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The Emergence of Alphabetic Writing: Tlahcuiloh and Escribano in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2020

Barbara E. Mundy
Barbara E. Mundy*
Affiliation:
Fordham University, The Bronx, New [email protected]
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Abstract

Over the course of the sixteenth century in Mexico (New Spain), alphabetic writing replaced pictography as the chosen form of written expression in indigenous communities. A new social role, that of the native language escribano (notary), emerged, eventually to become a principal cultural broker in the colonial period. Despite the indigenous escribano's importance, his origins and the source of his authority within the native sphere are poorly understood. This article offers a close reading of a corpus of hybrid pictographic-alphabetic documents, written in Nahuatl and created between 1553 and 1572 in the indigenous cabildo (town council) of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Within this important body, escribanos appear early in the documentary record; it was within the established indigenous ecosystem of governance that escribanos first found a niche.

Here, pictography flourished, as did performances unique to the indigenous sphere. The corpus reveals how escribanos worked side by side with indigenous tlahcuilohqueh, or painters, who drew on a long-established tradition of manuscript painting and cartography to create property maps. These maps adhered to established codes, both social and visual. Initially preeminent in itself, the work of the tlahcuilohqueh came to supply meaning and public authority to the work of the escribano in this crucial formative period.

Keywords

Nahua notariesIndigenous painterscartographywriting systems
Type
Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 77 , Issue 3 , July 2020 , pp. 361 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Academy of American Franciscan History

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Footnotes

This essay grows out of presentations given at the panel “Paper Trails: The Materiality of Documentation in the Spanish Empire,” Latin American and Latino Studies Association Meeting, organized by Aaron M. Hyman and Matthew Goldmark in 2014; “Telling Stories: Discourse, Meaning, and Performance in Mesoamerican Things: In Honor of Elizabeth H. Boone,” Harvard University, organized by the Moses Mesoamerican Archive, Peabody Museum, and Davíd Carrasco in 2014; Tercera Sesión del Seminario de Cartografía Indígena, Benemérito Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Puebla, organized by Lidia Gómez García in 2015; the panel “Los indios en el sistema de poder de la Nueva España,” International Congress of Americanists, organized by María Castañeda de la Paz and Lidia Gómez García in 2018; and the annual Northeastern Nahuatl conference organized by Louise Burkhart and John F. Schwaller in 2019. My thanks to all the organizers for helping to shape my ideas. I thank the staff at the Archivo General de Nación, Mexico, for allowing me special access to the documents, particularly in 2014, when I was carefully allowed to examine the Confirmation of the lands of Diego Yaotl and his wife Isabel Tlaco, of Dec. 10, 1563, in person, and to Alma del Carmen Vázquez Morales and Diego Castillo, who helped chase down photographs, as did Jordana Dym. John Sullivan aided with knotty Nahuatl terms and translation. I am grateful to the reviewers of The Americas for their helpful criticisms. I dedicate this essay to Dana Leibsohn, my most constant and most perceptive critic.

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29. On the early florescence of the cabildo, 1549–1554, see Rovira Morgado, San Francisco Padremeh, 55–90.

30. The major study of notaries is Muñoz, Jorge Luján, Los escribanos en las Indias Occidentales (Mexico City: UNAM, Instituto de Estudios y Documentos Históricos, 1982)Google Scholar. Also relevant are María de los Ángeles Guajardo-Fajardo Carmona, Escribanos en Indias durante la primera mitad del siglo XVI (Madrid: Colegios Notariales de España, 1995); and IMijares, vonne, Escribanos y escrituras públicas en el siglo XVI: el caso de la Cuidad de México (Mexico City: UNAM, 1997)Google Scholar. The social role of notaries is underscored in Tamar Herzog, Mediación, archivos y ejercicio: los escribanos de Quito (siglo XVII) (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1996).

31. In notarial documents, the use of the title “escribano” was an important one. Spanish notaries were prohibited from using it without some kind of appointment from a governing body. The crown jealously guarded its right to control the office of the notary for Spanish cabildos across the Indies, in part because the sale of office was profitable. See J. H. Parry, The Sale of Public Office in the Spanish Indies under the Hapsburgs, Ibero-Americana 37 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), as well as Muñoz, Los escribanos en las Indias Occidentales.

