Excuses, excuses

Posted on October 15, 2012 by admin

By Joel Thurtell

Oh, come on!

The Detroit Tigers defeat the New York Yankees in the first two games of the American League Championship Series, and The New York Times puts the lamest of excuses on Page One:

Gray Pinstripes: With Jeter Out, Time’s Toll Rises.

The poor Yanks.

They’re just a bit too creaky, aging and downright OLD to play Detroit on equal terms.

Here’s the Times’ thesis:

It is the one foe every athlete faces, but no athlete can beat. Each knows that the end will come, that age is undefeated in the annals of sports. The trick is to make summer last as long as possible, to put off reality for another day.

The Yankees’ best players have done this better than most, with another World Series title at stake this month. Yet bit by bit, and in devastating fashion, the team’s aging stars are falling. Derek Jeter, the centerpiece for the last 17 years, is the latest victim, following Mariano Rivera and the since-recovered Andy Pettite. Jorge Posada retired after last season, and Alex Rodriguez is mired in a deep slump.

Dotards of the Bronx.

Break out the canes and wheelchairs.

Maybe the Yanks should play Special Olympics.

It’s silly and self-serving, this claim that New York’s team can’t beat Detroit because the Yanks are too busy filling out their AARP apps.

Silly, because premature — what if the Yankees turn around and beat the Tigers?

Gray Pinstripes Do It Again: Tigers Fall to Aging Wrecks

The Times milks this absurd argument for all it’s worth, even mentioning the age of Yankees manager Joe Girardi.

Let’s start this demo derby with Girardi’s age: 48.

If the manager’s age were relevant to the discussion of why the Tigers beat the Yankees two in a row, then the age of Detroit manager Jim Leyland would matter (which it doesn’t).

Leyland is 67.

Let’s take the Times’ other examples.

Alex Rodriguez is mired in a deep slump.

What does a slump have to do with age? Rodriguez will come out of his slump, and nobody will be talking age.

Jorge Posada retired after last season.

Right, Posada retired and presumably was replaced with a younger player. Toss that line out.

…the since-recovered Andy Pettite.

The guy got better! You can’t put a guy who got better in your argument.

Out goes Pettite.

What about Mariano Rivera? Well, he’s 42 years old and was playing fine till he injured his anterior cruciate ligament last spring.

Don’t tell me ACL injuries are age-related. My son tore his ACL. He was 18.

My dog, Peppermint Patti,  tore the ACL on first her right (age 5) and later her left (age 6) hind legs.

As for Derek Jeter, anyone can break an ankle.

Fess up, New York: Detroit played better ball!

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

 

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Matty & UAW in bed???

Posted on October 12, 2012 by admin

By Joel Thurtell

How can this be true?

Ambassador Bridge owner Matty Moroun hustling the UAW in a swap of support, Matty pumping millions into the unions’ November 6 constitutional amendment Proposal 2 making immutable workers’ right to unions for the autoworkers’ backing of Matty’s call for a referendum on any public bridge that would rival his monopoly on bridge traffic between Detroit and Windsor.

The Detroit Free Press reported this unlikely wedding on today’s (October 12, 2012) front page.

Who told the Free Press?

Who knows?

According to the Freep, their sources were an auto executive and business leaders.

Huh.

No confirmation from Matty or the UAW.

No denials, though.

So far.

I first caught a whiff of this story in a column by Nolan Finlay of The Detroit News.

Finlay is a congenital union-basher, but his essay gives a clue to where this report is coming from.

Supposedly, the UAW put the BIG Three automakers — all supporters of a new bridge — on notice that they had made a deal with Matty.

At this point, I’m in skeptic mode.

I’ve plugged in my bullshit meter.

I’m watching the needle for signs of bunk.

What if it’s true?

Billionaire Matty Moroun has corrupted our Michigan Legislature with his money. He has proven that if you have enough cash, you can purchase the votes of men and women whose sworn duty is to represent the people, not one rich man.

When I was on strike at the Free Press back in the 1990s, the UAW supported our little Newspaper Guild. I was grateful to the UAW for standing up for workers’ principles against The News and the Free Press, major shapers of opinion in Metro Detroit. I thought that took not only spunk but bedrock dedication to workers.

