Here in This Year: Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley

Here in This Year

Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley

Camilla Townsend

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

This book has been published with the assistance of the Rutgers University Department of History.

Maps of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Region and the City of Puebla de Los Angeles, 1691 were prepared by Jeffrey

Ward.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Here in this year : seventeenth-century Nahuatl annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley / edited and translated by Camilla Townsend ; with an essay by James Lockhart.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804773478

1. Manuscripts, Nahuatl—Mexico—Puebla de Zaragoza Region. 2. Manuscripts, Nahuatl—Mexico—Tlaxcala de Xicohténcatl Region. 3. Indians of Mexico—Mexico—Puebla de Zaragoza Region—History—17th century—Sources. 4. Indians of Mexico—Mexico—Tlaxcala de Xicohténcatl Region—History—17th century—Sources. 5. Puebla de Zaragoza Region (Mexico)—History—17th century—Sources. 6. Tlaxcala de Xicohténcatl Region (Mexico)—History—17th century—Sources. I. Townsend, Camilla, 1965-F1219. 54.A98H47 2010 972’.47—dc22

2009034487

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Figures

Preface

Introduction

The Language of the Texts

Annals of Puebla

Annals of Tlaxcala

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Table of Figures

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 2

Preface

I HAD BEEN HARD AT WORK for some time on a study of the seventeenth-century Tlaxcalan annalist don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza when Jim Lockhart handed on to me a file of papers which he said would provide valuable context. In it I found photocopies of the documents presented in this volume—two sets of annals from the Tlaxcala-Puebla valley which were roughly contemporary to Zapata’s. Jim had made the copies in the 1970s in the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City while on a research trip. Since then, he had studied them in relation to his own work and had also shared them at one point with one of his graduate students, Frances Krug, and also with Arthur Anderson, thinking that perhaps one or all of them would one day publish an edition. All three of their lives in fact took different directions, but in the file I found their transcriptions, notes, and partial translations, silent testimony to the work that they had once poured into the project. That was in 2003. Several more years would go by before I felt myself deeply enough immersed in the annalistic genre to be able to do effectively what had not yet been done—that is, bring the project to completion. Our field’s knowledge of Nahuatl had deepened considerably in the more than twenty years since the project was last officially on the table, especially as concerns the relationships between clauses and certain vocabulary of the everyday language of postcontact times; thus I found I needed to begin the translation all over, as it were, even as I listened attentively to what the three of them were in a sense whispering over my shoulder.

My own study of Nahuatl had begun in 1998, in a Yale Summer Language School course taught by Jonathan Amith. After that I had plugged away on my own, thanking the fates for a talent with languages I certainly had done nothing to deserve. Then in early 2002 I learned to my joy that Michel Launey and James Lockhart would be teaching a follow-up seminar for those of Amith’s former students who were interested. Both men gave generously of their time and energy that summer, making it possible for me to move forward by leaps and bounds in a way otherwise impossible. Jim went further to answer a continuous stream of questions from me in the months and years that followed.

