Nicachi Songs: Zapotec Ritual Texts and Postclassic Ritual Knowledge in Colonial Oaxaca

The ethnohistorical context of the Zapotec ritual songs of Villa Alta

On a quiet evening in the year of 1703, the adult population of the Zapotec community of San Melchor Betaza, a town located to the northeast of Oaxaca City in the province of Villa Alta, stood assembled by the entrance of a building used for ritual observances that was called "House of the Great Tree/Beginning," or Yoo Yag Tao, ¹   awaiting a response that would forever change their way of life. About three years before, a riot in the neighboring village of San Francisco Cajonos had resulted in the lynching of two native informants who dared to reveal an unorthodox ritual ceremony held at the house of the head of a local confraternity. After this lynching, a protracted trail for insubordination and murder had resulted in the execution of fifteen of the Cajonos rebels, and Friar Ángel Maldonado, a newly arrived bishop, performed a lengthy inspection within the province of Villa Alta, and demanded that the inhabitants of the region surrender their ritual specialists (Gillow 1978). As a response to these extirpation attempts–which were the latest entreaty in a long and tempestuous series of confrontations between ritual specialists and Dominicans and their civil allies (Tavárez 2002a)–the Betaza town officials asked two men who specialized in interpreting the visions triggered by the cuana betao plant (probably the Rivea corymbosa vine, called ololiuhqui in Nahuatl) to imbibe this hallucinogenic brew in order to consult their deities. Hours later, when these specialists emerged from the communal house, they made a portentous revelation:

[they said] that they had fallen into the hands of God the Father, that the Christian doctrine would come into town, and that the Spaniards would come in and take away their parents and grandparents–meaning their idols. The first would be Goque Yagchila, and in fact, he was brought out and burned in the town square of [Villa Alta] later (AVA Criminal 117, 39v-40r).

In the end, the local deities' alleged premonition seemed prescient, as Maldonado's idolatry extirpation campaign turned out to be the most successful attack on native ritual practices in New Spain. Maldonado selected one of the defendants from the Cajonos trial, placed his pectoral around his neck, and ordered him to travel throughout the region of Villa Alta announcing his offer of absolution: in exchange for denouncing their ritual specialists and making a full confession about ritual practices, all native communities would benefit from a general absolution without trial (AGI 882). Between November 1704 and February 1705, the elected authorities of 15 Bijanos Zapotec, 27 Cajonos Zapotec, 26 Nexitzo Zapotec, 29 Mixe and seven Chinantec towns–representing a total population of about 60,000–journeyed to the provincial capital to surrender and sign a communal confession, one for each pueblo. Along with these confessions, the Zapotec officials–but not the Mixe or Chinantec–surrendered 99 booklets that contain complete or partial lists of day names in the piyè (also known as biyè in Villa Alta), the 260-day Zapotec ritual calendar (Alcina Franch 1993), along with various other calendrical annotations (see Figure 2, below). Furthermore, four booklets containing alphabetic transcriptions of Zapotec ritual songs (Booklets 100–103) were also presented to Episcopal authorities. These songs are of great importance for the study of Mesoamerican ritual practices, since they are the only extant corpus of communal ritual songs in a Mesoamerican language performed clandestinely in colonial times.

Click on image to enlarge.

Sometime after 1704, Bishop Maldonado submitted to the Council of Indies in Spain the Villa Alta confessions–which hold information about more than 300 individually identifiable Zapotec ritual practitioners–along with 103 octavo-sized booklets made of pieces of European paper sewn together. Maldonado was seeking to transfer control of ten parishes in Villa Alta from the Dominicans into his hands, and the sheer mass of evidence about "idolatrous" ritual practices granted him a powerful argument that facilitated the Spanish crown's decision to secularize these parishes. When these records were placed in legajo México 882 at the Archive of the Indies in Seville, the ritual songs were separated from the testimonies signed by the authorities of their towns of origin, thus blurring the evidence that may have allowed us to link the booklets to specific confessions by placement alone. These texts remained in Spain from the early 18^th century onwards, and were thus spared the canonical fate of native ritual texts–destruction by fire–and the haphazard survival rate of ecclesiastical documents in 19^th-century México.

Endnote

1. Yaga is the colonial Cajonos word for "tree, wood." Córdova (1578: 328r) includes the following entry: "Principio este assi no le ay en Dios q[ue] es el principio de todo. Dios yàca lóo, yàca ni-xèe ni cílla."

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