Made in Translation: Revisiting the Chontal Maya ...

Ethnohistory

Made in Translation: Revisiting the Chontal Maya Account of the Conquest Paja Faudree, Brown University

Abstract. In this article, I argue for placing the study of translators and translation processes more squarely at the center of ethnohistoric research. I focus on two texts well known to scholars: a seventeenth-century text written in Chontal Maya and its contemporary translation into Spanish. I discuss how translation practices contributed to the creation of the Chontal text and then analyze the systematic discrepancies between it and the contemporary Spanish translation. I show that even where the translation closely follows the original, the message is radically altered. This case speaks to issues commonly found in colonial encounters, while inviting deeper engagement with translation as a special site where colonial relations are constructed. Keywords. translation, Chontal Maya, practice, título, genre

Introduction: Revising Narratives about the Conquest In recent years, scholars have begun producing research that unsettles received narratives about the Spanish conquest. Sometimes called the “New Conquest History” (Restall 2012), this approach constitutes a “recent revisionist trend in Mesoamerican conquest history which recognizes that indigenous allies played a far more important and extensive role than scholars have generally acknowledged” (Fowler 2009: 150; Matthew and Oudijk 2007). Overturning these and other “myths of the Spanish Conquest” (Restall 2003b) has entailed “a focus on multiple protagonists and accounts, new archival materials, the roles and interpretations of indigenous and black men and women, and the exploration of understudied regions of the Americas” (Restall 2012: 151). This research has made visible Ethnohistory 62:3 (July 2015) DOI 10.1215/00141801-2890260 Copyright 2015 by American Society for Ethnohistory

Published by Duke University Press

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the historical importance of people who do not easily fit into the conquering Spanish/conquered Indian binary upon which standard conquest narratives depend. Whether this new research attends to intermediaries generally or to “Indian conquistadors” as a particular category-troubling type, the focus is on those people and the encounters and developments in which they participated, which triumphalist narratives of the conquest have tended to eclipse (among others, see Asselbergs 2004; Restall 1998; Restall and Oudijk 2008; Matthew and Romero 2012; Matthew and Oudijk 2007; Tavárez 2011; Yannakakis 2008, 2011; Schroeder 2011). The emphasis on figures who operated at the interface of two or more discursive worlds carries with it attention to other themes, in particular the important role that multilingualism and linguistic diversity played in the conquest. Stressing the participation of indigenous allies highlights the massive movements of people that made the conquest possible: myriad, interlocking diasporas that produced complex configurations of cross- ethnic interaction and alliance—all developments with strong linguistic implications. People with diverse linguistic resources at their disposal were differentially recruited to participate in emerging conquest- and colonial- era communicative systems. For example, Yannakakis’s discussion (2011: 658) of Spanish allies (naborías) in colonial Oaxaca does not address linguistic diversity directly, but attention to that issue is present in her discussion of the city’s residents—speakers of diverse languages from at least three distinct linguistic stocks. Nearly half the naborías were “ethnically heterogeneous Nahuatl-speaking central Mexicans.” That portion presumably included speakers not only of different varieties of Nahuatl (see Pizzigoni 2012) but also of other languages entirely. The other half of the naborías consisted of two further groups of people. The first of those groups was made up of people with “more local origins, among the Mixtecs and Zapotecs of the Valley of Oaxaca,” which minimally would have included speakers of those two large and distinct language groups and likely people who spoke different varieties within each. The second consisted of a smaller but substantial group of people “brought from Guatemala in the early Conquest period,” which at minimum meant speakers of at least one if not several Mayan languages (see Terraciano 2015, this issue). And that was just one colonial center among many. Colonial linguistic diversity and the practices by which it was managed are an emerging research focus, as witnessed by the recent special issue of Ethnohistory taking up diverse uses of Nahuatl in New Spain (R. Schwaller 2012). Yet scholars have only recently tried to grapple with the practical dimensions of multilingualism and attempted to answer the question that Yannakakis raises in her introduction to that special issue, “How did


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they talk to one another?” Essays throughout that volume call for further research into the “socially situated language use in a multilingual world: who used what languages, where, when, in what context, for what purpose, to what ends, and to what effect” (Yannakakis 2012: 671). I argue that this new research—and other work that troubles received narratives of New World conquest and colonization—should incorporate a more direct, sustained engagement with translation. Largely missing from accounts of New World literacy, writing, and language contact are discussions of the specific mechanisms through which communication operated in practice. Although translators and translation practices have long been acknowledged as crucial to colonial interactions, they have more rarely been taken as central subjects in their own right, as vital focal points in the process by which meanings are made and remade during this era. Translation allowed the transmission and conversion of information from one system to another and served as a key socialization vehicle through which translators and other intermediaries moved between competing linguistic regimes. Thus a more concerted focus on the mechanics of translation would further investigation into the lived reality of linguistic diversity at the dawn of New World colonies, including the role played by assorted “linguistic negotiators.”1 A more direct engagement with translation would also advance the project of finding “new stories as well as new ways to tell old stories” (Restall 2012: 156) by adopting new methods anchored in attention to linguistic diversity and the practices by which it was mediated. Revisionist conquest histories—including the essays appearing in this special issue (see Sampeck 2015, introduction this issue)—share the New Philology’s foundational impulse of privileging indigenous language documents in order to recover the lives of people “encased in the mortar of History” (ibid. [quoting van Deusen 2010: 268)]. Yet this emergent work also offers the potential of forging new techniques for integrating diverse sources into a unified analytic frame—including those in Spanish as well as other languages. It would make visible translation processes that scholars know are central to the conquest and colonial enterprises—and to the creation of sources on which our accounts are based—but that are rarely placed at the heart of our work. Translation was at the center of almost every aspect of conquest and colonial interaction. It was the engine through which the gears of divergent cultural and linguistic systems came into contact and began to move in response to each other—rarely smoothly, and often with grinding violence. In this article, I offer an initial foray into what deeper engagement with translation as practice might look like. I focus on two widely studied documents from the early colonial period: a text written in Chontal Maya and its contemporary Spanish translation. Both date from 1612 and were part