The new bridge is where unions need to place their support. The busiest crossing between Canada and the US will be expanded and create jobs. Construction of the bridge will create jobs. Anyone who has not been paid by Matty is for the bridge — automakers, chambers of commerce, former governors. Clearly, the new bridge would be good for workers. What Matty wants — retention of a bridge built for Model A’s so his family can rake in more money — would be bad for workers.

If it is true that the autoworkers’ union is taking money from Matty in return for supporting his bridge monopoly, then the UAW would have betrayed the very workers they represent.

I don’t believe it.

 

 

 

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All in the family: Sarah Palin

Posted on October 6, 2012 by admin

By Joel Thurtell

As soon as John McCain announced Sarah Palin was his running mate in 2008, my sister-in-law, Anne Potter of Dayton, Ohio, started hearing from people who thought she was the spittin’ image of the wannabe VP.

So for Halloween of 2008, Anne went trick-or-treating as an ersatz Sarah Palin.

The other day, I remarked that she ought to consider stand-up comedy.

“I did stand-up,” she replied. She found an iPad, punched up YouTube, and sure ’nuff, there was our Anne doing Sarah Palin on stage.

 

 

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Rattlesnakes for sale!

Posted on October 4, 2012 by admin

By Joel Thurtell

I visited the University of Michigan’s Ruthven Natural History Museum today.

I’m always a bit wary in that place.

You’d be nervous, too, if you went back to the place where you’d been attacked by a rattlesnake.

So what if it happened 23 years ago?

Truth to tell, I brought the viper in there myself.

It was part of a stunt for a newspaper story about how easy it was to buy venomous snakes.

I wrote the story for the Detroit Free Press.

I described opening a crate removing three venomous snakes. But there was no ink for the story of what happened when the wily Western Diamondback shook loose from museum handlers and dropped to the concrete floor of the small museum room where we were putting the snakes into cages.

At one end of the room stood Free Press photographer Al Kamuda, snapping frame after frame. At the other end stood I, holding a broom ineffectually as the rattler, tail sounding like a buzz saw, moved in my direction.

I had no plan. The snake was moving faster than I could think.

I could hear Al snapping photos and chuckling.

Then, one of the museum guys caught the snake with a metal stick and flopped it into a cage.

Here, with permission of the Detroit Free Press, is the yarn I spun after escaping from the fangs of a Western Diamondback:

Headline: SNAKES ON SALE

FLORIDA COMPANY FLIES DEADLY GOODS TO CATALOG SHOPPERS

Edition: METRO FINAL

Publication: DETROIT FREE PRESS

Last PubDate: April 22, 1989

Section: NWS

Copyright: Copyright (c) 1989 Detroit Free Press

Byline: JOEL THURTELL, STAFF WRITER

Body Text: Big black handprinted letters on the box warned, LIVE POISONOUS SNAKES.

Inside the double-boxed crate lay two large rattlesnakes and a thin,

yellow-eyed Asian pit viper neatly coiled in cloth bags and waiting for

release.

A fast, tireless ratcheting sound, like a child’s windup toy that won’t run

down, gently vibrated the box’s plywood top.

With help from a University of Michigan herpetologist, a fat, 3-foot-long

Eastern Diamondback rattlesnake slid out of a sack and onto the concrete floor

of the University of Michigan’s Natural Science Museum.

The rattler flicked its black forked tongue. Its tail was a clattering

blur.

“Can you believe you just bought this with your Mastercard?” asked Dan

York, a PhD candidate in biology.

Last week, York helped the Free Press prove that anyone with a

telephone and a credit card can buy poisonous snakes, regardless of their

training or reason for possessing the deadly creatures.

The Free Press snake purchase — $105,  plus $31.92 in air freight charges

— was made from a Florida dealer who advertises by direct mail and listed 51

poisonous species for sale in a July 1988 catalog.

The snakes arrived as freight on  a Delta Air Lines passenger flight. In

Delta’s freight depot, a woman read the crate and quickly backed away,

gasping, “Oh, my goodness!”

The U.S. Postal Service forbids shipment of snakes or poisonous  animals

through the mail, according to Don Rouse, a supervisor in the Dearborn Post

Office, so reptile dealers often ship by air freight.

Delta air freight worker Jerry Bigelow said, “Most of the people who

handle them here do not like to. If I didn’t have to handle them for my job, I

would not.”

