Testaments written in their own language, Nahuatl, have been crucial for reconstructing the everyday life of the indigenous people of central Mexico after Spanish contact. Those published to date have largely been from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Testaments of Toluca presents a large body of Nahuatl wills (98) from 1652 to 1783 from an important valley not much studied, thus greatly enlarging our perspective on the evolution of indigenous society and culture in central Mexico. Each testament is transcribed, translated, and accompanied by a commentary on the testator's situation and on interesting terminology. A substantial introductory study fully analyzes the testamentary genre as seen in this corpus (a first) and summarizes the content of the documents in realms such as gender, kinship, household, and land. Wills are very human documents, and the apparatus draws out this aspect, telling us much of local indigenous life in central Mexico in the third century after Spanish contact, so that the book is of potential interest to a broad spectrum of readers.
Testaments written in their own language, Nahuatl, have been crucial for reconstructing the everyday life of the indigenous people of central Mexico after Spanish contact. Those published to date have largely been from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Testaments of Toluca presents a large body of Nahuatl wills (98) from 1652 to 1783 from an important valley not much studied, thus greatly enlarging our perspective on the evolution of indigenous society and culture in central Mexico. Each testament is transcribed, translated, and accompanied by a commentary on the testator's situation and on interesting terminology. A substantial introductory study fully analyzes the testamentary genre as seen in this corpus (a first) and summarizes the content of the documents in realms such as gender, kinship, household, and land. Wills are very human documents, and the apparatus draws out this aspect, telling us much of local indigenous life in central Mexico in the third century after Spanish contact, so that the book is of potential interest to a broad spectrum of readers.
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Testaments written in their own language, Nahuatl, have been crucial for reconstructing the everyday life of the indigenous people of central Mexico after Spanish contact. Those published to date have largely been from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Testaments of Toluca presents a large body of Nahuatl wills (98) from 1652 to 1783 from an important valley not much studied, thus greatly enlarging our perspective on the evolution of indigenous society and culture in central Mexico. Each testament is transcribed, translated, and accompanied by a commentary on the testator's situation and on interesting terminology. A substantial introductory study fully analyzes the testamentary genre as seen in this corpus (a first) and summarizes the content of the documents in realms such as gender, kinship, household, and land. Wills are very human documents, and the apparatus draws out this aspect, telling us much of local indigenous life in central Mexico in the third century after Spanish contact, so that the book is of potential interest to a broad spectrum of readers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804768252 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/14/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 189 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Testaments of Toluca
By Caterina Pizzigoni
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6825-2
CHAPTER 1
Characteristics of the Corpus
ONCE THE CORPUS of available Nahuatl testaments from the Toluca Valley was narrowed to the 98 included in the present collection, the parallels with the Testaments of Culhuacan became clearer, as well as a number of very significant differences. It is in relation to the Culhuacan testaments that one can get a first appreciation of the nature of the body of documents employed here and of the significance of the present publication. The present corpus is considerably larger (including informative but unfinished wills, there are about 60 in the Culhuacan collection), but each one is large enough to demonstrate significant patterns. The Culhuacan documents are from the Valley of Mexico, the Toluca materials from the first major valley to the west, still in the central area of the country but a bit more removed from the capital. The Culhuacan documents are dated ca. 1580, in the heart of a hundred years of evolution that are sometimes called Stage 2, whereas the Toluca materials are from later, the second half of the seventeenth and above all the eighteenth centuries, falling into Stage 3. Temporal comparisons between the two bodies of documents are called for, especially since the later period is still less studied in terms of such documents than the earlier.