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of the Paxbolon-Maldonado Papers,2 a large collection of documents that included a petition for royal support. This is an ideal case for my argument that fuller attention to translation would make an important contribution to revising conquest history. First, these texts narrate the conquest in the Maya Chontal region, offering an indigenous version that is at odds with more widely known accounts. The figures animating these texts—especially the indigenous leader Don Pablo Paxbolon—fit the profile for the “new protagonists” (Restall 2012: 155) at the center of this new research; they are “middlemen” with hybrid identities who navigate competing discursive realms. In addition, the Chontal text has played a prominent role in research making the revisionist conquest history possible. This includes the foundational ethnohistoric text by France V. Scholes and Ralph L. Roys ([1948] 1968) and more recent work by Matthew Restall (1998: 53–76, 2003b: 147–56; see also Restall, Lisa Sousa, and Kevin Terraciano 2005: 56–61).3 However, this work generally has not addressed the Spanish translation in detail, focusing on the Chontal text instead. Here, I take the view that deeper attention to both versions—using the lens of translation—can be revealing, especially since both are the product of layered translation processes. This article begins with further consideration of translation as an analytic focus. I consider how translation practices have—and have not—been the focus of ethnohistoric research, and why attending to them more deeply would create a new frontier that expands upon the ongoing work of revising conquest histories. I then offer a background sketch of the historical and ethnographic context in which the Chontal manuscript and its Spanish translation were produced. I follow that with an overview of the content and structure of the Chontal text, stressing the ways in which this quintessentially colonial document bears the hallmarks of having been forged in the cauldron of cultural collision. I discuss how translation was involved in that process, considering how translation practices might have influenced the text’s content and form. Finally, I analyze the discrepancies between the Chontal text and the Spanish translation and consider what they might tell us about how meanings were made and remade through colonial translation practices. I conclude by returning to a discussion of why translation is a privileged site for exploring the dynamics of colonial interaction, stressing how translation practices created key groups of intermediaries who made conquest and colonialism possible. Translation: Crossing Linguistic (and Other) Boundaries Translation was crucial to the conquest process and, later, the institutionalization of colonialism; translation was embedded—if irregularly and



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inconsistently—in the machinery of colonial administration. As Laura E. Matthew and Sergio F. Romero put it, “Nahuatlatos translating for local caciques in early colonial judicial records are ubiquitous” (2012: 778). Although doubtless translation was also part of oral communications surrounding colonial administration, it was absolutely central to the production of written documents critical to the workings of colonial bureaucracy. Translation was involved in document production in at least two ways. Translators were routinely used when taking oral testimony from people speaking indigenous languages, particularly if the languages spoken were not among the few in which colonial documents were regularly written. In such cases, the testimony was translated orally into another indigenous language, such as Nahuatl or Zapotec, and then recorded in writing; or the oral testimony was translated directly into the written textual language, such as Nahuatl or Spanish, as the written document was prepared. Translations into Spanish were also routinely prepared for indigenous-language documents when they were passed up the administrative chain and sent on to officials unable to read the language in question. Both types of translation practices were involved in creating the texts discussed in this article. Translators and translation practices thus figured prominently in colonial New World contexts and played a crucial role in generating the materials—namely, written documents—that remain the primary evidence for historical research. But while translation has been highly salient to historians as a colonial “fact of life,” researchers have rarely taken up the practical dynamics of translation as a central focus. However, paying fuller attention to these practices would deepen our understanding of colonial interactions and help us better understand how translators became crucial intermediaries in colonial administration, evangelization, and cross-ethnic interactions. Though scholars have mostly attended to translators and translation practices in a scattered way, some recent works lay the groundwork for a more sustained attention to translation in practice. These include the aforementioned 2012 special issue. Though it does not focus on mechanisms of translation, several articles discuss translators at length and some consider language ideologies undergirding translation choices (J. Schwaller 2012; Matthew and Romero 2012; Nesvig 2012; R. Schwaller 2012; see also Tavárez 2000). Another example is Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650, Alan Durston’s commanding work on Quechua-language religious texts produced in colonial Peru (2007). His research provides an exhaustive analysis of how the Catholic Church reshaped Quechua in the process of making it into a tool for Christian evangelization. It primarily focuses on the complex choices Catholic


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clergy faced in translating Christian concepts into a language and discursive universe radically different from that of the Spanish priests. Although it does not focus on the dynamics of translation as quotidian process, Durston’s book masterfully captures “the pregnancy of translation for colonial politics and cultural/historical interpretation . . . [and] the impossibility of adequate translation at the time of the conquest” (314–15; see also 227–30). Finally, another essential work in this vein is William F. Hanks’s recent study, Converting Words (2010), on how language was thoroughly implicated in the political and spiritual conquest of Yucatán. This brilliant study focuses on the translation decisions of gran lenguas and other clergy producing materials that “established the apparatus of conversion” (117) by forging the new “translanguage” (16) that Hanks calls Maya reducido (missionary Maya). That colonial variety of the native language was taken up by the Maya, a process that furthered the political and spiritual dimensions of the colonial project. While the book does not examine the practical dynamics by which translations were created, it provides overwhelming evidence for their effects on the Maya language and crucial insight into the social positioning of translators, for whom “the ironies of intercultural communication . . . —that successful acts achieved unwanted effects, in some cases the exact opposite of wanted effects . . . —are not reducible to mistakes. They are intrinsic to the structure of the field, in which discourse agents are systematically Janus-faced, and their works systematically ambiguous” (21). I build on this approach. I tie Hanks’s emphasis on the effects of colonial translation—including its implications for the social positioning of translators—to an exploration of the dynamics of translation as “mundane” practice (see Lockhart 1992: 7). In the process, I draw on concepts and approaches from linguistic anthropology, a discipline I share with Hanks. Echoing Restall’s characterization of the “New Conquest History,” this interdisciplinary approach embraces the generative potential of crossing boundaries. A similar spirit animates the work mentioned above; these works are born not only of the disciplinary diversity of the authors involved but also, in Durston’s case, of his perspective as an Andeanist. In the Andes, there is nothing comparable to the vast corpus of native-language, native- authored texts present in Mesoamerica. Colonial Andeanists have thus been forced to devise “an increasingly sophisticated set of methodologies . . . [based on the] integration of Spanish and Quechua sources into a single framework of analysis” (Restall 2003a: 127). Scholars of New Spain, on the other hand, have had the option of focusing almost exclusively on native- language documents. Doing so makes it easier to treat indigenous-language documents as the source of “true meaning,” to look past the effects of their contemporaneous translations into Spanish, and to treat those translations



