Nahuatl and Pipil in Colonial Guatemala: A Central American Counterpoint, w/ Sergio F. Romero

Ethnohistory 59!4 (Fall 2012)"#$% 10.1215/00141801-1642743Copyright 2012 by American Society for Ethnohistory

Nahuatl and Pipil in Colonial Guatemala: A Central American Counterpoint

Laura E. Matthew, Marquette UniversitySergio F. Romero, University of Texas at Austin

Abstract. Nahuatl has often been described as a lingua franca in colonial Central America, but this conclusion has rested on a narrow range of Spanish and Nahuatl- language documents. In this article we broaden the evidentiary base, analyzing a corpus of forty- six Nahuatl documents spanning the years 1549–1666 from Cen-tral America. Most of these documents date from the turn of the sixteenth century and are in the Central American Nahuatl dialect of Pipil. Some exhibit incorrect emulations of the Classical Nahuatl of central Mexico, brought to the region by the Spaniards’ Nahua allies. Those written in Classical Nahuatl were generally pro-duced in areas of signi&cant Nahua and/or Spanish colonization. We conclude that Nahuatl in colonial Central America was signi&cantly impacted by indigenous Pipil. As a vehicular language, Pipil was as useful as the central Mexican Nahuatl of the invaders, and it developed its own written standard. In general, Nahuatl of all kinds served as a vehicular language in colonial Central America for only about a century after conquest and followed the path of the invaders.

Nahuatl is commonly labeled a lingua franca of colonial Guatemala. The historian browsing through records of early Spanish bureaucracy from the region will encounter numerous nahuatlatos, both indigenous and Euro-pean, translating from a local language to Nahuatl to Spanish or sometimes directly from Nahuatl. Nahuatl place-names are prominent throughout the region, a fact usually attributed to their literal translation from Mayan and other languages by the Nahua allies of the Spanish who invaded the region in the 1520s. Nahuatl loan words are evident in colonial Mayan- language texts. Why would this be so, in a region that was overwhelmingly Maya at the time of European contact? In 1996, archaeologist Carlos Navarrete suggested that Nahuatl, like archaeological and cultural borrowings that

766 Laura E. Matthew and Sergio F. Romero

he identi&ed as Mexican, would have arrived in Guatemala through con-tacts with the increasingly aggressive Aztec empire. Linguist Karen Dakin pushed Navarrete’s speculation even further, suggesting in 1997 that pre-colonial Maya elites in highland Guatemala preserved an archaic form of Nahuatl that they had learned as a language of trade and diplomacy prior to the rise of the Aztec state. Historian Robinson Herrera came to a di'er-ent conclusion while working with Spanish- language notarial books from the &rst sixty years of Spanish colonial rule in the capital city of Santiago de Guatemala. From his point of view, Nahuatl’s usefulness clearly derived from the presence and prestige of the Nahua allies who settled alongside the Spanish and acted as points of contact between Europeans and conquered locals.( Only Dakin’s theory depended on the collection and analysis of Nahuatl texts themselves. And Dakin’s sources narrowly focus on a par-ticular moment and place: a letter- writing campaign to inform the crown of mistreatment of “Indians” living in Santiago’s environs in 1572. Here, we reevaluate the role of Nahuatl in colonial Guatemala from a broader data set of forty- six Nahuatl documents from the region, spanning the years 1549–1666 and ranging from Chiapas to Nicaragua (corresponding to the boundaries of the Audiencia de Guatemala). Twenty- one of these docu-ments can be identi&ed as Pipil. Nineteen are Classical Nahuatl. Three con-tain a variety we have named Central American Colonial Nahuatl. Three of the documents contain one or more of these Nahuatl varieties, by di'erent scribes. Our analysis of these Nahuatl documents, in combination with Spanish- language sources, leads us to agree with Dakin that Nahuatl was not com-monly known or spoken by most native speakers of Mayan languages in mid- sixteenth- century Guatemala. Indeed, taking a cue from Michael Swanton’s work on Nahuatl in Oaxaca, we prefer the term vehicular lan-guage to lingua franca to avoid giving an incorrect impression of prevalent bilingualism in Nahuatl and local languages during the colonial period.) We also agree with Herrera that Nahuatl’s importance in colonial Guate-mala derived primarily from the military alliance between central Mexican Nahuas and Spaniards. In both practical and symbolic terms, Nahuatl and Castilian Spanish were the cooperative languages of conquest. There is little linguistic or historical evidence, however, to support Navarrete’s suggestion that central Mexican Nahuatl penetrated very far into postclassical Guatemala. Nor do we agree with Dakin’s identi&cation of some of the Nahuatl in the 1572 letters as an archaic form spoken by Maya elites into the late sixteenth century. Instead, the letters reveal a fas-cinating mixture: the Classical Nahuatl of the invaders; Pipil, a Nahuatl

Nahuatl and Pipil in Colonial Guatemala 767

dialect that had been spoken along the southwestern coasts of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua since approximately 900 CE; and the imita-tive variety we call Central American Colonial Nahuatl, which exhibits fea-tures of both. Our data set suggests that Pipil not only held its own against the more prestigious Nahuatl of the invaders but developed into an impor-tant lettered tradition with in*uence signi&cantly beyond its own region of native speakers.