I was already interested in the Nahuas’ cultural productions, doing some work with cantares (songs) but more with annals, especially don Juan Zapata. I was fortunate enough to receive grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society which enabled me to devote significant time to my new interest. As I proceeded I accrued many intellectual debts beyond those to my Nahuatl teachers, but three people in particular emerged as central—Frances Krug, Susan Schroeder, and Luis Reyes. Frances had worked with Jim on a doctoral dissertation which reached an advanced stage but for health reasons unfortunately never was completed. She gathered an almost exhaustive compendium of the entries in nearly all the extant annals from the region of Puebla and Tlaxcala; her work has been a central reference for me for years now. If in one set of annals the entry for the year 1576 does not make sense, one will often on consulting Krug’s work find five or six other entries for that year laid out side by side, with their commonalities and subtle differences pointed out. (Some of the important conclusions she was able to draw from this extraordinarily painstaking work will be discussed in the introduction that follows.) Sue Schroeder sent me the copy of Zapata’s work that inspired me in my study of annals in the first place, but she did much more than that. She has been a beacon of a kind, for she alone in our field as it exists in this country has worked actively and constantly to keep the Nahuatl annals in full view; her untiring efforts have helped to bring the works of Chimalpahin, the premier annalist, within reach of the English-speaking world. Finally, it was the late Luis Reyes García, an extremely talented translator and historian/anthropologist and a speaker of Nahuatl from childhood, who brought the annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla valley into the arena of modern scholarship. In 2003, when I was in Tlaxcala to do archival research on don Juan Zapata, he spoke to me on the phone and was kindness itself. He was already very sick with the illness that would later prove mortal, and could not see me in person, but he nevertheless opened doors for me while I was there. He himself, along with Andrea Martínez Baracs, published a transcription and translation of Zapata’s lengthy work. (Indeed, Andrea Martínez recently published Un gobierno de indios: Tlaxcala, 1519–1750, an excellent work partially based on Zapata which I was unable to obtain until preparation of this book was in its final stages, and thus unfortunately could not incorporate into my commentary.) Many of Reyes’ students worked on other annals from the area, always producing quality editions. Not least in importance (from my point of view) is the Anales del Barrio de San Juan del Río, edited by Lidia Gómez García, Celia Salazar Exaire, and María Elena Stefanón López, a set of annals closely related to the Annals of Puebla in this volume.

As I continued to work with the sets presented here, I came to the conclusion that some elements were so mysterious as to require further primary research. I sought background in published Spanish chronicles and cabildo records found in the collections of the New York Public Library, and I consulted the manuscript holdings of the John Carter Brown Library as they pertained to don Manuel de los Santos Salazar, a vital force behind the surviving annals of the Tlaxcalan region, as the introduction will demonstrate. When I was at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris to look at Zapata’s original manuscript, I surveyed other related materials from the Tlaxcala-Puebla valley.¹ I ended by traveling to Mexico to consult the original manuscripts, as the photocopies I had were not always adequate. The Annals of Tlaxcala are indeed still there; I found that only the first page as it existed in the 1970s was missing, and so I left a photocopy of that page with the original. The Annals of Puebla have been declared a national treasure, as they mention Juan Diego’s purported sighting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and thus are in a vault away from public view. Fortunately, digital images are available in the library.

In the latter stages, as I was working on the introduction, it occurred to me that the person who should really write an analysis of the texts in relation to postconquest language evolution was not I, but Jim. I could do it in some fashion, but the texts deserved more than the segment I would produce. I could look at the Annals of Puebla and recognize certain Stage 3 phenomena, but Jim with his decades of experience could review the same material and see its place in the overall Nahuatl corpus and the general evolution of the language. I asked him if he would write a separate chapter to be included within the covers of the book itself, and he kindly agreed. Though a bit unorthodox, the arrangement is, I believe, highly suitable.

My debts to individuals and in many cases their associated institutions are perhaps too numerous to name, but I will do my best. At Rutgers, my chairman, Paul Clemens, helped me to obtain much-needed funding from the Department of History. My inspiring colleagues, Indrani Chatterjee and Julie Livingston, brought me into the fold of their seminar on Vernacular Epistemologies, where the participants gave me invaluable advice. My fellow board members of the Colonial Latin American Review have always been for me a model of scholarship; on this occasion I particularly wish to thank Raquel Chang-Rodríguez for inviting me to present on the annals at CUNY’s graduate center, where I also received helpful comments. Richard Green, director of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Ohio State University, invited me to present the annals to a wide array of responsive scholars. Certain archivists and librarians went beyond any notion of duty: Sandra Francis and Beatrice Dey at the New York Public Library, Ken Ward at the John Carter Brown, and Genaro Díaz, José Francisco Tovar Ruiz, and el ingeniero Miguel Angel Gasca at the BNAH. At Stanford University Press, Norris Pope and his entire staff have been unfailingly helpful. Mapmaker Jeffrey Ward did marvelously painstaking work.²

