Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Notaries and the Making of Testaments in Ixil
Ten cen essno cin zic u hahil bicil amal mankinalob ychil no missa tin uuyah u xocol u hunil u visita ah yum noh tzicbenil yum ahau caan hele u hahil en 23 de mayo de 1788 anios.
I, who am the notary, put the truth here how on every occasion within the high mass I heard (read out) the paper of the notification of the visit of the great priest, the honorable bishop. Today, the truth, on May 23, 1788.
— Juan Couoh, notary
En 6 de marzo de 1769 años Lay u kinil Cin kamic u takin Ca yum Animas sinquenta y quarto pesos ... y Uunpel libra U cibil tu tanil priostre y mayordomoob ... Uay U hahil yn frmo.
March 6, 1769. On this day I received the money for the [cofradía of] Our Lord of Souls, fifty-four pesos ... and one pound of honeycomb. Before the administrator and majordomos ... Here is the truth, I sign.
— Clemente Mukul, patron and notary
Teabo y Nobi 22 de 1803 anos Ca ti oci yn canbal hoksic hunpel Libro fasion u kaba u tial txocol Ca u sates ten yn yumob hemax bin ylic ua yan Kasite ten u e il u Palilob Uay ti Cah Teabo lae
Teabo, November 22, 1803, when I finished learning to bring forth (perform) a book called Passion in order for it to be read. That they may forgive me, my lords, who will see if there are errors, I who am the least of their servants. Here in this cah of Teabo.
— Baltasar Mutul, notary
Documents are the foundational underpinnings of any historical work. Yet all too often we neglect those who wrote them — the scribes or notaries. Particularly in New Spain, notaries can be overlooked as mere cogs in a larger notarial machine driven by Spanish colonialism. The preassigned rubrics they followed and the volume of documents they produced at the behest of others oftentimes seem to relegate them to a historical role of voiceless copyists. Seen in one light, the notaries above served as simple secretaries recording entries and following the dictates of their superiors. In another light, they shine as important members of the town leadership. These notaries were entrusted, as was Juan Couoh, to ensure adherence to the mandate that episcopal visits be announced prior to the bishop's arrival; they were distinguished, as was Clemente Mukul, who served first as notary to his cofradía, then patron, then maestro to the town; and they were erudite, as was Baltasar Mutul, who composed a Passion text for his town of Teabo. As Kathryn Burns demonstrated for notaries in Peru, writing was indeed connected to power.
With regard to testaments, the notary's role was to record the testator's final spiritual and material bequests according to an established rubric. In one light, testament making in Ixil was the mundane, inconsequential task of a copyist. In another, it was the privileged responsibility of the few literate Maya that governed, and one that had profound social and religious impact on its inhabitants. Thus, this chapter begins this book's ethnohistorical study of Ixil's testaments by first examining their authors. Specifically, the chapter examines the notaries' rotation, status, and individual contributions to the testaments themselves along with those of the testators. In so doing, it gives each of the various notaries a distinguishable voice and recognizes their distinct preferences that further illustrate their importance in Ixil and its social and religious life.
The Notary in Ixil
The Spanish success in establishing a colonial system in New Spain relied in large part on Spaniards' custom of building upon preexisting structures, both physically and politically. Particularly in the Yucatan, Spaniards never even came close to outnumbering the indigenous population, and so a system of indirect rule and local governance was essential. Prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, the Maya employed a socially stratified hierarchy of governors and rulers taken from the nobility to oversee their religious and political affairs. Thus, every Maya community having pueblo status quickly adapted to the Spanish-style town council, or cabildo, introduced in the colonial period. It included the position of escribano, scribe or notary.
The Maya sculpted and shaped the colonial position of notary to resemble more its prehispanic predecessor, the ah dzib, or "he who writes." In some cases, the prehispanic ah dzib stepped directly into the position of notary, taking with him his knowledge of Maya hieroglyphs. Yet in all cases the Maya notary held a position of prestige elevated above that of his Spanish counterpart. Spanish practice held the notary at the lowest position in the hierarchy of the cabildo; the Maya ranked it as slightly below if not equal to that of the town's political leader, the batab (plural, batabob). John Chuchiak noted that despite Spanish notarial law stating that the notary's signature should be the final one on any document, Maya batabob and notaries continually signed the document together "either before the other officials of the cabildo, or in the center of the page, with the lesser officials' signatures off to the right- and left-hand sides." The wills from Ixil confirm this tendency, as seen in figure 1.1.
The early Franciscans in Yucatan established schools for the sons of the Maya elite to train the province's future leaders. From these schools emerged the maestros and notaries — the only two positions requiring literacy and the only two salaried positions in the community. Maestros served as religious caretakers of a Maya town tasked, among other things, with the instruction of Catholic doctrine. Notaries composed a wide range of documents, including petitions, registros (notarial books) of all types, wills, bills of sale, complaints, receipts, and other local communal documents. For many of these tasks, notaries collected fees in addition to their salary, ranging from two to four reales for a will and one to two reales for a signature.