From Metro Airport, the vipers — all three snakes fit that scientific

category — rode in a  reporter’s hatchback to Ann Arbor. Earlier, York, 33,

placed one restriction on the experiment.

“I’m a coward herpetologist,” he explained. “I’m scared of snakes, so I

won’t work with cobras or mambas  — they’re just too dangerous. . . .”

But the purchase could easily have included cobras and mambas. The dealer

lists a West African green mamba for sale at $275. The list also includes

Egyptian  cobras at $65 each, monacle cobras at $40 and several other cobra

species, as well as bushmasters, kraits, gaboon vipers, puff adders and

Florida cottonmouths.

“Fun for the whole family,” the dealer’s  catalog remarks about its 5-foot

West African spitting cobras, $55. Spitting cobras eject venom at their

victims’ eyes, and have caused blindness in some people who were not

immediately treated, according  to Dr. Findlay Russell, who wrote the

textbook, “Snake Venom Poisoning.”

“I’ll tell you, I think this whole thing is horrible,” said Detroit Zoo

Director Steve Graham. “I don’t believe in exotic pets at all.”

Graham is convinced that most poisonous reptiles are bought for private

home collections. He favors a state ban on keeping any kind of wildlife as

pets.

But the dealer, Chris McQuade,  said, “Where do you draw the line? Do you

give somebody a written examination or an oral examination to see if they have

the ability to adequately handle the animals? Putting a pit bull in the hands

of somebody who doesn’t know how to handle it is equally as dangerous.”

Graham said owners of exotic pets “want to draw attention to themselves. A

pretty green snake with blue stripes is one thing,  but the real macho is to

have a poisonous snake.”

Graham admitted that occasionally the Detroit Zoo buys from the same

Florida dealer, but said zoos are minor players in the poisonous snake trade.

“The last time the federal government did figures on animals imported into

this country, they found that about 60 percent went to the pet trade,” he

said. “Thirty-five percent of the animals went  to biomedical research, and

less than 1 percent went to zoos.”

Of the animals destined to be pets, “My guess is that the majority didn’t

live one year,” he said.

Not everyone who keeps poisonous  snakes survives, either.

Russell, a physician at Tucson’s Arizona Health Science Center, said he

received 15-20 reports last year of bites from exotic snakes, including a San

Diego collector who  died after his albino cobra bit him. And snakes can be

used as weapons, he said.

“I have testified on three cases in which people have attempted to commit

murder with snakes,” Russell said.

But the snake dealer countered, “Anybody who would try to commit a murder

with a venomous snake is kind of ridiculous.”

Contacted after the snakes arrived, McQuade said, “If you’re 21 and you

live  in an area where the possession of the venomous animals is not

restricted or prohibited, there is nothing that would prevent us from selling

the animals to you.”

The Free Press order was filled by  a salesman named Eric. While taking the

order, he didn’t ask how the snakes would be used, if the buyer knew how to

feed and care for them or whether proper snakebite medications were available

in area hospitals.

York, who is experienced in handling vipers, made sure that the appropriate

remedies were nearby.

Eric said his firm could supply a bamboo viper for $20. Also in stock was

an emerald  pit viper, $75.

“They’re real, real docile, but they have a hell of a long strike range if

they decide to hit you,” Eric said.

The decision was made not to buy the emerald pit viper. The less-expensive

bamboo viper was selected.

Next, an order was placed for a rattlesnake that would look good in

photographs — a 3-foot Eastern Diamondback priced at $45.

Eric said he could offer a reduced rate  — $30 — on a 4-foot Western

Diamondback rattler whose lighter brown and tan coloration would contrast

nicely with the Eastern’s black- brown-and-cream pattern.

It was agreed. Eric would throw in  the Western Diamondback.

“Hey, just as a joke, tell your friend who’s going to handle these that you

bought an 8 1/2-foot black mamba,” Eric said. “You open the cage and they’ll

shoot out over your  head, and it’s not like you live if they bite you.”

The black mamba “can strike so quickly that the victim may be unaware he

has been bitten,”  Russell wrote in “Snake Venom Poisoning.”

A large  black mamba can strike 5 or 6 feet and hit a human above the

waist, Russell said.

One study reported a 100 percent fatality rate from black mamba bites.

