Читать книгу A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture - Группа авторов - Страница 39

The Colegio Imperial de Tlatelolco opened on January 6, 1536, with 80 students from various geographical regions in central Mexico. Despite conflicts and controversies that would arise later against higher education for natives, the Colegio became a crucial center for research on Indigenous languages and cultures. Following a curriculum modeled on European elite higher education, the students studied the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music), which the friars adjusted according to the students’ needs. The gramáticos ² are recognized in several of the friars’ writings for their translation of works from Latin, Nahuatl, and Spanish and for their help in the elaboration of dictionaries and grammars on Indigenous languages. One of the most famous gramáticos was Don Antonio Valeriano of Atzcapozalco, who later served 20 years as the governor of Tenochtitlan, beginning in 1573. He helped with etymology and semantics in the development of the Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana of Friar Alonso de Molina, a dictionary designed to help friars in learning Nahuatl. He also helped Friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590), one of the most active researchers on native history and culture, with the Coloquios y Doctrina Christiana, a reconstruction of a debate that took place in 1524 between the 12 Franciscans, who had just arrived in New Spain, and a gathering of secular and religious native leaders. Valeriano also served as Sahagún’s interpreter in the compilation of his Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, and wrote glosses to the Sermonario of Friar Juan Bautista.

Also well versed in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl was Pedro of San Buenaventura of Cuauhtitlan, who collaborated with Sahagún, writing the section on pre-conquest medicine and the animals of New Spain for the Hymns of the Gods. He also illustrated Sahagún’s Mexican calendar. Hernando de Ribas from Texcoco translated the Diálogos de paz y tranquilidad del alma of Juan de Gaona and helped Friar Alonso de Molina with his Vocabulario in Nahuatl and Friar Juan Bautista with his Vocabulario Eclesiástico. Francisco Bautista de Contreras from Cuernavaca, before becoming governor of Xochimilco in 1605, worked with Friar Juan Bautista in the translation to Nahuatl of the Imitación de Cristo, known as the Contemptus mundi, and collaborated with Hernando de Ribas in the translation of Vanidad del mundo. Juan Badiano of Xochimilco collaborated in the translation from Nahua into Latin of the Libellus de medicinalibus Indorum Herbis, known as the Códice Badiano, attributed to the Xochimilcan Martín de la Cruz. This codex contains information about plants and medicines used in pre-conquest times. Esteban Bravo from Tezcoco helped in the writing of a lost Sermonario of Friar Alonso de Trujillo. Pedro de Gante, named after the Franciscan friar who inaugurated San José de los Naturales, assisted Friar Juan Bautista in the Colegio and wrote about lives of saints. Although none of Gante’s texts have been discovered, Friar Bautista relates that he always consulted his abilities and talents (Garibay 1954, 2: 225). Agustin de la Fuente from Tlatelolco served as copyist and editor for Sahagún and Bautista.

In the Florentine Codex Sahagún also recognizes the help of the ancient titicih or Indigenous physicians (León-Portilla 1990, 54). Diego Adriano of Tlatelolco and Agustín the la Fuente collaborated in painting the Codex. Martín Jacobita of Tlatelolco, who from 1561 to 1565 was rector of the Colegio, Antonio Vegeriano of Cuauhtitlán, and Andrés Leonardo of Tlatelolco helped Sahagún in the rewriting of the Coloquios and Códices Matritenses (León-Portilla 1990, 48). The Franciscans documented the names of the most brilliant students to show evidence of the Colegio’s success, emphasizing the students’ abilities and their willingness to cooperate in the enterprise of evangelization. However, the gramáticos’ textual production would later play an important role in the development of a native historiography.

For the Colegio’s translations and transcriptions, the friars and gramáticos standardized regional differences in Nahuatl into a prescriptive refined model known today as Classical Nahuatl, contrasting with the “Colonial Nahuatl” used by notaries for mundane purposes (Karttunen 1982, 400–401). Friars looked for synonyms and parallel concepts between Spanish and Nahuatl to develop a Nahuatl rhetoric based upon Christian models (Burkhart 1989, 10–11). For some scholars the prescription of Classical Nahuatl was another form of colonization. It was a means to aid the process of acculturation by educating the Indigenous elite; to replace the authority of native priests; and, among other aims, to assist the imposition of a unifying canon that would delegitimate local Nahuatl dialects (Klor de Alva 1989).

The introduction of the alphabetic system altered Nahua methods of recording history, which had been previously achieved by oral performance and pictographic or ideographic representations. Historical Indigenous systems of recalling the past were based on unique coordinates of time and space. The use of colors and other elements gave coherence to the natives’ way of life, a coherence which they began to explain to the friars by adopting European pictorial techniques. By the end of the sixteenth century, pictorial representation remained in use primarily in practical and mundane documents – legal accounts, land records, tributes, and histories and genealogies (Hill-Boone 1998, 164).³

Even if Sahagún and like-minded friars believed in the equality of human souls and had a thirst for legitimate cultural and linguistic knowledge of the Indigenous cultures, Christian intolerance also justified the study of pagan things for purposes of facilitating their eradication (Buckhart 1989, 3). Sahagún, in his prologue to his Historia, compares the friars’ enterprise of conversion to that of the physician who needs knowledge to cure the sick. So, for Sahagún, knowledge about native culture provided the “medicine” to extract the disease of paganism. Translation at the Colegio involved the “purification” of pagan resonances, and Christian notions served as models for the adjustments of traditional ideas.

