Valdmann 1964; Whinnom 1965) strove to find an explanation for why many creole languages spoken around the world appear to share certain grammatical properties. The answer proposed by this hypothesis is that all creoles would have derived from a common Afro-Portuguese contact variety, which developed on the Western African coasts through the contact of Portuguese sailors and Africans in the 15th and 16th centuries. This early contact variety would have spread around the world through succes-

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sive European colonial expansion; it would have preserved its basic grammatical structure, but its lexicon would have been substituted by words proceeding from other languages (e.g., Spanish in Latin America and the Philippines; English in Jamaica, French in Haiti, etc.). In some early studies, Granda (1968, 1988) claims that several linguistic features shared amongst Palenquero, Papiamentu, Puerto Rican Bozal Spanish, Macau Creole Portuguese and Philippine creoles are so striking that the only way to account for them is the Monogenetic Hypothesis. Granda (1968:202203), in fact, states: La similitud de rasgos morfosintácticos entre modalidades lingüísticas como el palenquero, el habla ‘Bozal’ portorriqueña y el papiamento (con aportación no europea de tipo africano), los dialectos ‘criollos’ de Filipinas (con aportación tagala) y el macaísta (con elementos no europeos de origen chino) no permite apoyar una explicación coherente y totalizadora de sus tendencias paralelas en el influjo de estos sistemas lingüísticos no europeos extraordinariamente diferentes entre sí, por lo tanto, incapaces de producir partiendo de bases estructuralmente diversas, resultados tan similares como los que he constatado […]. No parece, sin embargo, factible, como bien apuntan Willam A. Stewart, Douglas Taylor, Albert Valdmann, Jan Voorhove y Keith Whinnom, la producción independiente de procesos de simplificación, exactamente coincidentes, en ámbitos geográfica y socioculturalmente tan alejados como son África, Asia, América y Oceanía. Este hecho sería tan extraño como la invención paralela de un mismo sistema alfabético en múltiples y distantes puntos geográficos. (The morphosyntactic similarities among languages so typologically different as Palenquero, Puerto Rican Bozal Spanish and Papiamentu (with European and African linguistic inputs), the creole dialects of the Philippines (with Tagalog input) and Macau Creole (with European and Chinese elements) do not lead to a coherent and uniform explanation of the parallel tendencies found in these non-European and extraordinarily different systems […]. Indeed, it does not seem possible, as correctly indicated by Willam A. Stewart, Douglas Taylor, Albert Valdmann, Jan Voorhove and Keith Whinnom, to find the independent evolution of the same simplifications in regions which are as geographically and culturally apart as Africa, Asia, America and Oceania. This fact would be as strange as the parallel invention of the same alphabetic system in multiple and distant geographic locations).

Table 6.1. provides a list of the linguistic features identified by Granda in support of the Monogenetic Hypothesis, with their respective examples. In addition to the cross-linguistic data provided to back the Monogenetic Hypothesis, Granda adduced sociohistorical support. In particular, Granda (1970, 1988) analyzed an excerpt extracted from the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval’s (1627 [1956]) De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute and found what he considered to be evidence backing the existence of an Afro-Portuguese creole spoken among masses of black slaves in Latin America.

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Sandro Sessarego Table 6.1. Granda’s (1988) monogenetic features Phenomenon

Examples [from Palenquero (Montes 1962)]

Contact languages reported by Granda as presenting similar phenomena

No plural marking on nouns

Mucha gracia [muchas gracias] ‘thanks a lot’; son mi sufrimienta [son mis sufrimientos]‘they are my pains’

Palenquero, Papiamentu, Puerto Rican Bozal Spanish, Caviteño Spanish Creole, Zamboangueño Spanish Creole, Malayo Portuguese Creole, Macao Portuguese Creole

Invariable adjectives for gender and number features

Mucho moka [muchas moscas] ‘many flies’; luna ta muy claro [la luna está muy clara] ‘the moon is very bright’

Palenquero, Caviteño Spanish Creole, São Tomé Creole, Cape Verdean Creole, Macao Portuguese Creole

Single indefinite singular article un

Un patada [una patada] ‘a kick’; un batea [una batea] ‘a tray’

Palenquero, Puerto Rican Bozal Spanish, Papiamentu, Caviteño Spanish Creole, Zamboangueño Spanish Creole

Vos as second person singular pronoun

Bo comé [vos comés] ‘you eat’; bo bailá [vos bailás] ‘you dance’

Palenquero, Papiamentu, Puerto Rican Bozal Spanish, Caviteño Spanish Creole, Zamboangueño Spanish Creole; Ermitaño Spanish Creole

Ele as third person singular pronoun

Ele comé [él/ella come] ‘he/she eats’; ele bailá [él/ ella baila] ‘he/she dances’

Palenquero, Caviteño Spanish Creole; Zamboangueño Spanish Creole

Elimination of syntactic linking elements (prepositions)

Flo caña [flor de caña] ‘cane flower’; planta mano [planta de la mano] ‘hand palm’

Palenquero, Papiamentu, Puerto Rican Bozal Spanish, Caviteño Spanish Creole, Macao Portuguese Creole

Use of tener ‘to have’ instead of haber ‘to exist’ to express existence

Teneba cinco gende [había cinco personas] ‘there were five people’; tiene un señora [había una señora] ‘there was a woman’

Palenquero, Caviteño Spanish Creole; Zamboangueño Spanish Creole

Constructions based on invariant ta + INFINITIVE to express present tense

Aire tá quieto bué [el aire está quieto hoy] ‘the air is calm today’; pelo tá lairá [el perro está ladrando] ‘the dog is barking’

Palenquero, Papiamentu, Puerto Rican Bozal Spanish, Caviteño Spanish Creole; Zamboangueño Spanish Creole

Invariable forms for personal pronouns and possessive pronouns

Miña cabeza ele [mira la cabeza de él] ‘look at his head’

