Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Language in Service of the State: The Nahuatl Conterinsurgency Broadsides of 1810

2007; Duke University Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2007-001

1527-1900

M.W. Morris,

Historical Studies in Latin America

Fresh from the Spanish resistance at Cádiz, Francisco Javier Venegas de Saavedra had arrived in Mexico City in September 1810 just before the outbreak of the Hidalgo rebellion.1 The revolt posed both a challenge and an opportunity to the first viceroy to come from Spain since the beginning of the Napoleonic crisis. He could only suffocate the popular uprising by proving his government’s legitimacy on both the battlefield and the tricky ground of public sentiment. If he could win such a victory for Spain’s faltering authority in New Spain, he might win a new lease for colonial rule under the liberal order being born in the Cádiz Cortes. While zealously pursuing these goals, Venegas created probably the most candid portrait ever of the Spanish Empire’s ties to popular sovereignty in colonial Mexico.A key piece of the portrait w as two broadsides that Venegas had printed up in Nahuatl as Hidalgo’s rebellion swept through the Bajío.2 These were an eloquent précis of what Native American languages had meant to the Spanish seaborne empire. Aimed chiefly at the native communities (or altepetl) in the central heartland south of the revolt, both carried messages from the newly formed Regency Council at Cádiz.3 Both, likewise, tried to use the Nahuatl language to convince the altepetl to support colonial rule. One, larger though less significant, solicited money for the wars against Napoleon in a text dated September 22 but probably printed somewhat later. The other, of October 5, announced the historic abolition of tribute payments in New Spain.These broadsides shine a light on the subterranean linguistic network that connected the colonial state to its conquered subaltern cultures. Desperate measures of desperate times, they have exposed the Mesoamerican foundations of the colonial pax hispanica and the deep influence native languages wielded on imperial government. The broadsides abruptly ended a 40-year ban on these languages and mobilized Nahuatl in a hasty effort to defend the government with the reserves of residual legitimacy in royal insitutions. These reserves were a legacy from the formation of royal power in colonial Mexico in the imperative of building cross-cultural ties between Catholic Iberia and Mesoamerica. The Nahuatl broadsides became a unique means to tap into the cultural mes-tizaje intrinsic to this royal legitimacy through two of its strongest institutional expressions.Both emphasized the colonial state’s deep dependence on language, especially as written, above all else in the cultural mestizaje that underpinned royal power. One element was the Mesoamerican rhetorical canon and its rote formulae for social order based in myth. The other was the primacy of natural law and the written word in Spanish Catholic government. As further evidence of the central role of language, these traditions had flourished together in imperial administration alongside a sophisticated translation program adept at entwining the two. In 1810, Viceroy Venegas pittted the Nahuatl broadsides against the Hidalgo rebellion, hoping, it appears, they would tap this legacy through both medium and message. This article outlines the history of these broadsides to highlight the links between native languages, subaltern culture, and political power in colonial New Spain and early republican Mexico.The broadsides appeared during a defining moment in Mexican history. Distilling long-standing resentments against colonial rule into a spirit for a revolutionary age, the Hidalgo rebellion has symbolized the transition from a disparate menagerie of colonial subjects to citizens of a modern nation and placed subaltern participation in state formation at the very center of Mexico’s history. The cultural traditions of altepetl and empire decisively influenced both the broadsides’ counterinsurgent message and their role in this seminal crisis, leaving important clues about the complex relation between language, state, and subaltern in late colonial Mexico. The broadsides reveal culture as the driving force of subaltern participation in state formation and point to language — for both epistemological and hermeneutical reasons — as its chief historical agent.The long shadow of the Hidalgo rebellion crosses both late colonial and early republican Mexico and has made the role of subalterns and subaltern culture in the state a prime issue in its historical literature. Studies of the early national period, for example, have traced the legal and armed campaigns of casta and Indian communities during nation-building episodes such as the constitutions of 1812 and 1824, the anticentralist and anti-interventionist popular mobilizations, and the liberal reform. Often, local initiatives joined alliances with regional and