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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Farriss, Nancy M. (Nancy Marguerite), 1938– author. Title: Tongues of fire : language and evangelization in Colonial Mexico / Nancy Farriss.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001351| ISBN 9780190884109 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190884116 (updf) | ISBN 9780190884123 (epub) | ISBN 9780190884130 (online resource)
Subjects: LCSH: Language in missionary work—Mexico—Oaxaca (State)—History. | Language and culture—Mexico—Oaxaca (State)—History. | Language and languages—Religious aspects—Christianity—History. | Intercultural communication—Religious aspects—Christianity—History. Classification: LCC BV2082.L3 F37 2018 | DDC 282/.7274—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001351
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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To Juana and the memory of Padre Pablo
When the day of Pentecost came round, while they were all gathered together with one purpose, suddenly a sound came from Heaven like that of a strong wind blowing, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And then appeared to them what seemed to be tongues of fire, which parted and came to rest on each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different languages, as the Spirit gave each of them utterance.
Acts 2:1–4
CONTENTS
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Glossary xix
Abbreviations xxi
Introduction 1
PART I. Language Contact and Language Policy
1. Signs and Gestures 11
Sign Language 12
Words and Pictures 20
2. Interpreters 27
Nahuatlatos and Conquest 27
Indian Preachers 36
Unfaithful Translation 42
Mediated Penance 49
3. Confusion of Tongues 55
Language Policy 55
Language Diversity 61
Lingua Franca 68
Evangelization in Nahuatl 74
PART II. Evangelization in the Vernacular
4. Language Barriers under Siege 83
The Barriers 84
Language Learning 90
From Glyphs to Alphabet 96
Artes and Vocabularios 105
5. Speaking the Word of God 111
Language Requirements 111
Language Qualifications 119
Preaching 126
Confession 134
PART III. The Means and the Message
6. Catechists and Catechism 141
Recruiting the Elite 141
Indigenous Literati 148
Teaching Catechism 153
Doctrinal Basics 159
7. The Word of God 167
The Spoken Word 167
The Written Word 172
Evil: A Triad 178
No Other Gods 184
PART IV. Lost and Found in Translation
8. The Problem of Meaning 197
Dialogic Distance 197
Translation as Collaboration 204
Pursuit of Equivalence 211
Tools of the Trade 217
9. Adoptions and Adaptations 227
Heaven, Hell, and the Devil 228
Sin and Disorder 234
Risk of Contamination 241
One God or Three 246
10. The Art of Persuasion 255
Rhetoric in Two Worlds 255
Colonial Incorporations 261
Christian Libana 270
Mesoamerican Poetics 274
Conclusion: Doctrinal Legacies
11. Continuity and Convergence 285
Language Continuity 286
Doctrinal Exports 288
New Cultural Matrix 292
Lexical Fates 295
Notes 303 Bibliography 369
Index 395
PREFACE
This is a study of language and evangelization in Mexico during the first century or so of colonial rule, roughly 1525–1675. It highlights the efforts of Spanish missionaries, in collaboration with indigenous intellectuals, to communicate the gospel message in dozens of previously unknown local languages that differed greatly from each other as well as from those in the Old World. The dialogue represented in these efforts, and the indigenous responses to them, created a new, culturally hybrid form of Christianity that had become firmly established by the end of this period.
The focus on the southern Mexican region of Oaxaca springs from several sources, not least of which is the lure of a magnificent landscape and a prodigal variety of indigenous cultures. The same picturesque but rugged terrain and cultural richness posed major obstacles to the project of evangelization, magnified further by the fact that Zapotec and the other Otomangue tongues spoken in Oaxaca belong to one of the most phonetically and syntactically complex language families, certainly far more difficult to master than the better-known languages that compose the rest of the area known as Mesoamerica. Perhaps for these reasons, the region, the language, and the topic all represented relatively uncharted territory when I began my research in the early 1980s: difficult to navigate but with warm welcomes in the Zapotec communities and abundant records in the archives, including many previously unknown documents in colonial Zapotec. By the time I discovered how difficult a language Zapotec is, it was too late to switch. Besides, Louise Burkhart had already published fine works on Nahuatl as a language of evangelization in central Mexico— with more to come—and William Hanks had embarked on his monumental study of colonial Yucatec Maya, both of them concentrating on the Franciscan missions, whereas the challenges facing the Dominicans in the polyglot societies of southern Mexico remained largely unexplored. My challenge was to discover how the Dominicans preached the gospel under the especially adverse conditions in Oaxaca, what they managed
to communicate, and—insofar as possible— what the message meant to the Indians.