Palenquero, Papiamentu, Caviteño Spanish Creole, Ermitaño Spanish Creole

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6.2. On De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute Alonso de Sandoval was born in Seville (Spain) in 1577 and moved to Lima (Peru) at the age of seven to live with his father, a government official in the Spanish bureaucracy. At the age of sixteen, Sandoval joined the Society of Jesus (1593) and in 1605 he was sent to Cartagena, where nineteen years later he became the head administrator of the local Jesuit College (Germeten 2008:ix). At that time, Cartagena was one of the major slave-trading ports of South America. It received black slaves directly from the western African coast and from the Atlantic islands of Cape Verde and São Tomé. Sandoval spent the rest of his life in Cartagena, where he dedicated himself completely to the Christianization and indoctrination of African slaves. One of his major works was published in Seville in 1627: De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute. This work is a treatise on slavery composed of four books. After its reprint with an introduction by Father Ángel Valtierra in 1956, historians and Latin American specialists have paid much attention to Sandoval’s descriptions of early AfroIberian contacts both on the African and the Latin American sides of the Atlantic (cf. Valtierra 1956; Vila Vilar 1987; Germeten 2008). Granda (1970) was the first linguist to highlight the importance of De Instauranda for the study of AfroRomance contact varieties. The excerpt of Sandoval’s (1956:94) work cited by Granda (1970:6) is the following: Y los que llamamos criollos y naturales de San Thomé, con la comunicación que con tan bárbaras naciones han tenido al tiempo que han resistido en San Thomé, las entienden casi todas con un género de lenguaje muy corrupto y revesado de la portuguesa que llaman lengua de San Thomé, al modo que ahora nosotros entendemos y hablamos con todo género de negros y naciones con nuestra lengua española corrupta, como comúnmente la hablan todos los negros. (And those that we call creoles and natives of São Tomé, due to the communication that they had with so many uncivilized nations during the period that they lived in São Tomé, they understand almost all varieties, with a sort of broken Portuguese that they call São Tomé language, so that now we can speak with all kind of blacks with our corrupted Spanish, as it is usually spoken by all the blacks).

In Granda’s (1970) view, Sandoval’s statement is unequivocal evidence that a Portuguese-based creole was used by las masas de esclavos negros de la América española ‘masses of black slaves in Spanish America’ (1970:10). This would support the author’s previous claims about the genetic link between a proto-Afro-Portuguese creole, Papiamentu, Palenquero, Puerto Rican Bozal Spanish and the Spanish and Portuguese creole languages spoken in Asia and Oceania (cf. Granda 1968).

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6.3. Schwegler’s (1999) hypothesis: CVS as a decreolized Afro-Portuguese creole Schwegler (1999) attempts to provide evidence in favor of a revisited version of the Monogenesis Hypothesis of creole formation. In fact, he departs from the original hypothesis, which postulated that all creoles stemmed from a single Afro-Portuguese pidgin (cf. Schuchardt 1889; Voorhove 1953; etc.), to suggest that at least Caribbean Bozal Spanish was a stable creole with Afro-Portuguese roots (cf. Granda 1978, 1985, etc.). As he argued in previous works (Schwegler 1993, 1996), the presence of “even a single DEEP grammatical Afro-Portuguese feature in Caribbean Spanish automatically validates the monogenetic theory” (1999:238). In the author’s view, this statement is supported by the fact that the Portuguese never settled the Caribbean in large enough numbers as to transfer “deep” features (e.g., subject pronouns) of their language to the local dialects; consequently, the traces of Portuguese features in the Caribbean would be due to the previous existence of an Afro-Portuguese creole. Given this assumption, Schwegler (1999:237) identifies the pronoun ele (Port. ‘he’) as such a deep feature for Palenquero (1) and Chota Valley Spanish (2) and its counterpart elle for Cuban and Puerto Rican Bozal Spanish (3). (1) Palenquero (Colombia): a. ELE a-ta kumé ku ELE. ‘HE/SHE/IT is eating with HIM/HER.’ b. ELE tan miní akí. (archaic) ‘THEY will come here.’ (2) Chota (highland Ecuador): a. ELE, él ta allí. b. ¡Yo! con ELE no fuera. c. ELE no les quiero dar.

‘HE/SHE is there.’ ‘I! With HIM/HER/IT I would not go.’ ‘I don’t want to give it to HIM/HER/IT.’

(3) Bozal Spanish 19th c. (Cuba/Puerto Rico): a. ELLE estaba en un mortorio. b. ELLE solito con su espá…

‘They were at a funeral.’ ‘He alone with his sword…’

In Schwegler’s view, examples (1-3) unequivocally show the link between these languages and a Portuguese-based creole since ele and elle cannot possibly be derived from corresponding Spanish forms. To the skeptics who may consider ele as a simple paragoge of Spanish él>ele, he answers by showing on phonetic bases that plural ele in Palenquero and CVS provides evidence that the Span-

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ish hypothesis is flawed since paragoge of Spanish ellos/ellas or ‘they’ could not give rise to ele (Schwegler 1999:243-5). As far as the origin of Cuba/Puerto Rico Bozal elle is concerned, Schwegler indicates that it would be the result of a ‘blend’ between Afro-Portuguese ele and Spanish ella, ellos and ellas (1999:250). Map 6.1. The Afro-Hispanic linguistic areas reported by Schwegler (1999)

Cuba

Haití

Honduras

Rep. Dominicana

3

Nicaragua Costa Rica

1

Panamá

Venezuela Colombia

2 Ecuador

1 Palenquero; 2 Chota Valley Spanish; 3 Caribbean Bozal Spanish

Schwegler concludes by stating that ele and elle, which lack gender and number agreement morphology, cannot plausibly be linked to a common Spanish source but rather to a Portuguese creole-like one. Moreover, they are encountered in geographically non-contiguous Afro-American areas. These facts could not just be a coincidence or the result of independent linguistic developments. Rather they would validate the Monogenetic Hypothesis, if not for all Transatlantic, Asiatic and Oceanic creoles, at least for the regions under analysis: Chota, Palenque, Cuba and Puerto Rico (1999:251-2). Therefore, Schwegler states that these pronouns could not possibly have been ‘implanted’ in these dialects, unless the slaves had a “fairly extensive command of other domains of (Afro-)Portuguese grammar and lexicon” (1999:152). Such a creole language would have decreolized almost everywhere due to contact with regional varieties of Spanish and the negative pressure exerted by mainstream social attitudes; while it managed to survive only in the Colombian village of Palenque.

