CHAPTER 6 INDIGENOUS LITERATURE FROM COLONIAL MESOAMERICA
Mesoamerican peoples living under Spanish colonial rule produced a great trove of
documents written in their own languages. We have relied on some of this docu-
mentation in preparing the preceding chapters on the conquest and the Colonial pe-
riod. To more fully appreciate the quantity and variety of these texts and the insight
they provide into the history and culture of their authors, we here devote a chapter
to the native textual genres of the Colonial period.
Literacy is something that Mesoamericans had in common with the Europeans
who conquered them. This mutual recognition is well illustrated by an anecdote in-
cluded in one of the first European books that told of Spanish experiences in Amer-
ica. Peter Martyr of Anghiera, who interviewed returning Spaniards and published
their stories, heard the following account from a Spaniard named Corrales who, in
Panama around 1514, had met a man from the Mesoamerican interior:Corrales was reading. The native jumped, full of joy, and by means of an interpreter, ex-
claimed: How is this? You also have books and use painted signs to communicate with
the absent? And saying this, he asked to see the book in the belief that he was about to
see the writing he was familiar with, but he discovered it was different. (León-Portilla
1992:317)The native person’s utterance—“you also have books”—conveys his sense of his
own culture as a literate one and the importance he placed on this fact. He and the
Spaniard, unlike the native people of Panama among whom they found themselves,
understood the nature and value of books.
The roman alphabet would transform Mesoamerican literacy, even though writ-
ing remained the province of elites and stayed closely tied to oral performance. Al-
phabetic writing was a more efficient, though less aesthetically appealing, method of
recording the spoken word than the traditional pictorial systems. The friars who
taught the alphabet to their native students adapted it as well as they could to the222