Along with shedding light on a lesser known region, language, and set of actors, this study seeks to broaden the literature’s prevalent thematic focus by embedding linguistic analyses in the larger frame of sociocultural change in postconquest Mesoamerica. These two approaches have produced very fine scholarship when pursued separately; I think much can be gained by combining them, taking language contact as an entry point for exploring the transition to colonial society, with emphasis on the ideational codes, institutional structures, and social groups that interacted via translation to create the Mexican church. The Dominican friars who left behind their rarefied theological debates in the lecture halls of Salamanca to become apostles in a strange and often forbidding land are major players; so also are the creole clergy who navigated the indigenous world with far greater ease, having learned Zapotec and other native languages from servants and childhood playmates. Above all are the Indian elites who taught their languages, collaborated in the translations, and served as the principal agents of evangelization. Although rarely named as individuals, these elites were the main authors of the catechisms and other doctrinal literature and of Mexican Christianity itself.
This is not the book I set out to write. My intention was, and still is, to trace postconquest religious change within indigenous society through the objects they held sacred— their forms and uses and ultimately their meanings. What began as an introductory survey of Christian beginnings turned into a full- scale study of evangelization, its particular messages and modes of communication, as a means to understand this major element in the mix of influences that created colonial religion. I continue to think that meanings are expressed most powerfully through visual imagery and ritual practice, but I also think that they reveal themselves more clearly with the help of words. Therefore language has been a better starting point in the search for meanings.
SOURCES
In attempting to place translation in the context of postconquest cultural change, I have relied mainly on two types of documentary sources that have tended to figure separately in the scholarly literature, one pertaining more specifically to the language of evangelization and the other to the sociocultural matrix in which language contact occurred. The first consists of materials in indigenous languages, Zapotec for the most part but
also drawing on a wealth of translations of and commentaries on other Mesoamerican and Andean languages. Grammars and dictionaries fall into this category, along with the more obviously doctrinal texts, such as catechisms and sermons and different genres of devotional literature. All, regardless of whose name appeared as author, were the product of collaboration between members of the clergy and Indian elites, with or without the church’s formal imprimatur. Additional texts with religious content produced solely by the Zapotec ranged from the highly orthodox and formulaic testamentary preambles to clandestine divinatory calendars and sacred hymns addressed to local deities: both of these latter genres clearly pre- Christian in origin but transcribed into alphabetic script.
The other type of source is the immense collection of still largely unedited records compiled by the officials of church and state. It includes letters and reports, judicial cases, and inquiries from all levels and branches of colonial administration that often preserve in gratifying detail what people were doing and saying and even purportedly thinking. It is from this massive documentation, housed in a variety of repositories from local to imperial archives, that, piece by piece, a picture can be assembled of the world in which the language of evangelization was created, employed, and transformed: the actors who participated in the project and the circumstances that shaped its design and outcome.
Linguistic and sociocultural analyses both have been informed also by extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted— for the most part unsystematically, it must be confessed—in Oaxaca over a period of several decades. Any approximation to the target that my interpretations achieve is owing to help from people who still live culture contact and translation on a daily basis: Zapotec and Mixe community members and Roman Catholic priests and sisters who minister in their parishes.
A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY AND ORTHOGRAPHY
The term “Indian” is a misnomer traceable to the Europeans’ initial error in thinking that they had reached the “Indies,” or Asia. But it stuck and has even been widely adopted among Native Americans in the United States. Although indígena is now preferred in much of Spanish America, I have retained indio or “Indian” in many cases as the term used universally in the colonial period and closer to the original discourse. Along the same lines I often use “colonial” rather than “viceregal,” which has recently come into vogue in Mexico but seems to elide the reality of overseas domination.
