Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua

5. Language and Toponyms

69 DOI: 10.5876/9781607322764.c005 5 Language and Toponyms Places come into being out of spaces by being named. —Charles O. Frake (1996: 235) Moquegua’s long history on the peripheries of empire meant that people with varied ethno-politico-linguistic identities colonized the region during the Middle Horizon (MH), Late Intermediate Period (LIP), Late Horizon (LH), and Colonial Period. Whether their presence in Moquegua was forced or voluntary, these colonists and migrants established settlements that came to be known in later written ethnohistories and through archaeological excavations. Although indigenous voices were not registered directly in the earliest Spanish records of their encounters in the Andes (Ramírez 2005: 2), they are heard through toponyms. These toponyms provide twenty-first–century scholars with clues to the occupants of Moquegua’s spaces and places. toponymy A toponym is a proper noun—a name—that designates a unit of space as a place (see Martin and Ringham 2006: 203). The naming of places articulates humans’ relations with their environment and brings order to undifferentiated space. More specifically, the fact that a given space has a name reveals that it possesses meaning within that order and that there is a need to distinguish it unambiguously in various kinds of discourse. If existing place names are unknown to a newcomer or different spaces become important, the newcomer gives them names, thus beginning an alternative spatial history (Carter 1987). LANGUAGE AND TOPONYMS 70 Names can be drawn from numerous sources—for example, describing a key characteristic of a place, memorializing an event that occurred there, remembering a homeland, or honoring a person or religious figure. Not surprisingly, toponyms “encapsulate and unleash”memories and identities.Every place name “can and does peg some sort of story for someone, and a broad spectrum of possibilities surrounds the extent to which those stories are shared, significant, meaningful, or memorable through time for particular individuals or social groups”(Feld 1996: 111–13).Thus toponyms are part of an “emotional geography” (Kearney and Bradley 2009).Clearly,this was true in the Spanish naming of asyet -unexplored territories in the Southern Hemisphere: the names were chosen from the most dramatic Christian reconquista successes in Muslim-controlled Iberia—(Nuevo) Toledo and (Nueva) Granada—plus the most Christian of all provinces, (Nueva) Castilla. For indigenous groups or natives of an area, whether ancient or modern, “place names are more than remnants of an earlier time; they deny any notion of an innocent or arbitrary history . . . Naming place is a declaration of ownership , it expresses the inalienable right to know and call into being the places” that define collective identity (Kearney and Bradley 2009: 81). For example, the renaming of streets in modern times has become a matter of politicization and resistance (Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010). In situations of colonialism, the removal of indigenous toponyms and imposition of new ones is a naked exercise of power. Such erasure is a silencing of voice, a denial of identity, an act of linguistic hegemony (Rose-Redwood and Alderman 2011), and a “neutralizing of otherness” (Carter 1987: 61). Similarly, the withholding of information about the origins and meanings of place names, as in indigenous responses to Spanish questions in the late-sixteenth-century Relaciones Geográficas,can be an exercise of resistance (Scott 2009: 56–57).Place names and place naming, then, are critical to the social production of place and, as such, are often contested (Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010). At the same time, the creation of toponyms is an essential component of praxis, the processes of spatializing the physical world (Martin and Ringham 2006: 190, 203) and directing meaningful (and safe) movement through it (Whitridge 2004). Because of the recurrent flow of migrants into the Osmore drainage, the area can be thought of as having multiple re-spatializations. In addition to the Aymara-speaking Qolla and Lupaqa from the northern and western parts of the Lake Titicaca basin, respectively, residents included Pacajes (Pacaxes) from the southern basin (Stanish 1992: 99), Pukina/Puquina-speakers east of the lake (see Browman 1994), and probably some Quechua-speakers from the central highlands, plus Koli-speakers on the coast. LANGUAGE AND TOPONYMS 71 indigenouS toponymy in moquegua: pre-hiSpanic multivocality In general,late pre-Hispanic colonists in the Osmore drainage appear to have been primarily Aymara-speakers from the northern Titicaca basin: Qollas in the LIP and Lupaqas in the LH (Conrad 1993...