Indigenous Languages, Politics, and Authority in Latin America: Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives 0268103690

Citation preview

INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES, POLITICS, AND AUTHORITY IN LATIN AMERICA

INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES, POLITICS, AND AUTHORITY IN LATIN AMERICA Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives

Edited by ALAN DU RSTO N and BRUCE MANNHEI M

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu Copyright © 2018 by University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Durston, Alan, 1970– editor. | Mannheim, Bruce, editor. Title: Indigenous languages, politics, and authority in Latin America : historical and ethnographic perspectives / edited by Alan Durston and Bruce Mannheim. Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018011947 (print) | LCCN 2018013951 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268103712 (pdf ) | ISBN 9780268103729 (epub) | ISBN 9780268103699 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268103690 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Indians of South America—Languages—Political aspects. | Indians of South America—Languages—Social aspects. | Indians of South America—Languages—History. | Indians of Mexico—Languages—Political aspects. | Indians of Mexico—Languages—Social aspects. | Indians of Mexico— Languages—History. | Indians of Central America—Languages—Political aspects. | Indians of Central America—Languages—Social aspects. | Indians of Central America—Languages—History. Classification: LCC P119.32.S63 (ebook) | LCC P119.32.S63 I53 2018 (print) | DDC 498—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011947

∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected]

To the memory of Sabine MacCormack

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction Alan Durston and Bruce Mannheim

ix 1

ONE

“The Discourse of My Life”: What Language Can Do (Early Colonial Views on Quechua) Sabine MacCormack

25

TWO

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico Bas van Doesburg

59



THREE The Politics of the Aztec Histories

105



Camilla Townsend

FOUR

Toward a Guarani Semantic History: Political 125 Vocabulary in Guarani (Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries) Capucine Boidin and Angélica Otazú Melgarejo

FIVE

Quechua-Language Government Propaganda in 1920s Peru Alan Durston

161

SIX

Mayan Languages: A New Dawn? Judith M. Maxwell

181

SEVEN Xavier Albó’s “The Future of the Oppressed

207







Languages in the Andes,” Revisited Bruce Mannheim

viii  Contents

EIGHT Building Differences: The (Re)production of

231

List of Contributors Index

247 249



Hierarchical Relations among Women in the Southern Andes Margarita Huayhua

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume was originally conceived by Sabine MacCormack (1941– 2012), who invited most of the contributors and asked Alan Durston and Bruce Mannheim to take on editorial responsibilities. Now that it is coming out the editors would like to dedicate it to her memory. We thank Princeton University Press for allowing us to reproduce “‘The Discourse of My Life’: What Language Can Do,” chapter 6 (pp. 170–201) of Sabine MacCormack’s On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (2007), as her contribution to this volume. We are grateful to the authors for their patience with a prolonged editorial process. We would also like to thank Stephen Little, Eli Bortz, and Rebecca DeBoer, of the University of Notre Dame Press, for shepherding the project through to its conclusion, and Elisabeth Magnus for her rigorous copyediting.

ix

Introduction ALAN DURSTON AND BRUCE MANNHEIM

Indigenous languages have been used to express new understandings of community, polity, and authority throughout the history of Latin American societies. Additionally, specific Amerindian languages have themselves embodied authority as varieties of special standing in the colonial regime, or as emblems of national or ethnic identities. Ethnographic research is revealing how speakers today employ socially stratified registers that index and reproduce hierarchies among them. This volume explores how indigenous languages have functioned as vehicles of social and political orders from the sixteenth century to the present. Our focus is on languages that have been prominent in multiethnic colonial and national societies and are well represented in the written record—Guarani, some of the Mayan languages, Nahuatl, and Quechua are the main examples, but certainly not the only ones. The work assembled here challenges unspoken but persistent assumptions about the postconquest history of indigenous languages; once these assumptions are set aside, their long-neglected centrality to the ­political history of the region becomes evident. A first assumption could be termed the “assumption of linear decline”: that indigenous languages have, at best, “held on” in the face of the onslaught of European languages, with some merely declining more slowly than others. It is abundantly clear that indigenous languages expanded into new arenas in the wake of the Iberian invasions and that when they did lose ground the 1

2  alan

durston and bruce mannheim

gains often went to other indigenous languages.1 For example, it appears that in much of the Andes (particularly Peru) Spanish lost ground to Quechua after independence in the 1820s; as late as the middle of the twentieth century Spanish monolinguals were rare in some Andean cities.2 Similarly, in a pattern far from linear decline, the demographic falloff in Quechua monolingualism in the southern Peruvian highlands is relatively recent, a product of changes in the rural productive economy and in education in the second half of the twentieth century, rather than of colonial-era language policy. A second assumption, deriving from an ideology of language both anachronistic and acontextual, construes indigenous languages as monoethnic and monocultural, defining clearly bounded populations.3 Mobility and mutability are the corollaries of enduring vitality: indigenous languages experienced wholesale changes as they acquired new roles and were adopted both by nonindigenous populations and by indigenous groups that had not originally spoken them. It is not just that agents of colonialism appropriated indigenous languages for purposes like religious conversion. Well into the twentieth century, indigenous languages were the common medium of communication shared by all, regardless of socioracial status, in large areas of Latin America (elites being distinguished by the fact that they also knew Spanish). This situation still exists in Paraguay, where the most spoken language is Guarani. In their chapter on the Guarani written record—whose extent and diversity will come as a surprise to many readers—Capucine Boidin and Angélica Otazú Melgarejo argue that this record is the product of a “third space” or “middle ground” that was neither indigenous nor European. While Jesuit missionaries had a major hand in the initial development of a written, colonial form of Guarani, it was taken up and transformed by a variety of agents, indigenous, mestizo, and creole (of Spanish descent). A similar story emerges for the other widely written indigenous languages. To generalize this: languages as formal systems move across populations; they provide resources for the social construction of boundaries,4 particularly through differential access to linguistic repertoires, but the boundaries of a linguistic ­system—a named language or a named variety of a language—do not necessarily coincide with a social or political boundary. A key implication of mobility/mutability is the need to study distinct registers of a language and how they are regimented. Scholars have often failed to notice socially grounded registers because they have tended to focus on the formal, written representation of grammars to the exclu-

Introduction   3

sion of everyday contexts. Ethnicity is not the mechanical reflection of abstract knowledge of a set of lexical and grammatical forms or of an equally abstract heritage (inherited from where?). For speakers of K’ichee’ Maya, ethnicity is an interactional achievement, arrived at through a complex layering of linguistic accommodation and differentiation: (1) foundationally at the hyperlocal level that is characteristic of Mesoamerica as a region, in which speakers from local settlements strive to differentiate themselves from neighboring settlements, drawing on historically Mayan and historically Spanish resources to do so; (2) a layer up, where, at a local level again, speakers differentiate themselves by class/ ethnic affiliation through interaction between local varieties of Mayan and Spanish; and (3) at a pan-Mayan level, where Mayan intellectuals differentiate themselves from non-Mayans through a regimented purist register of K’ichee’.5 Each of these levels has a different, overlapping set of ethnic entailments, and each feeds into the others. These are ultimately observable only through detailed observation and analysis of ­linguistic behavior, as the more local points of differentiation are not necessarily within the purview of conscious control. The complexity of the linguistic repertoire within which K’ichee’ speakers (themselves of multiple varieties) interact has not diminished—rather, it has expanded as Spanish colonialism, l­ inguistic domination in republican Guatemala, and the pan-Maya movement have left linguistic accretions that, plugged into an older Meso­american “pueblo dialectology,” have provided a surplus of politically and socially charged varieties of K’ichee’, controlled to a greater or lesser extent by speakers differently located.6 The proliferation of new registers takes a variety of forms. The spread of linguistic features from indigenous languages to local varieties of Spanish is not restricted to the usual second-language phenomena, such as the deployment of Quechua vowel space in second-language Spanish or the expansion of the periphrastic past tense (he venido instead of vine) or of the mirative (habia sido) in Spanish, but in Vallegrande, ­Bolivia, can include the borrowing of ejectives (glottalized sounds) into Spanish, forming an affectively charged, “indigenized” register of the local Spanish.7 Another form of accommodation is the development of specialized or elite registers of the indigenous language, in which both grammar and lexicon are fitted to the categorial structure and semantics of Spanish or Portuguese. The elite overlay of southern Quechua, discussed in Bruce Mannheim’s chapter, is an example of this. It developed among landed creoles and their descendants and continues to be spoken

4  alan

durston and bruce mannheim

to this day by first-language Spanish speakers who work with popu­ lations that are primarily Quechua speaking, such as workers in non­ governmental organizations (see Margarita Huayhua, this volume). The process of accommodation can be deeply complex from a semiotic point of view, as William F. Hanks shows in his historical account of the emergence of what he calls Maya reducido on the Yucatán peninsula, remolding Yucatec Mayan to “the discursive practices of an emerging community of Christianized Indios.”8 Maya reducido overflowed the religious contexts in which it first emerged, shaping written Maya in public, secular venues, such as notaries. It is critical to note that neither is an instance of language change as it is normally understood.9 In both cases, Spanish-­ accommodated registers of indigenous languages have been added to regional repertoires, with specific social conditions within which they come into play. This volume is the first to address the political uses of Latin American indigenous languages in historical perspective and is among the first to present a collection of interdisciplinary research covering different time periods and geographical areas. In this last regard it joins two recent compilations: History and Language in the Andes, edited by Paul Heggarty and Adrian J. Pearce (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America, edited by Salikoko Mufwene (University of Chicago Press, 2014). History and Language in the Andes brings together linguists and historians working on Andean languages (mainly Quechua) to show the potential for rethinking key assumptions of either field through the findings and methods of the other. Mufwene’s volume deals with the linguistic and sociolinguistic processes set off by Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, combining research on Iberian and Amerindian languages by linguists, anthropologists, and historians. Both volumes reflect a growing interest in multilingualism and “language ­ecologies”—the social, political, and ideological forces that organize the distribution of languages and language varieties in a ­society— that is also present in this volume. The research assembled here is methodologically and disciplinarily diverse—history, historical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, philology, and combinations thereof— but the contributors share a focus on indigenous languages as political objects and vehicles. As the ethnographic chapters by Huayhua and Mann­heim remind us, languages are not merely abstract systems that peer out occasionally from historical or ethnographic accounts—rather,

Introduction   5

they are the stuff of everyday social life. The deployment of distinct linguistic varieties in social interaction—ethnographically attested at the present time but also attested historically if only in fragmentary ways— lays bare the workings of social differentiation and social hierarchy. BAC KGROU N D

The Amerindian languages that have left abundant written records are concentrated in three distinct areas: (1) Mesoamerica, (2) the central Andes, and (3) Paraguay. In Mesoamerica it is important to distinguish between central Mexico (where Nahuatl was the dominant language), Oaxaca (Mixtec, Zapotec, Chocho, and others), and the Mayan region. All three subareas are represented in this volume (Camilla Townsend’s chapter deals with Nahuatl; Bas van Doesburg’s with Chocho, Mixtec, and other Oaxacan languages; and Judith Maxwell’s with Mayan languages in Guatemala and southern Mexico). Four chapters deal with ­different moments in Quechua’s postconquest history (Sabine MacCormack, Alan Durston, Mannheim, and Huayhua). The third region, Paraguay, is represented by Boidin and Otazú Melgarejo’s piece on Guarani. This section offers general background on each area and goes on to ­provide some thoughts on periodization. Mesoamerica is characterized by a high degree of linguistic diversity packed into a relatively small area. Ethnographers have noted a tendency toward localized microdifferentiation, with the home village as a moral center, which the linguistic anthropologist Paul Friedrich described as “pueblo dialectology.”10 This heterogeneity speaks to the fact that in spite of millennia of close cultural and economic interactions the area was never unified politically, as the Andes were. Nonetheless, on the eve of the Spanish invasion Nahuatl had achieved the status of a lingua franca far beyond the regions subject to Tenochtitlan. The conquests helped spread Nahuatl yet further, because the conquistadors were accompanied by Nahua allies and because Nahuatl became the most widely used indigenous language among the Spaniards, particularly the clergy. Mesoamerica also stands out for its abundant written records in a number of indigenous languages. The abundance of community records in Nahuatl gave rise in the 1970s to one of the most influential and prolific schools in colonial Mexicanist historiography, the “New Philology,” whose

6  alan

durston and bruce mannheim

main champion was the late James Lockhart. Lockhart and his students were the first to write the postconquest history of Mesoamerican polities on the basis of indigenous-language sources and paid special attention to the continued use of native terms for sociopolitical units and offices.11 Townsend’s chapter in this volume builds on this rich tradition of Nahuatl scholarship and scrutiny of indigenous sociopolitical categories. There is now an extensive and diverse historiography employing sources in Mesoamerican languages, and recent trends include a focus on multilingualism and language ecologies.12 Multilingualism is an especially prominent issue in the Oaxaca area, where Mixtec or Zapotec, Nahuatl, and little-known languages such as Chocho could coexist in a single community. A distinctive historiography is emerging that explores the conditions of the exuberant multilingualism of the local archives and is exemplified by van Doesburg’s chapter in this volume.13 Turning to the Andes, the historian is faced first of all with the vast geographical extent of Quechua, still spoken today from Colombia to northwestern Argentina. While Quechua is considered a language family, its most far-flung varieties are very closely related, suggesting that they represent a more recent, relatively rapid expansion. An important shift in thinking on this topic took place in the 1960s and 1970s, when the conventional model according to which Quechua originated in Cuzco and spread with Inka rule in the fifteenth century was disproven. Instead, it was proposed that Quechua first developed in central Peru and spread north and south in different waves, with most of the expansion taking place in pre-Inka times.14 This model is currently being refined by new research that places greater emphasis on the transformations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—the time of the Inka and Spanish conquests.15 In the colonial Andes, Quechua was known simply as la lengua general (“the general language,” or “the lingua franca”) and was arguably more strategic to Spanish colonial interests than any other indigenous language, particularly because of its role as a lingua franca in the forced-labor system that fed the state-managed silver mining system.16 Nonetheless, the written corpus in Quechua from the colonial period is small by Mesoamerican standards, especially when it comes to texts of native authorship as opposed to the missionary literature authored by the European-­­born and creole clergy. Until recently, Quechua studies were the domain of linguists and had little parallel in the histori­ography. However, Quechua scholars have long been sensitive to how colonial

Introduction   7

agents used and transformed the language, including semantic transformations of key terms.17 In recent years, a wider range of Andeanist scholars in different disciplines have been studying Quechua texts and taking an interest in Quechua’s broader history—for instance, the dramatic spatial and demographic expansions and contractions of the language.18 Guarani, today the most spoken language of Paraguay, was part of a vast sphere of interaction that covered much of lowland South America. It is closely related to Tupinamba, a language spoken along much of the Brazilian coast that acquired lingua franca status in parts of colonial Brazil when it was carried inland by Portuguese slave raiders and colonists, their indigenous allies, and Jesuit missionaries.19 Languages of the far-flung Tupian family are spoken as far north as French Guiana, as far south as Paraguay, and as far west as the Peruvian Amazon. In the areas of the Rio de la Plata basin that were controlled by Spain, Guarani emerged as the local lengua general: the language of the Jesuit missions and of colonial Paraguay, as well as one of the most written Amerindian languages. A scholarship that reveals the full dimensions and characteristics of the historical Guarani literature has only recently emerged. This late development can be attributed in part to the fact that the early literature (from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) is dominated by Jesuit missionary writings and that writings of indigenous authorship and nonreligious writings date mostly from the late colonial and republican periods. Boidin and Otazú Melgarejo are part of a new generation of scholars who are revealing the importance of these “late” texts that many assumed had little potential to reveal the characteristics of a pristine, precontact Guarani society. Research using Amerindian texts has focused overwhelmingly on a period stretching from the mid-to-late sixteenth century to the mid-tolate seventeenth century. The great missionary linguistic and translation projects date to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a period that was also the high point of indigenous alphabetic writing in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Key Amerindian languages had a formally recognized status in colonial society. The initial development of the norms for writing a language was controlled by the Spanish clergy, but writing was then taken up for a variety of purposes by indigenous elites in Mesoamerica and (to a lesser degree) the Andes—­internal administrative and historical records, correspondence, and even the trans­ mission of non-Christian religious lore. While internal community

8  alan

durston and bruce mannheim

records in Meso­american languages continued to be kept in some localities throughout the colonial period, there was a marked decline after the mid-seventeenth century, and some genres all but disappeared.20 One of the novel aspects of Townsend’s chapter on Nahuatl annals is her focus on one of the last practitioners of the genre, Juan Buena­ventura Zapata, who wrote in the mid-seventeenth century. The decline reflects the fact that the indigenous nobility of Mesoamerica and the Andes were becoming increasingly bilingual but also experiencing ­increasing difficulty in maintaining their leadership over indigenous communities. As indigenous communities became smaller and more egalitarian, they had less need for or access to writing. It is thus particularly interesting that indigenous writing in Guarani took off just as it was declining, or even disappearing, in Mesoamerica and the Andes, a reflection of the fact that Paraguay was a frontier area with limited presence by  the colonial ­government—in fact, Guarani leaders assumed an even greater role in local government after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 (see Boidin and Otazú Melgarejo, this volume). The decline of indigenous-language writing in Mesoamerica and the Andes can also be associated with a turn to a more unified, top-down vision of the state, on the model of Bourbon France, which in turn engendered a growing belief in the necessity and feasibility of the Castilian language as a unified language of statecraft. Antipathy toward indigenous languages in the colonial establishment increased under the Spanish Bourbons, particularly during the second half of the eighteenth century, when a far-reaching process of administrative centralization and standardization took place. The Bourbons actively promoted Castilian Spanish as a national language, and in 1770 Charles III issued a decree calling for the eradication of Amerindian languages.21 It is important to note, however, that Bourbon language policies had little effect and in many areas were blithely disregarded even by creole elites and by the clergy. During the Independence Wars (1810–25), decrees and proclamations urging indigenous support were translated into indigenous languages by both patriots and loyalists and were published in New Spain, Peru, and the new viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata.22 Under the Habsburgs (prior to 1700), the church had been the main transmitter of political concepts; bilingual and multilingual catechisms and sermons explicitly referred to the nature and basis of the colonial order.23 The religious underpinnings of secular power were undermined

Introduction   9

by the secularization process undertaken by the Bourbons, and even more so by the Independence Wars and the rise of liberalism and nationalism. Accordingly, new textual genres and vocabularies had to be invented rather quickly, and a new symbolic role for indigenous languages appeared: that of the national language, embodiment of the historical continuity of a nation.24 Once independence was achieved, national leaders quickly abandoned their interest in indigenous languages, or in any case stopped publishing in them. However, the endemic conflicts and political instability of the early national period (roughly 1820–80) are associated with a florescence of political writing in indigenous languages. Two large corpora are in Yucatec Maya and Guarani: the first is a reflection of a prolonged period of Maya independence in Yucatán known as the Caste War (1847–1901), and the second is a product of Paraguay’s War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), when national leaders promoted a Guarani-­ language press as part of a nationwide military mobilization (see Boidin and Otazú Melgarejo, this volume).25 Indigenous languages received a new boost as political media in the early decades of the twentieth century as a result of two interconnected processes: (1) the rise of indigenismo and (2) movements that reacted against turn-of-the-century oligarchic modernization and its effects on indigenous peasantries. Both resulted in state institutions and practices that, at least, paid lip service to the inclusion of indigenous people in the nation-building process. During the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), Emiliano Zapata published manifestos in Nahuatl, and in its aftermath, Mexico’s revolutionary government developed bilingual education programs for several indigenous languages.26 Other countries such as Peru followed suit, if in a less systematic fashion (Durston, this volume). For the first time since the seventeenth century, centralized and more or less systematic programs for the instruction of Amerindian-language speakers were developed, this time focusing on notions of nationhood and ­modernity as part of a project of “soft assimilationism.” In Peru, Guatemala, and perhaps other countries as well, authoritarian leaders sought to co-opt indigenismo and forestall social unrest by presenting themselves as protectors of the indigenous population and publishing indigenous-­ language proclamations (Durston, this volume).27 Official interest in ­­indigenous languages waned after World War II, however. Rapid urbanization, in particular, boosted Spanish and convinced policy makers and intellectuals that indigenous languages would soon be obsolete.

10  alan

durston and bruce mannheim

The extensive and diverse indigenous-language literatures of the 1750–1950 period have only recently begun to attract scholarly attention in large part because under the assumption of linear decline they were wrongly assumed to be pallid versions of material from the first years of the colony. As Boidin and Otazú Melgarejo note in this volume, scholars have long gravitated toward the earlier texts for their presumed proximity to preconquest cultures (though these texts were often fitted to their Spanish counterparts). It has also taken a long time for the scholarship to take into account the role of indigenous languages in the process of independence and nation building. While there is a large and distinguished historiography on the involvement of indigenous peasantries in these processes, historians have rarely asked how key concepts and discourses were expressed in indigenous languages. Somewhat counterintuitively, scholars of Quechua and Guarani appear to have taken greater interest in these issues than Mesoamericanists, at least in relative terms— late colonial and republican political languages are now the most prominent theme in Guarani studies. Ironically, the blindness toward indigenous political languages and languages of politics extends to the present day. There is a disjuncture between the current preoccupation with the “new social movements,” in large part ethnically based, and our understanding of the ways in which these movements are mediated in large part through indigenous languages. Indigenous communities of North Potosí, Bolivia, have participated in a pan-indigenous movement, with communities represented across the ethnic divide between Quechuas and Aymaras. How are political rhetorics in the two (non–mutually intelligible) indigenous languages structured? What role do translators play in fitting the political and moral rhetorics of one language to another? What linguistic registers are their discussions conducted in?28 Our current age of indigenous-­language politics is characterized by the rise of ethic militancy and concepts of plurinationalism—in effect, an explicit rejection of the Latin American nation-states in favor of earlier identities. Its origins date back several decades, to the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s that produced movements like the Aymara-centered Katarista movement in Bolivia and the pan-Maya movement in Guatemala (see Maxwell, this volume).29 Yet these shifts in public, political rhetorics have had multiple, contradictory effects on the indigenous languages—as Maxwell (this volume) describes them, “steps forward,” “steps backward,” “steps side-

Introduction   11

ways.” In Ecuador, the emergence of indigenous political movements in the 1990s gave rise to a standardized, unified variety of Quichua (as the Ecuadorian members of the Quechua linguistic family are known), called Quichua Unificado, based on highland varieties of Quichua, with a semantics at least partly regimented to Spanish. But Amazonian Quichua speakers struggle with Quichua Unificado, and many speakers are now bilingual in the two Quichua varieties—often along with other Amazonian languages.30 Quichua Unificado is also brought into the classroom in Zapara-­speaking areas of Ecuador, creating a space in which all three languages are aligned to each other semantically.31 In Bolivia, too, school primers written in a single, standardized Quechua sit unused in bilingual classrooms. At the edge of the Peruvian Amazon, a community school used by Matsigenka, Quechua, and bilingual Matsigenka-Quechua students received a bilingual Quechua-Spanish instructor one year and a bilingual Matsigenka-­Q uechua instructor the next.32 In all these cases, the tacit message (made explicit by the paucity of indigenous-­language instruction at a secondary level and the utter absence of advanced study in indigenous languages) is to reinforce the dominance of Spanish as the only legitimate linguistic variety, public rhetoric notwithstanding. The bright exception to these patterns is the Guatemalan case, where Mayan communities have controlled both standardization and indigenous education, within limits (and with a somewhat distinct set of contradictions). MA IN T H EME S

The connecting threads of this volume can be grouped into four main categories: (1) political economies of language, (2) language choice and authority, (3) writing and polity, and (4) political concept formation. Every chapter deals at one level or another with the first topic, which concerns the changing standing and functions of indigenous languages relative to nonindigenous languages and to one another. The use of indigenous languages as sources of political authority (topic 2) is also a prominent topic throughout. The “writing and polity” topic is most prominent in the chapters by van Doesburg and Townsend, which reveal the close ties between indigenous-language writing and the construction and consolidation of indigenous polities. Finally, political concept building is an area where the use of indigenous languages to reproduce ­political

12  alan

durston and bruce mannheim

orders becomes particularly visible and concrete. Political terminology is discussed at length in the chapters by Boidin and Otazú Melgarejo and by Durston, while Townsend and Mannheim provide important methodological considerations. P o l i ti c a l E c o n o mi e s o f L a nguage

MacCormack’s chapter on early colonial views on Quechua introduces many of the key themes of the book. MacCormack reminds us that the Iberian invasions happened at a time when the history and relative qualities of different languages were topics of great interest in Europe.33 While humanists sought to restore Latin to its former glory, the vernaculars were being promoted as languages of learning and empire. Languages were regarded as essential vehicles of political order in two different ways. First, a common language was considered essential for a civil society. Second, some languages were thought to be more orderly and rational in their grammar and lexicon and to have the power to convey these qualities to their speakers. The Inkas were believed to have bestowed both forms of linguistic order on the Andes. Perhaps more than any other Amerindian language, Quechua was lionized by colonial writers as an embodiment of civility and a fitting vehicle for Christianity. Whether the Inkas themselves viewed Quechua in similar terms is doubtful. While they did spread a particular variety of Quechua (whose origin and characteristics are subject to debate), it is not clear that there was an explicit policy in this regard or that they attributed any special qualities to that variety.34 Spanish rule introduced new and essentializing ways of thinking about language—the humanist identification of grammatical and political order was a particularly idiosyncratic artifact. The praise and promotion of select indigenous languages was a double-edged sword that served to further their subordination and weakened other ­indigenous languages: indigenous languages were promoted insofar as they reflected qualities that European languages represented to a greater degree. The promotion of the “general languages”—one for each major region (Nahuatl in Mexico, Guarani in Paraguay, Tupi in Brazil, and Quechua in Peru)—was also an implementation of the colonial logic of the two republics, separate and unequal. Recent efforts to reintroduce indigenous languages to the public sphere have tended to reproduce colonial patterns of subordination, as

Introduction   13

shown by Maxwell’s chapter on Maya revitalization efforts. She points, for example, to the fact that Mayan-language educational materials in Guatemala are, by government mandate, translations of materials from the national curriculum, with the resulting “cultural infelicities.” Huayhua’s account of interactions in Quechua between Spanish-dominant ­bilingual officials and Quechua-dominant agriculturalists shows how the social dominance of the first-language Spanish speakers—and by extension of the Spanish language—is reproduced in the interactions below the participants’ conscious awareness. All three contemporary chapters (Maxwell, Mannheim, and Huayhua) suggest that the use of an indigenous language in new contexts does not necessarily further the cause of revitalization and can in fact work against it. Similarly, César Itier’s work on Quechua historical theater in early twentieth-century Cuzco stressed the detrimental aspects of the charisma of the language of the Inkas, arguing that the impulse to “cultivate” a presumptively archaic and pure Quechua has detracted from its standing as a language of multipurpose communication, much as sixteenth-century humanist cultivation of Latin detracted from its standing as an auxiliary language in Europe.35 However, postconquest transformations in the roles and relative status of indigenous languages often diverged from colonial strategies and intentions. When we look closely at practices on the ground, as van Doesburg does in the Coixtlahuaca valley in Oaxaca, different patterns emerge, reflecting the strategies of local colonial agents and indigenous elites. While many regions underwent a strong homogenization ­process—for example, the spread of Quechua in the Andes and Tupi in Brazil—the colonial written record from one Oaxacan valley is in three different indigenous languages: Nahuatl, Mixtec, and Chocho. This pattern of stable multilingualism has much to do with religious and political orders. The elites that ruled over ethnolinguistically differentiated units within the larger polity, and the competing religious orders with which they allied themselves, favored the permanence of the less spoken languages and their use in the written record. L a n g u a g e C h o i c e a n d Authori ty

Indigenous languages have been employed as sources of authority and legitimacy by a variety of agents, ranging from clergymen seeking control over a specific group or territory to twentieth-century politicians.

14  alan

durston and bruce mannheim

Van Doesburg argues that the Dominican order in Oaxaca promoted the development of a Chocho written tradition, not because there was a large population that could be reached only in that language, but because it justified their claim to the Coixtlahuaca basin. Augusto B. Leguía, president of Peru in the 1920s, sought to burnish his nationalist credentials during the heyday of indigenismo by having his speeches published in Quechua translation. Less is known about the linguistic strategies of indigenous elites. The issue is broached by Townsend, who discusses Nahua noble Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza’s championing of Nahuatl in seventeenth-­ century Tlaxcala. Like his early contemporary, the Peruvian mestizo author Garcilaso Inca de la Vega (see MacCormack, this volume), Zapata was worried about the growing influence of Spanish and shows a penchant for using archaic Nahuatl terms instead of established Spanish loanwords. Both Zapata and Garcilaso were influenced by the humanist notion that political order depended on the correct use of language and were concerned about Hispanicisms as a form of corruption reflecting the decay of the polity. Townsend argues that by Zapata’s time the original cellular structure of the Nahua annals had been forgotten, so that Zapata in some respects had more in common with a European historian than with his forebears. As Mannheim mentions in his contribution, ­lexical purism can compensate for, or obscure, deeper transformations. By contrast, the nongovernmental organization workers in Cuzco discussed by Huayhua strategically deploy both Spanish (in Quechua-­ Spanish code-switching) and a Spanish-influenced register of Quechua (the “overlay,” in Mannheim’s terminology) to establish their authority over monolingual peasants. The refusal to use an indigenous language can be a powerful mechanism of subordination, as Carlos Monsiváis notes in a discussion of local politicians in Juchitán (Oaxaca, Mexico), who use Zapotec on campaign and Spanish to reject people’s demands once they are in office.36 Conversely, for local officials to require an indigenous agriculturalist to speak Quechua even though the agriculturalist also speaks Spanish can also work as a mechanism of subordination, as anthropologist Penelope Harvey observed.37 Neither is merely a form of conjunctural subordination; rather, both send powerful messages about the institutional alignment of political power with the Spanish language. In these more recent contexts, indigenous languages are used to index not so much authority as community and solidarity, which can be easily denied when convenient for those in power.

Introduction   15

Wri ti n g a n d P o l i ty

One of the key achievements of the colonial historiography on indigenous languages, especially the New Philology, has been to clarify the circumstances under which written traditions emerged. In Mesoamerica these traditions are closely tied to the life of indigenous polities; as van Doesburg explains in his chapter in this volume, “Writing was a public activity, instrumental in integrating the community.” The florescence of indigenous-language alphabetic writing in the Oaxaca region and elsewhere in Mesoamerica was the result of the superposition of the colonial institutional structure of the cabildo onto indigenous poli­ties. The close ties between political structures and writing are also exemplified in Townsend’s chapter, which shows that the peculiarly repetitive organization of Nahua annals is a product of the cellular structure of Nahua city-states. The Mesoamerican reverence for the written word as an embodiment of the polity no doubt has preconquest roots, but it also has colonial ones. It emerges powerfully in Maxwell’s chapter on Maya revitalization, which chronicles how participants in projects to document and promote Mayan languages went to great lengths to protect their manuscripts during the genocidal violence of the 1980s, hiding them in pots and in the rafters of houses, and even having themselves buried with them. This close relation between indigenous polity and writing is less evident in South America or is present in different forms. The Quechua writings of indigenous authorship that have survived from the colonial period are mostly correspondence or petitions; the institutional records that abound in several Mesoamerican languages are few and far between, in part because the pre-Hispanic record-keeping technology of the khipu remained in use in the Andes.38 The Guarani record, on the other hand, exemplifies a peculiar association between writing and war. Guarani authorities began producing official records in the late colonial period as Jesuit control declined and frontier warfare increased. Political writing in Guarani flourished during the Wars of Independence (1810s) and the War of the Triple Alliance (1860s) and largely disappeared in the intervening periods.39 This correlation between writing and war is not unique to Paraguay. In Mexico, writing in indigenous languages made comebacks to the public sphere during the Caste War in Yucatán and the Revolution of

16  alan

durston and bruce mannheim

1910.40 Internal record keeping stopped at the time of independence, but independence, and the end of the Pax Hispanica, set the stage for a different sort of political writing: manifestos and communiqués in which political leaders addressed Indians in an effort to recruit them into political projects and new ways of imagining the polity.41 In the Andes, the Independence Wars saw a unique florescence of manifestos in Quechua and Aymara. Such texts would not reappear until the 1910s and 1920s, a period discussed in Durston’s chapter on government propaganda in Peru. Although there were no full-scale military conflicts, this was a time of indigenous mobilization, often in the form of local uprisings, and of rapid political transformation. Government propaganda in Quechua sought to inculcate loyalty to a new authoritarian indigenista state, while radicals promoted Quechua literacy as a path to indigenous citizenship and cultural resurgence. P o l i ti c a l C o n c e p t Bu i l di ng

Indigenous-language writings invoked polity formally and performatively, but also denotationally, through the political vocabulary sets that are the object of Boidin and Otazú Melgarejo’s “semantic history.” A particularly fruitful period to study in this regard is the independence era, which saw a massive influx of new political concepts like “citizen” and “liberty.” Here it is much more feasible to get a sense of a “before and after” than for the other great transformation in indigenous politics, that of the sixteenth century. But semantic history presents multiple challenges whatever the time period. The meaning and evolution of key terms are generally not well documented, and there is no tradition of commentary on this sort of terminology. Indigenous political categories do not have one-to-one European equivalents. Townsend warns against trying to give Nahuatl categories fixed reference, noting that this will not even work for the familiar altepetl (generally translated as “citystate”), because its meaning was independent of scale (similarly, the ­Q ue­chua term llaqta can mean “town,” “city,” or “country”). In a contemporary context, Mannheim warns against assuming that the Quechua terms and expressions used in public discourse in Peru are acceptable or even intelligible to monolinguals: Quechua’s condition as an “oppressed language” allows all sorts of calques from Spanish and invented traditions to pro­liferate.

Introduction   17

There is great potential in the comparative study of transformations in political vocabulary in different languages. Boidin has stressed elsewhere that the development of a “language of political modernity” in Guarani was part of a global process. The introduction of new concepts such as “nation” or “citizen” in Guarani cannot be seen in isolation—the political vocabulary of Spanish was undergoing a similar process of transformation at this time.42 A research project led by Boidin and Itier is attempting to facilitate comparative study of how these developments are reflected in independence-era writings in Quechua, Guarani, and other South American languages.43 The trajectories of the terms ava (Guarani) and runa (Quechua) illustrate the parallelisms and divergences in the development of key concepts (see the chapters by Boidin and Otazú Melgarejo, and Durston, respectively). Both were originally generic terms for “human.” In the colonial period they came to also have a meaning close to that of “Indian,” in ­opposition to a term that designated Spaniards (karai in Guarani, vira­cocha in Quechua).44 Both ava and runa were often avoided in independence-­era proclamations, probably because their authors or translators did not wish to emphasize divisions between indigenous and nonindigenous in the context of the independence struggle. Ava seems to have dropped out of the political vocabulary in Paraguay, an increasingly mestizo nation, but runa was a key category in official discourse in Quechua in 1920s Peru, where the authoritarian indigenista state was grounded in the indigenous-nonindigenous divide. SA BIN E MAC C OR M AC K AN D TH IS VOLU ME

Érase una vez, in the central plaza of Cuzco, at a moment when it still belonged to Cuzqueños, who might stop in the Café Ayllu to meet relatives or acquaintances. Going to meet a foreign scholar at one of the second-­ story hostels on the plaza, we were introduced to his traveling companion, who was sitting on the balcony sketching La Compañía, the Jesuit church, an imposing stone baroque structure that was rivaled only by the Cathedral of Cuzco, facing the plaza at a ninety-degree angle to La Compañía, the rivalry signaled by the towers that were added to the ­cathedral to make certain that it was taller than the Jesuit church, as canon law stipulated. The artist, Sabine MacCormack, was a classicist

18  alan

durston and bruce mannheim

and ­historian who specialized in late antiquity and had not yet transposed her interests in the intellectual and religious history of Europe to the early ­modern New World. But right in front of her eyes was a conflict between competing views of the colonization and evangelization of Peru, as was the field that was to shape a great part of her intellectual vision in the subsequent decades. To say that Sabine MacCormack was a formidable intellectual is an understatement. She continued parallel tracks of research on late antique Europe and early modern Latin America;45 her readership identified with widely different academic disciplines, but for Sabine the two tracks were synergistic. Her deep erudition in religion in late antiquity, theology, Latin, and church history opened up a more complex and nuanced understanding of religious transformation in the colonial Andes than had been hitherto possible. Her work showed the internal conflicts and interactions among and between European churchmen and Native Andeans in their full complexity. Her expertise in Latin and in the European imagination of the Roman world recast the histori­ography of the Andes.46 The Romans were ever present as a model for understanding the Inkas, with Rome for Cuzco and Latin for Quechua. She recognized the importance of present-time ethnography of Andean peoples for understanding their active roles in shaping colonial Andean religion. But she also increasingly saw the accounts of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury writers in South America as ethnography in its own right.47 Her two fields of concentration as a Europeanist and as a South Americanist allowed her to see the impact of the colonization of the Andes through reciprocal lenses, showing how American models transformed Spanish ideas of social welfare.48 Her erudition was no less important in the classroom, where Professor MacCormack was an inspiring teacher and mentor. A brief question in an undergraduate class could provoke a thoughtful, half-hour lecture explaining the matter at hand in all its complexity, not as a soliloquy but as an invitation to dialogue. Her mentorship extended to colleagues as well, as she worked tirelessly to support the research of scholars in sub­ sequent generations, both as an assiduous reader of manuscripts and in the behind-the-scenes ways in which a senior scholar can pay her intellectual debt forward. The book series she edited first at the University of Michigan Press and then at the University of Notre Dame Press, “History, Languages, and Cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds,”

Introduction   19

totaling seventeen monographs, has helped shape various emerging fields in the study of Iberian cultural contact. At Notre Dame, where Professor MacCormack was the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh Professor of Arts and Letters, with a primary appointment in the department of history, she found an intellectual home, bringing together her twin research agendas and a newly reaffirmed religiosity. Increasingly her attention turned toward language—rethinking the linguistic and rhetorical projects of the first grammarians of Andean languages—and to the project that she expected would be her last, a tenyear study of the life and writings of José de Acosta, the leading intellectual of the late sixteenth-century Jesuit world. These were left unfinished when she passed away suddenly, in 2012. Under Professor MacCormack’s tutelage, the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame hosted the second Symposium on Teaching and Learning Indigenous Languages of Latin America (STLILLA) on October 30– November 2, 2011. Most of the papers dealt either with the teaching of indigenous languages or with teaching in indigenous languages (especially in the context of bilingual public education). Sabine also invited keynote speakers to address themes that did not directly concern pedagogical issues but that illuminated their broader contexts. As a historian, she was particularly interested in historical perspectives on the politics surrounding indigenous languages in Latin America. Following the conference, she asked several of the participants to contribute essays on language and history in Latin America and invited the present editors to coedit the project with her. The present volume brings this project to ­fruition. We hope that it will serve as a tribute to Sabine’s vision and dedication to promoting the study of the indigenous languages of Latin America. Notes

1.  See the edited volumes History and Language in the Andes, ed. Paul Heggarty and Adrian Pearce (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America, ed. Salikoko Mufwene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); also Alan Durston, “Indigenous Languages and the Historiography on Latin America,” Storia della Storiografia 67, no. 1 (2015): 51–65.

20  alan

durston and bruce mannheim

2.  Adrian J. Pearce, “Reindigenization and Native Languages in Peru’s Long Nineteenth Century (1795–1940),” in Heggarty and Pearce, History and Language, 135–64; Alan Durston, “Quechua,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2015, http://latinamericanhistory.oxfordre .com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-97801 99366439-e-71. 3.  Judith T. Irvine, “Speech and Language Community,” in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. Keith Brown, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Elsevier, 2006), 689–98. 4.  Judith T. Irvine and Susan Gal, “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation,” in Regimes of Language, ed. Paul V. Kroskrity (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 2000), 35–83; Judith T. Irvine, “Style as Distinctiveness: The Culture and Ideology of Linguistic Differentiation,” in Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21–43. 5.  Sergio Romero, Language and Ethnicity among the K’ichee’ Maya (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015). 6. Ibid. 7.  Anna Babel, “Affective Motivations for Borrowing: Performing Local Identity through Loan Phonology,” Language and Communication 49 (2016): 70–83. 8.  William F. Hanks Jr., Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 7. 9.  Richard Diebold, who worked with the Huave language in Oaxaca, Mexico—a language isolate with approximately six hundred speakers in the late 1950s—identified similar accommodation patterns, which he regarded as a transitional step toward bilingualism. See A. Richard Diebold Jr., “Incipient Bilingualism,” Language 37 (1961): 97–112. 10.  Paul Friedrich, “Dialectal Variation in Tarascan Phonology,” International Journal of American Linguistics 37 (1971): 164–220. On the village as a moral center in Zapotec, see Mark A. Sicoli, “Formulating Place, Common Ground, and a Moral Order in Lachixío Zapotec,” Open Linguistics 2 (2016): 180–210, esp. 181–82. 11.  Classic monographs in this line include James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Matthew Restall, The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550–1850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Kevin Terraciano, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui History, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).

Introduction   21

12.  In 2012, a special issue of the journal Ethnohistory was dedicated to the uses of Nahuatl in colonial multilingual and multiethnic contexts: as a lingua franca, as a language introduced into new areas as a result of the Spanish conquests, and as a language used by the clergy and other non-Indians. In her introduction, Yanna Yannakakis raises the issue of multilingualism: “How did colonial subjects deploy different languages in everyday life, and why might they have chosen to use one language rather than another?” Yanna Yannakakis, “Introduction: How Did They Talk to One Another? Language Use and Communication in Multilingual New Spain,” Ethnohistory 59, no. 4 (2012): 673. 13.  Michael Swanton, “Multilingualism in the Tocuij Ñudzavui Region,” in Mixtec Writing and Society, ed. Maarten E. R. G. N. Jansen and Laura N. K. van Broekhoven (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2008), 347–80; Bas van Doesburg and Michael W. Swanton, “Mesoamerican Philology as an Interdisciplinary Study: The Chochon (Xru Ngiwa) ‘Barrios’ of Tamazulapan (Oaxaca, Mexico),” Ethnohistory 58, no. 4 (2011): 613–52. 14.  See in particular Gary J. Parker, “La clasificación genética de los dialectos quechuas,” Revista del Museo Nacional 32 (1963): 241–62, and Alfredo Torero, “Los dialectos quechuas,” Anales Científicos de la Universidad Agraria 2 (1966): 446–78. The two projects were carried out independently and published at approximately the same time, journal dates notwithstanding. For a new view of the prehistory of the Quechua languages, see Nicholas Q. Emlen, “Perspectives on the Quechua-Aymara Contact Relationship and the Lexicon and Phonology of Pre-proto-Aymara,” International Journal of American Linguistics 83 (2017): 307–40. 15.  Paul Heggarty and David Beresford-Jones, eds., Archaeology and Language in the Andes: A Cross-disciplinary Exploration of Prehistory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); César Itier, “Las bases geográficas de la lengua vehicular del imperio inca,” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Études Andines 42, no. 2 (2013): 237–60; and Simon van Kerke and Pieter Muysken, “The Andean Matrix,” in The Native Languages of South America: Origins, Development, Typology, ed. Loretta O’Connor and Pieter Muysken, 126–51. 16.  See, for example, Alfredo Torero, El quechua y la historia social andina (Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, 1974); César Itier, “What Was the Lengua General  of Colonial Peru?” in  Heggarty and Pearce, History and Language, 63–85; and Adrian J. Pearce and Paul Heggarty, “‘Mining the Data’ on the Huancayo-­Huancavelica Quechua Frontier,” in Heggarty and Pearce, History and Language, 87–109. 17.  For instance, Torero, Quechua; Bruce Mannheim, The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).

22  alan

durston and bruce mannheim

18.  Heggarty and Pearce, History and Language. 19.  On the Língua Geral Amazônica, see Denny Moore, “Historical Development of Nheengatu (Língua Geral Amazônica)” in Mufwene, Iberian Imperialism, 108–42. For a historian’s perspective on the development of Tupinamba, see M. Kittiya Lee, “Language and Conquest: Tupi-Guarani Expansion in the European Colonization of Brazil and Amazonia,” in Mufwene, Iberian Imperialism, 143–67. 20.  Cf. Lockhart, Nahuas after the Conquest, chap. 7; Matthew Restall, Lisa Sousa, and Kevin Terraciano, eds., Mesoamerican Voices: Native-Language Writings from Colonial Mexico, Oaxaca, Yucatan, and Guatemala (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15–17. 21.  “Real cédula para que en los reinos de las Indias se destierren los diferentes idiomas de que se usa, y solo se hable el Castellano,” in Documentos sobre política lingüística en Hispanoamérica (1492–1800), ed. Francisco de Solano (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1991), 257–61. 22.  Robert M. Laughlin, Beware the Great Horned Serpent! Chiapas under the Threat of Napoleon (Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, University at Albany, 2003); Mark Morris, “Language in Service of the State: The Nahuatl Counterinsurgency Broadsides of 1810,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 3 (2007): 433–70; Alan Durston, “Quechua Political Literature in Early Republican Peru (1821–1876),” in Heggarty and Pearce, History and Language, 165–86; Bartomeu Melià, “La lengua guaraní dependiente en tiempos de independencia en Paraguay,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 97, no. 2 (2011): 153–75. 23.  For example, Georges Dumézil, “‘El buen pastor,’ sermón de Francisco Dávila a los indios del Perú (1646), traducido del quechua,” Diógenes 20 (1957): 85–103. 24.  For example, César Itier, “Quechua y cultura en el Cuzco del siglo XVIII: De la ‘lengua general’ al ‘idioma del imperio de los incas,’” in Del siglo de oro al siglo de las luces: Lenguaje y sociedad en los Andes del siglo XVIII, ed. César Itier (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 1995), 89–111. 25.  On Yucatec Maya documents from the Caste War, see Victoria Reifler Bricker, The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), chap. 4 and Appendix A; for Guarani texts from the War of the Triple Alliance, see the Guarani Ñanduti Rogue website at www.staff.uni-mainz.de/lustig/guarani/. 26.  Miguel León-Portilla, Los manifiestos en nahuatl de Emiliano Zapata (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1978); Alexander S. Dawson, Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004).

Introduction   23

27.  For the case of Jorge Ubico in 1930s Guatemala, which closely parallels the slightly earlier regime of Augusto B. Leguía in Peru, see Sergio Romero, “‘¡Cuanto sufrir! Sólo la fe de indio me ha mantenido firme . . .’: Jorge Ubico y el indigenismo del presbítero Celso Narciso Teletor,” Mesoamérica 56 ( January–­December 2014): 1–23. 28.  This is a contemporary counterpart to Yannakakis’s question about colonial New Spain: “How Did They Talk to One Another?” 29.  There is an extensive literature on the language revitalization efforts of the last decades. See, for instance, Florencia Mallon, ed., Decolonizing Native Histories: Collaboration, Knowledge, and Language in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Kendall A. King, Language Revitalization Processes and Prospects (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2000); and Rosaleen Howard, Por los linderos de la lengua (Lima: Institut Français d’Études Andines, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2006). 30.  Michael Wroblewski, “Amazonian Kichwa Proper: Ethnolinguistic Domain in Pan-Indian Ecuador,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22 (2012): 64–86. On Quichua Unificado versus “Quichua auténtico” in Saraguro, Ecuador, see King, Language Revitalization Processes, 93–97. 31. Anne-Gaël Bilhaut, “L’école zápara en Equateur (Haute Amazonie): Politique et construction de l’identité dans un contexte ethnique,” AnthropoChildren 3 (2013), http://popups.ulg.ac.be/2034-8517/index.php?id=1743. 32.  Nicholas Q. Emlen, “Language and Coffee in a Trilingual Matsigenka-­ Quechua-Spanish Frontier Community on the Andean-Amazonian Borderland of Southern Peru” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2014), 59. For a comprehensive overview of political and social contradictions of the process of standardization in the Andean region, see Howard, Por los linderos. 33.  See, for instance, Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 34. Mannheim, Language of the Inka, chap. 2; Itier, “Bases geográficas,” 237–60. Nevertheless, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spain saw the emergence of a newly essentializing identification of a people and a language. See Kathryn A. Woolard, “Bernardo de Aldrete and the Morisco Problem: A Study in Early Modern Spanish Language Ideology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44 (2002): 446–80. 35. César Itier, El teatro quechua en el Cuzco, vol. 2 (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos; Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 2000), 89; Peter Burke, “Heu domine, adsunt Turcae: A Sketch for a Social History of Post-medieval Latin,” in Language, Self and Society: A Social History of Language, ed. Roy Porter and Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 25–30.

24  alan

durston and bruce mannheim

36.  Carlos Monsiváis, Entrada libre: Crónicas de la sociedad que se organiza (México, D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1987), 154. 37.  Penelope Harvey, “Lenguaje y relaciones de poder: Consecuencias para una política lingüística,” Allpanchis Phuturinqa 29/30 (1987): 105–31. 38. Alan Durston, “Native-Language Literacy in Colonial Peru: The Question of Mundane Quechua Writing Revisited,” Hispanic American Historical Review 88, no. 1 (2008): 41–70. 39.  Melià, “Lengua guaraní”; Capucine Boidin, “Textos de la modernidad política en guaraní,” Corpus: Archivos Virtuales de la Alteridad Americana 4, no. 2 (2014), doi: 10.4000/corpusarchivos.1322. 40. Bricker, Indian Christ; León-Portilla, Manifiestos en Nahuatl. 41. The first examples date from the Independence Wars: Laughlin, Beware; Morris, “Language in Service”; Alan Durston, “Quechua Political Literature in Early Republican Peru (1821–1876),” in  Heggarty and Pearce, History and Language, 166–71. 42.  Boidin, “Textos.” 43. Entitled LANGAS (General Languages of South America), the project is developing an online repository of texts with a sophisticated lexical search tool (www.langas.cnrs.fr/temp/index.htm). Also see Capucine Boidin, Joëlle Chassin, and César Itier, eds., “Dossier: La propaganda política en lenguas indígenas en la época de las guerras de independencia sudamericanas,” Ariadna Histórica: Lenguajes, Conceptos, Metáforas, suppl. 1 (2016). 44.  Something similar happened with the Nahuatl word macehual. It is generally glossed as “commoner,” but its basic meaning was “human being.” In the seventeenth century it was used with the meaning of “Indian.” See James Lockhart, Susan Schroeder, and Doris Namala, eds., Annals of His Time: Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 17. 45.  Sabine G. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), and On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 46. MacCormack, On the Wings. 47.  Sabine G. MacCormack, “Ethnography in South America: The First Two Hundred Years,” in Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3, pt. 1, South America, ed. Frank L. Salomon and Stuart Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 96–187. 48.  Sabine G. MacCormack, “Conciencia y práctica social: Pobreza y ­vagancia en España y el temprano Perú colonial,” Revista Andina 35 (2002): 69–110.

CHAPTER 1

“The Discourse of My Life” What Language Can Do (Early Colonial Views on Quechua)

SABINE MACCORMACK

When writing the prologue to the posthumously published second part of his Royal Commentaries, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega reminisced about an incident that had occurred soon after he had published his first book, the translation of León Hebreo’s Dialogos de amor.1 The chancellor of Córdoba Cathedral, having seen the book, wanted to meet the translator. Garcilaso was reluctant to call on the eminent gentleman but in the end was persuaded to do so, and I brought him one of those volumes handsomely bound and embossed. Even though he was in bed with gout, he was in every respect very kind to me, and the first words with which he greeted me were these: “Someone from the other hemisphere, born in the new world, far away beneath our hemisphere, a man who with his mother’s milk has drunk the general language of the Indians of Peru, how does he venture to set himself up as interpreter between Italians and Spaniards, and, given that he has presumed thus far, why did he not pick on some ordinary book rather than the one that Italians esteem the most, and the Spanish understand the least?” I answered him that it 25

26  sabine maccormack

had been the temerity of a soldier, for this is how soldiers perform their greatest deeds, and if they emerge victorious they are praised for their bravery, but if they die in the attempt, they are dismissed as fools. He laughed a great deal about my response and often repeated it to me during subsequent visits.2 Here as so often elsewhere, Garcilaso addressed a much-discussed issue of the day obliquely and with his customary self-deprecation. He himself had reflected on language on many occasions and had interspersed the Royal Commentaries with episodes involving translation from Quechua into Spanish and vice versa, as well as the relationship between the two languages. These were contributions to a well-established discussion. For by 1590, when Garcilaso’s translation of León Hebreo was published, many people in Spain—scholars, officials, writers, and poets— had thought about language, in particular about the relationships between different languages, in some detail. At the most fundamental level, the issue was language instruction, the teaching and learning of Latin and in due course of Quechua and other Amerindian languages. Next came translation: in the Peninsula this was for the most part the trans­ lating and reworking in Spanish of Latin and Greek literature, law, and history. In the Andes and the Americas at large, by contrast, the texts that most urgently required translating were Christian ones, the creeds, prayers, and hymns that were used in daily worship. But these American translations of Christian devotional texts were made in light of earlier experience in the Peninsula of translating Greek and most especially Latin literature into Spanish. Finally, the nature of translation, of what can be translated and how, depends on the translator’s estimation of the relationship between the original and the target language and also of the relationship between the cultures in which the languages in question were spoken, this being an issue that was considered repeatedly in the course of the sixteenth century. When the chancellor of Córdoba Cathedral asked Garcilaso why of all possible books he had been intent on choosing the Diálogos de amor to translate, he was insinuating that the conceptual equipment of “a man who with his mother’s milk has drunk the general language of the Indians of Peru” was perhaps not entirely equal to such a task. Comprised within this insinuation was the assumption that, language being the vehicle whereby we form concepts, Garcilaso’s native Quechua could not

“The Discourse of My Life”   27

have equipped him to understand, let alone translate, a platonizing di­­ alogue on love. Garcilaso’s response about the temerity of a soldier likewise suggests more than it states. The frontispiece of the first part of the Royal Commentaries, which was published in 1609, displays Garcilaso’s coat of arms with the words con la espada y con la pluma, “with the sword and with the pen.” Tacitly, Garcilaso was here evoking his paternal forebear, the poet Garcilaso de la Vega, whom he himself described in the account of his ancestors as the “mirror of knights and poets, the man who lived his life as heroically as all the world is aware, and, as he himself states in his works, he lived wielding the sword at one time, and the pen at another.”3 The poet Garcilaso’s sonnets, elegies, and eclogues were familiar to every educated person. Their beauty and learning could be appreciated all the better after 1580, when Fernando de Herrera published his voluminous commentary tracing and elucidating the poet’s echoes and reminiscences not only of Spanish but also of Latin and some Greek poets and philosophers, among them Vergil, Horace, and Ovid. The Inca Garcilaso himself had internalized Vergil’s account of the genesis of the war between Trojans and Latins in the Aeneid to such an extent that he wove one of its central themes, the imperceptible burgeoning of discord in human hearts, into his account of the Peruvian civil wars. No one, therefore, was better equipped than Herrera to appreciate the intertextualities and translations that Garcilaso the poet wove into his verses.4 Another of Inca Garcilaso’s paternal forebears was the poet Garcí Sánchez de Badajoz, some of whose poems likewise evoke Roman antecedents, and whose work Garcilaso was hoping to edit and publish—although he did not live to accomplish this task.5 In light of all this, and also in light of the Spanish fascination with lineages, the gout-ridden old chancellor would not have failed to appreciate the subtext of Garcilaso Inca’s soldierly ­response. Among the gateways to the multifarious erudition that pervaded Spain around the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the grammatical works of the humanist Antonio Nebrija, in particular his Latin grammar of 1480, a parallel text of that grammar in Latin and Castilian, which appeared in 1488, and his Castilian grammar of 1492— all three the first of numerous subsequent editions and adaptations. These grammatical works were accompanied by a Latin-Castilian dictionary, of which a Catalan adaptation was published in Barcelona in 1507. Like Nebrija’s grammatical works, his dictionary became influential

28  sabine maccormack

both in and far beyond the Spanish world.6 Furthermore, the grammars and the dictionary, and their diverse revisions and adaptations, provided the framework within which, some seventy years later, the missionary friar Domingo de Santo Tomás, a friend of Pedro Cieza de León, organized his Quechua grammar and lexicon. These two small volumes, ­published in Valladolid in 1560, were, as the author wrote, the first to confine the “general language of Peru” within rules so that it could be learned by outsiders.7 The enormous linguistic diversity of the Americas astounded and puzzled the Spanish. Oviedo noted that Columbus had encountered different languages on each of the Caribbean islands where he landed. Oviedo himself observed that on the mainland, within a single province, the languages were as distant from each other as Biscayan was from German and Arabic and that therefore, “in the space of one day’s journey of five or six leagues, among peoples settled next to each other as neighbours, one group of Indians does not understand the other.”8 This state of affairs, he thought, was the upshot of the confusion of languages after the building of the Tower of Babel and had helped and accelerated the Spanish conquest. For had it not been for such extreme linguistic fragmentation, and hence, as Oviedo understood matters, political fragmentation, how could the Spanish have subjected so many people living at so great a distance from Europe?9 In short, Oviedo considered the American mosaic of languages to be a consequence of sin that evangelization and “union with the Christian republic” would remedy.10 In the Andes, the position was rather different, at any rate as understood by Spaniards. For here, the invaders had encountered Inka officials in even the most distant outposts of Tahuantinsuyu,11 and Inka officials were ubiquitous elsewhere, which created an initial impression not just of political but also of linguistic cohesion. Besides, the Inkas had required regional lords to send their sons to live in Cuzco for protracted periods, whence they returned home speaking “the language of the Inka.” Finally, intermarriage between Inkas and local aristocrats was frequent—it was, in effect, a deliberate part of Inka policy. Hence, the Spanish came to appreciate only gradually that throughout the Andean world Quechua, described by Domingo de Santo Tomás and others as the “general language of Peru,” was spoken as an administrative language alongside numerous local languages.12 However, awareness of the ubiquity of Quechua led missionaries to think of the Inka Empire as a praeparatio evangelica, a

“The Discourse of My Life”   29

preparation for evangelization, the work of divine providence. As José de Acosta put it in 1590: In Peru and New Spain, when the Christians entered, those kingdoms had reached their peak, and stood at the height of their power; for the Inkas ruled in Peru from the kingdom of Chile up to and beyond that of Quito, which is a thousand leagues; and they were greatly respected and wealthy in gold and silver and in every kind of riches. . . . At this time, the Almighty judged that the rock of Daniel that shattered the kingdoms and monarchies of the world, should also shatter those of this other New World. And thus, just as the law of Christ came when the monarchy of Rome had reached its peak, so it was in the Indies of the West. . . . And there is here a remarkable detail, that when the lords of Mexico and Cuzco were conquering regions, they were also introducing their own language.13 This meant, Acosta continued, that it was possible to preach the gospel in one single language, not many different ones. Indeed, by his time, ­contrary to what had been envisioned initially by those who formulated policies in the Peninsula, Quechua rather than Spanish had become the primary language of Christian instruction, just as in Mexico missionaries taught primarily in Nahuatl, the principal language of the Aztec Empire.14 But during the early years of contact this outcome was not obvious. The issue at that time was not merely, or even predominantly, religious because what had to be demonstrated was that Quechua was a civilized language, not some conglomerate of barbarous communications incapable of giving linguistic shape to anything beyond what was accessible to the five senses. To make this argument, Fray Domingo appealed to Antonio Nebrija’s grammatical works. Throughout, Nebrija revealed the orderly definable qualities of language, using examples from Latin and sometimes Greek to explain the particularities and regularities of Cas­tilian, specifically the distinct qualities and uses of the parts of speech, the declension of nouns and the conjugation of verbs. Among Nebrija’s concerns was to show that the Castilian vernacular of which he composed the very first grammatical analysis was as orderly and systematic as Latin, and that even though Castilian differed from Latin in having more parts of speech, one of which was the article, nonetheless, the grammatical “foundations and principles” were the same for Castilian

30  sabine maccormack

as for Latin and also for Greek.15 Fray Domingo was eager to show that these same qualities prevailed in Quechua. His Quechua grammar would thus reveal, he wrote in his dedication of the work to Philip II, the exceptional order and regularity—policía—of this language, the abundance of words, the accord they have with the things they refer to, the diverse and notable ways of speaking, the gentle and agreeable sound that the pronunciation of this language brings to the ear, the ease with which it can be written with our characters and letters; how easy and sweet is the pronunciation of this language, which is ordered and adorned with the properties of declination, and the remaining properties of the noun, and with the moods, times and persons of the verb.16 Readers of the Roman orator and educator Quintilian, Fray Domingo continued, would see that Quechua, “regulated and enclosed under the same rules as Latin,” was not a barbarous and deficient language, lacking “moods, tenses, cases, order, regularity and concordance,” but ought to be described as “polished and delicate.” “Such being the language,” he wrote, “the people who use it should be counted not as barbarous but as possessing social order, policía: for according to many passages by the Philosopher, there is nothing whereby the quality of a person is more clearly revealed than in the speech and language he uses, for these give birth to the concepts that emanate from the intellect.”17 Proof of all this was the fact that “throughout the dominions of that great lord Guayna Capac” Quechua was spoken “by all the lords and leaders and by a great many commoners”—in short, like Latin, it was the lingua franca of a great empire.18 The general statements that Fray Domingo made in the prefatory parts of his Arte were articulated step by step in the body of the work, in the designation and analysis of the eight parts of speech in accordance with Nebrija’s designation and analysis of the eight parts of speech in Latin, and in the subdivision of the parts of grammar into orthography, pronunciation, etymology, and syntax,19 progressing thereby from studying the letter to studying the syllable, the word, and finally the sentence. All these topics were briefly mentioned by Quintilian in his Institutio oratoria,20 and Nebrija and Fray Domingo both appealed to him as the ultimate authority on matters of language. But they both recognized that

“The Discourse of My Life”   31

their task was profoundly different from Quintilian’s. In the first place, as Nebrija noted, Quintilian had written about the education of children and boys whose native language was Latin, and who therefore were only learning latini sermonis artificium, “the art of Latin speech,” not the language itself.21 Quintilian thus dealt with what would be the main themes of Nebrija’s Latin grammar, the particulars of declension, conjugation, and syntax, in a few short paragraphs. In the second place, regarding Spanish, Quintilian was more directly relevant, for here Nebrija noted the presence of several issues raised by Quintilian’s Latin in his own Spanish vernacular. This was the case especially regarding spelling and pronunciation. In the footsteps of Quintilian, Nebrija thought that one should spell as one pronounces and pronounce as one spells,22 noting that different groups of people will pronounce differently and that the sounds used by one language are not all the same as those used in another. It was therefore important to identify the sounds or phonemes of each language and to differentiate correct from incorrect usage, making allowance for the fact that all languages change.23 Quintilian’s framework was relevant for Nebrija not just in the abstract sense but also because Spanish was derived from Latin: as ­Nebrija expressed it, Spanish was “corrupted Latin,” in which many words had changed while still remaining recognizable. For example, with time, Latin caupo, “innkeeper,” had become Spanish copo; taurus, “bull,” had become toro; and by a more complex set of shifts, facere, “to do,” had become hazer, and factum, “something done,” had become hecho.24 Quechua, by contrast, had nothing whatsoever to do with either Latin or Spanish. However, Fray Domingo saw the finger of providence in the fact that two Quechua phonemes, “ll” as in llacta, “a village,” and “ñ” as in ñavi, “eye,” were also peculiar to Spanish, and in Quechua’s resemblance, as he saw it, to Latin and Spanish “in the art and craft” of its usage.25 It was therefore possible for the reader of Fray Domingo’s Arte to memorize declensions and conjugations just as Nebrija’s student of Latin would have done: in either case, the relevant material was set out in tabular form. Yet Quechua also offered numerous usages that were absent from or different in Latin and Spanish and could not be presented to the reader in the old established visual format of grammatical manu­ als.26 Take the plural: it was formed in Quechua with the suffix -cona or -cuna, but according to Fray Domingo this suffix was not used to express plurality for inanimate things. Instead of saying pircacuna, “walls,”

32  sabine maccormack

therefore, people said, achca pirca, “many walls,” or pixin pirca, “a few walls,” and Fray Domingo asked himself why this was the case: “The reason for this difference that I can think of at present is that this -cona, apart from its principal meaning, which is to indicate plurality, seems in some way to denote calling out, or calling for attention. For example, guarmecona, apart from meaning in plural ‘the women,’ seems also to signify what we would express in Castilian with Ola mugeres, ‘Hello, women,’ because we call out only to an entity that understands or hears, and for this reason they customarily add -cona to animate things.”27 However, ­although this specific usage was new to those familiar with European languages, in more general terms such problems were not new to grammarians. Quintilian and Nebrija had both drawn attention to the importance of the usage chosen by speakers, consuetudo loquendi or uso, and Fray Domingo resolved the cona question in accord with these precedents: The principal reason in this matter of nouns and manners of speaking is usage: for speaking in this particular manner and not another depends on the will of the first inventors of the language, and of those who first made use of and spoke it, and the same is the case regarding all the other ways of speaking, of the verbs, tenses, and nouns in this language, which are more or fewer than those in Latin and Spanish. For in the realm of each language, the most important issue is usage, which is to say the manner in which those who speak the language express themselves appropriately.28 In the footsteps of Quintilian, Nebrija divided grammar into the rules and usages that had to be taught (the methodic part) and the literature that should be imitated (the historical part).29 Nebrija thought that to reform Latin as written by Spanish scholars in conformity with classical Latin, as distinct from the Latin of medieval universities that was familiar to most educated people, he could best deploy his efforts in ­expounding the classical rules and usages.30 Domingo de Santo Tomás, in  accordance with his purpose of providing instruction in Quechua, also concentrated on these but added a brief foray into the “historical” branch of grammar by concluding the Arte with a model sermon of his own composition, for the use of prospective missionaries.31 This small text cannot be placed on the same footing as the corpus of Greek and Latin literature that awaited Quintilian’s students, or even those of Nebrija. The sermon did, however, make a beginning in creat-

“The Discourse of My Life”   33

ing for future students of Quechua a corpus of texts in alphabetic writing that was to grow exponentially during subsequent decades. Like this later literature, Fray Domingo’s sermon displays some uniquely Andean features that were designed to highlight both the potential and the limitations of translation: the potential, since the sermon demonstrated that “the things of our holy faith” could be talked about in Quechua, and the limitations, since Fray Domingo reordered the story of salvation in light of what an anticipated Andean listener might most easily identify with.32 The model sermon thus did not begin with Creation and Adam and Eve, which would have merely substituted an alien account of human origin that required much explanation for one that was familiar and made sense locally.33 Instead, Fray Domingo began with a definition of human nature, death, and afterlife. Also, in light of the deep-seated Andean habit of pairing concepts, social functions, features in the landscape, cultures, and societies as moieties, Fray Domingo spoke not of a human being’s body as such but of “our flesh and bones,” aychallanchic tullullanchic, and not of the human soul but of “our heart and creative spirit,” songonchic camaquenchic.34 In both instances, he replaced a single European concept with a paired Andean one. In short, in accord with the old established principle of accommodation in the exegesis of s­ cripture—itself a legacy of European classical antiquity—he accommodated Christian doctrine to correct Quechua usage, which was what Quintilian, thinking about Latin, had described as consuetudo loquendi.35 In theological terms, this amounted to reconceptualizing fundamental Christian doctrines so as to make them accessible to Andean Christians from within their own ­culture.36 In the context of grammatical instruction, consuetudo loquendi worked in two directions, so that in Fray Domingo’s Arte acquainting Andean people with Christian teaching went hand in hand with explaining the workings of Andean customs and social relations to Spaniards. The latter would thus learn how in the Andes oaths were sworn, how people greeted each other, by what terms kinship was expressed, and how names were given.37 Here also, Latin and the Roman past had their uses because they could render Andean customs meaningful by amplifying the realm of comparison beyond the confines of sixteenth-­century Spain. “It should be noted,” Fray Domingo wrote, that just as Latin and Spanish have names known as patronyms, that are passed on from parents, grandparents, and brothers to sons and

34  sabine maccormack

descendants, or else these names are passed on from lands to those who are at home there, for example Scipiones from Scipio, Catones from Cato, Romans from Rome; Mendozas, Guzmanes, Andalucians, etc.; so this language of the Indians has patronyms of all these kinds. For if a lord is famous for something, his sons take his name, and not only the sons but all the descendants, whence they derive the lineages that are known as ayllo and pachaca. Fray Domingo then proceeded to give some examples of how patronyms functioned in the Andes: All those who come from that first lord who was named Mangoynga call themselves yngas, and this lineage contains other particular names and lineages, the chief of which is called capac ayllo; another is ygñaca pañaca ayllo, another çucco pañaca ayllo, and many others like them. In Cuzco there are also two further principal lineages, one called Maras toco, and the other called Xutic ayllo, which was derived from another leading man called Xutic toco. These two were called by the epithet toco, which is to say “window,” because the Indians of Cuzco believe that they both emerged from the two caves that are in the village of Pacaritambo, from which they say the said Mango ynga emerged, for whose service they say those two Indians emerged. From which it appears that the said two Indians took the epithet toco from the cave whence they emerged, and their descendants, and those of Mango ynga took theirs from them.38 These methods of taking names from notable ancestors and from places of origin or residence were observed, Fray Domingo added, throughout all the “nations and provinces” of Peru, the issue being that these features of the language used by Andean people, comparable as they were to analogous features in Latin and Spanish, demonstrated that political order, policía, was as rooted in the Andes as it was in the Old World. The question as to whether Amerindian societies possessed policía, and if so, which ones and in what sense, was repeatedly discussed in early modern Spain. The term policía itself was elusive. In his dictionary, ­Nebrija translated it as civilitas, which fitted with the derivation of policía from the Greek polis. Cieza, with whom Domingo de Santo Tomás had shared some of his information about coastal Peru, perceived little or

“The Discourse of My Life”   35

no policía in the chiefdoms of Colombia and Ecuador that he described as behetrías,39 but he thought that the Inkas possessed it in the highest degree. Domingo de Santo Tomás agreed entirely, and in the dedication of the Arte to Philip II argued that not only the people but also their language was deeply imbued with policía: “My principal intent in offering this little manual to your Sacred Majesty has been that in it you may see clearly and manifestly, how false is the view of which many have tried to persuade you, that the people of the kingdoms of Peru are barbarians, and unworthy of being treated with the same gentleness and liberty as your other vassals. Your Majesty will know this to be utterly false when from this manual you realize how great is the policía that this language possesses.”40 Fray Domingo was not the first to describe language by recourse to political terminology. For in his Spanish grammar, Antonio Nebrija explained the transformation of Latin into Castilian and the derivation of related words one from another in metaphorical terms as a process resulting from the “kinship and proximity,” parentesco y vezindad, that letters have among each other: “Letters have among each other such great kinship and proximity that no one should be surprised, as Quintilian says, that some letters pass and corrupt themselves into others.”41 Quintilian did indeed comment on this topic, but without any political metaphors.42 For Nebrija, by contrast, connections not only between letters but also between parts of speech could be rendered more tangible by means of such metaphors, as he made clear when writing about the syntax of Castilian: “We will state how the ten parts of speech should join and be in agreement with each other. This topic . . . is described by the Greeks as syntax. We ourselves can call it order or the joining of parts.”43 The Spanish terms ayuntar, “to join,” and concertar, “to be in agreement,” as well as ayuntamiento, the “joining of parts,” all suggest political and legal meanings. Ayuntamiento was not merely a joining of parts, for its primary meaning was “municipal government.” Similarly, ayuntar and concertar described the action of making a formal agreement between parties.44 These political and legal overtones become all the more explicit when Nebrija goes on to explain that “the first concord and agreement is between one noun and another,”45 because the terms concordia and concierto both denote states of affairs that are public and political. “Language,” according to Nebrija’s celebrated phrase from the prologue of his Spanish grammar, “is the companion of empire.”46 He went on to say that this grammar would be useful to Queen Isabel’s future

36  sabine maccormack

s­ ubjects in their endeavors to learn Castilian. The book would also help to improve the Castilian language so that it could become a fit vehicle to communicate the queen’s triumphs to the world. There was in addition a more subtle, less propagandistic dimension to the phrase, which Nebrija also explained. Languages, like the societies that speak them, rise and decline. The Hebrew language was in its childhood when the Israelites were living in Egypt, flourished along with religion in the time of Moses, grew to maturity with King Solomon, and thereafter began to be dismembered along with the kingdom. As for Latin, it rose from humble beginnings along with the city of Rome, attained a first flowering in the time of the dramatist Livius Andronicus, and grew until, in the time of Augustus and the birth of Christ, there lived “that multitude of poets and orators who transmitted to our time the plenty and delight of the Latin language, Cicero, Caesar, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Livy, and all the others who followed until the time of Antoninus Pius. From that time, when the empire of the Romans began to decline, the Latin language diminished along with it.” Castilian was in its infancy under the early kings of Castile and León, began to show its power in the time of Alfonso the Wise, “and in this way grew until the monarchy and peace that we ourselves enjoy.” At that point, when “we may more appropriately fear the decline of Castilian than hope for its ascent,” Nebrija composed the Gramatica de la lengua castellana so as to give the language a certain permanence and fixity, just as in their day the Greek and Roman grammarians had done for Greek and Latin.47 Domingo de Santo Tomás did not worry that Quechua might be declining, although he was aware of changes taking place in the language. Just as, according to Quintilian, words from the languages of Italy and especially from Greek had made their way into Latin, so in the time of the Inka, words from other Andean languages had entered Quechua,48 and after 1532 a host of terms were coming in from Spanish, some of which Fray Domingo registered in his dictionary.49 The Inca Garcilaso also observed changes in Quechua, “the language I drank with my mother’s milk,” but thought about them in quite different terms. Among the books in his library were a commentary on Nebrija and a copy of Pero Mexia’s Historia imperial y Cesarea, which chronicled the history of the Roman Empire from Julius Caesar down to the accession of Charles V.50 Where Nebrija had reflected on the decline, caducar, of Latin, one of Mexia’s themes, derived from Flavio Biondo’s

“The Discourse of My Life”   37

history of Rome, was the decline, declinación, of the Roman Empire, the time when Rome was experiencing not merely those ordinary losses and recoveries that were the inevitable product of politics and war but the ever more serious inroads on its power and territory that led to the formation of new “kingdoms and new lordships.”51 Whether it was thanks to his reading of these volumes or thanks to his experience of speaking Quechua with his mother and her people and Spanish with his father, language and empire were inseparable in Garcilaso’s mind. Domingo de Santo Tomás thought that because of the greater mobility and commercial activity that the presence of the Spanish in the Andes had brought about, more people were speaking Quechua in his day than in former times,52 which made it the ideal vehicle for evangelization. Garcilaso agreed regarding evangelization. The Inkas had employed Quechua to unite people who were divided by different languages to live in harmony “as though they were of one family and kin group, and they lost the unsociability that arose from their not understanding each other.”53 “By this device the Inkas domesticated and united a great variety of different nations of conflicting religion and customs whom they brought into their empire, welding them—thanks to use of a common language—into such union and friendship that they loved each other like brothers. This is why many provinces that were not incorporated into the Inka Empire, attached to and convinced of this benefit, have learnt the general language of Cuzco, and many nations of different speech understand each other by means of it.”54 As the Jesuit Blas Valera, from whose papers ­Garcilaso derived some of his material for the Royal Commentaries had written, by disseminating a common language the Inkas “governed their entire empire in peace and tranquillity, and their vassals from different nations treated each other as brothers because they all spoke the same language.”55 Nothing was more advantageous to the Christian faith, there­fore, than that missionaries should teach in the general language of the Inka. But Quechua was declining, Garcilaso thought. In his opinion, far fewer people spoke it now than formerly,56 and entire Quechua-speaking provinces were reverting to their original languages.57 This brought on a  “confusion of languages” reminiscent of that of the Tower of Babel, thanks to which “Indians whom the Inka ruled with a handful of judges are now barely controlled by three hundred governors.”58 Garcilaso was not alone in complaining about the ever-increasing administrative t­ angles

38  sabine maccormack

of colonial Peru.59 Further, the Quechua language itself, no longer taught by teachers whom the Inkas had sent out from Cuzco, was losing its character because of the importation of phonemes, constructions, and vocabulary from Spanish.60 In short, with the collapse of the empire of the Inkas, their language fell into decline: “When the imperial power of the Inkas came to an end, and because of the general forgetfulness that came with the wars that arose among the Spanish, there was no one to remember this instrument that was so well suited and necessary for the preaching of the Holy Gospel.”61 That language declines with political power had already been observed by Nebrija, who produced the examples of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans to illustrate the phenomenon, implying the likelihood that Castilian also would at some point decline; his grammar of Castilian was designed to arrest or slow down that process. A century later, in Garcilaso’s time, this theory of linguistic change and decline required defending against advocates of primordial languages, among them Basque, one of whose protagonists claimed that it predated the Romans in Spain and was, in effect, the language spoken by the first settlers who came to the Peninsula after the building of the Tower of Babel.62 Spanish itself was defended as a primordial language dating back to Babel in the course of the debate about the expulsion of the Moriscos of Granada.63 Nearly half a century later, the issue of primordial languages was discussed once more in Peru, when the missionary Hernando de Avendaño suggested to his Andean listeners that not only Spanish but also Quechua was a primordial language, taught by God to one of the seventy-two families whom he dispersed over the earth after the building of the Tower of Babel. ­Avendaño even created a Quechua term to describe such a divinely infused language: it was a mama simi, in Spanish lengua matriz, a language that was a mother of other languages.64 In the Spanish debate about primordial languages, Garcilaso’s friend Bernardo Aldrete, the linguist and historian, reiterated in compelling detail the case that Nebrija had outlined for Castilian as the offshoot and descendant of Latin, the language that had formerly been the vernacular spoken in Spain. As the Florentine humanist and architect Leon Battista Alberti had already observed over a century earlier in his grammar of Tuscan, when Latin was the vernacular it did not have to be studied and learned laboriously; rather, like Alberti’s Tuscan and later Aldrete’s Castilian, it was spontaneously spoken by everyone, even the illiterate.65

“The Discourse of My Life”   39

What had been taught in Roman schools was not the language itself but elegant usage, what Nebrija had described as Latini sermonis artificum. To illustrate these issues, Aldrete cited Roman epitaphs, milestones, official inscriptions, and literary, historical, legal, and theological texts.66 He also demonstrated that in the course and aftermath of the Visigothic and Muslim invasions the language had changed, absorbing some Gothic and much Arabic vocabulary to become the Castilian that was spoken in early modernity.67 That the “conquered receive the language of the conquerors” was evident not only from the history of the Roman Empire but also from that of the Americas, where the Inkas and Aztecs had imposed their language along with their power, just as the Spanish were doing in Aldrete’s own day.68 An eloquent illustration of these realities came from topographical names, such as for the river Baetis, which the Arabs renamed Guadal­ quivir.69 The ubiquity of such linguistic changes was demonstrated by the name of Peru. As Aldrete learned from Garcilaso, the Inkas referred to their land as “Tahuantinsuiu, with which they designated the four parts of the Kingdom.”70 Realizing that Peru was not a term used by Andean people, Cieza often described the former empire of the Inkas as  “the land we call Peru,” and Acosta attached an explanation to the enigmatic term: originally, Peru was the name of a river near the equator which by osmosis was extended to describe the entire empire of the Inkas. A similar story involving a river that gave its name to the land of Peru had already been told by Oviedo and Francisco López de Gómara.71 Quoting the latter, Garcilaso transformed this explanation into an anecdote about miscommunication between Spaniards and Amerindians— this being a genre of narration that had been multiplying in the course of the sixteenth century 72—and recounted that the first Spaniards to sail along the Pacific coast of South America had captured an Indian, demanded to know what his land was called, and out of his confused and frightened responses derived the name Peru.73 As the Jesuit Blas Valera, many of whose notes Garcilaso incorporated into the Royal Commen­ taries, expressed it, the name was “imposed” by the Spanish and was “a name given by chance and not a proper name.”74 The differentiation between a name imposed by chance and a proper name, coming from Blas Valera and quoted by Garcilaso, both being writers of great linguistic finesse, invites scrutiny, as it touches on theories about the nature of language that interested grammarians of the time.