Noble David Cook kindly helped me untangle my confusion regarding some of the epidemics in the texts. Bradley Scopyk, who came to stay for a few days in the summer of 2007 in order that I might help him with Nahuatl, actually ended up being the one to help me in several regards, forcing me to rethink certain elements of grammar that I had taken for granted, and pointing out several works on Tlaxcala previously unknown to me. Within the community of students of Nahuatl, many have offered the warmth of their regard and much scholarly help. Stafford Poole patiently read both the Nahuatl and my translations for certain church-related segments I found confusing and offered me his perspectives. Doris Namala and Stephanie Wood have both generously shared with me their own ongoing work in relevant areas. Matthew Restall has offered trenchant insight and practical help on numerous occasions. And Caterina Pizzigoni has caused me to rethink several issues with her innate good sense and wisdom. In a different arena, my husband, John Nolan, has been a true partner in parenting, a point that is not at all irrelevant, for it is that which has made it possible for me to find the time to do the work that appears in this book.

But there is one person more than any other whom I particularly wish to thank in these pages, and that is, of course, Jim. Not only did he inspire the project in the first place, but he also literally read every word more than once, finding many mistakes and making crucial suggestions. I cannot convey my gratitude for all that I have learned from him since that summer of 2002. Teachers have been important to me since I was quite small, and there are many to whom I owe a great deal. But none has ever taught me as much as he. Sometimes as I work with the annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla valley, seeing how the authors borrowed from each other, taught each other, worked to pass on what had come down to them from the ancients, hoped that young people would pick up their work and carry it on, I also think of the community of scholars who have studied the Nahuas over the intervening centuries. I am profoundly grateful to be a part of that chain, grateful that Jim reached out his hand to me.

C. T.

Highland Park, New Jersey

June, 2009

Introduction

The Spanish law officials summoned the indigenous people and told them that they were going to take bread-making from them. They set a penalty on them, giving them a deadline of a day not to make bread.... On Monday, the 21 st day of the month of September, right on the feast day of San Mateo, on Monday and Tuesday, there was already hunger. No more did either wheat bread or tortillas appear in either marketplace or shop. When anyone secretly made half a carrying frame full and took it to the marketplace, even if it was tortillas, the Spaniards just fought over it.... Only weeping prevailed. And then everyone got worked up, priests, Spaniards and indigenous alike, so that everyone took the side of the indigenous people.

Annals of Puebla for 1682

ON THE MORNING of September 23, 1682, the brightly colored tiles of the buildings on Puebla’s town square must have been glinting in the sun, but nothing else was as usual. The previous week, a group of Spaniards had secured from the alcalde mayor (the highest local magistrate) monopoly rights over all bread-making in the city: they were to control not only the making of wheat bread, but even of tortillas. It had seemed to these men a lucrative scheme indeed, but within two days they had proven themselves unequal to the task. Apparently it had not been evident to them just how many mouths the city’s indigenous people customarily fed. Now the town’s indigenous community, normally peaceful, poured into the streets in protest. They shouted, Bread, bread, bread, lord captain! We will starve! We will starve!³ Their leader presented a letter to the alcalde mayor. It said that if the Spaniards wanted to usurp indigenous roles, then so be it, but in that case, they could also perform labor service and meet the tribute requirements. Let the Spaniards do whatever service there is and pay the tribute, they wrote bluntly. It seemed to the indigenous that their argument was effective. The native reporter on these events commented: When he heard that, the alcalde mayor quickly ordered that a decree be issued, so that a proclamation was hastily made that the indigenous people would make bread. Then he added somewhat smugly, And he ordered that the Spaniards be imprisoned.

