Relaciones Geograficas Research Articles

La autoría de las Relaciones Geográficas mexicanas: las voces náhuatl a través de los redactores

Este trabajo ofrece una propuesta tipológica en torno a la autoría de las Relaciones Geográficas americanas del siglo XVI, realizada a través de los datos que se desprenden de los agentes implicados en su elaboración, así como de los redactores de los textos. Se realiza un análisis de los procesos de designación, la creación léxica y las voces de origen náhuatl. Los resultados muestran cómo el tratamiento de las voces indígenas y las diferencias en los procedimientos de designación, permiten establecer una correlación entre el tipo de autoría y los mecanismos de transmisión del mundo indígena.

HETEROGENEIDAD LÉXICA EN LAS RELACIONES GEOGRÁFICAS DE LA GOBERNACIÓN DE YUCATÁN

Relaciones Geograficas are texts in Spanish that aim at obtaining reliable descriptions from the colonialism period. Previous research with very different repertoires have established that lexical heterogeneity is a common trend in the entire colonial written production. The objective of this research is to check whether a particular repertoire, such as relations of the Government of Yucatan (1579-1581) represents a homogeneous or heterogeneous body of indigenous loans incorporation. Quantitative and qualitative methodologies are used to analyse the potential lexical plurality of these texts which are associated with certain specific factors. The findings corroborate that lexical heterogeneity is present, despite being a uniform corpus, and show three different trends when including prehispanic concepts in Spanish documents.

Tzompantli, horca y picota. Sacrificio o pena capital

En este artículo me refiero a una faceta del proceso de aculturación del México antiguo, la manifestación pública de violencia corporal ligada al castigo, la pena de muerte y la exposición de partes del cuerpo humano, como se representa en los mapas de las Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI, donde la frontera entre el lugar de castigo y el lugar de sacrificio se desvanece. El estudio de dicho aspecto de la sociedad colonial permite entender el proceso mediante el cual las prácticas sacrificiales indígenas se han malinterpretado, cuando los conceptos divergentes de castigo y tortura de cada grupo se pasan por alto.

Cannibalism among Aztecs and Their Neighbors: Analysis of the 1577-1586 "Relaciones Geográficas" for Nueva España and Nueva Galicia Provinces

This article presents the first systematic analysis of the statements on prehispanic cannibalism in the 1577-1586 Relaciones Geograficas (RGs) for Nueva Galicia and Nueva Espana provinces of New Spain, an area occupied by the Aztecs and their closest neighbors. Forty of the 105 RGs analyzed, from widely scattered locales in the two provinces, allege cannibalism. In both their content and their inherent limitations as a database, these mainly rural reports are very similar to the well-known, intensive, largely urban studies of Aztec culture made in the sixteenth century (e.g., by Duran and Sahagun). While the Spanish/mestizo RG authors who offered damning assessments of Indian culture or character were more likely to allege cannibalism, those whose greater interest in indigenous culture is reflected in their lengthier reports on it also mention the practice. At the same time, the statements on cannibalism were directly attributed to Indian informants in 18 (45 percent) of the 40 RGs alleging cannibalism.

El conocimiento como necesidad de Estado: las encuestas oficiales sobre Nueva España durante el reinado de Carlos V

While Philip II’s initiatives in the field of statistics (such as the Relaciones Geograficas) have been attended to, very little has been done with regard to the Crownpromoted American encuestas in the time of Charles V, which originated a rich amount of documentation. This is a very serious gap, since it has meant overlooking the political significance of the statistical or pre-statistical initiatives in the first half of the 16th Century, which were both symptomatic and expressive of a new pattern as regards public administration and the State. This new pattern based on the necessity of knowledge appeared very early in Spain and in it America played a key role. It is precisely this process which is studied in this article.

Domestication of cultivatedleucaena (leguminosae) in Mexico: The sixteenth century documents

The distribution, and the morphological and genetic variation of the cultivated taxa of the genus Leucaena (especiallyL. esculenta, guaje rojo and guaje Colorado, andL. leucocephala, guaje verde and guaje bianco, are discussed in terms of their long history as arboreal food resources. In order to understand the domestication process it is essential to understand the changes in management, diffusion and importance of this natural resource throughout the prehistoric, prehispanic, colonial, modern and contemporary periods of Mexican history. In this article the principal documents of the contact period (Florentine Codex, writings of Francisco Hernandez and sixteenth century Relaciones Geograficas) are analyzed to examine the effect of culture change on the domestication process. The persistence of Prehispanic uses and management of Leucaena as a source of food is documented. Today’s patterns appear to be both a product of neglect of the plant by the conquerors, and the cultural resilience of the native people.