Often, the notary held the responsibility of maintaining the town's written archive, both official and unofficial. Native notaries frequently composed the numerous and mundane ecclesiastical records that the priest was required to maintain. Two examples, of many, concern the towns of Chicxulub and Ixil, where Maya notaries penned baptismal records that friars subsequently signed. The Chicxulub record (figure 1.2) reads as follows:
En el 7 de Abril de 1783 a.s Bautice y puse los Santos olios a Juana yja lixitima de Paspar taCu y de Manuela bas Cahnal Uai ti Cah Chicxulub lae Padrino D.n Domingo Zapata
fr. Franc.co Sanchez
On the 7th of April, 1783, I baptized and placed the holy oils upon Juana, legitimate daughter of Gaspar Tacu and Manuela Bas, residents here in this town of Chicxulub. Don Domingo Zapata, godfather.
— Fray Francisco Sanchez (rubric)
The Ixil record (figure 1.3) reads as follows:
Baixan tu kamah Caput sihil huntu[l] xibil pal ydalgo cahnal Yxil sihi tu kinil Sabado en 30 de Disiembre [1797] u mehen Mateo Pech y al M. a Josefa Pech cahnalob Yxil u kila cabil u yume Luis Pech y Franca Pech u kila cabil u na franco Pech y Dominga Pech u Padrinoe Lucas Yam y Micaela chan u Kaba lay pala Josef M. a u ah okotbae u yum San Josef in pixnal yum padre Fuentes tu betah lay oc ha lae.
(Left-hand margin) Jose Maaria YdalgoFr. Fuentes
Likewise, one noble boy, resident of Ixil, received baptism; born on Saturday, December 30, [1797], the son of Mateo Pech and the child of María Josepha Pech, residents of Ixil. The lineage of the father is Luis Pech and Francisca Pech; the lineage of the mother is Francisco Pech and Dominga Pech; the names of the godparents for this child, Joseph María, are Lucas Yam and Micaela Chan; his advocate is the lord San Joseph; my blessed lord Padre Fuentes performed this baptism.
(Left-hand margin) Joseph María, noble Fr. Fuentes (rubric)
The spelling, orthography, and use of Yucatec Maya in both entries betray native notaries who would have composed documents for an ecclesiastic to sign later — in a similar fashion to wills.
That the entries and verifying signatures of births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths often differed in both author and date of composition is made certain with a comparison of records. On January 4, 1766, both Isidro Pech and Antonia Coba died, the former in Conkal, the latter in Ixil. Yet both entries, done in separate hands and appearing in separate ledgers, bear the signature of fray Juan de Hoyos, the curate of Conkal, who simply verified and recorded that the event and accompanying rites occurred. According to expectations confirmed by the 1722 ecclesiastical Yucatecan synod and those enforced by late eighteenth- century visitas (a bishop's pastoral visitation to a province), every cabecera was to maintain individual books containing, baptismal, confirmation, marriage, and death records for itself and its visitas. Maya notaries would often compose such entries, which would later be signed by the Spanish curate.
With regard to Ixil, it is unclear why the Maya notary who penned the baptismal record for Joseph María Pech did so in Yucatec Maya. Indeed, it is strange that the baptismal ledger for Ixil from 1784 to 1799 was kept in Maya at all, whereas all other known Ixil ledgers and entries are in Spanish. Moreover, the Maya entry for Juana Tacu of Chicxulub states clearly that it was done in the town itself. It seems that on occasion, then, at least for Chicxulub and likely Ixil and perhaps others, Maya notaries composed the ledgers locally in their towns for which Conkal was responsible. This, after all, is not unheard of, as unofficial death, birth, and marriage records appear penned by town notaries in various forbidden and locally preserved texts such as the Books of Chilam Balam and Maya Christian copybooks. In the end, and regardless of the location of the ledgers, the role of native notaries in composing such records is clear.
As mentioned, notaries could also be responsible for penning quasi-notarial documents — unofficial, unauthorized texts or texts composed outside the supervision of ecclesiastics and intended for a Maya audience. Indeed, the privileged duties of the notary for many Maya cahob included both official and unofficial tasks, as made evident by the many forbidden texts that ecclesiastic officials confiscated throughout the colonial period. One example of a notary engaging in unofficial or quasi-notarial text production concerns the aforementioned 1803 copybook on the Passion of Christ from Teabo. The local native rulers of the town gave Baltasar Mutul the responsibility of composing the work, and he consequently signed his name at the end as escribano, complete with his particular rubric.