national caudillos to articulate and advance federalist and liberal plans for the new nation. Florencia Mallon, Peter Guardino, José Serrano, Michael Ducey, Karen Caplan, and others have sketched out the ways the road to a new nation wound through the rural communities of Mexico.4 From their internal wrangling over local power to their collective battles in court and in the field, these agrarian villages were at the forefront of Mexico’s early constitutional struggles, and their worldviews permeated nineteenth-century contests over the state.Although this scholarship has drawn an incisive portrait of subaltern agency in republican Mexico, it has not delved into the underlying principles of what the villages fought for in the new nation and how they fought for it. In the nineteenth century, the worldview of rural Mexican communities bore the firm imprint of the Spanish colonial state and all of its ethnic structures. But a strong Mesoamerican heritage also touched every facet of village life and actively formed their culture. The agrarian village was, in fact, historically synonymous with Mesoamerican civilization. They began history together, three millennia before the Spanish Conquest, when agricultural communities settled in permanent, socially stratified villages and charted the path to complex state societies. This civilization would spread everywhere settled agriculture did in North America west of the Mississippi River, taking with it such practices as writing, a ritual calendar, irrigated corn cultivation, and a team sport played with a rubber ball. Across time and distance, it joined the energies of dozens of cultures that each left their mark on two millennia of pre-Columbian commercial empires and urban centers.This legacy was not an atavism of a prelapsarian world, but a living part of a viable, evolving culture and as inextricably entwined in it as agriculture itself. To ignore its presence in rural Mexico during the transition from colony to republic tends to distort the villages’ relations to the state. Research on republican Mexico has, however, largely subsumed village culture in contemporary politics rather than meddle with its Mesoamerican bases. As much as this has helped explain the concrete steps that Mexico’s rural villages took toward a federal constitutional government, it has also framed their actions according to the European worldview of the nation’s elite. However, the goals that rural villages pursued, and the tactics with which they pursued them, often drew deeply on Mesoamerican rural traditions; only a view rooted in this culture can accurately represent these goals and strategies. Born of the relationship between the colonial state and Mesoamerican languages, the Nahuatl broadsides shed rare light on the cultural issues that shaped the popular insurgencies and political platforms of the early nineteenth century.In The Other Rebellion, Eric Van Young details the cultural dynamics of the relationship of villages with state ideologies and institutions during this period; yet it is difficult to appreciate his portrait of the violent amalgamation of altepetl culture and the Spanish Catholic monarchy without deeper analysis. His survey of independence-era rebellions credits their strong Catholic and regalist character to long-standing trends in colonial rule, noting a “prolonged process of cultural resistance” in New Spain’s countryside.5 Beneath the welter of disparate insurgent histories, he detects a common cause to restore balance in an agrarian moral universe that teetered on the brink of ruin as its imperial patron sank into obsolescence. Van Young chronicles a violent turn in a relationship that had long combined equal parts of oppression and protection. Presumably pitting urban Spanish civilization against rural Indian barbarism, colonial rule had tended to grind native society down to a uniform peasant class called the macehuale.6 Well before the Hidalgo rebellion, he notes, the partition into Spanish cities and Indian hinterland had thoroughly shaped Mexican society. The rural insurgency that would grow out of this divide lacked both the rural-urban alliances and the focused class consciousness of the French and Anglo-American revolutions. The besieged native communities that waged the Mexican insurgency championed no new ideology to bridge these divisions, he concludes, but instead relied on the customary symbols of imperial government to attack colonial rule.7But, rallying under God and king was not naive monarchism. It reflected a complex relationship that had allowed the altepetl to resist colonial domination through the hegemonic figures of the church and crown. The imperial majesties balanced their demand for exclusive sovereignty with access to the arts and institutions — the councils and courts, festivals, and ceremonies — of its genesis. As their own leadership and institutions had withered, the altepetl became highly dependent on the crown and church. They found the Spanish moral order converged easily with their own