Parallel Worlds: Genre, Discourse, and Poetics in Contemporary, Colonial, and Classic Maya Literature

10. Appropriating Sacred Speech: Aesthetics and Authority in Colonial Ch’olti’

271 Appropriating Sacred Speech Aesthetics and Authority in Colonial Ch’olti’ Danny Law 10 The task of religious conversion is not simply a matter of belief. It also involves the inculcation of new practices, a new aesthetic. To the true convert, much that was sublime must become diabolical; many of the actions and thoughts daily life so firmly inscribes into our bodies have to be rewritten. The Catholic missionaries , following on the heels of the conquistadors, baptized Native Americans in droves; in some cases, during the early years of the Conquest, as many as 1,500 baptisms were reported to have been performed by one priest in a single day (Greenleaf 1961: 46). In these early years, language was an enormous barrier to teaching , and the indigenous “converts were often baptized only after very limited instruction through an interpreter, or by means of pantomime” (ibid.: 48). Consequently, Catholic priests during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were often justifiably concerned about the sincerity of the conversion of some Natives. It has been argued that the infamous inquisition of the Yucatan Peninsula, carried out so zealously by Bishop Diego 10 272 Danny Law de Landa, was motivated precisely by his paranoia that the outer appearance of conversion manifest by many of the Maya he associated with was superficial and that non-Christian rituals, particularly human sacrifice, were still practiced in secret (Clendinnen 2003; Timmer 1997). The testimonies Landa readily procured through torture only confirmed his suspicions. Leaving aside the question of whether or to what degree such rituals were actually performed, the fear that Natives were not truly converted was widespread. The missionaries and priests working with the Maya and other Native American peoples used many different strategies to deal with the problems of insincere conversion. Some, like Diego de Landa, followed the lead of the Spanish Inquisition in the Iberian Peninsula and policed the Natives’ practices, publicly meting out harsh punishments to make an example of sinners. Harsh penalties against Natives, however, were not viewed favorably, particularly among those in Spain who were suspicious of the quality of instruction in Catholic doctrine the Natives received and unsure as to whether the indigenous peoples of the New World were capable of understanding the doctrines of the church well enough to be guilty of having committed major sins. When Fray Juan de Zumárraga executed Don Carlos, a powerful cacique of Texcoco, it created an uproar in Spain, and Zumárraga was severely reprimanded (Greenleaf 1961: 74). Diego de Landa’s actions in the Yucatan led to similar discontent in Spain (Timmer 1997: 479). But not all efforts to control and convert the Maya or other indigenous groups were based on punishment. The Catholic priests soon realized that many of the Natives’ “heretical” actions stemmed from misinterpretations of the Catholic teachings of the fathers. Many of these misunderstanding cropped up in translation; in many cases the priests were inadequately trained in the indigenous languages, and even those who spoke them fluently might still be unaware of the broader connotative meanings of indigenous terms used to translate Catholic concepts. Accordingly, many missionaries and priests began to focus on the language of instruction in the context of the mass, the catechism , and the sacrament of confession. The Catholic priests soon realized the pitfalls of translation in their efforts to Christianize the Natives. Because the nature of learning is to interpret new information in terms of previous knowledge, the most effective way to explain Catholic concepts was to draw analogies with indigenous theology. However, this, too, easily led to the simple equation of traditional beliefs with new Catholic ones, without the intended change in religious practices. Early attempts to translate words such as “Dios” (God), “santo” (saint), and similar terms quickly gave way to borrowing Spanish terms to avoid the non-Christian web of associations equivalent terms inevitably held in the indigenous languages (Tedlock 1993: 144). What emerged was a conflict between the instructional value of indigenous forms of expression and their dangerous potential to undermine and misrepresent the holy faith. 273 Appropriating Sacred Speech This chapter will examine the way the authors of one Colonial source, a seventeenth-century confessional and catechism written in Ch’olti’ Mayan, strategically either avoided or adopted indigenous forms of expression in an attempt to present the new religion and shun the old as effectively as possible . As will be shown, in some cases the authors of the...