Historians interested in indigenous experiences are accustomed either to reading between the lines in European narratives or to collecting native sources in dozens of bits and pieces until together, they take on meaning. It is rare indeed that a historian of early Latin America can read a first-person account of public events and find that it unmistakably offers a perspective that only a native person would have had. The historical annals of colonial Mexico, written in Nahuatl, are immensely valuable in that they do just that; they deserve far more attention than they have so far received.

The indigenous narrator who tells us of Puebla’s 1682 bread riot has the power to open a door for us leading rather directly into the world he once inhabited. His was a complex universe, and although in September of that year he felt very angry with the Spaniards, there were of course many days when he felt that he held far more in common with them than not. Eight months later, when English and Dutch pirates attacked the relatively nearby city of Veracruz, his heart bled for his Spanish and black neighbors who had to go and fight the marauding savages. He even spared some sympathy for their tearful women and the many well-to-do families whose horses were commandeered. They even took the poor little donkeys, he sighed.⁴ Yet two years later, his disgust with interfering legislative authorities surfaced again with a vengeance. Indigenous residents of Puebla, who were legally constrained to live in certain barrios in order to ease the collection of tribute, had for generations flouted such restrictions; now the alcalde mayor took it upon himself to order them to collect in their own barrios, under pain of public whipping. He promised he would distribute lands where the refugees would be allowed to reside, but he did nothing about it; chaos reigned in the beleaguered barrios. Finally the city’s indigenous governor was able to convince him to desist, ironically on grounds that it would be impossible under the circumstances to orchestrate the usual tribute collection. The governor had reason to be pleased with the end of the story: once again, indigenous people had come out on top, and plotters and planners had come to grief. He himself oversaw the writing of the set of historical annals which recorded the events in such detail.⁵ We know of his experience and his thinking today only because of the document he produced. The Spaniards in such situations would report only that there had been a change of policy, but not allude to all the causes, some of which did not reflect well on either their own judgment or their degree of control over the populace. And this is only one of the myriad insights which such a set of indigenous annals may provide.

In recent years, scholars have made excellent use of the abundant Nahuatl sources preserved in Mexico and elsewhere. The nearly exclusive attention traditionally paid to formal texts prepared in cooperation with Franciscans and other religious has been complemented by work with more unself-consciously produced mundane documents—wills, land transfers, petitions, etc.⁶ Relatively little studied have been the historical annals.⁷ These were produced by Nahuas for Nahuas, without any regard for the Spanish world as an audience or any supervision by Spaniards in either the clerical or legal branches. Yet we have not turned to them with any frequency, partly because they are few and far between compared to the rich lodes of mundane sources, but also because the genre is not well understood. A reader who turns to a set of annals without any preparation is likely to find them dry, terse, even confusing. It has for some time been understood that the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century annals which treat preconquest subjects should not be tossed aside as inscrutable or be taken literally as transparent presentations of fact, but rather analyzed as to what they reveal regarding patterns of religious or political belief, the perspectives of individual communities, negotiations for power, etc.⁸ Now it is time that we recognize as well all that the colonial annals which treat their own times may offer us, not only in terms of indigenous mentalité but also in terms of hard information on indigenous lives, the very element which seems more doubtful in the material treating bygone centuries. The annals are perhaps as close as we are ever going to come to an indigenous diary or set of letters. If we become more familiar with the ways in which the genre channels the expression of the writer, we will be able to decode much more of what such a writer has to tell us.

Furthermore, studying the indigenous annals, beyond enhancing our understanding of indigenous experience, may help us as scholars at some point to shed our own parochialism, to understand the ways in which the figures we study are both the same as and different from other peoples in somewhat comparable situations—where agriculture has fully taken hold but well defined nation-states have not yet emerged. The annals genre as it existed in early medieval Europe, for example, and the pre-colonial Marathi texts of India, are in some ways breathtakingly similar to the tradition that seems to have existed in Mexico. In the east Frankish kingdom, for the year 838, an anonymous writer of annals recorded an earthquake, the building of some ships, the passing of the kingship, the celebration of a great religious festival, disputes between two royal brothers, and the appearance of a comet; he could almost have traded places with one of his Nahuatl-speaking peers of later centuries.⁹ The Nahuas become more interesting, not less so, when they take their place on the stage of the world’s peoples.

