Читать книгу A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture - Группа авторов - Страница 45

There is still much research to be done on the facts surrounding the relationships that some of the native intellectuals such as Tezozomoc and others had with the Franciscan-Jesuit circle at the beginning of the seventeenth century. We have more information about the connections with a Franciscan–Jesuit circle that Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and several members of his family had.¹³ His brother, Don Bartolomé de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1600–1670), was a secular priest who had helped some of the Jesuits with the study of Nahuatl. Bartolomé de Alva had not only written a Confesionario mayor y menor en lengua mexicana, he also translated several Golden Age playwrights (Schwaller 1994, 393). However, a close look at annotations on the original manuscripts, for instance that of The Animal Prophet, reveal that even though Don Bartolomé was the main translator, it was also a collaborative enterprise to render Nahua idiosyncrasies “in re-making of Baroque Spanish theater in the Nahua world” (Brian 2014, 210). That a friendship had developed between Bartolomé de Alva and the Jesuits is revealed in his prefatory comments to the Arte de la lengua mexicana (1645) of Jesuit Horacio Carochi (1579–1662), a grammar that illustrates innovative techniques in the use of diacritics to mark the phonological uniqueness of Nahuatl. Bartolomé de Alva not only approves the publication of Carochi’s Arte, but also praises the Jesuit’s command of Nahuatl (Schwaller 1994, 393) and later dedicates to Carochi the translation of Lope de Vega’s La madre de la mejor (ibid.).

A compilation of the works produced by natives, mestizos, Europeans, and criollos, from the Franciscan initial projects to the Tovar–Jesuit circle, included some of the most important writings by Tezozomoc, Chimalpahin, and Alva Ixtlilxochitl. The ancient books and manuscripts in the Alva Ixtlilxochitl family and Jesuit collections were also accessible to the criollo intellectuals Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Sometime between 1680 and 1690, the Alva Ixtlilxochitl archive was donated to Sigüenza y Góngora (Schwaller 1994, 397). This collection, which ended up in the Jesuit convent of San Pedro y San Pablo at Sigüenza’s death, was catalogued in the mid-eighteenth century by the Italian Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci. This archive continued to be studied by Jesuits and criollo seculars during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and has been associated with the emergence of a Mexican historiography and national identity

The last years of the seventeenth century close an era of historiography written by educated natives. Educated Indigenous people pragmatically used the alphabetic and legalistic Spanish system to their advantage but not without consequences. Some scholars have seen that in Peru and in New Spain, the reliance on a juridical system arbitrated by the colonial power created a dependency that weakened the natives’ capacity for self-determining confrontation, limiting resistance to lack of cooperation (Stern 1982, 311; Borah 1982, 284). Writing local histories at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries provided temporary solutions for continuing tradition and securing positions of high status, as was the case for Tezozomoc, Ixtlilxóchitl, and others. But once the generation of educated natives declined, the steady use of local histories as sources to appeal privileges or to authenticate territorial rights – as Indigenous communities do in the Títulos or Códices Techialoyan – continued to feed ethnic fragmentation and struggles among the natives. Conceivably, ethnic divisions weakened the possibilities of native communities’ unification for radical resistance.

The narratives produced by ethnically diverse individuals in the Colegio and after its decline are important sources for critical investigations in different areas of research, from linguistic perspectives, to those of the social sciences, cultural studies, and postcolonial theories. Written after the shock of the conquest under an alien political and ideological hegemony, these narratives provide inquiry in the processes of meaning-making and representation. Since neither the colonizers nor the colonized were two antagonistic and monolithic factions, the multiple interactions and relations among these groups have to be taken into consideration when enquiring about processes and productions of identities in these narratives. The diffusion of writing and written materials was one of the most powerful tools of colonization in Indo-America, but was also the vehicle for different types of negotiations and creativity. Perhaps textual productions from the in-between spaces produced by colonization provide the “location and energy of new modes of thinking whose strength lies in the transformation and critique of the ‘authenticities’ of both Western and Amerindian legacies” (Mignolo 2001, xv). These narratives are also testimonies that remind us that Latin American histories have the modalities of an aggressive concert started 500 years ago in which the hierarchy of “harmony” is constantly interrupted by counterpoint and dissonance.