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as pale reflections—or worse, deliberate distortions—of the indigenous- language originals. I bring a different approach to translation, informed by my experience as an ethnographer studying translation practices among living indigenous Mexican authors. Most publish their work in bilingual books featuring indigenous-language “original” texts and Spanish-language “translations,” with both versions produced by the author. I have argued elsewhere (Faudree 2013, 2014) that the political economy surrounding indigenous authorship, and the practices by which bilingual texts are read, make the relationship between the Spanish- and indigenous-language versions more complex and fluid than the explicit ideology of translation suggests. While translation practices in the colonial period are different in many ways from current ones, my ethnographic research suggests that we limit ourselves as analysts if we do not leave open the possibility that translation can be generative and creative. We foreclose interpretive possibilities if we assume that, say, the Spanish translation of an indigenous-language text can at best faithfully reproduce its meaning and at worst constitute an impoverished copy in which key aspects of the original are lost. It is crucial to make visible both how translations may distort aspects of original texts and the ways that political power can be exercised through translation practices. Yet emphasizing these issues need not prevent us from considering whether something new is also produced in translation—new meanings as well as “new protagonists.” Taking seriously the possibility that translation can be a locus where meaning is constructed—rather than merely distorted or destroyed— depends upon viewing the translator as a crucial figure. In producing translations, translators navigate divergent cultural systems and create a space at their interface not only for themselves but also for other hybrid figures. This is true even in cases like this one, where we know relatively little about the people who created the texts in question. Knowing something of the biographical context of the individuals involved would be illuminating in numerous ways. Reading particular translations through their concordance with the biographies of well-known figures like Gaspar Antonio Chi—who “enjoyed a long career in sixteenth-century Yucatan as both a Maya nobleman and the colony’s Interpreter General” (Restall 2003b: 24)—would shed light on the lives of those particular individuals while expanding what we know of the lived experience of cultural-linguistic intermediaries.4 But even where we know little about the figures involved, placing them—as translators—at the center of our analysis opens new spaces for contemplating their role in forging colonial relations.


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The Chontal and Spanish Versions of the Title of Acalan-Tixchel: Genre, Translation, and Translators The two texts I discuss here are, as noted above, a colonial document from 1612 written in Chontal Maya and a Spanish translation of that text made several months later in the same year. The Chontal text concerns the history of Acalan, the region where Chontal Maya was spoken, in the southern part of modern Campeche, near the border with Tabasco (see map, fig. 1).5 It is the only known colonial document in Chontal Maya. The two documents form a small part of the corpus of documents in the Paxbolon-Maldonado Papers some six-hundred pages in length, whose originals are located in the Archivo General de Indias (AGI). The documents are examples of the genre probanza de mérito (“proof of merit”): documents “submitted to the Crown as a routine record of service . . . to support accompanying petitions for royal support” (Restall 1998: 55). Here, the petitioners were the “Maya conquistador” Paxbolon and his Spanish son-in-law Francisco Maldonado, a settler in Campeche. From 1612 to 1615, Maldonado amassed his probanza in support of his petition for an encomienda, “the right to the labor and tribute from the indigenous communities [of unconverted Mayas] he and Paxbolon had conquered in 1604” (ibid.). The Chontal text accompanying the probanza related more directly to Paxbolon, the “cacique and governor of Tixchel” (Scholes and Roys 1968: 359) and the reigning descendant of the ruling family whose history is recounted in the Chontal document. Not only was Paxbolon the “heir to a deep-rooted legacy of conquest, settlement, and legitimated rule” (54), but he was unusually successful at turning cooperation with the Spanish to his advantage. He “managed not only to preserve his territorial domain . . . but also to extend his power far back into the interior, incorporating new towns and many fugitive Maya from the north who had never previously been under his rule” (Farriss 1984: 97–98, 150). The Chontal Maya document is more properly referred to as the Title of Acalan-Tixchel. Following the depopulation of Acalan during the conquest, the survivors were moved to Tixchel, a Postclassical Maya site depopulated before the conquest that became a congregación in 1557 (Scholes and Roys 1968: 10–11). The primordial title, or título, was an important colonial Mesoamerican genre consisting of “a community history that promoted local interests, particularly related to land ownership, often those of the local dynasty or dominant noble families” (Restall 2003a: 122). Extant títulos in Mesoamerican languages have been widely studied by colonial ethnohistorians (e.g., Haskett 2005; Sousa and Terraciano 2003; Wood 2003), who have stressed how títulos are both similar to yet different from colonial Spanish genres, including the probanza—an issue I revisit below.



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Figure 1. The Relación Geográfica Map of Tabasco (aka Alfaro Map; artist unknown; 1579). The map illustrates a geographical area that includes the Acalan region. Original map in the Archivo General de Indias, Seville (México 14). Image in the public domain. I am grateful to Amara Solari for leading me to this image.

