CHAPTER 6 INDIGENOUS LITERATURE FROM COLONIAL MESOAMERICA 241vices such as metaphors and parallel constructions. The speeches were first tran-
scribed around 1547, probably in Tlatelolco, the northern part of Mexico City.
One set of orations concerns childbirth and is particularly valuable as a window
into the lives of women. Here are some excerpts from the speech that the midwife
would make to the newborn baby, welcoming it to its loving family and warning it
about the hardships and brevity of life on earth:
You have come into the world, my little one, my beloved boy, my beloved youth.
(If it is a girl she said: “My beloved girl, my little one, noble lady.”)
You have wearied yourself, you have fatigued yourself.
Your father, the lord, Tloque Nahuaque, Creator of People, Maker of People has sent you.
You have arrived on earth
where your relatives, your kin, suffer hardships, endure affliction,
where it is hot, it is cold, it is windy.
It is a place of thirst, a place of hunger,
a place without pleasure, a place without joy,
a place of suffering, a place of fatigue, a place of torment.
O my little one, perhaps, for a brief time, you shall shine as the sun!
By chance are you our reward, our recompense?
By chance shall you look into the faces, upon the heads,
of your grandfathers, your grandmothers, your kinsmen, those of your line?
And by chance shall they look into your face, upon your head?...
Here are your grandfathers, your grandmothers who have been awaiting you.
Here, into their hands, you have come.
Do not sigh, do not sorrow.
...
May Tloque Nahuaque, your mother, your father, the Maker, adorn you, provide for you!
And we who are parents, shall we, perhaps, regard ourselves worthy of you?
Perhaps wee as you are the Maker shall summon you, shall call to you.
Perhaps you shall merely pass before our eyes.
Perhaps we have had only a brief glimpse of you.
Let us await the word of our Lord, my beloved child. (Sullivan 1980:46–47)
Excerpts from another of these orations, a prayer to the rain god Tlaloc, are pre-
sented in Box 6.2.
Sometimes the transcription of oral literature involved coercion. Early in the sev-
enteenth century, a priest named Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón ran an antisorcery cam-
paign among Nahuas living to the south and west of Mexico City, in what is now the
states of Morelos and Guerrero. This was a rural context compared with the Basin of
Mexico, where most of the codices and other ethnographic documents were produced.