40  sabine maccormack

The difference between imposed and natural names had been explored by the Roman scholar and antiquarian Marcus Terentius Varra in De lingua Latina, of which several editions circulated in the sixteenth century, one by Antonio Agustín, bishop of Tarragona.75 Varro distinguished between names imposed on things by a person’s fiat or will and names arising from nature.76 At the first origin of language were names imposed by human will, which were followed by further names derived from these first names: “There are only two kinds of origin of words, imposition and inflection; the first is like the fountain, the second like the river.”77 According to this principle, Varro clustered words by interlocking their sound with their meaning, associating, for example, humus, “ground,” with humatus, “buried,” and humilior, “downcast,” and also with humor, “moisture,” which led him to udor, “dampness.”78 Simultaneously, Varro speculated about words being formed either by the fiat of the human will, arbitrarily, or else organically, by associated sounds and meanings. The formidable Francisco Sánchez el Brocense, professor of Greek at Salamanca, took up this theme, but in his Minerva, a treatise on Latin grammar published in 1587, he was prepared to allow only that it was “in the original language, whatever it was, that names and etymologies were derived from the nature of things.”79 Blas Valera, Aldrete, and Garcilaso were too deeply aware of the reality of historical and linguistic change to think of Quechua, or even Latin, as an original language, let alone the very first original language. After all, Varro had derived many Latin words from Greek as from an ancestor tongue. However, Garcilaso did portray the Inkas as having created civilized society in the Andes by means of teaching the arts of political living and above all by propagating a common language.80 In this sense, Quechua, the language whereby even people who were not Inka subjects learned to treat each other peaceably and as “friends and confederates,” stood in the place of an originary language, the civilizing function of which was disrupted by the intrusion of Spanish.81 Tahuantinsuyu, the “Fourfold Domain,” accordingly was a proper name that had flowed as a river from Varro’s source, whereas Peru was an arbitrary name, imposed by the conquerors’ fiat. There could be no more powerful token of conquest than the loss of the name of one’s patria. Evangelization, however, remained the order of the day, and Garcilaso thoroughly approved of the enterprise, more so since here the civilizing, humanizing impact of Quechua was once more becoming evident.

“The Discourse of My Life”   41

Thousands of Andean people congregated to work in Lima, Cuzco, and La Plata, and most of all they took their turns every year at working in the silver mines of Potosí, where for some time Blas Valera had been stationed as a missionary. It was perhaps here that he observed, in a passage that Garcilaso quoted, that the Andean workers, thrown together from different parts of the land, were united by the general language of the Inka so that “when they return home, with the new and more noble language that they learnt, they themselves seem more noble, more cultured and more alert in their understanding, and what they appreciate most of all is that the other Indians of their village honour and esteem them because of this royal language that they learnt.”82 Moreover, according to Valera, clergy and Spanish civic authorities observed that “the language of the Inka court possesses this peculiar capacity, worthy of being celebrated, that it bestows on the Indians of Peru the same benefit as the Latin language does on us, for apart from the advantage it offers for their negotiations and commercial dealings, for other temporal affairs and for their spiritual welfare, it makes them more acute of understanding, more teachable and ready to learn, and out of savages it turns them into political and cultivated beings.”83 This very same process, as Garcilaso stressed repeatedly, had also taken place in the time of the Inkas. A few years earlier, his friend Aldrete, quoting Pliny, had described the civilizing impact of Latin in the Roman Empire, making the additional point that precisely because, as Pliny had written, Latin “had drawn the savage languages of so many nations into conversation by the exchange of speech,” it was in due course possible to use it as the language of evangelization.84 All the more reason, therefore, for Garcilaso to urge that Quechua should be maintained in its purity and elegance and that it should be pronounced and construed correctly, avoiding the infiltration of Spanish semantics, syntax, and vocabulary.85 Several of Garcilaso’s friends were ­Jesuits, and he had a special appreciation for the work of this order in the evangelization of Peru. In 1607, two years before the Royal Commentaries were published in Lisbon after much delay, there appeared in Lima a Quechua grammar by the Jesuit Diego González Holguín, the labor of many years. Garcilaso appears not to have seen this work, but he would have appreciated the author’s commitment to portray the language of the Inka in its own right and not as a construct of Latin. Much had happened in the world of grammar after the publication of Nebrija’s

42  sabine maccormack

I­ ntroductiones Latinae, during the years that Domingo de Santo Tomás spent in Peru and subsequently. The linguist Francisco Sánchez el Brocense wrote his Minerva both as a companion volume and as a response to the Mercurius by the Italian scholar Augustinus Saturninus, the first edition of which appeared in 1546, followed by two further ones ten years later. El Brocense disagreed with his predecessor on many matters, but the two were at one in making the sentence, oratio, into the basic unit of grammatical analysis, rather than beginning, as Nebrija had done, with the sounds, letters, and parts of speech.86 This was a notable shift. In part it was determined by the different purposes of these later grammatical works from those of Nebrija. Nebrija had written primarily to advance the teaching of Latin to the young, but the methodology of beginning with the parts of speech also appears in his Spanish grammar. Saturninus and el Brocense wrote for those who were already fluent in Latin with the intention of explaining, not the traditional divisions of grammar, letters, syllables, and parts of speech, nor yet the historical and methodological aspects of grammar, but language in itself. Grammatica est ars recte loquendi, “Grammar is the art of speaking correctly,” no more, no less.87 Domingo de Santo Tomás, who had modeled his work on Nebrija, used Latin as a blueprint whereby to explain Quechua, making allowance for the many junctures where Latin did not help. The reason for the presence of Latin was, as we have seen, both political and didactic.88 All the readers of Fray Domingo’s grammar would have learned Latin, which was therefore a good place to begin explaining an additional foreign language. Furthermore, a grammar designed for language instruction such as Nebrija’s and Fray Domingo’s must inevitably translate concepts and vocabulary from the learner’s language to the language to be learned, and González Holguín was confronted with having to perform this same task. He had to get from Spanish with Latin to Quechua. Whether or not González Holguín knew of Saturninus and el Brocense, their method is in evidence in his Arte, which from the beginning invites the learner to form clauses. Whenever possible, the basic unit of analysis is not the isolated part of speech but the clause and then the sentence. Since therefore syntax was being learned from the beginning along with accidence, rather than having to be taken on as a separate enterprise once declension and conjugation had been mastered, the consuetudo loquendi of Quechua speakers stood at the forefront from the outset.

“The Discourse of My Life”   43

This shift in overall methodology that distinguishes the grammatical work of González Holguín from that of Domingo de Santo Tomás goes hand in hand with numerous differences regarding particulars. Some of these arise from the further study of Quechua by missionaries during the years after Fray Domingo published his work, and others from the Jesuit grammarian’s distinct methodology and outlook. Regarding plurals, for example, González Holguín described not only the principal plural suffix -cuna but several further ones conveying different plural meanings, and he also explained certain idiomatic uses of plural constructions, such as the plural pronoun in camchic runa, or camcamchic runacuna, meaning ­literally, “you people,” but in fact conveying vituperation, “you wicked people.”89 On another issue that Fray Domingo had written about, González Holguín thought no such thing as patronyms existed in Quechua. The passage in question, like several others, reads as though it had been written as a response to the friar’s discussion of this same topic: This language has no patronyms, and we cannot maintain that family names or surnames, whether of an entire lineage such as Incaroca, or of social groups, such as Hanan Cuzco and Hurin Cuzco, or of the provinces, like Cuntisuyo or Collasuyo, or of ancient surnames like Quispipuma Huaman (Shining Puma, Falcon) are patronyms. For these names do not follow the rule that is given in the grammar books, that they must be terms derived by means of some addition or extension from other terms of kinship, using a p ­ article for this purpose, such as the Latin particle—des in Aeneas, ­Aeneades, “those of the linage of Aeneas.” Nor yet are there in Quechua patronyms constructed with an adjectival noun derived from a proper name, as in Saturnia proles, the “descendants of Saturn.” In Quechua we find nothing like this, but there are names and surnames. Also, patronyms are not indispensible, since they do not occur in languages other than Latin and Greek.90 González Holguín chose never to spell out the conceptual revolution that is latent in this last sentence, but it is implicit throughout his Arte. Like Fray Domingo, González Holguín drew comparisons between Quechua and Latin wherever he thought this would help the learner. But unlike Fray Domingo, and unlike Nebrija, he did not think of Latin as

44  sabine maccormack

a possible model on which one could attempt to build a universal grammar. As a result, his Arte contains analytical and descriptive categories that had not so far appeared in European grammars but were useful, and indeed fundamental, for describing and analyzing Quechua.91 This feature helped to transform the traditional relationship between the learner’s language and the language to be learned, because the latter acquired from the former the leading role in forming concepts. If concepts that had been formed in relation to Latin or Spanish turned out to be useful in relation to Quechua, González Holguín welcomed this fact, but it was incidental to the main issue, which was that the learner was to internalize as dominant those concepts that derived from the behavior of the Quechua and not of some other language.92 In the concluding book of the Arte, which deals with elegant composition in Quechua, González Holguín spelled out what all this amounted to in actual practice: “The first law to succeed in composing in Quechua should be to flee from the Castilian manner of speaking, because it arranges the sentence and its parts in an order opposite to this language. Example: ‘I go to the church to hear a sermon about the most holy sacrament.’ The Indians begin where Castilian finishes, and finish where it begins: ‘About the most holy sacrament the sermon to hear to the church I go,’ ‘Sanctissimo sacramento sermonta uyaric yglesiamanmi rini,’ and this is the order that is elegant here, not ours.”93 At issue was, as always, the ars recte loquendi, “the art of speaking ­correctly.” Saturninus and el Brocense, early contemporaries of González Holguín, wrote about this art for scholars, people comfortable with reading a long and difficult book in Latin. González Holguín by contrast wrote to provide practical training for ordinary conversation and for delivering sermons in Quechua, and this was also what Domingo de Santo Tomás had worked for. If sacred oratory was to engage listeners and convince, it had to be elegant, abundant, and free of barbarisms. In aspiring to this goal, Fray Domingo and González Holguin joined hands with Quintilian, who had written the Institutio oratoria to train the young in oratory so as to prepare them to plead cases in the law courts and to ­administer the Roman Empire. The brief comments on grammar that ­attracted the attention of Nebrija and Domingo de Santo Tomás only served to remind educators that before a boy could begin his formation as an orator he had to be able to speak correct and cultivated Latin, this being the essential preliminary to an appreciation of Latin literature. Appreciation of literature, of the portrayal of human emotion and motiva-

“The Discourse of My Life”   45

tion in narratives in verse and prose, in fiction, history, and law, in turn opened the door to informed and ethical participation in public life. To say something, one had to know something. Nebrija, his humanist Italian predecessors, and his Spanish successors were deeply committed to reviving and handing on this knowledge, but as it turned out they passed on a learned, much more than a political and administrative, kind of knowledge such as Quintilian had envisioned.94 Except in the Americas. Domingo de Santo Tomás, González Holguín, and their many fellow missionaries had all undergone some form of classical training. Often they came away with no more than a smattering, but some missionaries were men of significant learning. In writing their grammars and lexica, therefore, Domingo de Santo Tomás and Diego González Holguín assumed this prior formation in what was to be said and focused on how to say it eloquently. They wrote for adults who were educated already, whereas Quintilian’s main theme had been the content of young people’s education and how to impart it. The missionary’s task was to run Andean parishes, doctrinas, to teach the Christian doctrine, to educate, inform, and inculcate policía, and to practice—on every Sunday and holy day—the art of sacred oratory. Convinced that Quechua was the appropriate vehicle in which to accomplish these tasks, the missionaries were as interested in perpetuating the purity and elegance of the language of evangelization as Quintilian had been in perpetuating these same qualities in Latin.95 Preaching for better or worse was a political ­activity, an active, sometimes militant participation in the república cristiana. Indirectly, but nonetheless in a vital, creative way, the effects of which are still with us, the missionaries were among Quintilian’s most influential students. And Quechua, for all that in the outcome it turned out to be not at all like Latin—a point that González Holguín made very  clear—proved to be the vehicle of interchange, communication, and identity in the Andes, much as Garcilaso Inca thought it was and ought to be.96 NOTES

riginally published as chapter 6, “‘The Discourse of My Life’: What LanO guage Can Do,” in On the Wings of Time: Rome, The Incas, Spain, and Peru, by Sabine MacCormack, 170–201. Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.

46  sabine maccormack

1. The Dialogos de amor was Garcilaso’s first published work: La tradu­ zion del Indio de los Tres dialogos de amor de Leon Hebreo, hecha de Italiano en Español por Garcilaso Inga de la Vega . . . (Madrid: Pedro de Madrigal, 1590). Cf. the facsimile with a good introduction by Miguel de Burgos Núñez (Seville: Padilla Libros, 1989). In the dedication of the Dialogos to Maximilian of Austria, Garcilaso mentions his further literary plans: “Y aunque entiendo que mi atrevimiento es demasiado en esto, todavia tengo propuesto de gastar lo que de la vida me queda, en escrivir.” For the works in question (the Florida and Comentarios reales) he requests Maximilian’s patronage: “Me atevere con el favor de V.S. à no bolver las espaldas à las dos empresas.” Garcilaso echoed the atrevimiento of this dedication in his defense of the Dialogos in the episode mentioned below. For “the discourse of my life,” see Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas, pt. II, ed. Carmelo Saenz de Santa María, vol. 3 of Obras completas del Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (hereafter BAE) 134 (Madrid: Atlas, 1960), 211a: “Adelante en el discurso de mi vida conocí muchos de los que se nombran en la historia.” On Garcilaso the historian, see Franklin Pease, Las crónicas y los Andes (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), 367–96. 2. Garcilaso, Comentarios reales, pt. II, ed. Saenz, vol. 3 of Obras completas, 14a: “Un antártico nacido en el Nuevo Mundo, allá debajo de nuestro hemisferio y que en la leche mamó la lengua general de los Indios del Perú, qué tiene que ver con hacerse interprete entre italianos y españoles, y ya que presumió serlo porqué no tomó libro cualquiera y no el que los italianos más estimaban, y los españoles menos conocían? Yo le respondí que habia sido temeridad soldadesca que sus mayores hazañas las acometen así, y si salen con victoria los dan por valientes y si mueren en ella, los tienen por locos.” 3. Garcilaso de la Vega, Relación de la descendencia de Garcí Pérez de Vargas, ed. Carmelo Saenz de Santa Maria, vol. 1 of Obras completas del Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, BAE 132 (Madrid: Atlas, 1965), 236b. See further, on Garcilaso’s name changes, punctuating the evolution of his self­-perception, and his career as a writer and historian, Christian Fernández, Inca Garcilaso: Imaginación, memoria e identidad (Lima: Fondo Editorial Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2004), chap. 2. 4.  See Garcilaso de la Vega, Obras de Garcilaso de la Vega con anotaciones de Fernando de Herrera (Seville: Alonso de la Barrera, 1580; facsimile, Madrid: CSIC, 1973), 101, soneto 7. Here, imagining himself to have escaped from an unhappy love, the poet wrote: tu templo i sus paredes è vestido de mis mojadas ropas, i adornado

“The Discourse of My Life”   47

como acontece a quien à ya escapado libre de la tormenta, en que se vido. [The walls of your temple have I decked out with my drenched clothing and adorned it as happens to one who has escaped free from the storm where he was caught.] In his commentary (108–9), Herrera cited Vergil, Aeneid 12.766–69, about the wild olive tree where shipwrecked sailors used to dedicate offerings of thanksgiving along with their clothes; Herrera also cited Horace, Odes 2.5, which is a misprint for Odes 1.5. 5. Patrick Gallagher, The Life and Works of Garcí Sánchez de Badajoz (London: Tamesis Books, 1968), 65: El cuerpo tengo de un rroble los brazos de un pino alvar, mi corazon es de piedra, mis entrañas de un sillar: callo tengo fecho en ellas, de sufrir y de callar, ya no siento la tristeza, ni me da pena el pesar turning round Dido’s accusations against Aeneas in Aeneid 4.365–68 with the simile of the oak in Aeneid 4.441–46. 6.  See Germán Colón and Amadeu-J. Soberanas, introduction to fac­ simile edition of Elio Antonio de Nebrija and Gabriel Busa O.S.A., Diccionario latin-catalán y catalán-­latín (Barcelona: Puvill Libros, 1987). 7.  Domingo de Santo Tomás, Lexicon o Vocabulario de la lengua general del Perú, ed. Raúl Porras Barrenechea (Lima: Universidad Nacional de San Marcos, 1951); Domingo de Santo Tomás, Grammatica o Arte de la lengua general de los Indios de los reynos del Peru (Lima: Universidad Nacional de San Marcos, 1951). 8.  Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Historia general y natural de las Indias, ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela y Bueso, vol. 1, BAE 117 (Madrid: Atlas, 1959), 202b. “Cosa es maravillosa que en espacio de una jornada de cinco o seis leguas de camino, y próximas y vecinas unas gentes con otras, no se entienden los unos a los otros indios.” 9. Oviedo, Historia general y natural, ed. Pérez de Tudela, vol. 1, 203a: “Estas diversidades de sus lenguas han seído las principales armas con que los

48  sabine maccormack

españoles se han enseñoreado destas partes, juntamente con las discordias que entre los naturales dellas continuamente había.” In this same chapter, Oviedo discusses the dispersion of humanity across the earth after the building of the Tower of Babel, and the original seventy-two languages that gave rise to all the rest, “que me paresce a mí que son incontables.” On the confusion of languages, Oviedo cites the standard sources of the day: Gen. 11:1–9; Augustine, City of God 16.11; and Isidore, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX 9.2, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), and adds his friend Pedro Mexía, Silva de varia leción 1.25, ed. Justo García Soriano (Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles, 1933). 10. Oviedo, Historia general y natural, ed. Pérez de Tudela, vol. 1, 203a, “unión de la república cristiana.” 11.  Pedro Pizarro, Relación del descubrimiento y conquista del Perú, chap. 5, ed. Guillermo Lohmann Villena (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1978), 18, about the Isla de Puná: “Estava en esta isla un ynga del Cuzco por governador que tenía alli el Ynga, que governava a Puerto Viexo, a la isla y a Túmbez.” 12.  See Bruce Mannheim, The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 31–60. He mentions sources about the “thicket of languages” spoken in the Andes at the time of the invasion; all postdate the period of first contact, when the initial impression of the ubiquity of Quechua came into existence (36). It was greater familiarity with the Andes that brought Spanish awareness of linguistic diversity alongside the general language. Here, as so often, Cieza led the way. He evidently thought that Quechua was much more than an administrative language; see below, note 68. 13.  José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962), 372, referring to Daniel 2:34, where Daniel explains to Nebuchadnezzar the meaning of his dream vision of the statue with a head of gold, chest and arms of silver, belly of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of clay, that is struck by a stone. 14.  See the real cedula of 1550, addressed to the viceroy of New Spain and reissued for Peru, ordering that Spanish be the language of evangelization, in R. Konetzke, Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493–1810, vol. 1 (Madrid: CSIC, 1953). In effect, the missionaries were instrumental in forming Quechua as the language of evangelization; about the process, see Alan Durston, Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Peru, 1550–1650 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 15.  Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática de la lengua castellana, bk. 5 and prologue, “Rudimentos y principios,” ed. Antonio Quilis (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1980). On the presence of the article in Castilian, see Gramática 3.1.

“The Discourse of My Life”   49

16.  Santo Tomás, Grammatica, fol. Av recto and verso. 17.  Ibid., fols. Av verso–Avi recto. 18.  The application of the term lingua franca is my own, but it is suggested by Fray Domingo’s repeated comparisons between Quechua and Latin throughout the Arte and by the political terminology with which he describes language, on which see further below. 19.  On the designation and analysis of the eight parts of speech, see Santo Tomás, Grammatica, fol. Bi verso of the prologue to the reader, “los términos, nombres y verbos y demás partes de la oración,” and Bii recto, “En esta lengua, como en la latina y en las demas, ay todas las ocho partes dela oración”; see also Santo Tomás, Lexicon prologue fol. +v verso, stating that here the model is Nebrija’s Latin dictionary. On pronunciation, see Santo Tomás, Grammatica, fols. Bi verso–Bii recto; Antonio de Nebrija, Introductiones latinas contrapuesto el romance al latín (ca. 1488), ed. Miguel Ángel Esparza and Vicente Calvo (Munster: Nodus Publikationen, 1996), 98, calls this part “Prosodia et syllaba.” Fray Domingo omits explicit discussion of Nebrija’s third part of grammar ­(etymology and diction), but it is implied throughout his Gramática; the fourth part of the Gramática, syntax, is at fol. 61v ff. 20. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1.1.24ff., ed. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), on education of children going from letters, to syllables (1.1.30), words, reading (1.1.32), and interpretation (1.1.35). 21. Antonio de Nebrija, Introductiones Latinae (Salamanca: Industrias Gráficas Visedo, 1981), preface addressed to Pedro Mendoza. On the difference between ancient and late antique Latin grammars written for those who already knew the language, and Latin grammars of subsequent times, written for those who were learning Latin, see W. Keith Percival, “Italian Affiliations of Nebrija’s Latin Grammar,” in his Studies in Renaissance Grammar (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), number XII. 22. Nebrija, Gramática 1.5. 23.  On identifying the phonemes of each language, see Nebrija, Gramática 1.4, mentioning Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1.4.7–12 on necessary and superfluous letters, and Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7.119, ed. Harris Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), on Greek letters that are also recognized in Latin. On consuetudo and spelling, see Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1.4.12–17 and 1.7.1–32, n30, “Ego, nisi quod consuetudo obtinuerit, sic scribendum quidque iudico, quomodo sonat,” with which Nebrija agreed (see Gramática 1.4). See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1.6.43, on preferring the ­consuetudo of the day to that of long ago. 24. Nebrija, Gramática 1.7. 25.  Santo Tomás, Grammatica, prologo a la S.M. del Rey, Av verso.

50  sabine maccormack

26. Nebrija’s Introductiones Latinae present as much information as possible in tabular form to facilitate learning by heart, and Domingo de Santo Tomás followed; even so, Quechua did not lend itself to the same kind of systematization as Latin. 27.  Santo Tomás, Grammatica, chap. 2, fol. 3v, “Quarta propriedad” of nouns. 28.  Ibid., chap. 2, fols. 4v–5r. 29. Nebrija, Introductiones Latinae, dedication to Pedro Mendoza, with Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1.9.1. 30.  See the preface to Nebrija, Introduciones latinas, prologue to Queen Isabel, 5–6. 31.  See Gerald Taylor, El sol, la luna, y las estrellas no son Dios . . . La evangelización en quechua (siglo XVI) (Lima: Institut Français d’Études Andines, 2003), 19–43, for an edition, translation, and commentary of this text. Taylor suggests the sermon might have been “un trabajo colectivo” (20). 32.  In light of the practice of preaching in Spain, one could argue that Fray Domingo arranged his model sermon in accord with established custom by focusing on the listener; see Fray Diego de Estella, Modo de predicar y modus concionandi, chap. 22, ed. Pio Sagüés Azcona (Madrid: CSIC, 1951), 307, “ut corda alloquatur, insuper et populum ignarum doceat, et bonis etiam moribus instruat. Ad hoc autem eligito utilia satis loca Scripturae, et jucundos nimis et placidos dicendi modos; non ea qua subobscura, sterilia et speculativa sunt.” See also chaps. 26 and 27, on pleasing and moving the listeners, but with appropriate decorum. 33.  Before writing the Grammatica and Lexicon, Fray Domingo’s missionary work had been primarily on the Pacific coast; for a coastal myth of origins, see Agustín de Zárate, Historia del descubrimiento y conquista del Perú 1.10, ed. Franklin Pease and Teodoro Hampe Marínez (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1995); for a different kind of coastal myth of origin (origin of noble men and women and of ordinary people from eggs of gold, silver, and copper, respectively; and origin from two pairs of stars, the parents of nobles and ordinary people), see Antonio de la Calancha, Corónica moralizada del orden de San Agustín en el Perú 2.19, ed. Ignacio Prado Pastor, 6 vols. (Lima: n.p., 1974–82), 934–35. No help is offered in these myths for the story of Adam and Eve. 34.  Santo Tomás, Grammatica, fol. 88r, cf. fol. 86r: “Cada lengua tiene su phrasis y modo particular de hablar.” 35. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1.6.3: “Consuetudo vero certissima loquendi magistra, utendumque plane sermone ut nummo, cui publica forma est.” On the principle of accommodation, see Robert Lamberton, “The Neo-

“The Discourse of My Life”   51

platonists and the Spiritualization of Homer,” in Homer’s Ancient Readers, ed. Robert Lamberton and John J. Keaney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 115–33; Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 213–43. 36.  This culturally open method of evangelization was displaced in the next generation by ever greater insistence on Christian doctrine as formulated in Europe; see now Juan Carlos Estenssoro Fuchs, Del paganismo a la santidad: La incorporación de los indios del Perú al catolicismo, 1532–1750 (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2003). 37.  Santo Tomás, Grammatica, fols. 57r, 67r–70v. 38.  Ibid., fols. 56v–57r: “Llámanse yngas todos los que proceden y son de aquel señor primero, que se llamo Mangoynga y este linage, tiene entre ellos otros particulares nombres y linages: que el principal se llama capac ayllo otro ygñaca pañaca ayllo otro çucco pañaca ayllo y assi otros muchos. Ay assi mismo en el Cuzco otros dos linages principales, llamado el uno Maras toco y otro llamado Xutic ayllo que se tomo de otro hombre principal, llamado Xutic toco Los quales ambos se llamaron por sobrenombre toco que quiere dezir, ventana, porque creen los Indios del Cuzco que estos dos salieron de dos cuevas que estan en el pueblo de Pacaritambo donde dizen que salio el dicho Manga ynga para cuyo servicio dizen que salieron los dichos dos indios, Donde paresce, que los dos indios dichos tomaron sobre nombre toco de la cueva donde salieron, y sus descendientes, y los de Manga ynga lo tomaron dellos.” This is a somewhat different story from the one discussed by Gary Urton, The History of a Myth: Pacariqtambo and the Origin of the Inkas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). For more on patronyms, see Nebrija, Gramática 3.3, ed. Quilis, 167–68. 39.  The term is derived from the behetrías of the Duero valley, communities that were thought to have gained independence from the Moors by their own unaided efforts, and with that had also gained the right to choose their own lords; see Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), chap. 7, nn20–28. 40.  Santo Tomás, Grammatica, prologo a la S.M. del Rey, Av verso. 41. Nebrija, Gramática 1.7, ed. Quilis, 123. 42. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1.7.11–29. 43. Nebrija, Gramática 4.1, ed. Quilis, 203. 44. Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Madrid: Turner, 1984), “AYUNTAR: del verbo latino iungere: quando dos cosas distintas se allegan la una con la otra. Ayuntar, congregar, y de allí ayuntamiento, que es consistorio o cabildo. CONCERTAR . . . latine, componere.

52  sabine maccormack

Concierto, acuerdo, composición, avenencia, consonancia. . . . Ir concertados o de concierto, ir ya prevenidos y comunicados de lo que han de hazer.” The Diccionario de autoridades of the Real Academia Española (Madrid: Gredos, 1984) s.v. “ayuntar” cites the preface of Alfonso X, Partida 1.1.1, along with Recopilación de las leyes destos reynos hecha por mandado de Felipe Segundo . . . con las leyes que después de la ultima impresión se han publicado por Felipe Quarto (Mexico City: Porua, 1987) book 7, title 1, law 1, “en que fagan sus ayuntamientos y concejos, y en que se ayunten las Justicias y Regidores y oficiales a entender en las casas cumplideras.” Cf. Diccionario de autoridades s.v. “ayuntamiento,” where from the same book, title, and law the following words are quoted: “de aqui adelante cada una de las dichas Ciudades y Villas fagan su casa de ayuntamiento, y Cabildo, donde se ayunten.” The Diccionario s.v. “concertar” also has some legal quotations, along with several other political renderings. 45. Nebrija, Gramática 4.l, ed. Quilis, 203, “la primera concordia y concierto es entre un nombre con otro,” meaning a noun and an adjective. 46.  Eugenio Asensio, “La lengua compañera del imperio: Historia de una idea de Nebrija en España y Portugal,” Revista de Filología Española 43 (1960): 399–413. See also Giuseppe Patota in Leon Battista Alberti, Grammatichetta: Grammaire de la langue Toscane (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2003), xxxii–xl. 47. Nebrija, Gramática prologue, ed. Quilis, p. 101, line 22, “Por estar ia nuestra lengua tanto en la cumbre, que más se puede temer el decendimiento della que esperar la subida.” 48. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1.5.55 on verba Latina and verba pere­ grina, and 1.5.58 on Greek words. 49.  Santo Tomás, Lexicon prologo al lector, pp. 14–15 (modern pagination), about Spanish vocabulary and many terms of particular provinces. 50.  José Durand, “La biblioteca del Inca,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 2 (1948): 239–64. The commentary on Nebrija was no. 46; there were two copies of Pero Mexia’s Historia imperial, nos. 79 and 82. 51.  “Reynos y señorios particulares.” Pero Mexia, Historia imperial y cesarea en la qual en summa se contienen las vidas y hechos de todos los Cesares, emperadores de Roma, desde Julio Cesar hasta el Emperador Carlos Quinto (Anvers: Pedro Bellero, 1578), 214, introduction to the reign of Theodosius II. See J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3, The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 240–57. 52.  Santo Tomás, Lexicon prologo, fols. +iii verso–+iiii recto. 53.  Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas, pt. I, in vol. 2 of Obras completas del Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, ed. Carmelo Saenz de Santa Maria, BAE 133 (Madrid: Atlas, 1960), 247, “a como si fuesen de una familia y parentela y perdiesen la esquivez que les causaba el no entenderse . . . [the

“The Discourse of My Life”   53

Inkas] los trajeron mediante la lengua a tanta union y amistad, que se amaban como hermanos.” 54. Garcilaso, Comentarios reales, pt. I, ed. Saenz, vol. 2 of Obras completas, 247a, translation with help from Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, trans. Harold V. Livermore (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966). “Con este artificio domesticaron y unieron los Incas tanta variedad de naciones diversas y contrarias en idolatría y costumbres como las que hallaron y sujetaron a su imperio; y los trajeron mediante la lengua a tanta unión y amistad, que se amaban como hermanos. Por lo cual, muchas provincias que no alcanzaron el imperio de los Incas, aficionados y convencidos de este beneficio, han aprendido después acá la lengua general del Cozco, y la hablan y se entienden con ella muchas naciones de diferentes lenguas.” 55. Garcilaso, Comentarios reales, pt. I, ed. Saenz, vol. 2 of Obras completas, 248b: Valera explained how the Inkas sent language teachers to the various parts of the empire: “Con este concierto regían y gobernaban los Incas en paz y quietud todo su imperio, y los vasallos de diversas naciones se habían como hermanos porque todos hablaban una lengua.” On Valera, see Sabine Hyland, The Jesuit and the Incas: The Extraordinary Life of Padre Blas Valera, S.J. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 56. Garcilaso, Comentarios reales, pt. I, ed. Saenz, vol. 2 of Obras completas, 247a, 248b–249a quoting Blas Valera. 57.  Ibid., 249a, listing Trujillo, Quito, the Collas, and Puquinas. 58.  Ibid., 250a. 59. This often took the form of complaints about the litigiousness of Andean people; see Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva crónica y buen gobierno, ed. John V. Murra, Rolena Adorno, and Jorge Urioste (Madrid: Historia 16, 1987), 591–92; cf. Jorge A. Guevara Gil, Propiedad agraria y derecho colonial: Los documentos de la hacienda Santotis Cuzco (1583–1822) (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1993), see esp. 92ff. 60.  For the fact that Quechua was no longer being imparted by teachers from Cuzco, see Garcilaso, Comentarios reales, pt. I, ed. Saenz, vol. 2 of Obras completas, 246b, “pusieron en cada provincia maestros Incas de los de privilegio.” On linguistic importations from Spanish, see Garcilaso, Comentarios reales, pt. I, ed. Saenz, vol. 2 of Obras completas, 3b. Garcilaso is writing “a comento y glosa y de intérprete de muchos vocablos indios” for Spanish authors who misunderstood them. He proceeds to discuss Quechua pronunciation, the Quechua plural, and other differences between Quechua and European languages. Words were changing their meaning as the society changed, as when persons of lowly birth usurped Inka titles; see Garcilaso, Comentarios reales,

54  sabine maccormack

pt. I, ed. Saenz, vol. 2 of Obras completas, 40b, commenting on a passage in Ercilla; see MacCormack, On the Wings, chap. 7, nn77–78. 61. Garcilaso, Comentarios reales, pt. I, ed. Saenz, vol. 2 of Obras completas, 248b–249a, “acabándose el mando y el imperio de los Incas no hubo quien se acordase de cosa tan acomodada y necesaria para la predicación del santo Evangelio por el mucho olvido que causaron las guerras que entre los españoles se levantaron.” See also 246b about the private language of the Inkas, “como pereció la república particular de los Incas, pereció tambien el lenguaje de ellos.” 62.  Balthasar de Echave, Discursos de la antiguedad de la lengua Cantabra Bascongada: Conpuesta por Balthasar de Echave, natural de la Villa de Cumaya en  la Provincia de Guipuzcoa, y vezino de Mexico (Mexico City: Henrrico ­Martínez, 1607). On the historiographical dimension of Spanish origins, see María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, Túbal, primer poblador de España, offprint from Abaco 3 (1970). 63.  See Kathryn Woolard, “Bernardo de Aldrete and the Morisco Problem: A Study in Early Modern Spanish Language Ideology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (2002): 446–80. 64.  Fernando de Avendaño, Sermones de los misterios de nuestra Santa Fe Catolica, en lengua castellana y la general del Inca: Impuganse los errores particu­ lares que los indios han tenido (Lima, 1649), sermon 9, 109–12. 65.  See Alberti, Grammatichetta, 9 (preface), cited in Vivien Law, The History of Linguistics in Europe from Plato to 1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 235. On Alberti’s vernacular project, see Maria Antonietta Passarelli, La lingua della patria: Leon Battista Alberti e la questione del volgare (Rome: Bagatto Libri, 1999); Giuseppe Patota, Lingua e linguistica in Leon Battista Alberti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1999). 66.  Bernardo Aldrete, Del origen y principio de la lengua Castellana ò Romance que oi se usa en España 1.7–12, ed. Lidio Nieto Jiménez (Madrid: CSIC, 1972). 67. Aldrete, Del origen y principio 2.6, ed. Nieto Jiménez, 178–81 (listing archaic Castilian vocabulary to show language change); also 3.14 and 3.15 (listing Gothic and Arabic vocabulary in Castilian as spoken in Aldrete’s time, ­respectively). 68. Aldrete, Del origen y principio 1.22, “los vencidos reciben la lengua de los vencedores,” in this context meaning that the inhabitants of the Peninsula, once defeated, accepted Latin as their language, as later they accepted Arabic. At p. 144 he refers to Peru’s lengua general as described by Cieza and José de Acosta, De procuranda Indorum salute 1.9, ed. and trans. L. Pereña and others (Madrid: CSIC, 1984–87), about the general languages of Mexico and Peru as

“The Discourse of My Life”   55

vehicles of evangelization. The passage by Cieza that Aldrete had in mind appears to be 1.41, fol. 60, “todos los de este reyno en más de mill y dozientas leguas hablavan la lengua general de los Ingas, que es la que se usava en el Cuzco. Y hablávase esta lengua generalmente, porque los señores Ingas lo mandavan: y era ley en todo su reyno, y castigavan a los padres si la dexavan de mostrar a sus hijos en la niñez. Mas no embargante que habalvan la lengua del Cuzco (como digo) todos se tenían sus lenguas, las que usaron sus antepasados.” Aldrete’s work aroused much contestation (cf. Woolard, “Bernardo de Aldrete”), so that in a subsequent volume he reiterated his arguments with more evidence: Varias antiguedades de España, Africa y otras provincias: Por el Doctor Bernardo Aldrete Canonigo en la Sancta Iglesia de Cordoua (En Amberes a costa de Iuan Hasrey año de MDVXIV). 69. Aldrete, Del origen y principio 3.12. 70. Aldrete, Del origen y principio 3.13, ed. Nieto Jiménez, 356. 71.  For Oviedo’s account, see his Historia general y natural 39.1, ed. Pérez de Tudela, vol. 1, 340b–4lb. According to Bartolomé de Las Casas, Apologética historia sumaria, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman (Mexico City: UNAM, 1967), chap. 248, p. 562, the name Peru was derived from the valley Piura, where the Spanish founded the city of San Miguel. 72. Garcilaso, Comentarios reales, pt. I, 1.5; he himself produced another example of the genre, see Garcilaso de la Vega, La Florida del Inca 6.15, ed. Sylvia Hilton (Madrid: Historia 16, 1986). 73. Garcilaso, Comentarios reales, pt. I, 1.4. 74.  Ibid., ed. Saenz, vol. 2 of Obras completas, 14ª, quoting Blas Valera: “Este nombre fué nuevamente impuesto por los españoles a aquel imperio de los Incas, nombre puesto a caso y no propio, y por tanto de los Indios no conocido antes, por ser bárbaro tan aborrecido, que ninguno de ellos lo quiere usar. Solamente lo usan los españoles.” See further José Durand, “Perú y Ophir en Garcilaso Inca, el Jesuita Pineda y Gregorio García,” Histórica 3, no. 2 (Lima 1979): 35–55; chapter 7 below, note 9. 75.  See the survey of editions of Varro’s writings in Marcus Terentius Varro, De lingua Latina libri qui supersunt cum fragmentis ejusdem. Accedunt notae Antonii Augustini, Adriani Turnebi, Josephi Scaligeri, et Ausonii Pompae (Biponti 1788), xxxiv, citing Agustín’s as the first critical edition of De Lingua Latina. I have not been able to consult Antonio Agustín, De nominis propiis . . . (Tarracone: Ex officina Philippi Meii, 1579), of which there was another edition from Barcelona 1592, a work that would appear to be relevant in the present context. 76.  Daniel J. Taylor, Declinatio: A Study of the Linguistic Theory of Marcus Terentius Varro (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1974), 14–32.

56  sabine maccormack

77.  Marcus Terentius Varro, De lingua Latina libri 8.4, ed. L. Spengel and Andreas Spengel (New York: Arno, 1979). 78. Varro, De lingua Latina libri 5.23–24. 79.  Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas (alias El Brocense), Minerva, o De causis linguae Latinae, chap. 1, ed. E. Sánchez Salor and C. Chaparro Gómez (Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 1995), 38. 80. Garcilaso, Comentarios reales, pt. I, 1.15. Note chap. 14, ed. Saenz, vol. 2 of Obras completas, 24b–25a: before the Inkas, “los que se entendían en un lenguaje se tenían por parientes; y así eran amigos y confederados. Los que no se entendían por la variedad de las lenguas, se tenían por enemigos y contrarios, y se hacían cruel guerra, hasta comerse unos a otros, como si fueran brutos de diversas especies.” 81. Garcilaso, Comentarios reales, pt. I, 7.1, ed. Saenz, vol. 2 of Obras completas, 247a, “por sola ella [i.e., the Quechua language] se han hecho amigos y confederadores donde solían ser enemigos capitales.” 82. Garcilaso, Comentarios reales, pt. 1, bk. 7, chap. 4, ed. Saenz, vol. 2 of Obras completas, 250b, y cuando se vuelven a sus tierras, con el nuevo y más noble lenguaje que aprendieron, parecen más nobles, más adornados y más capaces en sus entendimientos; y lo que más estiman es que los demás indíos de su pueblo los honran y tienen en más por esta lengua real que aprendieron. For a discussion of this and related passages in Garcilaso, see César Itier, “Lengua general y quechua cuzqueño en los siglos XVI y XVII,” in Desde afuera y desde adentro: Ensayos de etnografía e historia del Cuzco y Apurímac, ed. Luis Millones, Hiroyasu Tomoeda, and Tatsuhiko Fujii (Osaka: National Museum of Eth­ nology, 2000), 47–59. Unlike Garcilaso, contemporary linguists distinguish the Quechua spoken in Inka times from that generated by the missionaries; see Durston, Pastoral Quechua. 83. Garcilaso, Comentarios reales, pt. I, 7.4, ed. Saenz, vol. 2 of Obras com­ pletas, 250b–251a: “La lengua cortesana tiene este don particular, digno de ser celebrado, que a los indios del Perú les es de tanto provecho como a nosotros la lengua latina, porque además del provecho que les causa en sus comercios, tratos y contratos, y en otros aprovechamientos temporales y bienes espirituales, les hace más agudos de entendimiento, y más dóciles, y más ingeniosos para lo que quisieren aprender, y de bárbaros los trueque en hombres políticos y más urbanos.” 84. Aldrete, Del origen y principio 1.4, ed. Nieto Jiménez, 33, quoting Pliny the Elder, Natural History 3.41. 85.  On two misconstruals of Quechua current in Garcilaso’s time, see Comentarios reales, pt. I, 2.4–5, discussing different meanings of huaca, pacha, and p’acha.

“The Discourse of My Life”   57

86. Augustinus Saturninus, Mercurius Maior sive grammaticae institutiones, ed. Manuel Mañas Núñez (Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 1997). The analysis of phonemes, letters, parts of speech goes back to the late Roman grammarians Donatus and Priscian; see Grammatici Latini, ed. Henricus Keil (Hildesheim: Olms, 1961), vols. 2–3 (Priscian) and vol. 4 (Donatus). 87. Sánchez de las Brozas, Minerva, chap. 2, ed. Sánchez Salor and C. Chaparro, p. 46, line 13. 88. Cf. Fray Domingo on patronyms, above at note 38. But Diego González Holguín stated at some length that there was no such thing as patronyms in Quechua; see his Gramatica y Arte nueva de la lengua general de todo el Peru, llamada lengua quichua, o lengua del Inca (Lima, 1607), fol. 99r ff.; this is quite clearly and explicitly a contradiction of Fray Domingo, even though González Holguín does not mention him. 89.  González Holguín, Gramatica y Arte, fols. 8–9v; fol. 13v. Compare above at note 27. 90.  González Holguín, Gramatica y Arte, fol. 99: “Nombres patronimicos no los tiene esta Lengua, ni se puede dezir que lo son los nombres appelativos o sobrenombres, ora sean de todo un linaje, como (Incaroca) o de los vandos, como (Hanan Cuzco, Urin Cuzco) o de las provincias como (Cunti suyo, Colla suyo) ora sobrenombres antiguos, como (Quispipuma huaman) porque no guardan la regla de patronimicos que dan las Artes, que son vocablos deduzidos con alguna añadidura o composicion de otros vocablos de parentesco, con particula para esto, como en Latin (des) de (Aeneas, Aeneades) los de aquel linaje de Aeneas. Ni por via de nombre adjectivo sacado del nombre proprio, como (Saturnia proles, Los hijos de Saturno). Aca no hallamos cosa que corresponda a esto, sino los nombres y sobrenombres, ni es cosa necessaria, pues no es comun a otras lenguas sino a la Latina y Griega.” González Holguín was not thinking of Norse languages in which patronyms are frequent, but this does not compromise the point he is making, which is that patronyms are not a universal feature of language. 91.  For example, González Holguín, Gramatica y Arte, fols. 4v–5v, on declining adjectival participles. 92.  For example, González Holguín, Gramatica y Arte, fol. 54: “quedan todos nuestros romances reduzidos a la Lengua,” and not vice versa. 93.  González Holguín, Gramatica y Arte 4.1, fol. 119: “La primera ley para acertar a componer sea huyr del modo de hablar castellano, porque dispone la oracion y sus partes al reves que esta lengua. Exemplo. Voy a la yglesia a oyr sermon del sanctissimo sacramento, los yndios comiençan por donde acaba el romance, y acaban por donde comiença del sanctissimo sacramento el sermon a oyr a la yglesia voy sanctissimo sacramento sermonta uyaric yglesiamanmi rini, y este orden es aca elegante, y no el nuestro.”

58  sabine maccormack

94.  Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), and Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Peter Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), traces the emergence of “learned sociability” and its transformation into a social and political virtue that reached beyond the world of learning. 95.  Note especially the prologue to González Holguin, Gramatica y Arte, bk. 4. 96.  Garcilaso saw Quechua as an expression of Peruvian collective identity; see Garcilaso, Comentarios reales, pt. I, preceded by “Advertencias acerca de la lengua general de los indios del Perú”; at the end of these comments on the language, Garcilaso describes it as “la lengua general del Perú.” In the prólogo to Comentarios reales, pt. I, ed. Saenz, vol. 2 of Obras completas, 13a, Garcilaso mentions the Dialogos de amor, by León Hebreo, as “libro . . . que anda traducido en todas lenguas hasta en lenguaje peruano” (Comentarios reales, pt. I, 9.19, ed. Saenz, vol. 2 of Obras completas, 351a). In Comentarios reales, pt. II, 1.7, ed. Saenz, vol. 3 of Obras completas, 26a, Garcilaso refers to Giovanni Botero Benese, Le relationi universali di Giovanni Botero Benese, divise in quattro parti (Venice, 1605). Botero also saw Quechua as the Peruvian language; see Relationi universali, 230, on the three different landscapes of Peru, “piani, e Sierra, and Andi (quella è voce Spagnuola, questa Peruana).” For more on “Peruvian,” see Garcilaso’s prólogo to Comentarios reales, pt. I, ed. Saenz, vol. 3 of Obras completas, 14b, on the “librea natural peruana” that was to be seen in Cordoba during the celebration of the beatification of Ignatius Loyola. Note also that “La lengua general de todo el Peru llamada Qquichua o del Inca” is part of the title of Diego González Holguín’s dictionary.

CHAPTER 2

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico BAS VAN DOESBURG

This chapter is about the role of writing in Oaxacan indigenous cultures. It is less about the many current efforts to put the indigenous languages of Oaxaca in writing than about the writings of the past, about the communitarian writing traditions that flourished before Mexican independence.1 Several Mesoamerican indigenous societies developed very successful and enduring traditions of writing in their own languages during the colonial period (1536–1821), using the Roman alphabet. In southwestern Mesoamerica, in the current state of Oaxaca, at least three languages or language groups developed a strong written tradition. Besides Zapotec (or at least three Zapotec languages) and Mixtec (especially the Mixteca Alta variants), the lesser-known Chocho language was also put down in writing.2 Additionally, Nahuatl, the lingua franca of Mesoamerica, was used in writing in several of the Oaxacan language areas. These writing traditions arose and were successfully reproduced around specific social spaces such as community administration and justice. Writing was useful for keeping order in the community by ensuring a register of written records (testaments, inventories, accounts, and the like) endorsed by community authorities and sometimes by the intermediaries with the Spanish colonial system, such as friars, local priests, 59

60  bas van doesburg

or Spanish judges. Writing was instrumental in several social practices. The art of writing was mostly restricted to the public domain and was mostly in the hands of community scribes. While this writing especially served the internal administration of the communities, its texts were also regularly presented as evidence in Spanish courts. As a result, many texts are now preserved in municipal archives or in the judicial archives of the state. At the moment in which these traditions arose, Spanish was not a viable option for writing—not even as a lingua franca—because of the very limited number of indigenous people that spoke or understood Spanish and the very small number of Spaniards living in the indigenous communities.3 After independence, with the desire for a single national identity growing among the nonindigenous upper classes, literacy in indigenous languages was soon considered obsolete, thus closing a dynamic social space for those languages’ reproduction. In time, this possibly contributed to the consolidation of illiteracy and an ideology of illiteracy in indigenous communities.4 Because of the negative perception of writing in indigenous languages after independence, the colonial traditions are little known today and the reappraisal and study of some are only recently being undertaken. In many cases, the loss of the writing tradition in the early nineteenth century was so acute and severe that contemporary communities do not remember that they ever wrote. Some traditions have only very recently been rediscovered, and “new” texts are frequently found in local archives. This is the case of the Chocho written tradition, “rediscovered” only after 1996. In the village of Santa Maria Nativitas, a small community where some elder people still speak Chocho, known as Ngiwa by its speakers, the small group of active local teachers who had formed an organization called Kadiaa Ngiwa to promote the writing of the language for which they had designed an alphabet was very surprised to learn in 2000 that they were not the first to try to write their language and that their ancestors had written hundreds of documents in Chocho. This colonial tradition of writing in indigenous languages thus contrasts strongly with the current situation. Colonial writing is little appreciated by speakers and scholars alike, and its potential for enriching the ongoing reflection on writing in indigenous languages today is only very rarely mentioned.5 In the light of the challenges faced by those who promote the reintroduction of writing in indigenous languages, study of the historical situation may be relevant. Several questions come to mind: Why did strong traditions develop in only four of the approxi-

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  61

mately fifteen traditionally recognized language groups of Oaxaca? Were these d ­ evelopments simultaneous? Why was writing so successful in these communities? What were the function and use of the writings produced? What can indigenous-language documents tell us that Spanish documents can’t? How did authors and texts relate to the sociopolitical ­context? To discuss some of these issues I will look at the role of indigenouslanguage writing in one of the linguistically most diverse areas of Oaxaca, the Coixtlahuaca basin and the adjacent Teotongo valley, where Chocho (Ngiwa), Mixtec (Tu’un Savi), and Nahuatl were all spoken and written simultaneously during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, producing a unique multilingual documentary record. Also, during the first sixty years of the colony, the royal courts in this same area were still using the pictographic “script” of pre-Hispanic origin to produce large-scale polychrome documents that stressed and exalted the traditional rulership. In the past half century, these documents have received considerable scholarly attention.6 However, because of the pictorial nature of the graphic system used, these texts are traditionally studied without much reference to the languages spoken in the area. Indeed, at first sight, it seems that these documents can tell us very little about the linguistic history of the region. However, when we carefully relate them to the large corpus of alphabetic texts from the area we can obtain a better understanding of the distribution of languages during the sixteenth century and before. In this chapter, I will focus on the social and political role of writing in indigenous languages, the change from one writing system to the other, the eventual hierarchy among the languages and writing systems, and the resulting choice of language and writing system.7 T HE C OIX T L AH UACA BASIN AN D TH E A DJAC E N T T E OTON GO VA L L E Y

The Coixtlahuaca basin and the adjacent Teotongo valley comprise some 1,100 square kilometers, and towns are located at an average altitude of two thousand meters. While this region is arid during the dry season, the irregular summer rains allow for precarious agriculture. During the centuries prior to the conquest, a trade route that connected the rich tropical south of Mesoamerica with the densely populated central highlands crossed this area, turning it into a major commercial hub. The town of

62  bas van doesburg

Coixtlahuaca was the site of a large market. Its location in the northeastern corner of the geocultural area known as the Mixteca Alta turned Coixtlahuaca into the economic gateway of this region: toward the north were the large urban centers of the Nahuas in the highlands of Puebla, among which was the old and sacred city of Cholula. The lords of the Coixtlahuaca basin maintained close relations with this important area. However, culturally they were more akin to their Mixtec neighbors, with whom they shared their graphic system and their fascination for lineage histories. Because of its location, the area may have been quite “cosmopolitan” since pre-Hispanic times, and one could probably hear several languages spoken by the merchants that came in from close by and far away.8 This advantageous position also made it possible to maintain large populations in the area. Recent archaeological research has located major population clusters near the villages of Coixtlahuaca, Tequixtepec, Ihuitlán, Tulancingo, and Suchixtlahuaca. Coixtlahuaca, the “capital” of the region, may have sustained between fifty thousand and eighty thousand inhabitants during the late Postclassic period.9 This urban culture used a mostly pictographic graphic system that was able to register various aspects of society, especially those related to divination and lineages. The pictographic documents from the royal palace created powerful messages about the origin of authority and its moral and religious responsibilities. Their focus was the royal lineage as the central axis of the community. Pictography was probably also used to create administrative documents related to tax, land, and labor, the organization of which was also concentrated in the palace, but no pre-Hispanic examples have survived. The palaces (and temples) possibly had their own particular painters. At the time of the conquest, the Coixtlahuaca basin and the Mixteca Alta at large were notoriously prosperous. This situation endured for some time after the conquest. Between 1540 and 1580, that is, during the years between the two major epidemics that struck the region, the intense interaction between Spanish and Mixtec economies, technologies, and aesthetics sustained a refined local culture. The thriving silk production imported from Murcia, Spain, provided significant income for the towns, and despite the dramatic epidemics many communities were able to maintain a rich cultural life.10 Architectural monuments preserved in the region—among which are the church of Coixtlahuaca, a bridge and a friary in Tequixtepec, and lordly palaces in Tequixtepec and ­Tlapiltepec—and fine prints from this period, such as the choral book of Concepción Buenavista, still testify to the splendid cultural life of the

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  63

time and to the new religious orientation of the indigenous communities. These buildings and books, and other items that have disappeared, were part of an effort to literally rebuild the communities after the conquest. The devastating effects of the epidemics and the introduction of new ideas about morality and ethics related to both community life and religion called for the resettling of the communities—congregación is the word the Spaniards used—at different dates during the second half of the sixteenth century.11 During this process, the declining populations of towns and outlying agricultural and artisan hamlets (called estancias by the Spaniards) were moved to new centers—sometimes built on top of an ancient center but other times at a new location—clustered around the new Christian church or chapel. Not only had these hamlets suffered the loss of population, but their dispersion made converting and taxing the population more difficult. During the congregación program, a new form of government, based on the Spanish ayuntamiento, was introduced. This body, called the cabildo, soon took over the traditional economic and political control of the pre-Hispanic elite: often in charge of silk production, it became the main consumer and sponsor of new forms of art, clothing, and foodstuffs both for its own space and for the other new institution: the church and its fiestas. Hereditary lords had to compete or negotiate with the cabildo and in doing so often occupied administrative positions in it and thus participated as consumers and sponsors. During the sixteenth century, the descendants of the ruling families were generally reduced to a status of hereditary landlords (caciques). The administration of their estates, of the new-style cabildo, and of the church was an important trigger for the rise of the written tradition. Later on, after the population had collapsed as a result of recurrent epidemics during the sixteenth century, the economic crisis of the seventeenth century forced the indigenous towns into the role of a rural hinter­ land of the developing Spanish cities.12 However, by then the writing tradition had firmly established itself and was able to perpetuate itself without input from the outside until the time of Mexico’s independence. T HE L IN GU IST IC H ISTORY O F TH E R EGION

Historically, the Coixtlahuaca basin and adjacent Teotongo valley were the home of a Mesoamerican people called the Xru Ngiwa, “people of the Ngiwa language.” This language is called Chocho, Chochón, or

64  bas van doesburg

­ hocholtec in Spanish today.13 But besides the Xru Ngiwa, there were C also smaller communities of speakers of Mixtec (Tu’un Savi) and of Nahuatl living in some of the polities. Furthermore, Nahuatl also functioned as the lingua franca in communication with the highlands of Puebla and the basin of Mexico, where strong states had cultivated political and economic ties to the area. Ngiwa or Chocho is an Otomanguean language belonging to the Popolocan family. The four Popolocan languages or language groups (Chocho, Popoloca proper, Ixcatec, and Mazatec) are all spoken around the northern entrance to the La Cañada region, in the border area between the current states of Puebla and Oaxaca, suggesting an ancient presence—prior to their separation—in the area. The Spanish name Chocho derives from classical Nahuatl chochon (plural: chochontin) with unknown meaning. The Franciscan Nahuatl specialist Alonso de Molina, who composed his 1571 dictionary in the basin of Mexico, translated chochon as “boçal persona” (a foreign person who does not speak the dominant language) and gave tenitl, “hombre de otra nación y boçal,” as a synonym.14 In the past, these terms did not exclusively refer to speakers of  Chocho but included speakers of the closely related Popoloca language, living to the north of the Coixtlahuaca basin in the current state of Puebla.15 The close relation between modern Chocho and Popoloca is also apparent in these languages themselves: speakers of both languages still use the same word, Ngiwa or Ngiva, to refer to their respective language. During colonial times, the two languages and their speakers were sometimes also known as Pinotl (plural: Pinome) in Nahuatl. The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, the compiler of an “encyclopedia” on Nahuatl culture, described the area bordering the Nahua lands in current Oaxaca as In īpan onoqueh mixtecah: in ye ixquich cenpinōtl, in chohchon[tin], nonohualeh, “the land on which dwell the Mixteca: all the Pinome, the Chochones, the Nonoalca.”16 The documents written in Chocho during the colonial period show that this language innovated rapidly after the late seventeenth century, thus diverging more and more from Popoloca. This was probably partly due to low population numbers and to diminished contact between the two areas. Today, Chocho is an endangered language. Santa Catarina Ocotlán is the only town with a fair percentage of speakers. Small numbers of adult and aged speakers can be found in Santa Maria Nativitas and its agencias and in San Miguel Tulancingo. In total there may be only around six hundred speakers left in the area.

