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Discovering the Chichimecas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Charlotte M. Gradie
Charlotte M. Gradie*
Affiliation:
Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut
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Extract

The European practice of conceptualizing their enemies so that they could dispose of them in ways that were not in accord with their own Christian principles is well documented. In the Americas, this began with Columbus's designation of certain Indians as man-eaters and was continued by those Spanish who also wished to enslave the natives or eliminate them altogether. The word “cannibal” was invented to describe such people, and the Spanish were legally free to treat cannibals in ways that were forbidden to them in their relations with other people. By the late fifteenth century the word cannibal had assumed a place in the languages of Europe as the latest concept by which Europeans sought to categorize the “other.” As David Gordon White has shown, by the time the Spanish discovered America, barbarians were an established component of European mythology, history and theology as well as popular thought, and the categories Europeans employed to describe outsiders date as far back as the Greeks and the Egyptians before them. Therefore, it is not surprising that when they reached Mexico the Spanish easily adopted a word from Nahuatl to describe the Indian peoples of the north whom they believed to be barbarians. This word, chichimeca, which both designated and defined in a very particular way the native peoples of the north Mexican frontier, assumed in Spanish the credibility of longstanding native use, although as we shall see, this was not entirely justified.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , July 1994 , pp. 67 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1994

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References

1 This essay is an expanded version of a paper presented at the VIII Conference of Mexican and American Historians, San Diego, CA, October 18–21, 1990. I thank Hugh M. Hamill, Jr., Lawrence Mastroni and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. Recent studies on European ideas of the American savage are, for the Caribbean, Hulme, Peter, Colonial Encounters, Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Metheun and Co., 1986)Google Scholar; for the French colonies, Dickason, Olive Patricia, The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and for Virginia, , Sheehan, Bernard W., Savagism and Civility, Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

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3 van Zantwijk, Rudolph, The Aztec Arrangement, The Social History of Pre-Spanish Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), p. 308 Google Scholar, n. 22. Kartunnen, Frances gives the following definition in An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), p. 48:Google Scholar

“a person from one of the indigenous groups of northern Mexico considered barbarians by Nahuatl speakers…This has both a negative ‘barbarous’ sense and a positive ‘noble savage’ sense. By its vowel length pattern it is clearly not derived from the words for ‘dog’, ‘rags’, ‘patches’, or ‘bitter’. It is possibly derivationally related to chichi, ‘to suckle’.”

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4 Since my purpose is not to define who the prehistoric Chichimecas were but to show how the word was used by the Spanish and Aztecs and for what purposes, I refer the reader to the works of Pedro Carrasco, Paul Kirchoff, Jiménez Wigberto Moreno, Nigel Davies, Rudolph van Zantwijk and Jesús Dávila Aguirre for information on the prehistoric Chichimecas. See for example, Aguirre, Jesús Dávila, Chichemetcatl! Origen, Cultura, Lucha y Estinción de los Gallardos Bárbaros del Norte (Saltillo, Coah.: Imprenta del Norte, 1967)Google Scholar; Pizana, Pedro Carrasco, Los Otomíes: Cultura y Historia prehispánica de los pueblos de habla otomicana (Mexico: Biblioteca enciclopédica del Estado de México, 1979)Google Scholar; Davies, Nigel, The Toltecs Until the Fall of Tula (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and Davies, , The Toltec Heritage (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980)Google Scholar; van Zantwijk, The Aztec Arrangement.

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19 For example the Chichimec hunters in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis reproduced in Davies, Nigel, The Toltec Heritage from the Fall of Tula to the Rise of Tenochtitlan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), pp. 104 Google Scholar, 105, 217. There is at least one codex, the Codex Aubin, that represents the word Chichimeca with the head of a dog, but this is post-conquest. Dibble, Charles E. ed., Historia de la Nación Mexicana Reproducción a todo color de Codice de 1576 (Madrid: Editorial Porrua, 1963), p. 99.Google Scholar The Codex Azcatítlan (Paris: Société des Americanistes, 1949), planche XVII, shows an Aztec king with a doghead symbol. This is also post-conquest.