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Besides this linguistic data, Schwegler provides external (sociohistorical) information in support of his claim. He states (1999:240) the following four points: a. Throughout its formative period (17th-18th centuries), the Chota Valley society was overwhelmingly black. b. For over two hundred years black male Chota slaves lived a plantationlike lifestyle and thus had only minimal contact with the outside Spanishspeaking world (male slaves almost invariably worked on labor-intensive Jesuit-owned latifundios – mostly sugar plantations). c. Chota slaves were purchased in a variety of places, prominently from Cartagena, Popayán and Ibarra […], the latter two received the majority of its black slaves from Cartagena – the most likely place to receive AfroPortuguese-pidgin-speaking slaves. d. In Chota Valley, Jesuit haciendas apparently preferred importing Bozal rather than Creole slaves because the former were less expensive to acquire and more amenable to discipline (Jurado No[b]oa 1992:149; see also Coronel [Feijóo] 1988). This practice may have significantly extended the time span during which African and Afro-Portuguese features could enter and condition Chota speech. The logical conclusion that one may draw from these statements is that CVS was an Afro-Portuguese creole imported into and/or created in Chota Valley by bozal slaves. Over time it decreolized and gradually approximated Spanish. For these reasons, nowadays a creole language is not spoken in this area. Instead we can find a dialect of Spanish characterized by some morphological simplifications and certain African lexical borrowings. 6.4. McWhorter’s (2000) hypothesis: CVS as a missing Spanish creole The main point made by McWhorter’s (2000) book is that Atlantic and Indian Ocean creoles did not arise in a plantation setting due to Africans’ lack of access to the European lexifiers. The ‘limited access model’ would be essentially flawed, as creoles would have generated from the pidgins spoken on the West African coast by slave traders and the African populations in contact with them (Afrogenesis Hypothesis) and only later transplanted to the European colonies oversea, where they could develop into full-fledged contact languages. As Spain was the only European colonial power without a permanent slave trading station in West Africa, a Spanish-based pidgin did not exist; consequently, a Spanish-based creole could not develop in the New World. The Afrogenesis Hypothesis, however, does not deny the importance of demographic dispropor-

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tions between whites and blacks as a crucial factor in the formation of creoles. McWhorter claims that such a disproportion – typically encountered in New World plantation settings – preserved creoles, but did not create them (cf. also Schwegler 2002:115). In order to support his claim, McWhorter uses historical information from the genesis of transatlantic English and French creoles, which – in his view – would have developed from pidgins spoken in western Africa. He contrasts this data with the fact that Spanish creoles are missing. He suggests that creole languages would have come to symbolize black identity among slaves in European-ruled plantations. For this reason, if an African-born pidgin were introduced into a specific American plantation, recently imported slaves would have had two linguistic targets: the pidgin and the European language. They would acquire the pidgin and in this way contribute to its development into a full-fledged creole to express black identity and – in some cases – they would learn a second language variety of the masters’ language to communicate with Europeans. On the other hand, as Spaniards did not have western African forts, a Spanish pidgin could not possibly have been introduced in their Latin American plantations. Therefore, the linguistic bases for the development of Spanish creoles were missing and Africans simply learned second language varieties of Spanish. In this context, black identity would have been expressed via a vernacular variety with “blackness” encoded through phonological variation and African borrowings (McWhorter 2000:203-204). To support his strong claim on the nature of Latin American Afro-Hispanic vernaculars, McWhorter indicates that if we believe the ‘limited access hypothesis’ in the Chocó Region (Colombia), Chota Valley (Ecuador), Veracruz (Mexico), Lima (Peru) and the Mocundo hacienda (Venezuela) we should have Spanishbased creoles, but this is not the case. Several authors have criticized McWhorter’s position (e.g., Díaz-Campos and Clements 2005, 2008; Lipski 2000, 2005; etc.). In particular, Lipski (2005:283) claims that the Afrogenesis Hypothesis is not based on sociohistorical evidence, but rather on an ideological position claiming that creole languages would be the linguistic expression of black identity. Lipski (2005:283) goes on to say that there is no inherent quantitative difference between the American plantation or post-plantation settings and the western African trading stations described by McWhorter and “no a priori reason why blacks on a plantation should not adopt a second-language variety of Spanish as an ethnolinguistic solidarity marker (assuming that one can defensibly differentiate pidgins and rudimentary second-language approximations).” The sociohistorical evidence provided by McWhorter to support his claim is indeed scarce. In

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the case of Chota Valley Spanish, the author accounts for its origin by providing no more than three paragraphs of sociohistorical information: When the Jesuits missionaries settled the Chota Valley of Ecuador in the seventeenth century, they established massive sugar plantations worked by Africans. Creolists have considered sugar plantations to be a prime context for the development of creole languages because of the vast manpower which sugar cultivation required. Significantly, then La Concepción hacienda in the Chota Valley, for example, had no fewer than 380 slaves in 1776, the Cuajara 268 and so on (Coronel Feijóo 1991:88). Slavery was not abolished until 1852. Today, descendants of these slaves live “a life apart” from the surrounding society, separated from the nearest city by a mountain, not marrying out and considered an exotic local curiosity (Lipski 1986:156-9). Again, current genesis theory predicts a creole here. Yet the black Choteños speak a dialect only marginally distinct from the local standard, typified by occasional, but by no means regular, lapses of gender and number concord (haciendas vecino ‘neighboring haciendas’), prepositional substitutions (cerca con la Concepción ‘near la Concepción’) instead of cerca de, article omissions (porque Ø pueblo puede ser Salina ‘because the next town may be Salinas”; Lipski 1986:172). Such things leave the fundamental Spanish grammar intact, including, as in the Chocó, robust inflectional paradigms […]. There was no initial period of partial disparity between black and white which could explain the absence of a creole here. As in the Chocó, the original intention was to use Native Americans rather than Africans, but even they were brought to the plantation in large numbers at the outset [...]. Thus at one point two Jesuit haciendas were sharing some ninety Indian laborers – clearly a different situation from the intimate interracial contact among a dozen or so whites and Malagasies on small farms in early Reunion. Even this phase, however, lasted a mere twenty years or so after the first haciendas were purchased in 1614. Consequently, when Africans were imported to gradually replace the Indians, it was immediately in the large numbers necessary to harvest and process sugarcane (e.g., a shipment of 114 in 1637) and by 1780, the eight Jesuit plantations were worked by no less than 2,615 slaves. (McWhorter 2000: 10-11)