A strength of the Culhuacan testaments is that they were a unified collection from their very inception. The corpus here was assembled from scattered sources, but through concentration on certain areas, much of the same unity was achieved, and at the same time, spreading over a much longer period and containing documents from a variety of places, the present corpus allows study of temporal and regional variation within its own quite broad boundaries of time and space. Aspects such as patterns of possession and inheritance, funeral practices, and many others can be tested in multiple localities and over several decades. Cultural subareas can be discerned as well as unities across the larger region, and even the idiosyncrasies of some individual tlaxilacalli can be studied. The Culhuacan collection, with so many wills made in the same year in the same altepetl, contains several invaluable clusters of wills by relatives. But the documentation in this volume, as a result of the regional concentration and the archival practice of including several wills in the same dossier, also contains clusters, and in fact even more of them. Reconstructing the clusters has been a sort of detective work that was both difficult and fascinating. Some of the associated wills were in the same dossiers, but others were not, and it was only by recognizing internal crossreferences that many could be identified. I wish I could convey to the reader the sense of successful puzzle solving, of reality, that I felt as one after another of the clusters emerged, sometimes from the merest hints at first, and I hope that the reader too can have that experience in studying them in this book.
Chronology
LET US EXAMINE some of the prime characteristics of the corpus in more detail, starting with the chronological framework. At the same time it is necessary to say something about the regional distribution, to which I will devote more space below. Briefly, the corpus is divided into two main parts regionally, first Toluca proper with its immediate surroundings, and second the area of the double altepetl Calimaya/Tepemaxalco; discussion of temporal distribution in the collection must take this regional division into account. Overall, the testaments concentrate in the eighteenth century up until 1763; there is only one document from later (1783). Far fewer, just 10 of the 98, come from the second half of the seventeenth century (from 1652 to 1699); nevertheless, they are crucial in defining evolution over a longer time and in distinguishing the eighteenth century from what preceded it, identifying the changes that took place later. Many of the testaments concentrate in specific years, particularly 1737, 1759 — 60, and 1762. Although a large number of variables have been involved in the preservation of testaments and their appearance in this volume, it does seem that these concentrations correspond to years in which more people died as a result of epidemics (smallpox in 1737, matlaçahuatl [typhus] in 1762).
The table on p. 5 gives the number of testaments in the present corpus by decade for the Toluca area and Calimaya/Tepemaxalco, with totals.
The testaments from Toluca proper are in the main from relatively early in the eighteenth century, concentrating around the decade of the 1730s, with 10 in the first three decades and only 2 as late as the 1750s. The majority of the testaments from Calimaya /Tepemaxalco, 35 out of 60, concentrate in the 1750s and 1760s; indeed, 31 of them are from the short period 1758 — 63. Thus the reader of the book may form the impression that the coverage for the Toluca area is mainly earlier than for Calimaya/ Tepemaxalco. In a sense that is true, but note also that the latter group actually has more seventeenth-century wills than Toluca and displays a reasonable selection from the first half of the eighteenth as well, 18, concentrating in the 1730s just as in Toluca proper.
The division between seventeenth and eighteenth century in this context seems meaningful to me, and surely there are several phenomena which can be detected primarily only in one or the other. Yet I have also noticed that the documents of the 1690s share much with those of the first decade or two of the next century, and further that the numbers pick up with that decade. One way to look at the matter would be that the "early eighteenth century," and the core of the corpus, begins with the 1690s.
Temporal patterns of change will be discussed below in a number of specific categories of interest. Here let me make a more general remark about the temporal patterning that can be discerned because of the relatively even distribution of the documents over more than a hundred years. All of the documents in the corpus fall within Stage 3 as generally conceived, that is, after the dividing line of 1640 or 1650. To a great extent all belong to that stage linguistically and in other ways. From the beginning, for example, they contain loanwords for close kin like siblings and nieces/nephews. But the three stages of postconquest Nahua evolution have not yet been defined closely, year by year, in many categories, or within specific regions. What is seen in the present corpus is that many facets often thought of as characteristic of Stage 2 persist in the Toluca Valley, at least to some degree, through most of the seventeenth century and are still present in certain documents even in the first couple of decades of the eighteenth.
