The nations and languages of Nueva Galicia as a chronicler of 1742 found them: an indigenous migration tradition preserved at four removes, a list of tongues that had stopped being spoken, and the numbers behind the silence
Mota Padilla opens his history of western Mexico with the diversity of languages, prints a Mexica migration tradition traced back to a cacique's grandfather, names the cocas, tequexes, choras, tecualmes and nayaritas, and then records that by 1742 those tongues had ceased to be spoken and nearly all spoke one. His own figures say what happened to the speakers: thirty thousand reduced to about fifteen hundred in one alcaldia mayor, eight thousand to three thousand in another.
Why this wins its question: Ask which languages were spoken in western Mexico before the conquest and the answer available today is a family tree assembled by modern linguists from later evidence, with the extinct languages of Nueva Galicia named in a list and no witness attached. This object supplies the witness: the pages on which a lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara, writing in 1742, names the cocas, tequexes, choras, tecualmes and nayaritas and says in the same breath that they had stopped being spoken; gives his counts of fourteen, thirty- four and innumerable languages for the kingdoms to the north; prints a Mexica migration route recited by a named cacique from his grandfathers' memory; explains the survival of Tarascan and Otomi by the limits of a conquest; and shows Nahuatl working as the language of a bloodless entrada because the Spaniards had learned it from their own auxiliaries. It also refuses to let any of that stand alone. The same seven pages carry the numbers behind the silence in the chronicler's own arithmetic, the hunting of chichimeco captives from hill to hill to take a tongue, and the sentence in which the whole protective law of the Indies is grounded in the rusticity of the people it protects. The achievement and its price are on the same sheets, and both are claims here.
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 history begins not with a conquest but with a problem of language, which is unusual enough to be worth stating first. Page 19 opens the narrative with chapter I, headed as an account of the first settlers of the kingdom of Nueva Galicia in the time of their gentility, the variety of nations, the diversity of languages, the idols they adored and how they were dominated by the Indians who came out of Aztatlan and are today called Mexicans. The text concedes at once that the ground is uncertain: many pens have tired themselves investigating who the first inhabitants of the New World were, the variety of opinions is so great that it cannot serve as a foundation, and before the Spaniards discovered this vast realm there was no notice of it, nor afterwards did the Indians give their origin, because they were ignorant of it through the non-use of writing. The author then states the observation the rest of the chapter is built on: that in other kingdoms the language is at least uniform in each province, but not in America, where at short distances are found nations that do not communicate with one another through the diversity of tongues.
He gives figures for the neighbouring kingdoms, and they are his own, offered without a survey behind them. Page 20 states that the kingdom of New Mexico uses fourteen languages, the provinces of Nueva Vizcaya thirty-four, and those of Sonora and Sinaloa innumerable ones, a variety he says persuades him that the first settlers of the kingdom were not Carthaginians, nor Greeks, nor Romans, nor Chinese, nor Tartars, nor any other known nation of the world, because there would then have been uniformity in the language of some of them. The explanation he reaches for is the confusion of Babel, argued at length on the same page: no other nation of the world suffers so much confusion of tongues, God having wished to punish them, and in other kingdoms the idiom is at least uniform by province. The counts are worth recording because they are among the earliest quantitative statements about the linguistic density of northern Mesoamerica, and the explanation is worth recording because it shows what the counting was for. Neither is a finding: the numbers are unsourced on the page and no method is given.
