The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico

Introduction. Ixtlamatinih: Nahua Intellectuals Writing Mexican Modernity

3 introduction Ixtlamatinih Nahua Intellectuals Writing Mexican Modernity So all this time they’ve been lying to us, the schoolteachers. They said we were stupid burrohmeh, nothing but donkeys. I guess they were wrong. —abelardo de la cruz, nahua reading circles participant The tlamatinimeh and tlahcuilohqueh, the scholars and writers of preHispanic Nahuatl-speaking cultures, are remembered in painted codices and early colonial-period alphabetic manuscripts of Mesoamerica as the producers, transmitters, interpreters, and guardians of knowledge. The activities of these figures often seem bound to an ephemeral and unrecoverable past, for rarely in Mexico today does one hear the words “indigenous ” and “intellectual” linked together.1 At the same time, while it is widely accepted that indigenous peoples in Mexico have always possessed a rich oral tradition, it is often thought that they have not had a longstanding relationship with the written word. This is not the case, at least for Nahuas, native speakers of Nahuatl, one of the most widely spoken and best-documented indigenous languages in the Americas. In fact, as I will argue throughout this book, Nahuas have maintained a deep engagement with the written word as one of the vehicles for their intellectual work since the introduction—some might say imposition—of the Roman alphabet in the early sixteenth century. However, similar to other minoritized cultures in the context of conquest and colonization, the existence and persistence of indigenous knowledge production, particularly alphabetic writing, has until recently been ignored, underestimated, or obscured. In joining a steadily increasing body of scholarship on indigenous knowledges in the Americas, this book takes as its task sustained attention to the 4 · Introduction complex nature of Nahua intellectualism and writing from the colonial period through the present day.2 This broad temporal perspective shows not only the heterogeneity of Nahua writing in terms of genre, discourse, forum, and language but also that of indigenous experience in Mexico over the past five centuries. The indigenous intellectuals whose writings and life experiences are the focus of this book offer examples of how Nahuas took up the pen with skill—dare I say delight—as agents of their own discourses and agendas. They include Antonio del Rincón, one of the few indigenous men to be ordained as a Jesuit priest during the early colonial period and the first indigenous person in the Americas to write a grammar of his native language ; don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, a seventeenth-century elite Nahua statesman who wrote the history of his altepetl (city/state), Tlaxcala; Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca, the Nahua polymath, who left his mark on the nineteenth century as a staunch defender of indigenous land rights and as a scholar of Nahua texts; doña Luz Jiménez, the only published female Nahua prose writer to date, whose short stories and testimonio provide a window into assimilative education for Indian children at the turn of the twentieth century; Ildefonso Maya Hernández , the prolific playwright and cultural promoter whose open-air theater and painted books light the way toward indigenous language and cultural recovery and revitalization; and Sabina Cruz de la Cruz, Victoriano de la Cruz Cruz, and Refugio Nava Nava, all present-day Nahua intellectuals who have contributed statements or think-pieces specifically for this book. The texts gathered together here alert us to fact that, contrary to popular belief, Nahuas have continued to think, produce, transmit, and interpret knowledges even after European contact and conquest. Furthermore , they demonstrate that along with oral, embodied, musical, and painted modes of expression and communication, Nahuas appropriated and adapted alphabetic writing in order to assess and influence the world around them. A driving force of this project has been to make visible to the academic community and the general public examples of a continuous yet changeful trajectory of Nahua intellectual work and writing in modernity. Equally, it has been a priority to do the same in Nahua communities who are, more often than not, unaware of—and without access to—their own cultural heritage sources. As an exploration of collaborative research methods, I discuss the experience of reading these texts with native speakers today, some encountering Nahua intellectuals and their writing for the very first time. My hope is that this is a useful contribution to how we understand Ixtlamatinih · 5 indigenous intellectual work and writing in the Americas and to Nahua people as they look to their past, present, and future, as...