Spanish spelling, which was not yet standardized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, will be modernized except when quoting directly from a contemporary text or citing a published title. Written Zapotec, with regional variation already reflected in the colonial documents, has become even more heterogeneous with the current renaissance in indigenous literacy that has stimulated the creation of new systems of orthography. In this study I generally use the Valley Zapotec variant as it appeared in the 1578 Juan de Córdova Vocabulario, except, again, when quoting directly from a text or when quoting a word or phrase supplied by a modern speaker of another Zapotec variant. The j and i combination in colonial Zapotec texts is really a doubled vowel rather than a consonant and vowel and is rendered as ii: for example, cociio rather than cocijo. For other indigenous languages I generally retain the spelling prevalent in the colonial documents rather than modernized versions (for example, Quiché, not K’iche’).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The early catechisms featured in this study bear the name of a single author even while depending heavily on the help of others. This work is similarly indebted to Juana Vázquez of Yalalag, whose knowledge of the language, thought, and lifeways of the Zapotec undergirds the entire project and whose urgings on behalf of the “ancestors” have spurred it to completion. I dedicate this book to Juana and to the late Paul Merne (S. V. D.)—or Padre Pablo, as he is known in Oaxaca—devoted lexicographer and beloved longterm pastor of Yagavila. Aside from wishing to acknowledge their insights and encouragement, I see them as heirs of the indigenous intellectuals and missionary linguists whose collaboration produced the written records that inspired and inform this study. In vastly altered circumstances and with different incentives, they have labored to the same end of transcending language barriers.
Many others have contributed to what has become a multifaceted inquiry extending over decades, and I beg forgiveness from those inadvertently omitted. My main debt is to the scholarly and pastoral communities of Oaxaca and to the indigenous people they study and serve. Ron Spores, who introduced me to Oaxaca in 1980, is the first link in the chain that led through Angeles Romero Frizzi, Lucero Topete, and Manuel Esparza, and then the Hermanas Franciscanas Misioneras, to both Juana and Padre Pablo. I have crisscrossed much of the Sierra Norte and many other parts of Oaxaca gathering information from people and landscapes as well as documents, often accompanied by Juana and by her then young nephews. Other frequent travel companions in those years were Arthur Miller, Elvira Quiroz, and Heladio Zárate. For hospitality and introductions I counted most often on the missionary sisters of the Centro de Pastoral Indígena of Oaxaca and on those then in charge of the sprawling parish centered in Yalalag, where Juana and I first began to decipher Zapotec documents together. In Tlahuitoltepec-Mixe Sofía Robles and the late Floriberto Díaz Gómez frequently offered shelter along with much wisdom, and in Yalalag
I found a second home with Juana and her family. Among many members of the clergy who, besides Padre Pablo, provided insights and information from their pastoral experience, and sometimes hospitality as well, I note especially Enrique Marroquín, C.M.F. (Claretian), Valentín Santos Santiago, and Pío Estepa, S.V.D. (Divine Word).
For the documentation used in this study I am grateful to the staffs of the Archivo General de Indias (Seville), Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), Archivio Segreto Vaticano (Rome), Bodleian Library (Oxford), John Carter Brown Library (Providence), Library of the Hispanic Society (New York), University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library (now the Kislak Center, Philadelphia), Newberry Library (Chicago), Bancroft Library (Berkeley), Archivo General de la Nación, and the Biblioteca de Antropología e Historia, both in Mexico City.
In Oaxaca I was able to survey many parish archives through the good offices of the late don Bartolomé Carrasco, then archbishop of Oaxaca. Mitigating the deplorable conditions of these and other local repositories at the time, the late Luis Castañeda Guzmán generously shared his rich private collection with me as with many other scholars, and Manuel Esparza offered every facility under his direction then available at the Archivo General del Estado. Along with all historians I owe a special thanks to Lucero Topete for persuading the governor of Oaxaca to rescue the court records from Villa Alta and to the late Fr. Fernando Vázquez Núñez for tracking down lost ecclesiastical documents, including a huge cache hidden from revolutionaries in the Old Seminary cistern. These collections, salvaged in 1984 and 1986, respectively, later evolved with additions into two of the region’s major archives: the Archivo del Poder Judicial del Estado de Oaxaca and the Archivo de la Archidiócesis de Oaxaca. When I used them only Gonzalo Rojo and Padre Fernando were in attendance. I have been able to benefit from two other recent additions, the research libraries named in honor of the Dominicans Francisco de Burgoa and Juan de Córdova, created with guidance and funding from the Alfredo Harp Helú Foundation, and I thank their staffs for their help.
