My Tarascan Project

Here is a summary of the methods, goals and findings since December, 2012, when I re-commenced work on my old PhD dissertation on history of 17th century Tarascan Indians in western Mexico:

By Joel Thurtell

When I began doing research in Mexican parish archives, I conceived of the project in conventional demographic terms. I made graphs of fertility and mortality and aimed at performing a reconstitution of families in the tradition of French historical demography. However, that effort requires both baptism and marriage registers, and when it became clear that I was not finding marriage registers, I had a choice: I could abandon the project and find another thesis topic; or I could improvise.

Re-inventing the project was made easier as I worked with the baptism registers in the parish of Patzcuaro, Michoacan and detected a pattern that intrigued me. If you work with the registers for several hours each day, you may become sensitive to nuances that would not spring to the eyes of a casual reader. Parish registers on their surface are rather opaque and off-putting. But I had a printer make data recovery forms on which I transcribed every piece of information the priests had written onto the register.

The forms make plain things that seem inscrutable when viewed one-at-a-time in the priests’ handwritten notations. Two categories caught my attention: fathers’ and mothers’ surnames. What intrigued me was that the Tarascans had different surnames for moms and dads. I could go home and leaf through my forms and confirm the pattern that caught my eye in the dim little room where I was allowed to read the registers.

It was not immediately clear that these gender-sensitive surnames were being passed to children in a gender-specific way, because the priests’ attempts to suppress the practice involved not putting down the baby’s surname unless it was Spanish. However, the priests sometimes broke their rule and revealed to a latter-day researcher what their game was. And that confirmed also what the Tarascans were up to: Girl babies got mom’s surname, boy babies got dad’s surname. I translated a few male and female names and realized there was another pattern – meanings of male and female surnames were different.

My ultimate aim is to explain why two towns that were both Indian places in colonial times have diverged, with one – Cuanajo – retaining identifiable elements of Tarascan culture while its neighbor, Tupataro, no longer retains Tarascan identity. I plan to measure changes in native surname retention and patterns of godparenthood selection in hopes of charting and explaining what the late Eric Wolf called “cultural differentiation.”

I’m now in the process of again transferring the baptism data. Now the move is from my data recovery forms to my computer, where I can analyze data with Microsoft Access.

I’m also translating the names, which leads me to a new inquiry about the origins of these apparently beloved surnames.

For a detailed discussion with results of my computer queries, see my essay, “Those Intractable Tarascans”[1]. Here is a summary of what I’ve found:

— At least through the colonial period, Tarascan Indians in the parishes of Cuanajo and Patzcuaro in western Mexico gave their newborns surnames derived from separate male and female pools of indigenous surnames apparently dating to pre-Hispanic times[2].

— The existence of this native name-giving system well beyond the 16th century and the survival of many Tarascan surnames (and some Nahua as well) to the present day contradicts the judgment of Latin American historian James Lockhart that the use of indigenous surnames vanished “all over Mexico” by the end of the 16th century[3].

— Our[4] cursory check of US phone directories turned up dozens of colonial-era Tarascan surnames in use in the 21^st century, as well as four Nahua surnames mentioned by Lockhart. If indigenous surnames were out of use all over Mexico by the end of the 16^th century, as Lockhart maintains, it seems unlikely that they would appear in modern phone books. While a more thorough survey of telephone directories, especially in Mexico, is needed, our results add credibility to revelations from the colonial-era parish registers, if additional proof is needed.

— The existence of separate surnames for female Tarascans has not, to my knowledge, been reported. A historian, Delfina Lopez Sarrelangue, and an anthropologist, Maria de Lourdes Kuthy-Saenger, have delved into Tarascan surname usage but failed to detect the pool of female names, which in Cuanajo is larger than the male pool[5]. Anthropologist Donald D. Brand discussed surnames[6] in his monograph on the former Tarascan town of Quiroga, but didn’t notice the gender differentiation. He found a late colonial period parish register, but noted that “unfortunately, lack of time prohibited our doing more than scanning a few pages.”[7]

— The meanings of surnames in the two pools seem to fall under two general classes — wildlife names for men and household names for women[8]. But there are exceptions. A translation of all known Tarascan surnames is needed. Moreover, lists of Tarascan surnames made by other authors need to be checked against my list of known female names.

— Surnames were transmitted from father to son and from mother to daughter.