But they themselves and their own version of an annals genre must be more fully understood before any such forays into comparative history or literature can be effectively undertaken. There is a solid basis for doing this in work that has already been undertaken on the annals produced in the vicinity of Mexico City in the sixteenth century. We have usable editions available to us of the Annals of Tlatelolco, the Annals of Juan Bautista, the Codex Aubin, and many other more truncated sets, culminating in the seventeenth century in the extensive works of don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, now called just Chimalpahin, the premier Nahuatl annalist who produced a large annalistic corpus.¹⁰ In his generation, the historical works of don Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, and Cristóbal del Castillo are also of interest, though they directed themselves mainly to a Spanish audience. To the east, a few important sets of Nahuatl annals came into being in the sixteenth century, among them the works now known as the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca (part of which could be called the Annals of Cuauhtinchan), the various pictorial annals covered with alphabetic writing which are also from Cuauhtinchan, and the Annals of Tecamachalco. Generally, however, the central valley dominated in the early production of Nahuatl alphabetic annals, and in that area, the tradition reached its apogee with the work of Chimalpahin. After him, future generations became more removed from the styles and forms their forebears had once used to keep track of history; eventually their earnest efforts to recount their history came to be marked more by ignorance of the past than by any deep familiarity with it.

The annals genre, however, did not decline as precipitously in the Tlaxcala-Puebla valley to the east, where the second half of the seventeenth century saw a remarkable florescence of the annals-keeping tradition. The Tlaxcalans’ role in the conquest as an ally of the Spaniards guaranteed them certain privileges afterward, privileges which, as we will see, helped them to isolate themselves somewhat from Spanish culture. Then, too, in the course of the seventeenth century, Puebla, Mexico’s second city, attained a sort of golden age, becoming known for its churches, craftsmanship, music, and wealth; the indigenous community would undoubtedly have been affected by the pride and energy that were part and parcel of the era. Thus in this region, on the one hand the retention of some knowledge of the old forms, and on the other the deep acculturation born of generations of contact leading to relatively widespread literacy and cultural enthusiasm, apparently led to the production and preservation of a remarkable number of interesting annalistic documents. Twenty-four survive, eight as original documents and the remainder as copied-out fragments. And in-text references indicate that these twenty-four were merely points of production in a wider network.¹¹

This book brings two of these sets of annals into print for the first time, one from Puebla and one from Tlaxcala, both manuscripts in the keeping of the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City.¹² To render them as intelligible as possible, I offer an introduction in five parts: 1) a political history of the Tlaxcala-Puebla valley from the indigenous perspective; 2) background on the Mexican annals genre in general; 3) background on the Tlaxcala-Puebla family of annals; and 4) and 5) studies of the probable authors of these two particular texts and the worlds in which they lived. Armed with this information, readers should be able to make direct use of the documents for a multiplicity of purposes.

The political history of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley

THE NAHUAS, like most people around the world before the formation of nation-states, spent a good deal of their time forging alliances and deciding when to break them. When a group of people had been together long enough, they constituted in their own minds what we might call an ethnic group. The predominant organizational form, the altepetl or small state, consisted of subgroups, but its people saw themselves as having more in common with each other than with anyone else in the world and generally (though not always) remained unified. For at least two centuries before the arrival of the Europeans, the complex altepetl of Tlaxcala constituted a variation on this theme: the four subaltepetl of Ocotelolco, Tizatla,¹³ Quiyahuiztlan and Tepeticpac governed themselves independently, each having a separate tlatoani (king, literally speaker), but they nevertheless remained invested in an overarching identity as people of Tlaxcala and faithfully rotated duties among themselves in a fixed order. At any one time the ruler of one of the four subaltepetl presided over the whole. They shared a meaningful history, having migrated together from the north in relatively recent times, vanquishing various foes along the way, most notably the Otomi, whose lands they now held, and many of whom remained in the area as a tribute-paying population. Still, they had already experienced significant internal splintering, and their shared history and common interests might not have been enough to ensure that the complex altepetl held together. The concomitant rise to power of the Mexica in nearby Tenochtitlan probably helped them to continue to conceive of themselves as one. In their numbers lay some strength. Unlike most of the altepetl that surrounded them, they were never conquered by the Mexica.¹⁴