Given this description of how Chota Valley slavery has evolved, one may rationally be led to conclude that only two possible explanations can account for the lack of a Spanish creole in this region: (a) McWhorter is right and if black Choteños do not speak a creole language it is because Spain did not trade directly in western Africa, the hacienda system did not use pidginized Spanish and therefore blacks targeted just standard Spanish, spoken by a small minority of Jesuits; (b) McWhorter is wrong and Chota Valley Spanish was a Portuguese-based creole language that eventually decreolized, as suggested by Schwegler (1999). The rest of this chapter will try to shed light on this mysterious issue. It will attempt to explore possibilities which deviate from the binary option exempli-

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fied by (a) and (b). In particular, I will show that the information presented by McWhorter on the Jesuit enterprise in Chota Valley is not accurate and therefore misleading, while Schwegler’s account does not seem to be consistent with both the sociohistorical and the linguistic evidence available for CVS. 6.5. Sociohistorical remarks Before proceeding with the linguistic analysis of CVS, I think it is worth highlighting a few sociohistorical points made by Schwegler (1999) and McWhorter (2000), which appear to contradict the evidence so far collected for colonial Chota Valley. In fact, the possibility of an Afro-Portuguese creole being spoken in the Chota Valley (Schwegler 1999) seems to be strongly reduced by the available sociohistorical data. There are at least two reasons: first, several of the factors reported in chapter 2 indicate that locally-born slaves probably were more numerous than bozales across all the sociohistorical phases analyzed (Bryant 2005); second, when the Portuguese had the monopoly of asientos for trading slaves with Spanish America (Goodman 1987:397-398; quoted by Schwegler 1999:237), the black population in Chota Valley was not numerous (Coronel Feijóo 1991); while when more significant importations became necessary to the Jesuit enterprise (18th century), the transatlantic slave trade was mainly in the hands of French, Dutch and English companies (Colmenares 1997). We should also take a closer look at the data provided by McWhorter, which is not completely accurate. First, the claim that “there was no initial period of partial disparity between black and white” is not supported by researchers who worked on the socioeconomic history of this region. In fact, Coronel Feijóo (1991:81) – referring to the 17th century – said that “hablar de importación masiva de negros, para la época, parece sobredimensionado; difícil resulta atribuir a los estancieros de la zona un negocio de tal magnitud” (talking about massive black importation, by that time, seems to be overstated; it is difficult to ascribe such a big business to local settlers). Indeed, some blacks could be found in the region1, but the Jesuits and the rest of the farmers relied, whenever possible, on the cheaper Indian workforce. Only by the end of the 17th century, when the King had already forbidden the forced introduction of highland Indi1 We have several elements indicating an early black presence in the region: (1) Father Antonio de Borja indicated that in 1582 in Coangue, there were six Spaniards who cultivated winery and had some blacks working on their haciendas (Coronel Feijóo 1991:82). (2) Documents dated in 1627 (Table 2.6.) attest that Father Fernando Cortez sold a piece of land including coca fields, cotton plantations and 14 slaves to the Society of Jesus (Coronel Feijóo 1991:82). (3) Archival documents from the 1620s highlight the presence of black people in the conflicts over water resources (Coronel Feijóo 1991:69), etc.

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ans into this warmer region, did the Jesuits import more blacks. In addition, two other authors, Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego, indicated that this shift from Indian to African workforce was gradual (1959:215) and that the blacks who eventually came to populate the region were, for the most part, criollos. Second, McWhorter also indicates that “when Africans were imported to gradually replace the Indians, it was immediately in the large numbers necessary to harvest and process sugarcane (e.g., a shipment of 114 in 1637)” (McWhorter 2000:10-11). Nevertheless, this same transaction is mentioned by Coronel Feijóo (1991:86) who suggests, as we saw, that during the first half of the 17th century the Jesuits did not rely heavily on a black workforce. Rather they preferred to trade slaves to increase their liquidity. Indeed, a case in point is the sale of 114 slaves (24 men, 24 women, 37 female children and 29 male children) to Captain Andrés de Sevilla in 1637 in the town of San Miguel de Ibarra. McWhorter (2000) uses this same piece of information to claim the existence of massive bozal importations from the very beginning of the Jesuit enterprise in the region. However, if we look closer at the data, we can immediately see that McWhorter’s version of the story is not totally accurate. First, the Jesuits sold the slaves to Captain Andrés de Sevilla, so they did not import them to harvest and process sugarcane. Second, given that during this era the majority of the Afro-Ecuadorian population was composed of locally born criollos (cf. Bryant 2005:ch.2) and considering that 66 out of the 114 slaves sold in this transaction were children, it is also likely that the majority of the people in this group were not bozales and could speak Spanish or a good approximation of it2. Third, McWhorter concludes his sociohistorical account of CVS by reporting Coronel Feijóo’s (1991:88) demographic calculations. McWhorter says that “by 1780, the eight Jesuit plantations were worked by no less than 2,615 slaves.” However, as previously indicated, this piece of information also appears to be incorrect (cf. chapter 2 of present book). Not only it is not in line with the data of several other scholars reporting a more limited black presence in these haciendas (Cushner 1982:136; Peñaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego 1959:222; Bouisson 1997:47), it also contradicts overall demographic figures for the whole Corregimientos of Ibarra and Otavalo (Lucena Salmoral 1994b:58). 2 Schwegler (PC) points out that the fact that slaves could speak Spanish does not rule out the possibility that they could speak a creole language as well, which they might have developed as a sort of identity means of communication. I think this is a valuable observation that cannot be dismissed; however, we do not have any evidence suggesting the existence of such a language. In this book, I am trying to provide a description of the possible Chota Valley contact scenario based on the evidence we have.