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  65

Mixtec is also an Otomanguean language, belonging to the Mixtecan family together with Cuicatec, Triqui, and Amuzgo. It is spoken in a large area traditionally situated between the towns of Acatlán and Tututepec, as defined by the Franciscan Toribio de Benavente (Motolinia): “From the first town, which is called Acatlán, which is towards the direction of Mexico, to the last, which is called Tututepec, which is on the coast of the Mar del Sur [i.e., the Pacific Ocean], there are about eighty leagues. In this Mixteca there are many provinces and towns, and although it is a land of many mountains and chains, it is all inhabited by many people.”17 Mixtecs referred to these lands as Ñuudzavui, “the Lands of the Rain[god].” Linguistically, this area was not homogeneous, and in some areas other languages were spoken. In his 1593 grammar of the Mixtec language, the Dominican friar Antonio de los Reyes observed: “We can say that all over this Mixteca, besides the Chuchona language . . . and the Cuicatleca language, which is spoken in Cuicatlán and Las Almoloyas and other towns, and the language of Cuiquila [i.e., Triqui], which is also spoken in some small towns, everything else is one single Mixtec language. . . . There are different ways of speaking it, and all of them can be reduced to two principal languages which are the one from Tepuzcolula and [the other from] Yanguitlan, as the roots of the others.”18 Mixtec-speaking towns bordered the Coixtlahuaca basin to the west, south, and southeast. In Tamazulapan, Tejupan, and Coix­ tlahuaca itself, Mixtec- and Chocho-speaking communities lived side by side. Citing Friar Antonio de los Reyes once more: “The Chuchona tongue . . . is spoken in the towns of Cuixtlahuac, Texupa and Temaczulapa, and others in the area, in which there are also many Mixtecs, and in some of the said towns, there are more Mixtecs than Chochones. . . . The part of the Chochones was called [in Mixtec] Tocuijñuhu . . . and Tocuij Ñudzavui, which is Chuchon Mixteca, due to the participation and communication that they have with the Mixtecs, and much kinship.”19 Indeed, documents from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show that the towns of Tejupan and Tamazulapan were mainly Mixtec speaking but that Xru Ngiwa populations inhabited the areas immediately adjacent to the Coixtlahuaca basin. These populations were kept separate in the congregations: already before 1580, the large Xru Ngiwa population of Tamazulapan was “congregated” into the two towns of Santiago Teotongo (Xadë Duxö) and San Miguel Tulancingo (Ningaxingu).20 The situation in Tejupan was described in 1579 as follows: “In this town they speak two languages: Mixtec and Chochona. The most general is the

66  bas van doesburg

Mixtec one.”21 Again, the Xru Ngiwa population was probably concentrated in the northern tip of the valley of Tejupan bordering the Coixtlahuaca basin. Mixtecs and Xru Ngiwa also lived together in Coixtlahuaca, the principal urban center in the basin. Today, Mixtec has become extinct in Tamazulapan, Tejupan, and Coixtlahuaca itself. Reyes indicates that the Mixtec spoken in Coixtlahuaca was a close variant of Yanhuitlán Mixtec, while Tamazulapan and Tejupan followed Teposcolula with some variations. The Coixtlahuaca basin is located in the northeastern extreme of the Mixteca Alta, bordering the highlands of the current state of Puebla. During the four centuries prior to the conquest, these highlands received a steady influx of Nahuatl speakers from the northwest who established themselves in numerous populous urban centers.22 Nahuatl was a highly prestigious language in Mesoamerica at the time of the conquest. Although it is not known when Nahuatl acquired this status, it appears ­already to have been a lingua franca since early Postclassic (“Toltec”) times in the densely populated central lake basin. Later, at the time of the conquest, the principal political force in Mesoamerica was the young Mexica “Empire,” which also used Nahuatl as the court language. The Spanish chronicler Antonio de Herrera wrote: “There are, both in this Mixtec reign as well as in all other provinces of the Bishopric of Guaxaca, or Antequera, thirteen different languages, and the Mexican one [i.e., Nahuatl] is the general one.”23 The Spaniards took advantage of (and thus reinforced) this phenomenon. Nahuatl being the lingua franca of Mesoamercia and the language of the Mexica Empire meant that communication between Spaniards and the indigenous population started with Nahuatl, then moved to the larger local languages, such as Mixtec, and ended with the smaller but economically and politically important languages, such as Chocho. CO LO NI A L L IN GU IST IC DYN AMIC S B E FOR E W R ITIN G

During the first half of the 1530s, the encomendero Francisco Solís imposed a cruel regime in Tamazulapan, characterized by extortion and ­torture. Several communities fled the area. The hereditary lord, called Hernando, fled to Mixtec Tlaxiaco; the Ngiwa farmers found refuge in the neighboring polities of Tequixtepec and Coixtlahuaca, where they

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  67

settled in estancias known in Nahuatl as Capulalpan (also known as Tonala by Tequixtepec), Tepetlapa (also known as Aguatepec), and Zacualtongo.24 After Solís left in 1534, an agreement was reached before the first Spanish corregidor (judge) to reside in the Mixteca, Juan de Nájera, between the lords of Coixtlahuaca and Tequixtepec about the distribution of these migrant communities.25 The incomplete record of the event was written down in Spanish by a Spanish scribe but still reflects something of the complex communication that went on: apparently the judge spoke only Spanish, but both the scribe Martín de Salas and Francisco Gutiérrez, a young Spanish soldier and at the time calpixque (tribute collector) of Tamazulapan, stated specifically that they understood Nahuatl.26 Probably the Spanish calpixques of Tequixtepec and Coixtlahuaca also spoke and understood Nahuatl. The two anonymous Indian interpreters that are mentioned in the records must have translated from Mixtec and Chocho into Nahuatl. For this reason, the farmer communities received Nahuatl names, which they still retain today with the exception of Zacualtongo, which disappeared.27 Interestingly, at this stage, the Spanish judge seems to have been little more than a witness to the agreement reached by the local lords. When in 1543 Coixtlahuaca intended to undo the agreement, a local investigation was conducted before Juan Núñez Sedeño, corregidor of Tejupan. This moment marked a parting of ways, as pre-Hispanic customs were abandoned (at least on paper) and legal procedures started to follow Spanish law and protocol. In the court in Mexico City, where the final sentence was pronounced, each party was represented by a Spanish procurador (attorney): Tequixtepec had hired Álvaro Ruíz, and Coixtla­ huaca was represented by Alonso Flores. It is not clear how the towns chose these attorneys, nor do we know how both lawyers communicated with their parties in the Mixteca, but they must have used the same double-­translation principle as Juan de Nájera did earlier. Witnesses were heard (though their statements have not survived), and in early 1545 the Spanish court in Mexico upheld the original agreement, giving Tequixtepec control over Tepetlapa and Zacualtongo. By this time, Francisco Gutiérrez, the young Nahuatl-speaking Spanish soldier mentioned above, had returned from his participation in the Vásquez de Coronado expedition into what today is the United States (1540–42) and had set up a business for silk production in association with the lords of Tequixtepec.28 Apparently, he was still living

68  bas van doesburg

in Tamazulapan. Two surviving letters by his hand show he promoted Tequixtepec’s interests—or maybe more precisely those of its lord don Miguel—before its attorney and before visiting Spanish judges.29 He thus probably was the principal local mediator between local and Spanish cultures. At the same time, don Hernando of Tamazulapan had entered the arena with a complaint before the court in Mexico City that his party had not been heard when the first agreement was made and that the migrant communities belonged to Tamazulapan. In February 1544, the issue was conferred to Antonio de Nava, corregidor of Teposcolula, with Nahuatlspeaking Francisco Gutiérrez as scribe.30 Again, investigations with witnesses were carried out. In this case, two interpreters were appointed: a Spaniard to translate from Spanish into Nahuatl and vice versa, and an Indian called Juan to translate between Nahuatl and Mixtec. Interestingly, when it was don Miguel’s turn to present his witnesses, he asked for someone to translate from Ngiwa (called Chontal and the language of the Chochontes, possibly derived from the Nahuatl plural chochontin) into Nahuatl.31 The judge appointed a nobleman from Zapotitlán Salinas, a Ngiwa-speaking town. Witnesses came from Tejupan, Zapotitlán, Tecomavaca, Ixcatlán, Capulalpan, and Tepetlapa. Either the interpreter understood the several variants of Ngiwa and also Ixcatec, or some of the witnesses were bilingual. One witness from Tecomavaca did not give his declaration because “there was no translator who could understand his language.”32 He may have spoken Mazatec, another Popolocan language spoken formerly in Tecomavaca, although in this case it is curious that don Miguel would have asked for him as a witness. By now, it had become clear that the case revolved around two distinct claims: on the one hand, don Hernando claimed that the farmers of Capulalpan and Tepetlapa were originally tributaries of Tamazulapan. This was probably true for at least part of the farmers, those that had fled the violence generated by encomendero Solís.33 On the other, he also claimed that that meant both communities were located inside Tama­ zulapan’s territory, a statement that is more difficult to believe. In fact, territorial definitions are extremely vague in these years, suggesting a nonterritorial form of sociopolitical organization.34 Curiously, never do the witnesses give a plausible explanation of these contradictions or of the details of the undoubtedly complex territorial and personal arrangements in the disputed area. Apparently, and unfortunately for us, there

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  69

was no interest in giving the Spaniards a peek into the kitchen. The case dragged on for several years until 1550. At each step, double interpreters were appointed. The lords of Tamazulapan were backed up by the Spanish encomendero of their town, Juan Juárez, whom they had given a power of attorney.35 The conflict between the three polities was also carried out on another level, again involving Spanish officials. At some moment between 1542 and 1545, the rulers of Tamazulapan and the brother of the lord of Tequixtepec (apparently living in Tamazulapan) had ordered the killing of a man working in Capulalpan who claimed to be a teotl (divine person, god). This man apparently was a priest put in charge of Capulalpan by the lords of Coixtlahuaca.36 After the killing, the Tamazulapan lords had eaten the body, apparently as a revenge (called quipatla, from tepatla, “to exchange, substitute a person,” in the document) for the killing and eating of a Tamazulapan man by the lord of Coixtlahuaca and an indigenous priest called Martín. Since this case involved the crime of “idolatry,” it was examined by the vicar of Acatlán, again with Francisco Gutiérrez as scribe and a man called Pedro as interpreter, possibly from Chocho into Nahuatl (the use of teotl and quipatla in the final text suggests a translation through Nahuatl). No sentence seems to have been pronounced. Throughout the sixteenth century the rivals Tequixtepec and Coixtlahuaca continuously made political use of the Spanish willingness to investigate any report of “idolatry” in order to weaken the other party.37 Finally, the principal case between Coixtlahuaca, Tequixtepec, and Tamazulapan was sent back to the Mixteca, together with Tome López as the official Nahuatl-Spanish interpreter. In February of 1548 it was time to hear the witnesses, and don Miguel asked for an interpreter of the Ngiwa tongue (called lengua chocha, lengua de chocho, and pinol in the file). Two were appointed: Martín Ozomatli from Acatlán and Marcos Tochtli from Coxcatlán.38 The interpreters of Mixtec-Nahuatl were Pedro Ehcatl from Tlaxiaco and Domingo Sochicoatzin from Texcaltitlán. Witnesses that spoke Ngiwa were from Nopala (Ixcatlán), Zapotitlán and its subject town Acatepec, and Tecamachalco; one Mixtec witness came from Huautla, and one Nahuatl-speaking witness was from ­Tehuacán.39 Of course, by then all parties had spent considerable amounts of money on attorneys, scribes, legal fees, and other costs, thus sponsoring and strengthening the bureaucratic Spanish legal system at work in the

70  bas van doesburg

region. Since they depended on payments from the parties, it was in the interest of the attorneys to drag the case on as long as possible, and it is not clear if the local lords were completely aware of the endless legal maneuvers. However, the case was a clear example of the power of writing within the new colonial setting and of the need to master that system of written communication. The linguistic procedures installed by the Spanish administration resulted in toponyms and personal names being translated into Nahuatl on the Spanish side.40 Around 1545, Francisco Gutiérrez, the young Spanish soldier we mentioned earlier, wrote in Spanish to attorney Álvaro Ruíz in Mexico City on behalf of the lord of Tequixtepec.41 The letter was intended to remind the lawyer of the conflict between Tequixtepec and Rodrigo de Segura, the encomendero of Ixcatlán, over lands. All lands mentioned in the letter received names in Nahuatl—Temazcalapa (river of the sweathouse), Tlecaxiapa (river of the brazier), Coatlabayxtlabaca (plain of ??), Nopala (place of nopales), and Pachtiquipaque (above the moss)—though locally they were surely known by Chocho (and Ixcatec) names.42 We don’t know if these translations were produced by don Miguel, the lord of Tequixtepec, or by Francisco Gutiérrez.43 In the Spanish proceedings of the already mentioned long and complicated conflict between Coixtlahuaca, Tamazulapan, and Tequixtepec (1543–50), all geographical references were given in Nahuatl. At this time, boundaries were not yet established.44 The only two geographical references as to the extension of Tamazulapan lands are Tulateupa (“the temple of Tula,” the archaeological site of San Miguel Tulancingo) and Omeapa (“two rivers,” location unknown), where there were some ruins of a house of don Hernando’s father or grandfather.45 Also, most witnesses in this case had their calendar names translated into Nahuatl as well (e.g., Martin Tochel, “Rabbit,” from Tlaxiaco; Juan Calçin, “House,” from Yanhuitlán, etc.).46 In the Nahuatl translation of calendar names, the numeral of the name was commonly dropped. Female names often acquired the suffix noun -xoch or -suchil, “flower.”47 This custom in the Spanish administration of translating all place and calendar names into Nahuatl lasted until the late sixteenth century. This same phenomenon can be observed in the early pictographic documents, which often carry glosses in Nahuatl (e.g., Lienzo of Tequixtepec I, Lienzo of Ihuitlán, and Lienzo of Otla).48 By the end of the sixteenth century, most of the Nahuatl names of the larger settlements—the scale of interest to the Span-

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  71

ish o­ utsiders—had been frozen as loans in Spanish. This principle, of course, gave the towns of Coixtlahuaca, Tequixtepec, and Tamazulapan their Nahuatl names in Spanish; earlier, these towns were known respectively as (in modern spelling) Nginche (Chocho) and Yodocoo (Mixtec), Jnaningi (Chocho) and Yucuye (Mixtec), and Du’uxun (Chocho) and Tiquevui (Mixtec). I NDI G E N OU S-L A N GUAGE D OC U M E N TS FROM TH E CO I X T LA H UACA BAS IN A N D T H E TE OTON GO VA LLE Y

Scribes from the Coixtlahuaca basin and the Teotongo valley have left a remarkable multilingual documentary record. This record is little known and exists in the shadow of the more “exotic” pictographic documents.49 While several indigenous-language texts are still preserved in the region, others were sent to Spanish courts or were removed later on and are now kept in archives and libraries located in Oaxaca and Mexico City. Some communities still keep isolated but highly significant documents: there is an interesting Mixtec document in the archive of Santa Maria Nativitas, just south of Coixtlahuaca, and there is an extraordinary cluster of interrelated documents written in Chocho from the communities of Teotongo and Tulancingo, west of Coixtlahuaca. Table 2.1 lists all known indigenous-language documents from the area under study. Among these documents, several stand out. The two testament books, one from Teotongo and one from Tulancingo, together contain over eight hundred testaments written in Chocho and constitute the largest collection of testaments for any Mesoamerican language. The testaments are clearly based on a prototype, possibly composed by the ­Dominican friars of the nearby Tamazulapan convent. These testament books contain the wills of everyone to die in the community, poor and rich, young and old, male and female, and as such give a real profile of the community, hardly ever possible to obtain through other documents. As  we will see below, these books can give a unique insight into the system of land tenure or ownership among the Xru Ngiwa. The clergy’s involvement in these books is shown by the fact that each of the testaments was signed by a Tamazulapan friar. A second rare genre is the account book, represented by a unique example from the town of Teotongo. This book reveals the economic and

Table 2.1.  Indigenous-language documents from the Coixtlahuaca basin 1550–64 Nahuatl

Libro de Cuenta de Santa Catarina Tejupan (Codex Sierra) (Biblioteca José María Lafragua, Puebla).a

circa 1568 Nahuatl

Receipt for two colts sold to don Miguel de San Francisco, cacique of Tequixtepec (Codex Lucas Alemán); transcribed and translated in Bas van Doesburg, “El Códice Lucas Alamán: Un curioso comprobante por dos potros proveniente de San Miguel Tequixtepec,” Mexicon 28, no. 1 (2006): 15–19.

1551 Nahuatl

1574 Mixtec

1577 Chocho Supposedly 1579 Mixtec. The style suggests a midseventeenth-­ century hand. 1583 Nahuatl 1585–95? Chocho

1587 Nahuatl

Land transfer, Aztatla, Coixtlahuaca 1551 (Archivo Histórico Judicial de Oaxaca, hereafter AHJO, ramo Tepozcolula, Civil, legajo 21, expediente 10), transcribed and translated in Kevin Terraciano, “Ñudzahui History: Mixtec Writing and Culture in Colonial Oaxaca” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1994), 624. In the same file are a Mixtec text supposedly from 1579 and a Chocho testament from 1687.

Two-line introduction to a list of people of the six barrios of Tequixtepec that were “confirmed” (AAT-08); transcribed in Bas van Doesburg, Documentos antiguos de San Miguel Tequixtepec, Oaxaca: Los primeros cien años de la colonia (1533–1617) (Leiden: CNWS, Leiden University, 2002), 197.

Testament of doña María de San Miguel, cacica of San Miguel Tequixtepec (AAT-39); transcribed and translated in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 214–17.

A land transfer (AHJO, ramo Tepozcolula, Civil, legajo 21, expe­ diente 10); transcribed and translated in Maarten Jansen, La gran familia de los reyes mixtecos: Libro explicativo de los códices llamados Egerton y Becker II (Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt; México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994), 93–94, and Terraciano, “Ñudzahui History,” 625. In the same file are a Nahuatl document from 1551 and a Chocho testament from 1687.

Provisión Real ordering the alcalde mayor of Yanhuitlán to investigate a conflict between San Cristóbal Suchixtlahuaca and Tequixtepec over lands in Zacualtongo (AAT-68).

Doctrina cristiana en lengua chochona (Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, Mexico). See Sebastián van Doesburg and Michael W. Swanton, “La traducción de la ‘Doctrina cristiana en lengua mixteca’ de fray Benito Hernández al chocholteca (ngiwa),” in Memorias del Coloquio Francisco Belmar: Conferencias sobre lenguas otomangues y oaxaqueñas, vol. 2, ed. Ausencia Cruz and Michael Swanton (Oaxaca: Biblioteca Francisco de Burgoa, UABJO, CSEIIO, FAHHO, INALI, 2008), 81–118, for a discussion on the origins of this document. Letter from Domingo and Catarina García to don Diego de San Miguel, cacique of Tequixtepec (AAT-42); transcribed and translated in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 293–300.

a. This document is from just outside the area discussed. I have included it for its importance as an example of the combination of pictography and Nahuatl.

Table 2.1. (cont.) 1592–1621 Account book of Ca’andaxu, a barrio of Teotongo (municipal arChocho/Mixtec chive of San Miguel Tulancingo). The year 1599 is in Mixtec. 1592–1634 Chocho

1596 Mixtec 1596 Mixtec

1596 Chocho

Testament book of San Miguel Tulancingo (municipal archive of San Miguel Tulancingo), 291 testaments.

Memorias of excessive tribute paid to Francisco Jiménez by the inhabitants of San Jerónimo, Coixtlahuaca (AHJO, ramo Tepozcolula, Penal, legajo 4, expediente 10).

Two letters from the regidor and alcaldes of Coixtlahuaca regarding the widow of a murdered man (AHJO, ramo Tepozcolula, ­Penal, legajo 4, expediente 21). Testament of don Diego de San Miguel (AAT-40); transcribed and translated in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 333–36.

1597 Testament in Nahuatl of don Francisco de Mendoza, cacique of Nahuatl/Mixtec Coixtlahuaca (Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, hereafter BNAH, Colección Antigua 797, fols. 65–67v, translation on fols. 122–124v). Mixtec addendum prepared by the cabildo of Coixtlahuaca (BNAH, Colección Antigua 707, fols. 67v–68, translation on fols. 124v–125v). 1597? Mixtec

Memoria of the possessions of don Francisco de Mendoza written by his widow (photographed by Nicolás León, 1904).

1601 Nahuatl

Letter from don Pedro de San Pablo y Francisco Velázquez of Tequixtepec to Francisco de las Casa in Teposcolula regarding the theft of a horse (AHJO, ramo Tepozcolula, Penal, legajo 5, expe­ diente 46).

1601 Mixtec

1605 Mixtec

Letter from don Felipe de Mendoza and Melchor de San Juan of Coixtlahuaca to alcaldes in Teposcolula regarding the theft of a horse (AHJO, ramo Tepozcolula, Penal, legajo 5, expediente 46; transcribed and translated in Terraciano, “Ñudzahui History,” 635–36).

Testament of doña Isabel Bautista, wife of don Juan de Zúñiga, lord of Coixtlahuaca and Tejupan (AGN, Tierras, vol. 2732, expediente 18, fols. 406–7, translation on fol. 410).

1606–54 Testament book from Teotongo (BNAH, Colección Antigua Chocho/Mixtec 777), 535 testaments. One testament is in Mixtec.

1615 Testament in Chocho of don Felipe de Mendoza de Tonalá. Brief Chocho/Mixtec addendum in Mixtec to the same testament (BNAH, Colección Antigua 797, fols. 148–149v, translation on fols. 152–53).

1620 Mixtec

1621 Chocho 1631 Chocho

Testament of don Domingo de Guzmán y Zúñiga, lord of Coix­ tlahuaca and Tejupan (AGN, Tierras, vol. 2732, expediente 18, fols. 408–9, translation on fols. 410–11). Note on the reception of an alm (BNAH, Colección Antigua 797, fol. 72v).

Codicil of Cecilia de Mendoza (BNAH, Colección Antigua 797, fols. 71–71v, translation on fols. 126–126v).

Table 2.1. (cont.) 1631 Chocho

Codicil of Helena de la Cruz (BNAH, Colección Antigua 797, fols. 73–73v, translation on fols. 126v–127).

1657 Chocho

Memoria of the belongings of Gracia de Santiago, wife of the gobernador Melchor de los Reyes y Salazar (AHJO, ramo Tepozcolula, Civil, legajo 26, expediente 14).

1633 Chocho

1657 Mixtec

1663 Nahuatl

1663–64 Chocho 1666 Mixtec

1669 Chocho ca. 1675 Mixtec

1687 Chocho

Codicil of don Domingo de Mendoza (BNAH, Colección Antigua, 797, fols. 69–69v, translation on fols. 127–127v). This is not the testament of the same person, which survives only in Spanish translation in AGN, Tierras, vol. 232, expediente 1, fols. 10v–12v.

Note added to the above-mentioned memoria by alcalde Juan de Zúñiga (AHJO, ramo Tepozcolula, Civil, legajo 26, expediente 14).

Testament of don Francisco de Mendoza (BNAH, Colección Antigua 797, fols. 150–151v, translation on fols. 154–155v). A page from an account book from Coixtlahauaca (church archive of Coixtlahuaca).

Four-line note added to the last will of don Francisco de Mendoza (see above, 1597) by Juan de Zúñiga (BNAH, Colección Antigua 797, fol. 797).

Testament of María de Santiago from Coixtlahuaca, principala of the barrios Tzundun y Dûtzan (AHJO, ramo Tepozcolula, Civil, legajo 14, expediente 28). Memoria of don Juan de Vera y Zúñiga (municipal archive of Natívitas).

Testament of don Gabriel de San Juan. In the same file are a Nahuatl document from 1551 and a Mixtec text supposedly from 1579 (AHJO, ramo Tepozcolula, Civil, legajo 21, expediente 10).

1695 Chocho

Testament of Gracia de Salinas of Coixtlahuaca (AHJO, ramo Tepozcolula, Civil, legajo 29, expediente 13).

1714 Chocho

Note in the account book of Ca’andaxu.

1710 Chocho

Note by the cabildo of Santa Magdalena Jicotlán. Added to the testament of don Gabriel de San Juan (see above, 1687).

1718 Chocho

Note in the cover of a choral book of the church of Coixtlahuaca by Andrés de la Cruz y Salazar (church archive of Coixtlahuaca).

1760 Chocho

Entry in the account book of Thundu, barrio of Teotongo (Teotongo municipal archive).

1724–95 Chocho

Account book of Escotla, barrio of Suchixtlahuaca. The records for 1724, 1725, 1729, 1730, and 1732 are in Chocho (Suchixtlahuaca municipal archive).

Undated (early) Note on the back of a pictorial genealogy in the municipal archive Chocho of San Miguel Tequixtepec.

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  75

monetized dynamics of the “congregated” indigenous communities ruled by the colonial cabildo. The sociopolitical reorganization that accompanied the congregation policy led to the cabildo-run community taking on the characteristics of a small-scale business. Traditional social structures were incorporated into this business, though in the end the transfer of the economic power from the traditional lords (i.e., the monopoly on traditional luxury goods and long-distance trade in such goods) to the ­cabildo (production of new crops and the acquisition of Spanish luxury goods) meant the weakening of the former. While there is no evidence for a direct involvement of the friars in the book, the Spanish business culture expressed by the account book in its form and content suggests a relation with the congregation program promoted, supported, and possibly also partially carried out by the friars. There is also a Christian catechism written in Ngiwa, now preserved in the library of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística. Before it was moved to Mexico City in 1865, it may have been kept in the library of the Dominican convent of Oaxaca. Some pages of this rather hermetic text of 220 folios carry an incomplete Spanish interlinear translation. It is not clear where precisely this manuscript was created, but the Dominican convents of Coixtlahuaca and Tamazulapan are our obvious candidates. As we have shown elsewhere, this text is a direct translation into Ngiwa of the monolingual Doctrina cristiana en lengua mixteca printed in 1567 in Mexico City, which we will mention again below.50 Only in one case are indigenous-language documents still part of an integrated, “unpurged” local archive.51 This varied and multilingual documentary record is kept in San Miguel Tequixtepec, now a small community some ten kilometers north of Coixtlahuaca. The existence of this archive is no coincidence. All communities—or their ruling lineages—in the Coixtlahuaca basin were directly dependent on the political capital Coixtlahuaca, and most documents were kept in the archive of Coix­ tlahuaca, which was unfortunately destroyed at some unknown date.52 Tequixtepec, however, fiercely defended its independence from Coixtlahuaca at least from the early days of the colony and hence formed its own archive. Because of its remarkable preservation, the Tequixtepec archive allows us to see how the sixteenth-century archives were built up. No fewer than forty-six documents from the years between 1541 and 1618 have been preserved in the town. These are complemented by forty-five documents from the Archivo General de la Nación—the national archive

76  bas van doesburg

that grew out of the records of the viceroy’s court—in Mexico City and three more documents from other archives.53 Though most documents are in Spanish, there are also texts in Mixtec, Chocho, and Nahuatl. Interestingly, many of the official documents in Spanish in the Tequixtepec archive have short summaries written in Nahuatl or, in one case, Chocho and Nahuatl at the bottom or at the back of the document, strongly suggesting that the local secretaries could not understand the Spanish text and were guided by these summaries in identifying the documents when needed. The texts were zealously preserved in the local archive, but they could apparently be read only with the help of a Spanish-speaking interpreter. For the Tequixtepec scribes, these Spanish documents were highly authoritative since they were connected to Spanish power and served to protect certain rights of the town and curtail those of others, but this did not imply a mastery of the language in its spoken or written form. N A H UAT L W R IT IN G

After the conquest phase in central Mexico (1518–35) and during the rebuilding of Mexico City and the implementation of a more stable Spanish government in central Mexico, knowledge of the Nahuatl language became imperative for its agents.54 Many Spaniards learned Nahuatl to carry out their business with the Indians, and friars and priests embarked on an ambitious project to translate doctrinal materials and confessionaries into Nahuatl. In 1536, the Franciscan order, the viceroy, and the outgoing president of the Segunda Audiencia inaugurated the Colegio de Santa Cruz, where indigenous boys of noble descent were offered advanced education in preparation for the priesthood (a goal soon abandoned) and public and political service in their towns.55 In 1546 and 1548, the first doctrinal materials in Nahuatl were printed.56 The earliest of the two was composed by Alonso de Molina, son of a Spanish widow who had learned Nahuatl as a child when he and his brother used to play with indigenous children. In the 1550s he finished the first major dictionary in the Nahuatl language. Between the publication of the doctrines and the dictionary, the Franciscan friar Rodrigo de la Cruz wrote to the king: It is my opinion that Your Majesty should order that all learn the Mexican tongue, because there is no town without many Indians

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  77

who know it and learn it without difficulty, but by ear, and many confess in it. It’s a very elegant language, as much as any are in the world, and a grammar and vocabulary have been created, and many things of the Holy Scripture have been translated in it and many sermonaries, and there are friars that are very good translators. . . . We also have schools in which we teach the Indians to read and write and to count, and to say the Hours of the Virgin. And for this we bring in Indians from the countryside—from one town, four; from another, six; and so on. And after they know how to pray the Office of Our Lady, we send them back to their villages.57 It did not take long for written Nahuatl to become highly successful in the new colonial society of central Mexico. Around the mid-sixteenth century, alphabetic Nahuatl writing entered the Mixteca, possibly through the training of local men that already knew (some) Nahuatl. Since Nahuatl was understood and spoken mainly by rulers, nobles, and merchants, and also by many Spaniards in the area, it was—for about two to three decades—the written language of the indigenous courts. Indeed, the first Nahuatl texts from the Coixtlahuaca basin appear immediately after the dispute between Tequixtepec, Coix­ tlahuaca, and Tamazulapan was finally settled.58 Since the heirs of the ruling houses were clearly within the Dominican sphere of action, it is not likely that they attended the Franciscan school in Tlatelolco, though some young lords from the neighboring Cañada apparently did.59 Writing skills were possibly acquired locally. While the role of the Dominican friars in promoting indigenous literacy has been stressed, we know very little about the activities of the secular priests who were working early— sometimes even before the friars—in the region. One curious document from San Miguel Tequixtepec, which is known only through a photograph, illustrates the first phase of this alphabetic writing as set down by the community scribes. This document is a typical example of the kind of hybrid bi-scriptual documents produced around this time in the Mixteca.60 In the upper part of the document we find an alphabetic text in Nahuatl stating that don Miguel de San Francisco, lord and governor, bought two colts for thirteen pesos. Don Miguel, who did not write the text himself, did sign at the bottom, together with don Diego de San Miguel, his son, who signed as alcalde, and another nine men. All have Spanish surnames, except three of them

78  bas van doesburg

at the end of the list who have had their calendar names translated into Nahuatl. There is a hierarchy in the listing of the names, with the rulers— occupying the principal positions in the cabildo—first, followed by the higher nobles, recognized by their Spanish surnames, and, at the end, by the lower nobles, recognized by their calendar names only. Spanish surnames were clearly associated with a higher status.61 As other contemporary documents from the Tequixtepec archive show, the men who signed the document were members of the first full-fledged cabildo that was operational in the last years of the 1560s. This Spanish-style government was introduced in Tequixtepec during the same decade, and this early writing seems to be precisely an expression of this community council.62 In fact, in central Mexico the Franciscans had always insisted on the importance of reading and writing for the governance of the reorganized indigenous colonial communities, and the Dominicans in Oaxaca appear to have continued the same idea. The last signature on the list under discussion belongs to Martín Velázquez (Spanish surname). He was almost certainly the author of this Nahuatl text, but we don’t know where he ­acquired his skills. Fortunately, we have proof of his linguistic skills: in 1568, during an investigation about some lands in the Tequixtepec polity, the Spanish judge had himself accompanied by “Diego Hernández, Spaniard, who speaks the Mexican tongue, and . . . Martín Velázquez, Indian, who speaks the Mexican tongue and Chochona and Misteca.”63 Curiously, he was not a high noble in town; perhaps he was a trainee from the Coixtlahuaca convent.64 In the lower part of the document, we see the same message represented in pictography. Possibly, it was Martín Velázquez who drew this pictorial as well. While it is obviously hard to tell what particular language was behind the pictorial message, at least one curious feature suggests it was Ngiwa: while the Nahuatl text ends with the Spanish-style signatures of the cabildo members, the pictographic text ends with a series of calendar names. We may suppose that these names are the indigenous equivalents of the Spanish-style names. If this were true, it would be a unique example of such a double name list. Since numerical coefficients are indicated in the calendar names, it seems their reading was meant to be in Ngiwa and not Nahuatl, which normally left out the numbers. At this time, then, Nahuatl alphabetic writing had entered the communities, and new types of texts, mainly administrative texts related to the cabildo, still centered on the hereditary ruler, were produced. But also the pictographic writing was adapting itself to the new themes, inventing

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  79

new signs (like the signs for “colt” and “peso”). Documents that had to be understood by both a local audience and an outside (Spanish) one were drawn up in the two writing systems. Without doubt the best example of this creative development of pictorial writing to cope with the new objects and ideas is the Codex Sierra, an account book from the neighboring village of Tejupan. In this document, created between 1550 and 1564, the community of Tejupan, administered by secular priests, kept a detailed record of the monetized income obtained from silk, cheese, and wool— all European products. Most of the document, however, is dedicated to its monetized expenses. Interestingly, almost all acquisitions concern ­European products as well, with frequent purchases for the church and town hall, the two symbols of the new colonial community. The records were kept in both Nahuatl writing and pictography. Because of its focus on European products, the pictography was especially innovative. The book is a clear indication that monetization was directly connected to the commercialization of European products. The accounts are also an important indication that the control over this trade in European products and the resulting monetization was a function of the cabildo, slowly undermining the traditional control of the palace over long-distance trade. Writing was part of the business culture of the cabildo. Nahuatl would continue to be used well after Mixtec and Chocho written traditions were established, though without the pictography. Official orders and verdicts that came in from the court in Mexico were sometimes delivered in Nahuatl, although I am not sure if these translations were made locally or in Mexico City. There are two examples in the municipal archive of Tequixtepec, one from 1570 and another from 1583.65 An extraordinary example of the use of Nahuatl by nobles at the palace of Tequixtepec is a text from 1587, a personal letter by don Domingo García, a nobleman from Coixtlahuaca,66 to his brother-in-law, don Diego de San Miguel, about problems going on at the Tequixtepec court since 1560, which include accusations before the Inquisition about human sacrifice. It is written in a sure hand and even includes abbrevi­ ations for some common expressions. It is not clear why Domingo García would write or have someone write for him in Nahuatl at such a late date, when Chocho writing was already developed. Perhaps it is just a late example of the preference given to written Nahuatl; maybe there was only a Nahuatl scribe at hand; or maybe it was written outside the Coix­ tlahuaca basin. Or was it just uncommon to write such long letters in Ngiwa? We can also ask ourselves why he would write this letter at all: it

80  bas van doesburg

is extremely rare to find personal letters, something outside the realm of community or public writing. Why did he not bring his message verbally? Was don Diego out of town? Was it meant to be read out loud as a support for the cacique? The two-page letter is not folded, which suggests it was not “posted” but delivered locally. M IXT E C A N D C H OC H O W R ITIN G

According to one report, in 1571 many priests working in the Oaxacan bishopric knew a little Nahuatl.67 But Nahuatl allowed them to reach only part of the nobility and merchants and required complex translation schemes into local languages. Speaking Mixtec and Zapotec—the two major languages spoken in the province—was necessary to reach the masses. Moreover, it was thought that printed doctrines, as study material, could add to the success of conversion. But to be able to produce and use them, grammars and vocabularies were necessary. The Dominicans, trained in the sophisticated linguistic tradition of Antonio de Nebrija, took on this challenge in Oaxaca and in doing so propelled the written forms of these languages. The origins of the Mixtec tradition have been studied in some detail, for which reason a summary will suffice here.68 Its initial phase can be dated between 1540 and 1568. Already in the early 1540s, Friar Domingo de Santa María produced a short so-called cartilla, with the basic prayers printed in Mixtec and Latin, to be used by the Mixtec elite. Although no copies have survived, this little book may have been written in the variant of Teposcolula, where the friar worked at the time. After the death of Santa María in 1559, younger friars continued his work on a vocabulary, a grammar, and an extended version of the cartilla. This last endeavor resulted in the monumental Doctrina cristiana of Benito Hernández, printed in 1567 in the variants of Achiutla and Teposcolula, which is probably the major literary monument of the Mixtec language. Curiously, this Doctrina does not follow the standard catechism established in 1548 by the church of New Spain but constitutes an apparently unique composition. There can be no doubt that recent converts among the nobles of Achiutla and Tlaxiaco collaborated closely with Friar Benito and should be considered coauthors of the text. Linguistic production was continued with the grammar of Friar Antonio de los Reyes and the vocabulary of Friar Francisco de Alvarado, both printed

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  81

in 1593 with the support of Gabriel de San José, a friar who was also a provincial in the order. It is important to stress the crucial role played by some local Dominican leaders in promoting indigenous-­language publications: it was Gabriel de San José who during his two provincialates also promoted the publication of the Zapotec grammar and vocabulary by Friar Juan de Córdova and the Popoloca cartilla and doctrina of Friar Bartolomé Roldán.69 Without the decisive support of Friar Gabriel, the landscape of indigenous-language writing in Oaxaca might have looked quite different. It was during the process of collaboration that the refined colonial orthographies of the Mixtec and Zapotec languages were developed. At the same time, the collaboration put writing skills in the hands of the indigenous nobles. By now, the cabildo and lay church functionaries (e.g., fiscales, singers, and overseers) that had just been established in many of the towns eagerly adopted the new writing. For the nobles, the cabildo, and the church, writing was an important administrative instrument, and soon the village scribes found their own uses for it. The Dominican attention to the Mixtec and Zapotec languages was due to a mix of circumstances. Not only were these languages, at least geographically—and possibly also demographically speaking—the two major languages or language groups in Oaxaca, but they were also the languages spoken around the city of Oaxaca, where the Dominicans had their headquarters in the San Pablo monastery. Also, the most prosperous towns in the region were located in the Mixtec and Zapotec language areas.70 In this light, the late development of a written tradition for the relatively small Ngiwa language area in the last quarter of the sixteenth century seems curious, especially since Mixtec was understood by many in the Coixtlahuaca basin. However, this effort may have been, among other things, a way for the Dominicans to lay (evangelical) claim to the rich basin, which was on the border of the Franciscan sphere of ­influence.71 Furthermore, it may have been part of a competition for prestige and political presence among the Mixtec- and Chocho-speaking elites in the basin. Chocho writing seems to have been developed after the Mixtec tradition was well under way. No materials were ever printed, and little is known about the development or the people involved.72 The first document known to have been written in Chocho is the last will of doña María de San Miguel from 1577, preserved in the archive of Tequixtepec.73 We met her husband don Miguel de San Francisco as the buyer of

82  bas van doesburg

the two colts. He had died seven years earlier, at which time her son, ­baptized as don Diego de San Miguel, had assumed the rulership of Tequixtepec. While according to Spanish law doña Maria was not allowed to become governor, she still figures as the principal representative of the lineage, above her son, on a list of Tequixtepec nobles from 1574, which we will discuss below. The testament, written by the mayordomo Domingo Villegas, features an experimental orthography, quite distinct from what the Dominican friars and village scribes would adopt a decade later. For example, prenasalization of consonants is not indicated. As­ piration is generally not represented, and—more curiously—the typical Chocho retroflex fricative is represented by . This would suggest that Chocho writing was in an experimental phase during the 1570s. The testament of don Diego himself, written in Chocho in 1596, has also survived, and its orthography corresponds to the “classic” tradition, in which prenasalization and aspiration are indicated and the retroflex fricative is represented through .74 It is obvious that doña María and her son don Diego spoke Ngiwa as their mother tongue. However, our best examples of the successful Chocho written tradition come not from Tequixtepec but from nearby Santiago Teotongo and San Miguel Tulancingo, both part of the Tamazulapan polity during the colonial period. These are two surviving testament books and an account book.75 These documents not only are fine examples of the orthography of “classical” Ngiwa but also constitute unique historical sources and reflect several aspects of social organization not colored by the limitations of Nahuatl translation. Also, many of these aspects are not even present in the Spanish documents. For example, they reveal the naming practice without the obligatory translation into Nahuatl. While in a document from 1568, made before Judge Jerónimo Mercado Sotomayor, the calendar names of the farmers of Zacualtongo were all translated to Nahuatl (as usual, without the number), in the documents written by the Ngiwa scribes the calendar names were written in Ngiwa.76 High nobles carried Spanish first names and surnames. Most people, however, used only a Catholic first name while retaining their Ngiwa calendar name as a surname or second name. Also, at the head of each testament in the two testament books, the scribe always recorded a toponym. In the Tulancingo books eight names appear; in the Teotongo book there are twelve. It is easy to see that these toponyms referred to the sociogeographical unit the testator belonged to. These units—called sindi in Chocho or barrios in

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  83

Spanish—were in origin the dispersed hamlets that together with the administrative and religious center formed the larger polity, called saçê (today xadë ) in Chocho.77 With such high numbers of testaments, we can apply some simple statistics: for example, we may suppose that the number of testaments from one sindi in a book is indicative of the relative size of that sindi. Besides the testament books there is the small volume containing the yearly income and expenses between 1592 and 1621 of the Teotongo sindi called Ca’andaxu. This text records the communal economy of a sindi in detail. Apparently, these small, scattered communities had communal businesses, of which we virtually know nothing. In particular, the internal functioning of these sindi and their Mixtec equivalents has always been obscure to historians for lack of written documentation about the subject. The yearly accounts of Ca’andaxu were presented by a man called the xu chao (tequitlato in Nahuatl),78 who was assisted by a group of nduacha, or family elders, all male. Each year accounts were written down by a cabildo scribe and then signed by the nobles of Teotongo who functioned on the Tamazulapan cabildo as regidores. Several of the men that appear in the account book also have their testaments in the Teotongo testament book, making it possible to know their material possessions, since most testaments included an inheritance clause, which listed the lands, houses, and objects to be inherited to the next generation. Among these we find a large number of toponyms, apparently representing the names of the locations of the houses and cornfields that were being inherited. In the case of Tulancingo, where Ngiwa is better preserved than in Teotongo, many of these toponyms are still known today by the last speakers.79 This has made it possible to plot the lands on detailed maps from the National Geographic Institute (INEGI) and to correlate these lands to one of the sindi. This exercise allowed us to reconstruct the system of land tenure of the common population for the decades around 1600 at a precise level. It also allowed us to understand the relation between the different sindi and the lands its members held. But whatever the ethnohistorical value of these documents, they also show that Chocho scribes were very successful in creating an elaborate public administration. Besides carrying the signature of a Tamazulapan friar, each testament was signed by a scribe; in total twelve scribes have been identified for the period covered by the Tulancingo book. Among

84  bas van doesburg

them was don Agustin Maldonado, apparently a nobleman as indicated by the use of don in front of his name. Indeed, as other documents confirm, don Agustín Maldonado was a lord of Tulancingo and San Pedro Nopala. In the Tulancingo cabildo, he also was fiscal in 1603, alguacil de congregación in 1604, and alcalde in 1612.80 Don Agustin apparently was also something of a Don Juan, since he was accused on several occasions of having illicit affairs with married women in his village. In 1626, when he had already passed his fortieth birthday, he was living openly with Inés Pérez, whose husband Juan López had been thrown out of the house more than five years earlier. In fact, don Agustin and Inés were raising two children. Interestingly, one of the witnesses in the case declared that he had seen don Agustin “teaching the said children of his to read,” indica­ ting that literacy was transferred within the community from generation to generation.81 He or his direct ancestors may have designed and learned the Chocho orthography in collaboration with the Dominican friars of the Tamazulapan or Coixtlahuaca monasteries, just as had happened ­several decades earlier with Mixtec. This moment was possibly sometime between 1585 and 1595, when a group of friars and nobles translated the monolingual Mixtec Doctrina of fray Benito Hernández into Chocho.82 This impressive translation project was apparently intended to lead to a printed version. The resulting manuscript displays a very neat handwriting, with well-delineated individual letters, perhaps meant to help out the typesetter in Mexico City, who of course had no knowledge of the Chocho language. Unfortunately, the manuscript never made it to a printed version, perhaps for a lack of paper, money, or ­support. The administrative tradition that originated in the late sixteenth century maintained itself throughout the colonial period. Though most colonial documentation has been lost, in the local archives of Suchix­ tlahuaca and Teotongo we have identified some seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century inventories of sindi possessions. P UE B LOS COM PU E STOS : M U LTILIN GUA L C OM M U N IT Y OR GAN IZ ATION

The personal letter written in Nahuatl in 1587 commented upon earlier contains an interesting ethnic reference. In the letter, don Diego is ad-

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  85

dressed as tlacal tlatoani señor don Diego petlatl ycpalli tequiçiztepec S[an] Miquetl Pinocatlco (the lord don Diego, of the mat and throne of Tequixtepec, San Miguel Pinocalco).83 Pinocalco (in the house of the Pinotl ) is a term that designates the palace of a Pinotl or Ngiwa lineage.84 This coincides of course with the fact that don Diego’s own and his mother’s testament were written in Ngiwa, but it also hints at a more profound organizational principle in society. Paul Kirchhoff, while working the rich documentary record in Nahuatl from southern Puebla, called this principle the pueblo compuesto (composite polity).85 Especially in the complex ethnic constellations there, noble lineages and ruling houses were classified by ethnic affiliation and origin. In some instances, towns—­especially the larger ones—were made up by more than one ethnic group. Each stayed separate and was represented by its own nobles and, if prestigious enough, by its own ruler. Often each group preserved its own language, history, ethnic pride, gods, and artisan specializations. Ritualized collaboration, competition, and interdependence kept the units together. Spaniards called these parts parcialidades. These multiethnic and multilingual composites were common in the area. San Miguel Tequixtepec also accommodated two parcialidades in its interior: one, also called Tequixtepec, was headed by don Miguel de San Miguel in 1587. In the magnificent pictographic Lienzo of Tequixtepec I, he traces his lineage back to the principal lineage of Coixtlahuaca established in the eleventh century by a Toltec migrant called 6 Water in pictography and Atonal (a calendar name meaning “He with the name Water”) in one alphabetical Nahuatl source from central Mexico.86 The other house, called Tlachitongo or Tlaxtongo, was headed by don Juan Malinal (a calendar name translated into Nahuatl meaning “grass”) in the mid-sixteenth century.87 In 1551, ­introducing formally the office of gobernador in the town, the Spanish administration allowed one governor for each parcialidad: “On March 12, 1551, don Miguel [de San Francisco], principal of Tequecistepeque, was given the title governor of half of the said town. On the same day, month, and year don Juan [Malinal], principal of Tequicistepec, was given the title of governor of half of the said town that is called Tlastongo, which are two parcialidades.”88 Later, the governorship fell only to the lord of Tequixtepec, and the lord of Tlachitongo received the post of alcalde. A  similar process occurred also elsewhere in the Mixteca.89 Surely, tensions existed between the two parcialidades. A document from 1596 contains a complaint of don Diego de San Miguel about people of

86  bas van doesburg

Tlachitongo that did not want to serve in his palace.90 This was no doubt because the people of Tlachitongo did not consider themselves obliged to serve the lord of the other parcialidad. While the dynastic history of the first house is narrated on the large lienzo, a second, smaller pictographic text preserved in the Tequixtepec archive records the history of the second house. According to this text, the lineage had its origins in the Huerta de Jiquila, a curious geological phenomenon with religious significance on the Jiquila River north of ­Tepelmeme.91 Besides their calendar names, the priestly founders of this house carry glossed Nahuatl names, which apparently are not translations of calendar names but typical names of Toltec Nahuatl origin: Quauhtlix, Chalchiutona, and Totepeuh.92 This and the northern origins of this lineage suggest that it originally was a Nahuatl-speaking group, perhaps related to the Nahuatl-speaking Nonohualca people that lived to the northeast of the Coixtlahuaca basin.93 Besides the glosses in the second lienzo, they left no Nahuatl texts that can be ascribed to them, and after the sixteenth century they seem to have been “absorbed” by the Chocho population. In the city of Coixtlahuaca, the ethnic and linguistic composition was different. Several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents mention the existence of a Mixtec barrio and a Chocho barrio, here to be understood probably as parcialidades. In a Memoria written in Mixtec by or on behalf of don Juan de Vera y Zúñiga, a lord of Coixtlahuaca, around 1665–70, he gives us some detailed information on his ancestors:94 the ones from his father’s side, carrying the last name de Vera, were Coix­ tlahuaca lords with possessions in a place called Tizatepec in Nahuatl (the Chocho name of this site remains unknown).95 Tizatepec was located on the southern borders of the Coixtlahuaca polity. Sometime in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, the farmers belonging to this lineage were congregated in the new town of Santa María Nativitas. There are indications that this population, or at least its lords, was Mixtec speaking: the Lienzo of Nativitas from the mid-sixteenth century carries glosses in Mixtec that represent calendar names and dates of the line­ age.96 The 1582 title of Santa María, in which the town was protected from encroaching Spanish cattle and livestock, mentions several locations in both Nahuatl and Mixtec.97 Also, up until the second half of the seventeenth century, we find the name Santa María de los Mistecos in the parish books of Coixtlahuaca.98 Curiously, today the village is one of the last to have a significant number of Chocho speakers.

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  87

At some point in the mid-seventeenth century, Tomas de Vera inherited from the family of his wife, carrying the last name Zúñiga, a palace or barrio called Tiñeñe (Yeztepec in Nahuatl) in the town of Coixtlahuaca and a palace or barrio of Santo Domingo called Chiyocani (Zacualtongo in Nahuatl) in Tejupan: “aniñe chiyhocâni sasintonindeye siidzâ don juan de çuniga dona ysauel baptista y çuniga—ycâ yyha yaha ninacuhuaya dzayhaya tonindeye don domingo de gusman dona m[ari]a de mendoça. . . . Don domi[n]go yaha niquidzaya testam[en]to ninacuhuaya dzicuya dona m[ari]a bap[tis]ta y çuniga sihi don thomas de uera stoho may ñadzaña tayu aniñe tineñe sadzeui ndudzaua ninacuhuaya ñuutayu s[an]to domi[n]go chiyhocâni” (the palace at Chiyhocâni, which was of the late cacique, my [great-]grandfather, Don Juan de Zúñiga and Doña Isabel Baptista y Zúñiga. Thence this lord gave it to his son, the late cacique Don Domingo de Guzmán and Doña Maria de Mendoza. . . . This Don Domingo made his testament and gave his niece, Doña Maria Baptista y Zúñiga and Don Tomás de Vera, my father, the palace-domain in Tineñe in the same fashion he gave the pueblo-domain Santo Domingo Chiyhocâni).99 Both places were in the Zúñiga family already in the mid-sixteenth century and both places were Mixtec speaking. About the first, the nephew of Juan de Vera y Zúñiga (carrying the same name as his uncle) informs us in a Spanish letter that “the wife of my aforementioned grandfather was cacica of the tecpan of Tiñeñe, which is a barrio segundo of the Mixtecs.” It seems then that the Vera and Zúñiga lines were of Mixtec affiliation.100 Don Juan de Vera y Zúñiga the Younger was married to the widow of “Juan de la Cruz y Salazar, principal of this cabecera [of Coixtlahuaca] and of [the] barrio of the Chochos, ‘first barrio’ Tlanepantlan Y[s]tlaguaca.” If we compare this and the earlier quotation, we note that he kept the name of his own barrio in Mixtec, but translates the name of the Chocho barrio—the “foreign” entity—into Nahuatl.101 In another document from the same time, among the town council members assembled to establish the first school in Coixtlahuaca we find officials “of the Mixtec barrio ‘the first’” and “of the barrio [of the] Chochos.”102 In a recently discovered Chocho note written on the interior of a beautiful choral songbook from the church of Coixtlahuaca we find mentioned its purchase by gû Barrio xitin tzicaha . . . gû Barrio xitin ngihua (a barrio of the Mixtecs [and] a barrio of the Chochos).103 The longer Chocho text from which this fragment is quoted was signed in 1718 by Andres de la Cruz y Salazar, the brother of Juan de la Cruz y Salazar, the principal of

88  bas van doesburg

the Chocho parcialidad mentioned above. Interestingly, while this author preferred to use the Spanish loanword barrio for parcialidad, the Mixtec text cited earlier used the word aniñe, translated in Spanish as tecpan, a loanword from Nahuatl. Thus, in the early eighteenth century, the Cruz y Salazar family was related to the Chocho part of town and the Vera y Zúñiga family to the Mixtec part. Interestingly, each family left us documents in its respective language. It seems that these parcialidades can be identified on the pictographic documents from Coixtlahuaca, in which the sign of Coixtlahuaca is connected to two distinct topograms, which literally “support” two distinct principal ruling lineages.104 It is of course tempting to see in these two topograms the names of the two parcialidades. Indeed, one of the topograms is a “Place or Mountain of Blood,” probably representing the name of Yeztepec/Tiñeñe. According to the pictographic documents it was in this Mixtec parcialidad that the Dominican convent was built. This may be due in part to the fact that the first contacts between Dominicans and the local population were through Mixtec, which the friars had already mastered in Yanhuitlán and Teposcolula. The coexistence of a Mixtec and Chocho parcialidad in Coixtlahuaca and the establishment of the monastery in the Mixtec parcialidad may explain the production of the Ngiwa translation of the Mixtec Doctrina as a competitive initiative. It may be that once the Mixtec monolingual version was on the market, the Ngiwa-speaking parcialidad found it necessary to possess a Ngiwa version of its own. With the ethnic and linguistic distribution reconstructed above, a larger pattern becomes apparent. Both Tequixtepec and Ihuitlán, the two largest settlements after Coixtlahuaca at the time of the conquest, were established by descendants of Atonaltzin, who, as indicated by the use of the placename Pinocalco in Tequixtepec, may have had a Ngiwa affiliation. This is reinforced by a gloss on the Lienzo of Ihuitlán, which identifies Ihuitlán’s original location as “Pinoyalco Yuitla” (Ihuitlán at the Ngiwa River). Geographically, Tequixtepec and Ihuitlán dominated the northern part of the Coixtlahuaca basin. On the other hand, both Nativitas and Otla are located in the southern extreme of the Coixtlahuaca basin, where Coixtlahuaca borders with Mixtec-speaking towns. As we already saw, Nativitas probably was a Mixtec town in origin.105 Indeed, the lienzos of Coixtlahuaca, Nativitas, and Otla explain how these last two towns were established through the intervention of Lord 4 Jaguar, the twelfth-century ruler of the Mixtec parcialidad of Tiñeñe.106

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  89

Hints at the complex interaction between the hereditary lords and the Coixtlahuaca cabildo can be gathered by revising the series of testaments left behind by the Mendoza family of Ngiwa affiliation, lords of Coixtlahuaca and Tepelmeme. Before the Cruz y Salazar family came to dominate in the Chocho sindi of Coixtlahuaca, it was in the hands of the Mendoza family, whose members also controlled the lands of Tepelmeme and Aztatla. Their testaments, which are now kept outside the region, show the changing use of the Chocho and Nahuatl languages, while several documents carry addenda in Mixtec. When the second representative of this family we know of, don Francisco de Mendoza, died in 1597, he had his testament written in Nahuatl. This was probably a late example of the use of Nahuatl as a lingua franca. Following his testament is a statement in Mixtec prepared by the Coixtlahuaca cabildo. He was succeeded by his brother Felipe de Mendoza, who, when he died in 1615, had his testament written in Chocho, probably his first language. By this time, Chocho writing had established itself firmly in the region. In his testament he mentions the Chocho barrio Tzongutzine (Tlanepantla in Nahuatl) by name. And again we find a statement in Mixtec following his testament. His son, Domingo de Mendoza, also had his testament done in Chocho in 1633, but his grandson, Francisco de Mendoza, curiously decided to have his testament written in Nahuatl in 1663. It is not clear why, at such a late date, he would have preferred Nahuatl again, but it is possible that at this time the family did not live in the basin anymore (many caciques of the Mixteca moved to the city of Puebla after the second half of the seventeenth century) and had lost fluency in the Chocho language. Apparently, they also had not mastered the Spanish language yet. But while this is one of the last Nahuatl texts related to the region, the language was used even later. When the descendant Domingo de Mendoza took possession of the cacicazgo in 1706, the Indians of San Miguel Aztatla, asked who their cacique was, “answered in the Mexican language [i.e., Nahuatl] that [it was] Domingo de Mendosa.”107 After 1550, the indigenous communities in the Coixtlahuaca basin and the Teotongo valley developed rich and complex forms of written communication through the use of alphabetic writing. During the mid-sixteenth century, alphabetic writing in Nahuatl first came to enrich pictography, which was itself innovating to accommodate new concepts, objects, and themes. Later, the development of first Mixtec and then Chocho writing meant a powerful tool for keeping more detailed

90  bas van doesburg

community records of all sorts (testaments, accounts, inventories, etc.) by local scribes. Although the first steps in the development of this writing were possibly related to translation projects of the friars of the Dominican monasteries in the area, local scribes quickly made writing their own and reproduced that knowledge in the interior of the communities from one generation to the other. The handwriting of all the mentioned documents reveals trained scribes, indicating that writing these distinct languages was a recurrent practice. The Mixtec and Chocho texts almost exclusively deal with issues from the local context, since these languages had a restricted geographical distribution. The fact that most were of an administrative nature perhaps explains why so much was lost over time. These texts themselves show that their production corresponded to a local social use, to a system of administration that kept the complex societies functioning, even after the demise of the ruling lineages. Writing was a public activity, instrumental in integrating the community, although it was in the hands of a small number of specialized citizens. These were not necessarily the higher nobles. Writing was a clear extension of the functions of the community, its cabildo, or other corporate groups within it. Many documents have the characteristics of a public act or testimony carrying one and often more signatures at the end. Public reading probably was one important function of the texts. The changing genres and use of script and language reflect the changes and the process of redefinition that these societies went through as a result of colonial pressure. The development of the cabildo or the sindi as businesses made the use of written administration even more necessary. It is evident that the document types represented by the colonial alphabetic texts are not direct continuations of pre-Hispanic genres but represent European document types. There was no simple replacement of one system by another: the changing social reality in the community during the sixteenth century also called for the introduction of new types of documents. While the use of pictography for conservative messages about the ruling dynasties well after the conquest was apparently a conscious choice, the same seems to apply to the use of alphabetic writing for the newly introduced administrative genres like testaments and last wills, inventories and accounts. On the other hand, the decision to use one language or another was determined by a mix of factors, among which we can recognize the moment in time within the devel-

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  91

opment of the written traditions, but also the linguistic and ethnic affiliation of the lineages, the sindi units, and the intended audiences. Because of their close relation to community affairs, the texts produced by the community scribes are our best sources about what went on inside the indigenous communities at the time. They show that the communities were not passive receivers of foreign influences but well-­ organized, active, assertive, and creative communities that did everything possible to carve out their own niches in the sociopolitical and economic landscape of New Spain. Writing was part of that proactive attitude. And the results of that struggle are the contemporary communities of today. The documents are our best source for discovering the continuous and complex indigenous contribution to today’s Oaxacan reality. Finally, many of the documents that are crucial for the study of the indigenous written tradition of Oaxaca, like the ones used to write this chapter, are still kept in the indigenous communities. Crucial knowledge for the interpretation and understanding of these texts is often also preserved only in the memory of the elders of these communities. Besides their profound knowledge of the language in general, the elders know the toponyms and cultural sites, social indigenous categories, plant names and their uses, and other elements of local importance rarely included in linguistic studies. Research that takes into account this knowledge can significantly improve our understanding and interpretation of these documents. NOTES

1.  Discussions of the current or recent efforts in Oaxaca to use writing to stimulate language preservation—and the problematic relation between the means and the goals—can be found in María Teresa Pardo Brügmann, “El desarrollo de la escritura de las lenguas indígenas de Oaxaca,” in “Políticas del lenguaje en América Latina,” ed. Rainer Enrique Hamel, special issue, Iztapalapa 29 (1993): 109–34. Though two decades old, the text discusses several of the still unresolved problems in the efforts to promote indigenous-language writing. See also María de los Ángeles Romero Frizzi, Escribir para dos mundos: Testimonios y experiencias de los escritores mixtecos (Oaxaca: IEEPO, 2003), about writing Mixtec. A more recent overview can be found in Entre la normatividad y la comunalidad: Experiencias educativas del Oaxaca indígena actual, ed. Lois Meyer, Benjamín Maldonado, Rosalía Carina Ortiz Ortega, and Victor

92  bas van doesburg

Manuel García (Oaxaca: IEEPO, 2004). See also Mónica Vargas Collazos, Nunca más un México sin nosotros: Expresiones etnopolíticas oaxaqueñas (Mexico City: INAH, 2005). 2. The term Zapotec embraces a large group of languages. The Zapotec languages most widely written during the colonial period were Valley Zapotec, Cajonos Zapotec, and Nexitzo Zapotec. For the Mixtec tradition, see Kevin Terraciano, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui History, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Maarten Jansen and Aurora Pérez Jiménez, La lengua señorial de Ñuu Dzaui: Cultura ­literaria de los antiguos reinos y transformación colonial (Oaxaca: Gobierno de Oaxaca, Universidad de Leiden, CSEIIO, Yuu Núú, 2009). For the Zapotec tradition, see Smith Stark et al., “Tres documentos zapotecos coloniales de San Antonino Ocotlán,” in Pictografía y escritura alfabética en Oaxaca, ed. Sebastián van Doesburg (Oaxaca: IEEPO, 2008), 287–352; Michel R. Oudijk and Sebastián van Doesburg, Los lienzos pictográficos de Santa Cruz Papalutla, Oaxaca (Mexico City: UNAM, 2010); and the colonial texts in Wiki Filología (http://132.248.101.214/wikfil/index.php/Portada). For the Chocho tradition, see Bas van Doesburg and Michael W. Swanton, “Mesoamerican Philology as an Interdisciplinary Study: The Chochon (Xru Ngiwa) ‘Barrios’ of Tamazulapan (Oaxaca, Mexico),” Ethnohistory 58, no. 4 (2011): 613–52, and Michael W. Swanton and Sebastián van Doesburg, El libro de cuentas de Ca’andaxu: Lengua, sociedad, e historia chochona en Teotongo, Oaxaca, siglos XVI– XVII (in ­preparation). 3.  The dominant position of Spanish in most communities in Oaxaca today and the loss of social status of the indigenous languages during the twentieth century make consensus on the use of any indigenous language for public purposes difficult today. 4.  Among the recurrent ideas that make up the ideology of illiteracy is one that indigenous languages cannot be written or that writing these languages is extremely complicated or difficult. The use of the word dialect for indigenous languages is a similar idea. It seems that both ideas appeared in the postrevolutionary discourse, and both imply that indigenous languages are not “full,” “normal,” or “complete” languages. 5.  The well-developed orthographies of Nahuatl, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Chocho, the fluidity of the handwriting, and the practical use of this writing constitute comparative examples in the discussion about the possibilities and potential of writing current languages. The old texts also undo some of today’s widespread prejudices mentioned in the foregoing note. The reason these texts are little known are both practical (many are dispersed in local archives) and

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  93

ideological (colonial culture is generally underestimated and often reduced to the role of justifying the national independence that followed it). 6.  For introductions to this material, see Ross Parmenter, Four Lienzos of the Coixtlahuaca Valley, Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology 26 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982); Viola König, in “Der Lienzo Seler II und seine Stellung innerhalb der Coixtlahuaca Gruppe,” Baessler ­Archive, n.s., 32 (1986): 229–320, analyzed the Lienzo de Coixtlahuaca II in detail. Other studies are Nicholas Johnson, “Las líneas desvanecidas en el Lienzo de Tlapiltepec,” in Códice y documentos sobre México: Primer simposio, ed. Constanza Vega Sosa (Mexico City: INAH, 1994), 117–44, and Carlos Rincón Mautner, “Man and the Environment in the Coixtlahuaca Basin of Northwestern Oaxaca, Mexico: Two Thousand Years of Historical Ecology” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1999). See also Bas van Doesburg, “Origin of the Lienzo de Tulancingo: New Facts about a Pictographic Document from the Coixtlahuaca Region,” Ancient Mesoamerica 11 (2000): 169–83; Bas van Doesburg, Documentos antiguos de San Miguel Tequixtepec, Oaxaca: Los primeros cien años de la colonia (1533–1617) (Leiden: CNWS, Leiden University, 2002); and Bas van Doesburg and Olivier van Buren, “The Prehispanic History of the Valley of Coixtlahuaca, Oaxaca,” in Códices, caciques y comunidades, ed. Maarten Jansen and Luis Reyes García, Cuadernos de Historia Latinoamericana 5 (Ridderkerk: Asociación de Historiadores Latinoamericanistas Europeos, 1997). And see most recently Arni Brownstone, ed., The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec: A Painted History from the Northern Mixteca (Norman: University Press of Oklahoma; Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 2015). 7.  This text is the result of a research project carried out in the Coixtlahuaca basin and the adjacent Teotongo valley since 1997. It has received funding from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), The Hague; the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT), Mexico City, the Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú (FAHHO), Oaxaca City; and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City. This project is significantly intertwined with the work carried out by Michael Swanton in the same area. 8. The Dominican friar Diego Durán in his Historia de las indias de Nueva España e islas de la tierra firme, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1984) mentions among the people that traded at the Coixtlahuaca market many from central Mexican (i.e., Nahuatl-speaking) towns. 9.  According to the recent survey project directed by Steve Kowalewski of the University of Georgia (2008–11). 10.  For general studies on silk in the Mixteca, see Joaquín García Icazbalceta, La industria de la seda en México, vol. 1 of Obras de D. J. García ­Icaz­balceta

94  bas van doesburg

(Mexico City: V. Agüeros, 1896), 125–62; Woodrow Borah, “El origen de la sericultura en la Mixteca Alta,” Historia Mexicana 13, no. 1 (1963): 1–17. 11. There is an extended literature on the civil congregations in New Spain; see, e.g., the listing in María Teresa Jarquín Ortega, Congregaciones de pueblos en el Estado de México (Zinacantepec: El Colegio Mexiquense, 1994), 9n1, and Noemí Quezada, “Congregaciones de indios y grupos étnicos: El caso del Valle de Toluca y zonas aledañas,” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 21 (1995): 141–65. Most studies focus on the late congregations, carried out between 1598 and 1606. About the earlier congregations, promoted between 1551 and 1564, see Peter Gerhard, “Congregaciones de indios en la Nueva España antes de 1570,” Historia Mexicana 26, no. 3 (1977): 347–95. In the Coixtlahuaca basin, congregations were implemented at Suchixtlahuaca and Coixtlahuaca in 1556 and in Tequixtepec and Ihuitlán in 1563; see Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 23, and Sebastián van Doesburg, “Asentamiento y transición en el Lienzo de San Jerónimo Otla, Coixtlahuaca,” Relaciones 122 (2010): 82. A document about the congregation of Ihuitlán is included in Brownstone, Lienzo of Tlapiltepec, 81–82. 12.  To give just one example: one source states that the town of Coixtlahuaca had some twenty thousand tributaries (male heads of household) in the early colonial period (perhaps after the 1545–48 epidemic). Around 1580 only eight thousand were left, and in 1620 this figure had declined to only one hundred tributaries (Archivo General de Indias [hereafter AGI], México, legajo 141, ramo 3, no. 50). 13.  The language has been known as Chuchón and Chocho (or lengua chochona). Recently, the neologism Chocholtec has come in use, apparently to avoid the association with other meanings of the word chocho in Spanish. 14.  On the Nahuatl-Spanish side he has chochol, on the Spanish-Nahuatl side chochon. 15.  During the colonial period, the term Chocho (or Chuchon) was used for what today is known as Popoloca and vice versa. For example, the Dominican friar Bartolomé Roldán used chuchón to describe the language of Tepexi in his book on Christian doctrine, the only book published in a Popolocan language during the colonial period. This language would now be called Popoloca. Surely, Popoloca and Chocho were distinct names of what was considered a single language. As Michael Swanton has suggested (pers. comm., 2010), the name Chocho seems to have been preferred by the Dominicans and Popoloca by the Franciscans. This distinction finally crystallized into the names for the two branches of the Ngiwa language. 16.  Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: A General History of the Things of New Spain, ed. and trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 13 vols. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–82), vol. 11, fol.

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  95

256. In the earliest Spanish documents from the Coixtlahuaca basin we find the terms chochontes for the people and lengua pinol, lengua chochona, and chochon for the language (Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 82, 120). The word pinotl is now unknown in the area. Luis Reyes García, in Cuauhtinchan del siglo XII al XVI. Formación y desarrollo histórico de un señorío prehispánico (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1977), 58, pointed out that pinome was a word for the Chocho-Popoloca-speaking communities. Pinotl is still used in the Nahuatlspeaking Sierra de Zongolica to designate a foreign person. 17.  Fray Toribio de Benavente, or Motolinia, Memoriales, o Libro de las cosas de la Nueva España y de los naturales de ella (Mexico City: UNAM, 1971), 10. 18.  Antonio de los Reyes, Arte en lengua mixteca, Vanderbilt University Publications in Anthropology 14 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University, 1976), iii. The translation is mine. 19.  Ibid., i–ii. The translation is mine. Today, the Mixtecs and their language are called Tsinga’a in Chocho. 20.  A detailed study of the sixteenth-century history of Teotongo and Tulancingo will appear in Swanton and Doesburg, Libro de cuentas. 21. René Acuña, Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Antequera, 2 vols. (Mexico City: UNAM, 1984), 2:220. The translation is mine. 22.  The principal source on this process is the Historia tolteca-chichimeca, a Nahuatl text from Cuauhtinchan. See Paul Kirchhoff, Lina Odena Güemes, and Luis Reyes García, ed. and trans., Historia tolteca-chichimeca (Mexico City: CIESAS, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Gobierno de Puebla, 1976). 23.  Antonio de Herrera, Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del mar Oceano, 10 vols. (Buenos Aires: Editorial Guarania, 1944–47), 4:171. The translation is mine. 24.  This information is taken from documents related to the 1543–50 case between Coixtlahuaca, Tequixtepec, and Tamazulapan: Archivo Antiguo de San Miguel Tequixtepec (hereafter AAT), 55a (1543–45); Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter AGN), Indios, vol. 101, expediente 1 (1545); AGN, Civil, vol. 726, expediente 7 (1546–50); AGN, Tierras, vol. 2810 (I), expediente 8 (1547). Also related is AAT-55 (1545). All but the file from AGN, Civil, are published in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos. 25.  AAT-31, without year, but possibly around 1535. In Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 50–53. 26. Francisco Gutiérrez was put in charge of reuniting the dispersed population of Tamazulapan after Solís had left (Doesburg, Documentos an­ tiguos, 103). He apparently never considered including Capulalpan and Tepetlapa in this resettlement, but in 1544 he declared that both places originally had paid tribute to the house of don Hernando of Tamazulapan.

96  bas van doesburg

27.  Today Capulalpan is called Ndaxi in Chocho, and Tepetlapa is called Jatundarja. 28.  The license from 1542 for producing silk, signed by viceroy Antonio de Mendoza and directed to the town of Tequixtepec, has survived in the local archive. Francisco Gutiérrez states that he had set up a partnership with the town of Tequixtepec for the production of silk after his return from the expedition (AGN, Jesuitas, vol. 1–14, expediente 107, without date, in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 54–55). 29. In one letter (AAT-69, unpublished) he reminds attorney Álvaro Ruíz about a pending conflict about lands between the lord of Tequixtepec and the Spanish encomendero of neighboring Ixcatlán. In another (see note below), he accuses the lords of Coixtlahuaca of “idolatry.” He had heard about this “idolatry” from the lord of Tequixtepec. 30.  Curiously, five months earlier, the case had been transferred to Francisco Velásquez de Lara, corregidor of Acatlán, but apparently nothing had ­happened. 31.  AAT-55a (1543–45), fol. 18v, in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 58–63. 32. Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 109. 33.  This situation may even explain why Capulalpan and Tepetlapa were also known respectively as Tonala (by people from Tequixtepec) and Agua­ tepec. 34.  The notable absence of precise boundaries in documents prior to the first congregation efforts suggests that polities were defined less as precisely delineated territorial units than as dynamic entities in which personalized ­relations between commoners, nobles, and rulers (Personenverband) and the practical use of lands by these commoners determined the extension of the polity. 35.  AGN, Civil, vol. 726, expediente 7, fol. 63. Unpublished. 36.  There are two related documents about this case: AGN, Inquisición, vol. 37, expediente 11, without date; AGN, Jesuitas, vols. 1–14, expediente 107, without date. Francisco Gutiérrez was the scribe in the first and the author of the second. The second document was published in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 54–55. 37. Document AAT-42 (in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 293–300) makes reference to an otherwise not recorded accusation from around 1560 against don Miguel and doña María. Document AAT-23 (in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 241–91) is related to accusations of idolatry by Coixtlahuaca against don Diego de San Miguel in 1585. 38.  It is surprising to find Ngiwa speakers in Acatlán, generally identified as a Mixtec and Nahuatl community. And again it seems interpreters were able to deal with distinct variants of the Ngiwa languages and with Ixcatec.