The mapping of New Spain: indigenous cartography and the maps of the relaciones geograficas

Although Cortes conquered the Aztec empire in 1521, imperial Spain knew little about the Mexican territory under its control when Philip II acceded to the throne in 1556. As part of a vast project to learn about its territories in the New World, Spain commissioned a survey - the Relaciones Geograficas - of Spanish officials in Mexico between 1578 and 1584, as king for local maps as well as descriptions of local resources, history, and geography. Offering a contemporary record of what sixteenth-century Mexico looked like, the sixty-nine manuscript maps from this survey also highlight the gulf between colonial and indigenous conceptions of Mexico. In this text Barbara Mundy illuminates the complex cultural negotiations that colonists and indigenes undertook in mapping the colony. She explains the Amerindian and Spanish traditions represented in these early colonial maps, and traces the gradual reshaping of indigenous world views in the wake of colonization.

The Relaciones Geográficas of the New Spain in the 1580s and their Pinturas (maps)

During the reign of Philp II (1556-1595) about a half century arter the begin-ning of compilation of hydrographical data as “Padron Real”, the Spanish court under direction of Ovand, the Visitador del Consejo de Indias, had promoted the systematic compilation of related data basic to formulation of Crown policy. The Relaciones Geograficas de Indias, 1577-1585, are the most remarkable and systematic corpus among the several responses to the royal orders requiring reports on general and particular aspects of Spanish ultramarine realm.The questionnaire which contained 50 items on American lands, people, resources, products traditions etc., was circulated among the colonial officials and their replies were sent back to Spain during 1578-1585. This stipulated procedure which had been developed by Ovand and Velasco, the first royal Cosmografo-Cronista, required pinturas (maps) of the area as well as the detailed textual reports. Hence, in addition to a documentary corpus (208 documents, of which 167 were from the New Spain), there is a lesser but significant cartographic body of material. There remain 76 extant maps of RG from the New Spain.For the purpose of evaluating the significance of RG and their maps, it would be necessary to propose the classification of RG maps from two distinct aspects.First, considering the extent or scale of covered area in a map, we classify 76 maps into four types as follows.Type a) plan of the principal town showing the gridiron pattern of streets.Type b) a combination of somewhat detailed town plan with less detailed map of surounding area.Type c) map of the jurisdiction. There are three subtypes corresponding to the levels of jurisdiction unit: c-i) a principal town type, c-ii) composite type, contained several principal towns, c-iii) “provincia” type.Type d) so called marinar's chart.Our second classification is based on the spectrum of dichotomy of graphic style, that is, european vs. native. The maps belonged to type a) and d) would fall in the former category. We follow the classification proposed by Donald Robertson. He classified 76 RG maps into three categories; european type, native colonial type and mixed colonial type. The epithet “colonial” suggests that we have no prehispanic survivals in RG maps.Maps in european type (35 examples) consist of two distinct mode of cartographic depiction. One is the landscape map type painted in the three dimensional perspective, the other is the cartographic map type. The latter type is described with conceptual signs in the two dimensional perspective, and antecedent of our modern topographical maps. Several maps which lack these two refined graphic styles and were described with less skilled hand are included in another type, namely, folk type.As the ideal type of native map in the prehispanic period, I dare to assume a map called “Cuauhxochamatl” (chart of boundary) in the native language. In the format of this hypothetical native map, a pictographic place sign for a principal town of the area is encircled with the chain of pictographic place signs indicating boundary standmarks and the space between them is left empty. We could find out some influences of european graphic style in three RG maps classified as native colonial. But they preserve the format of native map, therefore, with a few hesitations, we classify them as native “colonial”.The third type, mixed colonial type (38 examples) has two subtypes. One is the acculturated type which would be transfigured with dominant influence of european graphic style in the copying process of the survivals of prehispanic maps.

Continuity and Change in Morelos, Mexico

SCHOLARS who have occasion to use the relaciones geograficas and other regional documents drawn up by local magistrates and priests in both colonial and independent Mexico should have a clear idea of what the terms and units of measurement in them mean and of what area is covered. Something, though perhaps not enough, has been done to define terms and to produce usable equivalents.' In this article I shall discuss the relatively ill-explored matter of territorial boundaries, as they were affected by demographic change and other factors, concentrating on the small area now known as the state of Morelos, on the southern slope of the volcanic axis just south of Mexico City. When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, they found the land divided in a number of ways. First, an obvious boundary separated farmers from nonfarmers. South of this line were the sedentary, politically sophisticated successors of the extinct classic civilizations, and north of it were primitive hunters and gatherers. The latter occupied subsistence territories, but as these people were driven northward in the Spanish advance, the pre-Conquest political geography of the Chichimeca disappeared and was replaced by arbitrary jurisdictional divisions set up at the convenience of the viceregal government. On the other hand, in central and southern Mexico various kinds of native political divisions survived during the colony and in some cases to the present day. As an example, one can trace the external boundaries of the Triple Alliance empire, with the addition of Michoacan and the Pacific coast kingdoms, in the early limits of New Spain. The extent of Tarascan hegemony is recognizable in several territorial units of the colony, and it is not too different from the modern state of Michoacan. The Huaxteca became the colonial province of Panuco; the old confederation of Metztitlan was about equal to the alcaldia mayor of that name; the empire of Tototepec had much the same limits as the partido of Xicayan. Perhaps the bestknown case of survival is that of Tlaxcala, where the military confederation that befriended Cortes kept its identity as a gobierno under the Spaniards and as a territory and state in independent Mexico. Alongside and within the empires and confederations were a great many autonomous little kingdoms or senorios, contiguous territorial and political units, each consisting of a number of calpultin or their equivalent ruled by a tlatoani or a calpixqui. The limits of these native states were mostly recognized and retained by the Spaniards and became the boundaries of the republicas de indios or Indian pueblos that were distributed in encomienda. After the great epidemic of 1545-1548, surviving native communities were consolidated in two ways. First, the scattered rural population within each pueblo was concentrated in villages (congregaciones), leaving unoc-