Nahuatl and Christian Indoctrination

One reason to question Nahuatl’s reach into Central America before the Nahua- Spanish invasion is the impressive lack of Nahuatl texts either gen-erated by sixteenth- century Maya elites or used by European friars anxious to evangelize the region. Maya elites transcribed their important sacred and historical works into their own languages, in works like the Popol Wuj, the Título de Totonicapán, and the Xajil lineage chronicles known as the Anales de los Cakchiqueles. Likewise, rather than using the Nahuatl materials already at hand that were being promoted by their hierarchies, the Francis-cans and Dominicans produced scores of vocabularies, catechisms, and ser-mons in K’iche’, Kaqchikel, Mam, Tz’utujil, and various other highland Mayan languages. These include the famous Theología Indorum (1553–54) by Domingo de Vico; the Catecismo o doctrina cristiana (1545) copied by Domingo de Beseta; and the Cartilla de oraciones en las lenguas guatemalteca, utlateca, y tzutugil (1583) by Pedro de Betanzos.+ Some friars did teach Nahuatl to their sixteenth- century protégés in Guatemala, as is evident in the musical works of Tomás Pascual, a Maya choirmaster from San Juan Ixcoy, Huehuetenango. Pascual’s polyphonic compositions—some of the earliest surviving from colonial Latin America and more important still for their hybrid nature—are frequently performed by early music ensembles today. The majority are set in Latin, Spanish, or a Mayan language. One, however, is in the Classical Nahuatl of central Mexico, as are all of Pascual’s signed addendums (&g. 1)., The Nahuatl of these musical manuscripts indicates a linguistic as well as artistic collabo-ration between Pascual and his Dominican (or possibly Mercedarian) part-ners. The Nahuatl employed by Pascual is clearly the “classical” form taught to the Dominicans by central Mexican Nahuas. Since nothing indicates that Pascual ever left the Guatemalan highlands, it seems likely that he learned Classical Nahuatl from the Dominicans and perhaps their Nahua associ-ates working in Santa Eulalia, San Miguel Acatán, and San Juan Ixcoy. Pascual, however, seems to have been an exception to the rule. When &rst contacting local groups on behalf of Franciscan, Dominican, and other


friars in the 1540s, Nahua allies often translated directly from Spanish to local languages such as Kaqchikel, avoiding an intermediary translation to Nahuatl.- In 1552, the Franciscan hierarchy requested permission to teach Nahuatl to the highland Maya who did not want to learn Spanish, because Nahuatl “is general in these lands”—though clearly not so general as to preclude the need for its instruction. The request indicates both the lack of general Nahuatl pro&ciency in highland Guatemala at the time and perhaps also concern that the di.cult work of learning Mayan languages was delaying the evangelical e'ort. (The crown denied permission, opt-ing in this case to promote Castilian Spanish instead)./ Meanwhile, pro-duction of translated Christian texts and various Mayan vocabularies con-tinued apace, with considerable output by the end of the sixteenth century. Individuals like Pascual who collaborated closely with the friars learned Classical Nahuatl as a language of ritual and scholarship alongside Latin. But there is no indication that Classical Nahuatl was used to teach the basic tenets of Catholicism to the majority of Guatemalan Maya. Evangelization

Figure 1. Musical manuscript by Tomás Pascual, from San Juan Ixcoy, Huehuete-nango, Guatemala (1595–1600). Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University


in Central America proceeded primarily in local languages, not in the Clas-sical Nahuatl brought by the invaders. Even Pipil merited its own translation e'ort for the purposes of Catholic indoctrination. Brought by tenth- century immigrants from central Mexico, Pipil had been spoken along the southern Paci&c coast and piedmont of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua for half a millennium at least when the Nahuas and Spanish invaded Central America. Somewhat disparag-ingly, the Spanish dubbed Pipil lengua mexicana corrupta (corrupted Mexi-can language). Similarly, the Nahua invaders termed this Central American language Pipil, after the Nahuatl word for children, because the characteris-tic dropping of the phoneme /tl/ sounded like childish speech to the central Mexicans.0 It would have been logical for Spanish friars to use the Classi-cal Nahuatl with which they were more familiar to minister to the Pipil—but they did not. Instead, by the 1570s friars such as the Dominicans had deemed Classical Nahuatl texts insu.cient for proper evangelization of the Pipil and were devoting considerable e'ort to creating vocabularies and catechisms in the Central American dialect.1 This e'ort continued into the seventeenth century in the production not only of doctrinal translations but also of institutional documents such as ordinances dictated in Pipil by the bishop of Guatemala for a cofradía in Santa Ana, El Salvador, in 1666.2 A major stumbling block to the translation of Christian doctrine into Pipil seems to have been the cadences appropriate to sacred speech. In Mexico, the friars had learned to express religious concepts in the prop-erly higher registers of Classical Nahuatl, which exhibits complex patterns of honori&cs added to nouns, prepositions, and verbs. But verbal honor-i&cs are absent from Pipil’s higher registers, and the attempt to add them garbled the friars’ message considerably. According to the clerical author of the seventeenth- century Tratado de la vida y muerte de nuestro Señor Jesu Christo, en lengua vulgar Mexicana de Guatemala, “If we were to use only reverential [Classical Nahuatl] particles, they [the Pipil] would not under-stand us.”(3 The friars were therefore forced to learn the distinct patterns of Pipil’s higher registers in order to accomplish their evangelical goals, as is evident in the excerpt from the Tratado that appears in table 1 and &gure 2. This is quite di'erent from the elaborate, pervasive honori&cs typically evi-dent in colonial- era Christian texts composed in Classical Nahuatl.(( The tendency of European friars to view Classical Nahuatl as both normative and superior impeded their understanding of the relationship between it and Pipil. The author of the Tratado considered them the same language and their di'erences stylistic rather than structural. Thus he incor-rectly considered Pipil a “vulgar” form of central Mexican Nahuatl. Ironi-


cally, Pipil’s di'erences from Classical Nahuatl compelled the friars to help create a separate written standard for it while simultaneously con&rming their prejudice that Pipil was a degraded version of the same language spo-ken in the heart of the former Aztec, and now the Spanish, empire.

