The languages of the Zacatecas frontier: a Franciscan province's language rule, printed in 1737
Arlegui's 1737 chronicle states a standing rule of the Franciscan custody of Zacatecas — every newly arrived friar was to be taught the language of the nation he was posted to — and prints what it produced: fifteen qualified lenguaraces, a minister credited with five languages, Indian interpreters at the first entradas, Nahuatl as the teaching medium. The same pages carry the coercion, the contempt, and the order's admission of what it lost.
Why this wins its question: The general question — did Spanish missionaries on the northern frontier actually learn the languages, or is that a pious claim — is usually answered from modern secondary summaries or from the surviving printed artes, which biases the answer toward the handful of regions that produced a book. This object answers it from the inside of one province's own chronicle, and quotes the institutional form the rule took: not an exhortation but a posting policy, with a stated reason, a headcount of qualified speakers, and a named ceiling of five languages in one man. It also prints the four things such an account almost always omits: that the first interpreters were Indian allies and not friars, that the teaching medium was Nahuatl rather than the local languages, that the chronicler concedes his order kept no record of its first thirty-eight years so the philology is lost, and that the same volume records the grievance of the people being taught — land taken, children seized at gunpoint, permanent fear — in their own terms while calling the women who voiced it instruments of the Devil. A reader can weigh a real institutional practice against its real cost without leaving the source.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The rule is stated as a decision of the custody rather than as a virtue of individuals. At page 45 Arlegui writes that the friars "se dieron maña en aprender los idiomas de los Indios, con que acabaron de hacerse dueños de sus rusticos corazones, porque aman mucho al que les habla en su idioma", and that from that time forward they laid down that those newly arriving in the Custodia "fuessen luego instruidos en el lenguage de la nacion, à que los destinaban, conociendo el grave inconveniente, que se sigue de no tener inteligencia de sus palabras". The stated reason is instrumental — a minister who cannot understand what is said to him is useless — and the stated result on the same page is a count: the custody found itself with "quince Ministros idoneos lenguaraces".
Language competence is recorded as a distributed capability with a named ceiling. Page 316 describes Fray Juan de Herrera — distinguished in the text from another friar of the same name who died at the hands of the Indians of Sinaloa — as "Ministro muy zeloso, versado, y inteligente en el idioma de los barbaros", who "tuvo especialissima gracia de aprehender, y hablar con toda perfeccion en cinco distintos idiomas". Page 244 says of Fr. Pedro Gutierrez that he "avia aprendido con eminencia los idiomas de las belicosas naciones de la Vizcaya"; page 311 calls another friar "diestrissimo en su idioma". The chronicle names no grammar, no vocabulary and no printed art produced by the province, and this entry makes no claim that any existed.
Before the rule there were interpreters, and the chronicle puts them at the decisive moment of the first approach. Page 14 records that the captain, with the camp pitched, "no quiso el cuerdo Capitan espantar la caza, ni hacer demostracion alguna de guerra, sino que con blandura, mediante uno de los Religiosos, que entendia el idioma, y dos Indios auxiliares de Güchipila, por donde vino, les hizo saber, que era pacifica su entrada, y que solo solicitaba comunicarles el mayor bien, que podian dessear". Page 26 has a friar travelling with a breviary, an image of Christ and "un Indio interprete, que llevaba", by whose means he made his purposes known to the Zacatecos at a river the text says they call Suchil, "que es lo mesmo, que en Castellano rosa, ò flor". On this frontier the interpreter is an Indian ally, and the chronicle says so.
Nahuatl is described as the working vehicle of instruction across the province, and not as one of the local frontier languages. Page 126 opens on "la lengua mexicana, donde se ha llegado à conseguir, que estén muy diestros en la Doctrina Christiana aun los Indios mas barbaros, y retirados": Mexican is what the most remote pupils are said to be proficient in. The chronicle does not say how the shift from a local language to Nahuatl was made, or what it cost the local languages, and this entry does not supply an answer. That the province's teaching medium on a frontier hundreds of leagues from the valley of Mexico was the language of central Mexico is a fact about the reach of Nahuatl as much as about the friars.
The language work was delegated below the friars, and the office kept a Nahuatl name. Page 125 records that so that the most distant rancherias should not lack the teaching, in the haciendas where the administered population lived there were "señalados Maestros, que se nombran Themaztianes" — temachtiani, the Nahuatl word for a teacher — the daily recital in the convent patios, checked against a padron, being what these masters extended to the settlements a friar could not reach. A frontier catechetical office is being named in the language of central Mexico, which is consistent with the same page's account of a Nahuatl-medium instruction, and this entry reads it as evidence of that rather than of anything about the local languages.