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6.6. The linguistic nature of present-day CVS Even though a consensus has yet to occur among linguists on the origin of CVS, everyone agrees that this language does not present the radical grammatical restructuring found in certain creoles such as Cape Verdean Creole (Baptista 2002), Sranan Tongo (Migge 2003), Palenquero (Schwegler 1996) or Haitian French (Lefebvre 1998), to mention a few. Present day CVS, in fact, displays phonological and morphological reductions, African lexical borrowings and some other traces of second language acquisition strategies, but lacks extreme morphological reductions and syntactic substrate transfer, which can be widely encountered in the aforementioned contact varieties3. Lipski (1987) highlights the most characteristic morphosyntactic features of CVS. He mentions: (4a) sporadic lack of number and gender agreement in the Determiner Phrase; (4b) sporadic presence of bare nouns; (4c) confusion between the adjectives mucho ‘much/many’ and the adverb muy ‘very’; (4d) on rare occasions, lack of subject-verb agreement; (4e) confusion between the verbs ser and estar ‘to be’; (4f) sometimes reflexive se is not used with verbs which prescribe its use in Spanish; (4g) the use of prepositions sometimes diverge from Spanish; (4h) the second person singular pronoun is vos, rather than tú, which is also a common feature of coastal Ecuadorian Spanish. (4) En las haciendas vecino[-as]. Material de aquí de[l] lugar. Mucha [muy] fuerte está la fiebre. Comienza[n] a colorearse las vistas. Estamos [somos] diecisiete comunidades. f. La gente [se] está dedicando a la agricultura. a. b. c. d. e.

‘In the nearby plantations.’ ‘Material from around here.’ ‘The fever is very high.’ ‘Their eyes start to get red.’ ‘We are seventeen communities.’ ‘People have turned to agriculture.’

3 Schwegler (PC) stresses the fact that the current lack of creole features in Chota Valley does not mean that a creole language was not spoken in the past in this region. This claim would be supported by the case of Palenque. In fact, Schwegler claims that Palenquero and Spanish are two different systems, completely apart, which do not influence each other. For this reason, if the inhabitants of Palenque stopped using Palenquero, by looking at the Spanish they speak we would not be able to tell whether a creole language was used in the community. Again, this is a valuable hypothesis, which I cannot dismiss; nevertheless we have no data whatsoever suggesting the existence of a creole language in this region. Not only are the linguistic creole traces lacking, but also the historical information we have does not suggest that colonial Chota Valley had the sociodemographic conditions for the development or preservation of a creole language.

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g. Yo soy [de] abajo. ‘I’m from down the road.’ h. Vos comés. ‘You eat.’ As the above examples demonstrate, some of these CVS features deviate from standard Spanish and are also in line with the grammatical characteristics provided by Granda (1988) in favor of the Monogenetic Hypothesis. In summary, among the features reported in Table 6.1. as potential indicators of an Afro-Portuguese creole origin, CVS presents the following ones: · · · · ·

No plural marking on nouns. Sporadic elimination of syntactic linking elements (prepositions). Sporadic use of invariable adjectives for gender and number features. Vos as a second person pronoun. Ele as an “emphatic particle” (topic/focus marker) and possibly a third person singular pronoun.

In the following section, we will take a closer look at the features proposed by Granda (1988) and Schwegler (1999) to understand to what extent they support the Monogenesis Hypothesis. 6.7. A closer look at the ‘monogenetic features’ In this section, I begin with the analysis of the ‘monogenetic features’ encountered in CVS and then move to the remaining elements reported by Granda (1988) for other Spanish and Portuguese contact varieties. The lack of plural marking on nouns has often been mentioned in the literature on Spanish and Portuguese contact varieties as a potential cue for previous creolization. The most famous debate on the nature of stripped plurals is probably the one between Guy (1981; 2004) and Naro and Scherre (2000) on the origin of Popular Brazilian Portuguese (PBP). Guy (2004) maintains that the existence of this feature in PBP is an indicator of previous creolization, while Naro and Scherre (2000) consider the presence of this phenomenon in PBP as the byproduct of ‘normal’ ̶ internally motivated ̶ language change (cf. Schwegler 2010, for an overview of this debate). Leaving aside the additional sociohistorical reasons that the authors provide in support of their claims, it must be highlighted that a lack of plural morphology across the Determiner Phrase should not be taken as a quintessential feature of Afro-Portuguese creolization. First of all, the loss of inflectional morphology is common to all cases of linguistic contact, not just Afro-Portuguese contact; or creole languages. Secondly, DP number agreement mismatches can also be found in advanced Spanish second languages (Bruhn de Garavito and White 2000; White et al. 2004), varieties for which a creole hypothesis is obviously not tenable.

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The use of invariable adjectives is not exclusively limited to the Afro-Portuguese context. As previously indicated for number, gender agreement is also one of the first features to be lost in cases of language contact and one of the least ones to emerge in second language acquisition (Montrul 2004). The partial agreement phenomena found across the CVS DP may be seen as the traces of advanced second language acquisition processes, rather than a creole feature. Gender agreement mismatches, in fact, can be observed not only in the speech of advanced students learning Spanish or Portuguese, but in the speech of all advanced students learning an L2, especially if coming from an L1 lacking ‘gender’ as a feature (Franceschina 2002). It can also be encountered in the native language of many speakers of contact varieties for which a creole hypothesis is not suitable but in which crystallized second language varieties seem more plausible, such as Barlovento Spanish (Díaz Campos and Clements 2005, 2008). The pronoun vos, as is well-known, is found in a variety of Spanish dialects which cannot be analyzed as relexified versions of an Afro-Portuguese language. Some examples are Argentinean Spanish (Lipski 1994:172), Salvadorian Spanish (1994:259), Guatemalan Spanish (1994:266) and also some varieties of Ecuadorian Spanish, including those found in the highlands (1994:249-250), to mention a few. As indicated in chapter 4, some doubts have been cast on the pronominal status of ele since CVS speakers do not seem to be aware of its use as a pronoun and Lipski (2009b:112) and Powe (1998:137) describe it as an emphatic particle. Moreover, a closer look at Schwegler’s (1999:244) data appears to suggest that the real function of CVS ele is the one of a topic (and possibly focus) marker, rather than a pronoun. As far as the divergent use of Spanish prepositions is concerned in CVS and in other Spanish and Portuguese contact varieties, again the Portuguese-pidgin/ creole link does not seem to apply. In fact, the limited use of prepositions in pidgins, creoles and second languages is universally widespread and should not be reduced to the Afro-Portuguese context. To mention a few examples, it is found in Russenorsk pidgin (Jahr 1996) and Delaware Pidgin (Goddard 1997), spoken on the border between Norway and Siberia and along the Delaware River (US) respectively, where neither African languages nor Portuguese have ever been proven as linguistic inputs. As for the remaining features mentioned by Granda (1970), which are not encountered in CVS, much caution should be taken before indicating that they all derive from a proto-Afro-Portuguese contact variety. The existential use of tener has been reported in many US varieties of vestigial Spanish and in several