Nahuatl and Colonial Settlement

If Nahuatl did not much bolster evangelization in colonial Guatemala, it did function as a vehicular language for more quotidian and bureaucratic transactions. Nahuatl facilitated communication between those who spoke mutually unintelligible languages: various highland Maya, Oaxacans, Nahuas, Pipil, Xinca, Spaniards, Africans, and mixed- heritage castas. It proved most useful in Spanish American cities, which were exceptionally polyglot. Nahuatl also served as a preferred language of o.cial documen-tation parallel, though not equal, to Spanish. But these observations come with caveats. Thus far, we see Nahuatl functioning as a vehicular language only in those regions of Guatemala most deeply penetrated by colonialism;

Table 1. First pages of the anonymous seventeenth- century Tratado, in Pipil

Nahuatl Text Literary Translation*Nlcneztiz centet quenamihuelmunequi4 inmuchintim Christianofme in matitaiulcuiticam4 auh in matitaneltucacan te nahuatilli in vtechmacac Tutecuio Dios4 auhin inim tenahuatilli huel nelli in quiiulcuitia4 auh inqui taneltucatu mahuiz Nantzim S5ta Ygle&a4 auh yuequi quitaneltucaz Chriftiano iteh ç5 çe huel nelli Dios muchi hellitini4 Tepiquini muchintim tamantim inyzemanahuac: nuzam munequi in mataneltuca4 quenami inim cenca huei Dios nemi itic muchintim tamantim talticpac ieliztica4 teixpantica4 auh in huelitiliztica6 Ynim huei Dios huelhuelnelli S5ti.ma Trinidad Dios Tetatzim Dios ipilzim4 Dios Spiritu Santo yeintim perfonafme4 auh inçan ce huelnelli Dios6 Xicaquicam ce temachiotilizti ipal ie7ti ancaquizque

I am going to explain how necessary it is for all Christians that we set in our hearts4 that we believe the commandments that Our Lord Dios gave us6 His commandments Christians must take as true6 And that they also believe in the Glorious Mother [HON**] the Holy Church6 And in the same manner4 the Christian believes that the only true Dios created everything4 all things on this earth6 Also4 that God lives in all things on earth4 their essence4 form and power6 The great Dios4 the true Holy Trinity4 God the Father [HON]4 God the Son [HON] and God the Holy Spirit4 three people in one true Dios6 Listen to this sermon so that you heed justice on its account6

*English translation by Sergio F. Romero.**“HON” indicates honori&cSource: Tratado, 231r–v.


only between the 1580s and 1640s, approximately; and even in these places and times, concurrent with strong tendencies toward monolingualism. Pri-marily, Nahuatl functioned as a bridge language of colonial administration and economics between local languages and Castilian. By the end of the seventeenth century, it was superseded by Castilian itself. Most commonly, Nahuatl documents and references to the use of Nahuatl in Spanish- language documents come from new colonial settle-ments and along long- traveled commercial/conquest routes, which were increasingly traversed by Europeans and Nahuas as well as Oaxacans and Central Americans. Thousands of Nahuas and Oaxacans invaded Central America with the Spanish. Hundreds remained as colonists and welcomed newer Nahua and Oaxaca migrants in subsequent decades. Largely Nahua settlements sprang up on the outskirts of and within every Spanish founda-tion in Central America. Nahua invaders also took possession of strategic outposts such as Totonicapán and Soconusco.() In these early years of colo-nialism, both Nahuatl and Spanish served as languages of translation among

Figure 2. First page of the anonymous Tratado, fol. 231. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University


the invaders themselves. The young Spanish conquistador Pedro Gonzáles Nájera, for instance, was locally renowned for his role as nahuatlato during the invasion of Guatemala in 1524. He continued to cultivate close relations with the Nahua allies who settled near Santiago—the region’s administra-tive capital after 1549 and its largest European settlement—in the later six-teenth century.(+ Oaxacan conquistadors also adopted Nahuatl and often assimilated into newly settled allied garrisons, a fact that is perhaps not surprising given higher levels of bilingualism in Nahuatl in Oaxaca before the arrival of Europeans.(, As the sixteenth century progressed, Spanish and Nahua conquista-dors continued to learn each other’s languages. Spaniard Juan Fernández Nájera was an early adopter, arriving in Santiago with his Nahua wife in the 1540s. He not only acted as interpreter for the vast majority of o.cial trans-actions requiring translation for the Nahua allies in the mid- sixteenth cen-tury, but also seems to have been an important point of contact between the Nahua and Spanish conquistadors as they supported each other’s claims to the booty of conquest from the Spanish crown. A second wave of nonmili-tary Spanish colonists was exposed to Nahuatl through their marriages to mestiza daughters of Spanish conquistadors and Nahua noblewomen. In some cases and for at least a generation, Nahuas living within their own “repúblicas de indios” in Guatemala maintained contact with these mestiza women living within the “república de españoles.”(- For their part, Guatemala’s Nahua and Oaxacan conquistadors adopted Spanish as a marker of their rank above the locals much as they adopted Christianity. Even if a majority of these “Mexicanos” (as they became known) did not in fact speak Spanish in the sixteenth century, they were careful to minimize any mention of interpreters in their letters to Spanish authorities. By the mid- seventeenth century many of the Mexi-canos in their largest Central American colony, Ciudad Vieja near Santiago, were capable of carrying out basic bureaucratic transactions in Spanish. Their use of interpreters in court and notarial records, which unlike let-ters and probanzas tend not to obscure translation, drops notably by the 1620s and disappears altogether by midcentury. By the eighteenth century, church o.cials considered the Mexicanos of Ciudad Vieja fully bilingual.(/ In areas where fewer Europeans settled, such as Totonicapán, by contrast, Nahua colonists appear to have gradually learned local languages and inte-grated into the Maya elite.(0 Nahuatl’s everyday usefulness to the Spanish soon grew beyond the boundaries of communication with their military allies from Mexico. In 1566, the episcopal synod reported that most Spanish priests in Santiago knew Nahuatl and therefore there was “no necessity . . . for confessions