At the University of Pennsylvania I have received invaluable research assistance from graduate students, some of whom have gone on to distinguished careers of their own. These include Kristin Cahn von Seelen, Robey Callahan, Marcello Canuto, Christine Kray, John Monaghan, Gabriela Ramos, Matt Tomlinson, and Kristina Wirtz. The linguistic turn followed in this study drew inspiration from colleagues assembled in a seminar in the 1990s under the title “Colonial Dialogues” and from whose counsel and encouragement I continue to profit: Asif Agha, Tom Cummins, William Hanks, John Lucy, Gary Tomlinson, and Greg Urban. For specific help with learning
Acknowledgments ( xvii )
Zapotec and deciphering Zapotec texts, in addition to Juana Vázquez and Padre Pablo, I have counted on Deborah Augsburger, Víctor Cata, Uliana Cruz Guerra, Raymundo Cruz Miguel, Martina Schrader-Kniffki, and the late Thomas Smith- Stark. The broader community of scholars working in and on Oaxaca has been exceptionally generous in sharing ideas and resources, none more so than Michael Swanton, who has piloted me for the past ten years through the shoals of Mesoamerican linguistics. I also thank other Oaxaca neighbors— Alejando de Ávila Blomberg, Bas van Doesburg, María Isabel Grañén, Sergio Navarrete, and Angeles Romero—and nonresident scholars Hilaria Cruz, Michel Oudijk, Javier Urcid, and Judith Zeitlin, with special mention of Yanna Yannakakis, former student and now valued colleague.
I have received stimulus and encouragement from a host of scholars in other fields. For particular advice or information I give thanks to Louise Burkhart, Jaime Cuadriello, Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo, Ann Farnsworth, Lynn Hollen Lees, Kenneth Mills, Mary Mitchell, Marcy Norton, Mónica Ricketts, and Camilla Townsend. For help in the final stages of book production, I wish to thank Jamie Forde, Eumenia Hernández, Nick Johnson, John O’Neill, Anne Pushkal, Abraham Villavicencio, Constance Wood, and my editor at Oxford, Cynthia Read. Among nonacademic friends who have helped to move things along, I count Myriam Darnaude, Gabriela Torresarpi, and especially Christine and Richard Samaha, who have indulged my taste for English writing paper developed in graduate school. Financial support for the years of research in Oaxaca was provided, in chronological order, by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MacArthur Foundation, the Getty Foundation, and the University of Pennsylvania.
I could not have written this book without the sustaining love and companionship, in Philadelphia and Oaxaca, of Juan Manuel Lombera.
GLOSSARY
alcalde mayor. Spanish official with judicial and administrative authority over a territory subordinate to the Audiencia of New Spain.
Audiencia, Real Audiencia. Royal high court of the viceroyalty.
cabecera. Main population center of a doctrina or indigenous parish. cacique. Hereditary indigenous ruler.
capiilla. Also gabila. Zapotec term for underworld.
cartilla. Basic catechism, also a reading primer.
cédula. Royal decree issued by the Council of the Indies. confessionario. Manual to guide priests in questioning penitents during confession.
difrasismo. Metaphoric paired couplet, combining two semantic elements to create a third, more abstract meaning. Emblematic of Mesoamerican literary style.
doctrina. 1. Indian parish. 2. Written compilation of church doctrine. 3. Classes or teaching of the catechism.
ejemplo. Brief tale with a moral message.
encomendero. Spanish layman holding an encomienda encomienda. Royal concession of a group of Indians with rights to tribute and, in early years, labor, with the obligation to provide Christian instruction.
escribano. Official scribe of a town or a royal court. estampa. Small print or engraving, usually with a religious theme. fiscal. In Indian communities, official serving as a deputy curate, chief catechist, and head of the church staff.