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  97

39.  AGN, Tierras, vol. 2810 (I), expediente 8, fol. 8v, in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 115–31. 40.  This, and not the Mexican conquest, explains the predominance of Nahuatl toponyms in Oaxaca and elsewhere today. 41.  AAT-69. Unpublished. 42. Two of these names appear in the Relación geográfica of Ixcatlán (Acuña, Relaciones geográficas, 2:227–34). Temazcalapa and Nopala were former “sujetos” (subject towns) of Ixcatlán. 43.  It is not clear why the letter is still in Tequixtepec and not in Mexico City. It may have been written by Francisco Gutiérrez but never delivered, or perhaps a copy was left in town. 44.  Interestingly, in the letter by Gutiérrez mentioned earlier, don Miguel, the lord of Tequixtepec, also asked for a Spanish judge to “put boundaries” ­between Tequixtepec and Ixcatlán, indicating these were not defined yet. This shows the Spanish judicial system slowly extending its grip over themes such as inheritance, borders, and cabildo functions. 45.  Omeapan is mentioned in AGN, Civil, vol. 726, expediente 7, multiple folios. Tula is mentioned in AGN, Indios, vol. 101, expediente 1, several folios, and in Civil, vol. 726, expediente 7. The variant Tulateopan is mentioned on fol. 41v. The first document was published in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, ­64–112. 46.  A notable exception are the lords of the towns themselves, who at this time are mentioned only by their first name. 47.  For other examples, see the glosses in the Lienzo de Otla (Doesburg, “Asentamiento y transición”) and the Mapa de Tecamachalco, Museum der Kulturen in Basel. 48.  The presence of Nahuatl glosses in some of the documents from western Mixteca has been interpreted as an indication of a “Nahuatl speaking corridor” (Mary Elizabeth Smith, The Codex López Ruiz: A Lost Mixtec Pictorial Manuscript, Vanderbilt University Publications in Anthropology 51 [Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University, 1998], 159–61). It seems more likely that the Nahuatl in these documents is due to the translation process. 49.  Michael W. Swanton, “Multilinguism in the Tocuij Ñudzavui Region,” in Mixtec Writing and Society / Escritura de Ñuu Dzaui, ed. Maarten Jansen and Laura van Broekhoven (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2008), 347–80, includes a first study of these materials. Some references in the present study will be to the same materials used by Swanton. 50.  Sebastián van Doesburg and Michael W. Swanton, “La traducción de la ‘Doctrina cristiana en lengua mixteca’ de fray Benito Hernández al ­chocholteca (ngiwa),” in Memorias del Coloquio Francisco Belmar: Conferencias sobre lenguas otomangues y oaxaqueñas, vol. 2, ed. Ausencia Cruz and Michael

98  bas van doesburg

Swanton (Oaxaca: Biblioteca Francisco de Burgoa, UABJO, CSEIIO, FAHHO, INALI, 2008), 81–118. 51.  This is of course not to say there were no losses of documentation. The archive does not preserve testament books, early account books, or tribute registers. These may have existed, but they were apparently lost. 52.  From a document from 1732 in the Aztatla municipal archive we know that subject towns consulted the Coixtlahuaca archive to find their older documents. 53.  Eighty documents were published in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos. The remaining fourteen will be included in a forthcoming volume. During 2001, most municipal archives in the basin, including Tequixtepec’s, were cleaned, ordered, and stored, in collaboration with Mexico’s National Archive. A general inventory of three archives was published in 2002 (Luis Alberto Arrioja, coord., Inventario de archivos municipales de Oaxaca [Mexico City: AGN, Fideicomiso Preservación de la Memoria de México, Amigos de Oaxaca, 2002]), but Suchixtlahuaca was not included (though it was well worked). The Tequixtepec archive includes the Archivo de la Alcaldía, ordered between 2002 and 2004. In 2009, the archive of Aztatla was ordered by students of the University of Oaxaca. 54.  For the development of Nahuatl colonial writing, see James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). 55.  “The Indians that have come from this college have taken care and are taking care in teaching others in the schools in their villages, in teaching their language to the friars, in translating and interpreting in it the ecclesiastical things that they translate from Latin or Spanish, and they serve as interpreters in the courts as well.” Relación franciscana, in Nueva colección de documentos para la historia de México, ed. García Icazbalceta, 5 vols. (Mexico City: Andrade y Morales sucesores, 1886–92), 2:178. 56. The so-called short and long doctrines printed by Juan Pablos in Mexico City. Of the first, only some pages remain in the Hispanic Society of New York. 57.  Mariano Cuevas, ed., Documentos inéditos del siglo XVI para la historia de México (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnología, 1914), 159. 58.  The first Nahuatl text from Oaxaca is precisely from 1550 and is on the first pages of the Codex Sierra from Tejupan, on the border of the Ngiwa homelands. The second text, from 1551, is from the Coixtlahuaca basin itself (Archivo Histórico Judicial de Oaxaca [hereafter AHJO], ramo Tepozcolula, Civil, legajo 21, expediente 10).

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  99

59.  Don Francisco de Salinas, the gobernador of Papaloticpac, stated in a document that he was taken by the teniente de alcalde mayor Juan Medel to Tlatelolco to study letras de Castilla y política para gobernador during the first half of the 1540s (Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Colección Antigua, vol. 828, fol. 17). The Cañada was administered during the early decades of the colony by the Franciscans but later came under the dioceses of Oaxaca. 60.  Bas van Doesburg, “El Códice Lucas Alamán: Un curioso comprobante por dos potros proveniente de San Miguel Tequixtepec,” Mexicon 28, no.  1 (2006): 15–19. For an example from the central Mixteca Alta, see Michel R. Oudijk and Sebastián van Doesburg, “A New Pictorial from Tilantongo,” Mexicon 29, no. 2 (2007): 45–49. 61.  For naming practices in the Mixteca during the sixteenth century, see Terraciano, Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca, 151–57. 62.  Until the late sixteenth century, the cabildo was controlled by the descendants of the pre-Hispanic elite. We have relatively complete listings of the government of Tequixtepec in 1559, 1568, 1582, and 1583 (docs. 13, 26, 47, and 49 in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 143–76, 189–92, 227–34, 236–37). The way in which the ruling lineage and nobles controlled the cabildo position is discussed in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 28–29. The position of governor was introduced already much earlier, but without the other cabildo positions. 63.  AGN, Tierras, vol. 3703, expediente 3, in Doesburg, Documentos anti­ guos, 191. 64.  He does not show up among the nobles of Tequixtepec or among the cabildo officials. Only once, in 1559, does he act together with the high nobles don Juan (Malinal) and don Pedro (Itzcuintzin) (AAT-30, in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 148). The first was the hereditary lord of Tlachitongo (see below). 65.  Mandamiento, Tequixtepec, 1570 (AAT-41), in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 193–94. A provisión real ordering the alcalde mayor of Yanhuitlán to investigate a conflict between San Cristobal Suchixtlahuaca and Tequixtepec over lands in Zacualtongo, 1583 (AAT-68). 66.  AAT-42, in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 293–300. Though a man with the same name is among the nobles in a list of nobles that were confirmed in church in Tequixtepec in 1574. According to AGN, General de Parte, vol. 2, expediente 1171, fols. 257–257v (1581), don Domingo García had been governor of Coixtlahuaca. According to AGI, Patronato 245, ramo 10, no. 2 (1585), he was born in 1505, so he was eighty-two when he wrote the letter or had it ­written. 67.  In 1571, the bishop of Antequera (Oaxaca) wrote that the elder priests, despite “their white hair, authority and good example,” did not know the local languages, “and if they know any language, it is a little Mexicano, which is not

100  bas van doesburg

the one of the natives of the bishopric, although there is no town where there are not some that understand the said Mexican language.” Luis García Pimentel, Relación de los obispados de Tlaxcala, Michoacán, Oaxaca y otros lugares en el siglo XVI (Mexico City: En casa del editor, 1904), 95–97. See Sebastián van Doesburg, “El clero secular de la catedral de Antequera durante el siglo XVI, el origen de la iglesia de Oaxaca,” in Ritual sonoro en catedral y parroquias, ed. Sergio Navarrete Pellicer (Mexico City: CIESAS, 2013), 33–74, for information about the languages spoken by the secular priests during the sixteenth century. 68.  See Doesburg and Swanton, Traducción, for a more detailed study. See also Terraciano, Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca, 38–65; Kathryn Josserand, Maarten Jansen, and María de los Ángeles Romero Frizzi, “Mixtec Dialec­ tology: Inferences from Linguistics and Ethnohistory,” in Essays in Otoman­ guean Culture History, ed. Kathryn Josserand, Marcus Winter, and Nicholas Hopkins, Vanderbilt University Publications in Anthropology 31 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University, 1984), 141–63 and Appendices II and III. 69.  Doesburg and Swanton, Traducción, 98–100. 70.  The Mixteca Alta, the central valleys, and the isthmus were among the most prosperous regions in what is now Oaxaca. This is already evident from the sixteenth-century architecture and art that still exists. 71.  Michael Swanton (pers. comm., 2010) first suggested this explanation. The Coixtlahuaca basin also connects the Mixteca Alta with Veracruz and México City. 72.  Doesburg and Swanton, Traducción. 73.  AAT-39, in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 214–17. 74.  AAT-40, in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 333–36. 75.  In the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia we identified a second testament book from almost the same period (1606–54) containing 535 testaments written down in Teotongo, a neighboring community of Tulancingo. The reading of these texts, however, presented a special challenge. For Nahuatl, Mixtec, and Zapotec, printed dictionaries, grammars, and doctrinal texts from the colony are available. None of this exists for Chocho, and even contemporary materials on the language are rare. Working practically from scratch, we finally achieved a translation by cross-checking several distinct data sets. The detailed explanation of this method will be published in a forthcoming study (Swanton and Doesburg, Libro de cuentas). 76.  AGN, Tierras, vol. 3703, expediente 3, published in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 189–92. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that in the Nahuatl letter by don Domingo García several people carry calendar names in Chocho: Domingo García Chisihi, Juana Techauh, and Domingo Cipac Xirhuu.

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  101

77.  For a detailed discussion on the sindi, see Doesburg and Swanton, “Mesoamerican Philology.” 78.  This translation results from the comparison of the sindi inventory of 1760, written in Chocho and preserved in a book of yearly inventories in Teotongo, with the Spanish-language inventories of the other years in the book. 79.  In 2001, Michael Swanton and I carried out a five-day workshop with a group of elders from the town in order to draw a physical map of the municipality registering all toponyms the elders could remember. Each day also included a field trip to some high viewpoint in one of the four directions, to help the elders’ memory by enabling them to look at the landscape. The first day was dedicated to the center of town and immediate surroundings, the other four days to the east, north, west, and south. After the first sheet of paper was filled up, the elders pasted new pieces to the edges until on the fifth day we ended up with a map, containing around 250 toponyms in Chocho, for an area of only some fifty square kilometers. The original map was left in the community, where it is displayed in the municipal building. 80.  Testament 61 of the Tulancingo book of testaments; AHJO, Teposcolula, Penal, legajo 9, expediente 47, expediente 1. 81.  AJHO, Teposcolula, Penal, legajo 11, expediente 32, 1626. 82.  Doesburg and Swanton, Traducción. 83.  The initial titles combine the words for “person” and “lord” with the Spanish señor. “Mat and throne” is a metaphor for hereditary rule. 84.  It is similar to Pinotepa, the name of a town on the coast of Oaxaca. Its name means “the palace of the Pinome.” In this case, it is not clear who was originally meant by the word Pinome. It may have been the pre-Mixtec population. 85.  Paul Kirchhoff, “Dos tipos de relaciones entre pueblos en el México antiguo,” in A Pedro Bosch-Gimpera en el septuagésimo aniversario de su nacimiento (Mexico City: UNAM, 1963), 255–59. 86.  See Doesburg and Buren, “Prehispanic History.” 87. Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 24, 27. 88.  Kraus Collection, Library of Congress, ms. 140, fols. 224v–225. In Silvio Zavala, ed., Libros de asientos de la gobernación de la Nueva España (periodo del virrey don Luis de Velasco, 1550–1552) (Mexico: AGN, 1982), and in Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 132. 89.  Yanhuitlán had two governors in the 1540s; see María Teresa Sepúlveda y Herrera, ed., Proceso por idolatría al cacique, gobernadores y sacerdotes de Yanhuitlán, 1544–1546 (Mexico City: INAH, 1999). Tlaxiaco and Teposcolula also both had two governors around this time (AHJO, Teposcolula, Civil, legajo 2, expediente 12).

102  bas van doesburg

90. AAT-61, unpublished. 91.  Carlos Rincón (pers. comm., 2004) discovered the relation between the genealogy on the smaller Lienzo of Tequixtepec and the one painted near the Huerta de Jiquila on the Lienzo de Coixtlahuaca II. The Huerta is a natural bridge in the Jiquila canyon, suspended above the river, and is irrigated by a spring in the canyon wall. 92.  See, for example, García Icazbalceta, Nueva colección, 3:270. 93.  One source (Doesburg, Documentos antiguos, 11) states that before Coixtlahuaca conquered the Jiquila area (this conquest is represented on the lienzos from Coixtlahuaca), it was controlled by the Nonohualca. 94.  The document—unpublished—was located in 1999 in the municipal archive of Santa María Nativitas. 95.  The municipal archive of Nativitas contains an unpublished document from 1562 in which Tomás de Vera is granted a sheep ranch in Tizatepec. 96.  Sebastián van Doesburg, “De linderos y lugares: Territorio y asentamiento en el Lienzo de Santa María Nativitas,” Relaciones 86 (2001): 15–82. 97.  Ibid., 70–75. 98.  Parroquial Archive Coixtlahuaca, Matrimony, 1653–93. Also, less frequently, one finds the name Santa Catarina de los Mixtecos. According to the pictographic documents, Santa Catarina Ocotlán was the place where Santa María was first located, well before the Spanish conquest. The population of both places was probably ethnically related. 99.  Translation by Michael Swanton, “Multilinguism,” 353. 100.  In 1700 the nephew was governor of Coixtlahuaca (Sebastián van Doesburg, “La fundación de una escuela indígena en Coixtlahuaca, Oaxaca, en el año 1700,” Acervos 25 [2002]: 34–35). Curiously, as Michael Swanton observed, the Mixtec letter by don Juan de Vera y Zúñiga represents the Mixtec from Tejupan, not the Mixtec from Coixtlahuaca, which was close to what was spoken in Yanhuitlán. This was probably because he was addressing the Tejupan lord and cabildo in his letter. 101.  The Chocho name figures in the Chocho testament of don Felipe de Mendoza (1615): thegutzene gundaçi nziya tzoguçcine cau tnoña cachzu therhaa chaña do dgô alldes, “all the house of Tzogutsine and its lot of magueyes I give to my son don Domingo, alcalde.” This was translated at the time as “Toda la casa que llaman Tlanepantla en chocho Tzogosine que está en Quaxtlaguaca con todo el solar se lo dejo a mi hijo Don Domingo” (Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia [BNAH], Colección Antigua 797). 102.  Doesburg, “Fundación de una escuela.” I have not been able to discover the meaning of the ordinal numbers connected to these barrios. In the original text: tequitlatos del varios misteco el primero and topiles y tequitlatos del barrios chochos.

Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico  103

103.  I thank Perla Jiménez for sending me a photograph of this text. 104.  For example, in the Lienzos of Coixtlahuaca I and II. 105.  Our best indication that Otla also may have been partially Mixtec speaking is a memoria from 1596 written in Mixtec by Juan García, tequitlato (administrator) of Otla (AHJO, Tepozcolula, Criminal, Caja 1, doc. 52, 1596). The short text is inserted in a Spanish-language investigation into the supposedly excessive payments made by people from San Jerónimo Otla to the regidor Francisco Jiménez. The inquiry was carried out with two interpreters “of the Chochon, Mixtec, Mexican [i.e., Nahuatl] and Castilian languages.” The contributors are mentioned with their Mixtec calendar name, a possible indication of their linguistic affiliation. 106.  Doesburg, “Linderos y lugares,” 42–46. 107.  AGN, Tierras, vol. 232, expediente 1.

CHAPTER 3

The Politics of the Aztec Histories CAMILLA TOWNSEND

One late sixteenth-century day, a young Tlaxcalteca asked an old man whom he knew what he remembered of the conquest by the Spaniards.1 The old man had been a boy then. “Some lords were baptized when three of the ones they called ‘friars’ came” (Ocçequi tlatoque moquayatequique yn icuac hualaque yeyme yntoca frayles). “One was fray Juan, and another we didn’t know the name of ” (Yn çe fray Juan yn oc çe amo tictocamatque). “The late fray Juan was a happy guy. He really wanted to teach people. But he could not yet speak Nahuatl” (Çenca quinequiya temachtiz ayamo huel nahuatlatohuaya). “He used to stand there . . . and just point with his finger toward the heavens. ‘Dios,’ he would say, and ‘Santa Maria, forever and truly a virgin’” (Yn ilhuican Dios quitenehuaya yhuan Santa Maria nochipa huel neli ychpotzintli). “Then he would point toward Mictlan and say, ‘Snakes, toads’” (Yhuan mictlan mapiluhuaya quitohuaya quitenehuaya cohuatl tamaçoli).2 The younger man’s interlocutor clearly remembered a certain humor in the situation. But it was not so with everyone whom he asked. Another time, an elder gave him a very different story, filled with bitterness and the sharp memory of pain. “The Spaniards hanged the ruling nobles—Temiloteuctli Tlaltochtzin from Quiyahuiztlan, Quauhtotohua from Atenpan, don Francisco Tecpanecatl, and Tenamazcuicuiltzin from 105

106  camilla townsend

Topoyanco.” This speaker implied that the newcomers hadn’t really done it in order to defend Christianity, as they claimed, for their actions indicated a certain hypocrisy. “They killed them, still the way they were, [unreformed] adulterers. People were killed without rhyme or reason” (Tetlaxincahuan quimictique ocqu iuh catca çan oquilihuiz temictiluya). This man spoke without reserve. He said, “Then began the terror. (Onca peuhqui ye nemauhtiloc). . . . That was when everyone went for baptism” (Onca ye cemontotiuh nequayatequiliztli).3 We have these vivid words today because younger Nahuas were still very much interested in writing traditional histories of their people. They were working within the framework of the xiuhpohualli. (The word is often translated as “year count,” as if to convey a certain archaic or even primitive quality, but it is more correctly “yearly account.”) For many generations, there had been two aspects to the xiuhpohualli, two kinds of historians involved in their production. Some of the history keepers had been painters who produced time lines recording events of interest to the community as a whole along lists of dates written out on unfolding strips of bark, maguey paper, or cloth. Other history keepers were performers who could look at these glyphic representations and produce detailed verbal accounts, often including vivid dialogue suggestive of the political tensions at play. Whether the artists and performers were ever—or perhaps even often—the same men, we do not know.4 Since the arrival of the Spaniards, young scholars (like the Tlaxcalteca with whom I opened) had taken their new knowledge of the Roman alphabet and used it to transcribe statements taken down from their elders. Some of these, from widely different origins, contain some of the same dialogue exchanges (often verbatim), so many of the tellers were remembering old performances they themselves had heard (or perhaps even given). Between them, the young transcribers wrote hundreds of pages, and what they took down circulated widely within their communities. Over the next century and a half, their descendants took their work and copied and recopied it, sometimes embellishing, sometimes extracting, and often continuing the story into years not originally covered. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scholars of European descent saw some of these documents and noted an interesting resemblance to early medieval European “annals,” as the genre was called. That tradition, too, moved forward through time year by year, recounting events that were of interest to the whole community—the births and

The Politics of the Aztec Histories   107

deaths of rulers, wars, meteorological phenomena, epidemics, and so on.5 To this day, we continue to call this indigenous genre the “Mexican historical annals” rather than the xiuhpohualli or some other fitting name. In doing so, we have created substantial confusion. Scholars of other specialties have understandably tended to assume that these were histories written under the tutelage of the Franciscans in semi-European style, as many other texts produced in that period were. But these histories were no such thing. Indigenous people wrote these “annals” entirely within their own traditions. Indeed, even the nowfamous annalist Chimalpahin, who worked for the Church of San Antonio Abad in Mexico City during the years that he wrote the annals, does not seem to have shown his work to Europeans.6 None of the authors did. They wrote in their own homes, for their own circle of friends and relatives, with their own posterity in mind, and in their own languages, without including gloss or translation. In short, they wrote entirely outside of the radar of the Spanish, and without regard to the Europeans’ interests or wishes. Unfortunately, the earlier scholars who looked at the annals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries not only determined the name by which such texts would be known but also largely set the tone for subsequent dealings with them. William Prescott wrote: “Clumsy as it was, the Aztec picture-writing seems to have been adequate to the demands of the nation, in their imperfect state of civilization. . . . The few brief sentences [of their histories] were quite long enough for the annals of barbarians.” Only Alexander von Humboldt saw that they actually exhibited “the greatest method and most astonishing minuteness.” But he was dismissed on this subject by the others.7 Tragically (in my opinion), these texts have also been marginalized much more recently by the very postmodern and multicultural trends we have trusted to rescue us from the past. Such renowned scholars as Walter Mignolo and Serge Gruzinski have insisted—with some justification, of course—that the very act of converting flexible indigenous performances into fixed texts radically transforms and reduces them, that their complexity cannot be imprisoned in a few frozen fragments without irreparable harm, and that if we attempt to study the results of so doing we only further the processes of colonialism. All true to some extent. But if we end there, decide to call it a day and go home, secure in our conviction that it would only be imperialistic to study such texts—

108  camilla townsend

have we not then become the worst kind of imperialists? Miguel Leon Portilla, one of the accused, has responded with humor whenever he can. “Such a conclusion is dramatic for those of us who, patiently applying available linguistic and philological resources, have translated some of those texts into European languages. In dealing with them, translating them, or quoting them . . . we have not understood what they in fact are. Instead of being testimonies of the ancient Native word, they reflect the forced answers of the vanquished vis-à-vis the imposed attitudes of the invaders and foreign lords.”8 There can be no question that the scholarly world of past decades needed to face the fact that many early indigenous written texts are the product of a painful and traumatic encounter. But they are not therefore all to be dismissed as the distorted products of European imaginations and cast aside as somehow unworthy of study. Many are clearly the products of indigenous imaginations and intended for indigenous audiences. One cannot help suspecting that some part of the prior scholarly resistance to incorporating these texts into the revamped “canon” of colonial Latin America may stem from the same phenomenon we see all too often among much less advanced students—a relatively simple desire to avoid having to learn a new language. I steadfastly insist that we must not concede the annals. They are extraordinary, illuminating documents and deserve to be fully known. And it seems to me that today’s intellectuals are now ready to take this stand about these and other texts we have available to us. We are at length ready to hear what they have to tell us. Perhaps the primary contribution that the xiuhpohualli texts make to our understanding of preconquest language and culture concerns political organization and political sensibility. We have long known that the Nahuas organized their lives around what James Lockhart once termed “the cellular principle”: that is, that they practiced rotation in communal labor drafts, tribute payments, and even political office holding.9 Every political entity was composed of important subentities, each with its own rights and duties. Certain cultural productions of the Nahuas have been understood to mirror their larger way of thinking about power as necessarily shared, and responsibility necessarily mutual. Their maps and their songs, for example, included parallel units that together formed a greater and more meaningful whole. However, because the historical annals have not been as well known, it has been assumed that they were an exception. They seemed to offer only linearity, a direct march through time, one

The Politics of the Aztec Histories   109

year following the next, with one key protagonist, the altepetl (the community, or small ethnic state). At the same time, however, as the annals were understood to be uniquely linear, they were also known for being “disorderly,” “confusing,” “repetitive,” and “choppy” (and here I quote the most sympathetic of souls).10 Most modern scholars resigned themselves to an apparently inexplicable obfuscation, implicitly putting it down to inscrutable cultural differences. The German scholar Günter Zimmermann, on the other hand, found the situation so intolerable that when he was preparing an edition of the work of Chimalpahin he simply cut and pasted with wild abandon, putting all the material he found about “1550” together, followed by everything he could find about “1551,” and so on.11 My research, however, has revealed that the traditional annals format probably required repetitiveness to some degree. That is, an arranger of a performance was apparently expected to produce men who could speak from the point of view of different relevant subcommunities—often two or four of them—thus covering events of the same chronological period multiple times, but from different perspectives. The individual “cells,” as it were (to use Lockhart’s evocative language), taken together, made a stronger and more meaningful statement than any one of them would have constituted, taken alone. “Truth” was necessarily composite, and its expression multivocal.12 Later, when the transition to recording the annals in the Roman alphabet occurred, the earliest writers made no comment about what they were doing, taking it as self-evident. When they finished with one man’s statement, they unapologetically backtracked in time and began with the next man’s, without marking it as a new statement. In a traditional oral performance, that is how it would have been done, for the performers were understood to be conduits, not prima donnas whose names needed to be known. Later copyists, even within Nahua communities, did not necessarily understand what they were seeing and simply reproduced what we might call fossilized forms. The practice thus became invisible to us. The remnants we had before us were an ostensibly confused and repetitive treatment of the same years over and over. Of course, the long-standing idea that the annals were intended to celebrate and commemorate the life of an altepetl or community is also entirely correct. In fact, however, exactly who constituted an altepetl was often a subject of contention. A performance of the annals could be a way of

110  camilla townsend

intervening in that conversation, of attempting to shape a political evolution instigated by wars and migrations. Even when it was entirely clear who belonged to a certain state and who did not, an altepetl was itself virtually always multipartite and thus subject to internal tensions (often due to long-ago wars and migrations). It nearly always consisted of differing constituent parts, and the varied players benefited from frequent reminders of all that they had in common. Sometimes altepetl communities in fact broke apart. Scholars have recognized the somewhat fluid nature of the altepetl and have had recourse to terms like sub-altepetl (parcialidad) and complex altepetl (or estado mayor) when faced with the difficulties of deciding what level of political authority in fact represented the altepetl in a given situation. Furthermore, each altepetl or sub-altepetl, even of the most clearly defined variety, was itself composed of smaller subunits, which we might think of as neighborhoods or symbolically defined clans. At the various levels, the political units were always somewhere in the process either of being bound together by their historic experiences or of breaking apart. This negotiation was a constant. Thus historical productions performed in the courtyards of nobles, high chiefs, or kings were often a necessary political project, making their statements effectively only to the extent that they incorporated a multiplicity of views. Sometimes the units affirming their bonds to one another were very small—subunits within a sub-altepetl. Sometimes they were sub-altepetls together forming an altepetl. Sometimes they were even multiple altepetls affirming political loyalty to another, greater power in whose orbit they felt they belonged—that of the Mexica (or Aztecs) of Tenochtitlan, for example, rather than that of a different and perhaps closer power who had long dominated them. Words for the concepts involved varied depending on region, and sometimes even within a region. This led to a plethora of political vocabulary that continues to torment the more rigid among us in the scholarly community who want a singular, immutable definition for any one word. For example, we have all heard the term calpolli in even the most cursory readings on the Aztecs, and some have also encountered the terms tlaxilacalli and teccalli. Technical translations would be, respectively, “great house,” “divided house,” and “lordly house,” with house meaning household writ large, like a ward or parish. They all referred to political subdivisions within an altepetl but were not all used by all Nahuas. Some groups preferred one term and some another, and some needed more than one because of political complexities regarding such matters, for

The Politics of the Aztec Histories   111

example, as who held land and who did not, or who had migrated to a given region most recently. In studies today the terms must be redefined in each new context. How often I have been asked the question, “But which category was the broader one?” or “But what is the difference between the calpolli and the teccalli?” It all depended on the political mental map of the speaker, and that map varied from place to place. What all the speakers held in common was a core belief in the complexity of any body politic and the need for multiple voices to convey a potentially infinite variety of perspectives. Reading these texts, I am sometimes faced with the near untranslatability of certain terms. In a mid-sixteenth-century set of annals from Cuauhtinchan, a text known now as the Historia tolteca chichimeca, the word imaçicayo has long vexed scholars. It means, in a sense, “the constituent parts of an altepetl ” or sometimes of “a greater altepetl.” The ­Historia begins something like this: “Here are the altepetls that were once the constituents of greater Tollan . . .” (Yzcate yn ialtepepouan yn tolteca yn imaçicayo . . .).13 But if we leave off the ending indicating intrinsic be­ longing, the word suddenly means “the complement of a fellow political entity,” or “the other units that help one to make up a whole.” Friction in the Historia tolteca chichimeca begins almost immediately: “For about a year, the Nonoualca were happy to be the political complements of the Tolteca Chichimeca, [but then . . .]” (Cexiuhtica yn oc pacticatca yn imaçica yn tolteca chichimeca . . .). Neither English nor Spanish has a single word that expresses so neatly the related ideas that a political whole by definition consists of multiple parts and that these parts are necessary to each other’s political existence. We are thus left scrambling every time this Nahuatl word comes up. Nor is it only in their vocabulary that these texts are richly evocative of ancient political concepts. They also reveal much in the nature of the actions, the dramas that they recount—the very plots, if you will. The speeches made in moments of crisis are replete with references to the responsibility of leadership. Partly, they refer to what we might expect such responsibility to consist of in nearly any cultural context—a leader’s duty to help spare his [or her] people’s lives, to take their needs seriously, to care for them. More specifically, however, the speeches refer to the notion that a leader must maintain a complex and delicate balance between all sectors of society, that duties must be reciprocal, and that the carrying out of such duties must be mutually beneficial.

112  camilla townsend

In the angry speech about the conquest that I quoted at the outset, the church was criticized, not for exerting its authority, but for doing it in a heedless, thoughtless way. If the religious had taken appropriate steps to save souls, that might have been fine. But they killed people needlessly, “without rhyme or reason.” They even ignored the danger to people’s souls—killing them while they were still unrepentant adulterers instead of allowing them to save themselves. In short, the church authorities were not listening to people and as a result created a disaster, a destructive period of terror that could have been avoided. Had the churchmen taken the time to work patiently with the polygamists, for example, instead of blaming everyone for everything, society would have been better off. We see a comparable dynamic in other annals. At about the same time that the foregoing story was set down by an eager young man in Tlaxcala, another set of annals was being produced in Mexico City. In 1564, the city’s indigenous people, mostly artisans—including expert scribes, painters, sculptors, and goldsmiths, many of them descended from noble families—were told for the first time that they would have to pay tribute in cash—in effect a head tax—just like all other indigenous people. There was widespread unrest. A number of the leaders were arrested. When they were sold into indentured servitude as punishment for failing to convince their people to comply, the protests subsided, and the money was eventually collected. Together, the people of one of the city’s sub-altepetls (San Juan Moyotlan) recorded a set of annals so that posterity might know how hard they had tried to ward off this tragedy. Each of four tlaxilacalli (wards, parishes) of the single sub-altepetl contributed their version of the events that unfolded in the year 1564, just as in the old days (which of course many of the people still remembered), and then someone copied them out, one after the other, into one seamless document.14 The Spaniards were abusing their authority, went the argument, not by making demands on the people—indeed, these same people happily put in long hours working for the church, for example—but by confusing different sectors of society and thus making inappropriate demands. The urban artisans did not have plots of land and thus could not produce hay and corn themselves. “Do we have fields? Do we have lands?” they cried out rhetorically—and the answer to such dramatic rhetorical questions was always meant to be a resounding “No!” They would thus have to buy the tribute items, and the money needed for that, plus the cash tribute

The Politics of the Aztec Histories   113

they also owed, would leave them destitute, unable to care for their children or even to perform their crafts. At one point the acting viceroy himself visited the prison where the leaders were incarcerated, urging them not to sacrifice themselves for an amount he perceived as being so small. At that Pedro Acaçayol answered, “It will not be possible, O king. Where will I get it from? I have saved only one medio and ten cacao grains. Please listen, O king. Even though they pay me four pesos [for certain work], it doesn’t stretch for everything. It is needed for my children.” “And do you serve only your children?” [asked the viceroy.] “Whom, if not my children? Our Lord gave them to me.” . . . The viceroy said, “Fine. You will be sold to the metal works.” “Fine. You [must] know what to do, for you are the king.”15 The man’s sarcasm in his last line is palpable. The point was that a king should know better than to disorder society by making impossible demands on the wrong segments of the people. Another indigenous writer—who had probably also been jailed for a time—put words in the mouth of the provincial of the Franciscan order in order to deliver a deadly criticism of the acting viceroy and other officials. “A drunkard . . . should not be chosen to lead if his life is not righteous, even if he is a nobleman. He should not guide the community. He who scoffs at other people should not hold any post. Even if he is the viceroy or the visitador, if he doesn’t do his job rightly, if he afflicts people, then he is from hell. He belongs in hell, and he will go to hell. He will be forever imprisoned there. He will never get out if he does not recompense people for the suffering he has caused.”16 The idea that a leader should understand balance, and the complex interlocking latticework of social duties, did not disappear with the passing of years, even as the xiuhpohualli evolved over the generations. As late as 1682, a writer of annals in Puebla told this story: The month of September came. At that point, fifty Spaniards agreed that only they would make bread [wheat bread or tortillas]. Then they went up before the alcalde mayor in order to arrange that only they would make bread to feed the Ciudad de los Angeles [Puebla]. The Spanish law officials summoned the indigenous people and told them that they were going to take bread-making

114  camilla townsend

from them. They set a penalty on them, giving them a deadline of a [certain] day not to make bread. Only those [particular] Spaniards were still authorized to make it. But they could not sustain it. For only two days was it done this way in the city. In those two days there was already hunger. . . . No more did either wheat bread or tortillas appear in either marketplace or shop. When anyone secretly made half a carrying frame full and took it to the marketplace, even if it was tortillas, the Spaniards just fought over it. Even if someone was an honored [customer], the indigenous people no longer respected them; whoever came first got the bread. Only weeping prevailed. And then everyone got worked up, priests, Spaniards and indigenous alike, so that everyone took the side of the indigenous people. The natives gave a letter with their own hands to the alcalde mayor. When they were going up to the palace of the alcalde mayor, all the small children and some of the adults shouted at him, saying, “Bread, bread, bread, lord captain. We will starve! We will starve!” And when the alcalde mayor heard that, and they had read to him what the document said—that all our great ruler the king’s tribute would be lost if we were deprived of our trade of bread-making; and let the Spaniards do whatever service there was and pay the tribute— when he heard that, the alcalde mayor quickly ordered that a decree be issued, . . . that the indigenous people could make bread.17 The indigenous writer added smugly: “Then he ordered that the Spaniards be imprisoned, and they ran off.” The point had been made clear. Indigenous people would pay their heavy taxes, but not if they were deprived of other valued roles they held dear. All voices had to be included for a societal blueprint to be acceptable. This was an old idea, and they had not forgotten it. But although this belief is so clearly present in this late seventeenthcentury set of annals, I am forced to acknowledge that much of what the annals once were has disappeared from this later text. Political tensions, for example, had always been expressed through extensive dialogue (another way of decentering the narrative, one could argue), but here, in the discussion of the bread monopoly, we have one of the few verbal exchanges in the entire text. And there were other losses as well. Indeed, throughout most of Mexico, the tradition of the xiuhpohualli was fading or even gone by this point. The practice of writing out traditional annals in alphabetic script had perhaps reached its zenith in the early 1600s in

The Politics of the Aztec Histories   115

the work of Chimalpahin. After he died, few others kept at such projects with anything like his zeal. Perhaps this was because by the time he died there was no one left alive who remembered the days before the Spaniards and the old historical performances. This is why it is especially interesting that, tucked away in a particular corner of the country, one group of people was in fact still working assiduously and purposefully to keep the older forms alive. Tlaxcala, of course, had a somewhat unusual history—though it was by no means unique. After losing several battles with Hernando Cortés and his men, the Tlaxcalans made the important decision to ally with the Spaniards and use them to try to bring down their old enemies, the Mexica. During the colonial period, they repeatedly argued in court that privileges promised them by Cortés should be maintained, and they achieved some legal success. As a result, they were never given out in encomiendas but rather paid their tribute directly to the crown, and the Spanish founded a separate capital (the city of Puebla) to the south of their state, rather than planting a town right on top of their own most urbanized area. The upshot of these two facts was that relatively few Spaniards lived in the region for most of the colonial period (in comparison to other regions). Not surprisingly, linguistic and cultural forms changed more slowly here than elsewhere, where life in close quarters with numerous Spaniards often sped the processes of linguistic and cultural evolution. One of the forms that held its own in Tlaxcala longer than elsewhere was that of the xiuhpohualli. Today, scholars know of at least twenty sets of annals or fragments of sets from the Tlaxcala valley. The count is somewhat fuzzy, for because of the process of mutual exchange and copying, many versions are so closely related that it is hard to tell if we should count them as separate points of production or not. Indeed, a doctoral student working in the 1980s found that literally all of the known sets are genetically related to each other—meaning that bits of material copied verbatim link all of them together. None was produced in isolation from all the others.18 A key figure in this cohort of people working together on maintaining the traditional xiuhpohualli was a man named don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza.19 He was descended from one of the teteuctin or dynastic overlords in power in Tlaxcala at the time of the conquest. Born in the early part of the seventeenth century, he grew up, as befitted a man of his station, to serve as an officer in the indigenous cabildo. At one point he was gobernador, or head of the council. Zapata took a special interest

116  camilla townsend

in his people’s cultural accomplishments. He always noted when an indigenous artisan produced a bell or a fountain or an oven he especially liked. While he was gobernador, he spent community monies on a figure of the Virgin Mary dressed in a fine, indigenous-produced cloak and had church choirs trained in playing the chirimía (an instrument, the ancestor of the oboe, that was originally European but had been reinvented in Mexican indigenous communities in the preceding century). At special ceremonies, he always encouraged the wearing of traditional warriors’ costumes. Most important of all, Zapata dedicated significant amounts of time over the course of his lifetime to writing a traditional set of annals of over two hundred manuscript pages. Much of the document concerns the highly traditional rotation of offices between people from the four different sub-altepetls of Tlaxcala, ensuring that power is shared and justice is done. Other themes are treated as well, however, and allow us further insight into Zapata’s thinking. He was very explicit in his sense of the importance of the preservation of indigenous practices, not only in social forums or cultural presentations, as above, but also in the ways language was used. Even in his choice of sources for his work, Zapata exhibited a sort of linguistic patriotism. Naturally, he exchanged materials with fellow Tlaxcalteca who were themselves engaged in producing the other nineteen known texts. We thus see significant overlap. But he alone included significant amounts of material not found in any of the works of the others. We may ask—what did he consider to be appropriate sources for his xiuhpohualli? For starters, they had to be in Nahuatl. We have every reason to believe that he had been educated at least for a while by the Franciscans who lived in town and thus knew Spanish well. At one point, for example, he served as clerk of the cabildo, and though this post largely involved taking notes in Nahuatl on proceedings occurring in Nahuatl, the job is highly unlikely to have been given to a man who could not read Spanish documents easily. His family was friends with the family of Diego Muñoz Camargo, the mestizo who wrote a detailed history (in Spanish) of Tlaxcala. But if Zapata ever read this Spanish text or any other, he gave no indication of it in his own work. Not once does his text share the purport, the errors, or the trajectory of any known Spanish text—and I have looked hard and long in sources both civil and ­ecclesiastical.

The Politics of the Aztec Histories   117

Furthermore, Zapata did not even choose to use the records of the indigenous cabildo, which were written in Nahuatl, and which were certainly extant, as some still survive today. So the language alone was not enough. Zapata sought not only sources in Nahuatl but those that he perceived to have been produced in a particular traditional manner. He seems to have turned to other tlatoque, other indigenous nobles descended from the teteuctin, to obtain statements he was willing to ­include—much as his forefathers would have done at an ancient historical performance. Often he lapses into use of the first person in places where it is clear (from the date, or the point of reference) that it is not he himself who is speaking; rather, he is copying the words of someone else. In six cases, I have been able to identify who these other speakers were. Every one of them was an indigenous man of noble lineage who was highly literate. Having carefully studied Zapata’s use of the word we and the social attitudes he evinces in general, I would argue that he asked for participation only by these select few, not because he was a man who demonstrated any social snobbery or desire to exclude others, but because he believed it was one of the noblemen’s many ancient duties to protect and preserve knowledge of communal history. If they did not, they would merely become, in effect, collectors of tribute, and as the people laboring in the fields would be unlikely to pick up the task of commemorating history, the indigenous community would no longer be sheltering keepers of their own intellectual traditions within their midst. This latter element was particularly important to Zapata. In the delicately balanced, socially constructed universe of mutually beneficial relations in which he lived, each group recognized and respected the rami­fications of its assigned role. If a young warrior’s duty was to fight to the death, a young woman’s was to stay alive at all costs and preserve future generations. If a member of the governing tlatoque deserved the position to which he had been born, he would work interminably to protect his people’s way of life—avoiding defeat in battles in the old days, defending against outside interference in the latter years. In Zapata’s view, the tlatoque whom he knew did not always do this. He accused his own kind of being unreasonable and selfish as often as he accused lower orders of being disobedient and disorderly. He recorded social conflicts between the groups with great pain and wrung his hands whenever interfering Spaniards made decisions that increased such conflict. He did not object when mestizo children grew up and joined the ranks of the

118  camilla townsend

tlatoque—unless they sided with the Spaniards on questions of policy and abused their power. Then, for example, a fellow nobleman with whom he had once gotten along could become “that mestizo from hell.”20 Exactly what the conscientious tlatoque of his own era were to preserve was complex. The ancient calculus about preserving life was somewhat outdated now, as it was no longer up to a chief when his people went to war, and the epidemics were inexorable. And it was obviously out of the question to preserve the old deities. But the other aspect of preservation that had long been part of the tlatoque’s duty remained very much a pressing issue: the most ancient annals texts reveal that chiefly figures worked hard even after a conquest by another group to preserve their people’s forms of prayer and old jokes and styles of exhortation.21 A people remained alive, remained a viable entity, as long as their ways of thinking still lived. Perhaps because he himself was part of a bilingual world, and had written out some of these ancient texts in his own work, and by temperament was a thoughtful man, Zapata seems to have been consciously aware that preserving the “facts” of his people’s history was not going to answer to his purposes; the nobles needed to go further and labor to preserve language itself. In his text, Zapata very clearly makes an effort to retain fading linguistic forms. In most Nahuatl documents of his era, for example, the Spanish king had become rey, but he makes sure to say tlatoani. Once, when a letter from the Spanish queen was read aloud, thanking the people of Tlaxcala for the beautiful funeral orations they had given upon the death of the king, Zapata insisted on calling her the cihuateuctli (or female dynastic overlord).22 In other cases, too, even when a loanword was in common use, Zapata would choose an older form if he could. For example, when he reports that an entire bridge has dramatically fallen to its destruction, or that a new bridge has been blessed by the fathers, he uses the Nahuatl word, quappantli. In more unselfconscious moments, his text reveals that the use of this word has been highly purposeful. When he and other cabildo members simply cross a bridge on their way somewhere, for example, he forgets and accidentally uses the Spanish word that is in common parlance, puente.23 The retention not just of Nahuatl vocabulary but of full, expressive forms of speech actually became an overt political preoccupation of Zapata’s at certain moments of his life. His duties as a cabildo member involved participation in numerous ceremonies with Spanish ecclesiastical

The Politics of the Aztec Histories   119

and civil authorities. Like many indigenous people of his era, he seems to have felt, not that he and his people were being swept up into serving Spanish ends, but rather that they were exhibiting the central importance of their own communities to the Spanish church and state. This view was easier to maintain, however, if the indigenous people present had full comprehension of all that transpired; they were partners rather than pawns if their own language was used in public, alongside Spanish. So it was that Zapata carefully noted when an element of a public ceremony was uttered in Nahuatl, and he commented on which priests could give sermons in Nahuatl, praising them when they did. In 1669, he accompanied a delegation to Mexico City to speak to the Audiencia about the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of the fathers. He listed many issues that they covered—including whether or not they were helpful in times of sickness and death, as all responsible caretakers should be— but he began with what seemed to him the most important question of all: “Do they know our language, so that they can preach to us and hear ­confession?”24 When Zapata went on this trip to the capital, he was accompanied by a good friend he had known all his life, don Bernabé Antonio Salazar, another descendant from one of the preconquest teteuctin. Don Bernabé, in fact, was one of the sources Zapata sometimes quoted in his great work, and one of the other sets of annals may have been authored by him. He had a son, don Manuel de los Santos Salazar, who as a very young man had entered the Franciscan monastery in Puebla with the intention of taking orders. (Theoretically, this was against the rules—native peoples were explicitly excluded by then—but the provincial must have wanted it to happen, for at his entrance interview they simply left out the question concerning limpieza de sangre and focused instead on his long and noble lineage.) However, something went wrong in Puebla, and young Manuel left the order before taking vows. Instead, he went to the university in Mexico City and became a priest. He was given a parish in the Tlaxcala region, and his father and don Juan Zapata were in attendance the first time he said mass. He worked there for many years, at one point even writing out a play in Nahuatl for his parishioners to perform.25 Don Manuel encouraged numerous friends and connections to write xiuhpohualli, and some of these he collected. Most especially, he encouraged don Juan Zapata in his magnum opus and apparently lent him at least one other source. A few years after don Juan died, his son had added

120  camilla townsend

very little more since his father passed away. Don Manuel took the work from the Zapata family and began to add to it himself. By the time of his own death, he had quite an assortment of treasured histories of his people, all in Nahuatl. Through him, they passed into the hands of Europeans and became part of great library collections. Some landed permanently in Mexico, but don Juan Zapata’s book went to the Bibliothèque Nationale in France, where it still remains. It is an open question how much Zapata and his cohort were aware of the political conceptual framework their texts reveal. That Zapata, for example, saw it as necessary to record the regular rotation of political office among the four sub-altepetls of Tlaxcala, and believed that certain men among the nobility were responsible for narrating events, is absolutely clear. Whether he consciously recognized such things as the old penchant for creating what are virtually “postmodern” composite histories based on successive retellings of the same events by different speakers with different points of view is less clear. The earlier part of his text certainly includes such multiple tellings, but he may have been copying them out in fossilized form; he may himself have found them repetitive and wondered why they were there. Certainly he did not do the same in the sections he wrote himself, covering the years of his own adulthood. And it is highly doubtful that he was aware of the old pattern of illuminating political tensions at play through dialogue. In the segments he wrote himself, there is almost no recorded speech. In short, his seventeenth-­century text reveals both the xiuhpohualli’s resilience in some regards and the vulnerability of the form’s complexities in certain other senses. Our assessment of the situation must not end there, however. Clearly Zapata deemed it essential that Nahuas should speak in Nahuatl and speak publicly on their own behalf, and even that Spaniards in their world should also learn and use their language. Indeed, what is perhaps most notable about that generation’s work, in our own era of language revitalization, is the very self-conscious effort that men like don Juan Zapata and don Manuel Salazar made to defend what we may legitimately call not just Nahuatl language but even Nahuatl scholarship. They were not writing in translation. They were not speaking in order to illuminate Spaniards or to argue with them. They were recording, a­ rranging, and analyzing history in their own linguistic and cultural terms, within their own frame of reference, for their own posterity.

The Politics of the Aztec Histories   121

Zapata, it turned out, was right to fear the disappearance of the role of the indigenous nobleman, for with it died, for a time at least, a belief in the idea of Nahuatl-speaking scholars. It would be the twentieth or even the twenty-first century before the world at large again recognized the central importance of indigenous figures bent on preserving and elaborating their own language. The oppressions of the intervening years not only silenced the heirs of Zapata’s cohort but even suppressed pos­terity’s knowledge that they had once existed. Yet looking backwards from where we stand now, we can suddenly see them all there, in their own centuries, pointing the way. NOTES

1.  Tlaxcala was a Nahuatl-speaking community just east of the Central Basin of Mexico. Many people in the region speak Nahuatl to this day. 2.  These statements come from a manuscript by don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza that is located in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Méxicain 212. Though I consulted the document in the original, I refer interested readers to the transcription and Spanish translation in Luis Reyes García and Andrea Martínez Baracs, eds., Historia chronológica de la noble ciudad de Tlaxcala por don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza (Tlaxcala: Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala, 1995), 96–99. 3.  Ibid., 104–5. For reasons of space, I will henceforth omit the Nahuatl unless its inclusion is essential to my point, but readers are welcome to consult the transcription in the cited edition. 4. For a treatment of what we know about the genre, see Camilla Townsend, “Glimpsing Native American Historiography: The Cellular Principle in Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Annals,” Ethnohistory 56, no. 4 (2009): 625–50. 5.  See, for example, Timothy Reuter, ed., The Annals of Fulda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). The translation and commentary make this work accessible even to those from outside the field. 6.  He wrote in Nahuatl for a Nahuatl-speaking readership, and no European seems to have mentioned him or his work while he lived. After he died, Chimalpahin’s papers apparently went to don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl. At the latter’s death, they went to his son, don Juan de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, and thence to don Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, thus entering the world of European bibliophiles. See the introduction to don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, Annals of His Time, ed. James Lockhart,

122  camilla townsend

Susan Schroeder, and Doris Namala (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 10–11. 7.  See William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, vol. 1 (New York: American Publishers, 1843), 87–88. Prescott quotes and gives his opinion of Humboldt in n10. 8.  Miguel León Portilla, “Have We Really Translated the Mesoamerican ‘Ancient Word?,’” in On the Translation of Native American Literatures, ed. Brian Swann (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 315–16. 9.  For a full discussion, see James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). 10.  Luis Reyes spoke Nahuatl as a child, and before his untimely death a few years ago he contributed mightily to the study of Nahuatl texts in Mexico. James Lockhart in effect created the New Philology movement in studies of colonial Latin America. Neither man could have been more respectful of the Nahuas and their culture or more interested in its many facets. Yet even these figurative giants envisioned the annals in this way. 11.  See don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtle­ huanitzin, Die Relationen Chimalpahin’s zur Geschichte Mexico’s, ed. Günter Zimmermann, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Cram, De Gruyter, 1963–65). It was Susan Schroeder who called attention to the fact that he had done this. 12.  See Townsend, “Glimpsing Native American Historiography.” 13.  See the opening segment of the facsimile provided by Paul Kirchoff, Lina Odena Güemes, and Luis Reyes García, eds., Historia tolteca-chichimeca (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1976). 14.  This precious text is housed in the Archivo of the Basílica de Guadalupe in Mexico City. A facsimile is now available in Luis Reyes García, ed., ¿Cómo te confundes? ¿Acaso no somos conquistados? Anales de Juan Bautista (Mexico City: CIESAS, 2001). 15.  Ibid., entry for September 18, 1564, fols. 32 and 32v. 16.  Ibid., entry for August 28, 1564, fol. 31v. 17.  Camilla Townsend, ed., Here in This Year: Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 122–25. 18.  A health crisis tragically cut short the work of Frances Krug, who studied at UCLA in the 1980s. For a summary of her findings, see Frances Krug and Camilla Townsend, “The Tlaxcala-Puebla Family of Annals,” in Sources and Methods for the Study of Postconquest Mesoamerican Ethnohistory, ed. James Lockhart, Lisa Sousa, and Stephanie Wood, Wired Humanities Project, University of Oregon, http://whp.uoregon.edu/Lockhart/index.html, 2007. 19.  For a full study, see Camilla Townsend, “Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza and the Notion of a Nahua Identity,” in The Conquest All

The Politics of the Aztec Histories   123

Over Again: Nahuas and Zapotecs Thinking, Writing, and Painting Spanish Colonialism, ed. Susan Schroeder (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010). 20.  Reyes and Martínez, Historia chronológica, 510. 21.  See, for example, the Historia tolteca-chichimeca, as well as the early segments of Zapata’s text. 22.  Reyes and Martínez, Historia chronológica, 395. 23.  Ibid., 444, 524, 538, 584. 24.  Ibid., 422. 25.  For material on this fascinating figure, see Townsend, Here in This Year, 21–25, and Peter Villella, “Indian Lords, Hispanic Gentlemen: The Salazars of Colonial Tlaxcala,” Americas 69, no. 1 ( July 2012): 1–36.

CHAPTER 4

Toward a Guarani Semantic History Political Vocabulary in Guarani (Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)

CAPUCINE BOIDIN AND ANGÉLICA OTAZÚ MELGAREJO

The main objective of this chapter is to propose a semantic history of Guarani. We propose to read the Guarani-language written corpus produced in Paraguay from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, following transformations in Guarani political concepts. New technologies and new directions in anthropology and history make it now easier than ever before to gather digital copies of manuscripts from all over the world, to transcribe them into computer databases, and to create an international community of researchers, sharing discoveries day by day.1 We draw on two different intellectual traditions: historical anthropology, based on Amerindian texts, and the history of concepts, also called semantic history. Amerindian textual studies are currently going through a process of profound renewal thanks to new perspectives on languages, beyond monolingualism and culturalism. Semantic history has shed new light on the late colonial and postcolonial Amerindian corpora, which have been neglected until now by Amerindian historical anthropology and philology. At the same time, historians have been taking native agency more and more into account, providing a better understanding of native literacy. 125

126  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY BASED ON AMERINDIAN TEXTS

Initially, studies of written texts in Amerindian languages focused on the more narrative, poetic, and mythical genres and applied to them anthropological questions about preconquest cultures and religions. In the 1970s James Lockhart drew attention to the great interest of Nahuatl mundane (nonreligious) documents for understanding postconquest society: “A corpus of documents tells things primarily about its own time and is much less informative about any other.”2 At around the same time, but independently, Bartomeu Melià wrote his groundbreaking work La création d’un langage chrétien dans les réductions des Guarani au Paraguay (1969).3 He was one of the first to study how Christian dogma was translated into Guarani and to analyze the linguistic attitudes of the Franciscans and Jesuits toward the language as well as semantic changes they induced in it. For instance, he underlined that the grammars produced by the Jesuits were oriented to the translation of the Christian message and that this pragmatic issue helped them to be aware of some specific and effective rules of the language. As they needed to invent neologisms they paid a great attention to the logic of agglutination (prefixes and suffixes).4 Debates in this field have dealt with Westernization, colonization, resistance, and métissage, but the overriding interest has been to study texts in Amerindian languages in order to understand Amerindian societies, cultures, and dynamics.5 More recently, William Hanks’s works on the colonial Maya combine an interest in religious (Catholic and apparently non-Catholic) and mundane texts so as to stress their interdependence. Hanks demonstrates how missionaries and their indigenous auxiliaries aligned Maya and Spanish languages, creating a Maya “translanguage” in order to express European concepts (religious but also pragmatic and political) and erasing potentially heretical knowledge, hieroglyphic writings, and previous genres of discourse.6 He explains how these languages have been reduced and transformed into text, grammar, dictionary, and Doctrina cristiana by foreigners for the purpose of colonization and evangelization. But he also emphasizes that by mastering alphabetic writing and colonial conventions of written correspondence, indigenous elites managed to negotiate a space of power and of cultural reproduction within colonial society.7 Religious texts such as the books of Chilam Balam, as well as mundane

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   127

documents, were actually written in the Maya translanguage. In this essay we draw on this perspective. We do not make the case for the equivalence between Amerindian language and Amerindian identity and culture. We propose that to understand the history of Amerindian languages we have to rid ourselves of three general assumptions that tend to be associated with their study and that can be expressed as (1) culturalism, (2) monolingualism, and (3) homogeneity. First of all, new research has recently highlighted that some Amerindian languages were not necessarily spoken only by the natives. Nahuatl was spoken by the Spanish, creoles, mestizos, slaves, and natives of different ethnic groups.8 Furthermore, spoken Nahuatl and the written pastoral Nahuatl of missionaries might have interacted in a much more complex way than we could have imagined until now: “Nahuatl was not a standard lingua franca spread across Mexico, but was used flexibly and spontaneously by people of many kinds for many different purposes, varying greatly according to the location, the ethnicity and the social status of speakers and writers, as well as the passage of time.”9 The same occurs for Quechua and Aymara in the Andes until the mid-twentieth century, for Tupi (lingua geral ) around São Paulo until the end of the seventeenth century, and for Nheengatu in the Amazons until the nineteenth century and in Río Negro until recently.10 In Paraguay, almost 90 percent of the population speaks Guarani, despite only 2 percent being declared as indigenous in the latest national census. Paraguayan Guarani is widely spoken in urban areas, by both men and women, as well as by rural elites and some urban elites. In Paraguay, Guarani is not a mark of ethnicity but rather a sign of “Paraguayanness,” of national identity, when spoken alongside Spanish and a sign of low social status when the speaker is monolingual.11 For pragmatic and symbolic reasons, Guarani is necessary in any Paraguayan political campaign. It is impossible for a presidential candidate in Paraguay not to speak both Guarani and Spanish. To predict uses of Guarani and Spanish, context is more important than the social, gender, or ethnic status of the interlocutors. The more formal the situation, the more Spanish is used. This diglossic situation has been challenged by linguistic politics since 1992, when both Guarani and Spanish were declared to be the official languages of all the country.12 Now Guarani courses are compulsory in the entire country at all levels. Recently the Ley de Lenguas (2010) and the Academy of ­Guarani Language (2012) have started challenging the diglossia of the

128  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

state. The current Paraguayan linguistic situation has stimulated our imagination as historians: multilingualism and the context of enunci­ ation have to be taken into account if we are to go beyond the mere ascription of Amerindian languages to Amerindian culture. This leads us to our second hypothesis. Second, multilingualism was prevalent in precolonial and colonial times. Some Amerindian languages were lingua francas, useful in a wide territory, while others were specific to limited geographical zones.13 In colonial South America they were called lengua general, lingua geral, or lengua universal, as opposed to local or maternal languages. They crossed ethnic boundaries and were spoken by different indigenous ethnic groups, and also by creoles and mestizos. But they were not composite or simplified languages (pidgins or creoles), as they were used for varied purposes and functions, being the vehicle of high written culture. As Juan Carlos Estenssoro and César Itier have recently demonstrated, a general language “defined a space of colonial governance.”14 Finally, the difficulty of tracing geographical frontiers between language-­cultures and even to isolate a homogeneous language-culture from others might not be due to lack of precision in the available sources. The linguistic panorama was probably one of continuous variation between multiple ways of speaking in different regions. Homogeneous linguistic and cultural isolates, when they do exist, are the result of complex, discontinuous political processes and were not ordained by nature.15 In South America, periods of expansion, standardization, and generalization and moments of contraction, regionalization, or ethnicization can be observed for Quechua, Guarani, and Tupi. This social history or external history of generalization (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries) and par­ticularization (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries) is fundamental for developing a valid semantic history. As we do not assume equivalence between Amerindian language and Amerindian identity and culture, we do not limit our analysis to identifying what could be truly Amerindian or what is Spanish in our corpus of texts. We suppose that these texts are the product of a linguistic “middle ground” in Guarani, a kind of “third space” of mutual accommodations between multilingual indigenous and multilingual foreigners (European missionaries and Spanish authorities).16 As a medium of their historical interactions, conflicts, discussions, and negotiations, a common political vocabulary in Guarani, embedded in religious and kinship vocabulary, was constantly produced and manipulated. We do not try to eu-

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   129

phemize domination, but we prefer keeping in mind that during this process of semantic transformation both counterparts were necessarily involved. Places such as the missions, doctrinas, forts, cities, and encomiendas but also rivers and roads, particularly boats and markets, functioned as third places where linguistic middle grounds developed. SE M AN T IC H ISTORY

At first glance, Amerindian studies and semantic history have nothing in common. Semantic history or the history of concepts emerged as an academic network built upon Reinhart Koselleck’s works and has focused on the history of European political concepts that emerged in the late eighteenth century, such as “democracy,” “nation,” and “republic.” Nevertheless, semantic historians now turn to no European horizons in order to understand how those ideas are thought, and with what words, in nonEuropean languages. Specialists in Amerindian texts usually prefer to work on early colonial texts because they are supposed to be closer to preconquest Indian societies. Recently some scholars have begun to study late colonial and postcolonial Amerindian corpora with a focus on political vocabulary.17 The parallel evolutions of these two fields can help to build Amerindian semantic histories: we need to include the colonial era (it would be impossible to begin in the eighteenth century, as semantic history usually does). We can’t neglect the postcolonial period and all the theoretical reflections developed by scholars on the difference between words and concepts. By defining reality in certain ways, words are also actions in themselves.18 Those shifts and lexical creations can still be traced today in written documents. Some words are more important than others and are likely to be turned into concepts. When a historical situation cannot be grasped without a certain word, when many actors have manipulated it in order to express their views on diverging realities, then a word will become a concept. A concept can be defined as “a concentrate of experience.”19 Our objective is to focus on specific political words in order to follow their semantic transformations from the very beginning of colonization until the nineteenth century. The focus on linguistic matters and ideas does not mean that we have forgotten institutions, social networks, and historical praxis; what we are trying to reach is the experience behind words, combining history, anthropology, and linguistics.20 We can develop our research on Guarani semantic history with the aid of

130  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

Latin American Spanish and Portuguese semantic history, for which online databases are available.21 Semantic history, traditionally dedicated to the study of the eighteenth century, gives us keys for studying the late colonial and postcolonial corpora in Guarani, which have been neglected until now. Researchers in this field ask questions like: What did modernity, citizen, liberty, equality, independence, and nation mean in the eighteenth century? When and how did they appear as political concepts? They have been using linguistics to find out how and when a word became a concept, nominalization being one of the signs. In Romance languages, the use of the singular can be a criterion for detecting the transformation of a word into a concept: for instance, when progresar, progresos is transformed into el progreso, or when pueblos becomes el pueblo. But there are also other mechanisms. For instance, in French, when the adjective métis gives birth to the noun métissage in the nineteenth century, it is thanks to the suffix -age. Amerindian languages do not necessarily have distinct nouns/verbs/adjectives in the same way as Romance languages do, and they preferentially nominalize and conceptualize with prefixes and suffixes, among other mechanisms. The early missionaries were particularly aware of these linguistic tools. Alonso de Aragona, in one of the first known linguistic descriptions of the Guarani language, explained that the suffix -hava signifies “lo abstracto” and transforms actions into concepts. For instance, from ainupã, “I hit,” we get nupã-háva, “the whip,” “the discipline,” “the time to hit or to discipline.”22 The prefix poro- indicates that the action concerns an abstract plurality (indistinct, everybody) or points to “the one who contains in himself the exercise of what the verb means,” that is to say the person who embodies the action;23 and the three-form prefix t-embi, r-embi, h-embi- or the suffix -pyr indicates that the action is applied to an abstract thing or person (indistinct, something, someone): for instance, che rembi-apo, “the thing I do, work”; che rembi-’u, “the thing I eat, food”; che rembi-ayhu, “what I love, my slave.”24 The suffix -pyr-a, -pyr-e indicates the past participle and is always used in absolute forms (not related to another person): hayhu-pýra, “the beloved.”25 But it seems that sometimes no apparent grammatical transformation indicates that a word has been transformed into a concept. Use is our guide. What we are trying to detect is when some words were first fetishized or reified by the actors and thinkers of a historic period, and then how and why recent historians have followed suit.

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   131

G UAR AN I AN T H ROPOLOGY A N D H ISTORY

Guarani history and ethnography have been profoundly renewed in the last twenty years. A new Guarani historiography emphasizing indigenous agency has been written by Eduardo Neumann, Barbara Ganson, Mercedes Avellaneda, Lía Quarleri, and Elisa Frühauf García, to mention just a few.26 Meanwhile, Graciela Chamorro and Guillermo Wilde, among other anthropologists, have been active regarding cultural creations and transformations through time.27 This new Guarani history is embedded in a more general Brazilian indigenous history elaborated by João Pacheco de Oliveira, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, and John Monteiro.28 These historiographical developments are paralleled by the “ontological turn” in anthropology, as initiated by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Anne Christine Taylor, and Philippe Descola and based on fieldwork in the Amazonian region (Tupi or Jivaro societies).29 They allow us to become aware of the profound ontological and epistemic differences ­between Amazonian and European societies. Carlos Fausto and Wilde have attempted to synthesize the two approaches, showing the history of how Guarani people experience structural change.30 Generally speaking, early colonial sources and current ethnography are much more explored and discussed than late colonial (eighteenth-century) and postcolonial (nineteenth-century) documentation, whether in Guarani or Spanish. The Guarani corpus has been the object of precise and updated lists by Melià. He is currently preparing an Antología de textos coloniales en guarani. Our contribution here is to propose a five-stage reading of the written Guarani corpora (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries), showing how they have been analyzed up to the present and how they can be used for the purpose of semantic history, giving some examples. The first stage corresponds to the creation of a Christian Guarani (1585–1684) at the beginnings of the Franciscan and Jesuit missions: Guarani was written by missionaries in a context of uncertainty. The second stage took place during the consolidation of the Jesuit missions (1684–1759), when Jesuits and indigenous elites collaborated in the creation of a standardized Guarani language that we might call an acrolect. The third corpus is exclusively mundane and written by indigenous town councils, caciques, and secretaries of the missions, starting before the

132  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

end of the second period and going further than the fourth subcorpus (1752–1832). The fourth one corresponds to the official use of Guarani by colonial and republican authorities—in this corpus it is more difficult to know if translators were indigenous, creole, or mestizo (1788–1813). The early official uses were abandoned by the newly independent states during the nineteenth century. We know that Guarani members of the former Jesuit missions took an active part in the nineteenth-century conflicts and the history of Rio de la Plata. They must have used political terms in Guarani and Spanish. Mestizos and creoles also continued to practice politics in Guarani. Nevertheless, written sources are scarce from between 1813 and 1867. The fifth period corresponds to nationalist uses of Guarani during the War of the Triple Alliance (Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay) against Paraguay (1864–70). This wartime press, written by mestizos in Guarani, allows us to speculate on the existence of underground Guarani writings during the nineteenth century. The five stages have been studied from different points of view and disciplines, which we will summarize in order to show how a semantic history can be ­conducted. At every step, we will propose to follow the uses of two pairs of terms: ava/karai, and voja/(mbur)uvicha. Why these particular words? Ava and karai have been transformed into collective names: ava mainly refers to Indians and karai to Spaniards. Voja was used to translate “vassal,” which was the status of the Indians of the missions. Mburuvicha has been an equivalent of king (rey), and (r)uvicha has been an equivalent of the caciques. Other words were used to qualify indigenous leaders in precolonial times and might have continued in use. It is still difficult to understand why only some words became signifiers that we may liken to colonial institutions such as the mission.31 A striking characteristic for those four words is that they appear very early in Spanish documentation: isolated, written in the middle of a Spanish sentence, they are taken out from their original pronunciation, syntax, and context. For instance, voja can be written mboja in 1609 and is treated as if it were a noun when in Guarani it functions like an adjective.32 All these words were strategic not only for the colonizers but also for the Indians because they designated the space that both parties occupied and tried to defend within the Spanish Empire. What we will try to understand here is how those words were used within the Guarani corpus at different stages.