— Catholic priests seem to have been aware of this name transmission practice and had tricks for suppressing and/or distorting the native name-giving system.

— One of the stratagems priests used in their effort to sabotage the Tarascan name system was to give babies a Spanish forename as surname, e.g., Theresa Maria. Another gambit was to give the baby the father’s surname, regardless of whether it was Spanish or Tarascan. By this means, female surnames would be extinguished.

— Despite priestly wiles, indigenous surnames vastly outnumbered (95 percent to 5 percent in favor of Tarascan) Spanish surnames in use in the parish of Cuanajo during a 25-year period (1665-1690) in the late 17th century. Spot checks in the 18th century confirm the Tarascan dual name practice survived in that period as well.

— I assume that Lopez Sarrelangue and Kuthy-Saenger missed the female surnames because they do not appear in Spanish civil records. It appears that Tarascan women’s use of ancestral surnames has evaded detection both by Spanish civil authorities in colonial times and by modern academics.

— Women were not excluded from the Spanish administrative and judicial system[9]. If that is so, why have scholars failed to find female Tarascan names in civil records? If female surnames don’t appear in civil records and women had access, is it possible that Tarascan women chose not to be recorded in the Spanish system?

— The fact that female surnames appear in abundance in parish registers suggests that these sources deserve closer scrutiny by students of Mexican history and society.

— That half of the Tarascan population’s surnames has remained hidden from scholars suggests that any interpretation of Tarascan behavior — including but not limited to strategies for accommodation, survival and resistance relative to the Spanish incursion — should be re-evaluated.

— It is also interesting that I found more female than male surnames in the Cuanajo/Tupataro registers.

— The persistence of Tarascans in giving pre-Hispanic surnames to children despite priestly opposition suggests that Indians were resisting imposition of Spanish rule in a way that until now was not known.

— The existence of a previously-unheard-of form of popular resistance to Catholicism encourages me to look for additional indications of subtle rebellion against Spanish values.

— Where did these surnames come from? Why were the names important enough for Tarascans to buck the priests?

— The incidence of Tarascan surnames such as “Cuini” and “Tzintzun” is very high. These examples — male names — were deemed by Kuthy-Saenger to be noble surnames. The high number of Cuinis and Tzintzuns in Cuanajo might seem to contradict the assertion that they belonged to elite families. However, in Cuanajo/Tupataro I found eight of 34 elite names proposed by Kuthy-Saenger. Maybe these places were dynastic strongholds for these families.

— Many of the male names didn’t exist in the two towns studied. Kuthy-Saenger’s work suggests there were many more male surnames that were in use in other places.

— Studies of other Tarascan pueblos’ parish registers may reveal additional surnames and may help understand social structure in and between Indian towns in colonial times.

— Parish registers are nearly nonexistent in Central Mexico, according to ancestry.org. In contrast, Michoacán is a mother lode. I’ve cataloged 17 Michoacán parishes with all three kinds of register – baptism, marriage and burial – starting in the 1500s and 1600s and running often well into the 20^th century[10].

— Given the unusual findings I’ve outlined above and the plentitude of parish registers in Michoacan, a well-organized study of multiple parishes could yield surprising findings. In addition to showing variations in surname retention, parish registers contain important vital data that, on a regional basis, could indicate fertility and mortality trends in a micro-geographically nuanced way.

— Comparisons of retention/decay of the surname system between pueblos and even between barrios within a town could help us understand how and at what rate some places lost their Indian culture while others retained it.

— I’ve described a surname transmission system that apparently was important enough to Tarascans that they resisted Catholic efforts to subvert it. Why was this system so important to the Tarascans? The answer, I believe, lies in the proto-history of the Tarascans. Did they have lineage gods?[11] Is there a connection to present-day customs of saving and grooming ancestors’ bones as is done on the island of Janitzio in Lake Patzcuaro for the Day of the Dead? It has been suggested that the dual name system may indicate a bi-lineal kinship system. If this were the case, how would bi-lineality change our understanding of Tarascan social organization? I plan further research in this direction.

— Who were the priests whose aim was to wreck the Tarascan surname system? Were there written policies or directives from Catholic prelates proposing to sabotage the surname system? I am in luck, in that the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia y Historia has just finished digitizing the archive of the Archdiocese of Morelia[12]. In theory, it seems I can do this research without traveling to Morelia.