gobernador. Head of an indigenous town government appointed by the Spanish as a check on the authority of the cacique. huehuetlatolli. Nahuatl term for traditional ceremonial language, meaning words of the ancients.
lengua. Language, and also linguistic expert and interpreter. libana. Zapotec for ceremonial or courtly speech, also applied to Christian sermons.
xx ) Glossary
lienzo. Painting on canvas or other cloth.
macehual. Indian commoner.
milagro. Miracle story, often a genre of Marian literature.
nahuatlato. Derived from Nahuatl, colonial Mexican term for interpreter. oidor. Judge of the audiencia
pecado. Sin.
pilhuan. From Nahuatl for children. Church servant or convent boy. pitao/betao/bitoo. Zapotec for deity. plática. Brief sermonizing speech.
principal. Indian noble.
rezandero/a. Prayer specialist in indigenous community. sermonario. Collection of written sermons, often in manuscript.
teotl. Nahuatl term for deity.
título primordial. Sometimes simply título, narrative serving as an ethnic group’s founding charter.
topil. Low-level official for Indian munipality or parish, constable.
visita. Subordinate settlement within a parish.
visita ad limina. Report that each bishop was required to submit periodically to the Holy See on the state of his diocese.
vocabulario. Dictionary.
ABBREVIATIONS
ACTAS Actas Capitulares de la Provincia de Santiago, 1541–1600. University of California, Bancroft Library, Mexican Manuscripts 142
AGEO Archivo General del Estado de Oaxaca
AGI Archivo General de Indias, Seville
AGN Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico, D.F.
AVA Archivo del Poder Judicial del Estado de Oaxaca, ramo Archivo de Villa Alta (document citation follows the Archivo’s pre-2000 numeration)
BN Biblioteca Nacional, Mexico, D.F.
CIIIM Concilio III Provincial Mexicano [1585] (1859)
ENE Paso y Troncoso, Francisco, ed. Epistolario de la Nueva España, 1505–1818. 16 vols. Mexico, Antigua Librería de Robredo, 1939–1942.
PETAPA Probanza de Santo Domingo Petapa, 1698. Archivo de Bienes Comunales, Santo Domingo Petapa, Libro 2, ff. 50–73.
POZO Antonio del Pozo “Arte zaapoteco . . con la doctrina cristiana y sermones en lengua zapoteca” [c. 1600]. Hispanic Society of New York, New Series 3, 1914, Item 27
RG Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: Antequera [1569–1571], 2 vols., 1984
Introduction
Language barriers are inseparable from the human condition. The need for translation must have emerged almost as soon as the capacity for language itself, since people have always been prone to move around the planet, and in any case language tends to splinter into mutually unintelligible speech forms, even in close geographical proximity. Some regard this prodigality of tongues as a curse, explained in more or less metaphorical terms as a second fall from grace or divine punishment for some form of arrogance, embodied in the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1–9). Others cherish language diversity as a treasure trove of unique ways of mapping the world and mourn the loss of any variant. Whether lamented as a catastrophic obstacle to human communication or welcomed as a reservoir of human wisdom, this multiplicity, along with the separation of mankind into distinct cultural forms that feed into and from language, is an ineluctable fact that requires the translator’s art to transcend.
Scientists have projected this need for translation into the future. For some decades they have been creating experimental codes— visual, mathematical, algorhythmic—designed to communicate with any intelligent beings that might be encountered in outer space.1 A past event equivalent to a Mars landing—if Mars were in fact inhabited by Martians—opens the scene for the translation story that occupies this volume. The October 1492 landing of Christopher Columbus on an as yet unidentified cay in the Bahamas initiated an almost interplanetary type of encounter between two groups and cultures, European and Native American, that had been more thoroughly isolated from each other than any on earth. Unlike the great Eurasian land mass and Africa in the Old World, which had maintained many points of contact directly or through intermediaries, America had
developed on its own since the last Ice Age. Except for a barely recorded Norse settlement in Newfoundland, and for what little the rest of America and Europe knew of that short-lived outpost, the quarantine had remained unbroken for many millennia until Columbus’s arrival.