and actively enlisted the moral persona of imperial authority as leverage in the competition for community resources. Turning to the forums of law and language (especially alphabetic writing) to defend their traditions of social legitimacy, the altepetl promoted discourses such as miserable and necesidad to temper colonial domination with local custom. For 250 years they had molded their political culture in the image of the Catholic monarchy by defending community and custom under its patronage.Cultural resistance in rural Mexico significantly changed after 1770. Until then, subjects of all classes and almost all native ethnicities readily used the moral discourse of empire to defend their interests in colonial civil and ecclesiastic institutions. Even in riots and revolts against colonial institutions, the moral authority of the Catholic monarchy was a central figure. The later stages of Bourbon reform, however, sharply lowered the institutional efficacy of moral discourse; this especially hurt rural communities’ ability to defend their resources. After 1770, the altepetl gave up their expensive, history-laden court cases of the previous half-century and turned to revolt and banditry.8 And yet, although this violent action was the face of the “other rebellion,” it was not an accurate reflection of the historic relationship between altepetl culture and the imperial Spanish monarchy. The truth, instead, lay in the political forces the counterinsurgency Nahuatl broadsides sought to mobilize in 1810.The revolts in the name of God and king, narrated by Van Young, did not so much display the underlying principles of subaltern politics as their breakdown under Bourbon rule. Important work on the colonial culture of rural Mexico has uncovered a deeper history of resistance and negotiation between altepetl and empire and traced its deterioration in the late eighteenth century. In Magistrates of the Sacred, William Taylor describes the central role priests played in the daily reality of colonial rule in Mexico’s rural communities and chronicles the crown’s intromission into this paternalistic relation after 1749. In its drive to rein in the church and tighten finances, Bourbon reform inflamed local discontents against priestly control and sparked a series of contests, in variable alliances, between communities, curates, and the crown. Yet, with its clear goals and clearer advantage, the crown eventually carried the day, and from 1749 to 1804 it pulled local colonial government away from a sacred foundation and toward a standardized fiscal one. In the process, it also eroded the value of moral discourse in community advocacy and drove a breach between community grievances and peaceful avenues of protest.9The Bourbon educational reforms studied by Dorothy Tanck de Estrada illustrate another facet of the tensions between Mesoamerican community agendas and reformist goals.10 In 1769, the archbishop of Mexico, Antonio Lorenzana y Buitrón, had conceived a bold solution to the cultural pluralism and subaltern political influence he felt blocked Bourbon absolutism in Mexico. His plan called for the extinction of all languages but Spanish in the empire, and it cut Nahuatl out of public life and politics.11 The royal cédula (in the 40 years after it became law in 1770) made Spanish literacy requisite for election to all government posts, suspended native-language competency for parish appointments, and obliged altepetl to pay for Spanish-language schooling. Although this decree increased the number of schools and their longevity in rural communities, it also tightened central control over altepetl finances.12 The ban on native languages also injected controversy into local schooling, with the many communities that had previously financed schools without crown intervention now facing a cruel choice between crown support for education and their own vibrant intellectual culture built around Nahuatl and other local languages.Though the cédula of 1770 banned scores of languages, Nahuatl was its main target. Not only central Mexico’s most widely spoken language, it was also the mainstay of New Spain’s ecclesiastic administration and, more notably, a reviving force in native cabildos across the region. Its abiding hold in Mexico’s colonial institutions, and the sanction it lent to linguistic diversity, went against everything Bourbon reform stood for. Lorenzana’s policy to eliminate its influence resurrected a dream that Antonio Nebrija’s Gramática had outlined for Queen Isabel three centuries earlier. Almost as if he were citing Nebrija, Lorenzana wrote, “There has not been a learned Nation in the world that when it extends its conquests it does not do the same with its language. To this have been accredited the successes and histories of the world to such a degree that never, according to Plato in the Timaeus, has there been achieved complete union, stable peace, constant friendship, and perfect subordination to the Sovereign without the common understanding of the same