Regional distribution, sociopolitical organization, and order
FOR CONSIDERATIONS of time and space, it was not possible to put the entire approximately 200 testaments collected from the Toluca region in a single volume. My choice, as already mentioned, was to concentrate on two main areas. First, the immediate area of Toluca (38 testaments), including Toluca proper with its constituent tlaxilacalli, as well as the tlaxilacalli that surrounded it and were in some way associated with it. Second, the double altepetl of Calimaya/Tepemaxalco (60 testaments), to the south of Toluca in the Valley, half way between Metepec and Tenango del Valle. The areas were chosen not for any preconceived attributes but because they delivered the largest concentrations of documents, and so many important cultural elements can be studied when there is a sufficient supply of texts from the same places, with related people and practices, and the same notaries. The testaments from the Toluca area mainly correspond to holdings of the AHAM that were collected by myself, while those from Calimaya/Tepemaxalco are principally from the AGN and were collected primarily by Stephanie Wood.
In the early stages of my Toluca project it was far from my mind that I might discover significant cultural differences between the subareas of the Toluca Valley. In my dissertation, based more on the materials from Toluca proper, I tended to assume that what I was finding was common to the whole valley at that time. Now, after close work with documents from both subareas, I realize that although there are many significant commonalities, the two also constitute distinct cultural regions in some quite important respects, and that some of the interesting things I found in Toluca were entirely absent in Calimaya/Tepemaxalco; some features of the latter were also missing in the former. The result is a more differentiated picture of evolution and an opportunity for fascinating comparisons within a regional setting. I will point out many below, but I am sure that additional distinctions remain to be discovered, and I also imagine that there were other cultural subareas in the valley.
With the documents for the volume once identified and grouped into the two different areas, the question arose of how to order them logically and usefully in the book, a matter naturally related to their organization in actuality, so that I will discuss the two things at the same time. To an extent I have followed Nahua sociopolitical principles (and indeed, if all the relevant information were available, I would have followed them much more closely). The large categories are based on the altepetl and the secondary categories on the tlaxilacalli that compose them. I immediately faced problems in that the organization of the altepetl of Toluca is not well studied, whereas Calimaya and Tepemaxalco are a complex, interwoven double altepetl, somewhat better studied but still mysterious, and sometimes it is not clear which of the larger entities a given tlaxilacalli belongs to.
I started with Toluca, the largest population center of the valley and the hub of its economy. Works on the area, based entirely on Spanish sources it seems, make a distinction between tlaxilacalli that they call barrios of Toluca and other tlaxilacalli more outlying but somehow still associated with Toluca. I followed this order, putting first the "barrios" (15 wills) and then all the other testaments belonging to the area (23). The individual tlaxilacalli in both groups come in a random order here, because nothing is presently known about their order of precedence or rotation, and the works do not even always agree about which category a given entity belongs in. In the wills themselves there is very little to document the existence of two categories. Nearly all of the documents name the tlaxilacalli only and no larger entity. In both of them testators often have church bells rung for them (not a known practice in Calimaya/Tepemaxalco), and in both they are often buried at the huei teopan, "the great church," apparently meaning the establishment built by the Franciscans on the main square of Toluca city.
As for Calimaya/Tepemaxalco, in this case too much information is lacking about internal organization. The two were paired altepetl sharing the same basic territory, and also the same parish and central church, but they had separate sets of tlaxilacalli, separate cabildos and separate governors. We have virtually no knowledge of exactly how the territories of the two related to each other. We do know that both had various tlaxilacalli in the central settlement cluster now known as Calimaya. In one case, it is known that an outlying Calimaya tlaxilacalli, San Antonio de Padua (la Isla), was the northern part of a single cluster, San Lucas Evangelista (Tepemaxalco) the southern.
It is strongly to be presumed that Calimaya was the senior of the two. Not only did it ultimately give its name to the whole, but the patron saints were San Pedro for Calimaya, coming first, and San Pablo for Tepemaxalco, coming second. San Antonio is today much larger and more prosperous than the adjoining San Lucas and has a much bigger and more luxurious eighteenth-century church. Yet no explicit, conclusive information is available about the order of the two altepetl. Even being aware of the fact that Calimaya is no doubt senior, I have put Tepemaxalco first in the volume because there are many more documents from there (31 against 18 from Calimaya), and because, as we will see, its internal order is better understood. There are some cases in which it is not certain whether a tlaxilacalli belongs to Calimaya or Tepemaxalco, and these documents have been placed at the end of the book (11 wills).