But translations require more than simply supplanting native codes with Christian ones. A coherent understanding of the cosmos organizing native religious beliefs was required to adjust the alien European systems of thought and representation. The task of the gramáticos was monumental. On the one hand, they provided a written corpus to serve the friars’ understanding of native practices against Christian ethical and moral principles, which provided the reasons for the Spanish presence in their territories; on the other hand, their translations were also intended to persuade other natives to embrace a foreign system of thought, refuting traditional beliefs. Christianity, whether by true conviction or not, provided the space for cultural negotiation. By declaring their affiliation to Christianity, the gramáticos, and other Indigenous writers, conveyed traditional beliefs and practices. This enunciative space not only allowed them to escape possible charges of apostasy but enabled them to maintain the echoes of their ancient traditions.

The ambivalence of transcribing ancient beliefs for the purposes of conversion is revealed in the translation of the Coloquios y Doctrina Christiana. This text is in the dialogue genre, with friars engaging the Tlamatinimeh (Nahua wise men) to convey Franciscan arguments for the superior truths of Christianity. But in the course of this dialogue, the Tlamatinimeh elaborate on the coherence of the ancient way of life, and in the end refuse to repudiate it even in the face of the best persuasions of the friars. Because the Coloquios are transcriptions of oral exchanges, traditional Nahua techniques could be used by the gramáticos. In contrast to the indirect style, at times used in annals, where everything is told in the third person, it is through quoting the words uttered by the characters where Nahuas express emotion. This technique, known also as direct style, gives immediacy to speech that reflects the collision of the Indigenous system of beliefs with the European ones. In their role as linguistic authorities, the gramáticos were able to preserve the sacred beliefs Christianity was erasing, even if the intent of the texts was the opposite. The highly emotive re-creation of the words of the elders, which Indigenous people would consider sacred, would in some cases reinforce these beliefs. Refusal to “forget” the teachings of the elders was a main reason given for difficulties in “eliminating idolatries” in the Manual de ministros para el conocimiento de sus idolatrías y extirpación de ellas of priest Jacinto de la Serna in 1636 (León-Portilla 1990, 63). The preservation of the word of the elders, so emotively re-created by the gramáticos, would continue as a practice of resistance in future textual creation by native intellectuals in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Just as transcription of ideas from the pre-conquest past opened a space for Indigenous preservation of old practices and beliefs, adjustments to the coherence of that past were necessary to explain their colonial present. The gramáticos tried to give coherence to a reality in which the Indigenous people were losing so much of their territories and traditions by searching for answers in their own past and implementing what they learned from European knowledge. The transcription into Nahuatl of Book XII of Sahagún’s Historia general (also known as the Florentine Codex) at the Colegio is a good example of creative interpretation of initial Nahua reaction to the Spanish encounter and rationalization of their defeat. Accounts passed through several hands when transcribed at the Colegio, including those of friars who might have collaborated in the gramáticos’ interpretations. For example, the section on the omens, which certainly was added a posteriori, may be highly influenced by European Christian and pagan myths (Dupeyron 2002, passim), and a spreading belief that Don Hernando Cortés was mistaken for Quetzalcoatl has been questioned by some scholars (Elliot 2002, 105–108; Dupeyron 2002; Lockhart 1992). However, being a compilation of many sources, Book XII gives us a good idea of how the Indigenous people perceived Spanish phenomena.

Book XII also illustrates the gramáticos preserving their ethnic identities, founded in the collective memory of their own altepetl (ethnic community established in a specific territory). It also reveals that each altepetl had its own views on the ancient past which, at times, competed against each other. The conquest in the Florentine Codex is written from the point of view of the Tlatelolcans (inhabitants of Tlatelolco), relatives of the Mexicas (inhabitants of Tenochtitlan) but from separate communities. This account of the conquest clearly sympathizes with the Tlatelolcans at the expense of the Mexicas, who had conquered them in 1473. The writing of local histories not only preserved tradition, but would also have a pragmatic use during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a means to restore previous positions of high status and to appeal for privileges and territory restitution.

The Colegio’s half-century trajectory reflects the struggles that the different secular and religious factions had in their purposes and methods of colonization. For the first 20 years, the Colegio operated under a general atmosphere of optimism. The Nuevas Leyes (1542–1543) favored the protection of the Indigenous people against the exploitation of the encomienda system, and debates suggesting natives as potentially “perfect” Christians gave friars motivation to advocate for their education-conversion projects. Later, however, in the face of the Counter-Reformation and emerging social pressures in an established colony, colonial policies would turn to favor further the economic goals of colonization by Hispanicizing the natives.