An intriguing and eye-catching subtitle – “When Amerindians Spoke Latin in sixteenth-century Mexico” – captures the appeal of a book that for its author, Serge Gruzinski, turns the alphabetic writing of the Spanish and Portuguese languages into the ‘real conquistadors that stormed the New World’.
Sean Sheehan
The conquerors that arrived in the early sixteenth century came to places where language systems were non-alphabetic: quipus in the Andes, pictographs in Mexico, petroglyphs in the Amazon. Spanish colonizers brought paper and machinery and in 1583 the “Psalmodia Christiana” was published in Mexico City. It brought together, in the Náhuatl language that had been spread by the Aztec civilization, biblical verses and indigenous songs to be used in churches on special feast days.
The transcription of Náhuatl into the vowels and consonants of Europe was a linguistic stage in the twin process of Christianizing and colonization but Latin remained sacred as the medium for communicating the word of God and Papal authority. It was a logical step to set about teaching it to those conquered and this is the focus of the fascinating “How the apprenticeship worked” chapter in the book with the main title of “The language of the conquerors”.
In 1523 the first school for this project was set up by Franciscan friars in Texoco, near Mexico City. Boarding schools, teaching Latin in Náhuatl, were established later for the sons of the indigenous nobility, uprooting them from their family and culture. The effect, if not the intention, was presumably for them to identify with the conquerors and become as loyal to them as the black house slave, played by Samuel L. Jackson, in Tarantino’s “Django unchained”.
In time, the students in these schools became teachers and intellectuals, translating extracts from the Bible and writing texts in Latin themselves.
In doing so, they played an important part in the alphabetic revolution that through ‘its hidden violence, its numbing and irreversible effects’ is, for the author, comparable to the impact of the digital revolution that now dominates our lives.
It is quite fitting that the author ends his book by noting how indigenous leaders in Brazil, like Cristian Wari’u Tseremey’wa, are adopting digital methods to keep their communities alive.
“The language of the conquerors” is very readable and full of interesting material about how the Christian states of the Iberian Peninsula, when they were not engaged in military conflicts and physical violence, pursued their colonisation projects in the New World. The author shows the crucial role of paper and printing, noting how the number of books printed in Europe increased from 15 million in the fifteenth century to 400 million by the end of the following century.
This becomes the background to his account of métissage (‘mixing, miscegenation’ he calls it) and readers interested in this line of thinking should take a look at the author’s earlier “The Mestizo mind”.
“The language of the conquerors: When Amerindians spoke Latin in Sixteenth-Century Mexico”, by Serge Gruzinski, is published by Polity.
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