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   133

STAG E 1 : GUAR AN I T R A N S L AN G UAGE (1585–1684)

The early colonial Guarani or translanguage created first by Franciscans and then by Jesuits in Paraguay has been the object of study for more than fifty years since Melià’s doctoral thesis.33 The corpus consists of prayers, catechisms, and confession manuals, as well as metalinguistic tools—grammars and dictionaries. The monumental linguistic works of the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya have attracted particular attention: Antonio Caballos and Graciela Chamorro, for instance, have studied the non-Christianized words and ethnographic data contained in Montoya’s dictionary, Tesoro de la lengua guaraní.34 While Melià focused on the creation of a Christian language, he opened the path for others to shed light on what remains un-Westernized in Montoya’s linguistic tools. There is also a very singular and interesting text in Guarani from this period that presents political vocabulary in context. It is a 1630 petition by Guarani caciques, denouncing the exploitation they were subjected to and claiming their rights.35 A Jesuit wrote it on their behalf “in their own language, as they expressed it,” and provided a Spanish translation. Research on this first-stage corpus (Catholic, metalinguistic, and political) shows that it is possible to reach some precolonial meanings and early colonial uses, not completely consolidated. Ava was a generic word for “man” and possibly for “person.” At this stage, it began to be used as an equivalent for “Indian,” but it was not yet consolidated. Indeed, in the 1630 document above quoted, when the caciques used ava to refer to the male members of their communities (as opposed to the female ones), the Jesuit did not translate ava by “indio” (Indian) but by “nuestro vasallo” (our vassal). Why? Probably because he needed, for strategic reasons, to make clear that Indian leaders were truly lords, ruling over their vassals. Karai was a lexical root (potentially noun, adjective, and verb) applied to some divinities and to some ritual leaders in precolonial times. Gods were not different by nature or separated from humans. And there was a continuity between political and ritual, shamanistic functions. In the terms of Viveiros de Castro, their ontology was profoundly different from the European one: body, kinship, nature, and culture were not conceptualized or organized under the same paradigms as in Europe at that time. Montoya explains in his Tesoro: “They use this word to always honor

134  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

their wizards, and they applied it to Spaniards, and very inappropriately to the Christian denomination and holy things, so we do not use it for these meanings.”36 Despite Montoya’s wish, all through the corpus karai would be used with a meaning equivalent to “Spaniard” and ­“Christian.” Voja (adjective) meant “medium-sized”: yga voja, “medium-sized canoe”; che arakuaa voja, “I have average understanding”; ava voja, “medium-­sized man.” It could also mean “smaller” and “moderate”: che voja, “the one who is smaller than me”; che juru voja, “moderate mouth.” Montoya also chose to make an equivalence between voja and “vassal,” nominalizing it: ava voja, “vassal”; che voja, “my vassal, my servant (siervo), my subject (súbdito)”; Tupã voja, “God’s servants or the Saints”; Añã voja, “Evil’s servants.”37 What did vassal mean in Montoya’s tradition? The vassal lives in his lord’s lands and respects him and is loyal to him.38 In the Jesuits’ spiritual tradition—their founder, Ignacio de Loyola, served in the army in a feudal society—a Christian serves and is loyal to his God, as a vassal serves, respects, and is loyal to his lord. But what could voja mean in Tupi-Guarani societies? To answer this question, we first have to follow the meanings of its counterpart: mburuvicha. Tuvicha (adjective) means “great in quantity and quality.”39 In the Guarani language of that time, some words accepted four different consonants (t, r, h, g) before the root: t-uvicha is the absolute form, r-uvicha comes with the mark of the first or the second person (singular or plural), and h- or g- are marks of the third person, the last one being reflexive. The “absolute form” is not very frequent. Nevertheless, in dictionaries, since Montoya, those words are to be found at the letter (t). In its meanings, tuvicha is close to guasu, “big,” or puku, “tall.” Let us follow some ­examples given by Montoya in his Tesoro (1639): Che ruvicha, “I’m tall in body” or “I’m the principal cacique” or “my superior”; Che huvicha, “I am his superior.”40 Mburuvicha appears as a separate item at the letter m before b: “c.d. (pó.) continens, and (tuvichá) great, the one who contains greatness in himself, prince, lord.” Examples are mburuvicha-vete, “king”; mburuvichahápe, “mainly” (principalmente); A-ñe-mo-mburuvicha, “I make myself ­superior” (hágome grande, superior); A-mo-mburuvicha, “I make someone superior” (hacerle superior).41 Montoya suggests that mburuvicha is composed by po/mbo + tuvicha. But when we search for “po/mbo” with the sense of continens or “the contained in the thing,” the “fulfillment of the thing” (la llenura de la cosa), or “sign” (señal ), we observe in all his ex-

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   135

amples that it is a postposition.42 The consequence is that po could hardly become the prefix of the root -uvicha. We rather suggest that mbur- derives from the prefix poro-/mboro-: “the one who contains the exercise of the verb, indicates excess, superlative, custom, extension, exercise of the verb on many persons, also used as superlative.”43 In brief, the prefix poro-/mboro- nominalizes verbs. Montoya himself explains at the word poro-, mboro-, “the one who contains in himself the exercise of the verb”; at tuvicha, “great in quality and quantity”; and at the word mburuvicha, “the one who contains greatness in himself,” suggesting that the prefix here is poro-. The first o in mboro- would have changed into u in mbur-u because of homophony. Here we interpret that mburuvicha is a nominalized form of -uvicha, that is to say a more abstract form, transforming it into a concept.44 Voja (minor) and –uvicha (superior) are relationships more than fixed positions such as vassal/feudal lord. Traditional Guarani anthropology has discussed political organization in Guarani societies in precolonial times. Ahistorical reconstructions—such as those carried out by Pierre and Hélène Clastres, who depict egalitarian and antistate Guarani ­societies—have been criticized.45 Early colonial documents are ambiguous and contradictory on this point. In his Conquista espiritual (1639), Montoya has a chapter where he describes the “ancient way of life.” He insists that they had government, that is to say caciques, an inherited nobility that had originally been established through their capacity to have vassals and to govern and through their eloquence.46 Montoya uses three times the root “noble” in nobleza, ennoblecidos, ennoblecen, linked to heritage, eloquence, and congregation of vassals. Is the relationship between the caciques and their followers one of hierarchy or one of equality based only on consent? Montoya proposes in his Bocabulario, at the item “inferiority,” teko vojaha, voja eko, a voja way of life.47 In everyday life, a leader could say, Che rog ypýra aheja che voja, “I left my voja to take care of my house.”48 But at the same time, many early colonial sources affirm that the leaders had no authority and that the Indians followed only the leaders they wanted. The analysis of historical sources is difficult because every statement on the social organization of the Indians had political implications at that time: if there was no authority among the Guarani they could be treated as slaves (that was the encomendero’s point of view). If they had had kings and lords, then they could be considered fully human, able to profess allegiance to another

136  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

king. And to complicate the panorama, some current anthropologists prefer finding equality in order to prove the originality of indigenous social organization. Another question that has not been resolved until now: Were vassals who were not family members considered naturally inferior, as the definition of vassal in Spanish suggests? Or from an anthropological point of view: Who were the followers? Only captives? Or mainly relatives and next of kin?49 Or everyone? Was voja a generic term referring to sons (ta’ýra), sons-in-law (tajyme), nephews (sisters’ sons are ti’ýra, brothers’ sons tyvy and tyke’ýra ra’y), brothers (tyke’ýra, tyvy), and brothers-in-law (tovaja)? Our intuition is that voja encompasses all those relatives and kinsmen, maybe some captives effectively linked to a leader, that is to say living with him under the same roof. A long house divided by several pillars could shelter hundreds of persons.50 But some leaders could build a reputation beyond their house, village, and region. The link was not necessarily experienced as ordained by kinship or a consequence of alliance or war (captives). One can be transformed against one’s will into voja: che mbovoja teı˜, me hace vasallo sin serlo.51 But one can also choose to be the vassal of someone else. Oñembovoja, “I become the vassal of a new lord” (Hágome vasallo de otro) and “I aggregate vassals for me” ( Junto vasallo para mi).52 A leader can say: I take vojas from others. Interestingly, the 1630 document distinguishes vassals (voja) from sons (ta’yra) and younger brothers (tyvy). ore voja opa katu, our vassals, all of them, ogueroje’ói jepi are taken continuously

ore ra’y, our sons, Marakajúpe to Marakaju

ore ryvy our little brothers, imano haguãme. in order to die.53

This distinction that seems to put the sons and younger brothers of the caciques in a separate class reflects the Jesuit judicial strategy of protecting indigenous lives from the encomenderos by affirming the existence of nobles within Guarani nations, nobles who had accepted to put themselves directly under the authority and protection of the king. If the Guarani were recognized as having a government, they could be considered as direct vassals to the king, just like the Spaniards. In the same manner that it was essential for the Jesuits to identify a form of government among the Guarani, they also needed to find there a stable cacique/vassal relationship and a hierarchy. They were obliged to find a variation of the

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   137

Spanish system but not something completely different from it, as otherwise the Indians would be considered as completely open to exploitation by local encomenderos. STAG E 2 : GUA R A N I AC ROL E C T OR H IGH W R ITTE N STA N DA R D (16 8 4 – 1759)

By the end of the seventeenth century (after 1680), the missions had gained economic and political stability. This process of territorialization effectively produced cultural homogenization and Westernization in Guarani.54 Space, time, and body concepts had been profoundly transformed but were still expressed in Guarani. A printing press was established between 1700 and 1727.55 Monolingual and bilingual books were printed in situ, conforming to a high written standard or acrolect.56 At present, Harald Thun and Franz Obermeier have endeavored to gather and study the material of this period in a project called PeKY.57 They assume that the Jesuits, as foreigners, could not master the Guarani language properly and that an indigenous Guarani remained out of Jesuit influences.58 They put the case for the existence, at least, of two forms of the Guarani language within the missions: a standard, Christianized, and written Guarani, controlled by Jesuits, and a more colloquial, oral Guarani, a koine coming from different Guarani dialects, due to migrations, economic mobilizations, and relocations. The first one is full of controlled resemantizations and neologisms (kuaitáva, order; avare, priest); the second, the koine, is characterized by a more extensive incorporation of Hispanisms such as cabayu (caballo), ndovi (novillo), and cabô (carbón).59 The first kind of Guarani can be found in Catholic texts and the metalanguage produced by the Jesuits. Meanwhile, the second one arose in non-Catholic works. By 1700, Jesuits would have become aware of the distance between their religious Guarani and the everyday languages spoken by natives.60 They produced new linguistic tools to update their knowledge. Pablo Restivo’s grammar and vocabulary (1727–28) are currently regarded as updatings of Ruiz de Montoya.61 During this period, Jesuits also translated Latin and Spanish books into Guarani: a translation of Juan Eusebio Nieremberg’s spiritual “best seller,” De la diferencia entre lo temporal y lo eterno, was printed in the mission in 1705. Montoya’s chronicle Conquista espiritual del Paraguay (1639) was translated into Guarani in 1733,

138  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

probably by Pablo Restivo.62 A monolingual Guarani book printed in Madrid in 1759 should be the object of more attention: it is called Ara poru aguyjei háva, which could be translated as Del buen uso del tiempo.63 At the same time, some indigenous elites were writing Christian Guarani with much more proficiency than the Jesuits themselves—if we give credit to Jesuit comments. Nicolas Yapuguay is known for two Guarani books printed under Jesuit control: Explicacion del catecismo (1724) and Sermones y exemplos (1727).64 But if Jesuits were getting more and more familiar with colloquial Guarani and natives with written Christian Guarani, what distance remained between the two? The secular corpus consists of a war diary, Diario de guerra ­(1704–5);65 a set of dialogues from everyday life known as the Gülich manuscript (XVIII) or “Dialogos guarani”;66 and a medical text called Pohã ñana (1725).67 Harald Thun and Franz Obermeier have asked: Were the first two documents written by Jesuits with the help of indigenous assistants or by natives under Jesuit supervision? It does not seem so simple to answer this question, and we prefer to think in terms of a third space, or a linguistic middle ground in constant evolution. In this middle ground, religious and mundane Guarani can be distinguished but not exclusively attributed to Jesuit or native authorship, respectively. A high standard (acrolect created from different variations of Guarani) including religious and nonreligious books, produced in collaboration by Jesuits and natives, might be distinguished from two other varieties: a basilect spoken by some Jesuits (limited and creolized Guarani) and a mesolect spoken by natives (a koine, also created from different variants of Guarani but mainly between natives, with less interference of the Jesuits). At this stage, what are the uses of ava/karai, voja/mburuvicha? We still have to conduct more research with this very extensive corpus, but at first glance the opposition between ava (Indian) and karai (Spaniard, baptized, Christian, holy) is settled. The opposition between karai ñe’e˜ (Spanish language) and ava ñe’e˜ (Indian language) is used in a title in 1733. Equivalences between voja and “vassal,” between ava ruvicha or mburuvicha and “cacique” or “principal,” continue. Nevertheless, the actual roles of voja and mburuvicha are profoundly transformed. Within the missions, “The cacique, when we ask him how many voja does he have, he answers, ‘I have x rows of houses or galpones’ in order to make clear how many they are.”68 He might be continuing the spatial and “household” representation of who are his followers. Never-

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   139

theless, ruptures in their roles are very important, at three levels. During the early history of the missions, caciques (distinguished from others by the Spanish title don) led their voja to war. Nevertheless, by 1680, as recently argued by Kazuhisa Takeda, they were displaced by a new elite based on merit who led standardized militias composed of fifty men.69 If in precolonial times caciques were also shamans, in the missions there was a progressive but clear separation between political affairs conducted by caciques and religious ones directed by the Jesuits. Third, government was also taken from the caciques’ hands. The cabildo with its corresponding elective offices was introduced. Some caciques adapted but others did not. They no longer waged wars or held rituals, or conducted diplomacy or administered anymore. What was left to them? The economy. Their main role seems to be related to the organization of the labor of their “vassals.” Nevertheless, they seem to have been vital for everyday life organization as an intermediate political and religious position between Jesuits and all the Indians for religious and mundane contexts. For instance, some of them would explain Jesuit sermons after the mass, occupying an intermediate ritual position. They also thrived by controlling institutions like the town council. STAGE 3 : T H E CAB IL D O C OR P U S (1752–1832)

The cabildo corpus is a corpus of correspondence, petitions, and other records usually written by members of town councils and/or caciques to gobernadores, military commandants, or other town councils. This is a large corpus: so far we have found a total of 248 references.70 Less than half of this corpus is bilingual. More than a hundred documents are monolingual in Guarani.71 The majority of the corpus is located in Buenos Aires (Archivo General de la Nación y Museo Mitre), and some scattered documents are in Asunción, Madrid, London, and Paris. Some of them have been merely referenced, others published and some translated since 1946 by investigators from different disciplines and nationalities.72 In particular, Eduardo Neumann has done systematic and insightful historical research on the corpus, reconstructing how indigenous leaders used paper and literacy.73 Thanks to all this previous historical and linguistic work, it is possible to read the corpus from the perspective of semantic history. It can be divided in three parts, according to historical events.

140  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

17 5 2 – 5 6 : Gu e rra Gu a ra n i ti c a C orpus

In 1750, the pact of Madrid fixed limits between Spain and Portugal, dividing Jesuit territory in two parts. Seven missions were handed over to Portugal, and as the Guarani army was accustomed to fighting against the Portuguese, this decision produced a major crisis within the missions. In 1752, probably because Jesuits couldn’t express themselves against a royal and papal decision, indigenous cabildos had the opportunity (or were encouraged) to send letters in their language to the king and to local authorities requesting them to abandon this plan.74 Diplomacy failed, and Guarani forces fought against both Spanish and Portuguese armies (1754–56). Even though the eight letters (1752–53) are quite well known and some have been published and translated, their political vocabulary has never been systematically studied. We can infer from them to what degree caciques maintained control over their followers as late as 1753 (see table 4.1). But voja is less and less used to refer to the caciques’ followers. Instead they use the term mbya (people). Voja is the term now specialized to express their relationship with the king. They claim they are rey España voja, his voja poriahu, and his vassals from the church ovoja Santa Iglesia rehegua. The cabildos claim their right to be listened to and respected as Christians and vassals. The colonial system never considered them as such but rather always reproduced the colonial difference—indigenous authorities had to fight for their full recognition within the colonial

Table 4.1. Passage from the Guerra Guaranitica corpus showing caciques’ control of their followers ore Corregidor hae Cabildo ñee nohenduçebey, orerehe opua Gubicha pope ñote oyco.

our words of corregidor and cabildo they do not want to hear anymore, they stand up against us, they are only in their caciques’ hands.

Source: Nicolás Ñe’engyrú (Concepción) to governor of Buenos Aires, José de Andonaegui, 1753.08.20, Archivo Histórico Nacional de Madrid, Clero Jesuitas, legajo 120 (1), 31–38. Paleography and transliteration at the website of the LANGAS project, http://langas.cnrs.fr/#/consulter_document/extraits/10.

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   141

Table 4.2.  Karai as a term for Spaniards in the Guerra Guaranitica corpus Portuges, cotera Caray amo yepe no meey mbaemo orebe

los portugueses, ni aun español alguno, nos han dado cosa ­alguna

[Neither the] ­Portuguese nor even the Spaniards have ever given anything to us 

Source: Nicolás Ñe’engyrú (Concepción) to governor of Buenos Aires, José de Andonaegui, 1753.08.20, Archivo Histórico Nacional de Madrid, Clero Jesuitas, legajo 120 (1), 31–38. Paleography and transliteration at the website of the LANGAS project, http://langas.cnrs.fr/#/consulter_document/extraits/10.

rhetoric. In the same text, karai is used for “Spaniard” as opposed to the Portuguese (table 4.2). The same occurs with ava, which is translated as “Indian” in the Spanish version. Karai and ava function here as collective identities. 17 5 8 – 6 8 : A d m i n i s tra ti v e C o r respondence

Thirty letters exchanged between indigenous cabildos and governors or military commandants during the period of late Jesuit government and expulsion are to be found in archives. They mainly seem to respond to demands coming from the governor of the missions or to events that occurred beyond their power. Nonetheless, some are signed by only one individual and not in the name of a whole pueblo. Four letters written in February 1758 were sent to Gobernador Ceballos and were translated into Spanish in a unique document.75 They are particularly interesting because they show the political vocabulary used to describe the relationship between the cabildos and the governor, called ore ruvicha: “We are humble vassals [poriahu voja], servants [rembiguái] of your illustrious lord governor [marangatu].76 We are not like those infidels [ikarai’ey˜], those we call Mocobies or Guaycuru or Abipones, who attack us, stealing and killing, refusing presents we offer them in order to have them baptized.” Another set of letters is conserved in Buenos Aires: in 1761, thirtyone pueblos answered Governor Ceballos’s request for military support for the missions: twenty-three wrote in Spanish, seven wrote in Guarani, and one sent a letter in Guarani and a Spanish translation (Candelaria). Usually short, these letters also use political and military vocabulary. Parts of this corpus seem to be written by individuals.77

142  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

A last coherent collection of documents is much more famous because it deals with reactions to the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. There are fourteen known documents written between 1768 and 1769: three are held at the British Museum and express sadness about the Jesuits leaving (one document is monolingual, two others are translated). One, signed by thirty pueblos, is in the Archivo Nacional de Chile and expresses great happiness about the departure of the Jesuits (in bilingual form). Nine, signed by individuals (cacique, teniente, alcalde), just congratulate the new governor in charge of the missions for his new position (Buenos Aires, Museo Histórico Nacional, Archivo General de la Nación, and Museo Mitre).78 In this corpus, we observe that voja is always preceded by a pos­ sessive (your vassal, nde voja, etc.); only in Spanish text is it used in the absolute form—“the” voja. As far as we could observe in this Guarani corpus, voja is never used to refer to the followers of an indigenous leader but only to Guarani people themselves as vassals of the king or the virrey. The relative form (t, r, h, g)-uvicha is much more used than the absolute one, mburuvicha. It expresses a relative position: guvicha (their own caciques), che ruvicha corregidor ha’e cabildo (my superior corregidor and cabildo), ñande ruvicha (our cabildo), ore ruvicha (our governor). When the absolute form mburuvicha appears, it always refers to Spanish authorities: “Mburuvicha Señor Governador Don Pedro Ceballos.” When Guarani leaders name themselves (all of us cabildos and caciques) when they sign documents, they always use the Spanish term cacique, for instance “Caciquez Javier Guapy.” They do not use mburuvicha at all. The Spanish authority, the governor, was addressed with a Guarani title, while the Guarani leaders affirmed their status with a Spanish one. What does this mean? First, the status of the indigenous elite within the missions changed so much that cacique was the only adequate word to be used. The Guarani leaders used (r, h, g)-uvicha only when referring to relationship more than to status. We could suggest that even if the status and functions of the caciques changed profoundly, the relationship maintained previous characteristics. Methodologically, it indicates to us that semantic analysis must take into account morphosyntactic phenomena. What happens with ava? Sometimes it is translated as “indios” and sometimes as “men.”79 When indigenous town councils were writing ava, they were probably thinking of “men” more than the colonial status of “Indian.” Nevertheless, our impression is that they progressively could have incorporated this colonial meaning, developing a new subjectivity,

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   143

a kind of double consciousness, seeing themselves through the eyes of the other. 176 9 – 1 8 1 3 : Wri ti n g a fte r th e J esui t Expul si on

The majority of the documents we have found (78 percent) were written after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767–68. If we were sure that our current state of archives was proportional to what was really written, we could say that Guarani leaders might have experienced more liberty and necessity to communicate by themselves to authorities. To our surprise, the prohibition of any language but Spanish, pronounced in 1770 by the Spanish administration, remained with little effect in the Rio de la Plata, as compared to Mexico, for instance.80 After 1767, Guarani missions were administrated by clergy for spiritual matters and by an administrator for secular issues. A significant number of letters concern the behavior (good or bad) of authorities toward the population of the missions. Others concern internal poverty and demands for support, protection against Spanish landowners whose cattle were invading community property, commerce, or military questions. They are more often written by individuals, on more diverse topics than before. At this stage, a new use of karai can be detected: it becomes a title similar to don, always applied to Spaniards. This corpus is also key for following cacique and noncacique behaviors. At this time, liberal economic reforms were being promoted from Spain—liberalization of commerce as well as administrative, military, and justice reforms. In the missions, a decree declared Indians to be “free” if they were considered “able” to be “liberated” from the community regime and to be responsible for their own land. Such reforms resulted in a bilingual Guarani/Spanish correspondence from the cabildos and caciques to the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires, created in 1776. Interestingly enough, some of those letters are to be found in Paris. As far as we could analyze them, we observe two translations of “freedom / to be freed from tribute”: one Hispanism, o-je-liberta, and the resemanticization pyhyrõ, also written pysyrõ, previously used to denote Christian salvation. A document from 1827 is full of Hispanisms for concepts that were previously conveyed in Guarani: Hermanos ciudadanos, humildemente, provincia, representante, protección, felicidad, but other texts from the early nineteenth century continue to show a remarkable continuity in grammar and vocabulary.81

144  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

STAG E 4 : IN D E PE N D EN C E C OR PU S (1810–13)

The coherence of this “independence” corpus derives mainly from its being issued by the Junta de Buenos Aires and translated into Guarani from Spanish between 1810 and 1813. The Junta de Gobierno, an emergency governing council, was created in Buenos Aires by the leaders of the independence of Argentina. They needed to obtain the support of the indigenous population and of the distant provinces like Paraguay or Corrientes. Now the formal sender of Guarani letters was no longer a member of a cabildo or a cacique from the former missions but an incipient government. Was the use of Guarani by political authorities a new practice? Apparently not: in 1788, the bishop of La Plata printed in Buenos Aires a letter in Guarani and Spanish.82 Furthermore, in 1803, the publication of a bando (decree) in Guarani was proposed to the viceroy.83 Nevertheless it is significant that independence leaders used written Guarani translations of their calls for unity. 1810 D i p l o ma ti c L e tte rs fro m Ge n eral B el grano

In 1810 Manuel Belgrano, who was tasked by the Junta de Buenos Aires with gaining Paraguayan support for their political project, sent nine bilingual letters in Guarani and Spanish addressed to the Paraguayan people but also to the Spanish officialdom of the region, including religious, civil, and military authorities.84 All those authorities (political, military) and communities (Christian Indians from the ex-Jesuit missions, Paraguayans, the soldiers of his army) were supposed to be pleased to receive a letter in Guarani and Spanish, as if Guarani was the diplomatic language of the region. Indeed, the use of Amerindian languages by loyalist or incipient national authorities usually targeted Indian populations, not a governor, a bishop, a cabildo, a military commandant, or ­creoles. We suggest that Belgrano’s letters were translated into Guarani by an indigenous cabildo secretary. The script, vocabulary, and style show continuity relative to the previous corpus written by indigenous elites. Besides, to qualify a free person, they use the hispanism libre, which can be found as such in some of the cabildo documents.85 Mburuvicha is applied only to Governor Velasco, and –uvicha to Belgrano himself, who is

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   145

described as the leader of many soldiers. To translate “vassals of the king,” his interpreter used rey voja. A striking feature is that these letters neither use karai nor ava. Perhaps Belgrano’s goal was a call for unity. T h e 1 8 1 3 D e c ree

The decree of 1813 ratifies a previous decree from September 1, 1811, putting an end to indigenous tribute and labor burdens.86 Our first hypothesis is that it could have been written in Buenos Aires by a priest or a creole—probably an expert speaker of Guarani who used Montoya’s dictionary. Roberto Romero has suggested that the translation was made by Dr. José Francisco de Ugarteche, a Paraguayan from Guaira who was present on behalf of Rioja Province at the constituent assembly that authorized the decree.87 The political vocabulary uses a certain number of specific neologisms created at the time of Montoya and not used in the cabildo corpus. Suggestively, some words such as yosuamo (provinces), ñemono’õngusu (assemble), and kuaipyme’e˜ (tributario) are directly taken from Montoya’s Bocabulario (1640).88 Besides, it contains very few Hispanisms. Terms like asamblea general constituyente and supremo poder ejecutivo are accompanied by glosses. The assembly is described as the reunion of mburuvichavete who govern. Supremo poder ejecutivo is preceded by capitã guasu (great captain). Montoya and later dictionaries define this term as the “governor,” who may have been seen as the most comparable real figure of a supreme executive power.89 But was capitã guasu a meaningful category for potential listeners? In the cabildo corpus, the title used to qualify a governor and later the virrey is slightly different: capitan general, not capitã guasu.90 In our analysis, these terms and others sound like archaic neologisms. We can imagine a Paraguayan creole translating the decree with the help of Jesuits’ dictionaries. Of particular interest is the relationship established between ava and karai. The Indian who pays tribute (ava) is opposed to the free citizen: karai tava ygua, literally “the karai of the cities.” We have seen in the previous corpus that karai ment “Christian and Spaniard” for the indigenous of the missions. The translator of the decree promises the Indians that they are not going to be Indians anymore but karai, citizens/Spaniards. This can only be the viewpoint of a creole or mestizo (with Spaniard status). It is very different from the viewpoint of Belgrano’s interpreter, who never uses ava and karai and insists that they are brothers, born in the same country, vassals (voja) of one king.

146  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

STAGE 5: NATIONAL WARTIME PRESS IN GUARANI (1867–68)

When Paraguay fought against the Triple Alliance formed by Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay (1864–70), a Guarani press developed. This corpus is of mestizo authorship and quantitatively remains the most important official use of Guarani known up to the present.91 Some Guarani texts from this period have been studied, translated, and published online by the linguist Wolf Lustig.92 In them, we observe the use of (t, r, h)-uvicha and mburuvicha, mainly with the sense of “our, your, and their president” and in the absolute form for “president,” as is still the case today in Paraguayan Guarani. One phrase uses mburuvicha as an equivalent for ancient caciques. In this Paraguayan Guarani, more influenced by Spanish, mburuvicha is preceded by the article los and followed by the plural suffix -kuéra, as in “Heê, chéko ako Lambaré pende ramói, herakuáva’ekue los mburuvichakuéra pa’ûme yma”93 (Yes, I’m Lambaré, your famous ancestor among the caciques [from] long ago). This suggests that the nominalized form, mburuvicha, could have been much more common among the creole and mestizo population of the capital Asunción than among the Guarani of the missions, who preferred the term cacique for their status (classification) and reserved (t)-uvicha for their relationship (enunci­ ation). Karai is used many times as an equivalent to “don” or “Lord,” in ­expressions like “Karai Mariscal López” but also as an equivalent to “Christian” and to “Spaniards” in discussion of colonial times. Ava is used as an insult (“savage”), as is still the case in Paraguayan Guarani. This corpus, as well as more recent ones, deserves study because of the possibility for connections to contemporary Guarani. What could be done is to elaborate two different corpora: one for Paraguayan Guarani during all of the twentieth century and another for ethnic Guarani as spoken in villages. Usually dialectology is the domain of linguists. Nevertheless, if we could connect historical, linguistic, and ethnographic data, we think that it could greatly help in the building of another history and anthropology of the region. Indeed, if we could compare the current political vocabulary of different ethnic groups (the names of the rituals and political leaders and their followers), then we could observe the degree of influence of the general language. Gérald Taylor gave us the method­ ology with his analysis of supay, the Quechua word chosen by the church to designate the devil. Its original meaning could be reconstructed with

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   147

the aid of current dialects where the term had other meanings. These varieties had escaped the influence of the general language shaped by the church, and the word could follow its own evolution.94 Before the conquest, ava (man) was associated with kuña (woman) and had no structural relationship with karai (neither ­synonymy nor antinomy). Because ava began to mean “Indian” and karai, “Spaniard” and “Christian,” they were put into an oppositional relationship with two different meanings: a difference of condition/status and a difference between social and ethnic groups. Town councils and caciques tried to defend their condition as Christian Indians and Christian vassals (voja karai), but in general terms ava and karai were thought of as opposite ethnic groups (Indians and Spaniards). In the independence corpus, we observe two strategies. Belgrano’s interpreter chose to avoid both terms to emphasize a common brotherhood. The 1813 decree’s translator used ava and karai as markers of juridical conditions and not of ethnic groups: ava was “the one who pays tribute” and karai tavaygua, “the karai of the cities,” was the citizen. The project was to transform ava into karai. These meanings can still be traced in the later national, Paraguayan corpus. From the end of the nineteenth century to the present, ava and karai have been even more radically opposed: ava is an insult, and karai is used as “sir.” Research is needed in contemporary indigenous communities to establish what karai and ava mean today in their everyday life. -Voja/-uvicha (minor/superior) can be considered an indigenous pair. The colonial system tried to affix an official status to voja/mburuvicha, but the town councils preferred to use -voja/-uvicha with possessive adjectives for personal relationships and rarely used the impersonal form mburuvicha, reserving it for Spanish authorities. They also reserved the term voja to express their relationship of vassaldom with the king. Guarani elites preferred to use the term cacique for themselves, symbolizing the great changes in their positions and functions. They also used other words to name their followers (mbya, for instance). They lost much of their protagonist status in war, rituals, and everyday politics, though they continued to be key intermediaries between the Jesuits and the people. After the independence of Paraguay and Argentina, the word voja became meaningless and cannot be found in Paraguayan Guarani. Mburuvicha is the only word of the pair that was still meaningful after 1811 and has been used for “president” in Paraguayan Guarani since at least

148  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

the end of the nineteenth century. More research should be done within Guarani-speaking ethnic groups in Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina in order to establish how those words are used today. We present our results schematically in table 4.3. These two pairs of words have been chosen because they are key to the colonial system of places and representations: we can see how much they were resemanticized within the missions. In this third space or middle ground, we can observe two entangled phenomena: structural relationships between words can be totally transformed (the opposition ava/kuña transformed into ava/karai) or apparently continued: (-voja/ (t)-uvicha) was transformed into voja/mburuvicha (vassals/governor or

Table 4.3.  Translation history of Guarani words Karai Before conquest Translanguage (1585–1684) Acrolect (1684–1759) Cabildo (1752–1832) Independence (1788–1813) Paraguay (1867–XXI)

Shaman* (wizard) Spaniards, Christians Spaniards, Christians Spaniards, Christians Sir Citizen Sir (T)-uvicha Mburuvicha

Ava Man Man Man, Indian Man, Indian Indian (pay the tribute) Indian, savage Voja Voja

Before conquest (Possessive) superior (Possessive) inferior Translanguage (1585–1684) Lord, king Vassal of the cacique, vassal of the king Acrolect (1684–1759) Governor Vassal Cabildo (1752–1813) (Possessive) superior (Possessive) vassal of governor the king Independence (1788–1813) Military leader, Vassal of the king governor Paraguay (1867–XXI) President -

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   149

king’s representative). In both cases, a profound resemantization was taking place in this third space of the missions: from being a transitional -voja or -uvicha of others, a person became a cacique by nature. Karai were no longer hechiceros/shamans, but the others, the Spanish. In conclusion, the Guarani corpus provides fertile ground for semantic history. It is an abundant and diverse corpus, spanning close to three centuries, that was produced by a variety of agents—foreign missionaries and indigenous town council secretaries, but also creoles and mestizos. The standard written form of Guarani created within the Jesuit missions for religious purposes has a more complex and longer history than expected. It is a testimony to indigenous agency, but also to how ­colonial and proindependence authorities used written Guarani in order to spread their ideas and projects and to recruit Indians, mestizos, and creoles to their armies. Through this corpus we have been able to trace some fairly radical semantic shifts. Future research will supplement the historical corpus with linguistic fieldwork among contemporary Guarani-­ speaking indigenous groups, revealing uses that both postdate and predate the corpus, with the potential to clarify a number of issues in Guarani cultural history. NOTES

We thank César Itier, Juan Carlos Estenssoro, Rossella Martin, Joëlle Chassin, and Graciela Chamorro for their comments on previous versions of this chapter, as well as Marie Laure Geoffray, Cecilia Adoue, Claudine Ewing, and Matthew B. Kowalsky for helping to correct the English version. 1. The authors are members of a research project entitled LANGAS (Langues générales d’Amérique du Sud). LANGAS was a four-year project funded by the ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) and coordinated by Capucine Boidin (2011–16). Our website and database—www.langas.cnrs.fr— provide access to transcriptions, transliterations, and translations of texts in Guarani, Quechua, and Tupi, Amerindian languages that were considered “general languages” by the Spanish and Portuguese, and features a sophisticated tool for lexical searches. LANGAS participants have been studying the semantic history and social history of Quechua, Guarani, and Tupi to give a new impulse to the historical anthropology of the region. 2.  James Lockhart, “Background and Course of the New Philology,” in Sources and Methods for the Study of Postconquest Mesomerican Ethnohistory, ed.

150  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

James Lockhart, Lisa Sousa, and Stephanie Woods, provisional version, Wired Humanities Project, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, 2007, 9. See also James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). 3.  Bartomeu Melià, La lengua guaraní en el Paraguay colonial, que contiene “La creación de un lenguaje cristiano en las reducciones de los guaranies en el Paraguay” (Asunción: CEPAG, 2003), a translation of his French PhD dissertation from 1969. See also his major work, La lengua guaraní del Paraguay: Historia, sociedad y literatura, Colección Lenguas y Literaturas Indígenas 6 (Madrid: Mapfre, 1992). 4. Melià, Lengua guaraní en el Paraguay colonial, 187–88. 5.  Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Serge Gruzinski, La pensée métisse (Paris: Fayard, 1999). 6. William F. Hanks, Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), chap. 1. 7.  William F. Hanks, “Intertextualité de l’espace au Yucatan,” L’Homme 32, no. 122 (1992): 53–74. 8. Robert C. Schwaller, ed., “A Language of Empire, a Quotidian Tongue: The Uses of Nahuatl in New Spain,” special issue, Ethnohistory 59, no. 4 (September 21, 2012); Mark Morris, “Language in Service of the State: The Nahuatl Counterinsurgency Broadsides of 1810,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 3 (2007): 433–70. 9.  Caterina Pizzigoni, “Conclusion: A Language across Space, Time, and Ethnicity,” Ethnohistory 59, no. 4 (September 21, 2012): 785–90. 10.  On Quechua, see César Itier, El teatro quechua en el Cuzco: Tomo II, Indigenismo, lengua y literatura en el Perú moderno (Lima: Institut français d’études andines, 2000); on Tupi and Nheengatu, see Aryon Dall’Igna Rodrigues, Línguas brasileiras: Para o conhecimento das línguas indígenas (São Paulo: Ed. Loyola, 1986); José Ribamar Bessa Freire, Rio babel: A história das línguas na Amazônia (Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ; Atlântica Editora, 2004). 11.  Significantly, it was Stroessner’s dictatorship that made the first step toward an official recognition of Guarani when he proclaimed it a national language in 1967. After the return of democracy in 1989, it became official in 1992, and bilingual education first started in 1994. See Capucine Boidin, “Du Gran Líder Stroessner (1954–1989) au Karai Tendota Nicanor Duarte (2003–2006),” Mots: Les Langages du Politique, no. 85 (November 1, 2007): 11–22. 12.  This bilingual education system is unique in all of Latin America. From the south of Guyana to the north of Argentina, Tupi-Guarani languages

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   151

present a wide range of sociolinguistic and political situations: Guarani is a symbol of ethnicity in Brazil, where two municipalities recognize it as an official language. Bolivia officialized Guarani in the regions where it is spoken. The Argentinian province of Corrientes officially recognized Guarani as a sign of regional identity. Guarani is now recognized by the Parlasur (Mercosur’s parliament). Capucine Boidin, “Le double discours des politiques d’éducation interculturelle bilingue au Paraguay,” Problèmes d’Amérique Latine, no. 92 (March 30, 2015): 73–90. 13.  Two debates on general languages were initiated in seminars organized by Juan Carlos Estenssoro with Berta Ares Queija, “Evangelizar en la diversidad: Catecismos y otros textos catequéticos relativos a moriscos, negros e indios (S. XVI–XVII),” Sevilla, Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, April 2009. 14.  Juan Carlos Estenssoro and César Itier, “Présentation,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 45, no. 1 (May 26, 2015): 9–14. 15.  The idea that languages are eternal, homogeneous monads also has a history. Sylvain Auroux, ed., Histoire des idées linguistiques, vol. 1, La naissance des métalangages en Orient et en Occident (Liège: Mardaga, 1989). See also the insightful anthropological and historical work of Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 16.  Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 17.  Robert M. Laughlin, Beware the Great Horned Serpent! (Austin: University of Texas Press; London: Eurospan, 2003); Morris, “Language in Service”; Alan Durston, “Quechua Political Literature in Early Republican Peru (1821–1876),” in History and Language in the Andes, ed. Paul Heggarty and Adrian Pearce (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 165–86; Cesar Itier, Capucine Boidin, Rossella Martin, and Alan Durston presented papers on this issue during the international congress organized by the LANGAS project (see note 1 above) on October 22–23, 2012, at INALCO, and these papers were discussed by Javier Fernández Sebastián. As a result, see Capucine Boidin, César Itier, and Joelle Chassin, “Presentación del suplemento especial sobre la propaganda política en lenguas indígenas en las Guerras de Independencia ­sudamericanas,” Ariadna Histórica: Lenguajes, Conceptos, Metáforas, suppl. 1 (March 30, 2016): 5–7; Capucine Boidin, “Teko aguyjei, ‘derechos,’ ‘vida buena,’ un concepto político central de las proclamas y oficios del general Belgrano traducidos al guarani,” Ariadna Histórica: Lenguajes, Conceptos, Metáforas,

152  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

suppl. 1 (March 30, 2016): 25–51; César Itier, “Awqa ‘tirano,’ ‘opresor’: Un concepto básico de las proclamas en quechua y aimara de las guerras de independencia,” Ariadna Histórica: Lenguajes, Conceptos, Metáforas, suppl. 1 (March 30, 2016): 53–71; Rossella Martin, “El arte de persuadir al servicio de las Cortes de Cádiz: La Proclama a los habitantes de Ultramar y su traducción a la lengua quechua (1812–1813),” Ariadna Histórica: Lenguajes, Conceptos, Metáforas, suppl. 1 (March 30, 2016): 73–95. 18.  Jacques Guilhaumou, “De l’histoire des concepts à l’histoire linguistique des usages conceptuels,” Genèses 38, no. 1 (2000): 105–18. 19.  Javier Fernández Sebastián, ed., Diccionario político y social del mundo iberoamericano (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, and Fundación Carolina, 2009), 44. LANGAS participated in the International Conference on the History of Concepts organized by Javier Fernández in Bilbao, August 29–31, 2013. 20. Pierre Rosanvallon, “Pour une histoire conceptuelle du politique (note de travail),” Revue de Synthèse 107, nos. 1–2 ( January 1, 1986): 93–105. 21.  The Corpus del Español database created by Mark Davies, professor of linguistics at Brigham Young University, is online at www.corpusdel espanol.org; the Corpus Diacrónico Del Español (RAE), created by the Real Academia de la Lengua Española (RAE), is online at http://corpus.rae.es /cordenet.html. 22.  Bartomeu Melià, “Breve introducción para aprender la lengua guarani por el Padre Alonso Aragona,” Amerindia 4 (1979): 23–62. Other examples of ha(-v): karuháva (tools to eat), che ruháva (my coming), che rekoha (my place), che potaháva (what I want). See Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Tesoro de la lengua guaraní (1639), ed. Bartomeu Melià and Friedl Grünberg (Asunción: Centro de Estudios Paraguayos “Antonio Guasch,” 2011), 138–40, and Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Arte de la lengua guaraní (1640), ed. Bartomeu Melià and Antonio Caballos (Asunción: Centro de Estudios Paraguayos “Antonio Guasch,” 1993), 101–2. 23. Montoya, Tesoro, 445–46. 24.  Ibid., 556, 558. 25.  Pablo Restivo, Arte de la lengua guaraní (1724), ed. Silvio Liuzzi (Paris: CELIA, 2010), 84. 26. Eduardo Neumann, Letra de indios: Cultura escrita, comunicação e memória indígena nas reduções do Paraguai (São Bernardo do Campo: Nhanduti, 2015); Barbara Ganson, The Guarani under Spanish Rule in the Río de La Plata (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Lía Quarleri, “Gobierno y liderazgo jesuítico-guarani en tiempos de guerra (1752–1756),” Revista de Indias 68, no. 243 (August 30, 2008): 89–114; Lía Quarleri, Rebelión y guerra en las

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   153

fronteras del Plata: Guaranies, jesuitas e imperios coloniales (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009); Elisa Frühauf Garcia, As diversas formas de ser índio: Políticas indígenas e políticas indigenistas no extremo sul da América portuguesa (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2009); Mercedes Avellaneda, Guaranies, criollos y jesuitas: Luchas de poder en las revoluciones comuneras del Paraguay, siglos XVII Y XVIII (Asunción: Editorial Tiempo de Historia, 2014). 27.  Graciela Chamorro is one of the few historians and anthropologists studying Guarani writings who are native speakers in Guarani; see her Kurusu ñe’ëngatu: Palabras que la historia no podría olvidar (Asunción: Centro de Estudios Antropológicos; São Leopoldo: Universidad Católica, 1995), and Decir el cuerpo: Historia y etnografía del cuerpo en los pueblos guaraní, Diccionario Etnográfico Histórico de La Lengua Guarani 1 (Asunción: Fondec Tiempo de Historia, 2009). See also Guillermo Wilde, Religión y poder en las misiones de guaraníes, Paradigma Indicial 7 (Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Ed. Sb, 2009), and, in the special issue edited by Capucine Boidin on the new anthropology of Paraguay, Pablo Antunha Barbosa and Fabio Mura, “Construindo e reconstruindo territórios guarani: Dinâmica territorial na fronteira entre Brasil e Paraguai (séc. xix–xx),” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 97, no. 2 (December 20, 2011): 287–318. 28. See, for instance, João Pacheco de Oliveira, “Uma etnologia dos ‘índios misturados’? Situação colonial, territorialização e fluxos culturais,” Mana 4, no. 1 (April 1998): 47–77; Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Francisco M. Salzano, eds., História dos índios no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992); John M. Monteiro, Negros da terra: Índios e bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994). 29.  Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo ameríndio,” Mana 2, no. 2 (1996): 115–44; Anne-Christine Taylor, “Un corps fait de regards,” in Qu’est-ce qu’un corps: Afrique de l’ouest, Europe occidentale, Nouvelle-Guinée, Amazonie, ed. Stéphane Breton and Michèle Coquet (Paris: Musée du quai Branly and Flammarion, 2006), 149–99; Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, Bibliothèque des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). 30.  For instance, Carlos Fausto, “If God Were a Jaguar: Cannibalism and Christianity among the Guarani (16th–20th Centuries),” in Time and Memory in Indigenous Amazonia: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Carlos Fausto and Michael Heckenberger (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 74–105. 31.  See Graciela Chamorro, “De señores y vasallos: Rangos sociales en la lengua guarani misionera,” in En el corazón de América del Sur: Antropología, arqueología, historia, ed. Lorena I. Córdoba et al., vol. 2 (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Museo de Historia UAGRM, 2015).

154  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

32.  In Guarani, there is a phonological difference between sound v (written b in the seventeenth century) and mb: mboja means to “bring close.” 33.  Links with previous materials produced in lingua geral from the coast of Brazil have been traced for the religious concepts but not for the political ones. See Angélica Otazú Melgarejo, Práctica y semántica en la evangelización de los guaraníes del Paraguay (S. SVI–XVIII) (Asunción: Centro de Estudios Paraguayos “Antonio Guasch,” 2006), 54–69. 34. Chamorro, Decir el cuerpo; Antonio Caballos, Etnografía guaraní según el “Tesoro de la lengua guaraní” de Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (Asunción: CEPAG, 2013). 35.  We would like to thank Bartomeu Melià for his transliteration and Ruth Monserrat for the digital copy of the microfilm from the Biblioteca Nacional de Río de Janeiro (I-29-1-34). For paleography and transliteration, see Cabildo de San Ignacio del Ypaumbucu, “Respuesta que dieron los Yndios a las Reales Provisiones,” 1630, uploaded April 2006, LANGAS project, http: //langas.cnrs.fr/#/consulter_document/extraits/109. 36. Montoya, Tesoro, 239–40: “astuto, mañoso. Vocablo con que honran sus hechiceros universalmente, y asi lo aplicaron a los Españoles, y muy impropiamente al nombre cristiano, y a cosas benditas, y asi no usamos de él en estos sentidos.” 37. Montoya, Tesoro, 624. 38.  Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua española, [1611] 1674, 203, Fondo Antiguo, http://fondosdigitales.us.es/fondos/libros/765/16/tesoro-de -la-lengua-castellana-o-espanola/. 39. Montoya, Tesoro, 600. 40. Ibid. 41.  Ibid., 338. 42.  It is difficult to say if it is a suffix, a noun, or a postposition: for instance, kambuchi po, “the contents of the pot”; Che kane’õ po aguyjei jei, “from my work I still take advantage”; Ndipóri che róga, “my house is empty” (Montoya, Tesoro, 431–32). 43.  Ruiz de Montoya explains poro- and mboro- as being the same (ibid., 445–46); Pablo Restivo explains mboro- as a more absolute form of poro(Arte, 46). 44. On the Brazilian coast, mburuvicha is usually written moruvixa, strengthening my hypothesis. At first, when the relationship between Indians and Europeans was established as an alliance, it was an equivalent for “king.” See Capucine Boidin, “Mots guarani du pouvoir, pouvoir des mots guarani (XVI–XIX),” habilitation, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, 2017. 45.  Pierre Clastres, La société contre l’etat (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974); Hélène Clastres, La terre sans mal: Le prophétisme tupi-guarani (Paris: Editions

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   155

du Seuil, 1975); Carlos Fausto, “Fragmentos de historia e cultura tupinamba, da etnologia como instrumento critico de conhecimento etno-histórico,” in Carneiro da Cunha and Salzano, História dos índios, 381–96; Chamorro, Kurusu ñe’ëngatu; Wilde, Religión y poder, 29. 46.  Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiritual hecha por los religiosos de la compañía de Jesus, en las provincias del Paraguay, Parana, Uruguay y Tape (Madrid: Imprenta del Reyno, 1639), 13, https://archive.org/stream/conquistae spiri00montgoog/conquistaespiri00montgoog_djvu.txt. 47.  Antonio Ruíz de Montoya, Vocabulario de la lengua guarani (1640), ed. Bartomeu Melià and Antonio Caballos (Asunción: Centro de Estudios Paraguayos Antonio Guasch, 2002), 236. 48. Montoya, Tesoro, 255. 49.  Guarani societies are generally described as being uxorilocal and practicing bride service (a man goes to his wife’s family and serves his father- and mother-in-law). Nevertheless, leaders tried to escape this service, marrying their sisters’ daughters, having many wives, and keeping their own sons and sons-in-law with them. 50. Wilde, Religión y poder, 100. 51. Montoya, Tesoro, 624. 52. Ibid. 53.  Original translation, possibly by Ruiz de Montoya: “Llevan cada día nuestros hermanos, hijos y vasallos a Maracayú, lugar donde se morían y acababan todos.” 54.  Oliveira, “Uma etnologia.” 55.  Guillermo Wilde, “Adaptaciones y apropiaciones en una cultura textual de frontera: Impresos misionales del Paraguay jesuítico,” Revista História UNISINOS 18, no. 2 (2014): 270–86. 56.  The concept of acrolect in sociolinguistics comes from creole studies. I use it here in order to describe the high written standard of Guarani fixed within the missions, as opposed to more creolized forms of Guarani that could be called mesolect and basilect. The first definition of acrolect was given in William Stewart, “Urban Negro Speech: Sociolinguistic Factors Affecting English Teaching,” in Social Dialects and Language Learning, ed. Roger Shuy, A. Davis, and Robert Hogan (Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1965), 10–18. 57.  Kuatia Ymaguare (PeKY) is a project led by linguists from Kiel University (Harald Thun and Franz Obermeier) that includes Angélica Otazú Melgarejo, Martín Ramírez Machuca, and Eduardo Neumann (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul/Porto Alegre). Their aim is to gather and publish nonreligious documentation.

156  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

58.  Harald Thun, “La hispanización del guaraní jesuítico en ‘lo espiritual’ y en ‘lo temporal,’” in Geschichte und Aktualität der Deutschsprachigen GuaraniPhilologie: Akten der Guarani-Tagung in Kiel und Berlin, 25.–27. Mai 2000, ed. Wolf Dietrich and Haralambos Symeonidis (Munster: LIT, 2008), 141–69. Melià had already noted that not all Jesuits were perfect grammarians and knew the “principios de esta lengua.” Melià, Lengua guarani en el Paraguay colonial, 176–79. 59. Leonardo Cerno and Franz Obermeier, “Nuevos aportes de la lingüística para la investigación de documentos en guarani de la época colonial, siglo 18,” Folia Histórica del Nordeste, no. 21 (2013): 33–56, 42. 60.  Carolina Rodriguez-Alcala, “L’exemple dans les grammaires jésuitiques du guarani,” Langages 166, no. 2 (September 12, 2007): 112–26. 61.  Silvio Liuzzi, linguist, also reedited Antonio Ruiz de Montoya’s work and particularly Pablo Restivo’s Gramática guarani jesuitico (Ituzaingo, Argentina: Enciclopedia de Misiones, 1996). See also Silvio Liuzzi, “Temps et aspect en guarani” (thèse de 3e cycle, Université Paris-Sorbonne, 1987). 62. The 1737 manuscript copy has been analyzed by Manfred Ring­ macher, “‘La conquista espiritual del Paraguay’ en guarani clásico como objeto de conquista filológica,” in Guaraní y mawetí-tupí-guaraní: Estudios históricos y descriptivos sobre una familia lingüística de América del Sur, ed. Wolf Dietrich and Haralambos Symeonidis (Berlin: LIT, 2006), 223–39. The 1754 manuscript was published with a Portuguese translation in 1879 by Dr. Baptista Caetano de Almeida Nogueira, Annaes da bibliotheca do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1878), vol. 6. Manfred Ringmacher is preparing an edition comparing existing copies. 63.  Until now, we have not been able to find a Spanish original version from which it could have been translated. It remains entirely untranslated, for its lexicon and syntax are quite different from other texts. Guillermo Wilde and Capucine Boidin recently identified two new devotional manuscripts. The total corpus amounts to about six thousand pages. 64.  Nicolas Yapuguay, Explicación de el catechismo en lengua guarani por Nicolás Yapuguai con direccion del P. Paulo Restivo de la compañía de Jesus (Pueblo de S. Maria la Mayor, 1724) (copy from the British Museum), and Sermones y ejemplos en lengua guarani por Nicolás Yapuguay con direction de un religioso de la compañía de Iesus, facsimile ed. of the 1727 edition (Buenos Aires: Editorial Guarania, 1953). This 1953 edition is not complete. 65.  Diario hecho por un indio de lo que sucedió en el segundo desalojamiento de los portugueses [de la Colonia de Sacramento] en 10 de septiembre de 1704 [hasta el 18 de marzo de 1705], manuscript given by Alejandro Larguía, from Posadas, to Bartomeu Melià. See Bartomeu Melià, “Escritos guaranies como fuentes

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   157

documentales de la historia paraguaya,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, April 5, 2006, http://nuevomundo.revues.org/2193. A complete translation has been done in Harald Thun, Leonardo Cerno, and Franz Obermeier, eds., Guarinihape Tecocue: Lo que pasó en la guerra (1704–1705). Memoria anónima en guaraní, critical ed., Fontes Americanae (Kiel: Westensee, 2015). 66.  See Cecilia Adoue, Mickaël Orantin, and Capucine Boidin, “Diálogos en guaraní, un manuscrit inédit des réductions jésuites du Paraguay (XVIIIe siècle),” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, December 1, 2015, https://nuevomundo .revues.org/68665. 67.  One manuscript is at the Welcome Library (YHSA.43) and the other, slightly different and more complete, at the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE, MSS/22992). Angélica Otazú is working on a translation. See Angélica Otazú Melgarejo, “Contribución a la medicina natural: Pohã Ñana, un manuscrito inédito en guarani (Paraguay, S. XVIII),” Corpus: Archivos Virtuales de la Alteridad Americana 4, no. 2 (December 27, 2014), https://corpusarchivos .revues.org/1301. 68. Wilde, Religión y poder, 69. 69.  Kazuhisa Takeda, “Cambio y continuidad del liderazgo indígena en el cacicazgo y en la milicia de las misiones jesuíticas: Análisis cualitativo de las listas de indios guaraníes,” Tellus 12, no. 23 (2012): 59–79. 70.  As of August 2013, the LANGAS database had 119 bibliographical references, 89 digitized documents, and 24 transcriptions without originals, in collaboration with Bartomeu Melià and Barbara Ganson. By December 2016, the corpus, with the help of Cecilia Adoue, Cesar Pereira, and Christian Salinas, reached 248 references, 178 digitized documents, and 5 transcriptions without originals. LANGAS has published 61 transcriptions and transliterations of this corpus online. We keep two aims in mind: to facilitate linguistic and historical research and to make this corpus visible and useful for modern Guarani speakers. 71.  Of the 180 digitized documents, 70 appear with original translation or  abstract in Spanish. A detailed analysis of the translations has not been done yet. 72.  Marcos Augusto Morínigo offered a first list and description of the documents without giving precise locations in “Sobre los cabildos indígenas de las misiones,” Revista de la Academia de Entre Ríos 1 (1946): 29–37, and “Documentos en guaraní de cabildos indígenas,” in Raíz y destino del guaraní, ed. ­Fernando B. Morínigo, Biblioteca Paraguaya de Antropología 8 (Asunción: Universidad Católica “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción,” 1990), 141–56. ­Bra­nislava Susnik offered some references and reproductions of documents in El indio colonial del Paraguay: Los trece pueblos guaraníes de las misiones

158  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

­(1767–1803), 3 vols. (Asunción: Museo Etnográfico “Andrés Barbero,” 1966), vol. 2. Roberto Romero reproduced some documents, translating and commenting on them in Protaganismo [sic] histórico del idioma guaraní, 2nd ed. (Asunción: Arte Final, División Libros, 1998). His aim was to legitimize the potential official use of Guarani today. Harald Thun traces linguistic changes over time: “Evolución de la escripturalidad entre los indígenas guaranies,” in I Simposio Antonio Tovar sobre las lenguas amerindias (Valladolid: Interuniversitario de Estudios de Iberoamérica y Portugal, 2003), 9–24, and “A dos mil la uva, a mil la limón: Historia, función y extensión, de los artículos definidos del castellano en el guaraní jesuítico y paraguayo,” in Dietrich and Symeonidis, Guaraní y mawetí-tupí-­guarani, 357–414. Barbara Ganson offers some translations in Guarani under Spanish Rule in order to exemplify indigenous agency. Martín Ramírez Machuca offers a precise transcription and translation of various documents in order to reconstruct a contemporary judicial vocabulary in El guaranihablante ante la justicia: De los primeros documentos hacia una terminología jurídica en guaraní (Kiel: Westensee, 2007). See also Bartomeu Melià, “La lengua guarani dependiente en tiempos de Independencia en Paraguay,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 97, no. 2 (December 20, 2011): 153–74. 73.  See the following works by Eduardo Neumann: “‘Mientras volaban correos por los pueblos’: Autogoverno e práticas letradas nas missões guarani— século XVII,” Horizontes Antropológicos 10, no. 22 (December 2004): 93–119, “Prácticas letradas guaranies en las reducciones del Paraguay (siglos XVII y XVIII),” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos / Nouveaux mondes mondes nouveaux / Novo Mundo Mundos Novos / New World New Worlds, February 7, 2005, https: //nuevomundo.revues.org/322, “De letra de índios: Cultura escrita e memória indígena nas reduções guaranis do paraguai,” Varia História, no. 41 (2009): 177– 96, “De la conquista espiritual a la conquista del alfabeto: La escritura indígena en las reducciones del Paraguay (siglos XVII–XVIII),” in Tradición, escritura y patrimonialización, ed. Anne Gaël Bilhaut and Silvia Macedo (Quito: Abya Yala, 2012), 43–76, and Letra de indios. 74.  Archivo Histórico Nacional de Madrid, Clero Jesuitas, legajo 120, 1, 31–38. 75.  The four letters in Guarani (from San Ignacio Guasu, Nuestra Señora de Fe, Santiago, and Santa Rosa) are held at the Biblioteca del Museo Mitre, 1758–1785 Colección de documentos en idioma guaraní correspondientes a los cabildos indígenas de las misiones jesuíticas del Uruguay: Manuscritos (oficios, cartas, listas). The Spanish translation is in the same archive but another dossier: Documentos Coloniales, ARM B.C.18, P.27, N° de orden 32: 1761, “Oficios en guaraní al Gobernador Pedro Cevallos enviados por diversos pueblos de las misiones.”

Toward a Guarani Semantic History   159

76. Those letters also show a very precise and powerful memory of past conflicts: Eduardo S. Neumann, “Documentos escritos por indígenas: As duas mensagens de Hilário Yrama (1757),” Corpus: Archivos Virtuales de la Alteridad Americana 3, no. 1 ( June 15, 2013), http://corpusarchivos.revues.org/346. 77.  Museo Mitre, Sección Archivo, Documentos Coloniales. 78.  Cesar Pereira sent us several letters for this period he found during his PhD research in the Archive of Buenos Aires (May 2016). As many of them are monolingual, they have yet to be analyzed. 79.  Our statements can be verified using our database and browser at langas.cnrs.fr. 80.  Real Cédula, Carlos III, May 10, 1770, “Para que en los Reinos de Indias, Filipinas y adyacentes, se observen los medios para conseguir que se destierren los diferentes idiomas que se usan en aquellos dominios y solo se hable el castellano” (Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Gobierno: Indiferente General, legajo 540). For Mexico, see, for instance, Morris, “Language in ­Service.” 81.  We hardly find written Guarani documents from 1832 to 1867. When the Jesuit missions decayed after the expulsion of the Company of Jesus (1767) and their oldest literate indigenous died, this written tradition was submerged. Nonetheless, since in 1867 written journals were edited in Guarani, we can suppose that a kind of undiscovered savoir faire was transmitted. 82.  We would like to thank Jean Paul Duviols, who mentioned to us the existence of a bilingual Guarani/Spanish Carta que el illustrísimo señor D. Fr. Joseph Antonio de San Alberto, arzobispo de la Plata, escribió à los indios infieles chirihuanos, published in 1788 by la Real Imprenta de los niños expositos in Buenos Aires. Open Library, uploaded April 6, 2013, https://openlibrary.org /books/OL25267124M/Carta_que_el_illustrisimo_señor_D._Fr._Joseph_ Antonio_de_San_Alberto_arzobispo_de_la_Plata_escribiò_; transliteration at LANGAS project, http://langas.cnrs.fr/#/consulter_document/extraits/101. 83. Susnik, Indio colonial del Paraguay, 105. 84. Manuel Belgrano, Documentos en guarani y español, Biblioteca del Museo Mitre en Buenos Aires, Nro. de Registro: 4490, 19 hojas manuscritas, 33 cm, 1810. Deficient transcriptions and facsimile, with scarce comments, can be found in Marcos Augusto Morínigo, Para la historia del español en la Argentina: Las cartas guaraníes del General Belgrano (Buenos Aires: Academia Argentina de Letras, 1969), and Roberto Romero, Antecedentes de la independencia paraguaya: Las proclamas castellano-guaraní del general Belgrano (Asuncion: Intento, 1988). 85.  See Capucine Boidin, “Textos de la modernidad política en guarani (1810–1813),” Corpus: Archivos Virtuales de la Alteridad Americana 4, no. 2 (December 27, 2014), https://corpusarchivos.revues.org/1322.

160  capucine boidin and angélica otazú melgarejo

86.  “Ratificacion del decreto que libertó a los Indígenas del tributo, abo­ lición de la mita, encomiendas, etc.,” reproduced in Comisión honoraria de reducciones de Indios, Ministerio del Interior, Argentina, 1935, 12–15. 87. Romero, Protaganismo [sic] histórico, 89. 88.  Significantly too, those words cannot be found in Montoya’s Tesoro, which is known to be closer to its contemporary spoken reality. In contrast, Belgrano texts and the cabildo corpus do not use those neologisms. 89.  Montoya, in his Vocabulario, proposed translating governor as “capitã guasu.” Afterwards we find capitã guasu in an anonymous manuscript from the Biblioteca del Museo Mitre, “Phrases selectas, y modos de hablar escogidos y usados en la lengua guaraní” (1687, 19 [for adalid], 371 [for governor]). 90.  In 1753, capitán is applied to Jesus and in 1759 and 1761 to military positions; in 1768 and 1775, capitán general is used for the governor and in 1776, 1782, and 1783 for the viceroy. 91.  Worthy of mention too is an official program communicated to us by Ignacio Telesca: Tetapi moatiro jhagua petei po ro’ijho aya: Plan Quinquenal del General de división Presidente de la Republica del Paraguay Don Higinio Morínigo, trans. Gumersindo Ayala (Asunción: Imprenta nacional, 1944). 92.  See Facsimiles del Cacique Lambare y de Cabichui, www.staff.uni -mainz.de/lustig/Guarani/. Three papers by Wolf Lustig, Christine Pic-­ Gillard, and Herib Caballero Campos on this war press are published in Les guerres du Paraguay aux XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Nicolas Richard, Luc Capdevila, and Capucine Boidin-Caravias (Paris: CoLibris, 2007). 93.  Facsimiles del Cacique Lambare y de Cabichui, www.staff.uni-mainz .de/lustig/guarani/cacique/facs/welcome.html. 94.  Gérald Taylor, Camac, camay y camasca y otros ensayos sobre Huarochirí y Yauyos (Lima: Institut français d’études andines, 2000), 19–34.

CHAPTER 5

Quechua-Language Government Propaganda in 1920s Peru ALAN DURSTON

The dictatorship of Augusto B. Leguía (1919–30) is considered a watershed in modern Peruvian history. Leguía greatly enhanced the power of the central government, among other things by defining the welfare of the indigenous population as a central concern of the state. Less attention has been paid to the fact that in its final years the regime published Quechua versions of speeches by Leguía and high-ranking government officials. This chapter examines the leguiista literature in Quechua and the contexts in which it was produced. In particular, it tries to explain why Quechua suddenly, and briefly, became a language of state in the late 1920s. Quechua speakers constituted a majority of Peru’s population in the early twentieth century, and Quechua was spoken universally in much of the southern highlands, but it had a very limited presence in Lima and other rapidly developing coastal areas.1 Monolingual Quechua speakers were generally assumed to be politically passive or incapable of political participation (Spanish literacy was a requirement for voting). While there is an important body of Quechua political literature from nineteenth-century Peru, most of it dates from the Independence Wars 161

162  alan durston

of the 1810s and ’20s. Peru’s first head of state, José de San Martin (1821– 22), published Quechua fliers to win over the population of the highlands, then in royalist hands, but very little political literature in Quechua is known from the century that separates Leguía from San Martín.2 LEG UÍ A A N D H IS QU E C H UA-L A N GUAGE P ROPAGA N DA

The Oncenio, as the 1919–30 period is known in Peruvian historiography, began with a bloodless coup that brought to an end a period of oligarchic rule known as the Aristocratic Republic (1895–1919). Leguía had been a prominent member of the dominant party of this period, the Partido Civil, and had even served a term as president (1908–12). Oligarchic stability was undermined in the 1910s by peasant and worker mobilization and discontent among urban middle sectors. Leguía became one of the most successful dictators in Peru’s history by dismantling the existing political elite, co-opting and repressing reformist causes, and strengthening the central government. He created a national police force and a central bank and carried out a massive road-building campaign using forced indigenous labor. The Leguía regime claimed to be constructing a Patria Nueva, a Peru that broke with its oligarchic past to become more united and truer to its historical roots.3 Especially in the regime’s final years, the cult of the leader reached extraordinary levels. The dean of Peruvian historians, Jorge Basadre, speaks of the “apotheosis” of Leguía, a term actually used by the leguiistas themselves.4 This “apotheosis,” added to Leguía’s nationalist discourse and some corporatist tendencies, makes him reminiscent of the populist leaders that emerged in many Latin American countries in the 1930s and ’40s. However, he differed from figures like Juan Domingo Perón or Lázaro Cárdenas in that he did not undertake significant socioeconomic reforms and maintained close ties to US ­capital. A key aspect of the Leguía regime was its espousal of indigenismo, and it may be useful to discuss what this means. Notwithstanding the differences between left- and right-wing variants of indigenismo, certain generalizations can be made. The indigenismo of the first half of the twentieth century was characterized not just by proindigenous advocacy and a glorification of the indigenous past (both long-standing discourses) but also by two additional convictions that were more novel: (1) living indigenous people preserved much of the greatness of the ancient civiliza-

Quechua-Language Government Propaganda in 1920s Peru   163

tions in their racial essence, and (2) they consequently had the potential to make a fundamental contribution to national progress (however it was conceived). The indigenista movement was also characterized by the belief that tutelage by nonindigenous intellectuals (the indigenistas themselves) was necessary for this potential to be realized. Indigenismo became a key conduit of state power in some Latin American countries. Among other things, it was useful for undermining regional elites and strongmen and for enhancing the presence of the state among indigenous peasantries. “State indigenismo” is generally associated with postrevolutionary Mexico, but it was also present in Peru, particularly during the Oncenio.5 Leguía created subministerial offices of indigenous affairs and indigenous education, both of which continued to function into the postwar period. Indigenous communities were recognized and protected as land-holding entities in the 1920 constitution, which was partly modeled on Mexico’s constitution of 1917.6 Leguía, a master of political stagecraft, associated himself in very visible, if ambiguous, ways with indigenous/­ indigenista symbolism. He sponsored Andean folk festivals and the construction of monuments with pre-Hispanic motifs in Lima.7 Julio Cotler notes in his classic study of Peruvian state building that “in order to underline the importance his government granted to the indigenous sector, Leguía used the title of Viracocha, donned indigenous symbols of authority, and even gave speeches in Quechua, a language he did not know.”8 Cotler does not provide a source for Leguía’s Quechua speechmaking; he may have been following Basadre, who mentions a speech to a delegation from Azángaro in February 1928 in which Leguía said “a few words” in Quechua.9 Leguía would later apologize for not knowing Quechua in a short bilingual proclamation, excusing himself with the claim that Quechua can be learned only during childhood.10 The earliest example of leguiista propaganda in Quechua comes, somewhat unexpectedly, from Chachapoyas, a town in a remote area of the northern Peruvian highlands that was the capital of the Department of Amazonas. In April 1928 a certain F. M. Pizarro published a pamphlet with a short bilingual history of Peru focusing on the president’s achievements.11 Pizarro refers to Quechua as the national language and claims to be writing for an indigenous audience, his purpose being to inform them of all that Leguía has achieved on their behalf. However, Pizarro says nothing about Leguía’s indigenista policies and instead discusses road building, as well as legislation that mostly affected the urban middle

164  alan durston

classes. The Quechua text presents many features unique to the distinctive and little-known variety of Quechua spoken in Chachapoyas, but it is barely intelligible because it is a word-for-word translation of the Spanish original. In 1929 Pizarro published a Quechua grammar in Lima, described by linguist Gerald Taylor as a bibliographical curiosity that indiscriminately mixes Chachapoyas Quechua with the far better documented southern varieties.12 There is no evidence that Pizarro’s history of Peru was commissioned by the government—it seems instead to have been a spontaneous tribute. Although his identity is uncertain, he was probably a member of the Pizarro casta, an elite extended family that had dominated Chachapoyas politics until 1923–24, when Senator Pablo M. Pizarro led an unsuccessful rebellion against Leguía.13 Pizarro is unlikely to have been a Quechua speaker, and he was certainly no linguist.14 His Quechua publications seem to reflect a disingenuous effort to jump on the indigenista bandwagon and curry favor with Leguía. Pizarro’s work is an outlier with respect to official leguiista Quechua texts, which were written in Southern (particularly Cuzco) Quechua by more-or-less competent translators, but its very implausibility speaks to the political capital that had become attached to the “national language.” In late 1928 the government published a pamphlet with speeches from the festivities for the first Día del Camino, a new holiday on October 5th that was created to celebrate road building.15 Loose Quechua translations of speeches by Leguía and the minister of development were provided by Darío F. Eguren de Larrea, a journalist and illustrator from Cuzco who was also responsible for the cover image, which depicts an indigenous man working on a road. The pamphlet included a note in which Eguren de Larrea explained his very idiosyncratic Quechua orthography. Faustino Espinoza Navarro, another Cuzco intellectual, provided a Quechua poem that addresses Leguía as an Inka emperor. This Inkaization of Leguía was a particularly effective form of the cult of the dictator because in official rhetoric the Inka Empire provided the historical precedent for Peru’s modernization, particularly in the realm of infrastructure. In July 1929 Casimiro Gutiérrez Madueño, director of agriculture and stockbreeding in the Ministry of Development, inaugurated a boarding school in Puno for teaching agricultural and manufacturing skills to indigenous boys. A Quechua version of his speech was published that

Quechua-Language Government Propaganda in 1920s Peru   165

same day in a local paper and was also printed as a flier. In January 1930 a very different Quechua version of the same speech was published in El Indio, a government indigenista periodical, and was also circulated as a flier.16 The two versions differ in both content and style—while the first employs a purist literary register derived from Cuzco’s tradition of Inka historical plays that abounded in archaic or erudite terms, the second could be described as more demotic (see below). In January 1930 Leguía spoke to an Indian delegation in the government palace telling them not to seek revenge for the abuse and exploitation they suffered at the hands of the gamonales (a peculiarly Peruvian term for highland rural strongmen) and to rely instead on government protection. Local officials were ordered to ensure wide distribution of this speech among the indigenous population. The subprefect of Cuzco, Luis F. Seminario, had a flier printed with the original speech accompanied by a Quechua translation, and ten thousand copies were allegedly distributed.17 At around the same time, a different Quechua version by Darío Eguren de Larrea was published in La Prensa, a major Lima daily, and in El Indio. Eguren de Larrea once again included a note on his Quechua orthography.18 In this case, however, the two versions cannot be clearly distinguished as “demotic” and “literary.” It is likely that the corpus described here is only the tip of the iceberg. It is quite diverse in stylistic, orthographic, and dialectological terms, reflecting the practices of several different translators. This, added to the different forms in which the texts were published, holds some clues as to the intended audience. In principle, the purpose of publishing Quechua translations of presidential speeches was to reach monolinguals. Some editions, however, were clearly designed for Leguía to be seen by newspaper-reading urbanites as communicating directly with the indigenous population, thus assuaging indigenista sentiments and enhancing the president’s aura of power. The translation of his January 1930 anti-gamonal speech is headlined as follows: “President Leguía Speaks Directly to the Soul of Five Million Indians Who Hope to Be Redeemed by Him.” On the other hand, the fact that a different version of this speech was printed on ten thousand fliers indicates that the effect p ­ ursued was not merely symbolic. In this case and that of the inauguration speech for the Puno boarding school different translations were commissioned for different media, which suggests that the campaign sought to reach both the urban middle class and the indigenous peasantry.

