Latin America
As pointed out by Dr. Nancy Fitch in her review of Gruzinski's TheConquest of Mexico, authorities disagree over how early the Nahuas adoptedthe Spanish alphabet to render Nahuatl into a written language to producetheir own codices or written accounts of the conquest (Fitch, 2003). The Mexican historian Miguel Leon-Portilla, author of The BrokenSpears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, believes that a rareFrench Bibliotheque National manuscript (variously described as "Manuscript22", Unos anales historicos de la nacion mexicana, or the Tlatelolco Codex)was written in Nahuatl by a group of anonymous natives of Tlatelolco in1528, just seven years after the conquest (Fitch, 2003). J. Jorge Klor deAlva, who wrote the forward to the English translation of The BrokenSpears, offers some additional independent primary source evidence that theNahuas were writing in their native language in the 1520s (Fitch, 2003). There is evidence that indigenous peoples authored many codices, butthe Spaniards destroyed most of them in their attempt to eradicate ancientbeliefs (Fitch, 2003). Moreover, we can gain little sense of how theirproduction was shaped by interaction with the Spani
Frances Kartutten, in her 1998 contribution Indigenous writing as avehicle of postconquest continuity and change in Mesoamerica (accessed athttp://www. She finds that, in common with many pre-Conquest American peoples, theNasa's have a sacred geography, and that their memories and history areembodied within this geography: their history is reinvented by changing thevisual representations between these sacred sites, such that their mythicalpast is omnipresent in their sacred landscape(http://citd. Sempat Assadourian's (2002) study of Calancha's account of how to tiea khipu to record a narrative is also extremely interesting, as it alsoshows us how difficult it is to provide interpretations of the eventssurrounding the Spanish Conquest of the American indigenous peoples. pdf) points out that "prior to contactwith Europeans in the sixteenth century, Mesoamericans had, over a longperiod of time, developed an ingenious symbolic system that they used inproducing the painted screenfold books called codices" (Kartutten, 1998). The Spaniards believed language and evangelization were the keys tomaking the natives "Spanish", in their understanding of the world (Fitch,2003). This idea is extended further by Joanne Rapaport, in her study of theNasa community of the Colombian Andes, The Politics of Memory: NativeHistorical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, the indigenous populations wrotein a pictographic style and used paintings as vehicles for writing history(Fitch, 2003). This shows a very stark impact of the Spaniards on native forms ofrecord-keeping and communication: not only were the indigenous peoplesexpected to change their language and to adopt a new writing system, butthey were also denied access to their own historical documents, and asKartutten (1998) says "From what remains painted on paper and leather, wecan only speculate on the full range of use to which the various peoples ofMesoamerica put their logosyllabic writing systems". Even the suggestions that Nahuatl becomethe official language represented a policy designed to further controllocal populations (Fitch, 2003). As we have seen, insome Andean communities, Natuatl was rendered into writing some few yearsafter the Spanish invasion, but this question does have extreme relevance,as Rapaport convinces us, through her analysis of this community.
Common topics in this essay:
Frances Kartutten,
Colombian Andes,
Conquest Mexico,
La Rosa,
King Itzcoatl,
Conquest American,
Broken Spears,
Sempat Assadourian,
fitch 2003,
Sempat Assadourian's,
Bibliotheque National,
kartutten 1998,
indigenous peoples,
conquest mexico,
communication record-keeping,
indigenous populations,
broken spears,
2002 harrison 2002,
change language,
account conquest,
local populations,
sempat assadourian 2002,
broken spears aztec,
assadourian 2002 harrison,
spears aztec account,
|
Acceptance Essays