The rubric itself is yet another distinction of status above that of other Maya positions. Spanish law decreed that a notary be issued a particular rubric to employ when signing his documents to prevent possible cases of forgery. Maya rubrics are, admittedly, not as lavish as their Spanish counterparts in the escribano business, often appearing as a series of loops or squiggles (figure 1.4) — although such a rubric would be perfectly respectable as used by a literate Spaniard who was neither a professional notary nor a high-ranking nobleman.
Regardless, the rubrics of Maya notaries distinguished their position above that of other members of the cabildo, with exception of the batab, who likewise could usually sign with a rubric (although not always) and who might have been a notary himself earlier in his career. As the colonial period progressed and the training of notaries increasingly became a communal responsibility fulfilled outside the monasteries, current notaries could handpick their successors, thus ensuring it as a position for elites only. Indeed, although Spaniards eventually appointed Maya commoners as governors in some towns, the position of notary largely continued to be a position for the native nobility.
The Ixil testaments and codicils provide a unique insight in the cah's rotation of notaries. To prevent conflicts, Spanish authorities theoretically prohibited the continuous holding of the office of notary among local indigenous men. Yet in practice this was oftentimes ignored. Towns such as Cacalchen and Tekanto and the cahob-barrios (as Restall dubbed them) of Merida-Tiho — San Sebastián, Santiago, La Mejorada, Santa Ana, and San Cristóbal — llustrate a pattern of semi-consistency with regard to the notary. Here the notaries often resembled the batab or maestro and stayed in their position for extended amounts of time. Mateo Couoh served as notary in Tekanto for a striking nineteen consecutive years from 1683 to 1702.
Ixil's testaments, however, suggest that the town elected annually its notary in late November and that the position rotated among a select cache of individuals (table 1.1). Despite the reappearance of regulars such as Marcos Poot and Pablo Tec, Ixil's consistent rotation of notaries is impressive for a town of its small size. It is possible that an Ixil notary occasionally held the position for a few consecutive years, as many of its testaments are dated years apart from each other, thus preventing a consistent, year-by-year glimpse. In reality, supply and demand along with famines, plagues, and death affected the rotational nature of the position for any town. However, the occasional run of sequential testaments suggests a trend, at least during the 1760s, of a strict annual rotation.
For example, the longest stretch of continuous years found in the extant wills occurs between 1765 and 1769. The notaries Marcos Poot and Pablo Tec passed the position back and forth from 1765 and 1768, with Alonso Cob, who took the position in 1769. Occasionally, the names of two notaries appear on a will, but this occurs in only two scenarios and both with Marcos Poot. The first scenario regards the months of December or January when the transition between notaries takes place. Perhaps the elected notary (re)familiarized and oriented the incoming notary by allowing him to compose a few testaments toward the end of the elected notary's tenure. This would allow, for example, the incoming notary, Marcos Poot, to pen various wills composed in late 1766 while including the name of the elected notary, Pablo Tec. Even with the names of both notaries appearing on the wills, a distinction is made. As the elected notary for that year, Tec always signs as essno publico, or public notary, while Poot signed simply as notary in 1766.
The second scenario occurs with Poot appearing as mahan kab, literally "hired hand," or, in this case, substitute notary, in the tenure of the elected notary, Joseph Cob, at the end of 1765. The testaments bearing Poot's name as mahan kab are all in his hand, and it seems that Cob's name appears only as a formality. Cob had previously served as notary in 1760 and would later become batab in 1773. Why Cob could not finish his elected year serving as notary is uncertain; perhaps he was battling illness. Within the available corpus, Cob served as notary in 1760 and again in 1765, but never thereafter. However, as Poot was not the incoming notary for the upcoming year of 1766 — that job fell to Pablo Tec — he signed as mahan kab instead of "notary," perhaps indicating the impromptu nature of his hired services.
As noted, the Ixil corpus is illustrative of the cah's limited literacy and the restriction of the position of notary to select, noble families — the Cetz, Coba, Poot, Cob, Tec Chim, Itza, and Yam lineages. Most prolific was Marcos Poot, who appeared serving as notary in 1755, 1766, 1767, and 1777. However, the Cob and Chim lineages also appear repeatedly, with the former having three individuals as notary and the latter having two.
The eastern Yucatecan town of Ebtun also offers an excellent example of the restriction of literacy and the position of notary to select families (table 1.2). Available documents suggest that the Dzul family dominated the position of notary for nearly half a century, if not longer. In Ebtun father likely trained son or nephew in the trade, allowing various members of the Dzul chibal to pen the town's written record. In some years, two separate members of the Dzul chibal appear as notary for different documents; yet no distinction between notaries such as "notary," "notary public," or "mahan kab" is given like that seen in Ixil.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Return to Ixil"
by .
Copyright © 2019 University Press of Colorado.
Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