Scholars have reconstructed some of the history through which the Chontal document and its translation were produced, including numerous translations and recopyings between 1567 and 1614 (Scholes and Roys 1968: vii, 359–66; Restall 1998: 55, 194–95n2–3). I briefly recount that history here to indicate what little we know about the people involved in these documents’ production and to emphasize the centrality of translation in their creation. The earliest written text tied to the Chontal título was a Nahuatl-language document likely written in 1567 that is no longer extant. It was translated into Chontal in July 1612 by Paxbolon (Restall


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1998: 194n1, 197n9) and recorded by “the native clerk of Tixchel” as the first part of the Chontal título (Scholes and Roys 1968: 360). That segment recounts the genealogy of Acalan’s rulers through the mid-sixteenth century; as indicated in its opening paragraph, the history was conveyed by two old men from Tixchel, presumably Chontal speakers. Thus the título itself seems to be the product of at least two translations: an oral Chontal narrative was first recorded in written Nahuatl; then it was translated and recorded in written Chontal as the first portion of a longer Chontal narrative. The título was sent to Campeche in 1612 (Restall 1998: 194n2). In December of that year, the Spanish translation was created by “two citizens of Campeche, who were said to be well versed in the Chontal language” and were likely native speakers of colonial-era Yucatec Maya (Scholes and Roys 1968: 366). The documents in the AGI are copies created in Mérida in 1614 “by a Spanish scribe” (360). Thus at a minimum, numerous acts of translation went into creating these documents, and the individuals producing them were linguistic and cultural intermediaries—figures like Paxbolon himself, who apparently spoke at least three languages and whose personal and family history positioned him at a discursive interface. The título recounts the history of how Paxbolon came to occupy that position. At the same time, the story it conveys—unlike narratives appearing in probanzas—is a collective one, retold in the service of shared rather than individual interests (Restall 1998: 56). The título gives a history of Acalan in the form of the ruling genealogy, beginning with the province’s founding and ending some ten generations later. A central episode in the narrative—which has garnered the greatest interest from historians—is the Chontal people’s initial encounter with the Spanish. It occurred in 1525, on Cortés’s famous march to Honduras; during that encounter, Cuauhtémoc—the son of the Aztec leader Moctezuma—was executed. Although subsequent engagements with the Spanish are portrayed as less pleasant, the initial encounter is presented as positive, with Chontal leaders in charge of their people’s fate. The título is “almost a Conquest narrative without a conquest” (Restall 1998: 29), a story about the onset of colonialism “without any apparent invasion” (Restall, Souza, and Terraciano 2005: 57). But even as the narrative alludes to the hardships of encomienda and reducción, it stresses local control, as the Chontal become active evangelizers and pacifiers of neighboring Maya populations. Before discussing the texts of the Title of Acalan-Tixchel in more detail, let me comment, briefly, on how I have accessed them. Although I have not consulted the originals in the AGI, I have consulted two reproductions: the Library of Congress’s microfiche copy of the Paxbolon-Maldonado Papers, and the facsimile of the Chontal document reproduced in Scholes and Roys’s



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first appendix. They also offer a transcription of the Spanish document and an English translation indicating some of the discrepancies between the two texts (1968: 359–405)—though as Restall notes (1998: 196n3), the differences are more substantial than they recognize. I thus triangulate by drawing on other sources. These include Restall’s translations of the Chontal document (1998: 58–76; Restall, Sousa, and Terraciano 2005: 56–61), his discussions of it (1998: 53–58, 2003b: 147–57), Ortwin Smailus’s morpheme- by-morpheme analysis of the Chontal text (1975), and my basic familiarity with modern Yucatec Maya. I follow Restall’s citation conventions for the Chontal text and cite from Scholes and Roys’s transcription for the Spanish version.6 Note that these authors, like most people working on these documents, focus primarily on the Chontal text, dealing less substantively with the Spanish translation. Smailus, for example, meticulously notes semantic differences between the texts but does not address their implications. This in itself helps to make my larger point about the ghostly presence of translation in the historiography of the conquest and early colonial period. While it is widely understood that translation is central to how colonial historical records were produced, quotidian translation practices and the translator-intermediaries who enacted them have rarely become objects of analysis in their own right. The Pragmatics of Colonial Genres: Contemplating the Role of Translation and Translators As is well known, translation requires attention not just to the semantics or to the referential content of a given text: those realities, past or present, to which it refers. Translation also requires addressing the pragmatic features of texts: the audiences to which they are directed, their purposes and uses, and the particular ways of using language that are appropriate in furthering those goals. Balancing the semantic and pragmatic elements of a translation is a crucial part of translators’ work. This is why, for example, one common complaint about translations is that they are “slavish” or “too literal”—meaning they have privileged a text’s semantic or referential content over its pragmatic aspects, in the process losing a sense of those meanings rooted in the text’s use. The opposite critique is launched when translations are deemed “too free”: translators trying to capture a sense of the text’s pragmatic elements have allowed the translation to become unmoored from the original’s semantic content. In this and the next section, I consider each of these aspects of translation in turn but stress that they are deeply interrelated; while separable analytically, they are firmly linked in practice. I begin with the pragmatic aspects of text and translation, which,


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though anchored in how texts are used, are crystallized in aspects of form and structure. These formal properties coalesce around a bundle of features most easily recognizable as genre. For some time now, colonial ethnohistorians have found genre useful in making sense of divisions within the documentary record (e.g., see Knowlton 2015, this issue; Bricker 2015, this issue). Genre has been particularly useful in thinking through how the interactive dimensions of colonial contact and interaction—as well as the introduction and institutionalization of political and racial hierarchies—are made manifest in the historical record. Attention to constellations of genres—as well as to the ambivalent or syncretic forms that violate the boundaries between them—has been a crucial focus. Genres and hybrid variants are a central theme in older works by Louise Burkhart (1989) and more recent ones by Hanks (2010). Particularly relevant to the texts discussed here is Restall’s discussion of colonial Yucatec genres (1998: 55–58). As many scholars working on genres have observed, the development and use of hybrid genres have implications for the people attached to them. This makes attention to genre particularly relevant to the aforementioned approach now coalescing around attention to Indios conquistadores and other middlemen, those “Janus-faced” intermediaries whose work and social position are “systematically ambivalent” (Hanks 2010: 21). However, the role that translation practices play in the creation of hybrid genres—or in their rejection, through the reinscription of ostensibly “pure” forms—has been a less central focus. Yet both in general and in the case discussed here, translation was central to the process by which colonial documents were produced; translators played a crucial role in navigating competing linguistic and discursive norms, including those defining genres. Thus translators, through habitual practice, would surely play a key if unpredictable role in hybridizing—or purifying—genres. In the service of encouraging others to treat these practical, quotidian dimensions of translation as a fruitful site for research, I turn to a contemplation of how translation practices and habits might have shaped both the Chontal and Spanish versions of the Title of Acalan-Tixchel, particularly those aspects that appear to be hybrid forms of colonial documentary genres. As we have seen, the Chontal text is in dialogue with at least two colonial genres: probanzas de méritos and títulos primordiales. There are also other pragmatic forms potentially in play if we read all colonial genres, however codified, as hybrids of earlier genres. For títulos primordiales, this would mean such pre-Hispanic precedents as Mayan hieroglyphic texts, whose hallmarks are “a tradition of political propaganda, dynastic promotion, and community-centrism” (Restall 1998: 57). But even if we take pro-



