Tongues of Fire: Language and Evangelization in Colonial Mexico by Nancy Farriss (review)

With this book, Nancy Farriss provides the kind of magnum opus social history that has gone in and out of fashion as various other subgenres have come and gone. But the basic unit of such high-quality social history has always been deeply researched investigation. This book does not disappoint.

Students of Mexican history, ethnohistory, and evangelization will find much to enjoy in this study; historians of language may find themselves split in their assessment of Tongues of Fire. The title itself is a play on the idea of the Pentecost, when tongues of fire, taken to be physical ardor of the Holy Spirit, landed on the tops of the heads of the apostles. This moment of the Pentecost also was a moment when, miraculously, everyone could understand other languages, even as they realized it was only a miracle that allowed them such comprehension. In keeping with the theme of language and its relationship to (Christian) salvation, Farriss argues that “translation in its largest sense was the engine of syncretism” (6). Her study takes Oaxaca as a microcosm of colonial Mexican society, wherein European missionaries attempted to translate Catholic doctrine and ideas into indigenous languages. For Farriss, “[t]he major legacy of this exchange is the thoroughly blended, uniquely Mexican form of Christianity that has survived and continues to remake itself to the present” (7). She thus appears to reject the assessment that indigenous and Spanish Catholic religious practices and cosmologies existed in parallel, not in concert.

The book offers a nuanced and richly researched work of scholarship. Each chapter reads like a self-contained essay of reflection touching on a variety of themes related to much broader questions about language vis-à-vis evangelization. Oaxaca makes for an especially rich case study, given its exceptionally high degree of ethnolinguistic variation and diversity. The breadth of analysis really makes this book stand out, even if it does not provide a microscopic analysis of indigenous languages per se.

The book is divided into four sections, each composed of two or three chapters. Part I examines “language contact and language policy.” Here we see the very earliest projects and attitudes concerning indigenous language approaches, especially those of the Dominicans, who dominated Oaxaca’s missionary enterprise. There is, in general, a paucity of deeply researched studies of the early sixteenth century in Mexico among US historians. Some of this is certainly due to the difficulty of the paleography. Farriss does an admirable job of piecing together a wide-ranging and diverse archival landscape to provide highly readable chapters about hand signs, interpreters, and language diversity. Chapter 2, on interpreters, offers a finely woven discussion of the everyday nature of interpreters—both formal nahuatlatos (interpreters) as well as informal ones. She makes two important observations. One, interpreters lived a life in between, in nepantla, trusted neither by their original indigenous community (in the case of indigenous nahuatlatos) nor by the Spaniards they served. Second, she shows that indigenous nahuatlatos often served as “surrogate or deputy missionaries” (39), given the low numbers of missionaries in relation to the large rural populations. In Chapter 3, Farriss outlines the bewildering diversity of languages in Oaxaca and the ways that the introduction of Nahuatl as a lingua franca affected translation efforts. In many cases, a two-part chain translation was necessary, rendering literal translations virtually impossible.

Part II tackles the issues of evangelization in vernacular languages. The issue concerned European priests as well, since by 1554 vernacular translations of Scripture were banned by the Spanish Inquisition. Farriss reiterates what has become common knowledge: that friars relied heavily on native scribes and language experts to produce their own indigenous language primers, doctrinas, and quasi-ethnographic observations. Chapter 5 offers a particularly intriguing discussion of the problems of language in the process of preaching and evangelizing, in the most everyday sense. The production of grammars and artes in native languages was intended to help missionaries...