Beware the Great Horned Serpent! Chiapas under the Threat of Napoleon (review)

Curator of Mesoamerican ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution and well known as an authority on Tzotzil, a Mayan language spoken in the Mexican state of Chiapas, Robert M. Laughlin devotes this entire book to providing the historical context for a single document that aroused his curiosity. The question is how a proclamation by the Duque del Infantado, dated August 30, 1812, and urging patriotic vigilance against the Bonapartist regime in Spain, came to be distributed throughout the Americas, where it was translated into many different indigenous languages, including Tzotzil.

Much of the historical analysis is cast in terms of metropolitan political forces in Spain. Both the usurper Joseph Bonaparte and his opponents among the Cádiz Liberals appealed to the Spanish colonies for support, and particularly to the native peoples, to whom they proposed to extend political rights. At the same time, Joseph's brother Napoleon considered ways of undermining Spanish power by provoking independence movements in the colonies, possibly with help from the United States. However distant and inconceivable Bonapartism and its attendant threats may have seemed to the indigenous population of rural Chiapas, loyalist authorities in Spain considered it important to warn it against the designs of the "great horned serpent."

The linguistic analysis of the Tzotzil document will be of greatest interest to specialists in Mayan languages, but even the non-linguist can appreciate the difficulties the translator must have experienced seeking to render wholly unfamiliar concepts into words and phrases his intended audience could understand.