Eric said his firm sells black mambas  for $300 to $500, but doesn’t often

trade in them because they are very rarely allowed out of their native African

countries.

CUTLINE

At the University of Michigan Natural History Museum, Daniel York,  left, and

Greg Schneider, museum collections manager, open snake crate.

A close view of a 3-foot  Eastern Diamondback rattlesnake, one of three

poisonous snakes the Free Press purchased from a Florida  company. The firm

lists 51 poisonous snake species in a catalog. Photos by Al Kamuda.

 

Caption:

 

Category:

 

Keywords: SNAKE; SALE

 

Status:

 

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My Tarascan Project

Posted on September 30, 2012 by admin

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 21st 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 16th 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 20th 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Joel Thurtell, “Those Intractable Tarascans: Survival of a Pre-Hispanic, Gender-differentiated Surname Transmission System in Colonial Western Mexico, and a Catholic Effort to Suppress It.” Soon to be published at joelontheroad.com. Copies or electronic version available from author at joelthurtell@gmail.com. The main source for these findings is Libro de Baptismos delos Pueblos de Ganaxo y Tupataro, 1665-1690, Parish Notary Office, Santa Maria de Cuanajo church; they also may be viewed on the Internet at https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/DGS-004768418_00004?cc=1883388&wc=11973855

[2] Ibid.

[3] James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest, A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1992, p. 122: “By the end of the sixteenth century, this type of appellation, consisting to all appearances of two Spanish first names, was becoming the norm for ordinary Nahuas (and Indians all over Mexico), and it was to retain that flavor until independence, despite many further complications of the system.”

[4] I received help with the telephone directory research from my student assistant, Adam Aaron, who also helped with translating Tarascan surnames.

[5] Delfina Esmerelda Lopez Sarrelangue, La Nobleza Indigena de Patzcuaro en la Epoca Virreinal, Universidad Nacional Autonima de Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas, Mexico, 1965. Maria de Lourdes Kuthy-Saenger, Strategies of Survival, Accommodation and Innovation: The Tarascan Indigenous Elite in Sixteenth Century Michoacan, Michigan State University, PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, 1996.

[6] Donald D. Brand, Quiroga: A Mexican Municipio, Smithsonian Institution, Institute of Social Anthropology, Publication No. 11, Washington, 1951, pp. 85-95.

[7] Ibid., p. 93.

[8] Joel Thurtell, “Most Popular Male and Female Tarascan Surnames with Meanings.” Soon to be published at joelontheroad.com. Copies or electronic versions available from author at joelthurtell@gmail.com.

[9] Conversation with University of Michigan History Prof. Rebecca Scott September 4, 2012; Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1999.

[10] Joel Thurtell, “Best Tarascan Towns for Parish Registers,” unpublished; preparing to post at joelontheroad.com; for copies, contact author at joelthurtell@gmail.com.

[11] Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, p. 151.

[12] http://noticierostelevisa.esmas.com/especiales/487786/digitalizan-archivo-historico-del-obispado-michoacan/

Posted in Adventures in history | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Hummers

Posted on September 30, 2012 by admin

By Joel Thurtell

I thought I’d seen my last ruby-throat mid-afternoon Monday, September 24.

The hummers — it may have been only one — were perching on my feeder and taking long drafts of nectar.

Usually, I see that kind of activity just before dusk and in the morning.

But this was more. This was business. The birds — or one bird — were at the feeder almost continuously.

Then they stopped coming.

I figured that was it — the hummers are on their way to Mexico for the winter.

I left my three feeders out, in case a latecomer flies over and needs nourishment.

I debated taking them down.

I tossed my nectar.

Then it happened. 6:27 p.m. tonight, Sunday, September 30.

A hummer flew up to the feeder outside my office window, perched and took a long, long drink. This lasted more than a minute. Then the bird was gone. But a half minute later, the bird — or another hummer — was back for another long session.

I’m glad I left the feeders out.

Guess I’ll have to cook some more nectar*.

In case more late-migrating hummers show up.

A few years ago, the hummers hung out longer.

I last saw one that year on October 7.

* A quarter cup of sugar for each cup of water, heated till the sugar dissolves.

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Two scoops off one story!!! Read about it here!!! Free Press leaves out a Hoffa demise

Posted on September 29, 2012 by admin

By Joel Thurtell

I just scooped the Detroit Free Press.