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banzas and títulos to be stable, discrete genres, we see that the Chontal text draws upon the norms from both. Allegiance to the generic conventions of probanzas is visible, for example, in the rhetorical strategy of highlighting the Chontals’ status as Spanish allies through a history of supportive acts. These begin with how Cortes’s men were fed and sheltered on their initial visit,7 and culminate in Paxbolon and Maldonado’s evangelizing missions.8 At the same time, the text’s rhetorical strategy reflects título norms. Though the collaborative activities described in the text built a case for royal favor, they are positioned structurally within a narrative recounting the genealogy of the ruling lineage. A similar tension marks the way in which crucial events involving Cortés and Cuauhtémoc are retold. Here, too, the ruler clearly allies himself with the Spanish; he even informs Cortés of Cuauhtémoc’s treasonous plans.9 Yet pivotal though the event may have been as evidence for royal support, it is positioned structurally as but one of many events taking place over time in Acalan. Chontal history precedes, absorbs, and survives the one event taking place in their lands—Cuauhtémoc’s execution—that has so fascinated historians. This strategy—in which indigenous elites incorporate a first-conquest encounter into the stream of local history while simultaneously giving the event a positive spin—has been widely documented by scholars (e.g., Diel 2008, Haskett 2005; Schroeder, 2010; Wood 2003). Here, the text’s synthesis of both genres is enabled by the congruence between their respective animating agendas, which align around partisan self-interest. Yet they also diverge on the matter of which entity is being promoted—as Restall discusses, it is the “individual . . . or his descendants” for probanzas and “the native community” for títulos (1998: 56). Stressing one or the other would have significant implications for such issues as the rhetorical construction of authority and the use of history to bolster legitimacy—competing demands that people had to navigate in practice as they created initial documents and as they reassembled and invariably recast them through myriad acts of translation. Pragmatic bivalence can also be found elsewhere in the Chontal text. I will briefly discuss two types, concerning how reported speech and pronouns are each used in the text. With respect to the first, I focus on the section recounting Cortés’s passage through Acalan. It is replete with reported speech: Cuauhtémoc’s only crime is treasonous speech; the only evidence against him consists of Paxbolonacha’s reporting of that speech;10 and though this episode constitutes just under 15 percent of the text, almost half of the direct quotes in the entire document appear in this segment.11 Reported speech does important work in both probanzas and títulos, but


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the genres privilege speech differently. Following broader Spanish legal conventions, probanzas stress the speech of individuals deemed trustworthy, who can offer testimony relevant in building a case for royal favor. Títulos, on the other hand, stress the deeds—including the speech acts—of nobles. In the Chontal text, the social identities of those deemed eligible for direct quotation shift over the course of the narrative. In the segment narrating the past through the initial contact period, only the speech of elites is reported: indigenous nobles and Spanish leaders (Cortés and the first friars). However, in the portion recounting Paxbolon’s deeds, those quoted include nonnobles whose knowledge qualifies them to speak in support of Paxbolon’s meritorious acts. Pronoun usage in the text is also suggestive. Pronouns are used to create a tripartite division of the social landscape: an unmarked “us” denoting “Christian Chontal Indians allied with the Spanish”; the marked category of “Spaniard” (or “Castilian,” e.g.);12 and another marked category, “them,” denoting unconverted Maya,13 which Restall translates as people who “had not yet destroyed and finished with listening to the words of their yakinob [priest]” (1998: 65). Throughout the text, pronouns are coupled to other social categories that, combined, establish a particular “social deixis” (Hanks 2010), one marking alliance between the Spanish and the Christian Chontal and distance between them and non-Christian Indians. This strategy becomes particularly salient where linked to the presentation of speech norms. In several places, the narrative recounts consensus-building events, where action by ahauob (principales, or nobles) cannot be taken until after collective discussion.14 Similarly, initial interactions with the Spanish are presented as consensus-building negotiations among mutual allies— even as those norms are later undermined when the returning Spanish imprison members of the ruling lineage and subject the people to tribute.15 Following that event, however, the narrative again resumes the strategy of closing the social gap between the Spanish and the Chontal while widening it between themselves and other Indians. Particularly as Paxbolon’s evangelizing campaigns escalate, the unconverted Maya are identified using negative terms perhaps best glossed as “refugees.”16 This rhetorical strategy of marking alliance with Spaniards and distance from unconverted Indians—like the one in which conquest encounters are positively recast and folded into local histories—is part of a widespread pattern. Scholars drawing on both alphabetic and pictorial sources have observed that indigenous groups across Mexico used similar strategies during the colonial period (e.g, Asselbergs 2005; Diel 2008; Yannakakis 2008, 2011; Matthew 2012; Matthew and Oudijk 2007). What this case foregrounds, however, are the pragmatic dimensions of that positioning:



