Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico (original) (raw)
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Indigenous Writing and Literacy in Colonial Mexico
Ucla Historical Journal, 1992
Ma quimatican Yn quexquichtin quitasque yhuan quipohuasque Ynin esCritura de Benta ticchihua Yn tehuantin... Let those know who should see and read this instrument of sale made by us... cin ualic u >ibtabal in testamento tu tanil in yum Batab y_ Justicias... I state my will for it to be written down before the batab and magistrates... yodzanacahui tutu yaha dzaha nudzahui... Let this document in the "Mixtec" language be read...Πntroduction to Indigenous Writing Soon after the arrival of Europeans in the land that they called New Spain, Franciscan and Dominican friars taught the art of alphabetic writing to members of the indigenous elite. As a result, indigenous peoples during the colonial Mexican period produced (mostly legal) documentation in their own languages using the Roman alphabet. The first group to do this were the Nahuas (sometimes called "Aztecs") of central Mexico; material in Nahuatl has survived in greater quantities than sources from other Indigenous Writing and Literacy 9 language-groups and has been studied far more by scholars. dditional work has also been published on Yucatec Maya and Cakchiquel sources and, more recently, on Mixtec documentation. There are also sources, known of but unstudied by scholars, in Zapotec, Chocho, Quiche, Otomi, Tarascan and no doubt other Mesoamerican languages.-^Smaller bodies of documents that have not surfaced or survived may have been written in lesser-spoken languages (see Figure 1: Map of Mesoamerican Languages). This chapter makes general remarks about indigenous-language documentation of colonial Mexico, but our specific comments refer only to the sources with which we are familiar-those in Nahuatl, Mixtec and (Yucatec) Maya. Our concern is to draw attention to the existence of these sources, to the ethnohistorical work in which they have been utilized, and to the potential this material holds for future study. In discussing the characteristics of indigenous sources in three different languages, we are hereby contributing a comparative framework that has yet to receive adequate attention, as well as working towards the disintegration of the term "Indian"~found by ethnohistorians to be increasingly inaccurate and unhelpful, save in its reflection of the Spaniards' racial per
Anthropology 1170: Mesoamerican Writing Systems
This seminar explores the role of writing broadly defined in the social, political, and religious fabric of ancient civilizations of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. The region, known as Mesoamerica, is characterized by an amazing variety of indigenous writing systems, from phonetic ones like Maya hieroglyphs, to largely pictographic notations such as Mixtec records. The course offers a survey of Mesoamerican writing systems that centers on the basic properties of the scripts and their uses. It highlights how specific features of Mesoamerican writing systems reflect broader regional traditions with respect to the role of writing in social, political, and religious life of ancient societies. The history of the study of writing systems in Mesoamerica is also brought into view with a particular emphasis on current discussions and recent advancements in our understanding of the indigenous scripts. The course combines lectures with seminar-style discussions, as well as some hands-on exploration of Pre-Columbian and Early Colonial texts on different media from the collections of the Peabody Museum and Harvard libraries.
The Writing System of Western Oaxaca: The Ñuiñe Style in a Regional Context. (2023)
Western Mesoamerican Calendars and Writing Systems. Proceedings of the Copenhagen. Edited by Mikkel Bøg Clemmensen, Christophe Helmke., 2023
The northwest of Oaxaca, the southeast of Puebla and northeast of Guerrero is the landscape that witnessed the confluence of different writing traditions, most notably those of Central Mexico, and the regions of Oaxaca and Guerrero. Inhabited since Precolumbian times by diverse linguistic groups, mostly of the Otomanguean language family, and especially by the Mixtec, this has been an area of intense cultural exchange between central and southeastern Mexico.
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).