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other areas where the presence of a former Afro-Creole language is not a plausible option (cf. Lipski 1990b). The existence of ta as a preverbal present marker in several Spanish and Portuguese contact varieties should not be taken as evidence of a common underlying Afro-Creole base. In fact, it can easily be analyzed as the result of parallel evolutions of the progressive verb estar ‘to be’ found both in Spanish and Portuguese. Moreover, as suggested by Lipski (1994:118-119), a closer look at the TMA systems of Papiamentu, Palenquero, Caribbean Bozal Spanish, the Spanish Philippine creoles, Cape Verdean creole and the rest of the Afro-Portuguese creole languages indicate clear structural differences. Such a typological variation could hardly be explained if we were to claim the existence of a common uniform underlying proto-creole. In addition, while the simplification of the pronominal system seems to be a common tendency among pidgin and creole languages (Winford 2003); it must be said that Palenquero, Papiamento and the Spanish creoles spoken in the Philippines clearly present different grammatical strategies to express possession (cf. Schwegler and Green 2007; Kouwenberg and Ramos-Michel 2007; Lipski and Santoro 2007). This, however, is not to say that Transatlantic connections between African and American contact varieties should be excluded a priori. Jacobs (2009), for example, has recently shown shared grammatical patterns between the Upper Guinea Creole and Papiamentu, which could hardly be explained as the result of universal constraints on language acquisition. However, such a finding should not be taken as an element automatically validating the Monogenetic Hypothesis for all creole languages; rather it should be seen as evidence of a deeper relation between two specific varieties. The analysis of the monogenetic features provided by Granda (1988) indicates that none of the grammatical elements he mentioned can exclusively be linked to a proto-Afro-Portuguese creole, since all of them can also be encountered in other contact varieties for which neither Portuguese nor African languages were linguistic inputs. Moreover, the linguistic and sociohistorical evidence so far provided does not seem to indicate that a creole language ever developed in Chota Valley Spanish. Nevertheless, in order to get a more comprehensive perspective on the potential origin of this vernacular, in the following section, I will also explore the text used by Granda (1970) in support of the Monogenetic Hypothesis: De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute by Alonso de Sandoval (1627 [1956]).

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6.8. Early Afro-Hispanic linguistic insights from De Instauranda The sociohistorical information so far encountered does not seem to indicate that a creole language could develop in Chota Valley. A potential alternative to account for a creole origin of CVS would be to postulate, in line with Granda (1970; 1988), that a stable Afro-Portuguese creole was spoken amongst a significant numbers of blacks in Cartagena and that it was subsequently transplanted to these Ecuadorian valleys (Schwegler 1999). As indicated by Colmenares, the slaves arriving to Cartagena were not only transported on Portuguese ships; rather, the Dutch, French and English were also active in this business; especially during the Jesuit phase (1680-1767). Moreover, we saw that during this period, the percentage of bozales sold in Popayán was not more than 40%, thus indicating that criollo slaves were still the majority in the region. The high number of children found in the Choteño plantations further supports the idea that a good portion of the slaves were locally born (Cushner 1982; Bouisson 1997). All these factors appear to indicate that even if an Afro-Portuguese creole language were spoken by the majority of the slaves found in Cartagena, such a language probably would not have been adopted by the blacks living in Chota Valley. This being said, the current section will try to explore to what extent an actual Afro-Portuguese creole could have been used by a significant number of the slaves in Cartagena. We will do this by analyzing the Jesuit treatise on slavery mentioned by Granda (1970): De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute, originally published in 1627 by Father Alonso de Sandoval. A closer analysis of Sandoval’s work provides clear evidence indicating that the vast majority of the slaves arriving to Cartagena could not speak any form of Portuguese. They usually could only speak one or more African languages. For this reason, Father Sandoval had to constantly rely on ladino4 interpreters to communicate with bozales. Nevertheless, even this strategy was not always successful, since the languages found in Cartagena were so varied and different from one another that finding an appropriate interpreter was often impossible. Sandoval’s (1627 [1956:94]) paragraph quoted by Granda (1970:6) refers to the people who were raised in São Tomé from childhood or ‘criollos’ and those who were born there or ‘naturales.’ It clearly indicates that they could speak a variety of Portuguese, which appears to be a creole or pidgin. Y los que llamamos criollos y naturales de San Thomé, con la comunicación que con tan bárbaras naciones han tenido al tiempo que han resistido en San Thomé, 4 Ladinos were slaves who had spent enough time with their masters to speak Spanish, practice the Catholic faith and adopt Spanish customs.

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Sandro Sessarego las entienden casi todas con un género de lenguaje muy corrupto y revesado de la portuguesa que llaman lengua de San Thomé. (And those that we call creoles and natives of São Tomé, due to the communication that they had with so many uncivilized nations during the period that they lived in São Tomé, they understand almost all varieties, with a sort of broken Portuguese that they call São Tomé language).

Thanks to this language and probably some other African languages that they may have spoken, these people could act as interpreters for the Spanish-speaking Jesuits. Al modo que ahora nosotros entendemos y hablamos con todo género de negros y naciones con nuestra lengua española corrupta, como comúnmente la hablan todos los negros. (So that now we can speak with all kinds of blacks with our corrupted Spanish, as it is usually spoken by all the blacks).

This paragraph, as indicated by Lipski (2005:288-289), does not imply that all Africans could speak an Afro-Portuguese pidgin; rather, it seems to suggest that even the Africans speaking such a contact variety would eventually use una lengua española corrupta ‘a corrupted Spanish’ to talk to the Jesuits. This being said, it is important to indicate that only a part of the slaves arriving to Cartagena in the first decades of the 17th century were coming from São Tomé and nearby western African coasts. Indeed, as Sandoval states repeatedly in his work, blacks were captured in many different regions of Africa and shipped to Cartagena from four main locations (and sometimes also from other areas): Guinea, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Loanda (also called Angola). Sandoval (1627 [1956:90]) writes: Cuatro son los más principales puertos de donde ordinariamente suelen venir negros a este puerto de la ciudad de Cartagena de las Indias, que es la principal y derecha descarga de todo el mundo. Vienen de los ríos de Guinea y puertos de su tierra firme, de la isla de Cabo Verde, de la isla de San Thomé y del puerto de Loanda o Angola; y cual y cual de los otros recónditos y apartados reinos, así de la Etiopía Occidental como de la Oriental. (There are four main ports from which blacks usually are shipped to Cartagena de Indias, which is the main slave-receiving hub in the world. They come from the Guinea rivers and from the mainland, from the island of Cape Verde , from the island of São Tomé and from the port of Loanda or Angola and sometimes also from other remote kingdoms from the western as well as the eastern regions of Africa).