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these strategies rely on deploying specific linguistic resources within particular genres. Yet as discussed below, the effects achieved by those rhetorical strategies are contingent upon context and thus are at the mercy of subsequent recontextualizations and reframings. Nowhere does this vulnerability come more fully into focus than when a text is translated. Translation: Comparing the Chontal and Spanish Versions In this section, I examine the mechanics of a particular act of translation, as the Title of Acalan-Tixchel was translated into Spanish and went on to lend its support for the Paxbolon-Maldono petition. In contrast to the above focus on pragmatics, here I focus, at least initially, on semantics: how changes made in translating the Chontal text changed its meaning. But as I show, semantic changes can have pragmatic effects. This links the shifts I discuss here to the pragmatic dimensions of the Title discussed in the previous section. The value of this exercise lies not in its representativeness or comprehensiveness—this is but one of millions of translations made in the colonial era. In fact, it is just one of the many translations bringing the Title of Acalan-Tixchel itself into being. Rather, this approach offers a glimpse of what deeper engagement with translation as quotidian practice might offer ethnohistorians working in contexts where, like colonial Mexico, translation is so pervasive—so woven into the fabric of social context—that it can become invisible as an analytic site. The Spanish translation differs systematically from the Chontal original in several revealing ways. I will confine myself to six changes that appear to be either systematic or suggestive of colonial social dynamics more broadly. The first concerns how the stated purpose of the Chontal text was subtly but significantly recast in the translation. According to the Chontal Title, the document was produced for these reasons: “To collect the statements of the elders, because he [Paxbolon] wished to hear of, and wished to know of, his origins and those of his grandfathers and fathers, lords a long time ago. . . [and] in the presence of the principal men . . . to read it before them so that they heard of the origin, region, and people of Don Pablo Paxbolon.”17 The explicit aim in the Chontal version becomes recast in the Spanish version as one of recording Paxbolon’s descendencia y genealogía, “descent and genealogy” (Scholes and Roys 1968: 369). This semantic shift, while subtle, neutralizes the rhetorical claim to authority in the original text. Furthermore, the amendment points to larger disjunctions between Spanish and Indian agendas. Another of the text’s goals is establishment of the legitimacy of Paxbolon as ruler or “governor.” While the Chontal original states the goal


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explicitly, the Spanish translation renders it implicit, subordinate to Paxbolon’s own subordination as a loyal subject of the Spanish monarch. Second, the Spanish translation tends to collapse the Chontal social hierarchy. In the Chontal text, two terms—nuc uinic(ob) and ahau(ob)—are used to distinguish different groups among the Chontal elite. In the Spanish version, both are glossed with the same Spanish term, principales (principal men)—even though the two are socially discrete categories, with the first being inferior to the second. Restall, for example, glosses the first as “officer(s)” and the second as “ruler(s)” (1998: 64, 63). An analogous discrepancy concerns the Spaniards’ second visit to Acalan, when the Spanish are markedly more authoritarian. The Chontal text refers to “the principles and leaders of the Castilian men” (Restall 1998: 65).18 This phrase appears in the Spanish version as the men que eran las cabezas y mayores (Scholes and Roys 1968: 373, my emphasis), omitting the crucial possessive phrase. Whereas the Chontal version suggests the leaders belong to a separate Spanish system, the Spanish version posits their status as universal, applying to Spaniards and Indians alike. Third, in several places the Spanish translation exhibits a tendency to totalize what the Chontal text leaves indefinite in terms of quantity. I offer two examples to demonstrate this broader trend. In the Chontal text, Cuauhtémoc plots to “kill the Spaniards”; in the Spanish he schemes to “kill all the Spaniards” (Scholes and Roys 1968: 372).19 While the semantic shift here is small, it magnifies the severity of Cuauhtémoc’s crime. A more dramatic example concerns the Chontals’ initial conversion to Christianity. In the Chontal text, the event is described efficiently: “And thus they entered Christianity” (ibid.: 395).20 This becomes, in the Spanish translation, “Y así fueron entrado la cristianidad todos, chicos y grandes, que no quedó ninguno” (And thus everyone, young and old, entered Christianity without there being anyone lacking [Scholes and Roys 1968: 373]). Obviously, this is a glaring alteration of the original text. In the Spanish version, the translator claims a new basis of authority for the Spanish: they control the Indians not only by secular domination but also by overwhelming religious supremacy. A fourth discrepancy concerns what we might call practices of reference: referents that in the Chontal original appear as proper names become labels indicating social status in the Spanish translation. The Chontal text exhibits a pervasive exuberance for listing proper names. This is consistent with título generic conventions calling for documenting the succession of rulers. In contrast, the Spanish translation tends to excise proper names or to substitute them with labels. This is consonant with the emphasis on status underlying the genre of probanzas. The importance placed on proper names by the Chontal is also evident in the text’s content: the enthusiasm



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with which the Chontal embrace Christian conversion and especially the accompanying renaming practices. Given the other hybrid aspects of the document, it is suggestive that the only person who is not referred to in the Chontal original by his proper name but rather by a label is Cortés, who appears as el capitán or Capitán del Valle (e.g., Restall 1998: 62).21 Place names are another site where there are systematic discrepancies between the versions. In the Chontal, people refer to themselves as Mactun and the region where they live as Tamactun. Yet the Nahuatl name, Acalan, is routinely included as well, as is the Spanish term Chontal, used to denote both the people and the place. The Spanish translation, on the other hand, adds the Spanish word Chontal wherever it is absent, and at times excises the indigenous names (Mactun or Tamactun, though not Acalan), in addition to omitting other Chontal-language names. This difference points to the hierarchy of languages in the contact situation but also to the Chontals’ relative comfort with linguistic diversity. The region’s history included large-scale in-migration by Nahuatl-speaking and later Maya-speaking peoples, and was long immersed in extensive long-distance trade that imported not only material but also linguistic diversity (Jones 1989). Fifth, the Chontal and Spanish versions characterize the trajectory of Spanish-Chontal relations in different ways, particularly in the period following the Spaniards’ second visit to Acalan. From that period forward, the Chontal are depicted as increasingly subject to colonial oversight once “given in encomienda” (Smailus 1975: 88, preserving the passive voice). They become subject to an unpredictable tribute schedule, which is later codified and regularized—but only as a result of Spanish rather than Chontal actions. A particularly revealing difference occurs in the passage describing the event that follows, when the people are relocated, via reducción, to the neighboring region of Tixchel. In the Spanish version, this is couched in terms of indigenous agency, implying that the Chontal responded to the priest’s (reasonable) suggestion that it would be “more convenient if they were based in Tixchel.”22 In the Chontal, however, no such pretense is made: the priest “told the people that they should go to Tixchel.”23 It is worth emphasizing how the Spanish translation, by recasting the Title’s original meaning, shifts the overall depiction of indigenous agency. We have already seen that the narrative arc of the Title depicts eroding agency, as the Chontal become subject to colonial rule. Following their reducción, the Chontal become more agentive again, through Paxbolon’s evangelizing missions; yet his actions remain circumscribed and mandated by Spanish colonial authorities. Thus the preservation of indigenous control so central to the Cortés episode finally gives way to a lack of agency, only partially reversed by Paxbolon’s strategic alliance with Spanish offi-