On a story they already had.

Since I wrote the first story, it gives me two scoops.

Two scoops for the price of one.

Same story, two scoops?

How’s that work?

Well, Freep writers just ran a story about all the ways Jimmy Hoffa’s body might have been disposed of.

All but one.

They missed a story that was their own scoop.

Now they’re the ones getting scooped.

The Free Press listed claims that Hoffa’s corpse is lying under Giants Stadium, or under a Milford horse barn. Most recently, headlines have blazed about the tip that Jimmy’s pushing daisies into the bottom of a Roseville driveway.

Somehow, they missed their own story proposing that Hoffa was shot in a Detroit house and reduced to ashes in a crematorium at Detroit’s Grand Lawn Cemetery.

I remember that story.

I wrote it.

It ran in the July 8, 2007 Free Press.

My blog, joelontheroad.com, had its debut on Sunday, December 9, 2007, the same day I was featured on E! Entertainment as an “expert” on labor history and the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. My Free Press story sure made an impression at E! Entertainment.

Two years later, Taylor, Michigan, police officer Jeff Hansen published a book, Digging for the Truth, about the death of Hoffa.

The story may be baloney, but it’s out there.

It’s no more preposterous than Giants Stadium or a horse farm.

Here, reprinted courtesy of the Detroit Free Press, is the story:

FORMER DETROIT COP THINKS HE KNOWS

                                                           THE FATE OF TEAMSTERS LEADER

Byline: BY JOEL THURTELL

Jimmy Hoffa’s last car ride took less than two minutes.

On July 30, 1975, he rode one long block south from a two-story house at 17841 Beaverland on Detroit’s west side and turned right – west – on Grand River Ave.

He passed the greens of William Rogell Golf Course and a scenic footbridge, crossed the woodsy Rouge River, cruised past the brown brick Redford Granite Co. building and the Mt. Vernon Motel, made a U-turn and rode east a few yards on Grand River. He came to a brief stop in front of an iron service gate to Grand Lawn Cemetery.

The gates were opened, and Hoffa entered the cemetery. But the once powerful International Brotherhood of Teamsters leader did not enjoy any of these sights. He was dead, having received two bullets in the head from his trusted old pal Frank Sheeran back in the Beaverland house.

Now, whether Hoffa really met his end this way is uncertain. Sheeran, the only person who claims it went down like this, died four years ago of cancer.

But the scenario makes perfect sense to Jeff Hansen, a Taylor cop who grew up near Grand Lawn Cemetery and later worked those streets as a Detroit police officer.

Hansen – author of the Detroit-based fictional crime book “Warpath” (Spectre Publishing, 2004) – has added a coda to Sheeran’s claim that he killed Hoffa in the Beaverland house at the command of mobsters. Hansen claims to have solved the mystery of what happened to Hoffa’s body. Rumors that Hoffa was buried under the New York Giants’ football stadium in New Jersey or under a Milford horse farm or maybe burned at a mob-controlled incinerator are baloney, Hansen says.

Hansen thinks Hoffa was cremated minutes after Sheeran dropped the murder pistol in the vestibule of the Beaverland house, either at Evergreen Cemetery at 7 Mile and Woodward, or more likely at Grand Lawn Cemetery at Telegraph and Grand River. His alleged proof: a pair of cremation ovens “a minute away from the Beaverland house” in the mausoleum at Grand Lawn, built two years before Hoffa vanished.

My drive from the Beaverland house to that gate lasted one minute, 37 seconds. I was not going fast. A minute from Beaverland to Grand Lawn? Possible. That doesn’t make Hansen’s hypothesis correct. He bristled when I called it “conjecture,” but that’s what it is. Fascinating conjecture, though.

Sheeran’s story received wide publicity three years ago thanks to “I Heard You Paint Houses,” a book by former Delaware chief deputy attorney general Charles Brandt. Brandt recorded long statements by Sheeran about his life as a Mafia hit man. Sheeran claimed he killed Hoffa at the command of Mafia boss Russell Bufalino. “Painting houses” referred to the blood left after people are shot. Sheeran also claimed to do “carpentry,” meaning he disposed of bodies.