to be heard using interpreters”—presumably for any “Indians” living in the city, Nahua or not.(1 By the 1580s, classes had been set up in Santiago to instruct judges, notaries, city council members, and other Spaniards in Nahuatl. This school closed after its founder’s death in 1590, but clearly some Spaniards were learning Nahuatl informally.(2 The notary Sebastián Gudiel needed a Nahuatl interpreter for bilingual transactions in the 1590s, for instance, but by the 1620s was conducting such transactions in Nahuatl himself.)3 Maya and other Guatemalan natives were also learning Nahuatl, espe-cially in and around colonial urban centers. Few documents record every-day transactions in early colonial settlements like Gracias a Dios, San Sal-vador, or Comayagua.)( For Santiago, however, a rich corpus of notarial and judicial records reveals Nahuatl’s utility to a broad spectrum of urban and suburban residents. Mayan speakers living in and around Santiago used Nahuatl—in however rudimentary a way—into the seventeenth century, to sign contracts, dictate wills, apprentice their children, and sell property to their neighbors. Sometimes this involved a translator; at other times, Maya living in and around Santiago spoke Nahuatl themselves. Via Nahuatl, they communicated with Spaniards, castas, and very occasionally with each other when their languages were mutually unintelligible. Further away from the Spanish urban core we still see Maya interpreters, but we see fewer people using Nahuatl independently.)) One judicial document marvelously captures some of the less bureaucratic uses to which rural Maya nahuatlatos could be put by their largely monolingual neighbors. When the Franciscans sent mestizo and Mexicano representatives to force the Kaqchikel Maya residents of San Antonio Aguascalientes to attend church during Holy Week in 1573, the Kaqchikel relied on their local scribe to translate insults against the enforcers into Nahuatl.)+ Our data set of Nahuatl documents agrees with these impressions given by Spanish- language sources. Of the nineteen Classical Nahuatl documents in our corpus, a majority (eleven) come from areas of concen-trated Nahua and/or Spanish population such as Ciudad Vieja, Santiago, Escuintla, Soconusco, San Salvador, San Miguel, and Chiapa de los Indios (&g. 3).), Of the eight remaining documents, &ve come from a single, unique source: the musical manuscripts of Pascual. We have found only two other documents in Classical Nahuatl from areas isolated from colonial power. One comes from Jacaltenango in Huehuetenango, close to where Pascual was composing and so perhaps indicative of a particularly active contingent of friars in the region. The other is from the Ch’orti area of Chiquimula. In addition, a single page of unknown provenance of cabildo notes in Classical Nahuatl includes a Kaqchikel translation.)-


The geographical distribution of extant documents from colonial Guatemala in Classical Nahuatl suggests that this written standard came with the sixteenth- century conquistadors and was more prevalent in those areas where they concentrated. Thus far, neither Spanish nor Nahuatl sources indicate high levels of Nahuatl usage in areas further removed from contact with the invaders. Also noteworthy is the temporal concentration of Classical Nahuatl documents in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-turies. Some among the &rst generations of Maya and other conquered Cen-tral Americans born and raised under colonial rule were learning Nahuatl. But they were also, apparently, learning Spanish. The incidence of Nahuatl documents decreases markedly from the second quarter of the seventeenth century, simultaneous to Nahuatl’s decreasing mention in notarial records. The latest example of a Classical Nahuatl document from Central America in our data set is the cabildo notes from Jacaltenango, dated 1656.

Figure 3. Tributary count in Classical Nahuatl, likely from the provinces surround-ing San Salvador, El Salvador, mid- seventeenth century. Courtesy of the Archivo General de Centroamérica, Guatemala City


The In!uence of Pipil

A question arises: if Nahuatl served as a vehicular language in Santiago and other centers of colonial settlement, what Nahuatl do we mean? There are hints that even in the environs of a major Spanish American city it was not always, exactly, the Nahuatl of the invaders. In a 1604 adultery case from San Miguel Petapa—a majority Poqomam town approximately thirty kilometers southeast of Santiago with a signi&cant population of Nahua immigrants—witness testimony was recorded in Pipil.)/ In San Cristobal el Alto on the outskirts of Santiago, testimony in a murder case was taken in “the Nahuatl that is commonly used in this city and province which the witnesses examined speak and understand very well.” The language of this interrogation, the Spanish o.cials in charge of the case speci&ed, was also “la lengua mexicana corrupta,” or Pipil.)0 The work of Creole chronicler Francisco de Fuentes y Guzmán also suggests Pipil’s in*uence in and around Santiago. Much like the clerical author of the Pipil sermons discussed earlier, Fuentes y Guzmán treated Classical Nahuatl as normative in his vocabulary list at the end of his His-toria de Guatemala, o Recordación !orida (1690). He frequently compared Maya or Pipil words and concepts with their equivalent—or his best guess—in central Mexican Nahuatl. However, Fuentes y Guzmán also evinced his famous Creole pride by distinguishing between Nahuatl and “the language of the valley of Guatemala,” noting, for instance, the di'erence between the local term pactli (medicine) and the “mexicano” term pahtli (medici-nal thing). He provided numerous Pipil etymologies for Guatemalan place names and pointed out that the university in Santiago had a chair in “lengua pipil o mexicana.”)1 Our sense of Pipil’s potential in*uence on Nahuatl in colonial Guate-mala is heightened by the fact that the majority of Nahuatl documents we collected are in Pipil. Of these, four are the pastoral texts already men-tioned. The other Pipil texts include fragments of cabildo minutes, wills, accounting records, bills of sale, judicial vases, and land titles. Thirteen come from Pipil- speaking areas in El Salvador, southwestern Guatemala, and Nicaragua. This suggests that not only Spanish priests but also local Pipil were contributing to the development of a vibrant lettered community in this Nahuatl dialect during the early colonial period. A few Pipil documents in our collection, however, come from Maya regions. Two—testimony for a court case (1604) and a land title (1637)—are from the Poqomam towns of San Miguel Petapa and Santo Domingo Mixco in Guatemala, respectively. The land title also contains a note in a di'erent hand in Classical Nahuatl. Several more Pipil documents come from Acaco-