Sandoval (1627 [1956:90-97]) provides a description of the main cultural and physical characteristics of the African groups arriving to Cartagena. He says that such groups, also called castas or naciones, spoke different languages which were innumerables or ‘innumerable.’ As for those proceeding from the Guinea area, he mentions a few: iolofos, berbesíes, mandingas, fulos, fulupos, banunes, bootes, casangas, banunes puros, branes, balantas, biafras, biojoes, nalues, zapes, cocolies and zozes. He indicates that some of these people could speak mutually intelligible languages (i.e., iolofos, berbesíes, mandingas, fulos), while

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others, who were commonly identified with a single casta, were actually composed of many different subgroups speaking completely different dialects. An example was ‘zapes’, composed of zape puro, zape cocoli, zape yalonga, zape baga and many others (1627 [1956:93]). Sandoval classifies the slaves departing from Cape Verde according to three main categories: (a) bozales, who were born in Guinea; (b) ladinos or criollos, who were born in Guinea but raised in Cape Verde from childhood and could speak Portuguese; (c) naturales, who were born and raised in Cape Verde. As for those arriving from São Tomé, Sandoval applies the same categorization: (a) bozales, (b) ladinos or criollos, (c) naturales. As we saw, he indicates that criollos and naturales from São Tomé could speak an Afro-Portuguese pidgin or creole. Moreover, he reports the castas belonging to the category bozales: minas, popoos, fulaos, ardas or arara, lucumies, terranovos, barba, temnes, binis, mosaicos, agars, gueres, zarabas, iabus, caravalies puros, caravalies particulars, among many others. Also, for this region, Sandoval highlights that certain castas are actually composed of completely different groups, whose languages are not mutually understandable. One of such cases is the group called ‘caravalies particulares’, which includes – among many other unmentioned nations: abalomo, bila, cubai, coco, cola, dembe, done, evo, ibo, ido, mana, moco, oquema, ormapi, quereca, tebo and teguo. In addition, he indicates that on the boats departing from São Tomé, oftentimes, it is possible to encounter black slaves originating from very remote regions of East Africa and even from Asia (1627 [1956:96]): En estas embarcaciones de San Thomé suelen de ordinario venir algunos negros de los reinos y naciones que tratamos de la Etiopia Oriental sobre Egipto, como los mozambiques, melindes, etc., y también de alla de la India, como ceileanes, paravas de la Pesquería. (In these boats departing from São Tomé quite often it is possible to find blacks proceeding from kingdoms and nations found in East Ethiopia and Egypt, such as Mozambicans, Melindes etc. and sometimes also from India, like Ceylon, Paravas from Pesquería).

The last groups described are those coming from Loanda. Sandoval (1627 [1956:96]) mentions the following castas: angolas, congos or monicongos, angicos, monixiolos and malembas. He says that for these groups it is easier to find interpreters because the group from Angola speaks a language which can be understood – to a certain extent – by the members of other Loanda nations5.

5 It is also important to note that the geographic term ‘Angola’ from the 16th - 17th centuries does not coincide exactly with its modern meaning. In that period, it also referred to the Loango Coast (cf. Schwegler 2012 for a detailed account).

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The importance of interpreters is often commented on in Sandoval’s work. In fact, De Instauranda can be seen as a manual, written with the purpose of teaching other Jesuits about how to “restore salvation” in Africans. Crucial to this process was the conversion to Catholicism and then baptism, which could only be carried out if the bozales were taught the principles of the Christian faith. Nevertheless, given the many slaves arriving to Cartagena, we can be sure that a good part of them were never really taught the principles of the Christian faith, at least not during their temporary stay in this city. Map 6.2. Main African departing ports as indicated by Sandoval in De Instauranda

Cape Verde

Guinea

São Tomé

Luanda

Given the different linguistic backgrounds characterizing the blacks in Cartagena, finding somebody able to translate Spanish into one or more African languages was crucial to the success of Sandoval’s project. This fact, no surprise, is repeated over and over again throughout all of De Instauranda. In book III, Sandoval dedicates chapter II to this issue: De la precisa necesidad que tienen los obreros destos etíopes del uso de los intérpretes y lenguas ladinas y fieles (On the precise need for using interpreters and trustworthy Spanish speakers when working with the Africans); he highlights the importance of finding people able to speak the language of the newly arrived Africans, especially those who were sick or about to die, since if not baptized before passing away, they would have been condemned to hell forever.

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He indicates that finding a translator in such a multi-linguistic context was extremely difficult, also because slave owners usually did not care about Christianizing their slaves (1627 [1956:335]): Y la dificultad está en que de ordinario sus amos no tienen intérpretes ni se les da nada por buscarlos; y nosotros parece moralmente imposible que aprendamos todas estas lenguas por ser tanta su multitud y no haber alguna general. (And the problem is that usually their masters do not have any interpreters and do not even care about finding one; and for us it is morally impossible to learn all these languages as they are so many and there is not a single one generally shared by all of them).

For these reasons, finding somebody able to translate from Spanish could require several days of searching: a buscarles lenguas e interpretes días enteros “looking for languages and interpreters entire days” (1627 [1956:335]). In order to save time and energy when instructing Africans in the Catholic faith, Sandoval considered it fundamental to find linguistic patterns across African groups with mutually intelligible languages. At the same time, it was necessary to encounter ladino slaves able to speak Spanish as well as several African tongues (1627 [1956:338]): También conviene advirtamos la diferencia de castas que hablan algunas, para que así una pueda servir por muchas y ahorrar trabajo y molestia. Y porque así como las lenguas e intérpretes ladinos suelen hablar varias lenguas, así los negros bozales también las suelen hablar y entender. (It is also important to identify the differences in the languages they speak because one language may be used to talk to different groups and in this way we would save time and energy. And because as the Ladino interpreters usually speak several languages, also bozal blacks usually speak and understand several ones).