According to Sheeran, Hoffa had more than one enemy’s house “painted.” Lured to the Beaverland house by Sheeran, Hoffa had his own house “painted” when Sheeran fired two shots into his brain.

In 2003, Brandt videotaped Sheeran’s deathbed confession to having murdered Hoffa on July 30, 1975.

A TV report on Sheeran’s confession to Brandt started Hansen thinking about Grand Lawn.

He’d worked as a cop in the old 8th Precinct, patrolling the streets around Beaverland and Grand Lawn Cemetery near Grand River and Telegraph. He wondered what Hoffa might have been thinking as the car came down Telegraph toward Grand Lawn Cemetery before he was shot. Hansen read Brandt’s book. It was the first time someone had actually confessed to killing Hoffa.

Sheeran described the area around the Beaverland house accurately, noting the Rogell golf course and precisely locating the house where he said he killed Hoffa. But the book was missing a piece of the puzzle. How did the mob get rid of Hoffa’s body?

The Hoffa file

Hoffa was a high-profile figure. He’d spent time in prison for jury-tampering. The Justice Department had restricted his union activities, even though he’d paid President Richard Nixon and his attorney general, John Mitchell, half a million dollars for a pardon. In 1975, he was threatening to reveal the mob’s entanglement with Teamsters pension funds – even though he himself turned the Central States Pension Fund into the Mafia’s private piggy bank. Organized crime wanted to shut him up, wrote Brandt.

While the FBI was busy in May 2006 digging up a Milford horse farm, Hansen was thinking about Grand Lawn – he had even called the Detroit FBI office and reported his theory.

He visited the cemetery and saw two crematory ovens in a mausoleum building. “It’s like being struck by lightning,” he said. “This cemetery was chosen because it’s near the house.”

Hansen said that Rod Milne, who managed the cemetery in 1975, told him, “We were doing cremations left and right” in 1975. Later, Hansen said, Milne recanted.

Milne’s wife, Carol, said she doubts Hansen’s theory, but admitted it might have happened. She wasn’t sure if cremations were done at Grand Lawn in 1975. Hansen said he found a Grand Lawn interment log that records two cremations the day Hoffa went missing. Carol Milne said that often crematory workers didn’t look at the bodies before they incinerated them. A burial transit permit could have been faked by a Mafia-friendly funeral parlor, Hansen thinks.

No need to take Hoffa to Giants Stadium or a horse farm at Milford.

Not a federal case?

So why is it important where Hoffa was killed and where his body went?

Charles Brandt explained that the FBI has spent many years and lots of money in the hunt for Hoffa, assuming that he was kidnapped (a federal crime) from the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, murdered and his remains shipped somewhere out of state (another federal offense).

In all those years, the FBI has refused to release a complete, uncensored copy of the voluminous Hoffa file.

“Once they accept what Frank Sheeran said, the FBI completely loses jurisdiction of the case,” Brandt said. “They would have no reason to hold onto the file. It’s not a kidnapping. The murder occurred in the city of Detroit. Nobody crossed a state line. It’s actually a Detroit homicide.”

For more on the Jimmy Hoffa mystery, see Charles Brandt’s Web site www.hoffasolved.com or Jeff Hansen’s www.spectrepublishing.com.

 

 

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hardaleepress.com is back

Posted on September 24, 2012 by admin

Hardalee Press books now may be ordered through hardaleepress.com:

MOUSE CODE

CROSS PURPOSES

SHOESTRING REPORTER

SEYDOU’S CHRISTMAS TREE

PLUG NICKEL

 

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Electric history

Posted on September 23, 2012 by hro50ta1

 

Electric History:

Detection and Measurement of Human Behavior Through Quantifiable Historical Records

By Joel Thurtell

Ever hear of an “electric historiscope”?

Nor had I until I began thinking about history in a new way.

“Electric historiscope” is my offbeat way of imposing order on the way I perceive and explain the passage of time and events.

What we call “history.”

I don’t use a real meter or oscilliscope. It’s definitely a conceptual thing.

For those who are not specialists in some section of a historical discipline, let me explain that I do a form of investigation known as “quantitative history.”

I count.

I count things that I think will help me understand how people’s lives were changing over time.