The migration tradition the chapter prints is indigenous in origin and the chain of transmission is named, which is what makes it usable and also what limits it. Page 21 attributes it to Fr. Antonio Tello, followed by Fr. Ornelas and others: in the pueblo of Tzapotzingo, between Xalisco and Centizpac, a cacique named Pantecal, baptised by Fr. Juan de Padilla with Nuno de Guzman standing as godfather, said he had heard from his father Xonacaltayorit, lord of the province of Acaponeta, what he knew from his grandfathers and forebears: that from the innermost north, from a province called Aztatlan, various families came out at two different times. The first entered by New Mexico, Zibola, Sonora, Sinaloa, Acaponeta, Centizpac, Xalisco, Ahuacatlan, Tonala and the provinces of Avalos and Colima, passed through the sierra of Michoacan and settled at Tezcuco; the second entered by Topia, Guadiana, Zacatecas, Xuchipila, Teul, Nochistlan, Tlaltenanco and Teocualtichi, passed by Queretaro and settled at the lake of Mexico. Both moved in stays of ten, twenty and thirty years, making war on the dispersed peoples they found. The page adds that the first Mexicans who entered were tractable and lived by natural law, and the second were warriors who brought idols to which they sacrificed human blood, not only of captives but of their own, offered by their parents. This is a cacique's account of his grandfathers' memory, written down by a friar, followed by a second friar and printed by a lawyer two centuries later, and it is reported here as that and not as a history of the Mexica migration.
The same page gives a sociolinguistic explanation of the map of languages, and it is an explanation by conquest and flight. Page 21 records that of the peoples the Mexicans found, some were defeated and captive and were subjugated and remained among them, from which arose the mixing and corrupting of the Aztec language, which is the most extended in the kingdom of Nueva Galicia although not with the perfection it has in Mexico; and that in the rancherias of Indians where the Mexicans did not dare to enter, the peoples preserved their native speech, as in the sierra of Michoacan the Tarascan language, and in the ranges near Mexico the Otomi. Within Nueva Galicia the page names as surviving nations the cocas, tequexes, choras, tecualmes and nayaritas, and others. A chronicler with no linguistic training is here explaining language distribution by the reach of a conquest and by the inaccessibility of the country that escaped it, which is close to the explanation a modern account would give, though he draws it from a migration story rather than from evidence about the languages themselves.
Then the sentence this entry exists for. Page 21 records that those other nations of Nueva Galicia, after the land was pacified, have ceased to be spoken, because those of the Aztec language, which was the greater nation, being now reduced, they have become mixed, so that by the time of writing almost all speak only one language in Nueva Galicia, except in the province of Nayarit, in the centre of the kingdom, which by its roughness has been a place of refuge for the Indians, such that reduced to unity is all the rest of the kingdom, and the Nayarit had been unconquerable until the years 720 and 722, when it was pacified. The claim is a chronicler's impression rather than a survey: no count of speakers is given, no locality is excepted beyond Nayarit, and languages reported dead by an outside observer have often turned out to be spoken. But it is a contemporary statement, made without embarrassment by a man in the interest of the colonising side, that within two centuries of the conquest the linguistic map of an entire kingdom had collapsed into one tongue.
The numbers that stand behind that silence are on the same sheets and are the chronicler's own. Page 49 records that in the province Pedro Almindez Chirinos entered the number of Indians would be eight thousand, whereas the corregimiento today composed of those pueblos and that of Santa Fe will reach three thousand persons with four hundred and forty-five tributaries. Page 50 records for the pueblos founded in the shadow of Santa Maria de los Lagos six hundred and ninety-four whole tributaries, which will make up three thousand five hundred persons. Page 64, arguing about the missions of the north, states that the alcaldia mayor of Centizpac was then composed of more than thirty thousand Indians, who have remained at three hundred and eleven whole tributaries, which will make little more than fifteen hundred persons. No census is cited for any of the three and the tributary-to-person multiplier is the author's, so the figures are reported as his arithmetic; taken together they are a colonial official's own account of a fall of roughly nineteen twentieths in one district and of more than half in another, printed without protest in the middle of a defence of the conquest.