A set of tribute lists extant for Tepemaxalco from 1658 to 1665 allows a certain insight into the internal organization of that altepetl, for not only do the lists go by tlaxilacalli, their order is unvarying from one list to the next, just as in traditional Nahua sociopolitical organization. Also traditional is the fact that there are exactly eight tlaxilacalli. They are as follows:
1. Teocaltitlan Tlatocapan (also sometimes called Teopanquiyahuac)
2. Pasiontitlan
3. San Francisco Pochtlan
4. Tlatocapan
5. Mexicapan
6. San Lucas (Evangelista)
7. Santa María de la Asunción
8. Santiago
Not all of these actually appear among the tlaxilacalli of the testaments in the present corpus (Pasiontitlan, San Lucas, and Santa María are definitely represented, with a reference in one will to Pochtlan), and one Tepemaxalco tlaxilacalli in the corpus, San Juan Bautista Yancuictlalpan, is not on the tribute list. Nevertheless, I have followed the order as far as it is applicable, putting the wills from the missing tlaxilacalli last. In the corpus there appear some wills from an entity called Santiago Apóstol Quaxochtenco. It is conceivable that this is the eighth tlaxilacalli of Tepemaxalco. In dossiers it is identified as belonging to the larger Calimaya parish (which does not exclude Tepemaxalco), but since the modifying words Apóstol and Quaxochtenco are very prominent in the wills and their dossiers, and they are entirely lacking in the tribute lists, I have classified Santiago Apóstol Quaxochtenco for now as uncertain between Calimaya and Tepemaxalco.
Working with the corpus has made me aware of a distinction within each of the two altepetl. Each of them had several tlaxilacalli in the same central, apparently somewhat nucleated settlement. Wills from these tlaxilacalli almost always try to identify the respective altepetl. But wills from outlying settlements, such as San Lucas and Santa María de la Asunción in Tepemaxalco, do not identify any overarching altepetl; sometimes the tlaxilacalli itself is called an altepetl. Santiago Apóstol Quaxochtenco appears to be one of these outliers, not giving any larger altepetl framework and making identification harder.
With Calimaya, essentially nothing is known about the organization of the tlaxilacalli, and probably there were some that have not yet been identified. As it happens, Calimaya too had a tlaxilacalli named Pasiontitlan, and I have put it first because it was ranked high in Tepemaxalco, but for the rest the order of Calimaya tlaxilacalli is random except for putting the outlying San Antonio de Padua last within Calimaya. A tlaxilacalli Santa María Nativitas known to be within the parish and general jurisdiction possibly belongs to Calimaya (it at least borders some Calimaya areas), but as with Santiago Apóstol Quaxochtenco, information is insufficient for a definitive classification, and here the tlaxilacalli is put at the end among those unclassified within Calimaya/Tepemaxalco.
The whole question of dual organization and parallel altepetl within the same jurisdiction is challenging and significant, and I believe that I have made here some contribution to the topic, but many aspects of it remain a mystery. Several wills of the corpus even contain hints that the people of the time were themselves becoming somewhat confused, and that some earlier distinctions may have fallen by the wayside. But the materials make clear that even as late as the 1760s, the two altepetl were functioning separately side by side.
Reflecting indigenous sociopolitical organization when feasible is important to me, but even more important is putting similar material together in one place for the benefit of the reader. All the documents from each tlaxilacalli will be found together, and within that all the documents prepared by a given notary; I maintain a general progression forward in time within each entity. Nevertheless, in the case of clusters of relatives in the same tlaxilacalli, I put their wills together regardless of the other principles. The result is something of a compromise, but I hope it will make the materials as usable as possible, and by crossreferences I have tried to point the reader to similar or connected materials which are located far apart.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Testaments of Toluca by Caterina Pizzigoni. Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.