The Europeans’ error in thinking that they had reached the outskirts of Asia blunted their sense of finding an alien world for at least a decade, until America was recognized as a wholly new world and speculation began about who the inhabitants, if they were not Asians, might be and where they had come from. (As for what the Indians made of Europeans, the notion of divine origins became a common but never substantiated trope.)2
Long before this recognition, in fact from the beginning, the newcomers had found that their accustomed methods of communicating across language barriers did not work. The Old World intermediaries who had for centuries provided stepping stones for far-ranging European explorers and merchants all around Africa and across Asia were of no use in the New World, where no Islamic diasporas or related languages were to be found nor in fact much at all that was recognizable.
The Spanish Empire that developed from Columbus’s discovery provides an ideal setting for studying how translation mediates the boundary between different languages and cultures. It contained the earliest sites of the confrontation between these previously isolated worlds, in some ways a more shocking collision than any intergalactic encounter, which will at least have been projected, however imperfectly, in the imagination. And because the Spanish were such assiduous record keepers their colonial empire also provides the best documented example of large- scale culture contact before or since, with minutely detailed accounts of the local ways of life, the language barriers encountered, and the various efforts made to transcend them.
The American languages presented an immense obstacle to communication, since they are unrelated to any in the Old World, where IndoEuropean and Semitic language families, each with representatives in the Iberian Peninsula, covered huge expanses of Eurasia and North Africa. Languages in America, along with being wholly unfamiliar, were also perceived as more highly fragmented, an impression that modern linguistic studies have confirmed. Within the Spanish colonies, the area of southern Mexico and Central America that has been dubbed Mesoamerica displays these qualities in a concentrated form, and, within that area, the territory encompassed by the present Mexican state of Oaxaca epitomizes the “crazy quilt” of languages that has plagued or bedazzled mankind since Babel.3 When the Spanish arrived they found in Oaxaca, with its funnel shape tapering into the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, its crumpled topography, and
its closely packed population, one of the most linguistically diverse regions on the entire planet.4 Even if this distinction had been matched in the empire’s other densely populated mountainous region, the South American Andes, the latter is not nearly as hospitable an archival setting for studying the role of translation because it failed to produce the rich trove of native language records that survive from colonial Oaxaca and other parts of Mesoamerica. When Andeans learned the Latin alphabet they tended to write in Spanish, and the documents they did write in Quechua or Aymara were less likely to be preserved.5
The same consideration has helped to dictate the choice of religion as the thematic lens through which to examine language and culture contact. Like the thief who robs banks “because that’s where the money is,” the historian is drawn to where the documents are. If geographically the richest source is Mesoamerica, the most productive activity was evangelization, a systematic and vigorous program to convert the Indians to Christianity that left no sphere of native life untouched. It created a need for translation unprecedented since the first age of the apostles, since in order to save the Indians’ souls the Spanish missionaries had not only to instruct the neophytes in an entirely alien set of ideas but also to persuade them to follow a code of behavior that must have seemed equally outlandish. The Spanish missionaries—primarily Franciscan and Dominican friars— met the need for translation with an explosion of grammars, dictionaries, and bilingual catechisms that rivaled if not surpassed anything produced in Europe at the time. In fact, grammars of American indigenous languages compiled by this new wave of apostles appeared in print before most of the equivalent texts for European vernaculars.6
Communicating the word of God and the mysteries of faith across language barriers posed the greatest intellectual challenge of the colonial encounter; it required far more careful attention to verbal nuance and accuracy than negotiating economic exchanges or norms of political governance. Cosmologies and systems of values are delicate and complex, and their differences in structure and ways of patterning the world are more likely to lead to incomprehension or misunderstanding, and with far graver consequences. At stake was the salvation of souls.
Translation as a tool of cultural change lies at the root of what we call Western civilization, beginning in the third century b.c. with the assimilation of Greek literary culture by the Romans,7 and continuing with the spread of Christianity in the first centuries of the present era. Christianity has been defined by translation to a degree unmatched by either of the other two Abrahamic religions, each of them monolingual in its own way. Judaism depends on a single ancestral language, and Islam has spread