yagua, Tepequiz, and other settlements in Chiapas between 1600 and 1623: cabildo notes, a letter to Spanish o.cials in Ciudad Real de Chiapa, and an account of the care of local Catholic images. Reminiscent of the Mixco document, the series from Chiapas also includes two documents in Classi-cal Nahuatl, one recording tribute payments and another describing a judi-cial case to the king of Spain.)2 The scattered appearance of Pipil documents created in majority Maya areas, some accompanied by Classical Nahuatl documents in the same bundle and from the same time period, raises interesting interpretive possibilities. Perhaps some Pipil trained in European technologies of writ-ing were putting their new skills to use as itinerant or immigrant scribes. Their honori&c registers may not have been su.ciently similar to Classical Nahuatl’s for satisfactory translation of religious concepts, but they were good enough for everyday colonial legalese. Perhaps Pipil’s in*uence and use increased with the introduction of Nahuatl as a language of immediate rather than distant empire. Additionally, the Chiapas documents may represent a colonial- era continuation of Nahuatl’s precolonial use in that region—something much closer to what Navarrete envisioned, but tied to particular local histories. In Ayutla, the southernmost Aztec outpost prior to Spanish contact, the Catholic church contracted Nahua teachers to instruct local residents in the 1560s. The residencia (judicial review) of Ayutla’s parish priest from 1573 suggests that he did not know Nahuatl well and was thus unable to properly supervise his parishioners. (The priest, tellingly, insisted that he did indeed know Nahuatl and that the only persons he could not confess were those in nearby villages where only Mam was spoken).+3 Again, we see Nahuatl functioning primarily as a language of colonialism and more prominently in areas of colonial settlement. But prior exposure to the lan-guage via Aztec imperialism may have increased Nahuatl’s usefulness under Spanish colonial rule. In Chiapas, we must also consider the possible in*u-ence of the Isthmus variety of Nahuatl with which Pipil shares historico- linguistic roots and many characteristics.+(

Central American Colonial Nahuatl: Imitation and Prestige

Finally, a small number of texts in our corpus can be classi&ed as neither Classical Nahuatl nor Pipil. Instead, they exhibit features of both in pre-dictable patterns. This form, which we call Central American Colonial Nahuatl, is not a written standard. Rather, it is a tendency on the part of some scribes who were not native speakers of Nahuatl to imperfectly


emulate the Classical Nahuatl that Nahua- Spanish conquest had elevated to o.cial status. Its hypercorrections are persistent: for instance, incor-rectly substituting the phoneme /tl/ for /t/ where there is none in Classi-cal Nahuatl, so that “titechnamiqui” (you meet us) in Classical Nahuatl becomes “tlitechnamiqui” in Colonial Central American Nahuatl. The term for father, “tetahtzin” in Classical Nahuatl, becomes “tetlatzin” in the Central American version. Conversely, the /tl/ is regularly left out of Cen-tral American Colonial Nahuatl when it should occur before an /a/; for instance, “mutlaliz” (it was put) in Classical Nahuatl becomes “mutaliz” in Central American Colonial Nahuatl, and “tlalli” (land) becomes “talli.” It is as if a modern- day speaker, having learned Spanish as a second language or in a form di'erent from that spoken in Spain, wished to use the peninsular ceceo (perhaps for status purposes) but consistently misplaced it. As with the Classical Nahuatl documents in our corpus, documents in Central American Colonial Nahuatl come predominantly from areas of Nahua and/or Spanish colonial settlement. Primary among these are some of the letters written to the Spanish crown in 1572 in Nahuatl by Maya resi-dents of the barrios and milpas (ex- Indian slave settlements) of Santiago, complaining of abuses. In her analysis of these letters, Dakin noted that “the Maya settlements from which these Memorias came were not bilingual, nor were the scribes who wrote them native speakers of Nahuatl, rather they employed a lingua franca that they had learned only imperfectly. . . . In using the term lingua franca for Nahuatl in this instance, it is not proposed that a generalised bilingualism existed in the Maya communities, nor that the Nahuatl they used was a simpli&ed or mixed structure, that is, a pid-gin language.”+) This agrees with the characteristics and distribution of the wider range of Nahuatl documents that we have collected. However, where Dakin sees only two types of Nahuatl in the Memorias, we see a greater variety, including Pipil and the hypercorrections characteristic of Colonial Central American Nahuatl. More profoundly, we see little evidence that this hypercorrected Nahuatl we are calling Central American Colonial represents an archaic form brought to the region by pre- Aztec trader- diplomats, learned by Maya elites or specialists, and developed in isolation from either Pipil or later contacts with central and southern Mexican Nahuatl speakers. Indeed, the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. Judith Maxwell notes a tendency to use the /t/ rather than the /tl/ variant of Nahuatl in the sixteenth- century Kaqchikel Xahil Chronicles, even when it records interchanges with central Mexicans who would have used the latter. She suggests that these borrowings into Kaqchikel came from nearby Pipil, and she also notes that they decrease as the chroniclers move closer to their present.++ The earli-