When the Spaniards arrived in 1519, the Tlaxcalans, having protected their independence for many years, were at first determined not to let these well armed strangers dictate to them. After sending the Otomi in first, they themselves attacked, still hoping to repel the invaders. The battle was a draw; both sides withdrew to nurse their wounded—and the Tlaxcalans to bury their dead. A few days later, just before dawn, the people of a number of villages near the Spanish camp woke to unexpected violence: mounted and armored lancers had approached stealthily, and now galloped through town, skewering people and setting homes ablaze with impunity. Day after day, the newcomers did this in different places. Mounted behind one of them rode a young woman, one of us people here, as the Tlaxcalans described her, meaning that she was not one of the foreigners from across the sea. She spoke Nahuatl, and shouted repeatedly that the strangers wanted to make peace, that they would willingly ally with them in their ongoing struggles against the Mexica.¹⁵

Thus it was that the Tlaxcalans made their famous bargain with the Spaniards.¹⁶ They held to it in the succeeding years—though not without some inner turmoil the next year, in 1520, when the deadly pox broke out, and the supposedly invulnerable strangers were driven ignominiously from Tenochtitlan. Their eventual decision not to waver brought its rewards. With their help, the Spaniards defeated the Mexica in 1521, and then the Tlaxcalans accompanied the conquerors to surrounding territories, convincing them all to put up their arms and join the new polity. Hernando Cortés has not become known to posterity as a man who paid all his debts, but he and his successors paid this one, at least to some extent. Tlaxcala was not given out in encomienda to pay tribute and perform labor for a particular conqueror, or worse yet, divided up by subaltepetl to be given to several different conquerors; rather they paid their taxes directly to the king. A Spanish magistrate/administrator and his staff came to live in their midst, but few others did; no Spanish city was established in their territory. (Instead, as we will see, the important city of Puebla, which normally would have been in the center of the Tlaxcalan territory, was established on their southern border, leaving the Tlaxcalans far less inundated than they would have been.)

The people continued to govern their internal affairs much as they always had in the decade after the Spanish victory, but they found that one important change had occurred. The tlatoani of Ocotelolco, the most powerful of the four subaltepetl at that time, was treated by the foreigners as though he had sole control over all the people of Tlaxcala, which bred significant resentment, as all tasks, including the paramount rulership, had always rotated in a fixed order. In the 1530s, when the Spaniards introduced a form of the cabildo (municipal council) through which they wished the indigenous sector to be governed, they ignored the traditional rotation, regularly giving Ocotelolco the governorship and other key positions. The dissatisfaction of the other three subaltepetl gradually grew to a crisis point, and by the mid-1540s a Spanish review committee had to be brought in to resolve the problem. In the new model, a rotating governor (himself Tlaxcalan) would serve with regidores (councilmen) and alcaldes (judges) from all the constituent altepetl.¹⁷ It was agreed that the indigenous noblemen would elect a governor from among themselves for a period of two years. Ocotelolco, having had too much power of late, would pass to the rear of the line, and then the usual order of rotation would pick up where it had left off. The first governor would thus be from Tizatla, the next from Quiyahuiztlan, the next from Tepeticpac, the next from Ocotelolco again. Each subaltepetl would elect