language.”13Lorenzana’s enlightened reform imagined though something yet grander than enduring imperial rule. He saw the Spanish language, which Nebrija’s Gramática had called but a handmaiden, he saw as a paladin of Western Christian culture to bring not only “perfect subordination” to rural Mexico but also civilization itself. He argued that native peoples should learn to read and write Spanish in order to “care for their homes, be officials of the republic, explain themselves to superiors, ennoble their Nation, and banish their ignorance, not only in the mysteries of faith, but also in the manner to cultivate their land, husband their animals, and market their fruits.” And so, the cédula of 1770 decreed the death of native languages in order that Mexico’s native majority would learn the language “of Kings and Conquerors” and bask in the light of civilization.14Although the policy aimed to further bind communities to imperial administration, it instead broke a vital link between altepetl society and the Spanish bureaucracy that the older “baroque” colonial intellectual tradition had nurtured. It started out among the other Bourbon policies that undermined the diffuse and dialogic nature of Habsburg legitimacy for its visible sacrifice of native culture at the altar of Bourbon efficiency, making a martyr of Mexican colonial traditions and a metaphor for popular sentiments of American grievance. The language cédula of 1770 bred the political conditions that helped the Nahuatl broadsides become a valuable counterinsurgency tool in the fall of 1810.In 1810, millions in Mexico still used Nahuatl daily as a first or second language, including Indians, castas, and Spaniards. But while the cédula of 1770 had made little headway against its spoken use, it had succeeded in eliminating Nahuatl almost entirely from government. By 1780, the renaissance of Nahuatl alphabetic writing that had accompanied the demographic recovery of the central Mexican altepetl had vanished as native officials abandoned it in their administrative duties. The total ban on the printing of new grammars, catechisms, and other works in Nahuatl from New Spain’s printing presses reinforced this internal censorship and fed a dangerous vacuum in altepetl intellectual life. Only with the 1810 publication of Rafael Sandoval’s Arte de la Lengua Mexicana would the Bourbon crackdown against native languages loosen; but by then, the articulation of native writing with the imperial administration had decayed.15The cédula of 1770 sought to reinforce colonial rule in New Spain by striking at the roots of its sui generis American social compact. Out of a miscellany of official policies toward native languages, it would impose a uniform one comitted to the ethos of European conquest and imperial commands and imposing an ethos of European conquest and imperial command. The reform singled out these languages because they were at the heart of the contradictory imperial policies that had nourished Mexico’s baroque modus vivendi of Old and New World cultures. Crushing them would also cripple the legal principles that had promoted a broad foundation for colonial rule through such cultural arts and institutions as law, religion, and writing.This heritage of Spain’s golden age had its strongest bastion in native languages; they most fully embodied its spirit within the machinery of the imperial bureaucracy and had steadily promoted the plural tendencies in colonial Mexican society that so troubled Lorenzana. For example, during the 1760s, the central government of Tlaxcala had regularly circulated handwritten Nahuatl broadsides, in which Mesoamerican concepts of justice and authority mingled with imperial ones.16 The outgrowth of grassroots reform in the province’s 127 altepetl, these circulars conscientiously used Nahuatl to root the colonial government in two cultural traditions. Above all, they strengthened the institutional footing of local culture by filtering colonial law through a Mesoamerican language. In the last of these, written in 1768, the cabildo interpreter tailored a new government tax census to altepetl custom through two effects of translation. He described the government with precolonial names wherever possible: calling, for example, the tax roll not a Matrícula but a tepoaliztli, as communities in the region had done for centuries.17 Some of these terms, moreover, carried deep cultural meanings, such as the translation of Juzgado as tlaixyeyecahuiliz. This term refers to a close examination by the perceptive faculties (the ixtli) and connotes moderation, sobriety, modesty, discretion, analysis, measuredness, and methodicalness; the interpreter thus invoked the disciplined, moderate, and measured concept of altepetl authority.18 He also freely mixed colonial rhetorical formulae into Nahuatl, directly calquing, for example, the executive action mandar y mando as omotlanahuatiliaya yhuan omotlanahuatili.19 By seam lessly blending imperial discourse into the region’s majority language, these broadsides fomented