Then, I use a computer to help me figure out what was happening. Now, while the computer sure helps, my own imagination and power of observation form a large part of the process. It was the latter which helped me discern a pattern in surname-giving that led to my discovery of something previously unknown about Tarascan Indians after the Spanish Conquest — they resisted priests’ efforts to adopt Christian surnames and instead kept on using surnames dating to before the Spanish arrival in the New World.

My area of interest is western Mexico.

My period of interest is pre-Hispanic and colonial times.

But I don’t feel confined by those terms. I don’t recognize barriers between so-called “periods.”

My particular focus and the documentary source for my investigation is the set of records compiled by priests as they tried to keep track of important events in church life.

Those events are births of parishioners, followed by marriages followed by their deaths.

Priests in colonial Mexico wrote down these important events in separate books known as “registers.” I’ve worked with all three kinds of register, but my primary focus now is on a book containing priests’ notations of baptisms of Tarascan Indian babies born to parents from the villages of Cuanajo and Tupátaro, Michoacán, between 1665 and 1690.

Each baptismal notation contains dozens of pieces of information, from the baby’s name, date of baptism, church where the baptism took place, name of priest officiating, birth date (sometimes), race of baby, names of father, mother, residence of parents, race of each parent, and similar information for godmother and godfather, including in some cases the free or slave status of a participant and, if slave, who the owner was.

That is a lot of information packed into a notation that might take up an inch of vertical space on a page.

You can see, though, that with such an array of information being repeated for newborns week after week, month after month, year after year, there is a tremendous flow of data with the consequent possibility of asking questions about subjects like who is selecting whom as godparent, or, are people from one town choosing, say, other Tarascans or maybe Spaniards as godparents? It turns out that sometimes Tarascans were appointing negro slaves — in one case a slave owned by the officiating priest — as godparent.

In some places, the stream of data sometimes begins as early as the late 1500s and flows well into the 20th century.

Such sources of data give us an opportunity to approach history in a scientific way. Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel describes the concept of a “natural experiment” in which data are created in a way unintended by the compiler but suitable for analysis by modern historical detectives. So it is with parish archives. The priests had no idea that by ritually setting down vital data about individual human beings, they were actually creating a compendium of data capable of being mined and analyzed in an orderly way.

The person who convinced me to study colonial Latin American history was the late Professor Charles Gibson of the University of Michigan. Before I went to Mexico in 1970, I was influenced by the French social historian, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who was encouraging students to think demographically. Think people in the aggregate. The way to study trends in population is to look at parish registers of burials, marriages and burials.

I went to Mexico looking for parish registers with the express purpose of transferring their data onto individual data recovery forms. I would — and did — carry the forms home, where the plan was for me to transfer the data again, this time onto punch cards that could be processed by an IBM mainframe computer at the University of Michigan.

That last step — the UM mainframe — turned out to be a huge stumbling block, or so it seemed at the time. Nowadays, I’m using my MacBook Pro with Parallels and Microsoft Access to do my analysis. I don’t have to finesse a computer bureaucracy. In fact, there are a lot of reasons why waiting 40 years to process my data turns out to be serendipitously a good idea, but that is another essay.

What I want to discuss now is my idea for electrifying history, at least conceptually.

I find it helpful to look at change in this way. Maybe you will find it useful, too.

Remember, I wrote that there are dozens of pieces of information in each baptism notation. Over time, it adds up to huge numbers of data points.

You can think of them as static entries on a page.

Or you can do as I do, and envision parish register data — or any quantifiable historical data — as electrons conducted in a circuit. The conceptual shift is important — we’ve gone from static to dynamic.

Month-to-month, year-to-year, individual negatively-charged pieces of data flow toward the positively-charged present. In a particular locale, say a Catholic parish where data are recorded, we have a continuous forward or future-directed stream that can be measured as an electrician might insert an ammeter to measure rate of flow — amperes — or electrical current.

[We might also use the movie metaphor: We’ve gone from a single photograph to a series of pictures related lineally in time to form a moving image of human behavior.]

The historian inserts metaphorical probes into points in time. While a simple meter measures one dimension, an oscilloscope (a cathode-ray tube displaying contemporaneous, disparate electronic behaviors) can detect complex changes in waveform. And so it is with parish registers, where our computer analysis can query about gender, surname, race, free/slave status, godparent selection, as well as birth and fertility, death and mortality, and a host of other qualities.

