Language, Literacy, and Power on a Nahuatl-Spanish Frontier

Considering the number of people involved (under a thousand), the resettlement of Nahuatl-speaking Tlaxcalans to New Spain’s northern frontier in 1591 has generated a disproportionately vast literature. It is surprising, therefore, that so few of these researchers have capitalized on the abundance of records the settlers produced at the frontier in their native Nahuatl (a large archive of Nahuatl materials remains from the colony of San Esteban de la Nueva Tlaxcala in Saltillo, Coahuila). That silence speaks less to the ‘peripheral’ location of the settlements they founded (after all, several dissertations and monographs are dedicated to the northern colonization) but rather to linguistic and spatial barriers prevailing in modern scholarship (these studies almost invariably invoke only Spanish-language documentation, while Nahuatl scholars predominantly focus on the “core” Nahua region of central Mexico). Nevertheless much can be gained, my paper will argue, from analyzing Nahuatl documents from the frontier. The paper traces patterns of philological change in Nahuatl documents composed by the Tlaxcalan cabildo at San Esteban in order to reconstruct bilingualism and literacy rates among the founder population in the seventeenth century. At San Esteban, literacy and power were mutually reinforcing. Therefore an analysis of literacy can provide insight into rulership and social stratification in early San Esteban and shed light on the extent to which indigenous forms of social organization were maintained—or transformed—through historical processes of diaspora, community re-formation, and language change. Thus this paper invokes two valences of the term “frontier”: the first refers to the physical location of a particular Tlaxcalan colony at the edge of Nahua-Hispanic ‘civilization,’ while the second calls attention to the permeable linguistic boundary that separated—and linked—Nahuatl and Spanish in northeastern New Spain.

Considering the number of people involved (under a thousand), the resettlement of Nahuatl-speaking Tlaxcalans to New Spain’s northern frontier in 1591 has generated a disproportionately vast literature. It is surprising, therefore, that so few of these researchers have capitalized on the abundance of records the settlers produced at the frontier in their native Nahuatl (a large archive of Nahuatl materials remains from the colony of San Esteban de la Nueva Tlaxcala in Saltillo, Coahuila). That silence speaks less to the ‘peripheral’ location of the settlements they founded (after all, several dissertations and monographs are dedicated to the northern colonization) but rather to linguistic and spatial barriers prevailing in modern scholarship (these studies almost invariably invoke only Spanish-language documentation, while Nahuatl scholars predominantly focus on the “core” Nahua region of central Mexico). Nevertheless much can be gained, my paper will argue, from analyzing Nahuatl documents from the frontier. The paper traces patterns of philological change in Nahuatl documents composed by the Tlaxcalan cabildo at San Esteban in order to reconstruct bilingualism and literacy rates among the founder population in the seventeenth century. At San Esteban, literacy and power were mutually reinforcing. Therefore an analysis of literacy can provide insight into rulership and social stratification in early San Esteban and shed light on the extent to which indigenous forms of social organization were maintained—or transformed—through historical processes of diaspora, community re-formation, and language change. Thus this paper invokes two valences of the term “frontier”: the first refers to the physical location of a particular Tlaxcalan colony at the edge of Nahua-Hispanic ‘civilization,’ while the second calls attention to the permeable linguistic boundary that separated—and linked—Nahuatl and Spanish in northeastern New Spain.

Considering the number of people involved (under a thousand), the resettlement of Nahuatl-speaking Tlaxcalans to New Spain’s northern frontier in 1591 has generated a disproportionately vast literature. It is surprising, therefore, that so few of these researchers have capitalized on the abundance of records the settlers produced at the frontier in their native Nahuatl (a large archive of Nahuatl materials remains from the colony of San Esteban de la Nueva Tlaxcala in Saltillo, Coahuila). That silence speaks less to the ‘peripheral’ location of the settlements they founded (after all, several dissertations and monographs are dedicated to the northern colonization) but rather to linguistic and spatial barriers prevailing in modern scholarship (these studies almost invariably invoke only Spanish-language documentation, while Nahuatl scholars predominantly focus on the “core” Nahua region of central Mexico). Nevertheless much can be gained, my paper will argue, from analyzing Nahuatl documents from the frontier.

The paper traces patterns of philological change in Nahuatl documents composed by the Tlaxcalan cabildo at San Esteban in order to reconstruct bilingualism and literacy rates among the founder population in the seventeenth century. At San Esteban, literacy and power were mutually reinforcing. Therefore an analysis of literacy can provide insight into rulership and social stratification in early San Esteban and shed light on the extent to which indigenous forms of social organization were maintained—or transformed—through historical processes of diaspora, community re-formation, and language change. Thus this paper invokes two valences of the term “frontier”: the first refers to the physical location of a particular Tlaxcalan colony at the edge of Nahua-Hispanic ‘civilization,’ while the second calls attention to the permeable linguistic boundary that separated—and linked—Nahuatl and Spanish in northeastern New Spain.

Considering the number of people involved (under a thousand), the resettlement of Nahuatl-speaking Tlaxcalans to New Spain’s northern frontier in 1591 has generated a disproportionately vast literature. It is surprising, therefore, that so few of these researchers have capitalized on the abundance of records the settlers produced at the frontier in their native Nahuatl (a large archive of Nahuatl materials remains from the colony of San Esteban de la Nueva Tlaxcala in Saltillo, Coahuila). That silence speaks less to the ‘peripheral’ location of the settlements they founded (after all, several dissertations and monographs are dedicated to the northern colonization) but rather to linguistic and spatial barriers prevailing in modern scholarship (these studies almost invariably invoke only Spanish-language documentation, while Nahuatl scholars predominantly focus on the “core” Nahua region of central Mexico). Nevertheless much can be gained, my paper will argue, from analyzing Nahuatl documents from the frontier.