Prayers for the Community: Parallelism and Performance in San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino

Introduction

This essay examines parallelism and other essential features of ritual discourse in San Juan Quiahije, Eastern Chatino. The Chatino languages are spoken in the highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico. The essay focuses on the poetic and discursive features found in two impromptu prayers within a corpus of civic/religious ritual petitions that the members of the community refer to as La⁴² qin⁴ kchin⁴,¹ or "Prayers for the Community."²

The "Prayers for the Community" are part of a ritual carried out regularly by elders and traditional San Juan Quiahije (SJQ) authorities in their official capacity as community representatives. These dignitaries come together at dawn on the first day of each month and on high holidays—the most important feast day is that of the patron saint of SJQ, Saint John the Baptist, June 24th—to petition for the well-being of the entire community, and especially for the younger generations. Both of the petitions analyzed in this essay were made at the same ceremonial event on June 24, 2009 at 5:00 a.m. in the Catholic church. The prayers were said by Simón Zurita and Wenceslao Cortés, two elders from the SJQ community.

On the evening prior to the prayers, a group of municipal envoys visited select elders of the community, including Simón Zurita, and formally invited them to join the municipal officials and participate in the worship. Wenceslao Cortés, serving his final elected position in the SJQ municipality, had instructed the envoys to invite the elders to the ceremony.

The elders who agreed to accompany the authorities to the ceremony were instructed to come to City Hall at around 4:15 a.m. to begin the ritual. A total of six elders participated in the petition and began to arrive at City Hall by 4:00 a.m. At 5:00 a.m. the group walked together from City Hall to the church. Upon arriving at the doorsteps of the church, they all knelt and crossed themselves. Then all proceeded to walk on their knees for three to four minutes toward the main altar holding the offerings in their hands while reciting their individual prayers.

The church attendants (catechists), lower ranking authorities (including helpers of City Hall), and members of the community who wished to be blessed by the elders' supplications were present at the church. Upon concluding their prayers, the community representatives stood in a row facing the church door, clutching their candles and flowers, in order to allow residents to touch and kiss the offerings they had brought for their petition. The petitioner's goal is to move and persuade the spiritual intermediaries (such as saints and ancestors) to grant his wishes.

Translation is as much an art as a science. Literary and cultural translations are challenging because cultural concepts frequently do not map one to one from one language to the next. When translating a poetic text, the translator must take into account the different layers of meaning in the source text including aesthetics, phonics, and polysemy (Barnstone 2010:4). These challenges are exacerbated when the source and target languages come from completely different language families. For example, Chatino and English idioms and metaphorical phrases have very little in common.

One of the challenges I encountered when I translated the two prayers studied here is that Chatino poetics make extensive use of positional and existential predicates to achieve poetic tension, imagery, and metaphor. Verses 1-2 of example (7) illustrate this point. The positional expression tyi²⁰ ton¹ literally means "s/he or they will stand," and tyi²⁰ tqen²⁴ means "s/he or they will exist or spread out on the ground." However, in this context these expressions are being used metaphorically to express that the new generation will one day take charge and step up and stand for the community. For this reason I have chosen to translate these expressions as "now they are about to rise up and now they are about to establish themselves," to convey the movement and agency that form part of the...