Pablo Tac, Indigenous Scholar: Writing on Luiseño Language and Colonial History, c.1840

Acknowledgments

xvii Acknowledgments Many people collaborated on this book and made it possible. I chose scholars to transcribe Tac’s manuscript who love literature and language. Marta Eguía and Cecilia Palmeiro transcribed the entire manuscript with expertise, care, and perseverance. Laura León Llerena edited the SpanishLuise ño transcription. Her work on indigenous colonial writing in Peru enabled her to better understand the intellectual world Tac formed part of as a native scholar. Jussara Quadros brought her linguistic and literary prowess to the Luiseño text to assure that it followed Tac’s original writing. I also thank Karl Kottman and Heidi Morse for their transcription and translation of Latin portions of the manuscript. The principal translators brought their poetic sensibilities and substantial knowledge of indigenous literary and cultural production, and of Spanish, Latin, and Luiseño, into the translation of Tac’s writing into English. Jaime Cortez used his bilingual knowledge of Spanish and English , along with his multilingual sensibility, to render Tac’s nineteenthcentury Spanish into English. Guillermo Delgado captured the sound and meaning of the ethnographic sketch Tac wrote in Latin because of his knowledge of Latin, Spanish, and indigenous languages and texts. Gildas Hamel also provided gems of insight into Pablo Tac’s Latin. I am very thankful to Eric Elliott for his help understanding Tac’s dictionary. Elliott placed Tac’s words in relationship to contemporary Luiseño, and otherwise made Pablo Tac’s historic language more comprehensible. All of those who have translated Tac’s writing understand the live quality and intertextuality of language. xviii | Acknowledgments As copy editor of the book for the University of California Press, Rose Vekony best grasped the specific literary and historical quality of Tac’s writing. She tried to ensure that the transcription and translation maintained their original, indigenous, and deeply bilingual Luiseño-Spanish quality. It is a significantly better book overall because of her trained and poetic eye. The tribal Chairman of the San Luis Rey Band of Luiseño Indians, Mel Vernon, presented a greeting to readers of this book. The San Luis Rey Band is the contemporary coastal tribe related to Tac’s lineage and heritage. I am grateful that they bless this endeavor; as many Luiseño people, they kept the memory and story of Tac alive. I thank Pechanga ChDmmakilawish bilingual elementary school for allowing me to sit in on an adult language class and to see the bilingual classrooms. I thank the Mellon Foundation for a grant that enabled me to do research at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where I initially worked with a microfilm of Tac’s manuscript. I am grateful to the staff at the Huntington Library for their exceptional help. The community of fellows working at the Huntington in 2000–2001, when I began studying Tac’s manuscript, created an environment in which ideas flourished . I am especially grateful for discussions with Maria Lepowsky and David Weber. The Hispanic Recovery Project at the University of Houston, Texas, awarded me a grant in 2005 that enabled me to work with the original manuscript in Bologna, Italy. I thank the director of the Biblioteca comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Pierangelo Bellettini, who extended the right to publish the manuscript. I am grateful for the help of the head archivist Anna Manfroni, and I also thank Paola Foschi and other staff in the manuscript and rare book reading room at the Biblioteca comunale dell ’Archiginnasio. They have created a truly beautiful place to work. I completed my work on Tac’s manuscript while a fellow at the Davis Center in Princeton University in 2008–2009. I am grateful to Gyan Prakash, then director of the Center, for making postcolonial and subaltern history a vibrant aspect of our collective thinking.I thank theAmerican Studies Department at Princeton for the opportunity to present a paper on Tac and for the lively discussion that followed. The Davis fellows , Princeton colleagues, the librarians and library, and Jennefer Houle at the Davis Center were exceptional in the support they provided, and I thank them all. I am grateful to my colleagues at the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas for their comments on a version Acknowledgments | xix of my work concerning Tac and other indigenous scholars. I have especially benefited from discussing this project with María Josefina Saldaña. I thank her and...