32. The topic is introduced in Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest, 40–41; Cline, Colonial Culhuacan, 43–47; and Horn, Postconquest Coyoacan, 63–65. On indigenous notaries, see Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and Juan Ricardo Jiménez Gómez, La república de indios en Querétaro, 1550–1820: gobierno, elecciones y bienes de comunidad (Querétaro, Mexico: Instituto de Estudios Constitucionales, 2006).

33. AGNM Tierras, vol. 20, 1a pte, exp. 3, fol 260r. Full transcription in Luis Reyes García et al., Documentos nauas de la ciudad de México del siglo xvi (Mexico City: CIESAS and Archivo General de la Nación, 1996), 92–93.

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35. Lockhart, Berdan, and Anderson, in The Tlaxcalan Actas (9), established that the notary was almost certainly a member of the indigenous nobility

36. Beginning in 1586, a Miguel de los Angeles appears as an alcalde of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and also as a resident of the tlaxilacalli (sub-barrio) of Tequicaltitlan. I have not determined if he is the same person as the escribano. Luis Reyes García et al., Documentos nauas de la ciudad de México del siglo xvi (Mexico City: CIESAS and AGNM, 1996), 203, 204, and following.

37. I follow here Luján Muñoz, Los escribanos en las Indias Occidentales.

38. On Spanish scribes in early Mexico City, see Bejarano, Ignacio, ed., Actas de Cabildo de la ciudad de México (Mexico City: Aguilar e Hijos, 1889)Google Scholar; Parry, The Sale of Public Office; and Mijares, Escribanos y escrituras públicas.

39. On standarized wills, see Teresa Rojas Rabiela, “Estudio introductorio,” in Vidas y bienes olvidados: testamentos indígenas novohispanos, Teresa Rojas Rabiela et al., eds., 5 vols. (Tlalpan, Mexico City; Lomas Altas, Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, CIESAS; Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, 1999), vol. 1, 17–102.

40. Nicolás de Yrolo Calar, La política de escrituras: estudio preliminar, indices, glosario y apéndices, María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano, Ivonne Mijares, and Javier Sanchiz Ruiz, eds. (Mexico City: UNAM, [1605] 1996).

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42. A royal carta arancel of 1503 established that each sheet that a registered notary wrote should cost 10 maravedís, and should be “an entire folded sheet written truthfully in a cortesana script, and not a procesada, so that the lines are full ones, without large margins, and that each sheet has on it no less that 35 lines and 15 words on each line.” Luján Muñoz, Los escribanos en las Indias Occidentales, 98, quoting Agustín Millares Carlo and José Ignacio Mantecón Navasal, Indice y extractos de los protocolos del Archivo de Notarías de México, D.F. 2 vols. (Mexico City: Archivo de Notarías del Departamento del Distrito Federal, 1945–46) vol. 1, 42–43.

43. See the numerous examples in the sixteenth-century logbooks held at the Archivo de Notarías, Mexico City.

44. Barry D. Sell, Larissa Taylor, and Asunción Lavrin, Nahua Confraternities in Early Colonial Mexico: The 1552 Nahuatl Ordinances of Fray Alonso de Molina, OFM, Franciscan Publications in Nahuatl 2 (Berkeley: Academy of American Franciscan History, n.d.), 3.

45. On notarial scripts of New Spain, see Natalia Silva Prada, Manual de paleografía y diplomática hispanoamericana, siglos xvi, xvii y xviii (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Iztapalapa, 2001). See also Natalia Silva Prada, “Paleografías americanas. O del arte de las escrituras antiguas,” n.d., https://paleografi.hypotheses.org, accessed May 20, 2020.

46. Juan de Yciar, Recopilacion subtilissima: intitulada Orthographia Pratica … (Zaragoza: Bartholome de Nagera, 1548), fol. 32v.

47. Sell, Taylor, and Lavrin, Nahua Confraternities in Early Colonial Mexico, 4.

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49. Based on examples of da Carpi, Ugo, Thesavro de scrittori: opera artificiosa laquale con grandissima arte … (Rome: Antonio Blado, 1535)Google Scholar, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Giovanni Battista Palatino, Libro di M. Giouanbattista Palatino cittadino romano, nelqual s'insegna à scriuere ogni sorte lette (Rome: Antonio Blado [1545] in the John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, R.I.). See also Susan Verdi Webster, Lettered Artists and the Languages of Empire: Painters and the Profession in Early Colonial Quito (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017).

