CHAPTER 7 MESOAMERICANS IN THE NEOCOLONIAL ERA 267Box 7.1 Napoleon, the Great Horned SerpentDevelopments in Spain during the period of the Napoleonic occupation had important reper-
cussions for the Spanish colonies of New Spain and Central America. Among these was the for-
mation of a constitutional assembly (cortes), and the creation of a constitution designed to be
applicable to both Spain and its American colonies. The constitution, ratified in 1812, was a pro-
foundly liberal document, granting “sovereignty” to the people, dividing power between the
government agencies, eliminating the privileges of nobility, and promoting the economic and so-
cial welfare of all peoples, including the native Mesoamericans in the overseas colonies.
That same year a proclamation was sent to the American colonies, explaining why the con-
stitution was necessary and pointing especially to Napoleon’s deceitful invasion and heavy-
handed rule over Spain, along with the capture and exile of King Ferdinand VII. According to
the anthropologist Robert Laughlin (2003:191), the constitution and the previously mentioned
proclamation were a source of political inspiration to many of the creoles in Mexico and Central
America. Of particular interest to Laughlin, however, is the fact that the proclamation was trans-
lated into a few of the Mesoamerican native languages as part of an attempt to gain the support
of the Indians for the continuation of Spanish authority in the American colonies. One of the
translations was from Spanish to the Tzotzil Mayan language spoken in the Chiapas province of
Guatemala. Although it is likely that the Tzotzil version of the proclamation was never read to a
single Tzotzil Indian, manuscript copies of the translation have been preserved and analyzed by
Laughlin in an attempt to decipher their coded messages relative to Napoleon, Ferdinand, and
the new constitution.
Laughlin concludes that the translator of the proclamation into the Tzotzil language must
have been a Spanish friar. This conclusion is made clear not only by the fact that the grammati-
cal use of Tzotzil does not appear to have been that of a native speaker, but also by the many
references to religion and the Catholic church, references that do not appear in the original Span-
ish proclamation. Nevertheless, the friar employed numerous Tzotzil terms and metaphors in
order to make the proclamation understandable to the Tzotzil Mayan people of Chiapas. Most
notably, while the Spanish proclamation paints Napoleon as a “tyrant,” in the Tzotzil version he
becomes the “Great Horned Serpent,” as well as a “jaguar,” “lighted fire,” “thunderbolt,” and
“whirlwind.”
The allusion to the great horned serpent no doubt drew upon images from the Book of
Revelations, but as Laughlin points out, it also was a key symbol in ancient Mesoamerica stand-
ing for “the god of the earth’s center.” Indeed, in one of the hamlets of Zinacantán, Chiapas,
where Laughlin has recorded Tzotzil tales, “horned serpents are believed to have gouged out the
ravines with their horns and to cause earthquakes when they emerge from the underworld”
(p. 160). The Tzotzil version was far more paternalistic toward the Indians than the original Span-
ish text, the former always referring to the Spaniards and creoles as “fathers, elder brothers” of
the Indians. In contrast, the original Spanish proclamation refers to the Indians as “that beauti-
ful portion of humankind that inhabits America.”
During the following years, the kind of liberal thinking expressed by the priestly translator
of the proclamation helped inspire the independence movements, although in the end the cre-
oles’ more paternalistic ideas about the Indians came to prevail. For this reason, as Laughlin
points out (p. 191), Indians such as the Tzotzils of Chiapas continued to perceive of their histor-
ical destiny as one of ik’ti’ vokol,“torment, suffering”!