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44 Jesuit Annual Letter of 1593, Monumenta Mexicana, vol. 5, p. 87; Spicer, Edward, Cycles of Conquest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962), pp. 378–379.Google Scholar

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51 Jesuit Annual Letter of 1597, Monumenta Mexicana, vol. 6, p. 428. See also Padden, Robert C. “Cultural Change and Military Resistance in Araucanian Chile, 1550–1730,” Southwest Journal of Anthropology, 13 (1957), 103–121 CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a similar analysis of Araucanian response to the Spanish.

52 Jesuit Annual Letter of 1598, Monumenta Mexicana, vol. 6, p. 634.

53 “Relación del H. Juan Carrera,” Ibid., p. 337.

54 On the wild man in European thought see David Gordon White, Myths of the Dogman, Bernheimer, Richard, Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Friedman, John Block, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Husband, Timothy, The Wild Man, Medieval Myth and Symbolism (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980)Google Scholar; Jones, W. R “The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 13 4 (1971), pp. 376–407 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dudley, Edward and Novak, Maximillian E. eds., The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Wells, David A., The Wild Man from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Hartman von Aues Iwein: Reflections on the Development of a Theme in World Literature (Belfast: Queen’s University of Belfast, 1975)Google Scholar.

55 Friedman, , The Monstrous Races, pp. 61–85 Google Scholar and White, Myths of the Dogman, passim.

56 See Ryan, Michael T. “Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23:4 (October 1981), 519–538.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57 The idea that Indians could be enslaved under certain circumstances is present very early in legislation concerning the treatment of the Indians. See, for example, “R. provisión para poder cautivar a los caníbales rebeldes,” Segovia, 30 Octubre 1503 and “R. provisión que los indios caribes se puedan tomar por esclavos,” Burgos, 23 dic. 1511, in Konetzke, Robert, Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493–1810, 2 vols. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953), vol. 2, pp. 14 Google Scholar and 31. See also Zavalo, Silvio, Los esclavos indios en Nueva España (Mexico: Colegio Nacional, 1968), pp. 1–66.Google Scholar

58 Powell, Philip W., Soldiers, Indians and Silver: The Northwest Advance of New Spain, 1550–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952)Google Scholar remains the classic study of the Chichimeca War.

59 Casas, las “Noticia de los Chichimecas,” pp. 144–146 Google Scholar and Himmerich, Robert y Valencia, , The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521–1555 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), p. 137.Google Scholar

60 Casas, Las “Noticia de los Chichimecas,” p. 152.Google Scholar

61 Ibid., pp. 165–173; Williams, Robert A. Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar provides an overview of the legal issues surrounding the Spanish conquest.

62 Powell, , Soldiers, Indians and Silver, pp. 105–119Google Scholar. Quote from Powell, p. 189.

63 On the peace-by-purchase plan see Powell, Philip W. “Peacemaking on North America’s First Frontier,” The Americas, 16:3 (January 1960), 221–250 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Soldiers, Indians and Silver, chapters 11 and 12.

64 For an analysis of this process in the Caribbean, see Hulme, Colonial Encounters, Europe and the Native Caribbean. A broader treatment is Arens, W., The Man-eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

65 de Ribas, Pérez, Historia, p. 201.Google Scholar

66 Schroeder, Susan, Chimalpahin and the Kingdoms of Chalco (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), p. 91 Google Scholar, shows how the Nahuatl historian, Chimalpahin, makes the distinction between the Chichimecas and his own people a cultural one. A post-conquest (probably late sixteenth-century) example of the colloquial use of the word chichimeca is found in the so-called Bancroft Dialogues in which an Indian mother describes her mischievous son: “he runs howling and shouting as though he were a Chichimec.” The connotation of the word Chichimec here clearly denotes a lack of control and respect for authority, i.e. “uncivilized.” See Kartunnen, Frances and Lockhart, James, The Art of Nahuatl Speech, The Bancroft Dialogues, UCLA Latin American Studies, vol. 65 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), p. 159.Google Scholar I thank Susan Schroeder for bringing this quote to my attention.