166  alan durston

T HE CHA N GIN G FAC E OF L EGU IISTA IN D IGEN IS M O

Leguía’s indigenismo tends to be associated with the 1919–23 period, during which the regime embraced dissident intellectuals like Hilde­ brando Castro Pozo and José Antonio Encinas. Leguía is thought to have distanced himself from indigenismo as a result of a combination of factors that came together in 1923. Indigenous demands for land and legal rights were resulting in violent confrontations in the southern highlands, and the regime ultimately sided with local elites. In 1923 there was also an important split within leguiismo when it became clear that Leguía was not going to step down at the end of his term, resulting in the exile of the key figures in government indigenismo.19 However, a new cadre of pro-Leguía indigenistas appeared at this point under the leadership of José Angel Escalante, a Cuzqueño politician and intellectual. Escalante was a congressman and owner of one of Cuzco’s main newspapers, El Comercio, who had openly opposed Leguía during the first phase of the Oncenio. In 1923 he resolved his differences with the regime, striking a deal with Leguía that included government support for the scholarly endeavors of Cuzco’s leading intellectuals, among them later-communist José Uriel García.20 The character of the new state indigenismo became more clearly visible in 1927, when the government mounted an offensive against leftwing indigenistas. The tone was set in Escalante’s famous article “Nosotros los indios,” which attacked José Carlos Mariátegui and other intellectuals associated with the journal Amauta for being fake friends of the Indians and “Bolshevists” who did not understand the economically liberal inclinations of the Indian race. Escalante claimed that the interests of the Indians were being looked after very effectively by the Leguía government, which included in its ranks many “Indians,” among whom he mentioned the archaeologist Julio C. Tello, a congressman and Leguía protégé.21 In mid-1927 a series of repressive acts took place. The government banned the Comité Pro-Derecho Indígena Tahuantinsuyo (CPDIT), an indigenous rights organization that had operated at national, regional, and local levels with government support.22 The Universidad Popular González Prada, an open university system aimed at urban workers and organized by the founder of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, was also closed.

Quechua-Language Government Propaganda in 1920s Peru   167

Finally, several prominent intellectuals associated with Amauta were briefly imprisoned in response to an alleged communist conspiracy.23 In the years following the 1927 repression we find a clear government effort to co-opt and “crowd out” indigenista discourse. The Patronato de la Raza Indígena, a conservative indigenous advocacy institution in which the church had a prominent role, received renewed impetus as a substitute for the CPDIT, as did the Office of Indigenous Affairs, where the registration of community lands peaked in 1928.24 An Office of Indigenous Education was created in June 1929 under the direction of José Rafael Pareja, a Cuzqueño and Escalante protégé, and in March 1930, a few months before Leguía’s fall, Escalante was made minister of justice and education. It was under the direction of Pareja and Escalante that the first official efforts to incorporate Quechua into the educational system were made.25 In late 1929 the government started publishing El Indio, a lavishly illustrated magazine that served as a mouthpiece for government indigenismo and a response to Amauta. The January 1930 speech that was translated into Quechua and numerous articles in El Indio carried the same message: the gamonales were still around, but Indians could obtain protection by approaching the Office of Indigenous Affairs or, better yet, Leguía himself. The doors of the presidential palace were allegedly open to indigenous petitioners, who were often featured in the pages of El Indio, complete with Quechua dialogue.26 Eguren de Larrea, whom we might consider Leguía’s official Quechuist, was part of the Escalante circle. He left Cuzco in his youth for Chile and Argentina, and in the 1910s and early ’20s he achieved some success as a writer and illustrator, but indigenous themes were by no means prominent in his work.27 In the late 1920s he became a triple threat—writer, illustrator, and Quechua translator—at the service of ­official indigenismo, a transformation that was probably provoked by his connections to Escalante and the government patronage he received through him. The Día del Camino pamphlet featured both his skill as an artist and his Quechua expertise, and El Indio published his translation of Leguía’s anti-gamonal speech and a column he wrote about indigenous petitioners at the presidential palace entitled “Charlas palatinas.”28 He was a somewhat surprising choice as a mouthpiece of government indigenismo given his lack of credentials aside from being from Cuzco and knowing Quechua, but he had the advantage of an established reputation among the newspaper- and magazine-reading public.

168  alan durston

QUE CH UA L IT ER ACY AN D P OL ITIC S IN E A R LY T W E N T IE T H -C EN T U RY P E RU

In 1930 the leftist author Abelardo Solís found it necessary to speak out in the pages of Amauta against the “absurd pedantry” of assigning Quechua a major role in the development of a national culture. He saw evidence of this pedantry in the prominence that debates over the reform of Quechua orthography had attained in the national press.29 Not long after­wards, Moisés Saenz, a Mexican indigenista and an important promoter of indigenous-language education, faulted his Peruvian counterparts for their excessive dedication to Quechua and for their desire to “cultivate” as opposed to merely preserving it. As Saenz noted, Quechua was not just the language of the Indians, it was the language of the highlands, and many highland intellectuals dreamed of a Quechua ­resurgence.30 The 1920s were a high point for Quechua’s status as a vehicle and emblem of regional and national identities. For many highland intel­ lectuals, writing in and about Quechua served to establish their role as cultural arbiters, challenging Lima’s dominance. Quechua letters were also a key arena of indigenista cultural production, paralleling and complementing performance arts (music, dance, and theater) and Spanish-­ language literature. The Cuzco intelligentsia had been writing and performing Quechua dramas set in Inka times since the turn of the century.31 In the 1920s more contemporary topics were being treated by playwrights in Puno and Ayacucho, and leading literary journals were publishing Quechua poetry.32 Articles on Quechua orthography were appearing in Peru’s main newspapers, where a debate developed between reformers who were trying to establish a more “scientific,” phonological alphabet that included unfamiliar letters like “k” and “w” and those who were loyal to a written tradition that used a Spanish-based Quechua orthography dating back to the sixteenth century.33 In parallel with the literary renaissance that was developing among the bilingual elites of the highlands, radical intellectuals and activists were increasingly interested in the potential of written Quechua for the education and mobilization of the monolingual peasantry. Fiona Wilson proposes using the term radical in the context of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Peru “as a shorthand way to describe a movement or

Quechua-Language Government Propaganda in 1920s Peru   169

party whose political philosophy involved an attack on the power and privilege of the established, white-mestizo, propertied class,” adding that “an older radical politics of gradualist reform was supplanted in the late nineteenth century by more belligerent radical protagonists inspired by European anarchism and socialism, who were drawn to revolutionary ideas.”34 The pioneers of radical uses of Quechua were two important but little-known intellectuals and activists: Adolfo Vienrich (1867–1908), from Tarma in the department of Junín, and Francisco Chukiwanka Ayulo (1877–1957), from the Puno area. Both were university-educated professionals of some standing in local society who became followers of the dean of Peruvian radicalism, Manuel González Prada, and his peculiar brand of anarchist-influenced, proworker, propeasant, and anticentralist politics.35 In 1904 Vienrich published a bilingual periodical in Spanish and the local variety of Quechua entitled Aurora/Pacha Huarai. The two known issues, discovered and published in facsimile by Gonzalo Espino Relucé, do not contain explicit references to local or national politics, but the editorials exhort the “sons of the Inkas” to take pride in their language and become literate. Contents include traditional Quechua animal stories, a fable from Plutarch illustrating the importance of education for achieving social harmony, and a piece about human equality.36 In 1914, Francisco Chukiwanka Ayulo published a phonetic alphabet for Quechua and Aymara that was intended to facilitate the acquisition of literacy by Indians and that he would continue to champion for decades. Quechua and Aymara literacy was to lead to a revolutionary upsurge in indigenous culture and to the emergence of a distinctive literature of indigenous authorship.37 Around this time Chukiwanka Ayulo became a collaborator of Teodomiro Gutiérrez Cuevas, an army major who in 1913 was sent by the short-lived reformist government of Guillermo Billinghurst (1912–14) to investigate abuses against indigenous peasants in the Puno area. Gutiérrez Cuevas is best known as Rumi Maqui (Quechua for “hand of stone”), the nom de guerre under which he led an abortive indigenous rebellion in 1915.38 On arriving in Puno in 1913, Gutiérrez Cuevas published a Quechua flier (asking Indians to come forward with their grievances) that was almost certainly the work of Chukiwanka Ayulo.39 The efforts of Vienrich and Chukiwanka Ayulo to promote Quechua literacy and Quechua-language education were complemented by two key movements of the 1910s: Protestantism and anarcho-­syndicalism.

170  alan durston

American and British missionaries wanted Indians to read the Quechua Bibles they were publishing, but they also saw Quechua literacy as a key piece in a broader program of indigenous “emancipation” and even suggested that biblical texts in Quechua be used as literacy primers.40 In the mid-1910s the Evangelical journal El Heraldo published hymns and Bible texts and commentaries in Quechua. The editors were on good terms with Chukiwanka Ayulo and experimented with his Quechua orthography to see if it was agreeable to their readers.41 The reasons for anarchosyndicalist interest in Quechua literacy are less evident. The Peruvian brand of anarchism that González Prada helped launch was characterized by its attentiveness to indigenous and rural issues. Peru’s industrial working class was tiny, and Peruvian anarchists identified key anarchist values in Inka and contemporary Andean society.42 Accordingly, they showed a keen interest in Quechua as an educational medium. Following the proposals of Spanish anarchist and educator Francisco Ferrer Guardia, they attributed special importance to the “rationalist” (secular and scientific) education of the working class as a prior step to their organization and mobilization.43 In 1912 Manuel Caracciolo Lévano, one of the founders of Peruvian anarcho-syndicalism, called for a campaign to teach indigenous-language literacy to Indians as a necessary step toward rationalist education.44 In the 1920s the radical program of galvanizing the indigenous peasantry through Quechua literacy and Quechua-language political texts was implemented on a large scale by the CPDIT, which attracted both anarcho-syndicalists and radical indigenistas like Chukiwanka Ayulo. CPDIT representatives arrested in Puno in 1921 were found to be distributing Quechua literacy primers.45 Another group of CPDIT representatives arrested in Aymaraes in 1926 were distributing a Quechua flier considered subversive by the authorities, along with anarchist periodicals from Argentina. The flier had been printed by the anarcho-­syndicalist Peruvian Workers Federation (Federación Obrera Local or FOL) and advocated solidarity between workers and Indians (or, as they put it, between indigenous and coastal workers). The flier contains a bilingual version of a 1922 law banning the practice of requiring Indians to provide unpaid labor to local authorities and a Quechua translation of the workers’ hymn “The Internationale.”46 It was probably published as part of a campaign against the use of forced indigenous labor in Leguía’s roadbuilding campaign in which the FOL participated.47 In these and other

Quechua-Language Government Propaganda in 1920s Peru   171

cases the delegates were released on government orders because the CPDIT had official backing, but they lost this support after the organization was banned in 1927.48 The body of radical political literature in Quechua that has survived from this period is hardly abundant, but such publications (physically ephemeral and politically subversive) must have had a very low rate of survival. There is no way of quantifying the effect that these efforts to spread Quechua literacy among the indigenous peasantry might have had, but there can be no doubt that literacy in general was on the rise during this period of increasing political mobilization. Exposure to and interest in written Quechua was also on the rise among bilingual middle sectors in the highlands as a result of the spread of indigenista ­regionalism. The Leguía government’s Quechua propaganda was part of the broader effort to co-opt and suppress radical indigenismo. The CPDIT had distributed Quechua fliers with political content until its suppression in 1927, and we find the government doing the same by mid-1929. However, the government’s appropriation of a radical tool kit did not extend to the promotion of Indian literacy, in Quechua or Spanish. Quechua was to be a tool of oral instruction used by teachers and officials to inculcate loyalty to the regime and an appreciation for the advantages of modern means of production and transportation. Castellanización, or Hispanicization, was not a prominent objective, and while literacy instruction in Quechua was not explicitly precluded it was sidelined. Interest centered on educational materials that did not involve Indians directly reading texts. In 1927 Congress approved a project calling for the production of phonographic recordings of lessons in Quechua to be distributed in rural schools. A competition to find the best speakers for the recordings was to be held in Cuzco in July 1929, but the project does not appear to have been carried out.49 In 1929 or 1930 the indigenista painter Camilo Blas was hired to create a series of educational posters promoting habits that were considered hallmarks of civilization, such as taking a daily bath, sleeping in beds, and using trucks rather than llamas and footpaths for transportation. Each poster featured “before and after” scenes explained by a trilingual admonition (Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara).50 The Leguía government did not distribute Quechua fliers in order to promote Quechua literacy among the peasantry, and it does not seem to have expected their addressees to read them directly. The way in which the flier containing Leguía’s anti-gamonal speech was distributed

172  alan durston

in Cuzco in early 1930 seems representative in this regard. The subprefect of the city wrote to the Ministry of the Interior asking to be reimbursed for the expense of printing ten thousand copies of the flier that were distributed to the “indigenous element,” presumably throughout a large area given the number of copies made (which could well have been exaggerated). The subprefect specified that “subaltern authorities” were ordered to explain the speech, presumably meaning district-level authorities like governors, priests, and school teachers.51 T HE LA NG UAGE OF L EGU ÍA’ S QU E C H UA P ROPAGA N DA

The core of the leguiista Quechua corpus consists of six texts: the Día del Camino speeches by Leguía and the minister of development, the inauguration speech for the Puno boarding school (two translations), and Leguía’s anti-gamonal speech (two translations). All are in forms of Southern Peruvian Quechua, primarily the Cuzco variety. There appears to be an evolution from the texts published in 1928–29 (the Día del Camino speeches and, in particular, the first version of the boarding school speech), which use a more literary and purist language replete with Inka references, to those published in early 1930 (the second version of the boarding school speech and the two versions of the anti-­ gamonal speech), which use more Hispanisms and fewer terms derived from the Inkaist tradition. This suggests a calculated effort to reach a larger ­audience. The Día del Camino speeches and the version of Leguía’s anti-­ gamonal speech that appeared in La Prensa are the work of Eguren de Larrea, while each of the remaining three texts appears to be the work of a different anonymous translator. Eguren de Larrea devised his own orthography, essentially a variant of the traditional spelling system for Cuzco Quechua that was distinguished by its use of the letter g for the uvular consonant and that he was at pains to explain in notes that ac­ companied his translations. A note to his translation of Leguía’s antigamonal speech in La Prensa states that at the president’s request he had sought to write a Quechua that would be easily understood by Indians and that he consequently used a number of Spanish loanwords as opposed to trying to find Quechua neologisms or paraphrases for them that would undermine the intelligibility of the translation. Eguren de Larrea appears to be preempting criticisms from the Cuzco Quechuist estab-

Quechua-Language Government Propaganda in 1920s Peru   173

lishment, which regarded Hispanisms as impurities that were to be avoided in writing Quechua. In spite of their diversity, some general points can be made about how key political concepts are expressed in these texts. The Quechua pamphletry of the Independence Wars provides a useful baseline, as its political vocabulary is easily plumbed with a search tool developed by the LANGAS (Langues Générales d’Amerique du Sud) project (see Boidin and Otazú Melgarejo, this volume).52 My discussion will focus on two domains: (1) the Peruvian nation and Leguía as its embodiment and (2) Peru’s Indians. The leguiista Quechua corpus is distinctive in that it consistently refers to Peru as Tawantinsuyu (the fourfold realm), a term for the Inka Empire that does not appear to have been widely used outside scholarly contexts prior to the 1920s. Its use in the leguiista propaganda is consistent with efforts to present the Patria Nueva as a restored Inka empire and Leguía himself as an Inka emperor. Eguren de Larrea’s translation of the minister of development’s Día del Camino speech addresses Leguía as the Son of the Sun, an epithet of the Inka emperor, where the Spanish original merely says señor presidente.53 Leguía could not refer to himself as an Inka emperor in his own speeches, but this restriction could be overcome by visual means: the pamphlet with his anti-gamonal speech printed for distribution in Cuzco features a stock image of an Inka opposite Peru’s coat of arms.54 A first point to be made about the way Indians are referred to in the leguiista Quechua corpus (and its Spanish originals) is that however much official indigenismo extolled the virtues of the Indians, they are generally not Inkanized.55 This treatment was reserved for Peru as a whole and for Leguía as the embodiment of the nation. There is a clear contrast here with the rhetoric of the radicals: Vienrich, Chukiwanka Ayulo, and the anarcho-syndicalist literature (e.g., the FOL’s Quechua flier) all referred to Indians as the children of the Inkas, as did many of the independence-era fliers. On the other hand, leguiista Quechua propaganda generally does not refer to Indians with the loanword indio, ­preferring instead the term runa, often in opposition to misti for the nonindigenous population.56 Runa means “person,” “human being,” but during the colonial period it also acquired a meaning approximate to “Indian.” In modern (twentieth-­century) monolingual Quechua discourse, runa is a social category constructed in opposition to misti—a loanword that is derived

174  alan durston

from m ­ estizo but that denotes elites in general and, in practice, anyone who is not runa. Quechua-speaking peasants think of themselves as runa, meaning properly socialized people who engage in reciprocal relationships with their social network and environment, as opposed to mistis, also called q’ara (naked), who do not recognize such obligations.57 Misti is barely documented in the written record prior to the 1920s (since it is a loanword, and a category of the monolingual peasantry, it was probably shunned by most Quechua writers). Runa is used with the meaning “Indian” in the independence-era literature, but some key texts, notably the proclamations to the Indians of Peru issued by Bernardo O’Higgins and José de San Martín in 1819, avoid it, addressing them instead as Inkas or children of the Inkas, or simply as compatriots (llaqtamasi).58 Their avoidance of both indio and runa in its racial sense reflects a context where independence leaders sought the active support of the indigenous population, but also a liberal rhetoric that called for national unity (see Boidin and Otazú Melgarejo, this volume, on the parallel evolution of the Guarani term ava and its uses in the independence-era literature). The runa-misti opposition fits well with official indigenismo, which rejected liberal notions of equality and instead emphasized the distinctiveness and separateness of the indigenous population. Indeed, terms conveying concepts like “compatriot” and “citizen” (llaqtamasi and llaq­ tayuq, respectively) are rare in the leguiista Quechua corpus.59 Indians were certainly meant to have rights in the Patria Nueva, but these rights were defined by a highly paternalistic legal and political regime of tutelage more reminiscent of the colonial republic of the Indians than of nineteenth-century liberalism. It is also crucial to bear in mind that ­leguiista indigenismo was developed to combat and supplant the radical indigenismo of organizations like the CPDIT, which had encouraged Indians to mobilize as workers, citizens, and heirs of the Inkas. Instead, they were urged to accept Leguía’s loving protection and the benefits of his program of authoritarian modernization. To varying degrees, the governments of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s maintained aspects of Leguía’s official indigenismo, in particular the indigenous affairs bureaucracy and indigenous education programs. However, they did not follow his example when it came to publishing Quechua versions of official statements. The Peruvian state would not “speak” again in Quechua until the reformist military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–1975), which officialized Quechua and pro-

Quechua-Language Government Propaganda in 1920s Peru   175

moted a Quechua-language press.60 It is fair to say that no Peruvian president has associated himself with the language as directly as Leguía did. Leguiista propaganda in Quechua was the product of a unique set of circumstances. The Leguía regime was arguably the most personalistic in modern Peruvian history, and Quechua was particularly suited to Leguía’s “apotheosis” as a restorer of Tawantinsuyo. More specifically, however, the official adoption of Quechua in the final years of the Oncenio was part of an effort to fill the vacuum created by the repression of progressive indigenismo that culminated in 1927. At this point, the regime needed to shore up its indigenista credentials among middle-class publics, and by “speaking” Quechua Leguía could appear patriotic and attuned to the realities of the country. At the same time, it seems likely that the leguiista Quechua literature was also directed at the peasant audiences that had been the target of radical efforts to use Quechua print as a political medium since the turn of the century. NOTES

Research for this chapter was carried out with the support of a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am also grateful to Jaymie Heilman, Anne Rubenstein, and Frank Salomon for comments on earlier versions. 1.  César Itier, “Quechua, Aymara and Other Andean Languages: Historical, Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Aspects,” Entertext: An Interdisciplinary Humanities E-Journal 2, no. 2 (2003): 160–63; Alan Durston, “Quechua,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, October 2015, http: //latinamericanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore9780199366439 .001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-71. 2.  Alan Durston, “Quechua Political Literature in Early Republican Peru (1821–1876),” in History and Language in the Andes, ed. Paul Heggarty and Adrian Pearce (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 165–86. However, Leguía’s use of Quechua was not entirely without recent precedent. In 1880, during the war with Chile, President Nicolás de Piérola issued a decree proclaiming himself protector de la raza indígena and ordered its publication in Quechua and Aymara translations. A Quechua version appeared in El Peruano: Diario Oficial, August 12, 1880, 1. 3.  Key studies for understanding the Oncenio include Jorge Basadre, Historia de la república del Perú, 6th ed. (Lima: Editorial Universitaria, 1968), vol. 13; Manuel Burga and Alberto Flores Galindo, Apogeo y crisis de la república

176  alan durston

aristocrática (Lima: Ediciones Rikchay Peru, 1979); Julio Cotler, Clases, estado y nación en el Perú, 3rd ed. (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005); and David Nugent, Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual, and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885–1935 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Both Marta Irurozqui (“El Perú de Leguía: Derroteros y extravíos historiográficos,” Apuntes 34 [1994]: 85–101) and Ombeline Dagicour (“Political Invention in the Andes: The Peruvian Case. An Essay on President ­Augusto B. Leguía’s Strategies and Practices of Power during the Oncenio, 1919–1930,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 51 [2014]: 59–86) propose that the historiography has treated the Leguía regime mostly as a backdrop and that we continue to know very little about it. 4.  Jorge Basadre, Historia de la república, 13:368; Thomas Davies Jr., Indian Integration in Peru: A Half Century of Experience, 1900–1948 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974), 92n74. 5.  For in-depth studies of indigenismo, see Marisol de la Cadena, The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Alexander S. Dawson, Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004); and Rebecca Earle, The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), among others. 6.  On Leguía’s indigenismo, see Basadre, Historia de la república, vol. 13; Davies, Indian Integration, chap. 4; and de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos, chap. 2. 7. See Zoila Mendoza, Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Gabriel Ramón Joffré, El neoperuano: Arqueología, estilo nacional y paisaje urbano en Lima, 1910–1940  (Lima: Municipalidad Metropolitana de Lima and Sequilao, 2014). 8. Cotler, Clases, estado y nación, 181. The title viracocha has multiple and complex associations: originally the name of an important pre-Hispanic deity, in colonial times it was used in reference to Spaniards in general, and in the present day it has a meaning approximating the title sir, generally applied to nonindigenous men of some standing. 9. Basadre, Historia de la república, 13:368. Basadre does not mention his source. 10. “Para ‘El Indio,’” El Indio: Quincenario de Propaganda Indigenista, no. 2 (December 18, 1929), 3. 11.  F. M. Pizarro, Camachicuc Piruapa Augusto B. Leguía (Chachapoyas: Imprenta Libre de Eloy Torrejón, 1928). While the publication date is April 5, 1928, the author claims to be writing in 1925.

Quechua-Language Government Propaganda in 1920s Peru   177

12. Gerald Taylor, Estudios lingüísticos sobre Chachapoyas (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Fondo Editorial and Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2000), 42–43. 13.  David Nugent, pers. comm., May 30, 2011; see Nugent, Modernity, 259. Pizarro may have been Luis F. Martínez Pizarro, a nephew of Senator Pizarro who had served as a congressman (Nugent, Modernity, 48). 14.  In 1940 only about 30 percent of the population of the province of Chachapoyas spoke Quechua, in contrast to much of the southern highlands, where the Quechua-speaking population was over 90 percent (Arca Parró, Censo, 159). 15.  Dia del camino: 5 de octubre de 1928 (Lima: Enrique Ravago Velarde, 1928). 16.  Biblioteca Nacional del Peru, Fondo Paul Rivet 2161, 2162; El Indio: Quincenario de Propaganda Indigenista, no. 3 ( January 15, 1930): 8. 17.  Archivo General de la Nación, Lima, Peru (henceforth AGN), Prefecturas 295. 18.  La Prensa, February 19, 1930, 13; El Indio: Quincenario de Propaganda Indigenista, no. 5 (February 15, 1930), 2–3. 19. Davies, Indian Integration, chap. 4; de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos, chap. 2. 20.  On Escalante, his coterie, and his relation to Leguía, see Luis E. Valcárcel, Memorias, ed. José Matos Mar, José Deustua C., and José Luis Rénique (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1981), and a series of articles in Cuzco’s El Comercio (e.g., January 19, 1923, 2; October 17, 1923; June 5, 1924, 2; and July 12, 1924). 21.  José Angel Escalante, “Nosotros los indios,” in La polémica del indigenismo, ed. Manuel Aquézolo Castro, 2nd ed. (Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1987), 39–52. 22.  On the CPDIT, see Wilfredo Kapsoli, Ayllus del sol, anarquismo y utopía andina (Lima: Tarea, 1984); de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos, chap. 2; and Jaymie Patricia Heilman, Before the Shining Path: Politics in Rural Ayacucho, 1895–1980 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), chap. 2. 23. Basadre, Historia de la república, 13:336–37. 24. Davies, Indian Integration, 90. 25.  “La campaña educativa del gobierno a favor del Indio,” El Indio: Quincenario de Propaganda Indigenista, no. 3 ( January 15, 1930): 7, 10; Manuel Antonio Hierro, “Ensayos experimentales indígenas,” El Indio: Quincenario de Propaganda Indigenista, no. 8 (April 15, 1930): 7–8. See Dan Hazen, “The Awakening of Puno: Government Policy and the Indian Problem in Southern Peru, 1900–1955” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1974), chap. 5, on the indigenous education programs of the Oncenio.

178  alan durston

26.  See, for example, Ayar Kisspe, “Las energías de la raza: Párrafos de psicología indígena,” El Indio: Quincenario de Propaganda Indigenista, no. 8 (April 15, 1930): 2, 11. 27.  Pedro Morales de la Torre, “Un artista peruano en Chile,” Variedades (Lima), no. 367 (March 1915): 1884–86; Luis E. Valcárcel, “Darío Eguren de Larrea,” and Jose Uriel García, “El Retorno de Eguren,” both in El Comercio (Cuzco), May 6, 1922, 2; Antonio Galletti, “El hombre de las cumbres,” El Comercio (Cuzco), December 27, 1922, 3; Pitucha, “El indio y a otra cosa más,” in Aquézolo Castro, Polémica del indigenismo, 104–6. See also Darío Eguren de Larrea, Crónicas de Pitucha (periodismo festivo) (Lima: M. Moral, 1921) and El Cusco: Su espíritu, su vida, sus maravillas (Lima: Excelsior, 1929). 28.  “Gran discurso del Presidente Leguía,” El Indio: Quincenario de Propaganda Indigenista, no. 5 (February 15, 1930): 2–3. For Eguren de Larrea’s column, see El Indio, no. 3 ( January 15, 1930): 3, and no. 8 (April 15, 1930): 6. 29.  Abelardo Solís, “La cuestión del quechua,” Amauta 29 (1930): 31–36. 30.  Moisés Saenz, Sobre el indio peruano y su incorporación al medio nacional (Mexico City: Publicaciones de la Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1933), ­242–43. 31.  César Itier, El teatro quechua en el Cuzco, vol. 1 (Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos and Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 1995); César Itier, El teatro quechua en el Cuzco, vol. 2 (Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos and Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 2000); César Itier, “Nationalisme ou indigénisme? Le théâtre quechua à Cuzco entre 1880 et 1960,” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Etudes Andines 30, no. 3 (2001): 527–40. 32.  Alan Durston, “Inocencio Mamani y el proyecto de una literatura indígena en quechua (Puno, Perú, década de 1920),” A Contracorriente 11 (2014): 218–47; Alan Durston, “El teatro quechua en la ciudad de Ayacucho, Peru, 1920–1950,” Corpus: Archivos Virtuales de la Alteridad Americana 4, no. 2 (2014), http://corpusarchivos.revues.org/1280. 33.  E.g., Humberto Suárez Alvarez, “El idioma de los Inkas, oficialmente debe escribirse Keswa y no Quechua,” El Comercio (Lima), July 30, 1930, and Francisco A. Loayza, “Una ortografía para los idiomas indígenas,” El Comercio (Lima), July 17, 1930. Luis E. Valcárcel’s Tempestad en Los Andes (1927), a key indigenista manifesto, included a chapter entitled “Rebeldía ortográfica” that applauded the reform efforts. 34.  Fiona Wilson, Citizenship and Political Violence in Peru: An Andean Town, 1870s–1970s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 54. 35.  On Adolfo Vienrich, see Wilson, Citizenship and Political Violence, chap. 4. On Francisco Chukiwanka Ayulo, see Augusto Ramos Zambrano,

Quechua-Language Government Propaganda in 1920s Peru   179

Rumi Maqui (Puno: Instituto de Investigaciones para el Desarrollo Social del Altiplano, 1985), 72ff. 36.  Gonzalo Espino Relucé, “Pacha huarai, para mirar el pasado del futuro,” Guaca 1, no. 1 (2004): 81–108. 37. Francisco Chukiwanka Ayulo and Julián Palacios Ríos, “Alfabeto científico kehshwa-aymara,” La Escuela Moderna, nos. 4–5 ( July 1914): 152–57. Julián Palacios Ríos, an important figure in the history of indigenous education in Puno, contributed with his knowledge of Aymara. See also Francisco Chukiwanka Ayulo, “Ortografía indoameriqana,” La Sierra: Organo de la Juventud Renovadora Andina 13–14 ( January–February 1928): 49–50. 38.  Frank Salomon and Emilio Chambi Apaza, “Vernacular Literacy on the Lake Titicaca High Plains, Peru,” Reading Research Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2006): 312. 39.  For a facsimile of the flier, see Jorge Basadre, Introducción a las bases documentales para la historia de la república del Perú con algunas reflexiones, vol. 2 (Lima: Talleres Gráficos P. L. Villanueva, 1971), 669. The flier was printed in Puno and is dated September 20, 1913. It employs the unique Quechua orthography developed by Chukiwanka Ayulo. 40. Juan Fonseca, “Protestantismo, indigenismo y el mundo andino (1900–1930),” in Más allá de la dominación y la resistencia: Estudios de historia peruana, siglos XVI–XX, ed. Paulo Drinot and Leo Garofalo (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruano, 2005), 282–311. See also Apunchis Jesu-Cristoc evangelio San Lucaspa qquelkascan . . . Segunda edición del texto quechua publicada por la Sociedad Biblica Americana (Lima: Imprenta El Progreso Editorial, 1912), 11–15. 41.  “Kehpachiy, Mana-imakocuy, Tuhncuypis,” El Heraldo 4, no. 38 (November 1914): 15; “Kehspicuy, Chekanchay Cusicuytajj,” El Heraldo 4, no. 39 (December 1914): 22; “Nueva Ortografía Quechua,” El Heraldo 4, no. 45 ( June 1915): 92–93. 42.  See Kapsoli, Ayllus del sol; Gerardo Liebner, “La Protesta y la andinización del anarquismo en el Peru, 1912–1915,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latin y el Caribe 5, no. 1 (1994–95): 83–102. 43.  Ricardo Melgar Bao, Sindicalismo y milenarismo en la región andina del Perú (1920–1931) (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1988), 34–35. 44. Kapsoli, Ayllus del sol, 185; cf. Liebner, “La Protesta.” 45.  Annalyda Alvarez Calderón, “Pilgrimages through Mountains, Deserts, and Oceans: The Quest for Indigenous Citizenship (Puno 1900–1930)” (PhD diss., Stony Brook University, 2009), 187. 46.  AGN, Prefecturas 246-A; see also Alvarez Calderón, “Pilgrimages,” 206.

180  alan durston

47.  Steven J. Hirsch, “Peruvian Anarcho-Syndicalism: Adapting Transnational Influences and Forging Counterhegemonic Practices, 1905–1930,” in Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution, ed. Steven J. Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 252. 48.  AGN, Prefecturas 246-A and other 1926 documents from Prefecturas. 49.  Hazen, “Awakening of Puno,” 231. 50.  Natalia Majluf and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, Camilo Blas (Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 2010), 138, 140, 144–49. 51.  AGN, Prefecturas 295. 52.  See the LANGAS project’s website at www.langas.cnrs.fr/. 53.  Día del camino, 9–10. 54.  AGN, Prefecturas 295. 55.  The main exception is the first Quechua version of the inauguration speech for the Puno boarding school, which refers to its future students as the descendants of Manco Capac, the mythological founder of the Inka royal line­ age. Significantly, the second version omits this epithet (Biblioteca Nacional del Peru, Fondo Paul Rivet 2161, 2162; El Indio: Quincenario de Propaganda Indigenista, no. 3 [ January 15, 1930]: 8). 56. E.g., Día del camino, 7, both versions of the anti-gamonal speech (La Prensa, February 19, 1930, 13; AGN, Prefecturas 295). 57.  Bruce Mannheim, The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 86–89. 58.  Paul Rivet and Georges de Créqui–Montfort, Bibliographie des langues aymará et kichua, 4 vols. (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1951–56), 1:275–77, 497–99. For an example of a flier that uses runa in its racial sense, see 285–87. 59.  On the use of these categories in the nineteenth century, see Durston, “Quechua Political Literature,” 171, 177. 60.  Studies of the Velasco regime’s uses of Quechua are lacking, but see José Tamayo Herrera, El misterio de la oficialización del quechua en 1975: Un secreto finalmente revelado (Lima: Centro de Estudios País y Región, 1996).

CHAPTER 6

Mayan Languages A New Dawn?

JUDITH M. MAXWELL

On December 21, 2012, the fourteenth pihk of the Mayan calendrical Long Count was inaugurated.1 Celebrations of the end of the thirteenth pihk reverberated throughout Maya homelands in Guatemala, Chiapas, the Yucatán peninsula, and Belize. While the Western media had been hyping a doomsday frenzy for years leading up to the turn of the pihk, Mayans were awaiting a new “dawn.”2 Mayan prophets had predicted a pihk of suffering under Spanish rule to be followed by a new era, an era that offered the possibility of justice and equality. Many of the hopes and aspirations centered on language. Mayan activists and scholars have been working for decades to document and analyze Mayan languages, to develop teaching materials and further bilingual education, to bring the languages back into public domains ceded to Spanish during the colonial period and still not reclaimed, and to develop new genres for the growing digital media. This essay will review the background of scholarship on Mayan languages; describe research and educational initiatives in Mayan areas, primarily in Guatemala; and attempt to assess the prospect for the resurgence of Mayan languages in the new pihk. 181

182  judith m . maxwell

EA R LY SC H OL A RSH I P

The first known studies of Mayan languages are those of the Spanish clerics, charged with evangelization. In Mexico, Yucatec Maya received intensive attention, resulting in several vocabularies and grammatical sketches, which were compiled by Juan Ramón Bastarrachea Manzano et al. for the magnum opus Diccionario Maya Cordemex (1980).3 Bishop Diego de Landa, in his 1566 defense of his treatment of the indigenous peoples of his see, recorded the writing practices he encountered among the Maya of the peninsula, famously including a key to the syllabary, though he failed to recognize it as such.4 In the highlands of Chiapas, Tzeltal and Tzotzil also were studied. Robert M. Laughlin lists an anonymous Diccionario en lengua sotzil and Francisco de Zepeda’s Artes de los idiomas chiapaneco, zoque, tzendal y chinanteco.5 In Guatemala, careful attention was paid to K’ichee’ and Kaqchikel, the languages of two of the strongest regional polities. The Spanish established their first Guatemalan capital in the valley adjoining the Kaqchikel capital of Iximche’. Early Kaqchikel vocabularies were compiled by fray Domingo de Vico (ca. 1553) and fray Francisco de Varea (ca. 1603). Fray Thomás de Coto, using these manuscripts and at least two others as well as his own expertise in the language, gathered extant indigenous vocabulary and posited ecclesiastical neologisms into a massive work, Thesaurus verborum.6 Around 1545, Fray Domingo de Vico, a brilliant polyglot, composed a massive exegesis of Christian doctrine designed to persuade and convert the K’ichee’.7 He went on to compile a robust K’ichee’ vocabulary around 1555.8 His missionary treatise Theología indorum was partially translated by de Vico himself into Mam and Poqom. Priests locally shared doctrinal documents in highland languages and sought to bring the local populations into the fold of the church. An assiduous maestro de canto (choirmaster) from San Juan Ixcoy, a small Q’anjob’al community nestled in the Cuchumatan mountains, collected songs in a number of Mayan languages: Q’anjob’al, Akateko, Chuj, K’ichee’, and Kaqchikel. He also archived songs in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl. This collection, now housed at the Indiana University Music Library, contains the only known documents in sixteenth-century Q’anjob’alan languages. It should be noted that these colonial clerical texts generally followed the orthographic conventions posited by fray Francisco de la Parra in the mid-1500s.9 This

Mayan Languages   183

unity of orthographic practice fell apart as the evangelical mission succeeded and as writing shifted more toward Spanish dominance. Restandardization has been an ongoing process in both Mexico and Guatemala since the mid-1900s. After the Bourbon reforms of the late eighteenth century, Spanish was designated as the appropriate language for the church as well as for secular administration. Work on indigenous languages languished. In the nineteenth century, interest in indigenous languages was revived, this time scholarly. The abbot Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg visited Guatemala and discovered in the church archives several indigenous manuscripts. In 1855 he published a transcription and translation of one document, chronicling the history of the Xajil lineage of the Kaqchikel.10 He also collected documents in K’ichee’, including the famous Popol Wuj, and in Achí.11 The search for more indigenous documents and literature yielded a few more documents, including some early-contact screenfold documents written in Mayan glyphic script.12 By the late 1800s, the contemporary spoken languages had lost their place in the Catholic Church. Legal documents could still be submitted in Mayan languages, but with translation. Nahuatl, which along with K’ichee’ and Kaqchikel had been sanctioned before the Bourbon Reforms for official petitions to the Audiencia and to the crown, was no longer in active use as a language of legal mediation. Translation in court matters also languished, only to be revived after 2003 (see below, Ley de Idiomas). At the dawn of the twentieth century, most Maya had lost literacy in their own languages. A few ajq’ija’ retained some knowledge of the glyphic symbols for the days in the 260-day ritual calendar, the cholq’ij.13 But knowledge of the larger time cycles, the aab’ (solar year),14 the lunar cycles, the lords of the night, and the Long Count, waned. The Chuj, of northwestern Huehuetenango, maintained their solar count as well as the 260-day lunar count up through the disruption of the genocidal war (1960–95).15 The other Mayan groups “froze” their calendrical counts, commensurating them with the Gregorian calendar.16 Ritual speech forms preserved some archaic vocabulary in the domains of spirituality and divination, but terms for kinship and sociopolitical structures were rapidly replaced with Spanish expressions denoting the dominant culture’s categories.17 The Mayan languages by and large ceded the public domains to Spanish.

184  judith m . maxwell

M AYA N LA N GUAGES IN T H E T W E N TIE TH C E N TU RY

Today there are thirty-two Mayan languages still spoken in their homelands.18 One language, Chicomulceltec, no longer has speakers. While it can be argued that all the Mayan languages are endangered (language shift is an ongoing process in these communities), vitality indices show that the degree of endangerment varies greatly.19 K’ichee’ has a large speaker base, with 2,330,000 speakers; it is followed by Q’eqchi’ with 800,000, Yucatec Maya with 766,000, Mam with 530,000, and Kaqchikel with 451,000.20 Four of these, K’ichee’, Q’eqchi’, Mam, and Kaqchikel, are spoken primarily in Guatemala and are referred to in Ministry of Education and public policy documents as idiomas mayoritarios, “majority languages,” a point I will return to below. At the other extreme of the vitality spectrum lie Mocho’ and Itzaj. Mocho’ has only 140 speakers, divided between two municipalities in Chiapas. Ethnologue classifies it as moribund. Itzaj, spoken in San José Petén on Lake Petén Itzaj, has only twelve remaining speakers. Charles Andrew Hofling, in his 1991 introduction to his collection of Itzaj tales, lamented that his volume was likely the last such book to be compiled, as the language was no longer in active circulation.21 Of course, population counts alone are not determinative of language vitality. Intergenerational transmission is the single most important feature in language maintenance.22 Most adults in Mayan communities at least know some Spanish, and many are Spanish dominant or even monolingual. Parents for the past two generations have generally chosen to teach their children Spanish in the home so that they will enter school speaking the hegemonic language; while some children do learn the language later, the grammatical patterns of Spanish often seep into spontaneous Mayan-language speech. Moreover, some lexical domains have been lost and to the extent speakers are reacquiring them they are doing so nonsystematically. Let us look at a quick example from Mopan, a Mayan language with 3,000 speakers in Guatemala and 9,200 in Belize. In 2011, I joined the presidents of the Guatemalan Mayan-language communities visiting San Luís Petén, the principal Mopan municipality in Guatemala, for a conference on language revitalization strategies. The community leaders were proud of ongoing efforts to widen the use of the language within

Mayan Languages   185

the schools and the town government. The conference was inaugurated with a midnight ceremony at a hillside cave shrine. The jk’in welcomed everyone to the worship circle around the sacred fire and announced that while he would pray in Mopan an elder would provide translation.23 The jk’in conducted the two-hour service in Mopan; his translator shadowed him smoothly. However, when it came to the count of the days, the crux of the ceremony, he recited the day names in K’ichee’ rather than in Mopan. In counting the days, he counted one to ten in Mopan and eleven through thirteen in K’ichee’. Ritual vocabulary had been extinguished in the San Luís Petén area by early Catholic conversion and was just making a comeback. K’ichee’ ritual specialists were retraining counterparts in areas where the practice had been lost. Though the Mopan day-names and numerals are knowable, given the systematic correlation to Yucatec Maya, ceremonial language use is acquiring a tinge of K’ichee’. The Mayan languages are poised on a cusp of endangerment. Communities are aware of their internal language shift; most want to see the new pihk bring the language back into active use. IN ST IT U T ION AL BAC K G ROU N D

To situate the current state of the languages in sociopolitical context, I will offer a brief review of educational and legislative initiatives. In Mexico, the Secretaria de Educación Pública (SEP) was established in 1921. Since its inauguration, SEP has expanded its coverage of municipalities and language groups. Mexico early on developed studies of indigenous languages and promoted bilingual education. In the early 1980s, a special university section was established at the Colegio de Mexico in Pátzcuaro to establish norms for the writing and teaching of indigenous languages. Local school systems often did not follow the suggested norms, relying on local expertise and past orthographic practices. In 2003, the Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas was established to standardize writing and teaching practices in the country and to promote the use of indigenous languages.24 Local initiatives have also promoted Mayan language use in Mexico. In 1983, Sna Jtz’ib’ajom (House of the Writers) was formed as a cooperative in San Cristóbal de las Casas to promote writing and performance in Tzeltal and Tzotzil.25 In Yucatán, as early as 1937 Mayan scholars formed the Academia de la Lengua Maya.26

186  judith m . maxwell

In Guatemala, initiatives for the study and teaching of Mayan languages have come from a number of sources. Presidents of the country have varied considerably in the importance they placed on educating the indigenous peoples. In 1873 Justo Rufino Barrios made bilingual education a major plank in his campaign, though he did little to implement it. Rural (Maya) education languished until Jorge Ubico’s rule from 1931 to 1944. Ubico established rural schools and sought to staff them with bilingual teachers. The “Ten Years of Spring” under presidents Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Árbenz saw a strengthening in normal school preparation of indigenous teachers. After the 1954 coup, these educational initiatives were scaled back, but slow expansion eventually brought bilingual education back to the fore for the Ministry of Education in 1979, when the Programa Nacional de Educación Bilingüe Intercultural (PRONEBI) was established.27 PRONEBI was a pilot program. Initially, only the idiomas mayoritarios were targeted, though Q’anjob’al was soon added to the mix. New schools were established in rural areas. A new curriculum was developed for the schools, supplementing the national curriculum with culturally adapted materials. Mayan artists illustrated the textbooks with children wearing indigenous dress. Those charged with translating the national curriculum wrestled with the idea of introducing Mayan concepts in the core subjects. Tasked with translating base-ten math texts, after debate they included units on base-twenty, the Mayan numerical system. The bilingual program was envisioned as transitional, with the preschool and first-grade classes being primarily in the local Mayan language with some Spanish-language instruction, shifting throughout grades 2 and 3 to more Spanish-dominant presentations. As these schools thrived, more schools were added to serve the original language groups. Other language communities clamored for like bilingual services. In 1995, the Ministry of Education acknowledged the success of the pilot programs and made bilingual education a permanent division, forming the Dirección General de Educación Bilingüe Intercultural (DIGEBI).28 The Ministry of Education was not alone in working with Mayan languages, developing orthographies and written materials. In 1935, the Summer Institute in Linguistics (SIL), under the tutelage of William Cameron Townsend, began working with Mayan languages. The primary emphasis was on developing a modern alphabetic writing system

Mayan Languages   187

for translating the New Testament and providing basic primers. SIL became the government’s chief adviser on indigenous-language education in both Guatemala and Mexico, though both countries later substituted national advisory panels.29 In 1972 Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín (PLFM) began a program of documenting Guatemalan Mayan languages, producing dictionaries and grammars and training native-speaker linguists to develop language resources for their communities. Beginning with three of the big four idiomas mayoritarios (Mam, K’ichee’, and Kaqchikel), the PLFM quickly expanded their coverage to pick up the fourth, Q’eqchi’, and to add three languages of the Q’anjob’alan group. I joined this project in 1973, working first on Ixil (a Mamean language) and then on Chuj (Q’anjob’alan). In the first years of the project, we had support from the Ministry of Education. It housed us in a largely abandoned building in Antigua, the Rancho Nimajay, used only on weekends for university extension classes. It also supplied us with one ream of paper a year. Most importantly, the ministry acknowledged the training we were imparting, allowing us to award perito (“expert”) degrees to our graduates. This degree, roughly equivalent to a high school diploma, placed our alumni among the most highly educated Maya in the country. This and their leadership roles in their communities made them targets during the worst years of the genocidal war. The PLFM teams working on their respective languages were forced to hide their work. The Tz’utujiil team hid their dictionary manuscript in earthen vessels, which they buried. The Chuj team divided their dictionary work and hid the pages in house rafters. Other teams secreted their documents as well. We counted on the Instituto de Nutrición de Centroamérica y Panamá (INCAP) to help us conserve the work. INCAP had generously offered to computerize our thousands of dictionary entry file cards. INCAP workers recorded entries for four dictionaries, Chuj, Tz’utujiil, Awakateko, and K’ichee’, on magnetic tapes. As the war heated up, digitization ceased. In 1975, the government withdrew its logistical support, ousting us from the Rancho Nimajay. The directors of the PLFM opted to move the center to Huehuetenango, as this would reduce commute time for students from remote communities. This move, however, precluded adding the lowland language groups, Mopan and Itzaj, as their journey would become impractically long. In Huehuetenango, our students were at first housed in pensiones, boardinghouses. However, we learned that

188  judith m . maxwell

they were not given blankets for their beds or served their meals with utensils by their plates. When confronted about this, the hosts justified their actions saying simply, son indígenas. We had to rent a house and hire a cook to get proper accommodations for the Maya linguistics students. At this time the government was actively conscripting for the military. On market days, troops would sweep the town, loading indigenous men into transport trucks. The men would be held for a day at the local army post. If no nonindigenous employer stepped forward to claim a man as an employee, he would be shipped off to military indoctrination. We US linguists would take turns going to the cuartel and asserting that our students were our employees. Since they were paid scholarships to be able to attend our classes, we had the financial ledgers to support our claims. Constant pressure on the indigenous students in Huehuetenango led the administration to rethink the move to this departmental capital, and the linguistic center was relocated back to Antigua, Guatemala. I left in July 1976 to resume my graduate training. Later that year, the Chuj team let me know of two setbacks: (a) the Ministry of Education would no longer authorize us to award perito degrees; (b) the last Chuj jk’inh had died, and his book of the Chuj days and months had been buried with him, as he left no successor. New linguistics work was largely suspended, as our students hid their work and often themselves. Of the original Chuj team, only two remained in their communities. Two had been assassinated, two were in exile in the United States, and one was hiding in the Cuchumatanes. Other teams had also been decimated. Nonetheless, management of the project as well as responsibility of language documentation shifted from the hands of non-Mayan linguists and entrepreneurs to those of the program graduates. Even during the early ’80s, when the military was killing record numbers of indigenous peoples, the PLFM moved to bring some of their work to light. The Tz’utujiil dictionary was rescued from its pots. The Chuj dictionary did not fare so well. Rats had eaten the rafter-secreted pages of the hard copy. A structural leak had obliterated two-thirds of the digital copy. Careful reconstruction allowed about half of the original twenty-thousand-word corpus to reach publication. In addition to the Ministry of Education, SIL, and PLFM, myriad local groups were pushing bilingual education and literacy programs in the 1970s and early 1980s. Each group devised its own orthography, with

Mayan Languages   189

little or no consultation with other groups. SIL had a policy of local determination, leaving the design of orthographies for each language variant, language, or dialect up to the SIL linguist working in the home communities.30 No one recalled or harked back to the de Parra writing system that had unified indigenous communities of Mexico and Guatemala during the colonial period. By 1984, there were so many orthographies in use that the Guatemalan government stepped in to attempt to create a synthesis that could lead to a standard writing system. It called for a Congreso sobre los Alfabetos.31 Linguists, educators, and interested Mayan and Mayanist scholars were welcome to attend the meeting, and all were given access to the floor, but the government established guidelines that gave the vote only to the Mayan participants. Many groups sent non-Maya spokespeople; the PLFM was represented solely by Maya linguists. The vote on the alphabet essentially ratified the PLFM orthography, with the exception of the use of “7” to represent glottal stop. Most participants felt that this symbol was irrevocably a number and could not also be a letter. The congreso yielded two major ­accomplishments. The first was a “unified” alphabet. It established one system for representing the phonemic distinctions of the Mayan languages.32 The second was the formation of a committee of Mayan scholar-leaders to organize their communities and to petition the Congress of the Republic to establish an academy of Mayan languages, to work for the preservation, codification, dissemination, and promotion of these languages throughout the country. This initiative bore fruit in 1987 with the establishment of the Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala (ALMG) as a semiautonomous branch of the Guatemalan government. These changes, though subscribed to by all who attended the Congreso sobre los Alfabetos and subsequently ratified by the Congress of the Republic, were met with both open opposition and negligent support. SIL, having agreed to use the new unified alphabet, continued, until their contract with the government ended in 1990 without renewal, to print materials in their own orthography, with the official alphabet as an addendum. Their 1991 Kaqchikel dictionary had the main entry in the SIL orthography, with the alfabeto unificado following in square brackets and italics, indicating this as a phonetic representation.33 All the example sentences were written solely in the SIL writing system. Moreover, SIL workers lobbied against the new alphabet in the Mayan communities,

190  judith m . maxwell

telling residents that since most Maya surnames had been officialized using Spanish-based transliterations rather than the new orthography, documents having these earlier spellings would not be valid and thus people would lose the title to their lands. They even brought the case to the United Nations Human Rights ombudsman, claiming that indigenous rights had been violated by the switch in orthographies. The ombudsman found that the new orthography did not invalidate the traditional spellings of surnames or affect titles and contracts. On the other hand, the new alphabet, though adopted by the Ministry of Education, was not actively promulgated, and the newly established ALMG did not have any power to sanction institutions not conforming to the new standard. Six years after the alfabeto unificado had been ratified, the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología still had all its signage in the old Spanish-based orthography. The welcoming display in the first exhibit hall showed a large map of Guatemala. The legend noted that in pre-Hispanic times the Maya had lived throughout the territory. In 1990, I led a class composed of Kaqchikel scholars and US graduate students on a “field trip” to the museum. Upon reading this introductory text, several of the Kaqchikel pointed out to the museum’s vice-director, our guide, herself Kaqchikel, that seguimos habitando, “we are still living here.” R E C E N T D EV ELOPME NTS O n e S te p F o rw a rd , On e S te p Si dew ays

Even during the fraught years of the internecine war, many proposals to further Mayan education and to integrate Mayan peoples and communities as equal citizens of Guatemala blossomed. The Universidad Rafael Landívar (URL), with sponsorship by the US Agency for International Development, recruited and trained two cohorts of indigenous linguists. They established the Instituto de Lingüística (now the Instituto de Lingüística e Interculturalidad [ILI]) to prepare teaching materials in Mayan languages. At its Quetzaltenango campus, the URL also established a set of university curricula to train Maya in the professions of medicine, law, and business, under the label “Proyecto Apoyo Desarrollo Integral de la Población Maya” (PRODIPMA). The linguistics major

Mayan Languages   191

initiative, supplemented with visiting US scholars as faculty, successfully graduated two classes. The Maya students in PRODIPMA, however, soon ran into difficulty. Their instructors, ladino Guatemalans, were failing most of the students.34 The vice-rector of the University, Guillermina Herrera, asked me to consult with her on the problem. An examination of the graded papers revealed that the instructors were taking off points for grammatical parallelism and the use of kennings, two tropes central to proper formal Mayan discourse. With this cultural conflict identified, Lic. Herrera ran workshops for the instructors. However, at the end of the first three years of the trial period, an assessment found that slightly more than half the students in this Mayan professionalization program were ladinos: a step sideways. The program underwent some revisions, and the majors were eventually mainstreamed, eliminating the Maya-­ focused initiative. A n o th e r S te p F o rward

In the mid-1980s, Dr. Nora England, a veteran linguist of the PLFM, revamped the Proyecto’s indigenous linguist training program. The initial phases (the cohorts of 1972, 1973, and 1975) had recruited students who (a) were native speakers of their languages; (b) could speak, read, and write Spanish; and (c) had no more than three years of formal education.35 Dr. England recruited students who had high school degrees. After two years of intense linguistic training, her students were capable of designing and carrying out linguistic research projects. All young people, unlike the original cohorts of adult family men, these fresh scholars were eager to bring serious linguistic study to their languages. They formed a nonprofit organization, Oxlajuuj Keej Maya’ Ajtz’iib’ (OKMA). This group produced new dictionaries and grammars of their languages, carried out dialect surveys, themselves trained two successive cohorts of young linguists (OKMAcitos), produced a digital library of language resources, and developed a curriculum for a university major in linguistics that has since been implemented by the national university, Universidad de San Carlos. They supported this work through expert grantsmanship, but in the post–Peace Accords world erstwhile supporters prioritized auto-sustainable projects. Twenty years after their inauguration, OKMA dissolved in 2005. Their contributions were formally recognized in a ceremony in Guatemala City hosted by the Ministry of Education and

192  judith m . maxwell

sponsored by the German development agency German Technical Cooperation (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, GTZ). At the ceremony, Lic. Manuel Salazar, vice-minister of education, accepted OKMA’s donation of the full set of their publication and promised that research on Mayan languages would not end with OKMA’s demise. He pledged the creation of a Mayan research branch within the ministry. OKMA published over two hundred works during their twenty years of research. A successor research group has not emerged. A step sideways. A n o th e r S te p F o rw a rd

In 1992, Kaqchikel Cholchi’, the Kaqchikel branch of the ALMG, began a neologism project with the goal of producing all the lexical items needed to teach the standard national curriculum in grades 1 through 4. A team of linguists working in Chimaltenango identified lexical gaps in Kaqchikel that needed to be filled and constructed candidate lexemes to fill those gaps. These candidate lexemes were reviewed by panels of town elders, teachers, and parents of school-age children. Words that did not resonate with the language sensibilities of the panelists were retailored. Once a set of vocabularies had been ratified, a workshop/conference was called for all the indigenous linguists working on the eight other languages of the K’iche’an group. Seven of the allied languages sent representatives. Working with the Kaqchikel base vocabulary and using the same strategies of word creation, these teams were rapidly able to construct cognate forms. One language group was boycotted, K’ichee’, the largest. A step sideways. In 2002, the Ministry of Education was poised to implement a new national curriculum. This was to be an intercultural curriculum. Tellingly, however, the committee that devised the new plan of study was composed primarily of South American educators; the two Maya representatives were unable to resist the folklorization of the presentation of Mayan cultural elements. I headed a team of native-speaker linguists and educators from the eleven Mayan languages with over one thousand children entering first grade.36 We reviewed the new curriculum materials for grades K through 12. Even before beginning translation and identifying terms that needed to be created, we found cultural problems with the materials. A striking example comes from the kindergarten textbook.

Mayan Languages   193

The children’s booklet showed an illustration of a sylvan countryside. The sun, trees, bushes, and flowers were all shown smiling. The in­ structor’s manual indicated that the students were to circle those elements that were “absurd.” Given that the Mayan worldview holds that all of creation is animate and sentient, this exercise was designed to wean them away from their culture’s norms and to adopt Western perspectives.37 I complained immediately to the director of DIGEBI, Raxche’ Rodríguez. He asked me to track the number of cultural infelicities in the text. When I had examples of over one hundred from the first three grades of material, we consulted again. I wanted to simply strike these lessons from the indigenous materials. I was told, however, that the agreement that allowed bilingual education to go forward required that the materials used in Mayan schools be “the same” as those in non-Maya schools, except for the language of representation. The price of having Mayan-language materials was to translate lessons that disrespected Mayan culture, hoping that the advantage of having Mayan languages in the school would offset the occasional Eurocentrism. The neologism team we had assembled of indigenous linguists and educators agreed that it was important to have Mayan languages in the schools. Moreover, this new initiative did not stop at grade 4, but was to run through grade 12. For each of the eleven languages, we developed over two thousand new terms, ranging from “planet” to “cytoplasm.”38 The team members consulted on a weekly basis with the Ministry of Education and ALMG educators and technicians in their home communities. Once the entire set of new words had been devised, the neologism team met with community members, ajq’ija’, town elders, teachers, parents, and high school students to amend the lists as needed and to ratify them. Finalized lists were then published by the Ministry of ­Education. Then, however, the National Association of Teachers, the largest union in the country, struck, protesting the new curriculum and other ­administrative changes. Printing of new textbooks integrating the new words was halted. A step sideways. A n o th e r S te p F o rward

In 2002, DIGEBI decided to sensitize ladino schoolteachers in Mayan areas to the languages of their students. Once again Kaqchikel was

194  judith m . maxwell

chosen as the pilot language for the project.39 Kaqchikel linguists developed a CD with short language lessons, primarily simple vocabulary lists. Once the Kaqchikel project was nearly completed, a Mam linguist was brought in to translate the materials into Mam.40 The CDs were prepared with little attention to language-learning pedagogy. Raxche’ Rod­ ríguez Guaján, then director of DIGEBI, shrugged off this problem and the low scores attained by pilot study learner-users of the materials, saying that the exercise was intended to increase teachers’ respect for the students and their languages. The teachers’ failure would only impress upon them the complexity of the Mayan languages.41 The CDs were to be distributed along with Walkmans on which to play them to teachers in rural areas. This distribution never occurred, though for a time teachers who learned of the initiative could come to the DIGEBI offices in Guatemala city and get copies of the discs. No new discs were pressed. A step sideways? A n o th e r S te p F o rw a rd

In 1995 the section of the Peace Accords that dealt with indigenous peoples, mandating a constitutional amendment redefining Guatemala as a multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual nation, was signed. However, the May 1999 referendum to approve the constitution and legal reforms necessary to implement the provisions of the Accords failed, negating the proposed emendations. Tellingly, whole areas of the interior of Guatemala, Mayan areas, were recorded with few to no votes in this consulta popular; negative reception in the capital defeated the measure. A huge step sideways. Mayan activists and non-Maya supporters of indigenous rights fell back on earlier international agreements, especially the International Labor Organization convenio 169. A n o th e r S te p F o rw a rd

Despite the failure of the sweeping legal reforms set forth in the consulta popular, the referendum, some reforms were implemented. In 2003 the Guatemalan Congress passed the Ley de Idiomas (Law of Languages), which guaranteed the rights of indigenous people to have government services (educational, juridical, police, and medical) accessible in their own languages. In preparation for this, the URL implemented a new

Mayan Languages   195

plan of study for court interpreters. Training in legal process and vocabulary was devised for the potential interpreters from the four idiomas mayoritarios. A Defensoría Indígena was established to help guide indigenous complainants through the court system, facilitating legal recourse to discrimination. However, courts continue to routinely conduct business in Spanish; the Defensoría accepts complaints but rarely seconds them to the courts.42 Vocabulary for legal process in the eighteen non-“majority” Mayan languages has not been developed, and there are no programs for training interpreters, lawyers, clerks, or judges in these languages. In 2014 the Conrad Adenauer Foundation began sponsoring training workshops for Defensoría translators. I led one such workshop in August 2014. The translators noted that most judges would not let them provide culturally sensitive and annotated translations on court documents, insisting on “literal” renditions, which did not make sense in the indigenous languages. Moreover, many judges barred the translators from the courtroom and devised makework to have them be elsewhere during proceedings. A step sideways. A n o th e r S te p F o rward

Early in this millennium, a consortium of Mayan educators and international aid groups, including GTZ and foundations in Norway and Sweden, drafted plans for a Mayan university in Guatemala, buying land in Chimaltenango. The Universidad Maya Popol Wuj was legally incorporated in 2004.43 A curriculum and faculty have yet to be agreed on. A step sideways. However, in 2014 three Maya universities opened on their own without government sanction. A fourth, a technological college, in Coban, opened in 2015. The Kaqchikel University in Comalapa has worked out accreditation arrangements with the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica in Heredia. I lectured at the Kaqchikel University in 2014. All the students attending were Kaqchikel by descent. Most spoke some Kaqchikel. A few were just learning the language at the university, but all stated that learning the language and using it in their studies was the primary reason they had chosen to study at this institution. The school is sharing space with a private elementary-high school. Its staff receive token salaries. Tuition goes to pay for materials, light, and water. A step forward.

196  judith m . maxwell

A n o th e r S te p F o rw a rd

In 2010, the Ministry of Education implemented a new policy: a domestic (i.e., indigenous) language must be taught to students in all accredited schools, public or private. Suddenly there was a huge demand for teachers of Mayan languages, though most of the schools surveyed by the ILI investigative team of the URL in March and April of 2010 found ways to comply without actually hiring trained bilingual education teachers.44 Rural elementary schools such as the Mixta Rural of Pachalí had only one indigenous teacher fluent enough in his language to teach. He gave presentations to the whole school in outdoor assemblies. The ILI team left teaching materials that were transparent enough for semispeakers and even nonspeakers to be able to present basic vocabulary, games, and songs. An upper-class private school in nearby San Lucas Sacatepéquez had only one indigenous teacher, the physical education instructor. The administrators simply informed him that language classes for the five grade levels encompassed by the school had been added to his duties. He had had no training and no teaching materials prior to the arrival of the ILI survey team. Another elite private school located between Antigua and Escuintla opted to hire a trained Kaqchikel teacher to teach all grade levels; however, it refused to allow her to require a textbook or to use school resources to reproduce teaching materials. No indigenous students were in her classes, or at the school. In her first classes, she was met with derision. Students informed her that their gardeners and maids spoke Kaqchikel. She replied blandly that she was confident that the gardens and houses were well cared for, then. She insisted that they study the lessons she presented. She regularly assigned homework and gave exams. When students found that failure to study resulted in low grades that were figured into their grade point averages, they knuckled down to study, though not without complaints to and by their parents. After two years of her successful management of her classrooms, the administration decided that the students didn’t really need to learn the language: rather, simple exposure to some concepts from Mayan culture and cosmology would suffice and would comply with the Ministry of Education’s strictures. The class was cut, and the Maya instruction was reduced to two seminar days during the semester. A step sideways.

Mayan Languages   197

Mayan educators had applauded the requirement of teaching a domestic language in all schools. It brought some degree of bilingual education to Mayan children in most parts of the nation. After some initial resistance, non-Maya children who were actually given language instruction in their schools responded with enthusiasm. The understanding of and respect for Maya culture and language in Mayan and non-Maya communities and households alike was burgeoning. Indigenous representatives in Congress drafted a resolution that would make the Ministry of Education policy law. The proposal failed to pass. A step sideways. Then, in 2011, Otto Pérez Molina was elected president of Guatemala, bringing with him a conservative backlash. Among his first official acts was to order that the Maya flag and the solidarity flag no longer be flown in front of the Presidential Palace.45 He characterized these flags as too divisive.46 Other proindigenous legislation, such as the proposal to protect Mayan sacred sites, first presented to Congress by Rosa Elvira Zapeta and Ferdy Berganza in 2007 and revised and resubmitted in subsequent years, has languished.47 Pérez Molina has vacated the stay on mining leases, which had protected Mayan communities and sacred landscape for the past five years. On May 2, 2013, Pérez Molina declared martial law (estado de sitio) in four indigenous communities to quell protests over the pollution and illnesses resulting from untreated mining waste.48 A step backwards and sideways. Size does matter. As the Hispanophone governments of Guatemala and Mexico have struggled with integrating their Mayan citizens into the national fabric, they have tried various means of eliminating practices seen as heretical or antinational and have sought to assimilate Mayan peoples to national ideologies. These ideologies have highlighted modernity and development. In Mexico, the image of a single mestizo people speaking Spanish, la raza, has held forth an ideal of unity—racial, philosophical, political, and economic. Recently, a countervailing concept of interculturality has gained prominence in both Mexican and Guatemalan governmental and intellectual circles. Pluri­ culturalism is hailed as a new way to construct shared national futures. Though the Acuerdo sobre Identidad y Derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas (UN, 2013) signed by the Guatemalan government and the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca party guaranteed the rights of all the Maya peoples to their languages, cosmologies, and cultural practices,

198  judith m . maxwell

and despite piecemeal enactment of some follow-up legislation following the defeat of the sweeping referendum to give these guarantees the force of law, reforms and extensions of Guatemalan government services did not reach all Mayan peoples in the country. Citizens still have to fight to get their national identity cards, which are required for voting and social services, inscribed with names spelled in the official Mayan orthographies.49 Court translation is not available in any but the four idiomas ma­ yoritarios. School curricula in Mayan languages are not available for all the language groups. Teaching materials for those schools blessed with bi­lingual teachers seldom include any bilingual texts or supplementary reading material. Both Mexico and Guatemala are signatories to the International Labor Organization’s convenio 169 (ILO, 1989), which holds that all native peoples have the right to education and public services in their languages. But neither country has the resources, human or financial, to develop a full suite of educational materials for all their languages or to develop the infrastructure to provide social services in all the languages of its citizens. The government has prioritized public services, with the largest sectors of the population getting the most services. The brief review of Guatemalan legislative and educational initiatives above shows that innovative programs were first piloted on a single language, Kaqchikel, and were then expanded to allied languages, either the most closely related languages, the four idiomas mayoritarios, or languages with large population bases. Smaller languages, including those in greatest danger of extinction, received little to no support from governmental agencies, such as the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Culture and Sport (the ministry in charge of indigenous affairs). Initiatives by other institutions ranging from the national ALMG and the Comité Nacional de Alfabetización (CONALFA) to the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín seldom reach the smaller language groups. Resources trickled downward through the population pyramid. The big four have the largest number of trained specialists in linguistics, in education, and in professional fields. More materials for teaching these languages and documenting and conserving traditional knowledge are prepared nationally for the big four. A second tier of populous language groups qualifies for personnel and material development once the mayoritarios have inaugurated programs. This tier includes K’iche’an languages such as Tz’utujiil and Poqom, as

Mayan Languages   199

well as Q’anjob’al and Ixil. Few projects reach a third tier of languages, such as Chuj, Akateko, Jakalteko, Teko, and Achí. Fewer still reach the most endangered languages, including Mopan, Itzaj, Mocho’, and ­Lakantun. It should be noted that while this chapter has focused on Mayan languages, other indigenous languages of the area also exist in a hierarchy with respect not only to Spanish but to the Mayan languages. In Chi­ apas, the Yucatán peninsula, and Guatemala, Mayan languages are the most salient, the languages and cultures that capture the public imaginary. The Guatemalan national currency uses Mayan numerals as well as Arabic numbers on all bills. The Guatemalan national bird is the quetzal, which was the nawal or animal pair of the K’ichee’ war leader Tekun Uman. National tourist campaigns promote Mayan images. Billboards in Yucatán, Campeche, and Quintana Roo advertised the celebrations for the new Maya dawn, the new pihk three years in advance. Legislation and social programs focus on the perceived importance of communities. Mayan communities in Chiapas, the Yucatán peninsula, and Guatemala receive the lion’s share of education and social program support.50 NonMayan indigenous languages get short shrift. The language revitalization movement for the Xinca of Guatemala received brief financial assistance from a language documentation grant awarded to a US linguist, Lyle Campbell.51 Nahuatl speakers in Guatemala, returnees from El Salvador, have no legal recognition by the Guatemalan Congress as a legitimate national ethnicity, despite their precontact presence and importance as translators and mediators during the colonial periods. Garífuna is only slowly being integrated into Guatemalan national programs. CONALFA added bilingual literacy programs for Garífuna only in 2011. Language groups not in the public imaginary must fight for a place at the table. After a conference with the United Nations Commission in Guatemala (MINUGUA) in 1996, Rodríguez Guaján remarked that prior to the Peace Accords the Maya appeared in national rhetoric but that whenever there were policy decisions to be made the Maya were not seated around the discussion table; post-Accords, he said, “Now we are, at least, at the table” (Wakamïn stape öj k’o xe ruchi’ ri ch’atal ).52 The non-Mayan languages have yet to be seated. Despite the many steps sideways, the multiple initiatives presented for Mayan education and social equality are making inroads in the blanket hegemony of the non-Maya. On October 18, 2012, on the eve of the

200  judith m . maxwell

new pihk, the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán inaugurated a bachillerato degree in intercultural studies, with six required courses in Yucatec Maya and additional coursework on Mayan culture.53 Sixty-six Mayas, selected for their language fluency and the depth of their connection to iconic Mayan cultural practices, have been hired as faculty within the program.54 This program is open to Maya and non-Maya alike. While the Universidad Maya Popol Wuj languishes on the drawing board in Chimaltenango, Guatemala, the national university, San Carlos, has initiated a licenciatura program in linguistics, and its language institute (CALUSAC) offers a suite of Mayan languages. In 2014, three Mayan universities in Guatemala boot-strapped themselves into existence, with a fourth on the way. Though not a law, since 2010 the policy of the Ministry of Education has dictated that all schoolchildren in accredited programs learn an indigenous language. The recent brouhaha over the end of the thirteen pihk focused world attention on Mayan communities. Through the years of repression and the thirty-five years of genocide in Guatemala, Mayans have marshaled international aid groups, social media networks, news resources, foundations, their own nongovernmental organizations, community elders, teachers, activists, and ajq’ija’ to protect their cultural heritage; to seek out new domains, new allies, and new opportunities; to enrich their language resources; to develop new pedagogies and new teaching ma­ terials; and to prepare the way for the dawning of the new Maya era. In Chiapas, as December 21, 2013, dawned, an estimated fifty thousand Maya from the Zapatista communities of Palenque, Ocosingo, Altamirano, Las Margaritas, and San Cristóbal de las Casas marched, celebrating their political strength and the revitalization of Mayan values seen within their communities of resistance. This march constitutes the largest public mobilization to date of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional.55 Maya communities celebrated throughout the homeland. At Iximche’, the precontact Kaqchikel capital, at Chwa Ab’äj, a Poqom precontact capital, and at San Juan la Laguna, a Tz’utujiil stronghold, stelae with carved inscriptions were erected.56 These monuments, the first new carvings to be erected by Maya for their own communities since the Spanish invasion, were carved using the classic hieroglyphic writing system, modified to include the postvelar consonants and liquids of K’iche’an languages that the Ch’olan system used for the lowland preHispanic inscriptions lacked. The council of ajq’ija’ of Tecpán negotiated long and hard with the Ministry of Culture and Sports to be able to erect

Mayan Languages   201

their stela at Iximche’, since the archaeological site is a part of the national patrimony. They wished to follow the ancient tradition of erecting stelae in the plaza; this, the ministry held, would “taint” the archaeological record. They finally won permission to erect the stela at the entrance to the site, in a section of the defensive ditch built to shut off the approach to Spanish cavalry.57 Stelae have now been erected. The ancient writing system is being relearned by Mayan writers and educators. A group of Mayan scholars has formed a collective, Sak Chwen, to offer workshops and seminars to any Mayan school or community group with a desire to recapture its orthographic heritage.58 Another set of Mayan scholars sponsored by the PLFM and the ILI of the URL regularly hold workshops, inviting national and international epigraphers. They also provide teaching materials to local schools and between terms give classes in Mayan communities. Mayan time is cyclical but not circular. It moves out in spirals of patterned interactions. Mayan languages remain at risk. Even the largest languages of the Mayan family are losing speakers. Parents hope to prepare their children for brighter economic futures by teaching them Spanish in the home. Language shift has already extinguished one Mayan language. Four seem doomed to be snuffed out in the next decade. While government institutions have sworn to support indigenous languages and are pledged through national and international laws and covenants to teach Mayan languages in the schools, provide social services in these languages, and promote the indigenous cultures, resources, human and monetary, remain scarce. The most populous language groups receive the bulk of federal support and will continue to do so. However, Mayan organizations, such as the Academia de la Lengua Maya in the Yucatán peninsula, the ALMG in Guatemala City, and Sna Jtz’ib’ajom in Chiapas, continue to promote study, pedagogy, literary and artistic development, and expansion into new genres and media for all the Mayan languages. As non-Maya learn Mayan languages in Guatemalan schools, old prejudices born of fear and raised in ignorance begin to erode. Racist opposition experienced by early language activists, such as the PLFM students, is becoming less socially acceptable in light of “interculturality.” The new life breathed into one language community also invigorates kindred groups. As this new pihk dawns, it is unclear how many Mayan languages of the current thirty-four will make it to the next period ending. On the other hand, a pihk is only 394.26 tropical years.