est writings by Maya elites in the new alphabet of the Europeans were all composed in Mayan languages. Nahuatlatos translating for local caciques in early colonial judicial records are ubiquitous. The sixteenth- century His-toria de los Xpantzay de Tecpán Guatemala states (in Kaqchikel) that Kaji’ Imox, legendary Kaqchikel leader who led the original alliance with and later resistance against the Spanish, was unafraid to meet Pedro de Alva-rado even though “he did not speak the Yaqui [Nahuatl] language.”+, If an archaic form of Nahuatl provided the language of governance and cere-mony in Guatemala prior to the Nahua- Spanish invasion, it is surprising that no more examples have been found from the early colonial period. In our data set, Central American Colonial Nahuatl is rare and mostly produced in areas of signi&cant Nahua- Spanish colonial presence. Our best example is a set of Nahuatl cofradía ordinances dated 1632 from the Bar-rio de Santo Domingo in Santiago.+- Composed entirely in Central Ameri-can Colonial Nahuatl, the ordinances habitually add /tl/ where it does not belong, for instance using “tletlapupulviliztunal” instead of the Classical Nahuatl “tetlapupulviliztunal” (day of indulgences), “itlencopatzinco” instead of “itencopatzinco” (through), and others. The document also has some 120 instances of /u/ substituting for /o/. The scribe is clearly a native speaker neither of central Mexican Nahuatl nor of Spanish.+/ The Nahuatl text, which follows two Spanish versions in regular handwriting, is also dis-tinguished by its artful, careful calligraphy. The members of this cofradía, an artisanal guild of carpenters and masons, were primarily indigenous, though some Spaniards and castas also joined. While most came from the Barrio of Santo Domingo, others were from San Pedro de las Huertas, Ciudad Vieja, San Cristobal el Bajo, and as far away as Chimaltenango. Interestingly, Santo Domingo was one of two original barrios in Santiago with designated parcialidades (wards) for Nahua conquistadors. Although Maya (mostly K’iche’ and Kaqchikel) also settled in Santo Domingo in their own ethnic parcialidad, cabildo o.ces were reserved for Nahuas. Yet despite their demographic and political in*u-ence, Nahuas do not appear to have had a hand in the making of the 1632 cofradía ordinances from the Barrio of Santo Domingo. In both form and language, the ordinances aspire to a high level of rhetoric and presentation. They do not, however, achieve the *uidity of language that a native speaker of central Mexican Nahuatl, or someone highly trained in its written stan-dard of Classical Nahuatl, would have. These cofradía ordinances and some of the Memorias translated by Dakin are the most extensive examples of Central American Colonial Nahuatl we have found. Only three others emerge in our data set: a will


from Escuintla (a Pipil region and also a magnet for Nahua settlers in the sixteenth century), a fragment from the unidenti&ed calpul, or barrio, of San Benito protesting abuses by their governor, and several seventeenth- century notes by a hand di'erent from that of Tomás Pascual in the Hue-huetenango musical manuscripts.+0 For the time being, we consider Cen-tral American Colonial Nahuatl a colonial- era imitation of the prestigious sixteenth- century language of power and empire, Classical Nahuatl, rather than an antique form of Nahuatl kept pristine over centuries and untouched by its close neighbor, Pipil.

Conclusion

Labeling Nahuatl a lingua franca in colonial Guatemala has often evoked an image of Maya, Xinca, Lenca, and Pipil freely communicating with the Nahua, Oaxacan, Spanish, and African invaders of their lands. Dakin’s analysis of the 1572 letters from Santiago de Guatemala suggests that even in the most Spanish of Central American colonial cities, this was not neces-sarily the case. Our larger collection of Nahuatl documents from the colonial period, in combination with notarial and other Spanish- language sources also used by Herrera, con&rms Dakin’s impression. Even in and around Santiago at the turn of the sixteenth century—the height of Nahuatl usage in the city for which we have the most data on interpreters—a signi&cant number of Maya needed translators competent in local languages to per-form basic bureaucratic and economic transactions. Furthermore, Nahuatl documents do not seem to have been widely produced outside areas of Nahua- Spanish colonial settlement, while both sacred and secular texts in a variety of Mayan and other Central American languages were. Thus far, all indications are that Nahuatl was most useful to and most widely used among the invaders themselves. Those who lived in regular contact with the invaders also found Nahuatl useful, but only for a brief window of time and in areas of intense colonial contact. Nahuatl’s heyday in colonial Guatemala lasted around &fty years, between the 1580s and the 1630s, after which it was replaced as a vehicular or bridge language by Spanish. Nahuatl in colonial Guatemala seems to have been signi&cantly in*u-enced by Pipil, even in areas politically dominated by Nahuas and Span-iards. Notarial books, judicial records, and chronicles like Fuentes y Guz-mán’s suggest that the Nahuatl typically used in central Guatemala was sometimes distinct from the central Mexican Nahuatl of the invaders. The imitative form we call Central American Colonial Nahuatl also indicates points of contact between Pipil and Nahuatl in its incorrect but enthusias-


