Performance and Discourse: Transcribing Latin American Languages and Cultures (original) (raw)
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Mesoamerican voices: native-language writings from Colonial Mexico, Oaxaca, Yucatan, and Guatemala
2005
Mesoamerican Voices presents a collection of indigenous-language writings from the colonial period, translated into English. The texts were written from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries by Nahuas from central Mexico, Mixtecs from Oaxaca, Mayas from Yucatan, and other groups from Mexico and Guatemala. The volume gives college teachers and students access to important new sources for the history of Latin America and Native Americans. It is the first collection to present the translated writings of so many native groups and to address such a wide variety of topics, including conquest, government, land, household, society, gender, religion, writing, law, crime, and morality. Matthew Restall is Professor of Latin American History at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of more than thirty articles and essays and seven books, including The Maya World (1997) and Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003).
Writing the Indigenous Americas
American Literary History, 2023
This essay considers three recent works in NAIS scholarship that take up past and present-day understandings of writing in the Americas: Gesa Mackenthun and Christen Mucher’s edited collection, Decolonizing “Prehistory”: Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (2021); Chadwick Allen’s Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native American Literature and Arts (2022); and Edgar Garcia’s Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (2020). Although writing is not the most immediate brief of any one study reviewed here, each contributes to the continuing relevance of thinking about the scholarly role of this category. In particular, I explore how each book enables us to see the concept of writing in ways that are not reducible to the positions outlined above, even while addressing the interpretive risks each position poses. Rather than reading these works as polemics invested in an either/or choice on the matter of expansive or narrow definitions of writing, I suggest that each contribution be understood as an act of scholarly generosity that proffers decolonial ways of interpreting the communicative media of the Indigenous Americas.
Indigenous Voices in Literature (Latin America)
Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies, 2018
Introduction The indigenous peoples of Abya Yala (Latin America)—which in the Kuna language means “Land in Its Full Maturity”—are the descendants of the first inhabitants and ancestral owners of the lands that were later conquered by European conquistadors. Indigenous peoples, indeed, have resisted centuries of colonialism and neocolonialism, which attempted to strip them of their territories, native languages, and cultural identities. Since the time of Christopher Columbus, the Spanish word indio has been used to imply the racial, cultural, linguistic, and intellectual inferiority of indigenous peoples, yet they have never accepted colonization and exploitation passively. There is a long history of indigenous rebellions and symbolic reappropriations of the “New World.” Today, there are more than eight hundred indigenous ethnic groups in Latin America, and two hundred more are estimated to be living in voluntary isolation, according to the United Nations. The cultural and linguistic heritage of indigenous peoples contributes to the world’s diversity. Indigenous literatures, in particular, are a paradigmatic example of this rich cultural heritage. Based on collective oral traditions (myths, rituals, legends, stories, songs, etc.), these literatures encompass a vast heterogeneous textual production (pre-Hispanic codices, colonial documents, letters, chronicles, autobiographies, testimonies, poems, short stories, novels, etc.) that has been written by indigenous peoples themselves, often using their own languages and reflecting their own worldviews. In this sense, indigenismo, understood as an urban-white-criollo cultural tradition of representing and speaking about and for indigenous peoples, has a radically different point of view (see the Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies article “Latino Indigenismo in a Comparative Perspective”). During the last few decades, the production of indigenous literatures has flourished, putting an end to traditional indigenismo and modifying views on national histories of literatures and conventional literary concepts. New multilingual editions and anthologies of indigenous poetry, fictional narratives, and other genres are currently being published, sometimes as the result of literary festivals and workshops, scholarships, and projects with the participation of indigenous peoples. This new literature is also part of the contemporary social struggle of indigenous communities to affirm their right to live with dignity and preserve their own cultures and languages. Quechua, Kichwa, Aymara, Nahuatl, Maya, and Mapudungun literatures, among many others, allow us to hope that a full social, political, and cultural recognition of indigenous peoples is not so far away. In this bibliographical review, key pre-Hispanic, colonial, modern, and contemporary indigenous authors and works are considered chronologically, giving special priority to indigenous primary sources, and to English translations when they are available. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/abstract/document/obo-9780199766581/obo-9780199766581-0199.xml?rskey=9usSqA&result=3&q=juan%20carlos%20grijalva#firstMatch Introduction General Overviews Reference Works and Bibliographies Pre-Hispanic Codices, Colonial Testimonies, and Other Documents Anthologies Across the Americas Early Modern Indigenous Narratives Indigenous Testimonio and Autobiography Anthologies of Contemporary Indigenous Narratives Anthologies of Contemporary Indigenous Poetry Selected Contemporary Indigenous Writers (Prose and Poetry) Translations into Indigenous Languages
Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana (Chasqui) 2018; 47 (1): 32-50., 2018
Ahora tomamos esta palabra que nos ha sido negada por más de cinco siglos, para que llegue a todos los oídos del mundo. (Gaspar Pedro González, El 13 B'aktun 8) When thinking of Latin America's indigenous cultures, it is often assumed that literacy goes hand-in-hand with assimilation into Western epistemology. 1 In practice, however, since the initial period of contact with Spanish colonizers, the dynamic between alphabetical writing and the cultural integrity of communities with oral traditions, or different systems of mnemonic representation, has been significantly more complex. 2 By the mid-sixteenth century, Maya K'iché scribes had already drafted a written rendition of their ancestral stories of origin in the Popol Wuj to preserve them during a period of extreme duress. The text provided both access to the tools of writing and a means to resist the homogenizing pressures imposed by Christian evangelization and Spanish colonial rule (Tedlock 25). Dennis Tedlock describes this early strategy of Mayan endurance through the appropriation of the alphabet in his introduction to the English translation of the Popol Wuj: "Just as Mayan peoples learned to use the symbolism of Christian saints as masks for ancient gods, so they learned to use the Roman alphabet as a mask for ancient texts […] very little time passed before some Mayans found political and religious applications for alphabetic writing that suited their own purposes" (25). Despite the long-standing practice of cultural resistance through the appropriation of writing, it is certainly true that after independence, in the early nineteenth century, the Guatemalan state implemented educational policies that promoted assimilation as a push toward Western notions of modernization and "progress." Members of indigenous communities have long been keenly aware of these top-down efforts to "re-educate" the Maya meant to forge national citizens that fit the Ladino ideal 3-that is, to speak and read Spanish and to familiarize students with a 1 "Walking the path of letters" is from A Mayan Life (González 222). 2 When positing the idea of "cultural integrity" it is helpful to read José Rabasa's reminder that "there is no pure state but a plurality of worlds in which there is porosity between the modern and the non-modern through which information, categories, ideologies and concepts travel back and forth without erasing the pores […]" (Rabasa 91). 3 Ladino refers to Guatemalans who speak Spanish, do not wear traditional indigenous clothing, and have adopted a Western world vision.
Ritualized Discourse in the Mesoamerican Codices: An Inquiry into Epigraphic Practice
2016
Master's Thesis, University of Leiden Supervisor: Dr. Maarten E.R.G.N. Jansen Despite the fact that the PostClassic Mesoamerican codices display a striking amount of similarity, academic studies of the discipline typically separate the Central Mexican and Mixtec manuscripts from those of the Maya, with the Maya receiving an epigraphic approach and the Mexican and Mixtec receiving an art historical approach. Many of these studies implicitly privilege phonetic writing systems, taking an evolutionary view of writing which devalues the pictographic. This privileging of the phonetic speaks to the more extensive devaluation of indigenous beliefs and practices on a wider scale. This thesis seeks to bridge the gap between the art historical and epigraphic by understanding the codices as products of the communities in which they were created, and thus fulfilling culturally-specific needs. Ritualized Discourse in the Mesoamerican Codices: An Inquiry into Epigraphic Practice accomplishes this through two case studies, one of which is based on the representation of the same subject matter, bloodletting, and one of which is based on the representation of the same linguistic practice, difrasismo. The results of the analysis indicate that while on a visual level the codices appear very different, on a phonological level there are many similarities in how they represent linguistic and phonetic elements. The Central Mexican and Maya codices in particular display a high degree of overlap, speaking to their shared scribal traditions. Approaching the codices as inventions designed to fulfill a purpose, interpretations of iconographic and phonetic elements are reached which speak to a pan-Mesoamerican experience of writing and highlight the benefits of alternative traditions of knowledge.
Indigenous Languages and the Historiography on Latin America
The historiography on Latin America is increasingly cognizant of the fact that the post-conquest development of indigenous languages cannot be understood in terms of a linear process of decline, and that there are valuable sources in these languages from unexpected times and places. An important segment of the historiography on colonial Mexico has long made intensive use of indigenous-language sources, and indigenous languages are beginning to appear on the historiographical radar elsewhere. This article surveys the treatment of indigenous languages and indigenous-language sources in the historiographies on Mexico, Peru, and Paraguay. It argues that the most promising new trends in the field include greater attention to the social history of language, to the use of indigenous languages by non-Indians, and to their use in nation-building processes.