50. Rosa María Fernández de Zamora, Los impresos mexicanos del siglo XVI: su presencia en el patrimonio cultural del nuevo siglo (Mexico City: UNAM, 2009).

51. Maps by professionally trained agrimensores in any great number do not appear in Mexico until the seventeenth century. See Trabulse, Elías, Cartografia mexicana: tesoros de la nación, siglos xvi a xix (Mexico City: Molina y Albañiles, 1999)Google Scholar.

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57. Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal to the king, Archivo General de Indias, Nov. 1532, Patronato 184, R. 21, page 38.

58. In Confirmation of the lands of Agustín López and his wife, Ana Ocelo[yolli?], 1577, AGNM Bienes Nacionales 498, exp. 15, only one man and three women attest to the act of possession; the women are named as cihuatzitzin, “honorable women.”

59. Scott, James, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

60. AGNM Tierras, vol. 29, exp. 5, fols. 23v-24r (1563).

61. The footprint is currently difficult to read, given that the document was refolded and bound so that its text, originally found on 2r, became the opening page, that is, 1r.

62. In contrast, in other works written by Nahua escribanos, a term like amatl (which can be translated as “paper”) is used for “textual document,” perhaps because it is a loaned concept.

63. Such use is consistent with the descriptions of maps from other places. See, for instance, the examples in Javier Eduardo Ramírez López, Documentos nahuas de Tezcoco, vol. 1 (Texcoco: Diócesis de Texcoco, 2018).

64. Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana [1571] (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1970), fol. 50v.

65. Allison Caplan (personal communication, 2019) suggests that the verbs may also refer to how the pigment lies on the page.

66. In the colonial period, friars used “machiyo” for the sign of the cross, so that “ninomachiyotia” (the “nino” being the first person reflexive), meant “I make the sign of the Cross on myself,” a meaning still in use among Nahuatl speakers today. Personal communication, Ofelia de la Cruz, July, 2014.

67. Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana, fol. 125r.

68. Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana, fol. 96r.

69. Machiyotl was also extended to apply to the imported technology of printing, in which a plate prepared with raised letters or images, then coated with ink, leaves its impression on a sheet of paper. The Nahuatl word coined for images taken from something else, including those produced by woodblock print, was tlamachiyantli. Molina, Vocabulario, 74v. And while the first instance of its use is not yet known to me, “machiote” is still used in Mexico today for the printed templates that notaries fill in with concrete data and for photocopies.

70. Ramírez López, Documentos nahuas, 64. I have normalized orthography. Benjamin Johnson's translation is “La tierra se extiende así, como mostrado en la pintura, en la figura.”

71. See AGNM Vinculos 279, exp. 1, fol. 38v, as well as documents reproduced in Reyes García et al., Documentos nauas de la ciudad de México.

72. Mundy, Barbara E., The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 184Google Scholar.

73. Kerpel, Diana Magaloni, The Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine Codex (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014)Google Scholar.

74. Borah, Justice by Insurance, 79–119.

75. Velasco, Francisco Quijano, “Los argumentos del ayuntamiento de México para destituir al corregidor en el siglo xvi. El pensamiento político novohispano visto desde una institución local,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 55 (2016): 46–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76. An example from Xochimilco of 1582, now also bound incorrectly, suggests that the full-folio format may have flourished, and endured, elsewhere. Confirmation of possession by the indigenous cabildo of Xochimilco, AGNM Vinculos 279, exp. 1, fols. 84–85.

77. Confirmation of the lands of Agustín López and his wife, Ana Ocelo[yolli?], AGNM Bienes Nacionales 498, exp. 15.

78. Miller, Mary Ellen and Mundy, Barbara E., eds., Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City: Land, Writing, and Native Rule (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University: Distributed by Yale University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; María Castañeda de la Paz, “Sibling Maps, Spatial Rivalries: The Beinecke Map and the Plano Parcial de La Ciudad de México,” in Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City, 53–73.