tic emulation of aspects of Classical Nahuatl that may have been particu-larly confusing to a Maya or Pipil speaker unfamiliar, for instance, with the proper placement of the phoneme /tl/. Our most complete example of Central American Colonial Nahuatl comes from a barrio in Santiago whose cabildo o.ces were by decree &lled by Nahuas. Yet even here, central Mexi-can Nahuatl was not necessarily the language spoken nor Classical Nahuatl the written standard employed by a group of cofrades that included Nahuas, Maya, and Spaniards. Pipil itself was transformed by contact with Nahua and Spanish invaders in that a separate written standard developed for it despite its mutual intelligibility with central Mexican Nahuatl. Pipil themselves must have participated in this process in collaboration with Spanish Catholic friars, whose interest lay in translating Christian doctrine to their new nov-ices. The Pipil, however, adopted this technology for more secular purposes. One of the most striking aspects of our collection of forty- six colonial- era Nahuatl documents is that the majority are in Pipil with the majority of these from Pipil areas. Also striking, however, is the far- *ung distribution of the remaining Pipil texts in areas that were neither Pipil nor centers of colonial settlement. This fact, in combination with the apparent intermin-gling of Pipil and Classical or central Mexican Nahuatl forms discussed above, leads us to conclude that Pipil may have equaled or exceeded central Mexican Nahuatl as a vehicular language in colonial Guatemala. It is important not to overgeneralize. As the contributors to this issue and others have pointed out, Nahuatl’s use and characteristics under Span-ish colonial rule varied even in central Mexico. The Maya of highland Guatemala had been less exposed to central Mexican Nahua power at the time of the sixteenth- century invasions. At the same time, many groups of Maya, Xinca, and Lenca had sustained regular contact with their Nahuatl- speaking neighbors, the Pipil, for hundreds of years. We have argued that most Maya did not adopt Nahuatl as a vehicular language for communicat-ing with the invaders, much less with each other, and those that did shifted to Spanish over the course of the seventeenth century. At the end of the colonial period, o.cials in Santiago sought interpreters only for Mayan languages, not Nahuatl, into Spanish.+1 What was the situation in San Sal-vador, the heart of Pipil territory? How was it di'erent in Chiapas or the eastern Ch’orti’ Maya area? These questions, and a &ner understanding of historical linguistics in the Maya highlands of Guatemala, await further research and analysis.


Notes

We thank the editors of this volume for inviting us to contribute and for their help-ful comments. We are also grateful to those who helped us collect the data set of Nahuatl documents upon which this article is based: Franz Binder, Lyle Camp-bell, Hector Concohá, Lawrence Feldman, Enrique Gordillo, Rodolfo Hernández, Robert M. Hill, Christopher Lutz, Kathryn Sampeck, Stacey Schwartzkopf, and John Weeks. 1 Carlos Navarrete, “Elementos arqueológicos de mexicanización en las tie-

rras altas mayas,” in Temas mesoamericanos, ed. Sonia Lombardo and Enrique Nalda (México, DF, 1996), 346–48; Christopher Lutz and Karen Dakin, Nues-tro pesar, nuestra a"licción, tunetuliniliz, tucucuca: Memorias en lengua náhuatl enviadas a Felipe II por indígenas del valle de Guatemala hacia 1572 (Mexico City, 1997), 166–89; Robinson Herrera, Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Sixteenth- Century Santiago de Guatemala (Austin, 2003), 157–58.

2 Michael Swanton, “Multilingualism in the Tocuij Ñudzaviu Region,” in Mixtec Writing and Society (Escritura de Ñuu Dzaui), ed. Maarten E. R. G. N. Jansen and Laura N. K. van Broekhoven (Amsterdam, 2008), 363–73.

3 Rosa Helena Chinchilla M. provides a comprehensive bibliography in her intro-duction to Francisco Ximenez’s seventeenth- century Arte de las tres lenguas kaqchikel, k’iche’, y tz’utujil (Guatemala City, 1993), xxvii–xxix.

4 Sheila Raney Baird, “Santa Eulalia M. Md. 7: A Critical Edition and Study of Sacred Part Music from Colonial Guatemala,” master’s thesis, North Texas State University, 1981; Paul Borg, “The Polyphonic Music in the Guatemalan Music Manuscripts of the Lilly Library,” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1985; Robert Stevenson, “European Music in Sixteenth- Century Guatemala,” Musi-cal Quarterly 50, no. 3 (1964): 341–52; Alfred E. Lemmon and Fernando Horca-sitas, “Manuscrito musical de Santa Eulalia: Un estudio de un tesoro musical y lingüistico de Guatemala colonial,” Revista Musical Chilena 34, no. 152 (1980): 37–39. Two texts listed by Borg as Nahuatl (MS 7–37 and 7–44) are in fact in a non- Kichean, non- Yucatecan Mayan language. Pascual’s manuscripts in Clas-sical Nahuatl are housed at the Lilly Library of Indiana University (Stevenson, MS 7, 10, 13–15), and Princeton University Library (Garrett- Gates Mesoameri-can Manuscripts, 258).

5 Francisco Vásquez, Crónica de la provincia del Santísimo Nombre de Jesús de Guatemala, 4 vols., ed. Lázaro Lamadrid (Guatemala City, 1937–44), 1!71, 81; Francisco Ximénez, Historia de la provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guate-mala de la Orden de Predicadores, ed. Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María (Guate-mala City, 1977), 238–39; Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Justicia 290, “Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo contra el &scal sobre el derecho a las encomiendas de Cobán y Acatenango” (1563–67), cited in André Saint- Lu, La Vera Paz: Esprit évange-lique et colonisation (Paris, 1968), 521.

6 AGI, Guatemala 168, “Carta de los franciscanos sobre enseñar el castellano a los yndios” (1552).

7 Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, Historia de Guatemala, o Recordación !orida, 2 vols., ed. Justo Zaragoza (1690; Madrid, 1883), 2!257, 426.

8 Dominican Fr. Juan de Samaniego, for instance, “knew Mexicano so well, that he wrote the arte on which we depend in the province of El Salvador” sometime


before his death in 1590 (Antonio de Remesal, Historia general de las Indias occi-dentales y particular de la governación de Chiapas y Guatemala, 2 vols., ed. Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María [Madrid, 1964–66], 2!429). Samaniego’s work may have in*uenced the anonymous Arte de la lengua vulgar Mexicana de Guatemala que se habla en Ezcuintla y otros pueblos de este Reyno (Guatemala City, 16—), held by the Museum Library, University of Pennsylvania, Brinton Collection.