an administrative culture firmly tied to local traditions.Lorenzana’s initiative cut away the tangle of policies that had allowed these local grassroots variants of colonial government to flourish. Since the sixteenth century, Spain’s language policy had oscillated between a spirit of Christian conquest and one of universal justice — this latter animated largely by the monarchy’s relationship to natural law. Each tendency had fostered different approaches to native languages. Armed, by 1520, with a clear vision that its culture was a metonym of Christian civilization, Spain spread Catholicism by stamping its likeness on the Mesoamerican countryside. Language would be the keystone of this new order in the altepetl and Spanish the model of its divine origin. With the whole edifice of Christian society seemingly resting on its doctrinal language — Latin — Spain carried that divine authority into the New World through its own linguistic legacy of Rome. Expressed even in granting new names at baptism, Spaniards widely assumed their language was truer to the original Adamic language, as St. Augustine believed — where the Thing was the Word and the Word was in God — than native languages.20 Over the next two centuries, royal policy would codify this vision in acts such as the 1550 cédula that advocated Castilian instruction for the native population and the 1691 cédula that planned schools in the altepetl for that purpose.21Yet, the unique circumstances of early colonial Mexico would fix native languages in the heart of the imperial Catholic monarchy. After the fall of Tenochtitlán, Spain was in a race to establish its reign over the populous cities of Mesoamerica. Its quest was, perhaps, the most extraordinary political adventure in history. Here, some twoscore centuries after the First Father and Mother had set the sacred hearthstones of civilization in their place, a faraway kingdom itself forged in the heritage of three empires would test its claim to universal dominion by transplanting its government to the towns of this “New World.”22 Here, a new chapter in world politics began, as two very different civilizations united under a single sovereign consecrated to preserve the justice of good custom and natural law. This novel experiment in transoceanic government would hinge crucially on the culture hosting Spain’s imperial Catholic monarchy in Mexico and the terms it set for effective government over the region.The Spanish monarchy and its institutions would, themselves, acquire their true temper from this epic undertaking. Emerging from the medieval world buoyed by its ties to popular religion and municipal governments, in the sixteenth century it would form a central state around the judicial and administrative framework perfected through grappling with two elemental problems in Mesoamerica.23 One was the practical question of how to govern these very urban and very alien societies far across the ocean. Yet, within that question lay the deeper, more difficult one — delayed but not deferred — about who these newly discovered people were and what rights and obligations they had under a Christian authority.The solution to both questions came from the native languages of Mesoamerica. The early mendicant friars and their students fashioned a durable link in the imperial chain of authority by connecting these languages to Christianity’s venerated written word. As underscored by Walter Mignolo, much of writing’s authority in the Spanish Empire rested on the elevation of written over spoken language, in the belief that the written word was the template of speech as divinely inscribed in a primordial language, often thought to be Hebrew.24 The acute need to communicate in detail and in depth impelled a rush of creative linguistic work that did not just surmount a language barrier but created a living foundation for the Catholic Church in Mexico. Alphabetic writing was so effective in Mesoamerica because the Spanish Empire not only talked through Latin characters; it listened. Before long, languages such as Nahuatl that had been modeled in Latin alphabet and grammar became essential elements of colonial civil administration.25 Much as royal authority had benefited from the growth of vulgar writing in Iberian municipal governments during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the rapid adoption of alphabetic writing by altepetl across central Mexico bolstered royal administration and, consequently, quickly ramified through all of its colonial organs.26 Alphabetizing Nahuatl, Otomi, and other languages put imperial rule on firm ground against both existing Mesoamerican institutions and the more direct, personal authority of the conquistadores; yet, it also set the altepetl on firm ground in the Spanish Empire by imbricating them in the golden authority of the written word, thus laying the foundations for an empire ruled through paper, where the highest authorities kissed and bowed under the king’s letters.27 It grafted the very root of imperial authority