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The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3727515

1527-1900

Erika Hosselkus,

Latin American history and culture

Educated, often noble Nahua men became extraordinarily influential cultural mediators in New Spain. They worked as translators, city council members, and church officials, and they often represented their communities and their culture to Spanish and creole officials. Moreover, some of these individuals contributed to the production of knowledge in the colony as painters of pictorial maps and codices and as writers of annals histories and Nahuatl grammars. In her unique, interdisciplinary study, Kelly S. McDonough defines these individuals as Nahua intellectuals (ixtlamatinih/tlamatinimeh) and connects their work to the endeavors of their brethren of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to create an innovative portrait of Nahua intellectual production in Mexico across the centuries. McDonough structures her work around profiles of five Nahua thinkers and writers but also includes short contributions from contemporary indigenous intellectuals and reflections on her work with Nahuatl speakers at the Zacatecas Institute for Teaching and Research in Ethnology (IDIEZ), making this book a collaborative project that admirably supports the recovery and revitalization of Nahua culture and language in the present day.McDonough first profiles colonial grammarian and Jesuit priest Antonio del Rincón (chapter 1) and colonial Tlaxcalan historian don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza (chapter 2). As perhaps the only indigenous Jesuit priest in New Spain's history, Rincón is a fascinating individual. Most notably, McDonough compares his Nahuatl grammar to those of Franciscan friars Andrés de Olmos and Alonso de Molina. Like the Spanish authors, Rincón aimed his work at humanist-educated priests ministering to indigenous populations. While all three authors drew on Antonio de Nebrija's 1481 Latin grammar Introductiones latinae in arranging their own, Rincón's native fluency allowed him to bend Nebrija's work to the needs of Nahuatl and to address phonological aspects of the language in ways far surpassing other grammarians. Not unlike Rincón's grammar, the history of the altepetl of Tlaxcala produced by another Nahua intellectual, don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, also bends or appropriates Spanish models for indigenous purposes. In particular, McDonough reads the ceremonies held in Tlaxcala upon the coronation of Charles II and death of Philip IV as bids for political power by Tlaxcala's elites within a hegemonic colonial context. These chapters are intended in part to remind us that “indigenous people were not passive victims of Spanish conquest and colonization, but key players in shaping their own experience,” a point that, if not entirely novel, is worth reiterating (p. 81).The final three profiles cover, respectively, nineteenth-century Nahua scholar Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca (chapter 3); writer, thinker, and artists' model doña Luz Jiménez (chapter 4); and bilingual educator, playwright, artist, and activist Ildefonso Maya Hernández (chapter 5). McDonough convincingly advocates a reevaluation of Chimalpopoca, whose problematic translations of Nahuatl texts have typically colored his reputation. As in other chapters, she makes skillful use of this intellectual's own words to uncover his goals for Mexico's Nahua community. According to chapter 4, a reevaluation of doña Luz Jiménez, who served as a model for revolution-era artwork depicting the iconic Nahua woman, is also in order. Also known as an informant for anthropologist Fernando Horcasitas, this storyteller and representative of Nahua culture is resituated by McDonough as an intellectual in her own right. The 23 stories told by doña Luz that appear in the collection De Porfirio Díaz a Zapata (1968) include traditional Nahua myths and stories, some of which also provide a unique and underutilized window into the (female) indigenous experience of the Mexican Revolution and forced education. In another strong chapter, McDonough introduces the impressive corpus produced by Ildefonso Maya Hernández, which ranges from painted codices to plays. Her cogent analysis of the play Ixtlamatinij (The learned ones) shows how this intellectual has contributed, often through public performances, to a critique of the Mexican state's official assimilationist policies and the marginalization of the nation's Indians.Between and within these five chapters are contributions by present-day Nahua intellectuals, including Refugio Nava Nava (“Nonahuatlahtolnemilitzin,” or “My Life in Nahuatl”), Victoriano de la Cruz Cruz (“Tlapepetlaca,” or “Lightning Strikes Again and Again”), and Sabina Cruz de la Cruz (“Cihuatequiuh,” or “Women's Work”), as well as the participants of Reading Circles held by McDonough at IDIEZ, to discuss the contents of this book, which works to bridge native speakers and their cultural heritage resources (p. 147). Many of these contributors recount personal experiences of discrimination and marginalization based on their use of the Nahuatl language and their indigenous identities, not unlike doña Luz and Ildefonso Maya. By creating and offering this new intellectual canon, populated by Nahua producers of knowledge, McDonough (and her collaborators) provide an innovative and necessary corrective to histories of Mexico that ignore or too easily elide native contributions.