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cials. In some ways, two narratives of Acalan history seem to be fighting for dominance. One narrative appears politically neutral, depicting a history of Spanish-Chontal engagements wherein interactive norms are established, violated, and replaced by new ones. The other narrative is more sharply political, recounting a history of declining autonomy wherein an earlier era of indigenous agency—forged from negotiation and consensus— is replaced by strategic compliance. As some of the examples given above demonstrate, the Spanish translation tends to mobilize the former narrative while the Chontal original tends to activate the latter, presenting the Chontal’s declining agency more starkly. The differences in pronoun usage mentioned above participate in this dynamic as well, though in this case translation produces the opposite effect. The overall rhetorical structure of the Chontal text and how pronouns are used within it tend to close the social gap between the Spanish and the Christian Chontal, widening the divide between them and unconverted Maya. In contrast, differences in pronoun use in the Spanish translation shift those relations in the opposite direction, tending to align the Chontal with other Indians while distancing them from the Spanish. Two final examples demonstrate similar effects. According to the Title, Paxbolon’s father, on his deathbed, exhorts the people to convert to Christianity and to give themselves to “another God.”24 This noun appears in the Chontal as singular and proper. In the Spanish version it is translated as otros dioses, in the plural and generic form characteristic of idolatrous belief (Scholes and Roys 1968: 374). A similar reframing occurs in Cuauhtémoc’s plea to the Chontal ruler to join his plot against the Spanish. The ruler is addressed in the second person (“you”) in the Chontal (TAT: 72v), first person plural (“we”/“us”) in the Spanish (Scholes and Roys 1968: 372). This is a subtle semantic shift but one that creates, in the Spanish version, a metacommunicative alliance between the two leaders that does not exist in the original Chontal text. Individually, each of the assorted changes introduced by the Spanish translation is small and subtle. These amendments might not even have registered as significant by the people producing them. This is especially likely to be the case if we position these changes in the context of translators’ daily practice and busy lives, where the work of scribes and translators can be shaped by unconscious assumptions, habitual practice, and emergent demands. These practical, mechanical dimensions of translations and how they are produced become tangible, for a moment, if we consider that several pages of the Chontal text were lost when a notary evidently failed to copy them; that section of narrative survived only because it was reproduced in the Spanish translation (see note 17). Yet collectively, these



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changes amount to a more substantial recasting of the Title’s meaning, distorting it yet also creating it anew, revalencing the world inside the narrative while remaking the social universe surrounding it. Conclusion: Toward an Ethnohistory of Translators and Translation in Practice Translations—and the people who create them—by definition work at linguistic and cultural boundaries; translation and translators played a central role in making the colonial project possible. Thus translation practices and the translators who enact them constitute a privileged site for exploring the nature of colonial linguistic and cultural boundaries. Making them the focus of research includes examining how translation is implicated in the ways in which boundaries are erected by politically powerful people and institutions.26 But that inquiry would also entail considering how social divisions are negotiated, shifted, and even subverted through the actions of daily life. Of course, in this case, the very existence of the Spanish translation indexes a profound linguistic asymmetry: in the context of colonial Acalan, texts written in Spanish did not require translations while those in indigenous languages often did. Yet acknowledging that political context should not prevent us from engaging with the fullness of translation as practice, leaving open to investigation what translations do in addition to reinscribing existing hierarchies of power. For example, in case of the Title of Acalan-Tixchel, the Spanish translation played an instrumental role in recovering lost meaning: it provides the only version we have for one segment of the narrative. That particular situation was highly contingent—a distracted notary makes a mistake one day at work, and decades of collective history nearly vanish from the documentary record. Yet it can nevertheless serve as a metaphor for the creative possibilities of translation, its potential to generate rather than merely distort meaning. This case study may contribute in a small way to how we understand the conquest and earlier colonial period in Mexico. But its greater value, I think, lies in its potential to issue an invitation for other researchers to take translators and translation-as-practice as an entry point for new research. Some of the barriers standing in the way of doing so are obvious. Translators are common to contexts that, like colonial Mexico, are marked by high levels of cultural and linguistic diversity. Research based on studying them depends upon having specialized skills, such as paleographic training or expanded linguistic abilities that make it possible to conduct research in linguistic borderlands. Furthermore, my discussion here stands to push yet another methodological hurdle to the fore by calling for an engagement


