The Passion According to the Wooden Drum: The Christian Appropriation of a Zapotec Ritual Genre in New Spain

Abstract

Sometime after the summer of 1703, a strange traveler journeyed to several Zapotec-speaking communities nestled in the rugged geography of Villa Alta—an alcaldía mayor northeast of Oaxaca City in New Spain. He wore a pectoral ornament around his neck—a gift from the Benedictine friar Ángel Maldonado, a newly appointed bishop who had arrived in Oaxaca in July 1702—and was received throughout Villa Alta with “great noise and expressions of joy.” Upon his arrival in each locality, he would gather the townspeople and proclaim an offer of amnesty from the bishop: in exchange for registering a collective confession about traditional ritual practices at the administrative seat of San Ildefonso, and turning in their ritual implements—such as alphabetic ritual texts and wooden cylindrical drums—each Zapotec community would receive a general amnesty from ecclesiastical prosecution for idolatry.

Zapotec Time, Alphabetic Writing, and the Public Sphere

“…It is clear that calendar authors regarded the production of these texts as a public but illicit practice that had to be carefully compartmentalized from a broader textual sphere. Several calendar owners reported having buried these texts for safekeeping; others inserted a title page that contained the beginning of a document in Zapotec directed to civil or ecclesiastic authorities (Tavárez 2006). Although townspeople did continue to consult illiterate specialists, evidence from fifteen Villa Alta towns implies a correlation between text authorship or ownership and one's renown beyond hometown boundaries as a specialist offering individual and collective consultations.…”

“…Ángel Maldonado only two years after the momentous execution of fifteen Zapotec rebels from San Francisco Cajonos. During this period, the officials of fifteen Bijanos Zapotec, twenty-seven Cajonos Zapotec, twentysix Nexitzo Zapotec, twenty-nine Mixe, and seven Chinantec towns presented brief confessions, denounced their ritual specialists, and turned in copies of their ritual texts (Alcina Franch 1993, Archivo Histórico Judicial de Oaxaca 2004, Gillow 1978[1889], Tavárez 2006. This bureaucratized exercise, which involved directly or by proxy most of the 60,000 indigenous inhabitants of Villa Alta, was the most multitudinous experiment in idolatry extirpation carried out in New Spain.…”

“…Although Maldonado's regional focus may bring to mind the persistent extirpations of Francisco de Ávila in Huarochirí in the early seventeenth century (Duviols 1971, Mills 1997, Griffiths 1995, Salomon and Urioste 1991, one element sets this campaign aside from other eradication exercises in colonial Spanish America: the surrender of about 107 separate textual units conZapotec Time, Alphabetic Writing, and the Public Sphere 75 taining alphabetic ritual texts in Bijanos, Cajonos, and Nexitzo Zapotec by officials from forty communities. Among them, one finds four collections of transcribed ritual songs, two of which are devoted to Christian entities (Tavárez 2006), while the remaining two celebrated Zapotec deities and founding ancestors from the standpoint of local cosmological theories (Tavárez 2008). The remaining 103 units are copies of the 260-day Zapotec ritual calendar, bound into ninety-nine cuadernos, or "booklets.…”

Predictions and Portents of Doomsday in European, Nahuatl, and Maya Texts

“…As if Nahuatl did not pose sufficient challenges, both David Tavárez and Mark Z. Christensen have added a second language to their investigations of colonial religion. Tavárez has published many studies of colonial religious practice among speakers of both Nahuatl and Zapotec (e.g., Tavárez 2000Tavárez , 2006Tavárez , 2009Tavárez , 2013aTavárez , 2013b, as well as a major treatise on colonial anti-idolatry campaigns that fully incorporates Nahua and Zapotec reactions to the intended eradication of their clandestine practices (Tavárez 2011(Tavárez , 2012. Also working with Zapotec, Farriss examined the encounter between the ritualized language used to address deities and the Christian sermons introduced by Dominican friars (Farriss 2014).…”