Depopulation of the Central Andes in the 16th Century [and Comments and Reply

ESTIMATES of the pre-conquest population of the Americas have been the subject of debate and controversy for many years, and the extent to which the Indian population declined after the Spanish conquest has equally been hotly disputed. Dobyns (1966) has revived interest in the subject by his analysis of estimates and methods and by his introduction of the concept of the depopulation ratio to compare regional estimates and to reach a new assessment. There would be no point in recapitulating his arguments and his methodological discussion, but one or two comments may be made. Dobyns concludes that a depopulation ratio of 20:1 or 25:1 between pre-conquest totals and the nadir of Indian population, occurring at various dates in different regions, may represent the truth. He arrives at projections of 90,000,000 and 112,500,000 for the Indian population of the Americas before the impact of the Europeans was felt. The nadir of population in the area of the Central Andean civilizations is estimated at 1,500,000 in 1650 or slightly later (Dobyns 1966:415) and the pre-conquest population at 30,000,000 to 37,500,000, five or six times greater than Rowe's (1947:184) estimrate of 6,000,000 for the pre-conquest population of the area approximately equivalent to the coastal and Andean regions of modern Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. It has been pointed out with some justice that a general ratio must necessarily conceal many regional variations, a point well made in the discussion of Dobyns' paper by Denevan (1966:429). In particular, Denevan casts doubt on the applicability of a 20:1 depopulation ratio for the Indian cultures of the Central Andes. For this region, Dobyns relied chiefly on figures derived from Rowe for the Rimac and Chincha areas, which suffered, according to Rowe, depopulation of the order of 16:1 and 20:1 between 1525 and 1571. These coastal regions are not, however, representative of the Central Andes as a whole; Rowe has presented much lower rates of depopulation in the central sierra of Peru (see Table 1, p. 454). Rowe assumed an average depopulation ratio of 4: 1, which was applied to the estimated population of 1,500,000 in 1571 to give a pre-conquest population of 6,000,000. The 1571 figures are based on the totals of tributary Indians recorded in the census of Viceroy Toledo, using an arbitrary multiplier of 5: 1 to estimate total population from the recorded total of 311,257 tributary Indians in the coastal and sierra regions of the Central Andes. It is also assumed that the Inca taxpayers represented a similar proportion of the total population, and the same multiplier of 5:1 is used to convert Inca taxpayers to total numbers. The figures for 1525 are based on two kinds of evidence. For Rimac and Chincha, they are based on no more than the numbers of hunukurakas, the Inca officials responsible for 10,000 taxpayers. Thus the fact that Chincha had one such official is taken as evidence that the province had 10,000 taxpayers, and hence 50,000 people. The magnification of error in such a process of multiplication is clearly enormous. It seems entirely possible that the allocation of 10,000 taxpayers to each Inca official was, or must gradually have become, a nominal allocation, perhaps no more representative of the total population than a count of English hundreds at the time of the Norman conquest. It is unfortunate, therefore, that there is no firmer basis than this for estimnating the fall of population in the coastal region. The estimates for the central sierra of Peru are based on slightly more reliable and direct information: for Yauyos in 1582 (Relaciones geograficas de Indias 1965, vol. 1:155),

Ferns of the Incas

is from these three sources. I pursue them in this venture among the ferns. A compilation of the plants in the chroniclers' accounts has been made by Fortunato Herrera and Eugenio Yacovleff in their paper, El Mundo Vegetal de los Antiguos Peruanos. The earliest of these in which a plant, Malz, can be recognized with certainty is a letter written in 1533 by Hernando Pizarro, brother of the conqueror, Francisco, giving his impressions of the country and people. I have examined the records cited by Herrera and Yacovleff containing references to ferns except for the earliest, an anonymous paper, Relaciones Geograficas sobre Quito, 1573. Here Doradilla is mentioned and has been identified as Notholaena nivea. In reference to Trembladera they quote the original work and I translate-- In the region of Quito there are always herbs although much taller in warmer places than in cold, and withered in summer, except an herb called trembladera, which is more or less a yard in height; it has nodes and internodes similar to fennel and its branches although thicker . and they identify this as either Equisetum bogotense or E. giganteum. From the general size and comparison to fennel this would seem to be the latter, or