202  judith m . maxwell

NOTES

1. The pihk is a unit of time composed of 144,000 days. This cycle of time has long been referred to by epigraphers as the bak’tun (also baktun, b’ak’tun, and b’aqtun). Recent advances in decipherment reveal the more probable phonemic reading of pihk. Though there was some hoopla concerning whether the pihk cycle would reset to zero after the thirteenth unit, most epigraphers believe that the basic full count is 20. Oxlajuj Ajpop, a Guatemalan council of ajq’ija’ (daykeepers, Mayan ritual specialists), studied this question and consulted with the oracles, determining that we are entering the fourteenth pihk (Cristóbal Cojti’, pers. comm., 2011). 2.  For examples of this doomsday mania, see the blockbuster movie 2012, from Centropolis Entertainment, distributed by Columbia Pictures in 2009, as well as its poor cousin, released by Faith Films in 2008: 2012: Doomsday. John Major Jenkins’s book, The 2012 Story: The Myths, Fallacies, and Truth behind the Most Intriguing Date in History (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), was but one of the most popular of over fifty books published on the subject of the end of this cycle of time. His sensationalist claims were roundly challenged by Anthony Aveni, The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2009), David Stuart, The Order of Days: The Maya World and the Truth about 2012 (New York: Random House, 2011), and other Mayan epigraphers and archaeologists. 3.  Juan Ramón Bastarrachea Manzano and William Brito Sansores, Diccionario maya Cordemex: Maya-español, español-maya (Mérida: Ediciones Cordemex, 1980). 4.  Diego de Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1959). 5.  Robert M. Laughlin, The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975), 2. 6.  Thomás de Coto and René Acuña, Thesaurus verboru[m]: Vocabulario de la lengua cakchiquel u[el] guatemalteca: Nevamente hecho y recopilado con summo estudio, travajo y erudición (Mexico City: UNAM, 1983). 7.  Saqijix Candelaria López Ixcoy of the Instituto de Lingüística e Inter­ culturalidad of the Universidad Rafael Landívar, working from a facsimile copy, has just finished the transcription of part of this document into modern K’ichee’ orthography with exegesis of now-archaic morphological and syntactic constructions. Domingo de Vico and Saqijix Candelaria Dominga López Ixcoy, Theologia indorum (Guatemala City: Universidad Rafael Andivar, 2­ 010–). 8.  Domingo de Vico, Arte de lengua k’iche’, MS, 1550, Universidad Mariano Gálvez, Guatemala, Guatemala.

Mayan Languages   203

9.  Coto and Acuña, Thesaurus verboru[m]; David Bolles, “The Mayan Franciscan Vocabularies: A Preliminary Survey,” n.d., accessed June 6, 2017, www.famsi.org/reports/96072/franciscan/section01.htm. 10.  For a modern transliteration and translation of the original manuscript, see Judith M. Maxwell and Robert M. Hill, Kaqchikel Chronicles: The Definitive Edition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). 11. Luis Enrique Sam Colop, Popol wuj: Versión poética ki’che’ (Quetzaltenango, Guatemala: PEMBI-GTZ; Guatemala City: Cholsamaj, 1999). Brasseur de Bourbourg found and saved a copy of the dance-drama Rabinal Achí. Working with the Rabinal dance director, Dennis Tedlock has published a modern version of the text: Rabinal Achi: A Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Ruud van Akkeren, using both a manuscript copy and contemporary interviews, has produced another modern ethnographically based translation: Ruud van Akkeren, The Place of the Lord’s Daughter: Rab’inal, Its History, Its Dance-Drama (Leiden: Research School CNWS, 2000). 12. Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg and Léon de Rosny, The Madrid Codex, Or, Tro-Cortesano Codex, Combining the Manuscrit Troano by Brasseur de Bourbourg 1870, Color Chromolithographs, and the Codex Cortesianus by León de Rosny 1883, Black and White Heliographs (Washington, DC: Ecological Linguistics, 2001). 13.  Cholq’ij is a K’iche’an word for this 260-day cycle, composed of twenty named days and thirteen numeral coefficients. This calendar is called tzolk’in in Yucatec Maya. It is this latter term that is generally used by epigraphers, who got into the habit of using Yucatec words for entities in the Classicperiod inscriptions before the language of these texts was identified as Ch’olan. 14.  Again, this is the K’iche’an term. The equivalent Yucatec Maya term is haab’. 15.  Felipe Pérez, pers. comm., 1981. The 260-day lunar count is termed Cholk’inh in Chuj. 16.  Munro S. Edmonson, The Book of the Year: Middle American Calendrical Systems (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988). 17.  Maxwell and Hill, Kaqchikel Chronicles; Pantaleón de Guzmán, Compendio de nombres en lengua cakchiquel (Mexico City: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, 1984). 18.  There are, of course, large immigrant communities of Maya living in the United States. Many retain connections to their home communities and provide language and culture activities for those living in diaspora: for example, IXIM in Los Ángeles and Corn Maya Inc., the Maya Jacaltec Association, and the Friends of the Jupiter Neighborhood Resource Center in Jupiter, Florida.

204  judith m . maxwell

19.  Gary Simons and Paul Lewis, “A Global Profile of Language Development versus Language Endangerment,” paper presented at the third International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation, March 1, 2013; UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages, Language Vitality and Endangerment (Paris: UNESCO, 2003), www.unesco.org/culture /ich/doc/src/00120-EN.pdf. 20.  All speaker counts are from Ethnologue 2013, www.ethnologue.com. 21.  Charles Andrew Hofling, Itzá Maya Texts: With a Grammatical Overview (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991). 22.  Joshua Fishman, New Perspectives on Language Maintenance and Language Shift (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1987). 23.  Jk’in is the Mopan title for ritual specialist. The term is cognate with ajq’ij. 24.  Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas (Mexico City), Catálogo de las lenguas indígenas nacionales: Variantes lingüísticas de México con sus autodenominaciones y referencias geoestadísticas (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas, 2009). 25.  Robert M. Laughlin, Sna Jtz’ibajom, and Teatro Lo’il Maxil, Monkey Business Theatre (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), http://site.ebrary .com/id/10245788. 26.  For more on the history of this institution, see “Academias de Lengua Maya,” n.d., accessed October 9, 2017, www.mayas.uady.mx/institutos/ins_04 .html. 27.  Judith M. Maxwell, “Bilingual Bicultural Education: Best Intentions across a Cultural Divide,” in Mayas in Postwar Guatemala: Harvest of Violence Revisited, ed. Walter E. Little and Timothy J. Smith (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 84–95. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30.  Dr. K. Langan, pers. comm., 1978. 31.  This 1984 meeting was the second such congress assembled to work toward standardization. An earlier congreso in the 1940s had led to concrete proposals, but these were never ratified by law and were generally unknown to the language workers of the 1970s. 32.  This proposal was later ratified by the Congress of the Republic of Guatemala as Acuerdo Gubernativo 1046-87. 33.  Déborah Ruyán Canú, Rafael Coyote Tum, and Jo Ann Munson, Diccionario cakchiquel central y español (Guatemala City: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano de Centroamérica, 1991). 34.  Ladino is the commonly used term in Guatemala to designate nonMaya citizens.

Mayan Languages   205

35. The stipulation of low levels of formal education was designed to short-circuit brain drain from indigenous communities, since typically those Maya who had managed to get a sixth-grade education or even some high school had had to leave their home communities to do so and generally took jobs outside their hometowns so that they could put their advanced training to use. The goal of the initial PLFM phases was to train linguists who would return to their hometowns and work with their languages amid their peers. 36.  It should be noted that the original enabling policy drafted by the Ministry of Education and approved by the ALMG called for thirteen languages to be represented. But the minimum education requirement set for participation was a licenciatura, roughly the equivalent of a BA with thesis; no representative could be contracted for two groups. 37.  Comales, “clay or metal griddles,” should not be left over flames as it causes them pain. The household fire speaks to residents, advising them when company is coming or someone unknown approaches. 38.  The classic Maya were renowned astronomers and had names, as yet undeciphered from the glyphic representations, for the planets. However, they seem to have used a single term for “star” and “planet,” while the sun, the moon, and comets had separate designations. Unable to use the glyphic designations as modern planet names, since their phonetic form had yet to be determined, we had to create new terms. Using the metaphor of the family, inspired by the colloquial designation of the moon as “grandmother,” the earth as “mother” and the sun as “father,” we made the planets children, with Pluto as the ch’ip “the last-born child.” 39.  The position of Kaqchikel communities close to the national seats of political power dates back to the establishment of the first Spanish capital in the environs of the Kaqchikel capital of Iximche’. This proximity has allowed Kaqchikel more access to schooling, with large numbers of children able to attend secondary school. Large numbers of the current Maya Movement leaders are Kaqchikel. Kay B. Warren, Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: PanMaya Activism in Guatemala (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 40.  He jokingly designated his text as “Super Mam.” 41.  Rodríguez, pers. comm., 1988. 42.  Cuma Chávez, pers. comm., 2010. 43.  “Fundación Maya de Educación Superior,” Educación Superior Para Todos, UNESCO/IESALC, n.d., accessed June 6, 2017, www.iesalc.unesco .org.ve/index.php?option=com_fabrik&view=details&formid=5&rowid=188& lang=es. 44.  Judith M. Maxwell et al., Manual para la enseñanza de un segundo idioma (Guatemala City: URL, 2014). 45.  This banner depicts the nik’te’, symbol of zero and completion, beginning and continuity, with the four cardinal directions symbolized by their

206  judith m . maxwell

a­ ssociated colors: red for east, black for west, white for north, yellow for south. The flag is properly flown with the red eastern quadrant in the superior position. The solidarity flag was quadripartite to represent the four major ethnic groupings of Guatemala: Maya, ladino, Xinca, and Garífuna. 46.  Oxlajuj Ajpop, communiqué, January 14, 2012, circulated via e-mail. 47.  Zapeta Osorio, Rosa Elvira, and Ferdy Berganza, “Iniciativa de Ley de Lugares Sagrados,” 2009, www.mcd.gob.gt/2009/iniciativa-de-ley-de -lugares-sagrados/. 48.  It is worth noting that the Congreso de Estudios Mayas programmed for August 2013 was slated to deal with the theme of Tierras: Minería, “Lands: Mining.” This annual interdisciplinary meeting of scholars is sponsored by URL, Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, IDEI-USAC (Universidad San Carlos), Oxlajuj Ajpop (the council of ajqíja’ ), Consejo de Educación, Documentación e Investigación Maya, Comité contra Discriminación Racista, ALMG, and Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes. 49.  Alejandra García Quintanilla, pers. comm., 2013; Cuma Chávez, pers. comm., 2013; and Raxche’ Rodríguez Guaján, pers. comm., 2013. 50.  Of course, unrest in minority communities does receive government police and military attention; witness the recent martial law declarations for Xinca communities of Guatemala. 51.  Lyle Campbell, pers. comm., 2002. 52.  Raxche’ Rodríguez Guaján, pers. comm., 1995. 53. A bachillerato at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán is an intermediate university degree, somewhere between an AB degree and a BA. This is a certificate program. 54.  The iconic practices represented include milpa (corn) agriculture, beekeeping, embroidery, and Mayan art forms. Dr. Alejandra García Quintanilla of the Unidad de Ciencias Sociales of the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, pers. comm., 2007. 55.  KMN Collective, “Movilización Zapatista 21 de Diciembre de 2012,” December 24, 2012, http://komanilel.org/2012/12/24/movilizacion-zapatista -21-de-diciembre-de-2012/. 56.  Chwa Ab’äj was formerly called Mixco Viejo. In 2012, Maya activists were able to get the legislature to ratify an official name change, restoring the original Mayan place-name. These leaders hope to extend the initiative to current municipalities, erasing the colonial labels that generally give a Nahuatl geonym followed by a Catholic saint designation. Draft legislation has yet to be introduced in the Congress. 57.  Mokchewan Rodríguez Kristal, pers. comm., 2012. 58.  Q’aqawitz, pers. comm., 2011.

CHAPTER 7

Xavier Albó’s “The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” Revisited BRUCE MANNHEIM

Several years ago, a researcher from New Zealand who lived in Samoa arrived in Sitka, Alaska, with an encyclopedia of Tlingit, an indigenous language spoken today in Alaska. The encyclopedia, which reached beyond language to discuss aspects of Tlingit culture and society, was written over several years as a labor of love and was based on written sources that the researcher had found, some in libraries, some on the Internet. The sources dated from the nineteenth century up to the present day, including the very ethnographic work of John Swanton, which was written before the time of the founder of American anthropology, Franz Boas. The work, written entirely in Tlingit, was presented to Tlingit elders in Sitka. No one could understand even the smallest bit of the encyclopedia. What happened? There are several obvious answers. Tlingit is what anthropologist Xavier Albó called an “oppressed language,” not only because the speakers can exercise free use of their language only in limited domains, mainly the home, but also because even in those limited domains the specter of another language—most recently English—has hovered just beyond, giving Tlingit speakers a “double consciousness” (to use the famous phrase by W. E. B. DuBois), even when speaking their 207

208  bruce

mannheim

own. For the aficionado from New Zealand by way of Samoa, as for those of us reading this chapter, knowledge of Tlingit is mediated entirely through the dominant language, English: the meanings of words have been fitted to the meanings of counterparts in English, the grammatical morphology has been reshaped to fit English grammar, and the syntax and the mundane pragmatic calculations that Tlingit speakers use day in and day out have been altered to fit English. Even the most wellintentioned materials developed for promoting the revival of Tlingit carry traces of the presence of English as the “matrix language.”1 In brief, the answer is painfully obvious. Although the English-language forms— the words and affixes of English sentences, written following practices of English style and English pragmatics—were replaced with their Tlingit counterparts through the use of dictionaries, they remained English sentences, not becoming any more Tlingit for the Tlingit words. So to interpret the encyclopedia, a Tlingit speaker would have had to treat it as a word puzzle, to take every single word, imagine a word-for-word translation into English, and then try to find it in a bilingual dictionary (using the English-to-Tlingit part, of course). I walk you through this anecdote because it speaks to the status of Quechua today in the Andean republics. Quechua, like Tlingit, is an “oppressed language,” albeit a language family with ten to twelve million speakers, many of them—perhaps most—for all intents and purposes monolingual. (By Quechua speaker, I mean someone whose default mode of interaction in mundane circumstances is Quechua, regardless of what other languages he or she may speak; practice, not knowledge, is critical here.) Here Spanish is the matrix language, and though official statistics in Peru and Bolivia show a precipitous decline since the 1960s in the population that speaks it in everyday contexts, my limited ethnographic experience is that in many communities it is being reproduced and transmitted normally—that is, with all children learning Quechua at home and being exposed to Spanish only in school. Nonetheless, when one leaves rural heartlands, and when one leaves the contexts of home and agropastoralism, it is eminently clear that Spanish is the language of public discourse. Moreover, Spanish is the matrix language in the same sense as English in Alaska. All public knowledge of Quechua linguistic structure, all grammatical analysis, all documentation of lexical meaning is mediated through Spanish (although it is sometimes retranslated into a third language, such as French or English). Such mundane routines as

“The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” Revisited  209

greeting a fellow traveler on a footpath, giving directions to the nearest town, entering a house, or asking for a drink of water are reformulated into Spanish-language interactional routines, although these are as opaque to Quechua speakers as the Tlingit encyclopedia was to Tlingit elders. Quechua culture is described in the matrix language, and Quechua culture, history, and archaeology are returned to Quechua-speaking children using Quechua word forms to label Spanish meanings, again as opaque to their audience as in the Tlingit case. Why would this be so? After all, the Spaniards arrived as settlerconquerors. In policy matters, religious and secular alike, they debated how to approach the linguistic differences with their new subjects; some proposed that Spanish be imposed on the new subject population with the same vigor as it had been imposed on Arabic speakers on the Spanish peninsula, and others advocated missionizing their new subjects in their own languages, with a pendulum swing between these two approaches, neither of which quite fit the facts on the ground.2 Language policy in itself, whether we are talking about royal decrees, recommendations to the Council of the Indies, or recommendations to missionary priests, is a poor indication of practices on the ground, particularly under as polycephalous an administrative tangle as the Spanish Habsburgs, whose multiple jurisdictions could adopt and implement policy in very different ways. Moreover, the division of labor between state administrative structures and church structures looked very different in the Hapsburg dominions than they look today in its successor republics. Language policy was discussed in both church and state venues; linguistic and cultural practices, in contrast, were implemented by the church and varied from one diocesanal jurisdiction to another. In the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Diocese of Lima, which included the central coast of Peru and adjacent highland areas—Huaylas, Conchucos, Tarma, Jauja, and Yauyos—the diocese carried out a well-documented campaign to transform local cultural practices deemed idolatrous under the aegis of a special church legal system, the “Extirpation of Idolatries,” parallel with but separate from the Office of the Holy Inquisition.3 Ecclesiastical inspectors went from town to town; the unlucky heretics were brought to Lima for trial and subsequent punishment. At the same time, the Diocese of Lima established a program of schools in doctrinas, native parishes, in which among other things, indigenous children were taught to speak, read, and write in Spanish.4

210  bruce

mannheim

­ istinct from the schools for the children of indigenous nobles estabD lished elsewhere in the viceroyalty, doctrina schools touched every level of native society. In contrast, the Diocese of Cuzco—based in the former Inka capital but including large parts of the southern highlands—had neither campaigns to extirpate native religious and other quotidian practices (though they did have an active Inquisition) nor a system of parish schools. Another critical difference between the Diocese of Lima and the Diocese of Cuzco was their demographies. On the coast, there was a major demographic collapse of native populations during the sixteenth century; Spanish settlers were numerous in Lima. In Cuzco, Spanish settlers were relatively few and concentrated in enclaves. From the colonial period (before 1821) and after independence (for the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth), the evidence is limited but quite consistent. In rural areas (for a primarily agrarian populace), few Spaniards or descendants of Spaniards were present in the Diocese of Cuzco in the late seventeenth century.5 Spaniards (and their creole descendants, mainly landholders, administrators, and priests) lived primarily in urban areas, and never in the countryside in any substantial numbers. Even those who lived in urban areas (such as Cuzco, Huamanga, Huanta, Arequipa, Cochabamba, and so forth) spoke Quechua as well as Spanish (and often to each other, a reflection of their regional allegiances). The priest-jurist Ignacio de Castro wrote in the late eighteenth century that the few elites of Cuzco spoke Spanish but that they and “people of honor” spoke Quechua with their servants and preferred to hear mass said in Quechua.6 There are comparable data from the early nineteenth century (for Huanta and La Mar in Ayacucho). Cecilia Méndez Gastelumendi, who has done detailed research on the sociology of a liberal royalist rebellion in that region in the decades after independence, observes that “Spaniards” (this is a folk category, based on the tax status of the individual, and consists primarily of American-born descendants of Europeans) clustered primarily in urban areas and in particularly productive rural settlements and that “Indians” (again a folk category, based on fiscal status) also clustered in those areas, as well as everywhere else in the region.7 From individuals described in court cases, the pattern was that members of the first group, “Spaniards”—along with arrieros and other traders—were bilingual in Spanish and Quechua and that members of the second group, “Indians,”

“The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” Revisited  211

were monolingual in Quechua. Finally, at the beginning of the twentieth century, travelers observed that Cuzco itself was primarily Quechua speaking.8 The overall pattern, then, was fairly stable, regardless of demographic downturns, such as the one in the eighteenth century, or recoveries, such as the so-called re-Indianization of America in the first part of the nineteenth century.9 The shift to the contemporary geography of language and of language use—in which Quechua is identified with the Sierra and treated as undifferentiated—dates to the middle of the nineteenth century and is fully anchored in Lima.10 The major demographic declines in the percentage of the Peruvian population that speaks Quechua monolingually (though not in the number of speakers) took place largely in the second half of the twen­tieth century through the mediation of military conscription and rural public education, and then through population shifts to urban areas triggered first by the Agrarian Reform of 1969 and then by the twelve-year internal war of the 1980s and 1990s. The relationships between Quechua and Spanish languages, and thus among their speakers, described in ethnographic monographs and by educational specialists are thoroughly contemporary, not traditional. Thus it should not be surprising that instead of the colonial language being imposed in the Diocese of Cuzco, the language that emerged among Spanish settlers and their creole descendants was a special register of Spanish-inflected Quechua.11 This developed primarily among provincial elites and traders (a register that César Itier calls Quechua ­general ), in tandem with a specifically religious register of Quechua, both in urban settings such as Cochabamba, Puno, Ayacucho, and Cuzco and among owners of rural estates.12 These registers brought Quechua lexical, morphological, and phonological forms into alignment with Spanish semantics and pragmatics. Indeed, for demographic reasons, Spanish-­inflected local registers of Quechua were a much more common “intermediary” between the languages than were Quechua-inflected local varieties of Spanish, at least until the early part of the twentieth century. This is the Quechua of the eighteenth-century dramatic poems Ollanta and El pobre más rico and the Quechua of nineteenth-century urban plays, such as the contested drama Tragedia del fin de Atawallpa.13 But it is also the Quechua of the Centro Qosqo de Arte Nativo; of Luis Valcárcel, the distinguished anthropologist of the 1920s; of the novelist and poet José María Arguedas; of Quechua poetry destined to remain in

212  bruce

mannheim

desk drawers; and potentially of an epistolary corpus like that identified for nineteenth-century Mapudungun.14 And today it is the Quechua of “multi­cultural bilingual education” (educación bilingüe multicultural ) and of the provincial nongovernmental organizations. Even today, scholars, such as linguists and anthropologists, are more likely to find their research intermediated by Spanish-inflected Quechua than by the Quechua of monolinguals and to not recognize the fundamental differences between them. Pretenses to the intimacy of fieldwork notwithstanding, scholarly knowledge of the Andean languages and cultures is filtered through the matrix, meaning that language structure and social practice are both rendered invisible. What we are facing is the flipside of James Scott’s notion of “legibility,”15 through which populations that cannot easily be shoehorned into the rationality of a state-ordered society find that their language, culture, and social relations are literally rendered invisible in favor of proxies, the overlay (in linguistic terms, the Spanish-inflected Quechua that I described above). What appears to be a native Quechua conceptual and linguistic framework is, frequently, the Spanish-inflected overlay. It is no accident that at the specific point at which native Peruvians were rendered socially, culturally, and linguistically invisible, the government in power in Peru, the Civilistas, moved to centralize the administrative structure of the entire country—a move that was wholly successful and that, despite politicians’ lip service to “decentralization,” has survived to the present time largely unscathed.16 The problem of the overlay is not unique to Quechua as an oppressed language (consider the Tlingit example again), but it is specific historically and socially. The twists and turns in language policy in Guatemala discussed by Judith Maxwell (in this volume) can be understood as a struggle over the overlay,17 with the difference between the cases marked by Mayan speakers having had—at critical points—sufficient political agency to challenge it. The social and political forces at play in making Quechua an oppressed language were first addressed more than forty years ago by the Bolivian anthropologist Xavier Albó in an article that helped shape my own work as an anthropologist and linguist, “El futuro de los idiomas oprimidos en los Andes” (The future of the oppressed languages in the Andes). Born in Catalonia, Father Albó joined the Jesuit order at age seventeen, was sent to Bolivia, and took on Bolivian nationality the following year. He followed two degrees in theology with a doctorate in anthropology from Cornell University (1970), based on a sociolinguistic study of the Quechua spoken around Cochabamba, B ­ olivia.

“The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” Revisited  213

“El futuro de los idiomas oprimidos en los Andes” was published in mimeographed form by the now-venerable nongovernmental organization CIPCA (Centro de Investigación y de Promoción del Campesinado, Center for Research and Promotion of the Peasantry), founded by Albó himself.18 The concept of “oppressed language” was more appropriate than “minority language” because at that time the majority of the population in both Bolivia and Peru spoke an indigenous language. And, Albó argued, to call these languages “native,” “autochthonous,” “indigenous,” and so forth “doesn’t do justice to the social dimensions that mold them.” Albó explained that “in some traditional Spanish-speaking areas of the Andes, Spanish is the native language, while the Quechua of inmigrating groups is the foreign language. If one does not wish to accept this principle, then one should likewise not call Quechua ‘autochthonous’ in the many regions of Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and even Peru, where it was introduced by the Inkas only a few years before the conquest, or even introduced by missionaries afterward, under Spanish rule.”19 Albó proposed instead to use a phrase coined by the Paraguayan linguist Bartomeu Meliá, oppressed language,20 which would front its sociolinguistic features, such as “reduction of functional domains,” “low prestige,” “home (or kitchen) language,” and even “endangered.” Albó warned us that “it might be best to speak of an ‘oppressed subculture’ and of a [social] force that not only constrains but overwhelms [the subculture] as long as the alignment of forces in the matrix structure does not change.”21 His argument has both important strong points and limitations. Among the strongest points is the causal direction, starting from the political economy (“the matrix,” in Albó’s words) to the linguistic setting, rejecting a position, common since the sixteenth-century writings of José de Acosta, that went in the opposite direction, treating linguistic domination, once established, as independent of the social setting. Albó’s position entailed rejecting a commonplace Romantic solution to linguistic domination that concentrated on reviving the language without addressing the social situation. Language revitalization makes no sense without, in the end, addressing social oppression in a full and conscious way. Here I use both the terms indigenous and oppressed, the former to refer to languages that were spoken in the Andean region before the Spanish invasion, especially as the objects of scholarly knowledge, and the latter to recognize that the future of the oppressed languages lies not in language policy alone but in understanding and ultimately transforming mechanisms of social domination.

214  bruce

mannheim

The limitations of Albó’s argument reflect the state of research in the 1960s and 1970s. The most important is the narrowness of his conception of language change and linguistic variation, which considered only contact between Spanish and the indigenous Andean languages, leaving aside three equally important axes of change. The first axis is contact between indigenous languages, for example, the contact between Quechua and Aymara in North Potosí in Bolivia, in which Aymara is ceding ground to an Aymarized Quechua, or in Puno, in which the zone of contact is relatively stable; or the contact between Quechua and Machiguenga (southern Arawakan) in the montaña in the eastern part of the department of Cuzco, Peru, or between Ecuadorian Quichua and neighboring Barbacoan languages, all of these active zones of contact since before the Spanish invasion.22 The second is variability within indigenous languages (as in any living languages), including both geographic variability (which is much more dramatic than the limited publications have shown) and temporal variability—motivated, again, as in any living language, by internal systemic pressures.23 The third is variability by social class and individual sociolinguistic experiences among speakers of the indigenous languages, which has had the effect of erasing significant social, cultural, and linguistic differences among registers of the languages.24 Though I focus on these constraints, I want to reiterate that these limitations reflect, not Albó’s thinking in particular, but empirical limitations in scholarly research in the 1960s and 1970s, along with the sociopolitical climate of the time, in which indigenous languages were treated in essentialist terms.25 Indeed, in The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion (1991) I also used a model that did not recognize the existence of a diversity of social registers in Quechua—­ essentially, a flat model—to talk about the historical differentiation of the linguistic family, the recorded history of southern Quechua since the conquest, and geographic variability among speakers. The third limitation is especially important because it shapes ethnographic and linguistic knowledge of the indigenous languages and communities in both scholarly and popular contexts, which feed back on each other. The central point is that there is a hierarchy of linguistic registers within the indigenous languages that reflects social domination. These reflect, not so much processes of loan borrowing (indeed, the most elite forms of speech tend to be the most purist with respect to loanwords),26 as a reshaping of phonology, core grammatical systems such as person

“The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” Revisited  215

and voice, the meanings of lexical stems, and everyday interactional ­practices—in short, all the stuff that is at the very core of a language and of a linguistic description. The existence of registers of Quechua calqued on Spanish linguistic practices was documented as early as the second half of the sixteenth century. Instead of describing a variety of Quechua that was already in place as the lingua franca of the Inka state, sermonals, confessionals, grammars, and dictionaries written by colonial-era missionary priests were a leading source of a “high” register of southern Quechua, which was spread by these very texts. Nor is linguistic contact between Spanish and the indigenous languages flat; rather, it varies from region to region, consonant with local histories and with differences in the linguistic structure of the indigenous language in question. Although Alberto Escobar once summed up the relationship between Spanish and Quechua with the pithy dictum, “Spanish is the dominant language, Quechua is the language of the dominated,” linguistic domination is experienced differently in different places and in distinct circumstances. For example, Spanish domination is distinct in southern Peru, in which Quechua has only recently been reintroduced to public domains, and then only sparingly, from Cochabamba, Bolivia, where Quechua is freely accepted in mass media and in other public venues. For example, recorded performances of popular music— huaynos—show different patterns of code-switching in Cuzco, Peru, than in Cochabamba, Bolivia. In Cuzco, Quechua songs are frequently encapsulated in a Spanish-language performance setting, never the reverse;27 in contrast, a common Bolivian pattern is to divide a single line, a distich, or a pair of strophes by language (usually Quechua first and Spanish second), with one a close translation of the other, and the same speaker stance established across the two. Both patterns occur within a translinguistic horizon,28 with Spanish dominant in both, but only in the Cuzco case is the dominance manifest textually. Similarly, Anna Babel’s research in Vallegrande, Bolivia, shows this to be true in Spanish as well.29 Vallegrande is resolutely bilingual, and the interactions among the linguistic features in Spanish that index contact with Quechua (often, but not always, indexing the speaker to be a first-language speaker of Quechua) vary with setting, genre, and linguistic biography but are also “modified to fit the speakers’ changing understandings of appropriate language.”30 The linguistic consequences of the interaction between the indigenous languages and Spanish are also qualitatively different in different

216  bruce

mannheim

regions. In Chimborazo and Imbabura, where the introduction of Quechua was late and perhaps colonial, a variety of Quechua that was already accommodated to Spanish syntax was used as the base of an intermediate register, Chawpi Lengua.31 On the other hand, in southern Peru and in Bolivia, where Quechua had a deeper presence before the Spanish invasion, and where the Quechua retains a more rigidly SOV (subject-­objectverb), right-headed syntax, the structural interaction between Quechua and Spanish is much more orthogonal. Although academic folklore suggests the existence of a Quechua-based hybrid of the Quechua and Spanish in the southern region (Quechuañol), none has ever been described linguistically, meaning that its existence is more like chupacabra legends than a true linguistic variety. (Most of these claims involve mistaking a substantial infusion of loanwords—much as happened between Norman French and the ancestors of modern English in the twelfth century—for a distinctive variety of the indigenous language. And as we have already seen, distinct Spanish-based registers of Quechua have existed since the sixteenth century within restricted domains of practice and among elites.) Variation within Quechua is not flat; but note also that linguistic contact between Spanish and indigenous languages is polymorphic.32 We are left with an open field to understand the complexity of the interactions among Andean languages (including Spanish), a complexity that is not yet fully understood in its linguistic, historical, social, and ethnographic aspects. To understand the subtlety of this interaction, consider an example that has been discussed, it seems, endlessly: the representation of the Quechua vowels. What makes it an especially useful example is that the distinctions among registers of Quechua are indexed by a purely formal phonological process—which other than thematizing differences among speakers has no semantic or ideological load of its own. The traditional story is that Quechua has only a subset of the five ­canonical vowels of Spanish, and that this affects the speech of Quechua speakers when they speak Spanish. This alleged effect—known as motosidad or muteness—was identified in the speech of creole elites of Cuzco in an eighteenth-century travel account,33 but over the years it has been discussed by linguists, anthropologists, and educators.34 There is no bit of linguistic ideology more pervasive or more emblematic of contact between Spanish and Quechua. Newspapers and other mass media publish discussions of motosidad and its implica-

“The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” Revisited  217

tions orthographic and educational; street comedians and editorial cartoonists satirize it; a long-running popular comic strip, Supercholo, has had its hero mix up the vowels of Spanish. Conversely, discussions of norms for writing Quechua have become inflamed over whether to use the Quechua or the Spanish vowels, to the point of death threats. Like the late nineteenth-century popular ideas that Native North Americans were “sound blind,” physiologically unable to perceive certain linguistic sounds, because they spoke English with distinctive accents mediated by their first languages, a fable that was falsified at the end of the nineteenth century by the anthropologist Franz Boas (1889), motosidad has become a mainstay of the popular and scholarly landscape, an ideological fact on the ground, always described at the interface between Spanish and ­Q uechua.35 A growing body of empirical phonetic evidence suggests that the interface between Spanish and Quechua looks a great deal like that discussed by Boas in the nineteenth century. Just as “sound blindness” was a  misrecognition by English speakers of the normal effects of first-­ language sound patterns on the production of a second language, so too is motosidad an artifact of Spanish speakers’ misrecognition of Quechua sound patterns in the speech of second-language Spanish speakers. Along with the misrecognition of the source of so-called motosidad, there is also a misattribution. Focusing on the interface between Spanish and a Quechua that is represented as sociolinguistically flat, motosidad, both as linguistic ideology and as the object of attention by linguists, erases the internal register differentiation in Quechua,36 a differentiation sensitive to linguistic biography and to social class. The evidence has come from acoustic measurements and frequency plots of the vowels of Quechua speakers from Ecuador and southern Peru, by Susan Guion and associates, by Michael Pasquale, and by Jorge Ivan Pérez and associates.37 These three bodies of work, carried out independently of each other, converged in identifying the vowels of Quechua as centralized relative to the canonical vowels of Spanish: in other words, as forming a pattern distinct from, and not a subset of, the Spanish vowels. In varieties of Quechua with phonologically distinctive uvular consonants, adjacent vowels were pronounced further back in the mouth, as would be expected from coarticulation processes. (All prior work on Quechua since the late sixteenth century, my own included, described the vowels as lowered, not backed adjacent to uvulars. I’ll return to the implications of

218  bruce

mannheim

this statement shortly.) All three of the studies followed tradition in addressing their work to language contact but converged in identifying enregistered internal differentiation in Quechua, depending on qualitatively distinct patterns of exposure to Spanish. From an articulatory point of view, the social differentiation of the vowel system revolved around the degree of opening—the aperture of the buccal cavity. First-language Quechua speakers use a relatively narrow aperture, first-language Spanish speakers a relatively wide one. The fine muscle control involved in buccal aperture, like other somatic aspects of behavior, such as gesture and gait, is habituated in early childhood and, though plastic, is relatively resistant to change. Buccal aperture is distinct among monolingual speakers of Quechua, speakers who are dominant in Quechua but also speak Spanish, and speakers who are dominant in Spanish but also speak Quechua. These differences are enregistered— recognized by Quechua speakers themselves, though not consciously. The description of the registers follows, drawing heavily on Pérez et al.38 Register 1. Monolingual speakers of Quechua—the overwhelming majority—use a narrow aperture and so distinguish three vowels, none of which correspond to the vowels of Spanish: a centralized i, like the lax i of English “bi t,” more or less in between the Spanish i and e; a centralized υ like the vowel in the English word “book,” more or less in between the Spanish u and o; and a lax ae produced more to the front of the mouth than the Spanish a.39 Adjacent to a uvular q, q’, qh, or χ, the three vowels move further back but do not become lower. Register 2. In contrast, first-language Quechua speakers who have learned Spanish to the point of having coordinate fluency in the two languages use a wide aperture of their buccal cavities. They distinguish the five canonical vowels of Spanish in their Quechua and so have relocated the Quechua vowels parallel to the vowels of their Spanish. Adjacent to a uvular q, q’, qh, or χ, the two high vowels become lower but do not move back; the low vowel moves back. Register 3 consists of first-language Spanish speakers who have learned Quechua as a second language—the former owners and administrators of landed estates (haciendas), their older children, and people who have had major commercial or administrative business in the countryside, but also others who have official business in Quechua-speaking regions: professional workers in nongovernmental organizations and many people professionally engaged with the promotion and teaching of

“The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” Revisited  219

Quechua, such as the members of the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua.40 They assign the Quechua vowels to the counterpart vowels in Spanish. Their Quechua has five distinctive vowels, assigned to their lexical representations by memory, word by word. They have Spanish midvowels not only adjacent to uvulars q, q’, qh, or χ, but also in other phonological contexts. For speakers of register 2, the height of the vowels is determined by a phonological rule; for speakers of register 3, the distinctions are phonemic. A linguistic description of register 1 (that of the overwhelming majority) in terms of registers 2 or 3 is false (and by this analysis falsified), even though the bulk of work on Quechua is precisely such a description. A linguistic description of registers 2 or 3 in terms of register 1 is also false (and by this analysis falsified). The pattern of vowels—both in paradigmatic terms and in terms of their coarticulatory modifications—is saturated with social affect and racialized. Thus speakers of any of the three react with negative affect to any description that does not reflect their own linguistic intuitions, framed in terms of their own register of Quechua. The differences in sound pattern are accompanied by enregistered differences in syntax, grammatical semantics, lexical meaning, and interactional routines. For example, along with a nominative-accusative agreement system, register 1 has an ergative agreement system in subordinate clauses and a semantic alignment system, both of which greatly expand the options for expressing semantic agency.41 Register 3, in contrast, has its range of agreement possibilities limited to a Spanish-style nominative-­ accusative system. Register 1 treats possessive phrases as syntactic islands, closely binding an object to its possessor; register 3 does not. In a narrative on which I am working, the phrase hatun sunqu is used to describe a particularly greedy landowner. In register 1, it means roughly “expansive essence”—in other words, a “predator.” In register 3, which is calibrated to lexical equivalences between Spanish and Quechua (such as those in the dictionary of the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua), it would be translated as “big-hearted.”42 In register 1, introducing oneself includes mention of the place one is from, often before one’s name. In register 3, in contrast, one introduces oneself (as in Spanish) by name only. In register 1, the default form of narrative is conversational, requiring input and at least assent from other participants in the speech event. In register 3, it is monological. Allin p’unchay (Good day), Añay (Thank

220  bruce

mannheim

you), and allin kawsay (Good life) are all innovations in register 3, contrasting with ­Allillanchu/allillanmi (Is it good?/it’s good), urpi sunqu (Dove essence; focusing on the social relationship), and allin ñan (Good road; usually wished to newlyweds), respectively. In short, register 3 is regimented to Spanish-language linguistic and social practices, phonologically, syntactically, lexically, and pragmatically. Conversely, self-­ translations into Spanish by a speaker of register 2 frequently reflect an underlying Quechua semantic, even as they are spoken with grammatically appropriate Spanish forms. A speaker of English or Spanish who asks directions of a register 2 speaker is likely to receive a reply that is grounded in an allocentric-­intrinsic frame of reference, meaning that it will be a series of named landmarks, rather than a series of instructions that track the position of the person asking directions—and thus is likely to find the response bewildering. While the three registers look more or less equivalent on paper, in fact they are vastly different demographically. In many rural communities, young children speak Quechua monolingually and are exposed to Spanish only in the school system.43 The overwhelming majority of adults use register 1, and a substantial minority register 2. In rural areas, register 3 is limited to a small minority of first-language Spanish speakers, though it is quite common in cities, creating the illusion that it is dominant. The community discussed by Mannheim and Gelman in a recent article on how children learn generic concepts and related publications is the rural type, in which all preschool children are monolingual in Quechua.44 They are first exposed to Spanish in public elementary schools, with the proportion of lessons taught in Quechua varying with the talents of the teacher, but as the child moves through the school system an increasing portion of the instruction is in Spanish. A second major setting for learning Spanish occurs when the child leaves the community for work or for military service. But at home, Quechua is spoken and transmitted quite normally across generations. Quechua speakers are not consciously aware of the differences among the three registers but do use them as the basis for making social judgments about each other, including social exclusion, much as English speakers might not be able to identify the phonetic components of a working-class New York City accent or a North Georgia accent but might still stigmatize the speaker that has either of them. The anthropologist Margarita Huayhua carried out a “match guise” test, an experimental method devised by social psychologists to study social dis-

“The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” Revisited  221

crimination in situations of contact between languages.45 Such tests involve playing recordings of matched speech samples in various social guises to participants, who are asked to evaluate the speaker of each guise as friendly, educated, urban, wealthy, and so forth. Huayhua’s study, carried out in a community just outside of Cuzco, tested four guises: a narrow-­aperture Quechua guise (in the style of a first-language Quechua speaker using register 1); a wide-aperture Quechua guise (in the style of Quechua registers 2 and 3); a narrow-aperture Spanish guise (in the style of a first-language Quechua speaker speaking Spanish, with motosidad ); and a wide-aperture Spanish guise in the style of a first-language Spanish speaker. All four guises were recorded by a single woman with a knack for imitating different styles of speech. The participants in the study included twenty first-language Quechua speakers from the community, primarily agricultural smallholders, and fourteen first-language Spanish speakers, consisting of local officials and health and nongovernmental organization workers who commuted to the community daily. All participants spoke both languages to some extent, and many were fluent in the “other” language. Both groups of participants could identify the social origins of the aperture of the guise with astonishing accuracy, regardless of the language being spoken, and evaluated the personal qualities of the speaker represented by the guise accordingly. All of the first-language Quechua speakers and more than 90 percent of the firstlanguage Spanish speakers identified the guises accurately. It is critical here to know that while racism—directed especially at highland Quechua and Aymara speakers—is widely recognized to be a major social problem in Peru today, perhaps the major social problem, a countervailing discourse argues that racialization is best represented on a gradient. The reasons for this are several. Throughout the twentieth century there was a strong public discourse of mestizaje much as in other parts of Latin America, though often as a window dressing for virulent practices of discrimination based on physical appearance and surname.46 At the same time, social scientists often took the paradigm case of racism to be a normative version of racial discrimination in the United States, and because the local parameters of discrimination were different in each of the Latin American republics, the assumption was that as a system Latin American forms of racism were more fluid. Too, social scientists were charged to identify their subjects of study among those “least like ourselves” (Robert and Margaret Redfield’s injunction in the mid-1930s)

222  bruce

mannheim

and to treat the relationship between their objects of study and other, more urban people around them as a continuum. In short, the dicta of everyday ideologies of race in the Andean republics and of social science methodology coincided; and it helped that physiological features did not always indicate who was who, or that dress was easily changed from the rural clothes of a worker in the fields to the clothes of the urban middle class (although in fact that was harder to pull off than ethnographers sometimes claim). Gradience seemed to represent the vectors of discrimination accurately—except when it didn’t. Vowel aperture allows every participant in face-to-face interaction to identify the social location of the speaker and act accordingly. It is a qualitative marker of social location, not a gradient, a marker that stays with a speaker regardless of which language he or she is speaking. It is habituated early in childhood, and though it is changeable it can be changed only with difficulty: someone who can switch from a narrow-aperture style of speech to a wideaperture style and back again is likely as rare as a good voice actor in the United States. So, unsurprisingly, a complex web of social stereotypes and emotional associations has grown around vowel aperture and around the representation of vowels in written Quechua. The distinct registers of Quechua not only are the linguistic outcome of differences in buccal aperture but are saturated with social meaning. (See Huayhua, this volume.) The register hierarchy constrains the knowledge we have of Quechua language and culture (and so constrains the representation of Quechua language and culture in the Andean republics, in public media and in the schools), encapsulating the language and culture of speakers of register 1 within registers 2 and 3. Most contemporary linguistic descriptions of Quechua (with exceptions noted) describe a phonological system with the vowel-lowering rule (register 2) or a five-vowel phonological system (register 3), meaning that they describe the speech not of monolinguals but of coordinate (register 2) or Spanish-dominant (register 3) bilinguals. The differences among the vowel systems, though small, are signatures of the social experiences and orientations of the speakers who served as informants. This is true, mutatis mutandis, of social anthropologists, who often work through translators who speak register 3. To return to Xavier Albó’s concept of an “oppressed language,” it is a feature of oppressed languages and cultures that they are known only through the filter of a distinct, relatively superordinate language and culture. As scholars, this should not depress us; rather, it should animate us to reconceive Andean linguistics and anthropology.

“The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” Revisited  223

It should also alert us to another issue: in the Andean republics, public cultures are equally enregistered, not only through encapsulation of Quechua—as an oppressed language—within Spanish but also through encapsulation within a social space in which those who speak for the language itself are speakers of register 3. For register 1 speakers, the vast majority, it means that even if they have learned Spanish as a second language, even if they have graduated from high school or have received university degrees, they are faced with a double encapsulation of their most intimate forms of expression. A dramatic illustration involved a first-language Quechua speaker who had been elected to Congress in Peru. A news photographer with a telephoto lens took a picture of her notepad during a congressional debate and discovered that her handwritten notes showed motosidad, which was then displayed on the front page of a Lima tabloid. The congresswoman sued to protest the humiliation.47 Albó tells us that “graduates still need their mother tongues as the medium through which they express their personalities, while in the public world they are diminished if not annulled. Those who have assimilated the perspective of the established order will say that the reason for this frustration is ‘that they don’t know Spanish well.’ Those who rather take a subversive stand will say that the reason is ‘that the established disorder does not accept their language.’”48 Father Albó does not hesitate in telling us which of these he believes. Like the researcher from New Zealand by way of Samoa, scholars studying the Andean region cite the grammars and dictionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as if they were a transparent repository, without considering the ways in which they were constructed intellectually and socially, as if they were photographs of the brains of colonial-era speakers of Quechua and Aymara placed in a time capsule. We cite them without doing the difficult ethnographic and linguistic work of speaking to people for whom one of the oppressed languages is their primary, if not their only, language, without exploring their linguistic practices ethnographically, and even using colonial written sources to explain contemporary practices of the everyday. Like the colleague from New Zealand, we are performing a labor of love. Affectionately we describe ama suwa, ama llulla, ama qilla, and allin kawsay as if these were ­indigenous concepts passed down to us through the ages; respectfully we begin our talks with wayqikuna panaykuna (brothers and sisters [said by a man]) or ñañaykuna turaykuna (sisters and brothers [said by a woman]), imagining that the politicians who use it must be correct, even when

224  bruce

mannheim

a­ ddressing people who were not born of the same mother as ourselves. We are able to do so affectionately, with the best of intentions, precisely because the languages we study are oppressed languages. And when we go into the field and visit rural areas with questionnaires and interview protocols written in the Quechua that we read in books, the Quechua of priests, mestizo shopkeepers, and landlords, and we interpret what people tell us through the same filters—ayni, pachamama, a­ yllunchis— we, in spite of our very best intentions, are participating in reproducing the oppressed status of the oppressed languages. Who among us is prepared to join Xavier Albó in challenging the established disorder and accepting the language as more than the abstract object of scholarship, as blood and breath? Good intentions will take us only so far. As the Tlingit case showed us, there is still a long road ahead, to understand and to be ­understood. NOTES

I am grateful to Hoda Ahmadi-Bandeh and Georgia C. Ennis for their comments on an earlier version and to David Garrett and Cecilia Méndez for discussions of some of the issues raised in this chapter. 1.  For a thorough examination of this issue in another Arctic language, see Barbra A. Meek and Jacqueline Messing, “Framing Indigenous Languages as Secondary to Matrix Languages,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 38 (2007): 99–118. 2.  Bruce Mannheim, The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), chap. 3. 3.  Pierre Duviols, La lutte contre les religions autochtones dans le Pérou colonial: “L’extirpation de l’idolâtrie” entre 1532 et 1660 (Lima: Institut Français d’Études Andines, 1971); Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 4.  Amy Huras, “Castilianization in the Archdiocese of Lima, 1600–1700” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2016). 5.  David Garrett, Shadows of Empire: The Indian Nobility of Cuzco, 1750– 1825 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 2, based on the survey undertaken by Archbishop Mollinedo from 1674 to 1694; David Garrett, “Locating ‘Criollo’ in Late Habsburg Cusco,” Illes e Imperis 14 (2012): ­139–65.

“The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” Revisited  225

6.  Ignacio de Castro, Relación del Cuzco (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, [1788] 1978), 44. 7.  Cecilia Méndez Gastelumendi, La república plebeya (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2013), chap. 5. The legal terms for the fiscal categories were peruano for indigenous people and vecino for people of European descent, respectively. On the long-term demography, see George Kubler, The Indian Caste of Peru, 1795–1940: A Population Study Based upon Tax Records and Census Reports (Washington, DC: Institute of Social Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution, 1952). 8.  Yazmín López Lenci, “El Cuzco y los viajeros del 1900,” Cuadernos de Literatura (Bogotá) 9, no. 18 (2005): 12–23. 9.  Leticia Reina, ed., La reindianización de América Latina: Siglo XIX (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1997). 10.  Cecilia Méndez Gastelumendi, “De indio a serrano: Nociones de raza y geografía en el Perú (siglos XVIII–XXI),” Histórica 35 (2011): 53–102. 11.  Though it is commonplace to attribute regional variation in the Spanish of the Andean region to indigenous substrata, one needs to distinguish carefully and on a case-by-case basis between the Spanish spoken as a second language by first-language Quechua speakers and internal variation within Spanish, as Yakov Malkiel observed decades ago in Linguistics and Philology in Spanish America: A Survey (1925–1970) (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). See Germán de Granda, Español y lenguas indoamericanas en Hispanoamérica (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1999), and Virginia Zavala, “Reconsideraciones en torno al español andino,” Lexis 23 (1999): 26, for two exemplary approaches to this problem. 12.  Bernard Lavallé, Le marquis et la marchand: Les luttes de pouvoir au Cuzco, 1700–1730 (Paris: Maison des Pays Ibériques, CNRS, 1987); Mannheim, Language of the Inka; Bruce Mannheim, “El renacimiento quechua del siglo XVIII,” in El quechua en debate: Ideología, normalización y enseñanza, ed. JuanCarlos Godenzzi (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos “Bartolomé de las Casas,” 1992), 15–22; César Itier, El teatro quechua en el Cuzco (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos “Bartolomé de las Casas,” 1992); Rodolfo Cerrón-­Palomino, “El diccionario quechua de los académicos,” Revista Andina 15, no. 1 (1997): 151–205. On Quechua General, see César Itier, “Lengua general y quechua cuzqueño en los siglos XVI y XVII,” in Desde afuera y desde ­adentro: Ensayos de etnografía e historia del Cuzco y Apurímac, ed. Luis Millones, Hiroyasu Tomoeda, and Tatsuhiko Fujii (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 2000), 47–59. Also see Gérald Taylor, “Langue de prestige et parlers d’opprimés,” Actes du XLII Congres des Americanistes 4 (1978): 231–44; Gérald Taylor, Introducción a la lengua general (quechua) (Lima: Institut

226  bruce

mannheim

­ rançais d’Études Andines, 2001). On the religious register of Quechua, see F Alan Durston, Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 13.  Jesús Lara, Tragedia del fin de Atawallpa (Cochabamba: Universitaria, 1957). 14.  On the Centro Qosqo de Arte Nativo, see Zoila S. Mendoza, Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). For a bilingual anthology of both unpublished and published Quechua poetry, see Julio Noriega Bernuy, Poesía quechua escrita en el Perú (Lima: Centro de Estudios y Publicación, 1993). On the epistolary corpus of Mapudungun, see Jorge Pavez Ojeda, ed., Cartas mapuche, siglo XIX (Santiago: Fondo de Publicaciones Americanistas, Universidad de Chile, 2008). 15.  James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 16.  Méndez Gastelumendi, “De indio a serrano.” In the most recent version of “decentralization,” the key administrative units, “departments,” have been renamed “regions,” and the appointed prefects have been replaced with elected presidents. There is sufficient administrative autonomy that public works are funded at the regional level, but not sufficient autonomy that any decisions of policy or law can be made at that level. 17.  Compare Sergio Romero, Language and Ethnicity among the K’ichee’ Maya (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015). 18.  It also appeared in a Paraguayan anthropology journal, the version that is cited here: Xavier Albó Corrons, “El futuro de los idiomas oprimidos en los Andes,” Suplemento Antropológico 8 (1973): 141–61. An English translation was published several years later, with some translation errors: Xavier Albó Corrons, “The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” in Language and Society, ed. William C. McCormack and Stephen A. Wurm (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), 309–30. 19.  Albó Corrons, “Futuro,” 142. 20.  Bartomeu Meliá, “El guaraní dominante y dominado,” Acción, Revista Pararaguaya de Reflexión y Diálogo 11 (1971): 21–26. Meliá coined the expression in 1966. 21.  Albó Corrons, “Futuro,” 144. 22.  Koomei Hosokawa, Diagnóstico sociolingüístico de la región Norte de Potosí (La Paz: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Lingüísticos, 1980), discusses the contact between Quechua and Aymara in North Potosí. Sandhya Narayanan, pers. comm., 2017, and Cristina Moya and Robert Boyd, “Different Selection Pressures Give Rise to Distinct Ethnic Phenomena: A Functionalist Frame-

“The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” Revisited  227

work with Illustrations from the Peruvian Altiplano,” Human Nature 26 (2015): 1–27, discuss the contact between Quechua and Aymara in Puno. On contact between Quechua and Machiguenga in Cuzco, see Nicholas Q. Emlen, “Public Discourse and Community Formation in a Trilingual Matsigenka-­Q uechuaSpanish Frontier Community of Southern Peru,” Language in Society 44 (2016): 679–703, and “Multilingualism in the Andes and Amazonia: A View from InBetween,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, ­November 2016, doi:  10.1111/jlca.12250; on contact between Ecuadorian Quichua and neighboring Barbacoan languages, see Jorge Gómez Rendón, “Las lenguas barbacoanas meridionales y el quechua,” Revista Pucará 27 (2016): 57–85. 23. Mannheim, Language of the Inka. 24.  Compare Michael Wroblewski, “Amazonian Kichwa Proper: Ethnolinguistic Domain in Pan-Indian Ecuador,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22 (2012): 64–86, on Quichua Unificado in Ecuador. 25.  See Moya and Boyd, “Different Selection Pressures,” for a refutation of the traditional position of linguistic essentialism from a cognitive standpoint. 26.  To put this differently, the most elite registers are structurally the most accommodated to Spanish but lexically have the fewest loanwords. 27.  For an example, see Bruce Mannheim, “Couplets and Oblique Contexts: The Social Organization of a Folksong,” Text 7, no. 3 (1987): 265–88. 28.  Compare Rosaleen Howard, Por los linderos de la lengua: Ideologías lingüísticas en los Andes (Lima: Institut Français d’Études Andines and Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2007), 372. 29.  Anna Babel, “Uso de rasgos de contacto en el español andino: La influencia de la identidad,” Neue Romania 41 (2012): 5–26; Anna Babel, “The Role of Context in Interpreting Linguistic Variables,” Boletín de Filología 49 (2014): 49–85; Anna Babel, “Affective Motivations for Borrowing: Performing Local Identity through Loan Phonology,” Language and Communication 49 (2016): 70–83. 30.  Anna Babel, “Contact and Contrast in Valley Spanish” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2010). 31.  Pieter Muysken, “La mezcla entre quichua y castellano,” Lexis (Lima) 3 (1979): 41–56; Pieter Muysken, “Media Lengua,” in Contact Languages: A Wider Perspective, ed. Sarah G. Thomason (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1979), 365– 426; Jorge Gómez Rendón, Mestizaje lingüístico en los Andes: Génesis y estructura de una lengua mixta (Quito: Abya-Yala, 2008); Jorge Gómez Rendón, “La media lengua: Una revisión de los supuestos teóricos,” manuscript, University of Amsterdam, 2014, www.uva.nl/binaries/content/documents/personalpages/g/o /j.a.gomezrendon/en/tab-two/tab-two/cpitem%5B11%5D/asset?141895

228  bruce

mannheim

4813471; Suzanne Dikker, “Spanish Prepositions in Media Lengua: Redefining Relexification,” in Hispanisation: The Impact of Spanish on the Lexi­con and Grammar of the Indigenous Languages of Austronesia and the Americas, ed. Thomas Bakker Stolz and Rosa Dik Salas Palomo (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), 121–46; Marco Shappeck, “Quichua–Spanish Language Contact in Salcedo, Ecuador: Revisiting Media Lengua Syncretic Language Practices” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign, 2011; Jesse Stewart, “A Brief Descriptive Grammar of Pijal Media Lengua and an Acoustic Vowel Space Analysis of Pijal Media Lengua and Imbabura Quichua” (MA thesis, University of Manitoba, 2011). 32.  Babel, “Role of Context.” 33.  Alonso Carrió de la Vandera y Acarette, El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes, ed. Emilio Carilla ([1773?]; repr., Barcelona: Labor, 1973). 34.  Charles C. Fries and Kenneth L. Pike, “Coexistent Phonemic Systems,” Language 25 (1948): 29–50; Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino, “La ‘motosidad’ y sus implicancias en el enseñanza del Castellano,” in Aportes para la enseñanza del lenguaje, ed. Martín Quintana Chaupín and Danilo Sánchez Lihón (Lima: Retablo de Papel, 1975), 125–65; Xavier Albó Corrons, “Social Constraints on Cochabamba Quechua” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1970); Nancy H. Hornberger, “Five Vowels or Three? Linguistics and Politics in Quechua Language Planning in Peru,” in Power and Inequality in Language Education, ed. James W. Tollefson (London: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 187–205; Mannheim, Language of the Inka, 211ff. 35. Franz Boas, “On Alternating Sounds,” American Anthropologist 2 (1889): 47–54. 36.  Judith Irvine and Susan Gal (“Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation,” in Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, ed. Paul V. Kroskrity [Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2000], 38), regard erasure as a primary process in the semiotic of boundary making, one “in which ideology, in simplifying the sociolinguistic field, renders some persons or activities (or sociolinguistic phenomena) invisible. Facts that are inconsistent with the ideological scheme either go unnoticed or get explained away. So, for example, a social group or a language may be imagined as homogeneous, its internal variation disregarded.” My use of register here departs from more common uses in which it is possible for individual speakers to shift from one register to another (see Asif Agha, “Registers of Language,” in A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, ed. Alessandro Duranti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 23–45. In this case, the registers are rigidly indexed to speakers.

“The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” Revisited  229

37.  Susan G. Guion, “The Vowel Systems of Quichua-Spanish Bilinguals: Age of Acquisition Effects on the Mutual Influence of the First and Second Languages,” Phonetica 60 (2003): 98–128; Susan G. Guion, James E. Flege, and Jonathan D. Loftin, “The Effect of L1 Use on Pronunciation in Quichua-Spanish Bilinguals,” Journal of Phonetics 28 (2000): 27–42; Michael D. Pasquale, “Quechua and Spanish Language Contact: Influence on the Quechua Phonological System (Peru)” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 2001); Michael D. Pasquale, “Phonological Variation in a Peruvian Quechua Speech Community,” in Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages, ed. James N. Stanford and Dennis Preston (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009), 245–58; Jorge Ivan Pérez Silva, Jorge Acurio Palma, and Raúl Bendezú Arauja, Contra el prejuicio lingüístico de la motosidad: Un estudio de las vocales del caste­ llano andino desde la fonética acústica (Lima: Instituto Riva Agüero, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2009). 38.  Jorge Ivan Pérez Silva et al., Contra el prejuicio lingüístico. 39.  For two relatively good descriptions of these vowels, see John Howland Rowe, “Sound Patterns in Three Inca Dialects,” International Journal of American Linguistics 16 (1950): 137–48; and Antonio Cusihuamán Gutiérrez, Gramática quechua (Cuzco: Callao; Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1976), 45–47. 40. Cerrón-Palomino, “Diccionario quechua”; Tim Marr, “Language Ideology, Ownership and Maintenance: The Discourse of the Academia Mayor de La Lengua Quechua,” in Opportunities and Challenges of Bilingualism, ed. Wei Li, Jean-Marc Dewaele, and Alex Housen (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), 199–219; Mercedes Niño-Murcia, “Linguistic Purism in Cuzco, Peru: A Historical Perspective,” Language Problems and Language Planning 21, no. 2 (1997): 134–61. 41.  For a discussion and examples, see Bruce Mannheim and Guillermo Salas Carreño, “Wak’a: Entifications of the Andean Sacred,” in The Archaeology of Wak’as: Explorations of the Sacred in the Pre-Columbian Andes, ed. Tamara Bray (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2015), 51–52. 42.  Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua, Diccionario quechua-españolquechua; Qheswa-español-qheswa simi taqe (Cuzco: Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua, 2005); Cerrón-Palomino, “Diccionario quechua.” 43.  The survival of Quechua in the rural Andes is a topic that is much discussed but little studied. The community discussed in Bruce Mannheim and Susan A. Gelman, “El aprendizaje de los conceptos genéricos entre niños quechua hablantes monolingües,” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Études Andines 42 (2013): 353–68, located in the Valle Sagrado of Cuzco, is relatively accessible to outsiders but is also a fairly self-sufficient agropastoral community. But in

230  bruce

mannheim

communities that depend entirely on herding or on the income from labor in the mines, community members often decide en masse to expose their children to Spanish as early as possible, remote physically though these communities may be. Systematic ethnographic research on language maintenance and shift in the rural heartland is long overdue. I am grateful to Rodolfo Cerrón-­ Palomino for discussing this issue with me. 44. Ibid. 45.  Margarita Huayhua, “Strangers in Our Own Land: Social Oppression in the Southern Andes,” unpublished manuscript, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, 2017. 46.  Francisco B. Galarza and Gustavo Yamada, “Labor Market Discrimination in Lima, Peru: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” World Development 58 (2014): 83–94. 47.  “Congresista Hilaria Supa anuncia demanda contra medio que la ‘humilló,’” Radioprogramas del Peru, Noticias, April 23, 2009, www.rpp.com.pe /2009-04-23-congresista-hilaria-supa-anuncia-demanda-contra-medio-que -la-humillo-noticia_177427.html. 48.  Albó Corrons, “Futuro,” 150.