Perspectivas sobre la investigación cualitativa / Perspectives on qualitative research, 2015
Language and other elements that constitute culture should be treated as independent variables when trying to understand late pre-Hispanic and early colonial central Mexican society. At the time of the Spanish conquest, native kingdoms in this region were inhabited by speakers of several languages belonging to diverse linguistic families. The majority languages were Nahuatl and Otomi. A comparative study of the words used in these languages to express concepts from several semantic fields reveals an abundance of calques, or semantic loans devoid of phonological correspondence. In this study, which draws on fifteen years of research on central Mexican culture, language, and writing, examples of calques will be presented from six semantic fields: toponyms, anthroponyms, names of deities, calendrical terms, social structures, and metaphorical couplets. This research reveals a high degree of cultural unity between these two language groups, forcing us to rethink the relationships between language, culture, and ethnicity. The abundance of calques between these and other native languages is the cultural basis for the fundamentally semasiographic system of pictorial writing used throughout much of Mesoamerica; most of the graphic signs in this system of notation can be read in any of the languages spoken by groups that participated in Mesoamerican culture.
Alphabetic writing in the hands of the colonial Nahua nobility
Contributions in New World Archaeology, 2014
Alphabetic writing in Nahuatl, originally promoted by friars, was quickly adopted and developed by native writers, including notaries and chroniclers, who left the biggest corpus of indigenous writing in the Americas. They used this new tool prolifically and practiced it in their own ways. In doing so, they created new spaces and forms of expression for elements of preconquest pictorial genres and traditional orality. Writing flourished at the hands of particular members of different social classes of the indigenous population, including the nobility, middle-class and sometimes even lower-class individuals who used it efficiently for legal and economic purposes. In addition, we have evidence pointing to the production and translation of devotional religious materials by the Nahuas themselves, paralleling the preparation of official ecclesiastical texts by friars and priests. As argued in this paper, the Nahuas did not perceive alphabetic writing as something imposed and culturally alien, but used it both to preserve their tradition as well as to negotiate successfully with and challenge the Spanish administrative, judicial, political and religious order. Resumen La escritura alfabética en lengua náhuatl, originalmente promovida por frailes, fue rápidamente adoptada y desarrollada por escritores nativos, incluyendo notarios y cronistas, que dejaron el corpus más grande de escritura indígena de las Américas. Aprovecharon esta nueva herramienta de una manera prolífica y la emplearon a sus propia manera. De este modo crearon nuevos espacios y formas de expresión para elementos de los géneros pictóricos de origen prehispánico y para la oralidad tradicional. La escritura florecía en las manos de los miembros de diferentes clases sociales de la populación indígena, incluyendo la nobleza, la clase media y a veces incluso individuos de la clase baja que la usaban con eficacia para varios fines de índole legal y económica. Además, existen evidencias de la producción y traducción de materiales religiosos de carácter devocional por los propios nahuas, en paralelo a la confección de los textos eclesiásticos oficiales por frailes y sacerdotes. Como se demuestra en el presente artículo, los nahuas no percibían la escritura alfabética como una imposición o algo culturalmente ajeno, sino que la empleaban tanto para conservar su tradición como para negociar con y desafiar el orden administrativo, judicial, político y religioso de los españoles.
Towards a Complex Theory of Writing: The Case of Aztec and Mixtec Codices
Signata, 2022
The aim of this paper is to propose the elements of a new theory of writing and writing systems. It concentrates in the decades-long controversy about whether to consider the highly pictorial communication system present in Aztec, Mixtec and other non-Maya Mesoamerican pictorial codices as writing. After exposing the history of this controversy and the problematic elements in contemporary grammatological and semasiographic visions, I propose to treat Aztec and Mixtec writing as complex systems which depict language through bottom-up strategies (logograms and/or syllabograms, which are signs which try to represent the morphological and phonological levels of language), and top-down strategies (pictography, which is a semantic depiction aided by contextual inferences grounded in pragmatics), strategies which roughly correspond to the bottom-up and top-down language processing operations. Based on this idea, I propose that semiotic writing strategies are possible, and that writing should not be seen as a mere surrogate of phonetics: this vision could solve the long-standing question of why writing systems which developed phoneticism seem to start in a non-phonetic stage that is still treated, in an unclear way, as ‘proto-writing’.