Nahuatl worked as the language of a peaceful entry, and the chronicle shows how the Spaniards acquired it. Page 49 records that Pedro Almindez Chirinos entered with eighty Spaniards and a thousand Indian auxiliaries, that the caciques of the neighbouring pueblos came out to meet him, that he took possession of that whole territory being received and feasted by its natives, who spoke the Aztec language, for which reason they were well understood by the Indian auxiliaries, and even by the Spaniards, who by the continual conversation of the Mexicans were becoming practised in it. The same page records that the entry through the Cuitzeo valley had been bloody and that experience of it made them resolve to give free passage to Chirinos. The linguistic point and the military one are inseparable on this page: the tongue that made the peaceful entrance possible was carried there by the auxiliaries of a conquest, and the Spaniards learned it from them rather than from a grammar.
Where the language failed, the method of getting information was capture, and the page says so plainly. Page 50 records of the chichimeco peoples north of Lagos that they lived without king, without cacique, without republic and without anyone to rule them; that embassies were sent by the hands of Indians loaded with gifts, though of little value; and that the Indians gave much trouble not because they resisted the entry with arms but by the labour with which our men went from one hill to another like hunters, setting stands to take them by hand. About a hundred Indians were thus seized, from whom a tongue was taken and who gave account that those peoples lived without king, without cacique and without republic. The verb the page uses, coger lengua, is the period term for seizing a captive as informant and interpreter at once, and its appearance here means that part of the ethnographic and linguistic knowledge printed in this chapter was obtained from prisoners. The same page records that the other Indians called them chichimecos, glossed as dogs, for their having no fixed residence.
The register in which all of this is written is contemptuous, and it is left standing here because it is evidence about the writer and about the doctrine he is invoking. Page 20 concludes that the Indians surrender to everything and everyone deceives them, and that only the Christianity of the Catholic kings and the prudence of the supreme councillors of the Indies have recognised the rusticity of these wretches, for which reason it is ordained by infinite laws and cedulas that they be protected and defended by the courts and in everything treated as minors. Page 50 calls the northern peoples rustics who went naked and did not sow. That single sentence on page 20 contains both halves of the colonial settlement as an eighteenth-century criollo lawyer understood it: a genuine and enforceable body of protective law, and a justification for it that denies the protected their capacity. The corpus treats the legal doctrine itself elsewhere; what is claimed here is only that this is how a well-placed jurist of 1742 stated it, in his own words, on a page describing the peoples it applied to.
An adjoining chapter shows the legal machinery being run in the other direction, and it is printed without any sign that the author found it awkward. Page 27 records that the caciques of Xacona asked for a hearing, in which the Indians said that in the province where they were there were certain settlements of Indians who, though valiant, were tractable and went clothed, among whom many spoke the Aztec or Mexican tongue, that their lands were fertile and sown, that they had their republics well ordered, and that they extended to the sea on the west. The same page records that Nuno de Guzman, as president of the Real Audiencia, having seen and been advised of the report of such a conquest, and knowing that no right could be acquired in what was entered without founding the conversion by placing religious to teach doctrine and baptise, and that the repartimiento of encomiendas gave no right while the encomenderos did not reside in them, decided to enter those provinces again and include them in his conquests, rooting the gospel in them by means of workers, and without giving his thought to be understood moved his camp. Testimony taken from indigenous petitioners is the source of the geography, and the legal requirement of evangelisation appears on the same page as the condition of title that made a second entrada worth mounting.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 19, 20, 21, 27, 49, 50 and 64 of the Mexico 1870 printing of a manuscript finished at Guadalajara in 1742; the manuscript was not seen and the editors' transcription is not tested here. Fr. Antonio Tello's chronicle, which is the source of the migration tradition, was not opened, so nothing here establishes what Tello wrote as against what Mota Padilla made of him. Nothing here identifies the cocas, tequexes, choras, tecualmes or nayaritas with any language family, states when any of them was last spoken, or tests the claim that they had stopped being spoken by 1742 against any other witness; the corpus's own entries on Orozco y Berra and on Hervas were not consulted for this purpose and are linked as related rather than as corroboration. The population figures are the chronicler's and no cause of the decline is claimed here, epidemic, labour or flight. The gloss of chichimeco as dogs is the page's, not this entry's, and is reported as a period usage recorded by an outsider.