The Legacy of Mesoamerica History and Culture of a Native American Civilization, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 6 INDIGENOUS LITERATURE FROM COLONIAL MESOAMERICA 253

differences; by reading their declarations of Christian faith and seeing what people

leave to the Church, we learn about their religion. Here is one such will, from the

Yucatec Mayan town of Ixil, where, in 1765, a woman named Antonia Cante lay on

her deathbed:

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit three persons one true

God almighty, the paper of my final statement in my testament will be seen, inasmuch as

I am Antonia Cante, the daughter of Martin Cante and child of Bernardina Canche, res-

idents here in the cah [native town] of Ixil. Althrough my life is ending on this earth, I

wish my body to be buried in the holy church. Likewise, I supplicate our blessed lord the

Padre, that he say one said mass for my soul, that he send a prayer in the mass that will

assist my soul in the sufferings of purgatory. The fee shall be given, six tomines and two

tomines for Jerusalem. Likewise one chest for my infant Juan Canul. Likewise one bed that

is now the property of Pedro Canul. Likewise one shirt and one measure of yarn, the in-

heritance of my husband, Lucas Cuouh. One beehive with bees for Juana Canul, one bee-

hive with bees is Juliana Canul’s, one to Viviana Canul, one to Maria Canul, one to Marta

Canul, one to Pedro Canul. This is the truth, the end of my statement in my will. (Restall

1995:31)

She designated a local nobleman to see to the mass, and the priest later wrote

down that he had performed it. We see from her will that Antonia wished to conform

to Roman Catholic customs concerning mass and burial; that she had been recently

widowed and remarried, as her seven children, including an infant, have a surname

different from her husband’s; that she earned money by keeping bees (as some peo-

ple in Ixil still do today); and that she tried to divide her modest property equitably

among her husband, two sons, and five daughters.

With the end of the Colonial period, this tradition of local native-language

record-keeping almost completely vanished along with the administrative structure

that had fostered it in most of the Mesoamerican regions. Thus, with few exceptions,

native people literate in their own languages disappear from Mesoamerica until the

twentieth century. Although people’s words are not recorded, their traditions of

speech and performance were passed along orally, and would reenter the written

record when anthropologists, folklorists, and linguists arrived on the scene in the

twentieth century (see Chapters 11 and 13).

SUGGESTED READINGS

ANDERSON, ARTHURJ. O., FRANCESBERDAN, and JAMES
LOCKHART(eds. and trans.) 1976 Beyond the Codices:
The Nahua View of Colonial Mexico.Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press.
BIERHORST, JOHN(ed. and trans.) 1992 History and
Mythology of the Aztecs: The Codex Chimalpopoca.Tuc-
son: University of Arizona Press.
BURKHART, LOUISEM. 1996 Holy Wednesday: A Nahua
Drama from Early Colonial Mexico.Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press.

CARMACK, ROBERTM. 1973 Quichean Civilization. The Eth-

nohistoric, Ethnographic, and Archaeological Sources.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

COE, MICHAELD., and GORDONWHITTAKER(eds. and

trans.) 1982 Aztec Sorcerers in Seventeenth Century Mex-

ico: The Treatise on Superstitions by Hernando Ruiz de

Alarcón.Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies.

EDMONSON, MUNRO(ed. and trans.) 1982 The Ancient Fu-

ture of the Itza: The Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin.

Austin: University of Texas Press.