The strongest evidence in the chronicle that the language rule was real is that it appears in scenes where it did the friars no good. Page 244 describes Fr. Pedro Gutierrez at the pueblo of Santa Cathalina, "pocas leguas adelante de Sãtiago Papasquiaro", in the rising of the Tepehuan nation, with the Spaniards fortified in a house the attackers set on fire from every side. He went out to them "y con eficaces razones les dixo en su idioma: que si se hallaban sedientos de christiana sangre, derramassen la de sus venas, perdonando la de tantos innocentes"; the text says he persuaded them so effectively "en su idioma" that they were held suspended a long time, until one of them cut the argument short with the resolution to leave no Spanish Christian alive, mocked the others as cowards, and began to shoot. Page 267 has another friar walking into a barranca to men with their bows drawn, "predicandoles en su idioma", who put down their weapons. The language is doing the work in both scenes, and the chronicle records that it failed in one of them. Note on the date: page 244 puts this death "en el mesmo año de mil, seiscientos, y seis", where the Tepehuan rising is conventionally dated 1616. This entry reports the year the chronicle prints and does not adopt it.
The same chronicle records that language was an instrument on the other side, and it records it without noticing what it has said. Page 159, describing the councils that preceded a rising, states that "el modo de convocarse, para tratar la materia, es embiar un Indio, que hable bien el idioma" of the nation being summoned: a competent speaker sent as an envoy between nations, the exact skill the custody was training in its own friars, used for the coordination of war. The chronicle treats it as a symptom of barbarity rather than as a diplomatic institution, and this entry notes the asymmetry.
The motive on the record is conversion and the pacification of a frontier, not the preservation of languages, and the chronicle is explicit about the coercion that ran alongside the persuasion. Page 126 concedes that "casi todos los Indios son inclinados al ocio, y como gente rustica cuidan poco de lo que conduce à su espiritual provecho, y assi muchas vezes es preciso, valerse del paternal rigor, para que executen lo que se les ordena para su enseñanza"; page 127 says that in the Reyno de Leon and in Vizcaya the people are "tan bozales, y ferozes" that much suffering and tolerance is needed "para ganar à los barbaros las voluntades", that the ministers are left "muy desconsolados", and that consolation is sought in the children because the old "ya hicieron costumbre de lo barbaro". A language policy sat inside a programme that assumed the people it addressed were rude and idle, and applied "rigor" when they did not attend.
Page 159 is the sharpest counterpoint in the volume, because the chronicle prints the grievance in the speakers' own terms while assigning it to the Devil. At the dances, Arlegui writes, the old women remind the young "la libertad, con que en la antiguedad vivian, antes que los Españoles se señorearan de sus tierras, y la poca, que gozan en los presentes tiempos, y como las mejores tierras estàn en poder de los Christianos, quienes à fuerza de sus escopetas les quitan à sus hijos, y los hacen andar siempre con temores". He then calls the speakers "el organo, por donde el Demonio introduce en los Indios su veneno" and "viejas depravadas". Land loss, the seizure of children and life under permanent fear are recorded, verbatim and hostilely framed, by the institution that benefited from all three.
What the province lost is stated by the chronicler himself, on the same page as the language rule. Page 45 says that in the custody's first thirty-eight years, under nine prelates, "como entonces mas se atendia à obrar, que à escribir, dexaron muchas cosas, dignas de saberse, en el olvido". Whatever grammars, vocabularies or catechisms the fifteen lenguaraces made, the chronicle of their own order says the record of that period was not kept. This is the ordinary condition of frontier missionary philology and is the reason a count of speakers, rather than a shelf of books, is what survives here.
Language competence and armed force are on the same page more than once, and the entry does not separate them. Page 316, which credits Fray Juan de Herrera with five languages, continues immediately into the sack of the convent of San Andres de las Ventanas, where a hundred and three people of both sexes and all ages were killed, most of them Tlaxcaltecas who had been settled there the year before at the cost of the royal treasury. Page 311 has a friar "diestrissimo en su idioma" walking barefoot some three hundred leagues to Mexico City to petition the viceroy, in company with Concho captains "que avia reducido" and relying on "la destreza de los flecheros, que llevaba". The languages were learned in the course of a colonisation that moved populations and fought wars, and the chronicle does not pretend otherwise.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 14, 26, 45, 124 to 127, 159, 244, 267, 311 and 316 of the Mexico 1737 printing. The chronicle names no individual frontier language of the Zacatecas province on the pages read — no Zacateco, Guachichil, Tepehuan or Cora grammar, wordlist or speaker count appears — so nothing here identifies which five languages Fray Juan de Herrera is credited with, or what the "idiomas de las belicosas naciones de la Vizcaya" were. The chapters on the risings from page 187, the Nayarit material at page 172, and libros III and IV were not opened. Nothing here establishes whether the fifteen lenguaraces left any written work, whether the rule outlasted the years Arlegui describes, or how the province's practice compared with the Jesuit missions to its west. Everything is what one interested chronicle prints about its own order.