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with translation in its full complexity. This substantive engagement with translation practices requires us, I have argued here, to foster joint attention to both the pragmatic and semantic dimensions of translations. That means, in turn, attending not only to how translators’ work involves carrying referential content across discursive boundaries but also to how translations bridge dimensions of lived practice. Finally, analyzing quotidian translation practices also requires engaging with ideological matters, since ideological allegiances guide the way in which translators navigate the tension between the semantics and pragmatics of translation. An examination of these issues returns us to consideration of translators as transdiscursive agents, who operate within particular ideological frameworks that shape the translations they produce. For the Title of Acalan-Tixchel and its contemporary Spanish translation, we know very little about the translators involved and even less about the ideological orientations informing their translation choices and habits. This makes it risky, I think, to ascribe intentions to those translators—to read the significant discrepancies between the Chontal original and the Spanish translation as motivated, say, by personal interest or political factionalism. This is not to say, however, that translators are not animated by those factors and others besides. Rather, this awareness elicits an appeal for further research about translators and about how the complex social webs in which they live influence the translations they create. At the same time, the absence of such information about translators and their translation practices encourages us to shift our focus away from the motives and habits of particular translators and toward how their translations are wrapped up in making and remaking discursive worlds. Focusing on the productivity of translation reminds us that however necessary it is, translation can also be instrumental; and that however pervasive it is, we should not take it for granted. Notes I am indebted to numerous people for helping to make this article possible, but especially to Nancy Farriss, under whose guidance I first began this endeavor; Matthew Restall, who provided invaluable guidance, encouragement, and substantive help as I was writing and revising it; and Katie Sampeck, who invited this piece to join her fine collection despite having been through a separate review and revision process. I also thank others who commented on earlier drafts, including Tom Cummins, Bianca Dahl, Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Rob Hamrick, Bill Hanks, Tamar Herzog, Robert Hill, Steve Houston, Webb Keane, Paul Kockelman, Jessa Leinaweaver, John Lucy, Sabine MacCormack, Bruce Mannheim, Laura Matthew, Judith Maxwell, Magnus Pharao-Hansen, Garbiela Ramos, Joanne Rappaport, Sergio Romero, Becky Schulthies, Robin Shoaps, Amara Solari, Dan Suslak, David Tavárez, Gary



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Tomlinson, Greg Urban, Yanna Yannakakis, and four anonymous reviewers. In addition, I received helpful feedback from audience members at the various venues where I presented research related to the article, including the University of Chicago Colonial Latin American Workshop, the Colonial Dialogues Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania, the Colonial Mesoamerican Literacy Conference at the John Carter Brown Library, and annual meetings of both the Society for Ethnohistory and the American Anthropological Association. 1 See, e.g., Victoria R. Bricker 2015 (this issue), on how orthographic variability relates to linguistic difference. 2 Paxbolon-Maldonado Papers, Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Mexico 138. 3 However, though they share much, earlier and more recent ethnohistoric approaches also differ significantly. For example, for a difference of opinion pertaining to the texts discussed here, see Matthew Restall 2003b: 191n7 and France V. Scholes and Ralph L. Roys 1968: 119, 121. 4 Chi is one of the most widely discussed indigenous figures in colonial Mesoamerican literature (e.g., Hanks 2010: 11; Farriss 1984: 97; Solari 2009: 47; Scholes and Roys 1968: 383; Restall 1998: 144–50; 2002; 2003b: 88). 5 See Amara Solari 2009 for a discussion of the accompanying map, the Relación Geográfica Map of Tabasco, which includes the Acalan region. The original map and the textual account that accompanied it are both located in the AGI, with the map in Mapas y PIanos, Mexico, N. 14, and the text in Indiferente, 1530, N. 5. A copy of the map also appeared in the Scholes and Roys volume (1968: facing 16; for a discussion of the map, see 16). On the political geography of Acalan, see Ana Luisa Izquierdo 1997. 6 That is, I abbreviate the source—Title of Acalan-Tixchel—as he does (TAT), followed by the folio number, verified against the Scholes and Roys facsimile (1968: following 366) and Restall’s translation. See Restall 1998: 197n8 for a fuller description. 7 TAT: 72r. 8 Ibid.: 75v–76v. 9 The rhetorical agency animating the Chontal text is further highlighted when it is compared to the three other extant accounts of the same event, by Cortés himself ([1522–25] 1993: 563), by the chronicler Díaz del Castillo (1982: 449), and by Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1891–92: 295). None credits Paxbolonacha or any Acalan native with informing on Cuauhtémoc. See Restall 2003b: 147–57 for a discussion. 10 TAT: 73r. 11 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that the conversation purportedly taking place between Paxbolonacha and Cuauhtémoc would likely have occurred in Nahuatl. Not only does bearing this in mind make visible the multilingual character of early colonial New Spain that is sometimes lost in received narratives about it, but doing so foregrounds, yet again, the importance of translation in this context. 12 TAT: 70v. 13 Ibid.: 74r. 14 Ibid.: 71v–72r. 15 Ibid.: 73r. 16 Most of these occur in a section of the narrative available to us only in Span-


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ish; the notary who copied the documents in 1612 apparently omitted several pages from the Chontal text that were included in the Spanish translation. In the Spanish-only portion, the terms used are cimarrones or cimarrones idólatras (Scholes and Roys 1968: 378–80), “idolatrous refugees” (or “runaways”). Although we do not know what the original Chontal phrases were, Restall notes that a pecheob, which he glosses as “refugees,” was used later in the Title (1998: 201n48). 17 TAT: 69v, 70v. The English translation here is Restall’s (1998: 58, 60). 18 Ibid.: 73r. Smailus translates the Chontal as “eran los grandes, los que principalmente llevaban la palabra entre los españoles” (1975: 66). 19 My translation and emphasis. The Spanish translation reads: “matar a todos los españoles” (Scholes and Roys 1968: 372); note that Smailus does not offer a translation of this passage from the Chontal original. 20 Smailus translates this as “Así ingresaron en el cristianismo” (1975: 84). 21 TAT: 72r. 22 Fray Diego de Pesquera . . . les trató como convenía que se bajasen a Tischel (Scholes and Roys 1968: 376). 23 TAT: 75v. “Fray Diego de Pesquera . . . dijó que el pueblo debía irse para Tixchel” (Smailus 1975: 93). Compare with Restall: “They moved them there to Tixchel” (1998: 69). 24 TAT: 73v. 25 For other work on the political aspects of translation, see Judith M. Maxwell 2015 (this issue).

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