9 Reproduced in Pedro Geo'rey Rivas, El nawat de Cuscatlán: Apuntes para una gramática tentativa (San Salvador, 1969), 87–93.

10 Teotamachilizti In yiuliliz auh yni miquiliz Tu Temaquizticatzim Iesu Christo que-nami in quimpua teotacuiloque itech teomauxti, Ó sea, Tratado de la vida y muerte de nuestro señor Jesu Christo, en lengua vulgar Mexicana de Guatemala (Guate-mala City, 16—) (hereafter Tratado), held by the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, 229r–v.

11 For example, in the didactic drama “How to Live on Earth,” in Nahuatl Theater: Death and Life in Colonial Mexico, vol. 1, ed. Barry Sell and Louise Burkhart (Norman, OK, 2004), 210–41.

12 Pedro Escalante Arce, Los tlaxcaltecas en Centro América (San Salvador, 2001); Laura E. Matthew and Michel Oudijk, eds., Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman, OK, 2007); Florine Asselbergs, Conquered Conquistadors: The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, a Nahua View of the Conquest of Guatemala (Boulder, CO, 2008).

13 AGI, Justicia 291, r. 1, n. 1, fols. 171, 239; AGI, Guatemala 114, n. 10, “Ynfor-mación de los méritos y servicios de Juan de Ecija” (1577); AGI, Guatemala 60, “En nombre de Juan Calbo de Nájera” (1605).

14 Laura E. Matthew, Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guate-mala (Chapel Hill, NC, 2012), 167–68, chap. 6; Swanton, “Multilingualism.”

15 Matthew, Memories of Conquest, 222–23, 234. 16 Ibid., chap. 6. 17 José Chaclán, “Los caciques de Totonicapán en el siglo XIX,” in “Segundo Con-

greso de Estudios Mayas,” special issue, Revista de Estudios Sociales 59 (1998): 139–67; Robert Hill, “Social Organization by Decree in Colonial Highland Guatemala,” Ethnohistory 36 (1989): 170–98.

18 AGI, Patronato 182, r. 24, “Testimonio del sínodo espicopal celebrado en San-tiago de Guatemala” (1566), fol. 7.

19 Archivo General de Centroamérica (AGCA), A1.2, leg. 1127/exp. 9620, “Proto-colo de Fernando Niño,” fols. 64 (12 September 1586), 112 (2 November 1589), 135 (6 April 1593); AGCA, A1.2, leg. 1507/exp. 9994, “Que el padre fray Juan de Samaniego negó asistir la catedra de la lengua mexicana” (1585); Antonio de Molina, Antigua Guatemala: Memorias de Fray Antonio de Molina, ed. Jorge del Valle Matheu (Guatemala City, 1943), 197. See also Herrera, Natives, Euro-peans, and Africans, 158n48.

20 AGCA, A1.2, leg. 810, “Protocolo de Sebastián Gudiel,” fols. 6 (3 June 1595), 88v (29 May 1596), 404 (21 August 1623).

21 The linguistic situation of each of these cities would, of course, have been shaped di'erently by the native groups of the area and the ethnic and linguistic makeup of invaders, colonists, and settlers there.

22 Herrera, Natives, Europeans, and Africans; Matthew, Memories of Conquest, chap. 6; Laura E. Matthew, “El náhuatl y la identidad mexicana en la Guate-mala colonial,” Mesoamérica 40 (2000), 41–68.


23 AGCA, A1.15, leg. 4078/exp. 32361, “Contra los yndios de San Antonio Aguas-calientes por no haber asistido a jueves santo” (1580).

24 Three documents in the data set contain items in more than one variety of Nahuatl and therefore are counted more than once in the breakdown of the list by those varieties.

25 Christopher Day Collection 4, 27 (1656), Latin American Library Collections, Tulane University; AGCA, A1.43, leg. 6071/exp. 54671 (1605).

26 AGCA, A1.15, leg. 4089/exp. 32445 (1604). 27 AGCA, A1.15, leg. 4094/exp. 32482 (1611). 28 Fuentes y Guzmán, Historia de Guatemala, 2!241, 279, 411, 418, 424, 426. 29 AGCA, A1, leg. 6074/exp. 54897, 54898, 54900. 30 AGI, Escribanía 371A, 61r, 369r. 31 Una Canger, “Nahuatl Dialectology: A Survey and Some Suggestions,” Interna-

tional Journal of American Linguistics 54, no. 1 (1988): 28–72. 32 Lutz and Dakin, Nuestro pesar, nuestra a"licción, 169. 33 Judith Maxwell and Robert M. Hill, Kaqchikel Chronicles: The De#nitive Edi-

tion (Austin, TX, 2006), 62–65. 34 Adrián Recinos, Crónicas indígenas de Guatemala (Guatemala City, 1957), 124 35 Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano, Guatemala City, Cofradías T2, 107, no. 13.

(1632). 36 We thank Barry Sell for his thoughts on this document. 37 AGCA, A1.43, leg. 6083/exp. 55029 (1594); AGCA, A1, leg. 6074/exp. 54890;

Garrett- Gates Mesoamerican Manuscripts, 258, Princeton University. 38 AGCA A1.39, leg. 24/exp. 692, “José Francisco Gonzáles solicita el nombra-

miento de interprete” (1805); AGCA A1.29, leg. 397/exp. 8311, “El indio inter-prete José Francisco Gonzáles pide que se le dé alguna ayuda por sus servi-cios” (1813); AGCA A1.39, leg. 2650/exp. 22236, “Providencia sobre sustituir al ynterprete de la Real Audiencia” (1816).

Nahuatl and Pipil in Colonial Guatemala: A Central American Counterpoint, w/ Sergio F. Romero

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