Africans were usually unable to understand each other, not only in Cartagena, which received slaves from all over the western African coast; they quite often could not understand each other even in the location from where they were shipped, due to the fact that they were captured in regions far away from the actual point of departure. Sandoval (1627 [1956:100-101]) states that slave traders would go to inland town markets, 80 leagues away from the port, to purchase slaves from local merchants, called genses, who would exchange slaves captured 200-300 leagues away (cf. Schwegler 2012:164-166 for a detailed account of precise trails/routes from the interior to the coast in the Congo region). Éstos se parten en compañía […] trecho de ochenta leguas, donde hallan unas grandes ferias, y juntos para rescate en ellas muchos negros a quienes llaman genses, que quiere decir mercaderes, que han venido de más se docientas y trecientas leguas, con muchos negros de diferentes reinos para rescatarlos por varia mercadería […]. (These people leave as a group […] travelling for 80 leagues, until they find big markets, where there are many blacks who can be acquired from the genses, which means merchants, who came from more than 200 and 300 leagues away with many blacks from different kingdoms in order to exchange them for other products […]).

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Due to such a multiethnic mix, slaves in the port of departure could not rely on a common means of communication and when they were baptized en masse before leaving for the Americas, it was impossible for them to understand what they had been told, not even if they were addressed using an African language6. For this reason, Sandoval argued, such ceremonies were not valid and the slaves had to be baptized again once they arrived in Cartagena (1627 [1956:361]): Pues nos consta que en un navío donde vienen más de seiscientos negros de tan varias y diversas castas como hemos dicho, y que no se entienden sino es cual y cual los unos con los otros, mal entenderían si les quisiesen catequizar con sola una lengua destas, bran, mandinga, fula o biojo. De modo que las demás naciones, castas y lenguas que no entendieran aquella por que les hablaban, en ninguna manera harían concepto, ni comprenderían lo que se les decía, y por el consiguiente no quedaban bautizados. (It is well-known that in a boat transporting more than six hundred blacks originating from so many groups as we said, and who cannot talk to each other, they would not understand if they were catechized with just one of these languages, Bran, Mandinga, Fula o Biojo. So that the remaining groups and nations that do not speak such a language would not understand what they were told and for this reason they would not be really baptized).

In summary, a closer analysis of De Instauranda has shown that an Afro-Portuguese creole was not the means of communication used among a significant number of slaves in Cartagena. Conversely, the majority of the bozal slaves could not rely on any common means of communication until they learned Spanish. We identified only two specific categories of bozales who could speak an Afro-Portuguese contact variety, the naturales and criollos from São Tomé. However, this group would also eventually use Bozal Spanish to communicate with the Jesuits (cf. Lipski 2005). The lack of a stable Afro-Portuguese creole adopted by a significant number of bozales is further supported by the fact that the slaves were not only shipped to Cartagena from São Tomé; rather, they were sent to this town from three other main regions: Guinea, Cape Verde and Loango. In addition, the Africans departing from these locations were often captured in lands far away from the actual ports of departure and they did not have any shared linguistic background7. In fact, not only could they not understand each other in Cartagena, where slaves were arriving from the whole western

6 This piece of information does not back Schwegler’s (2012) claim that Palenque had a very uniform substrate (Kikongo). Also Castillo (1982, 1984, 1992) stresses the importance of Kikongo and other Bantu languages in the formation of Palenquero. Further research on this topic may shed light on the linguistic background of the slaves arriving to colonial Cartagena. 7 Schwegler (PC) is a bit skeptical about these claims. He argues that a creole was probably vastly spoken in Cartagena and that Kikongo varieties were the main substrate languages found in the region, as they are supposed to be for Palenquero.

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African shore; they often were not capable of mutual linguistic comprehension even in the departing ports of Africa. Given this data, the chances of a well-established Afro-Portuguese creole spoken in Cartagena and then eventually transplanted to Chota Valley appear to be highly reduced. Moreover, the fact that during the Jesuit Phase (1680-1767) the Portuguese no longer were the main slave suppliers for the Spanish colonies further diminish the likelihood of such a possibility. 6.9. Conclusions This chapter has provided a novel analysis of the Monogenesis Hypothesis proposed by Granda (1970; 1988) and more recently revisited by Schwegler (1999); it also assessed McWhorter’s (2000) claims on the sociohistorical nature of slavery in colonial Chota Valley. Linguistic and sociohistorical evidence indicate that Chota Valley was not the ideal place for a creole to develop – or be preserved – and that CVS should not be seen as the result of a decreolization of a previous Afro-Portuguese creole. Linguistic data indicates that the so-called ‘monogenetic features’ provided by Granda can be better analyzed as common grammatical patterns encountered in several contact varieties, not necessarily related to either Portuguese or African languages. A closer look at CVS grammar suggests that this dialect derived much of its structure from Spanish while it also presents clear morphological simplifications and regularizations. These elements seem to be the remaining traces of crystallized second language strategies, rather than evidence of the existence of a more radical creole. Historical findings suggest that the sociodemographic conditions of Chota Valley were probably not conducive to the local creation of a creole language; they also suggest that in all likelihood a western African creole was not introduced in this area, since the majority of the slaves found in Chota Valley were locally born. Additionally, a closer look at Sandoval’s work indicates that the vast majority of the slaves arriving to Cartagena could exclusively speak African languages, often mutually unintelligible and thus they did not share a common Afro-Portuguese creole. The overall picture emerging from the available data seems to suggest that CVS was neither a creole which decreolized (cf. Schwegler 1999) nor a “missing Spanish creole” (cf.McWhorter 2000). The linguistic features of this language may be better explained as cases of incomplete acquisition, which do not necessarily imply a previous creole stage. The present study not only contributes to shedding light on the origins of CVS, but it also helps clarify the controversial puzzle concerning the genesis of Afro-Hispanic languages in the Americas.

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Juana Chalá and her nieces

Billboard commemorating Afro-Choteños’ resistance

A group of friends from Concepción

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Don Cristóbal showing local youngsters how to make a bomba drum

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Don Cristóbal playing the bomba drum

Teenagers practicing the bomba dance

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Traditional tresses

Traditional dances

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