CHAPTER 8

Building Differences The (Re)production of Hierarchical Relations among Women in the Southern Andes

MARGARITA HUAYHUA

In the Andes large numbers of people speak indigenous languages such as Quechua, spoken by approximately 95 percent of the rural population of the southern Peruvian highlands. In this context, when government and nongovernmental organization (NGO) employees speak Quechua they assume that their rapport with first-language speakers of Quechua will improve. Drawing on interactions between government employees and rural women in a community in southern Peru, I suggest that even when government and NGO employees speak Quechua as a second language, the way they use that language reinforces hierarchies between them and women who speak Quechua as a first language. To put this another way, bilingual speakers—women and men—perpetuate forms of domination that typecast Quechua-speaking people not only in Spanish but also in Quechua. These forms of domination reproduce the stereotype of Quechua speakers as abnormal, as people who lack social judgment and do not have the social requisites to live a “modern” or “civilized” life. These forms of domination can be conveyed above or below the 231

232  margarita

huayhua

thresholds of awareness of the participants, regardless of whether they are bilingual or monolingual. For government or NGO employees to speak Quechua as a second language does not in itself reduce the production of hierarchy in rural settings because it is produced interactionally, despite the best avowed intentions of all concerned. C ON T E XT S

Over the past seventy-five years, various scholars working in the Andean republics—Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador—have claimed that language maps onto ethnicity in a one-to-one way. Many studies associate Quechua or Aymara language with so-called Indians and Spanish with socalled criollos. If Indians learn and speak Spanish, they are labeled as cholos or mestizos.1 This way of linking ethnicity to language is connected to an old idea—the idea that under the pressure of “modernization” ethnicity is a gradient phenomenon, in which native people inevitably become modern by assimilation to the Euro-Westernized style of life that elites claim to represent.2 Consequently, the largest focus of research on native Andean languages is not on the native languages per se. Rather, it focuses on the sociolinguistic effects of linguistic assimilation and bilingualism,3 always understood as an inexorable force affecting Quechua speakers. Scholars rarely study monolingual Quechua villages and monolingual speakers, or the social consequences of their interactions with each other or with outside government or NGO employees in Quechua.4 The assimilationist framework is shared not only by scholars but by laypeople who speak Spanish as a first language (and who often also have a knowledge of Quechua), particularly in Peru. This includes people such as bureaucratic employees, intellectuals, and political and economic elites, who share the belief that the so-called Indians need to change their “backward” forms of life for modern ones, in which the inevitable outcome is mestizaje or, as Helen Safa translated the word, “whitening.”5 One key feature of such whitening is replacement of Quechua with Spanish, because Quechua is associated with stereotypes of backwardness, ignorance, falsehood, and lack of judgment in relational opposition to Spanish. Spanish is considered the language of “civilization,” “knowledge,” “truth,” and “reason.” What is more, within the political economy of the Andean countries, Quechua is considered a burden and

Building Differences   233

a hindrance to the development of an imagined monolingual Spanish-­ speaking “nation.” In this framework, there is a desire to erase the existence of a monolingual Quechua-speaking population; this population is stigmatized and oppressed. They are oppressed in the sense that they can speak their own language unselfconsciously only in limited settings (see Mannheim, this volume) and are particularly unlikely to do so in institutional settings,6 even with the current spate of government-­ sponsored programs to promote indigenous languages, such as bilingual-­ intercultural education. The stigmatization of Quechua is heightened when rural speakers move to the city to work, for example when women work as domestic servants in Spanish-speaking households. The very idea of linguistic mestizaje or “whitening” reinforces discrimination. The implication is that Quechua-speaking people will no longer face discrimination if they become fluent in Spanish. The reality is otherwise. Even if they speak Spanish, Quechua speakers are identified as Indians and treated accordingly.7 Consequently, the scholarly emphasis on linguistic “whitening,” that is, the idea that by switching language Indians are becoming civilized, unwittingly reinforces the domination of Quechua speakers by Spanish speakers. Quechua speakers who either fail to learn Spanish or have a Quechua accent have failed the task of linguistic whitening; Quechua speakers who have learned a relatively elegant Spanish are treated as remarkable and thus also fail the task of linguistic whitening. In addition, bilingualism itself, especially in southern Peru, does not improve, and has not improved, “race” relations. Bilinguals, particularly those who speak Quechua as a first language, are assigned to the stigmatized categories of cholos or mestizos, in accordance with the ideology of mestizaje. Bilingual social interactions contribute to discrimination and hierarchical relationships among speakers just as much as interactions that are polarized by language. Code-switching and code-mixing inform the local social hierarchies of domination in which speakers are embedded. Bilingual linguistic practices do not smooth over social differences but are instead the material out of which social differences are made, the ways in which speakers create a “we code” and a “they code,” as John Gumperz suggested.8 Though code-switching practices depend on their interactional situation, such practices are informed by the larger sociopolitical and economic structure in which Quechua and Spanish are positioned as languages.9 Spanish is placed at the top of a hierarchy with respect to the

234  margarita

huayhua

languages spoken primarily by native Peruvians, such as Quechua, Aymara, Asháninka, Shipibo, or Yanesha, as the language of power. Spanish legitimacy is imposed not only by the state and its institutions but also—in habitual and everyday contexts—by those who have access to Spanish as a first language.10 In this chapter, I examine the politics of language use in real-time interactions, with a special focus on interactions among women.11 I argue that access to Spanish as the language of power and access to Quechua as a second language are instrumental in subordinating Quechua-speaking women.12 I follow Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet’s call to study relations within same-sex groups in order to pinpoint how, within those groups, differences are highlighted and produced to build hierarchical relations.13 It is critical to Andean ethnography to study interaction among women, partly to avoid the scholarly reproduction of the “Third World Woman” as a singular monolithic subject.14 Alison Spedding highlights the social position of many who work with women in the Andes: both domestic and international scholars tend to be middle class and interpret differences in class, ethnicity, and language to reproduce a stereotype of indigenous women as victims and as poor.15 This chapter illustrates how differences among women are produced in everyday interactions, defying any easy cross-class or cross-ethnic solidarity. For the most part, when scholars speak generically of a large-scale social category such as “women,” particularly in Peru, they exclude those who speak minority languages (or, in the terminology of Mannheim’s chapter in this volume, “oppressed” languages). For example, as the feminist scholar Maruja Barrig pointed out, people working on issues of women and equal rights in Peru often exclude women who speak Quechua and the women who work as domestic servants inside their own homes.16 These women are often invisible to activists and scholars. This paradox is noteworthy because it informs the space and the social position in which Quechua-speaking women are placed within the Peruvian social hierarchy and illustrates the way difference functions in producing relations of dominance among groups of women. Such relations are in turn related to the place these groups occupy in the larger society. I illustrate my main point by showing how women who have access to both Spanish and Quechua distinguish themselves from monolingual Quechua-speaking women. They do so by using both codes, tacitly subordinating Quechua women in terms of language access but also in terms of reasoning capacity and hygiene. Such subordination is embedded in

Building Differences   235

habitual forms of social interaction, forms that are used without either side necessarily being conscious of the ways in which they produce subordination. I share some of my findings from three different settings—a van, a clinic, and a domestic household—in a Peruvian village called Uqhururu,17 located near the city of Cuzco. The van service is used by both villagers and city dwellers. The village clinic is run by government employees who speak Spanish as a first language but frequently use Quechua in their interactions with villagers. Although the government employees speak Quechua, the registers of Quechua spoken by first-language Quechua speakers and first-language Spanish speakers are distinctly different, especially in the use they make of the supralaryngeal cavity, a difference that both are attuned to, at least unconsciously, but invariably.18 The domestic setting is a household in which day-to-day activities are carried out entirely in Quechua. All of these interactions involve codeswitching, either from Spanish to Quechua or from Quechua to Spanish. Unlike many accounts of code-switching, however, this one highlights its motivation to reinforce social hierarchy between employees and villagers in much the same way that Penelope Harvey observed.19 E V E RYDAY IN STAN C E S OF “C IV IL IZIN G” QU E C H UAS PE AK IN G WOME N A C a l l to Wo m e n fo r P ro p er B ehavi or

Let us consider the van setting. To travel to the village of Uqhururu, passengers can count on only two vans. The first van departs from Cuzco around 7:00 a.m. and the second around 7:20 a.m. Employees of institutions working in the village are the usual passengers, employees or professionals like teachers, medical practitioners, and municipal agents— although some villagers also travel by van. From here on in this chapter I refer to nonvillagers as “agents” (A), since all are positioned vis-à-vis the villagers (V) through distinct public institutions. On one particular morning in April 2010, one of the vans was overcrowded, leading two Quechua-speaking women to board the second van. One of the women (V1) grasped the seat backrest in the second row where two agents were seated. The agents stared at her with hostility, and one of them (A1) yelled (Quechua is in bold italics and Spanish in ­italics):20

236  margarita

huayhua

01 A1: ¡Allinta sayay doñita ñit’imuwashanki! ¡Por qué no van en vuestro carro! 02 Esta gente no hace caso, nos incomodan. 03 V1: Manan mamitay tupayamuykichu, sayakullashanin. Manaya huq karu kanchu, 04 lliwpis wihakuytaqa munanchismi, riki? In the translation that follows, the English counterpart of the Quechua is bolded: A1: You are crushing me, Missy, stand properly! Why don’t you travel in your assigned car! These ((nasty)) people do not obey, they are making us uncomfortable. V1: My beloved mother, I am not touching you, I am only standing. There is no other car. We all want to travel, right? The word doñita, an inflection of the Spanish doña, addresses V1 as if she were a child. [D]oñita is intertwined with ñit’imuwashanki (line 01), an expression that asserts that A1 is being crushed although nobody has touched her. After this utterance—a mix of Quechua and Spanish— the speaker follows with a Spanish utterance. The Spanish utterance asserts that both women should have caught the first car, the one allocated for villagers. A1’s last utterance (line 02), no hace caso, nos incomodan, portrays V1 and her companion as obnoxious troublemakers who are misbehaving. In addition, this comment depicts the Quechua-speaking women as having no consideration for entitled passengers and as making the agents uneasy and uncomfortable by boarding the van. A1 is exasperated with how close V1 is standing to her and her companion, and she expresses this by the use of two different codes, Quechua and Spanish. The code-switching marks a distance and creates a boundary between the two female parties. It highlights the allegedly exclusive rights of agents to ride the van. Quechua is used to accuse the Quechua-speaking women, and Spanish is used to command and express contempt for the Quechua-­ speaking women by objectifying the interlocutor as someone not worth speaking to in the first place. It also marks the Quechua-speaking riders as minors incapable of realizing that their presence is unsettling to the agents and to their “privileges” to ride the van. In her response, V1 addresses her interlocutor as mamitay (my beloved mother) to show subordination and to acknowledge A1’s social standing. Then the interlocutor points out that she has definitely not touched or crushed A1: Mana-n tupa-ya-mu-yki-chu (line 03).21 Rather,

Building Differences   237

V1 is merely standing near A1—sayakullashanin—which should not bother her or cause her any trouble. A1’s claim is out of place. V1’s closing question, l­liwpis wihakuytaqa munanchismi, riki? (line 04), makes the point that everyone needs to travel—the Quechua-speaking interlocutor is not traveling to cause trouble and should not be harassed by other passengers, regardless of her social position. It also implies that people’s right to travel cannot be constrained; such a right has to be acknowledged regardless of the circumstances in which people find themselves and regardless of what people think of each other. In view of this response, A1 and her companion both look at each other, move closer together in their seats, and frown in disapproval at the woman’s behavior. That both agents are women does not make them any less contemptuous toward the native woman. They seem to want to make sure that they inhabit a superior standing in relation to the villagers. V1 is able to respond to A1 and manages to put herself on the same footing by addressing A1 and questioning her claims of being crushed and bothered by the travelers. The Quechua speaker looks briefly at the agents, resting her gaze on the window and utters nothing further. Her villager companion also remains quiet, covering her forehead and most of her eyes with her hat. The second passenger does not deal with the agents. The van reaches Uqhururu. Both female villagers get off on the main road. Be i n g a n Irra ti o n a l Ani mal

In the village clinic, villagers are ratified as interlocutors, although that does not mean they will be treated on equal footing with the clinic staff. When agents resort to Quechua, it is to depict villagers as lacking judgment, that is, as irrational and in need of supervision. Let us examine an example of dialogue from the clinic. In the examining room, an agent is filling out the patients’ registry book. A patient (P1) comes in and sits facing the agent. The agent (A2) asks:22 05 A2: Niway este (-) imawan cuidakunki qan (.) ah (?)23 06 P1: Mana siñurita kuyrakuymanchu ((facing A3)) 07 A2: Por qué (?) Otro wawa kanqa ((reviewing a page contained in the medical record)) 08 P1: Umayman siñurita atakawan

238  margarita

huayhua

A2: Tell me this (-) what ((method)) will you be using for birth control (.) ah (?) P1: Ms., I won’t use any method ((facing A3)) A2: Why (?) You will have another baby ((reviewing a page contained in the medical record)) P1: Ms., it gives me terrible headaches Confronted with the patient’s refusal to use a contraceptive method, the agent asserts the patient did not want to take care of herself. Ignoring the patient’s headaches, the agent says: 09 A2: Entonces no quieres cuidarte y quieres tener diez ó veinte hijos (?) Aqnata munanki. 10 P1: ((becomes silent)) A2: So you don’t want to use any method, and you want to have ten or twenty children (?) You want that. P1: ((becomes silent)) The agent scolds the patient in both Spanish and Quechua, asserting that the patient purposely wants to have many children despite the availability of contraception. The patient becomes silent and begins to swing her feet while the agent, combining Quechua and Spanish, adds: 11 A2: Mana wawata aqna animal hinachu kanan (.) solo waka (.) oveja tawa (.) chunka (.) pisqa (.) comunlla (.) qan humano kanki igual nuqa hina no cierto (?) A2: Babies cannot come into being like an animal (.) only cows, sheep ((have)) four, five, ten offspring without any care (.) you are human like me, right (?) The agent—despite her good intentions—stereotypes the patient as an animal, a judgment that is even more severe in Quechua than it would be in Spanish or English. Animal hinachu denotes that women who deliver more than three children are like animals, resembling cows or sheep—they are not human. The woman, in order to be human, must use

Building Differences   239

a contraceptive just as A2 does, as implied by “qan humano kanki igual nuqa hina[,] no cierto[?].” Describing women who refuse contraception as animals—in contrast to humans, who know how to take care of their bodies and control their reproductive capacity—is common around the clinic. Uywa, animal in Spanish, shows that one example of irrational behavior is not having a “proper” number of children. In the interaction between the agent and the patient, the agent combines Quechua with Spanish (line 05), and then Spanish with Quechua to convey that having another baby is an issue that must be addressed. In the next utterance (line 09) the agent highlights in full Spanish that P1 is an irresponsible woman, who is not taking the “proper” steps to avoid having more children. The woman should use contraception, otherwise P1 will be behaving like a nonhuman by having ten to twenty children. This is made fully explicit in line 11, where the Quechua-­Spanish utterance states that to have more than three children is to belong to the animal kingdom, that is, to the field of irrationality.24 What is more, Quechua becomes useful as an instrument to subordinate women to the demands of the medical practitioner. The practitioner does not take into account how the contraceptive method negatively affects the woman’s health. Quechua is used to threaten the woman and to blame her, to make her feel guilty for not behaving as a human. That is, it is not A2 who is racializing the woman (P1); rather, it is P1 who fails at being a human and behaves like an irrational being, and thus is racially inferior. Quechua is used here to produce and perpetuate a hierarchical relation. C l e a n l i n e s s a s a C i v i l i z i ng Process

The racism displayed inside the clinic even reaches into the privacy of Quechua-speaking households. Let us consider a last example. The municipality of which Uqhururu is a part has an explicit policy of “modernizing” the village of Uqhururu by introducing urban “standards” of domestic organization and cleanliness. The municipality sends an agent to visit each household to make sure they are complying. Sasiku, the host, receives the visitor on her patio. She lays her shawl over a rock and invites the visitor to sit, a kind gesture of hospitality for Quechua-speaking people. The agent (A3) sits down and pulls out a form,25 saying:

240  margarita

huayhua

12 A3: Mamita visita Ah (.) VISITA DOMICILIARIA (.) Ña yachankichisña riki (?) A3: Little mama visit (.) HOUSE VISIT (.) You are familiar with this already, right (?) The visitor warns the host that the visit is to assess whether her household meets the municipal guidelines for “house hygiene” by checking the organization of household utensils and kitchen and bathroom hygiene. In this context, the Spanish word mamita alludes to the assumed lower position of the host who has to fulfill the guest’s demands. The demand is reinforced by visita Ah and VISITA DOMICILIARIA; these phrases convey that the inspection is legitimate. To avoid any doubts, the speaker, switching to Quechua, highlights that everybody in the village is familiar with the “house visit” program. The host (H1), after hearing the Quechua phrase, signals her acceptance by uttering aha (yes). They go to the kitchen, where the agent pulls aside a plastic curtain covering a wooden crate to check mugs, plates, forks, and spoons. After inspecting a mug and checking the plates, she says approvingly, Muy bien, aqna kanan (Very good, it must be like that). The agent asks questions about water cleanliness and personal hygiene. The host answers quickly with yes or no. The agent goes on to inspect the hygiene of the washbasin and the bathroom. She returns and fills out the form, saying, 13 A3: No deben de echar tierra al baño (.) MANA ALLPA KANACHU (?) 14 H1: Mana, mana ((in a whispering tone)) A3: You shouldn’t let dirt or mud fall on the ((squat)) toilet (.) THERE SHOULDN’T BE DIRT OR MUD (?) H1: No, no ((in a whispering tone)) The agent scolds the host about bathroom cleanliness first in Spanish and then in Quechua. She uses Quechua to make sure that the addressee “understands” the new rules of cleanliness. For example, the toilet must always be free of any traces of tracked-in dirt and mud. In this interaction Spanish, the language of power, is used first in order to highlight the power with which the agent is vested. This sets the frame that

Building Differences   241

the government is interested in every procedure within the house in order to “improve” villagers’ lives. The supervision is invasive, and it infringes on the host’s intimate life and the household’s sovereignty in the name of “hygiene habits.” The host finds herself in a dilemma; this is her house, and she can ask the visitor to leave if she has been offended. But the host needs to maintain her kind demeanor, more so when the visitor highlights that her concern with the host’s house cleanliness is an “official” duty. C ODA

A standard way to describe the use of a subordinate language such as Quechua in bilingual interactions is to say that it creates “solidarity” among the interactants, as Mannheim and Gal suggest for the Andes and eastern Europe respectively.26 But in the interactions described above, Quechua is used to scold, criticize, command, and intrude upon Quechua-­ speaking women’s lives. Quechua and Spanish are used to depict them as women who must be disciplined and raised to a “human level” of life. That is, Quechua women are framed as inferior beings in need of being taught how to behave in public, how to take care of their reproductive ­capacity, and how to run their households properly, according to the “standards” of the agents—agents who, as women, claim to be especially sensitive to the women and committed to helping them. Having good intentions or a sense of solidarity with other women—even learning the indigenous language—does not rid the agents of behaviors that are, in essence, rituals of humiliation. In these interactions Quechua combines with Spanish in at least four different ways. First, Quechua utterances are followed by Spanish utterances, as in line 01. Second, Spanish words are inflected by Quechua suffixes, as in lines 05 and 11. Third, Quechua phrases incorporate a Spanish lexicon, as in lines 05 and 11. And fourth, a set of Quechua phrases are used after a Spanish utterance to reinforce what has been said in Spanish, as in lines 07, 09, 12, and 13. The Quechua coming from the mouths of its native speakers is ignored and dismissed, as in lines 03–04 and 08. That it is not acknowledged as a valid language by the agents is shown by their condescension toward Quechua monolingual speakers.

242  margarita

huayhua

In all these cases, the patterns of mixing or switching between Quechua and Spanish do not establish a more balanced footing between the government agents and the first-language Quechua speakers—far from it. What is more, the discourses in Quechua with Spanish or Spanish with Quechua that emerge in the interactions are informed by racist ideologies. They convey tacitly or explicitly that Quechua women’s “misbehaviors” must be tamed, that Quechua-speaking women need to be habituated to “civilized” (“modern”) ways of living by agents who intervene in their sexual and reproductive lives and household sovereignty through patronization and “guidance.” The discourses that emerge in the above interactions inform the distinctions made among women, stereotyping those who have no access to the language of power as disobedient minors who lack “hygiene” and “judgment.” Linguistic mestizaje or whitening is not a way station in a pattern of linguistic assimilation. Rather, it informs the nature of social dominance; at the same time, such patterns are determined by the local frameworks of social dominance in the southern Andes. In the cases examined I have illustrated how the well-intended measure of teaching government or NGO employees to speak Quechua as a second language does not in itself reduce the production of hierarchy in rural settings because that hierarchy is produced interactionally. In these instances, the use of Quechua becomes one more instrument of hierarchy. Inasmuch as they focus on linguistic codes and not on standards and best practices for interaction, the standard understandings of linguistic assimilation, bilingualism, and mestizaje disguise a much bleaker story. In this context, even interactions among bilinguals index and reproduce patterns of social discrimination and subordination. NOTES

his study was made possible through research grants from the National SciT ence Foundation, a Mary Malcomson Raphael Fellowship from the Center for the Education of Women at the University of Michigan, the Inter-American Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Rutgers University. I thank Alan Durston, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Claire Insel, Bruce Mannheim, Amy Mortensen, Andrew Shryock, and Tom Stephen for their comments on earlier drafts, as well as Elisabeth Magnus for her revisions. Any errors remain mine. 1.  See Penelope Harvey, Género, autoridad y competencia lingüística (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1989), 21.

Building Differences   243

2. Margarita Huayhua, “Everyday Discrimination in the Southern Andes,” in “Para quê serve o conhecimento se eu não posso dividi-lo?,” ed. Birgit Krekeler, Eva König, Stefan Neumann, and Hans-Dieter Ölschleger (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2013), 49–58. José María Arguedas, the icon of multiculturalism in Peru, opposed the view of ethnicity as a gradient phenomenon. Although he was a Peruvian who spoke Spanish as a first language and Quechua as a second language, he argued that speaking both languages did not make him an acculturated individual, or a cholo or mestizo. In his 1968 speech when he received the Inca Garcilazo de la Vega award, he stated, “No soy un aculturado,” that is, “I’m not an acculturated person.” He rejected the depiction of himself as a subject who had become mestizo just by learning both languages. José María Arguedas, “No soy un aculturado,” appendix to El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1968). 3.  For example, there are many sociolinguistic studies on the effects produced by contact between Spanish and Quechua, such as Rodolfo Cerrón-­ Palomino, “Unidad y diferenciación lingüística en el mundo andino,” in Pesquisas en lingüística andina, ed. Luis Enrique López (Lima: CONCYTEC, 1988), 121–52; Ana María Escobar, “El español andino y el español bilingüe: Semejanzas y diferencias en el uso del posesivo,” Lexis 16 (1993): 189–222; and Nancy Hornberger, Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance: A Southern Peruvian Quechua Case (Dordrecht: Foris, 1988). 4.  This may reflect a lack of mastery of Quechua at the level of being able to talk directly with monolingual speakers. 5.  Helen I. Safa, “Challenging Mestizaje: A Gender Perspective on Indigenous and Afrodescendant Movements in Latin America,” Critique of Anthropology 25 (2005): 307–30. 6.  Xavier Albó, “The Future of the Oppressed Languages in the Andes,” in Language and Society: Anthropological Issues, ed. William C. McCormack and Stephen A. Wurm (The Hague: Mouton), 309–30. When Quechua speakers address the personnel of public or private institutions, they are frequently answered in Spanish. The response in Spanish signals that the conversation will be in that language. So they frequently go accompanied by someone who can speak Spanish and act as a translator. Comparable issues faced by Native North Americans are discussed by Barbra Meek in “Failing American Indian Languages,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35, no. 2 (2011): 43–60. 7.  See Margarita Huayhua, “Racism and Social Interaction in a Southern Peruvian Combi,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37 (2013): 2399–2417. 8.  John Gumperz, Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Cf. Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet, Language and Gender, 2nd ed.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), on gender.

244  margarita

huayhua

9.  Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language,” in Language and Symbolic Power (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1981), 43–65; Susan Gal, “The Political Economy of Code Choice,” in Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives, ed. Monica Heller (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988), 245–64. 10.  It is important to note that in Peru certain varieties of spoken Spanish are regarded as “inferior” to the variety spoken by elites in Lima. It is routine in Lima to use the variety of Spanish spoken by someone to identify them as belonging to a specific neighborhood, with ethnic and class implications. If the spoken variety does not match the whiteness of the speaker, the speaker will be asked what neighborhood he or she lives in. For instance, a university student was outraged when another classmate asked her if she was from Lima because her Spanish was “a little funny.” Afterward, she commented, “We live in X [a district of Lima], and my father is a physician. I don’t know why they asked me where I live; I feel discriminated against.” 11.  Huayhua, “Racism and Social Interaction.” 12.  For an up-to-date review on gender as social practice and language, see Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, Language and Gender. Studies on power relations between women and men in Anglophone environments have focused on the way male dominance is produced or reinforced through talk. Women are shown to contribute tacitly to emergent power relations. 13.  Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet, “Communities of Practice: Where Language, Gender and Power All Live,” in Language and Gender: A Reader, ed. Jennifer Coates (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 489, 491. See also Henrietta Moore, Feminism and Anthropology (London: Polity Press, 1988). 14.  Gender relations in the Andes have been analyzed by scholars from different perspectives. One outstanding framework is that of egalitarian complementarity, in which men and women are an essential half to the other, which is supposedly reflected by Aymara and Quechua phrases chacha-warmi and qhari-warmi (man and woman) respectively. A man is the complement of a woman and vice versa because they are a unit as a labor force to produce their means of subsistence. See Billie Jean Isbell, To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978); Irene ­Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). Some scholars, such as Marisol de la Cadena (“‘Women Are More Indian’: Ethnicity and Gender in a Community near Cuzco,” in Ethnicity, Markets and Migration in the Andes: At the Crossroads of Anthropology and History, ed. Brooke Larson and Olivia Harris [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995], 329–48), suggest that such complementary relations are asymmetrical—that is, women are de-

Building Differences   245

valued in relation to men. Susan Bourque and Kay Warren (“Campesinas y comuneras: Subordination in the Sierra,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 38 [1976]: 781–88) propose that the subordination of women in terms of the asymmetrical distribution of power is illustrated “by the limited access women have to roles in the political or official life of the town” in Andean communities (785). They suggest that the sexual division of labor in politics reveals patriarchal structures in the social organization of the family, the community, and the state that work to reinforce and perpetuate male power (Susan Bourque and Kay Warren, Women of the Andes: Patriarchy and Social Change in Two Peruvian Towns [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981]). From a linguistic perspective, Harvey argues that social relations between men and women and the representation of these relationships, whether as complementary or as hierarchical, refer essentially to local notions of power and authority (Penelope Harvey, “Mujeres que no hablan castellano: Género, poder y bi­lingüismo en un pueblo andino,” Allpanchis 38 [1991]: 227–60, and Género, autoridad, 11). Beyond complementarity, there are cross-gender differences but also hierarchical ­relationships established among women (Género, autoridad, 26–27). Weismantel’s ethnography on food and gender illustrates the way difference is produced among Quechua-speaking women in Zumbagua, Ecuador (Mary Weismantel, Alimentación, género y pobreza en los Andes ecuatorianos [Quito, Ecuador: AbyaYala, 1994].) For a comparative examination of gender in the Andes and of the frameworks that have been used to interpret gender relations, see Parentesco y género en los Andes, ed. Denise Arnold (La Paz: CIASE, ILCA, 1997), 53–74. On constructing the “Third World Woman” as a monolithic subject, see Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse,” Boundary 2 3, no. 1 (1988): 333. In an Andean context, see Arnold, Parentesco y género, 20. See also Alison Spedding, “Investigaciones sobre género en Bolivia: Un comentario crítico,” in Arnold, Parentesco y género, 53–74, and “‘Esa mujer no necesita hombre’: En contra de la ‘dualidad andina.’ Imágenes de género en los Yungas de La Paz,” in Arnold, Parentesco y género, 325–44. 15.  Spedding, “Investigaciones sobre género,” 327. 16.  Maruja Barrig, El mundo al revés: Imágenes de la mujer indígena (Buenos Aires: CLACSO/ASDI, 2001). 17.  I use the older name of the village—Uqhururu, which has changed to Uqhupata (written in Spanish as Occopata)—because the village’s leaders wanted to distinguish the village from another one with a similar name. 18.  Margarita Huayhua, “Runama kani icha alquchu? Everyday Discrimination in the Southern Andes” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2010), 66–83.

246  margarita

huayhua

19. Harvey, Género, autoridad. 20.  Words in double parenthesis (()) indicate the transcriber’s comment. The transcription was translated into English by the author. 21.  The phrase is a assertion rather than a statement of fact. The meanings of stems and suffixes change according to the way they are combined. For example, mana (no), the suffix -n (certainly no), the stem tupa (touch), the suffixes -ya-mu (from my upright position to your seated position), -yki (to you), and -chu (no) together denote that there is no touching by any means. 22.  The recorded interactions have been transcribed following the transcription systems used by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson, “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation,” Language 50, no. 4 (1974): 696–735, and Marjorie Harness Goodwin, He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). For instance, a hyphen (-) marks an abrupt cutoff of the current sound or word; a dot (.) indicates a micro pause; a question mark (?) indicates a rising intonation; uppercase letters indicate increased volume; words in double parenthesis (()) indicate the transcriber’s comment. Transcription and translation into English by the author. 23.  The syntax of A2’s Quechua utterance shows that she is bilingual, with Spanish as her dominant language. 24.  My analysis is concerned with the content of interlocutors’ utterances and not with the fact that agents are switching to Quechua or Spanish in their interactions with Quechua speakers. 25.  The form is a checklist to see if the household meets the criteria of hygienic habits, including water, personal hygiene, house, latrine, and garbage management. 26.  Susan Gal, “Codeswitching and Consciousness in the European Periphery,” American Ethnologist 14, no. 4 (1987): 637–53; Bruce Mannheim, The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).

CONTRIBUTORS

Capucine Boidin is Maître de Conférences in Anthropology at the Institut des hautes études de l’Amérique latine, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. She specializes in the Guarani language and Paraguayan history and has published Guerre et métissage au Paraguay, 2001–1767 (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011). Alan Durston is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean at York University in Toronto. He specializes in the cultural history of the Andes (primarily Peru) and has published Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). Margarita Huayhua is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts,  Dartmouth. She is a first-language speaker of Quechua with extensive field research in Peru,  Bolivia, and Ecuador. Her research revolves around relations of power and social domination, language, gender, race and racism, and social movements, which she approaches through the analysis of everyday social interaction. Among her publications are “Social Subordination and Language” (2016) and “Racism and Social Interaction in a Southern Peruvian Combi” (2014). Sabine MacCormack was the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh Professor of Arts and Letters and the University of Notre Dame and a leading scholar of late antiquity at the colonial Andes. She authored Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 1981), Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton University Press, 1991), The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine (University of California Press, 1998), and On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton University Press, 2007). 247

248  List of Contributors

Bruce Mannheim, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, is a leading scholar of Quechua/Inka language, culture, and history. He is author of The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion (University of Texas Press, 1991). Judith M. Maxwell, Ixq’anil, is Louise Rebecca Schawe and ­Williedell Schawe Memorial Professor of Linguistics and Anthro­pology, Tulane University. Mayan languages are her primary area of interest. Recent relevant publications include, with Ajpub’ García Ixmata’, Ulïk ri Oxlajuj Ajmaq’: La llegada de las Trece Naciones (Universidad Rafael Landívar, 2015); and, with Ajpub’ García Ixmata’, Saqijix Candelaria López, and Celia Ajú, Manual para la enseñanza de un segundo idioma (Universidad Rafael Landívar, 2015). Angélica Otazú Melgarejo is a Professor of Social Ethics at the Universidad Católica “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción” and teaches Guarani at the Ateneo de Lengua y Cultura Guaraní, in Asunción, Paraguay. She is a member of the Programa Nacional de Incentivo a los Investigadores, Concejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, Paraguay. A native speaker of Guarani, she has studied and translated a number of historical Guarani texts and has published Práctica y semántica en la evangelización de los Guaraníes del Paraguay (S. SVI–XVIII) (Centro de Estudios Paraguayos “Antonio Guasch,” 2006). Camilla Townsend is Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. A Guggenheim scholar, she is most recently the author of Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive (Oxford University Press, 2016). Bas van Doesburg is a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas of Mexico’s National University. He is interested in the sixteenth-­century archives and buildings of indigenous Oaxaca and has published widely on pictographic documents from that area. Among his recent publications are his participation in a joint study of the Lienzo de Tlapiltepec, edited by Arni Brownstone (2015), and a study of the Codex Yanhuitlán (2015). Currently, he is preparing a monographic commentary on a large group of pictographic documents from the Coixtlahuaca basin in northern Oaxaca.

INDEX

Acaçayol, Pedro, 113 Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua, 219 Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala (ALMG), 189, 190, 192, 193, 198, 201, 205n36 Achí, 183, 199 Acosta, José de, 29, 39, 213 Acuerdo sobre Identidad y Derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas (UN, 2013), 197 Agrarian Reform (1969), Peru, 211 Agustín, Antonio, 40 Akateko, 182, 199 Alberti, Leon Battista, 38 Albó, Xavier, “El futuro de los idiomas oprimidos en los Andes” (1973), 207, 212–15, 222, 223, 224 Aldrete, Bernardo, 38–39, 40, 41, 54n68 ALMG (Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala), 189, 190, 192, 193, 198, 201, 205n36 Alvarado, Francisco de, 81 Amauta (journal), 166, 167 American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), 166 Amuzgo, 65 anarcho-syndicalism and Quechua literacy, 169–70

Andres, indigenous languages in, 5, 6–7. See also Quechua Antoninus Pius (Roman emperor), 36 APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance), 166 Ara poru aguyjei háva (1859), 138 Aragona, Alonso de, 130 Árbenz, Jacobo, 186 Archivo General de la Nación, 75–76, 98n53 Arévalo, Juan José, 186 Argentina Guarani spoken in, 148, 150n12 independence in, 144, 147 Quechua spoken in, 6, 213 War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), 9, 15, 132, 146–47 Arguedas, José María, 211, 243n2 Asháninka, 234 assimilationist framework for language and ethnicity, 232–33 Aurora/Pacha Huarai (bilingual Spanish-Quechua periodical), 169 authority and language choice, 11, 13–14 government/NGO representatives speaking Quechua and, 14, 233–34, 240, 243n6 Spanish, use of, 14, 233–34, 240, 243n6 Avellaneda, Mercedes, 131 249

250  Index

Avendaño, Hernando de, 38 Awakateko, 187 Aymara (culture/ethnicity), 10 Aymara (language) Amerindian language and Amerindian identity, nonequivalence of, 127 Camilo Blas posters in, 171 contact between Quechua and, 214 literacy promotion in, 169, 179n37 racism directed at speakers of, 221–22 writing and indigenous polity, 16 Aztec historical annals. See Nahuatl annals Babel, Anna, 215 Babel, Tower of, 28, 37, 38, 47n9 Barbacoan languages, 214 Barrig, Maruja, 234 Barrios, Justo Rufino, 186 Basdre, Jorge, 162, 163 Basque, 38 Bastarrachea Manzano, Juan Ramón, et al., Diccionario Maya Cordemex (1980), 182 Belgrano, Manuel, 144–45 Berganza, Ferdy, 197 bilingual education systems, 9, 11, 150nn11–12, 196–97, 212 bilingual social interactions, 233–34 Billinghurst, Guillermo, 169 Biondo, Flavio, 36–37 Blas, Camilo, 171 Boas, Franz, 207, 217 Boidin, Capucine, 2, 5, 7, 10, 12, 16, 17, 174 Bolivia Aymarized Quechua in, 214 education in, 11 Guarani spoken in, 151n12 “oppressed language,” Albó’s theory of, 212–13

pan-indigenous movements in, 10 Spanish-inflected Quechua in, 215 spread of indigenous linguistic ­features to Spanish in, 3 Bourbon dynasty, 8, 9, 173 Bourque, Susan, 244n14 Brasseur de Bourbourg, Charles Etienne, 183, 203n11 Brazil Guarani spoken in, 148, 150n12, 154n44 indigenous history in, 131 Tupinamba/Tupi in, 7, 12, 13 War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), 9, 15, 132, 146–47 bride service in Guarani societies, 155n49 buccal aperture, 218 Cadena, Marisol de la, 244n14 calendar names, translation of, 70, 78, 82, 85, 86, 100n76, 103n105 Campbell, Lyle, 199 cannibalism, as “idolatry,” 69 Caracciolo Lévano, Manuel, 170 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 162 Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela, 131 Caste War (1847–1901), Yucatán, 9, 15 Castro, Ignacio de, 210 Castro Pozo, Hildebrando, 166 Catholic Church. See religion and the church Ceballos, don Pedro, 141, 142 Centro de Investigación y de Promoción del Campesinado (CIPCA or Center for Research and Promotion of the Peasantry), 213 Centro Qosqo de Arte Nativo, 211 Chamorro, Graciela, 131 Charles III (king of Spain), 8 Charles V (king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor), 36

Index   251

Chawpi Lengua, 216 Chicomulceltec, 184 Chilam Balam, 126 Chimalpahin, 107, 109, 115, 121n6 Chocho (Ngiwa) colonial linguistic dynamics before writing, 67, 68, 69, 96n38 colonial-era writing in, 13, 14, 59, 60, 80–84, 100n75 contemporary promotion of writing in, 60 Doctrina cristiana en lengua mixteca (1567), translated into, 75, 84 Kadiaa Ngiwa, 60 linguistic history of, 64 modern speakers of, 60, 64 multilingual community organization and, 6, 13, 84–89 as Oaxacan language, 5, 6–64 surviving written colonial-era documents, 71–76, 72–74 (table 2.1) terms for, 63–64, 94n13 Xru Ngiwa (culture/ethnicity), 63–64, 65–66, 71 choice of language. See authority and language choice Chuj, 182, 183, 187, 188, 199 Chukiwanka Ayulo, Francisco, 169–70, 173, 179n39 Cicero, 36 Cieza de León, Pedro, 28, 34–35, 39, 48n12, 54n68 CIPCA (Centro de Investigación y de Promoción del Campesinado or Center for Research and Promotion of the Peasantry), 213 Civilistas, 212 code-switching and code-mixing, 14, 215, 233–36, 241 Codex Sierra, 79, 98n58 Coixtlahuaca basin. See Oaxacan languages in Coixtlahuaca basin and

Teotongo valley, colonial-era ­indigenous writing in Colombia, 6, 35 Columbus, Christopher, 28 Comité Pro-Derecho Indígena Tahuantinsuyo (CPDIT), Peru, 166, 167, 170–71, 174 Conrad Adenauer Foundation, 195 consuetudo loquendi, 33, 42 Córdova, Juan de, 81 Cortés, Hernando, 115 Cotler, Julio, 163 Coto, Thomás de, 182 Council of the Indies, 209 Covarrubias, Sebastián de, 51n44 CPDIT (Comité Pro-Derecho Indígena Tahuantinsuyo), Peru, 166, 167, 170–71, 174 Cruz, Rodrigo de la, 76–77 Cruz y Salazar family (of Coixtlahuaca), 87–88, 89 Cuicatec, 65 Descola, Philippe, 131 dialect, as term for indigenous ­languages, 92n4 “Dialogos guarani” (Gülich manuscript), 138 Diario de guerra (1704–5), 138 Diebold, Richard, 20n9 don Diego de San Miguel, 79, 82, 84–86, 96n37 Dirección General de Educación ­Bilingüe Intercultural (DIGEBI), Guatemala, 186, 193–94 doctrina schools, 209–10 Dominican order, in Oaxaca, 14, 71, 75, 77–78, 80–82, 84, 88, 90, 94n15 Donatus, 57n86 double consciousness, 143, 207–8 DuBois, W. E. B., 207

252  Index

Durán, Diego, 93n8 Durston, Alan, 5, 12, 16, 17 early colonial views on Quechua, 25–45 accommodation to Quechua usage, 32–33, 42, 44 change, rise, and decline of languages, theories regarding, 36–40 Christian instruction, suitability for, 28–29, 37, 40–41, 45, 48n14 Garcilaso de la Vega and, 25–27, 36–38 González Holguín’s grammar, shift in methodology demonstrated by, 41–45 imposed and natural names, ­theories about, 39–40 Inkas and Inka empire, civilizing influence of, 28–29, 30, 37–39, 41 patronyms, 33–34, 43, 57n88 political economies of language and, 12, 34–38, 40 primordial languages, concept of, 38–40 Santo Tomás’s grammar and lexicon based on Nebrija’s work, 27–28, 29–36, 42 sociability, as virtue, 37, 58n94 Eckert, Penelope, 234 Ecuador, 11, 34–35, 213 education and indigenous languages bilingual education systems, 9, 11, 150nn11–12, 196–97, 212 Colegio de Santa Cruz, inauguration of (1536), 76, 98n55 doctrina schools, 209–10 Guarani courses required in Paraguay, 127 Mayan languages, advances and setbacks in, 185–97, 200–201

Quechua literacy and Quechualanguage education in 1920s Peru, 168–72 translation of materials from ­national curricula, 13 egalitarian complementarity, ­244–45n14 Eguren de Larrea, Darío F., 164, 165, 167, 172, 173 Ehcatl, Pedro, 69 el Brocense, Francisco Sánchez, Minerva (1587), 40, 42, 44 El Salvador, 199 Encinas, José Antonio, 166 England, Nora, 191 eradication decree (1770), 8, 143 erasure, 228n36 Escalante, José Angel, 166, 167 Espinoza Navarro, Faustino, 164 Estella, Diego de, 50n32 Estenssoro, Juan Carlos, 128 ethnic identity and language, nonequivalence of, 127–29, 232, 243n2, 244n10 Extirpation of Idolatries, 209–10 Fausto, Carlos, 131 Federación Obrera Local (FOL or Peruvian Workers Federation), 170 Ferrer Guardia, Francisco, 170 Flores, Alonso, 67 FOL (Federación Obrera Local or Peruvian Workers Federation), 170 Franciscan Order admission of indigenous peoples to, 119 Guarani and, 126, 131, 133 Nahuatl annals and, 107, 113, 116 in Oaxaca, 76, 77, 78, 94n15, 98n55, 99n59 French Guiana, 7

Index   253

Friedrich, Paul, 5 Frühauf García, Elisa, 131 Gal, Susan, 228n36, 241 Ganson, Barbara, 131 García, don Domingo, 79–80, 99n66, 100n76 García, José Uriel, 166 García, Juan, 103n105 Garcilaso de la Vega (poet), 27, 46n4 Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, 14, 25–27, 36–41, 45, 58n96 Royal Commentaries, 25, 26, 27, 37, 39, 41, 53–54nn60–61 translation of León Hebreo’s Dialogos de amor, 25–27, 46n1 Garífuna, 199 Gelman, Susan A., 220, 229n43 gender relations, 244n14 geographic names, imposed versus ­indigenous, 39–40, 70–71, 97n40, 101n79, 206n56 geographic variability within indigenous languages, 214 Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), Germany, 192, 195 González Holguín, Diego, 41–45, 57n88 González Prada, Manuel, 169 government propaganda in Quechua in 1920s Peru, 161–75 CPDIT (Comité Pro-Derecho ­Indígena Tahuantinsuyo), 166, 167, 170–71, 174 on gamonales, 165, 167, 171–72, 173 indigenismo movement and, 162–63, 166–67, 171, 173 Inkas invoked by, 164, 169, 172, 173, 174, 180n55 Leguía, political regime of, 14, 23n27, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 173

literary renaissance in Quechua and, 168 nature of language used in, 172–74 offices of indigenous affairs and ­indigenous education, 163, 167 political concept formation and, 17, 173–74 post-Leguía government use of Quechua, 174–75 promotion of Quechua literacy and Quechua-language education, 168–72 writing and indigenous polity, 16 written corpus of, 163–65, 172 government/NGO representatives speaking Quechua, 231–42 assimilationist/mestizaje framework and, 232–33 authority and language choice, 14, 233–34, 240, 243n6 bilingual social interactions and ­hierarchical relationships, 233–34 cleanliness, Quechua used to enforce government standards of, 239–41 clinic, Quechua used to depict women refusing contraception as animalistic in, 237–39 in context of study of women, 234–35, 244n12, 244n14 political economies of language and, 13 reinforcement of social hierarchies through, 231–32, 241–42 van, Quechua used to chastise ­villagers for crowding in, 235–37 gradience ethnicity viewed as, 232, 243n2 race ideology and, 221–22 Gruzinski, Serge, 107

254  Index

GTZ (Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit), Germany, 192, 195 Guaján, Rodríguez, 199 Guapy, Javier, 142 Guarani, 125–49 acrolect or high written standard Guarani, production of (1684– 1759), 137–39, 155n56 administrative correspondence (1758–68), 141–43 ava/karai, 17, 132, 133–34, 138, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147–49, 148 (table 4.3) Belgrano letters (1810), 144–45, 147 cabildo corpus (1752–1832), 139–43, 145 colloquial or koine version of, 137, 138 colonial Guarani or Guarani translanguage (1585–1684), 133–37 decree of 1813, 145, 147 geographic distribution of, 5 Guerra Guaranitica corpus (1752–56), 140–41, 140 (table 4.1), 141 (table 4.2) historical anthropology based on Amerindian texts and, 126–29 history/historiography of, 7, 8, 9, 10, 131–33 independence corpus (1810–13), 144–45 mobility and mutability of, 2 national wartime press in (1867–68), 146–47 political concept formation in, 16, 17, 130 post-Jesuit expulsion corpus (1769–1813), 143 promoted as general language in Paraguay, 12

semantic history, concept of, 129–30 voja/(mbur)uvicha, 132, 134–36, 138–39, 140, 142, 144–45, 146, 147–49, 148 (table 4.3), 154n44 written corpus, analysis of, 131–32 Guarani societies, bride service in, 155n49 Guatemala cultural missteps in treatment of Mayan languages in, 190, 191, 193–94, 195 indigenismo in, 9 indigenous language requirements for accredited schools in, 196–97, 200–201 Ley de Idiomas (Law of Languages; 2003), 194–95 Mayan languages, institutional and educational initiatives involving, 182, 184, 186–97 (See also specific institutions) national ideologies in, 197–201 non-Mayan indigenous languages in, 199 pan-Maya and indigenismo movements in, 3, 9 Peace Accords on indigenous peoples (1995), 194, 199 Pérez Molina regime in, 197 standardization and indigenous education in, 11, 13, 189–90 See also Mayan languages Guion, Susan, 217 Gülich manuscript or “Dialogos guarani,” 138 Gumperz, John, 233 Gutiérrez, Francisco, 67–70, 95n26, 96n36, 97nn43–44 Gutiérrez Cuevas, Teodomiro (Rumi Maqui), 169 Gutiérrez Madueño, Casimiro, 164–65

Index   255

Hanks, William F., 4, 126–27 Habsburg dynasty, 8, 209 Harvey, Penelope, 14, 235, 244n14 Haya de la Torre, Victor Raul, 166 Hebreo, León, Dialogos de amor, 25–27, 46n1 Hernández, Benito, Doctrina cristiana en lengua mixteca (1567), 75, 80, 84 Hernández, Diego, 78 don Hernando of Tamazulapan, 68, 70, 95n26 Herrera, Antonio de, 66 Herrera, Fernando de, 27, 46n4 Herrera, Guillermina, 191 hierarchical relations, reproduction of. See government/NGO representatives speaking Quechua Hispanisms, use/avoidance of, 14, 137, 143, 144, 145, 172, 173 Historia tolteca chichimeca, 111 historical anthropology based on ­Amerindian texts and, 126–29 History and Language in the Andes (ed. Paul Heggarty and Adrian J. Pearce; 2011), 4 Hofling, Charles Andrew, 184 homogeneity, linguistic, assumptions about, 13, 127, 151n15, 228n36 Horace, 27, 36 Huave, 20n9 Huayhua, Margarita, 5, 13, 14, 220–21, 222 Humboldt, Alexander von, 107 Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America (ed. Salikoko Mufwene; 2014), 4 Ignacio de Loyola, 58n96, 134 ILI (Instituto de Lingüística e Interculturalidad), 190, 196, 201 illiteracy, ideology of, 60, 92n4 INALCO, 151–52n17

INCAP (Instituto de Nutrición de Centroamérica y Panamá), 187 Independence Wars (1810–25), 8, 9, 15, 16, 161–62 indigenismo movement, 9, 14, 162–63, 166–67, 171, 173 indigenous languages in Latin America, 1–19 authority and language choice, 11, 13–14 (See also authority and language choice) contact between, 214 decline, challenging assumptions about, 1–2 eradication decree (1770), 8, 143 ethnic identity and language, nonequivalence of, 127–29, 232, 243n2, 244n10 European view of linguistic diversity of, 28, 48n12 geographic distribution, 5 history/historiography of, 5–11 illiteracy, ideology of, 60, 92n4 MacCormack’s work on, 17–19 mobility and mutability of, 2 multiple registers of, 2–4 political and social uses of, 4–5, 9, 10–11 political concept formation and, 11–12, 16–17 (See also political concept formation) political economies of, 11, 12–13 (See also political economies of language) sociolinguistic differences in, 214–15, 220–21 Spanish, spread of linguistic features to, 3–4 terms for, 92n4, 213 variability within, geographic and temporal, 214 writing and indigenous polity, 11, 15–16 (See also Guarani; Nahuatl

256  Index

indigenous languages (cont.) annals; Oaxacan languages in Coixtlahuaca basin and Teotongo valley, colonial-era indigenous writing in; writing and indigenous polity) See also specific languages El Indio (Peruvian government indigenista periodical), 165, 167 Inkas administrative language, use of Quechua as, 28–29, 30 archaic and “pure” Quechua, urge to cultivate, 13 collapse of empire, decline of Quechua attributed to, 37–38 government propaganda in Quechua in 1920s Peru invoking, 164, 169, 172, 173, 174, 180n55 spread of Quechua attributed to, 6, 12, 37, 39, 213 Inquisition, 209, 210 Instituto de Lingüística e Interculturalidad (ILI), 190, 196, 201 Instituto de Nutrición de Centro­ américa y Panamá (INCAP), 187 intergenerational transmission, 184 International Conference on the History of Concepts, 152n19 International Labor Organization, convenio 169 on indigenous peoples, 194, 198 Irvine, Judith, 228n36 Isabel (queen of Spain), 35 Itier, César, 13, 17, 128, 211 Itzaj, 184, 187, 199 Itzcuintzin, don Pedro, 99n64 Ixcatec, 64, 68, 96n38 Ixil, 187, 199 Jakalteko, 199 Jesuits expulsion of (1767), 8, 142, 159n81

Guarani and, 2, 7, 126, 131, 133, 134, 136–40, 147, 156n58 Tupinambá, spread of, 7 Jiménez, Francisco, 103n105 don Juan de Vera y Zúñiga, 86 Juárez, Juan, 69 Julius Caesar, 36 Kadiaa Ngiwa, 60 Kaqchikel early scholarship on, 182–83 educational, institutional, and legislative initiatives, 187, 189, 190, 192–96, 198 proximity to national seats of power and access to schooling, 205n39 SIL dictionary, 189 stelae, 200–201 in twentieth century, 184 Kaqchikel Cholchi’, 192–93 Kaqchikel University, Guatemala, 195 Katarista movement, 10 kennings, 191 khipu, 15 K’ichee’ Maya and K’iche’an languages, 3, 182–85, 192, 198, 199, 200, 202n7 Kirchhoff, Paul, 85 Koselleck, Reinhart, 129 Krug, Frances, 122n18 Lakantun, 199 Landa, Diego de, 182 LANGAS project, 24n43, 149n1, 151n17, 152n19, 157n70, 173 language ecologies, concept of, 4 Latin grammar and early colonial views on Quechua. See early colonial views on Quechua Laughlin, Robert M., 182 Leguía, Augusto B., 14, 23n27, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 173. See also

Index   257

government propaganda in Quechua in 1920s Peru Lienzo de Coixtlahuaca II, 102n91 Lienzo de Otla, 97n47 Lienzo of Ihuitlán, 88 Lienzo of Nativitas, 86 Lienzo of Tequixtepec I and II, 85–86, 102n91 Livy, 36 Lockhart, James, 6, 108, 109, 122n10, 126 López, Juan, 84 López, Tome, 69 López de Gómara, Francisco, 39 Lucretius, 36 Lustig, Wolf, 146 MacCormack, Sabine, 5, 12, 17–19 Machiguenga, 214 Madrid, Pact of (1750), 140 Maldonado, don Agustín, 84 Malinal, don Juan, 85, 99n64 Malkiel, Yakov, 225n11 Mam, 182, 184, 187 Manco Capac, 180n55 Mannheim, Bruce, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 16, 48n12, 220, 229n43, 233, 234, 241 The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion (1991), 214 Mapudungun, 212 doña Maria de San Miguel, 81–82, 85 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 166 Matsigenka, 11 Maximilian of Austria, 46n1 Maxwell, Judith, 5, 10, 13, 14, 212 Maya reducido, 4 Maya solidarity flag, 197, 205n45 Maya universities, Guatemala, 195, 200 Mayan calendrical Long Count, fourteenth pihk, 181, 199–201, 202nn1–2

Mayan languages, 181–201 Achí, 183, 199 Akateko, 182, 199 Awakateko, 187 Chicomulceltec, 184 cholq’ij (260-day ritual calendar), 183, 203n13 Chuj, 182, 183, 187, 188, 199 cultural missteps in treatment of, 190, 191, 193–94, 195 early scholarship on, 182–83 educational, institutional, and legislative initiatives involving, 185–97, 200–201 (See also specific institutions) European concepts, Mayan translanguage expressing, 126–27 fourteenth pihk of calendrical Long Count, rejuvenation associated with, 181, 199–201, 202nn1–2 geographic distribution of, 5 INCAP (Instituto de Nutrición de Centroamérica y Panamá), 187 Itzaj, 184, 187, 199 Ixil, 187, 199 Jakalteko, 199 K’ichee’ Maya and K’iche’an languages, 3, 182–85, 192, 198, 199, 200, 202n7 Lakantun, 199 loss of literacy in, 183 Mam, 182, 184, 187 in Mexico, 175, 182, 187 Mocho’, 184, 199 Mopan, 184–85, 187, 199 national ideologies and, 197–201 neologism project, 192–93, 205n38 PLFM (Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín), Guatemala, 187–89 political economies of language and, 13 Poqom, 182, 198

258  Index

Mayan languages (cont.) PRONEBI (Programa Nacional de Educación Bilingüe Intercultural), Guatemala, 186 Q’anjob’al, 182, 186, 187, 198–99 Q’eqchi’, 184, 187 SIL (Summer Institute in Linguistics), 186–87, 188–89 standardization/restandardization of orthographic practice, 182–83, 189–90 Teko, 199 in twentieth century, 184–85 Tz’utujiil, 187, 188, 198, 200 United States, Maya immigrant communities in, 203n18 writing and indigenous polity, 15 Yucatec Maya, 4, 9, 182, 184, 185, 200, 203n13 See also Kaqchikel Mazatec, 64, 68 McConnell-Ginet, Sally, 234 Medel, Juan, 99n59 Melià, Bartomeu, 133, 156n58, 213 Antología de textos coloniales en guarani (forthcoming), 131 La création d’un langage chrétien dans les réductions des Guarani au Paraguay (1969), 126 Méndez Gastelumendi, Cecilia, 210 Mendoza, Antonio de, 96n28 Mendoza, Pedro, 49n21 Mendoza family (lords of Coixtlahuaca and Tepelmeme), 87, 89, 102n101 Mercado Sotomayor, Jerónimo, 82 Mercosur, 150n12 Mesoamerica, indigenous languages in, 5–6. See also Mayan languages; Nahuatl; Oaxacan languages mestizaje (“whitening”), 221, 232–33, 242

Mexia, Pero, Historia imperial y Cesarea, 36 Mexica historical annals. See Nahuatl annals Mexican Revolution (1910–20), 9, 15–16 Mexico Caste War (1847–1901), Yucatán, 9, 15 constitution of 1917, 163 education in, 9 eradication decree (1770) in, 143 Mayan languages in, 175, 182, 187 national ideologies in, 197–201 writing and indigenous polity in, 15–16 See also Mayan languages; Nahuatl; Oaxacan languages Mignolo, Walter, 107 don Miguel de San Francisco, 77, 81–82, 85 don Miguel of Tequixtepec, 68 Mixtec (culture/ethnicity), 62 Mixtec (Tu’un Savi) colonial linguistic dynamics before writing, 67, 68, 69 colonial-era writing in, 59, 61, 80–82 Hernández, Benito, Doctrina cristiana en lengua mixteca (1567), 75, 80, 84 linguistic history, 65–66 multilingual community organization and, 84–89 multilingualism and, 6, 13, 84–89 as Oaxacan language, 5, 64 surviving written colonial-era documents, 71–76, 72–74 (table 2.1) Mixtecan language family, 65 Mocho’, 184, 199 Molina, Alonso de, 64, 76

Index   259

Monsiváis, Carlos, 14 Monteiro, John, 131 Montoya, Antonio Ruiz de Conquista espiritual del Paraguay (1639), 135, 137–38 Tesoro de la lengua guaraní (1639), 133–35, 145, 160n88 Vocabulario de la lengua guarani (1640), 135 Mopan, 184–85, 187, 199 Motolinia (Toribio de Benavente), 65 motosidad, 216–18, 223 multilingualism Nahuatl and, 21n12 in Oaxacan languages, 6, 13, 84–89 prevalence in precolonial and colonial Latin America, 128 Muñoz Camargo, Diego, 116 Nahua (culture/ethnicity), 62 Nahuatl authority and language choice, 14 ethnicity and language, nonequivalence of, 127 Ethnohistory special issue on, 21n12 geographic distribution of, 5 in Guatemala, 199 history/historiography of, 5–6, 8, 9 multilingualism and, 21n12 political concept formation in, 16, 24n44, 110–11 promoted as general language in Mexico, 12 Nahuatl, in Oaxacan language areas colonial linguistic dynamics before writing, 48n97, 67, 68, 69, 70 colonial-era writing in, 76–80 community use of, 59, 61, 64 as lingua franca, 59, 64, 66, 77 linguistic history, 66 multilingual community organization and, 84–89

multilingualism and, 6, 13, 84–89 surviving written colonial-era documents, 71–76, 72–74 (table 2.1), 98n58 Nahuatl annals, 105–21 altepetl or community, relationship to, 109–11 cellular organization and structure of, 108–9 by Chimalpahin, 107, 109, 115, 121n6 composition of, 105–7 decline of, 114–15 indigenous tradition, written in, 106, 107, 108 performative aspects of, 106, 107, 109 political economies of, 108–9, 111–14, 120 responsibilities of leadership conveyed in, 111–14 Western scholarly perception of, 106–9 Juan Zapata and Tlaxcala annals, 115–21 Nájera, Juan de, 67 national language Castilian Spanish promoted as, 8 as symbolic role for indigenous ­languages, 9 nationalism, national period, and ­indigenous languages, 9, 14 Nava, Antonio de, 68 Nebrija, Antonio Castilian Spanish and Latin ­compared by, 29–30, 31, 35, 38 Dominicans trained in linguistic tradition of, 80 González Holguín’s grammar ­compared, 41–45 on rise and decline of languages, 36, 38–39

260  Index

Nebrija, Antonio (cont.) Santo Tomás’s Quechua grammar and lexicon following principles of, 27–28, 29–36, 50n26 Neumann, Eduardo, 131, 139 New Philology, 5–6, 15, 122n10 Ngiwa. See Chocho Nieremberg, Juan Eusebio, De la diferencia entre lo temporal y lo eterno (in Guarani, 1705), 137 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). See government/NGO representatives speaking Quechua Norman French and English language development, 216 Núñez Sedeño, Juan, 67 Oaxacan languages authority and language choice, 14 contemporary consensus use, ­difficulties posed by, 92n3 geographic distribution, 5 Huave, 20n9 multilingualism in, 6, 13, 84–89 number of, 61 Zapotec, 5, 6, 14, 20n10, 59, 80, 81, 92n2, 100n75 See also Chocho; Mixtec; Nahuatl, in Oaxacan language areas Oaxacan languages in Coixtlahuaca basin and Teotongo valley, ­colonial-era indigenous writing in, 15, 59–61 calendar names, translation of, 70, 78, 82, 85, 86, 100n76, 103n105 colonial linguistic dynamics before writing, 66–71 geopolitics of region, 61–63 linguistic history of region, 63–66 loss of writing tradition after ­independence, 60

Mixtec and Chocho writing, 80–84 multilingual community organization and, 84–89 Nahuatl writing, 76–80 pictographs, continued use of, 61, 70, 78–79, 85, 86 political economies of, 13, 89–91 public activity, writing as, 90 silk production in region, 62, 63, 67, 79, 96n28 surviving documents, 71–76, 72–74 (table 2.1), 98n51, 98n53 trained scribes, use of, 90 Obermeier, Franz, 137, 138 O’Higgins, Bernardo, 174 OKMA (Oxlajuuj Keej Maya’ Ajtz’iib’), 191–92 Ollanta (eighteenth-century dramatic poem), 211 oppressed language, concept of, 207–8, 212–15, 222–24, 233, 234 Otazú Melgarejo, Angélica, 2, 5, 7, 10, 12, 16, 17, 174 Otomanguean languages, 64, 65 Ovid, 27, 36 Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo Fernández de, 28, 39, 48n9 Oxlajuuj Keej Maya’ Ajtz’iib’ (OKMA), 191–92 Ozomatli, Martín, 69 Pacha Huarai/Aurora (bilingual Spanish-­Q uechua periodical), 169 Pacheco de Oliveira, João, 131 Palacios Ríos, Julián, 179n37 pan-indigenous movement, 10 pan-Maya movement, 3, 10 Paraguay ethnicity and language identity, nonequivalence of, 127–28 Jesuits expelled from (1767), 8, 142

Index   261

Spanish and Guarani as official languages of, 127–28, 150n11 Tupian family of languages in, 7 War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), 9, 15, 132, 146–47 See also Guarani parallelism, grammatical, 191 Pareja, José Rafael, 167 Parra, Francisco de la, 182, 189 Pasquale, Michael, 217 patronyms, in Quechua, 33–34, 43, 57n88 Pax Hispanica, 16 PeKY, 137, 155n57 Pérez, Inés, 84 Pérez, Jorge Ivan, 217, 218 Pérez Molina, Otto, 197 Perón, Juan Domingo, 162 Peru administrative decentralization in, 212, 226n16 Agrarian Reform (1969), 211 Aristocratic Republic (1895–1919), 162 constitution of 1920, 163 decline of indigenous languages, challenging assumptions about, 2 education in, 9, 11 Independence Wars, use of indigenous languages during, 8, 161–62, 173 indigenismo in, 9, 14 Oncenio (1919–30), 162, 166 Patronato de la Raza Indígena, 167 post-Leguía use of Quechua by government of, 174–75 terms for, 39, 40, 173 Tupian family of languages in, 7 Universidad Popular González Prada, 166 war with Chile, government use of Quechua during, 175n2

See also government propaganda in Quechua in 1920s Peru; Quechua Peruvian Workers Federation (Federación Obrera Local or FOL), 170 Philip II (king of Spain), 30, 35 pictographs, continued use of, in ­colonial era, 61, 70, 78–79, 85, 86, 107 Piérola, Nicolás de, 175n2 Pizarro, F. M., 163–64 Pizarro, Pablo M., 164 Pizarro, Pedro, 48n11 PLFM (Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín), Guatemala, 187–89, 191, 201, 205n35 Pliny, 41 Plutarch, 169 El pobre más rico (eighteenth-century dramatic poem), 211 Pohã ñana (1725), 138 policia, early colonial views on Quechua concept of, 34–35 political concept formation, 11–12, 16–17 government propaganda in Quechua in 1920s Peru and, 17, 173–74 in Guarani, 16, 17, 130 (See also specific terms, under Guarani) in Nahuatl, 16, 24n44, 110–11 in Quechua, 16, 17 in Spanish, 17 political economies of language, 11, 12–13 early colonial views on Quechua and, 12, 34–38, 40 government/NGO representatives speaking Quechua and, 13 Mayan languages and, 13 Nahuatl annals and, 108–9, 111–14, 120

262  Index

political economies of language (cont.) Oaxacan languages in Coixtlahuaca basin and Teotongo valley, ­colonial-era indigenous writing in, 13, 89–91 Popol Wuj, 183 Popoloca, 64, 81, 94n15 Popolocan language family, 64, 68 Poqom, 182, 198 Portilla, Miguel Leon, 108 Prescott, William, 107 primordial languages, concept of, 38–40 Priscian, 57n86 Programa Nacional de Educación ­Bilingüe Intercultural (PRONEBI), Guatemala, 186 Protestant missionaries, Quechua ­literacy promoted by, 169–70 Proyecto Apoyo Desarrollo Integral de la Población Maya (PRODIPMA), URL, Guatemala, 190–91 Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco ­Marroquín (PLFM), Guatemala, 187–89, 191, 201, 205n35 purism and conscious conservation of older linguistic forms, 13, 14, 118, 165, 172–73 Q’anjob’al, 182, 186, 187, 198–99 Q’eqchi’, 184, 187 Quarleri, Lía, 131 Quechua Amerindian language and Amer­ indian identity, nonequivalence of, 127 archaic and “pure” version of, urge to cultivate, 13 contact between Aymara and, 214 decline, challenging assumptions about, 2

élite overlay of southern Quechua, 3–4 geographic distribution of, 5 history/historiography of, 6–7, 10–11 homogeneous language-culture, lack of, 128 Independence Wars in Peru and political literature in, 8, 161–62, 173 Inkas and spread of, 6, 12, 37, 39, 213 missionary versus Inka versions of, 56n82 patronyms in, 33–34, 43, 57n88 phonetic alphabet for, 169 political concept formation in, 16, 17 promoted as general language in Peru, 12 racism directed at speakers of, 221–22 runa/misti, 17, 43, 173–74 in rural Andes, 229n43 stigmatization of, 232–33 supay, 146–47 virachocha, 17, 163, 175n8 war with Chile, Peruvian government use of Quechua during, 175n2 writing and indigenous polity, 15, 16 See also early colonial views on Quechua; government propaganda in Quechua in 1920s Peru; government/NGO representatives speaking Quechua; Spanish-inflected Quechua Quechua (ethnicity), 10 Quechuañol, 216 Quichua Unificado, 11 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 30–33, 35, 36, 44, 45

Index   263

Rabinal Achí, 203n11 race ideology and gradience, 221–22 Redfield, Margaret and Robert, 221 re-Indianization of America (early nineteenth century), 211 religion and the church accommodation of Christian ­doctrine to indigenous usage, 32–33, 126 cannibalism, as “idolatry,” 69 Dominican order, in Oaxaca, 14, 71, 75, 77–78, 80–82, 84, 88, 90, 94n15 early colonial views on Quechua as language suitable for Christian instruction, 28–29, 37, 40–41, 45, 48n14 European formulation of Christian doctrine, later insistence on, 51n36 Extirpation of Idolatries, 209–10 Inquisition, 209, 210 Protestant missionaries, Quechua literacy promoted by, 169–70 secular power, religious under­ pinnings of, 8–9 Spanish-inflected Quechua, development of, 209–10 See also Franciscan Order; Jesuits reproduction of hierarchical relations. See government/NGO representatives speaking Quechua Restivo, Pablo, 137–38 Reyes, Antonio de los, 65–66, 80 Reyes, Luis, 122n10 Rodríguez, Raxche’, 193, 194 Roldán, Bartolomé, 81, 94n15 Roman Catholic Church. See religion and the church Romero, Roberto, 145 Ruíz, Álvaro, 67, 70, 96n29

Rumi Maqui (Teodomiro Gutiérrez Cuevas), 169 Safa, Helen, 232 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 64 Sak Chwen, 201 Salazar, don Bernabé Antonio, 119 Salazar, Lic. Manuel, 192 Salazar, Manuel de los Santos, 119–20 Salinas, don Francisco de, 99n59 Samas, Martín de, 67 San José, Gabriel de, 81 San Martin, José de, 162, 174 San Miguel, don Diego de, 79–80 Sánchez de Badajoz, Garcí, 27, 47n5 Santa María, Domingo de, 80 Santo Tomás, Domingo de González Holguín compared, 42–45 Nebrija’s grammatical principles, following, 27–28, 29–36, 50n26 Pacific coast, missionary work on, 50n33 on patronyms, 33–34, 57n88 Saturninus, Augustinus, Mercurius (1546), 42, 44 Scott, James, 212 Segura, Rodrigo de, 70 semantic history, concept of, 129–30 Seminario, Luis F., 165 Shipibo, 234 SIL (Summer Institute in Linguistics), 186–87, 188–89, 198 Sochicoatzin, Domingo, 69 sociability, as virtue, 37, 58n94 social hierarchies, reinforcement of. See government/NGO representatives speaking Quechua sociolinguistic differences, 214–15, 220–21 Solís, Francisco, 66–67, 68, 95n26 “sound blindness,” 217

264  Index

Spanish authority and language choice, 14, 233–34, 240, 243n6 Castilian Spanish as national language, Bourbon promotion of, 8, 173 factors boosting use of, 9, 11 Gothic and Arabic components of, 39, 54n67 Hispanisms, use/avoidance of, 14, 137, 143, 144, 145, 172, 173 Latin and Castilian Spanish, relationship between, 29–30, 31, 35, 38–39 Oaxaca, contemporary dominance in, 92 political concept formation in, 17 spread of indigenous linguistic ­features to, 3 variations in linguistic contact with indigenous languages, 215–16, 225n11 variations within, 215–16, 225n11, 244n10 Spanish-inflected Quechua, 207–24 development of, 209–12 matrix language of public discourse, Spanish as, 208–9 motosidad, 216–18, 223 as oppressed language, 207–8, 212–15, 222–24 race ideology and gradience, 221–22 registers of, and sociolinguistic ­differences in, 4, 217–24, 228n36 variations in Spanish-indigenous contact and their consequences, 215–16, 225n11 Spedding, Alison, 234 STLILLA (Symposium on Teaching and Learning Indigenous Languages of Latin America), 19

Stroessner, Alfredo, 150n11 Summer Institute in Linguistics (SIL), 186–87, 188–89, 198 Supercholo (comic strip), 217 Swanton, John, 207 Swanton, Michael, 94n15, 101n79, 102n100 Symposium on Teaching and Learning Indigenous Languages of Latin America (STLILLA), 19 Taylor, Anne Christine, 131 Taylor, Gérald, 146–47 Teko, 199 Tekun Uman, 199 Tello, Julio C., 166 temporal variability within indigenous languages, 214 Teotongo valley region. See Oaxacan languages in Coixtlahuaca basin and Teotongo valley, colonial-era indigenous writing in Thesaurus Verborum, 182 Thun, Harald, 137, 138 Tlingit, 207–9, 224 Tochtli, Marcos, 69 topomyns, imposed versus indigenous, 39–40, 70–71, 97n40, 101n79, 206n56 Toribio de Benavente (Motolinia), 65 Tower of Babel, 28, 37, 38, 47n9 Townsend, Camilla, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 16 Townsend, William Cameron, 186 Tragedia del fin de Atawallpa (drama), 211 translanguages colonial Guarani or Guarani translanguage (1585–1684), 133–37 European concepts, Mayan translanguage expressing, 126–27 Triqui, 65

Index   265

Tupi, 12, 13, 127, 128, 134 Tupian family of languages, 7 Tupinambá, 7 Tu’un Savi. See Mixtec Tzeltal, 182 Tzotzil, 182 Tz’utujiil, 187, 188, 198, 200 Ubico, Jorge, 23n27, 186 Ugarteche, José Francisco de, 145 United States Maya immigrant communities in, 203n18 racism in, 221 Universidad Rafael Landívar (URL), Guatemala, 190–91, 194–95, 201 Uruguay. See War of the Triple ­Alliance Valcárcel, Luis, 211 Valera, Blas, 37, 39, 40, 41 van Doesburg, Bas, 5, 6, 11, 13, 14, 15, 101n79 Varea, Francisco de, 182 variability within indigenous languages, geographic and temporal, 214 Varro, De lingua Latina, 40 Vásquez de Coronado expedition (1540–42), 67 Velasco Alvarado, Juan, 174–75 Velásquez de Lara, Francisco, 96n30 Velázquez, Martín, 78 Vera y Zúñiga family (of Coixtlahuaca), 87–88, 102n100 Vergil (Virgil), 36 Aeneid, 27, 46nn4–5 Vico, Domingo de, 182 Vienrich, Adolpho, 169, 173 Villegas, Domingo, 82 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 131, 133

War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), 9, 15, 132, 146–47 Warren, Kay, 244n14 “whitening” (mestizaje), 221, 232–33, 242 Wilde, Guillermo, 131 Wilson, Fiona, 168–69 women, studies of, 234–35, 244n12, 244n14. See also government/ NGO representatives speaking Quechua writing and indigenous polity, 11, 15–16. See also Guarani; Nahuatl annals; Oaxacan languages in Coixtlahuaca basin and Teotongo valley, colonial-era indigenous writing in Xinca, 199 xiuhpohualli. See Nahuatl annals Xru Ngiwa, 63–64, 65–66, 71 Yanesha, 234 Yannakakis, Yanna, 21n12 Yapaguay, Nicolas, Explicacion del ­catecismo (1724) and Sermones y exemplos (1727), 138 year(ly) counts. See Nahuatl annals Yucatec Maya, 4, 9, 182, 184, 185, 200, 203n13 Zapara, 11 Zapata, Emilio, 9 Zapata y Mendoza, Juan Buena­ ventura, 8, 14, 115–21 Zapeta, Rosa Elvira, 197 Zapotec, 5, 6, 14, 20n10, 59, 80, 81, 92n2, 100n75 Zepeda, Francisco de, Artes de los idiomas chiapaneco, zoque, tzendal y chinanteco, 182 Zimmermann, Günter, 109