Traces and Many Centers

Thoughts on: Mesoamerican Voices: Native Language Writings from Colonial Mexico, Yucatan, and Guatemala, and on Invading Guatemala: Spanish, Nahua, and Maya Accounts of the Conquest Wars

1. Did you know: the appearance of things shifts with the ground you stand on. As we move from the single narrative of a Cortes or Diaz, from the one to the many of other Spanish accounts and the diverse indigenous accounts of the conquest(s) of Mexico and Guatemala, things become much more complex, more disorienting. We are not sure if we are on the same ground, the same field of battle, the same narrow stone causeway before a Maya city, as we were a couple narratives ago. It makes a great difference whether your experience of, say, the conquest of Guatemala ends in a governorship, or in a poorly-attended to settlement far from home, spurned by your supposed allies.

Things that seemed so important recede from view and others take their place; the ‘local’ supersedes the grand tale; or, rather, everything is revealed as ‘local,’ as particular. Knowing the boundaries, the markers, of your narrative, knowing what plot of ground you are standing on: this makes all the difference in the world, as much for understanding these multiple coexisting pasts as describing a wood lot or house plot. And the boundaries, like Pasquala Chi’s forested lands, are themselves marked with ruins and edges of other things, promises of what lies behind the text before us, what lies beyond the bounds, under the overgrowth, between the lines.

2. Did you know: things do fall apart and come back together and fall apart again. Some things matter more than others: the Spanish may keep local hierarchies intact, but it is not the same thing, is it? And perhaps many things can be tolerated- empires expand and contract, after all, and who can know the way things will work out after all. But some things matter a great deal more: the congregacion, for instance, does something especially troubling. It opens up questions that are painful to answer: ‘When he comes to settle, will there be a house already there for him? And wheover settles on his land, will e not also apropriate for himself the fields? Where will he work land if they are entirely lost to him? And if he thus leaves behind his maize, chia, or cactus fruit, and his burial grounds, who will guard them for him? Will he not lose whatever he leaves behind?’ Gods can come and go, altapatl to cabildo, so be it- but the land, the mothering soil and seed and stock. This is something more, isn’t it?

3. Did you know: there are thin traces, like the beloved’s old campsite in the desert, running through all these texts. From the vivid quietly solemn and joyful dialogue for land from St. Michael, to the equally vivid and sorid tales of murder and hit-jobs gone awry, there are people, great and small, whose names and not much else- a story, a list of things, lands, relationships briefly mentioned- spread a narrow trace over the desert of the past. Some are especially poignant, even coming in unlikely places; you can almost feel the trace, or at least think you can: ‘Here is another person, named Martin Itzcuin, from Mexicatzinco. His wife is named Ana Teiuc; their children are no longer alive. They came fifteen years ago. They live together with Catalina. All they did was try to make a living. He says: “Let us be given a field on which we will pay tribute, we will not go back to our hometown, since we came [here] a long time ago.’

4. Did you know: sometimes you wake up and realize how strange much of this must have been, at least at first, how fresh and foreign and yet familiar these events and processes and people appear. Cortes dressing up in feathers and golden ornaments; Japanese envoys escorted by a monk strolling through the streets of a rebuilt Mexico City; priests dug up out of the mountains offering children to rain deities. And so much familiar: squabbles in cabildos, power struggles in households and among neighbors, professions of faith and hope in the face of death.