into altepetl government and provided the empire a valuable tool of hegemony while offering the altepetl a means to shape imperial authority.Translation was the active agent in this exchange, a protean device that allowed traditions of Mesoamerican legitimacy to become part of Spain’s imperial administration in an exchange of specific linguistic expressions from different linguistic habitus — in Peircean labels, a linguistic exchange through mutually intelligible signs with different grounds, or what James Lockhart has aptly called “double mistaken identity.”28Over the years, the widespread use of alphabetic writing in native communities fused the king’s justice with their own revered bodies of rhetorical wisdom. Yet, the written word did not alone unite altepetl and empire. From the outset, royal justice, rhetoric, and writing — both Western and Mesoamerican — formed a reciprocal nexus in imperial administration that facilitated subaltern influence on colonial administration. For example, two principles essential to the Catholic monarchy — natural law and Christian universalism — had been central in enabling the Franciscans to open Western writing to Mesoamerican languages, and as the empire thrived from the union, those principles became the monarchy’s sine qua non. Equally, Mesoamerica’s high reverence for rhetoric, especially written, spurred the rapid florescence of alphabetic writing in altepetl government and, subsequently, shaded the meaning of writing in colonial administration.Nahuatl captured this Mesoamerican reverence of formal rhetoric in its eloquent metaphor, in tlilli in tlahpalli — the black and the red — to describe both the sacred art of writing and the ancient wisdom it conserved.29 Under colonial rule, this venerated corpus joined with natural law to make language a source of subaltern power in government, buttressing custom and the legal authority of moral argument. Once attached to Western writing, for example, it pushed the colonial state to accept written documents as incarnations of community and to reify formal elements of official discourse. Natural law, that gift from the Roman to the Spanish Empire, uniquely enabled the Catholic monarchy to gain purchase in this rhetorical pith of altepetl government and to use it effectively in the imperial bureaucracy. Consequently, it flourished in the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century, inspiring the neoscholastic revival at Salamanca, supporting an absolutist monarchy, and permeating every level of the imperial bureaucracy.30 Nicolás de Yrolo Calar, whose 1606 manual La Política de Escrituras distilled four decades’ experience as a notary in Mexico City, highlighted its prominence in daily government in a long footnote that began, “This law, the natural and the divine, obliges us to live well, to neither vex nor hurt our neighbor, and to not do to others what we do not want for ourselves.”31 Until the late Bourbon era, natural law effectively mixed subaltern culture into the written apparatus of imperial administration through its close concordance to both divine revelation and the Mesoamerican rhetorical canon.When the Hidalgo revolt erupted in 1810, subaltern voices had enriched Spanish royal legitimacy in New Spain for three centuries by means of natural law, the written word, and Mesoamerican rhetoric. That triumvirate had thoroughly blended the empire into altepetl government and established an elastic, hybrid political culture. The altepetl had, for example, incorporated a sundry of new linguistic conventions into their rhetoric as they adjusted to colonial rule; these conventions, in turn, spread across the colonial bureaucracy through the written word and imprinted the Mesoamerican worldview onto the judicial foundations of the colonial state.Principally dualistic, the Mesoamerican worldview came forth in language, foremost, through the use of parallel forms: for example, in metaphorical couplets such as in atl in tepetl (town) or in tlilli in tlahpalli (writing, wisdom), which projected this worldview onto specific settings, such as community, commerce, government, and rhetoric. These metaphors formed the rhetorical pith of alte-petl life, and their changes under colonial rule indexed the transculturation of the Catholic monarchy and its written protocols with altepetl government.32 The reformulation of a parallel metaphor during colonial rule could, for example, evidence the binding of specific political concepts between altepetl and imperial government. Before colonial rule, altepetl spoke of “just government” using a parallel metaphor that referenced the twin pillars of sacred community authority — in tlahtocayotl in tehcyotl.33 Both were offices invested with community responsibilities and resources under their namesakes, the man-god tlahtoani (speaker) and the teuctli (lords). Especially when qualified with the adjective ihuiyan (peaceful), the metaphor explicitly identified good government with compassion for the poor.34 Although colonial rule destroy