Este artículo se centra en un tipo importante de intermediarios en el Yucatán colonial, los intérpretes generales del Juzgado Privado de Indios de Yucatán. Desde la época de Gaspar Antonio Chi en 1580 hasta la desaparición de esta corte en la década de 1820, estos hombres mediaron directamente en disputas de propiedades, quejas contra las autoridades, y tradujeron decretos inicialmente publicados en español para la mayoría maya hablante de la provincia. Sus actividades demuestran que Yucatán poseyó un alto número de individuos que dominaron tanto el maya como el español hasta finales del periodo colonial. Además, la cantidad de individuos calificados sirviendo extraoficialmente como intérpretes durante finales del siglo dieciocho, y el sorprendente número de no-mayas que necesitaron sus servicios, muestran también que el periodo colonial fue una época en la que el maya se extendió como lenguaje predominante en Yucatán, en lugar de una época de declive para ese idioma.
and Testimonio del Expediente del comun del Peten, AGI, Estado 49, No. 74, Cuad. 2, 1800, fols. 4v-5. Since Peten's priests, including don Santiago Xavier Rebolledo of San Andres, officiated at the marriages of bozales (African-born blacks) and Maya women, ecclesiastical complaints were more muted than those of the commander and the cacique.4. San Jose and San Jose de los Negros, although in close proximity, were distinct pueblos.
Although indigenous languages elsewhere in the Americas declined during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in eighteenth-century Yucatan fluency and literacy in Yucatec Maya became more common among castas and creoles. During the later colonial period, interpreters were readily available, with an upsurge in literacy in Maya among criollo clergymen, merchants, militia officers, and provincial administrators. They in turn observed that almost as many mestizo and Afro-Yucatecan subjects and parishioners spoke only Yucatec Maya as their indigenous counterparts. In criminal cases, indigenous, casta, and even creole witnesses and suspects required interpreters to translate their statements. This article builds on earlier research into indigenous-language documentation but shifts its emphasis to mundane genres produced by non-Mayas, demonstrating that the linguistic persistence of Yucatec Maya should be viewed not only as an instance of effective cultural preservation but also as an example of multidirectional transculturation.
In 1796, the commander of die Guatemalan presidio of Peten, Jose de Galvez, together with its leading prelate and the caciques of the nearby pueblos of San Andres and San Jose, registered a formal complaint: an increasing number of runaway black slaves from Belize taking refuge there had been marrying Maya women in their villages. The officials objected to these unions, stating that they did not want “their blood mixed with these newly Christian blacks” and alleged that the asylum seekers took Maya brides in thinly disguised attempts to exploit native female labor. The cacique of San Andres, don Raimundo Chata, backed by the leading civil and ecclesiastical authorities in a rare moment of unity, advocated the removal of the escaped slaves to a site set aside for blacks on the other side of Lake Peten (see map in Figure 1). The result of this proposed policy of segregation was the creation of a “new pueblo for blacks converted to the faith.”
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