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

The linguistic and textual context of production of the Villa Alta songs

Dialectal features

Villa Alta was a colonial jurisdiction located to the northeast of the Oaxaca Valley administered by a resident alcalde mayor in the town of Villa Alta of San Ildefonso, and it encompassed more than one hundred towns inhabited by speakers of Zapotec, Chinantec and Mixe. Kaufman's (2004: 64) ongoing research on Proto-Zapotecan reconstructions has proposed that Zapotec is best understood as a language complex consisting of five language areas–Chatino, Papabuco, Northern, Central, Southern, and Western Zapotec–with remarkable internal differentiation. The traditional division of Northern Zapotec–which may have preserved some relatively archaic traits from Proto-Zapotecan and Proto-Zapotec–into Cajonos, Nexitzo, and Bijanos Zapotec (Chance 1989: 7) is supported by Juan Jose Rendón's (1995: 157-199) glottochronological study.

This report will not focus directly on the 99 calendrical booklets seized in Villa Alta, which were called "the time count of the ancestors and fathers of us all," or piyè xoo tao xoci reo, by their owners. This is a separate area of inquiry that was pioneered by José Alcina Franch (1993, 1998) and Arthur Miller (1991, 1998), and which is also being pursued as an essential part of my ongoing translation project. Instead, I will turn to the contents of the last four booklets, each of which contain a variable number of ritual songs. Booklet 100 (18 folios), and Booklet 101 (ten folios) focus on non-Christian Zapotec beliefs. On the other hand, the two remaining collections, which feature references to Christian entities, are rather short: Booklet 102 has two folios, and Booklet 103 seven folios.

Booklet 100 and 101 are linked through annotations with owners who lived in the Cajonos Zapotec towns of Betaza and Lachirioag, an issue that will be discussed below. On the other hand, since Booklets 102 and 103 bear an attribution to neither owner nor location, they can be assigned a provenance only on the basis of linguistic evidence (Tavárez 2000, 2006). The first salient dialectal feature one notices in these two texts is the usage of the grapheme tz to represent the voiceless alveolar affricate (IPA [ts], Americanist [¢]) in Zapotec words such as guetze (town) or tzela (and), which is characteristic of many colonial and contemporary variants of Nexitzo and Bijanos Zapotec. In colonial Cajonos Zapotec–the dialect in which Booklets 100 and 101 were written–this phoneme is realized as the voiceless alveopalatal affricate (IPA [tS], Americanist [č]) and represented as ch in the same words, yielding the colonial orthographic variants gueche and chela. These two phones are variants of the same phoneme, and they may be used to trace an isogloss that divides the Zapotec-speaking regions of central Villa Alta into two minimally defined linguistic communities: the Nexitzo and Bijanos variants to the north and east, and the Cajonos dialect to the south, as suggested by the orthographic data summarized in Tables 1 and 2 below:

The Villa Alta songs and other Mesoamerican ritual genres

The author(s) of Booklet 100 refer to the songs of Villa Alta as dij dola, which could be rendered loosely as "song." Córdova (1578: 69v) states that the Valley Zapotec expressions tij, ticha tij, and tij tólani are synonymous with "song." The element tò(l)la is included in the verb tòllaya, which meant both "I beat on drums" (ibid., 44r), and "I sing" (ibid., 70v). There may be a semantic link between this term and a different item with similar spelling, tòla, which in Pre-Columbian times designated sharp pieces of straw, which were woven together and presented to a Zapotec priest (pigana) by penitents as tangible representations of their transgressions. Tòla was later recruited by the Dominicans as the translation for the term "sin" in Valley Zapotec (ibid., 228v).

Moreover, the Villa Alta testimonies often refer to these texts as "teponaztli songs," using the common Nahuatl term for a cylindrical drum. Some testimonies also describe the use of tall standing drums, whistles and tortoise shells. All of these instruments–the cylindrical drum, the standing drum, the tortoise shell, and the whistles–are traditional Mesoamerican musical instruments associated with communal ritual singing and dancing by Diego de Landa and Sánchez de Aguilar in Yucatán, and by Durán, Sahagún and others among the Nahua. These communal ritual songs featured the beat of the cylindrical drum–called nicachi in Zapotec and tunkul in Yucatec Maya, and carried a label derived from the generic term for "song"–cuicatl in Nahuatl, kay in Yucatec Maya.

As a genre, the songs of Villa Alta resemble another substantial corpus of colonial Mesoamerican ritual songs: the Cantares Mexicanos, 91 Nahuatl songs transcribed between 1550 and 1580 by Nahua elites in the Valley of México. Each of the 15 Zapotec songs of Villa Alta in Booklets 102 and 103 begin, just like the Cantares Mexicanos, with an alphabetic transcription of a cylindrical drum percussion pattern that uses the syllables ti, qui, co and to. Moreover, in both the Nahua and the Zapotec compositions in each of the booklets (100–103), the end of each stanza is marked with a litany of syllables with no lexical content–ayao, hiya, hoya, etc.–which were sung during the performance; this feature appears in both the Christian and the traditional Zapotec songs of Villa Alta. On the other hand, the Zapotec songs in Booklets 100 and 101 propitiate only Pre-Columbian deities, a focus that resembles that of the Cantares de Dzitbalché, 15 songs that celebrate a wide range of Mayan divine entities transcribed in late 18^th-century Yucatec Maya orthography in the town of Dzitbalché in Campeche (Barrera Vázquez 1965).

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