Are there differences between different inhabited places? Again, the electrical analogy helps conceptualize how we might measure differences in potential between towns where priests simultaneously recorded data. So, our meter probes would measure and compare rates, say, of erosion or retention of native surname transmission in two or more parishes. Or we might measure the extent to which people from one town marry people from another, maybe even correlating to social class.

In Michoacán, western Mexico, there are at least 17 parishes with extensive runs of baptism, marriage and burial records back to the 1600s and sometimes 1500s. This is amazing, since in central Mexico, parish registers are virtually nonexistent, as I found when I surveyed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints section for Mexico on ancestry.org.

In Michoacan, for a reason I don’t yet understand, many, though certainly mot all, parish archives have been preserved. Whether or not you accept my electrical analogy, these archives provide an opportunity for comparative measurement of social change and even individual human behavior on a large scale both in temporal and geographic terms.

 

 

 

 

 

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A gender-sensitive surname transmission system among Tarascan Indians in colonial Mexico

Posted on September 11, 2012 by hro50ta1

Readers of joelontheroad my be surprised to learn that during the same time that I’ve been publishing blog articles about abuses in school finance in Michigan 19 years ago and in California right now, I’ve also been conducting research into the colonial history of Mexico.

In 1970-71, I lived in Mexico so that I could do research into the demographic history of Mexican Indians. I focused on the Tarascans of the western state of Michoacan, because that’s where I found a rich lode of church records going back sometimes to the late 1500s.

I returned to the US in 1971 with hundreds of data recovery forms — specially printed sheets of paper designed to receive the dozens of pieces of information for each baptismal notation that I was finding on parish registers of baptism.

I ran into some problems using the mainframe computer at the University of Michigan, and wound up doing other things. One of those “other things” was building schools and a well in northern Togo, West Africa while I was a Peace Corps volunteer. For some 30 years, I was a newspaper reporter.

Now, I’m again working with those by now 40-year-old data recovery forms with information more than three centuries old. I no longer need a mainframe computer. I have my laptop and Microsoft Access, and I’ve been getting excellent help from staff at UM’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.

Parish registers, I’m learning, contain far more than demographic data. They are amazing barometers of culture, and a shrewd reading of the registers can reveal behavior of not only Indians, but also Catholic priests, that otherwise would be invisible.

Occasionally, I’ll be posting results of my research.  My hope is that people with a general interest in history will look at an unusual way to learn about the past, while specialists in the history of colonial Mexico may find a different way of looking at their area of interest.

Tarascan surnames by gender:

Cuanajo and Tupataro, 1665-1690

Joel Thurtell

Tarascan Indians at least through the colonial period maintained a separate but apparently in their eyes equal dual set of surnames, one for women and one for men. The separate list of female surnames, it would appear, has remained largely invisible when viewed through the window of Spanish civil documents. A recent study[1] of Tarascan elites in the Tarascan heartland of Pátzcuaro, Michoacán based on civil records turned up no female Tarascan names.

The naming practice among Tarascans in western México was very different from the customs that have been reported in central Mexico. Among the Nahuas, a pre-hispanic name-giving system with separate names for men and women appears to have disappeared by the end of the 16th century. Instead, according to the prevailing academic view, Indians were giving babies two Spanish first names, one as a forename and another as surname. An example would be Juan Diego. James Lockhart asserts, “By the end of the sixteenth century, this type of appellation, consisting to all appearances of two Spanish first names, was becoming the norm for ordinary Nahuas (and Indians all over Mexico), and it was to retain that flavor until independence, despite many further complications of the system.”[2]

While the practice reported by Lockhart in Central Mexico of giving Nahua children two Spanish first names also occurred in Tarascan territory in western Mexico, it was far from dominant even by the end of the 17th century in two Tarascan villages whose parish baptism registers I’ve studied. By the late 17th century, giving children a Tarascan surname identical to the surname of the parent of the child’s gender still was the norm among Tarascans in two mountain towns of Michoacán: Cuanajo and Tupataro.

While female surnames did not appear in Spanish civil documents, they were routinely recorded by Roman Catholic priests in registers of the sacraments of baptism and marriage. Thus, parish registers are an invaluable source revealing a previously unobserved custom involving roughly half the Tarascan Indian population, that is, women.

In June of 1971, I worked in the notarial archive of the Santa Maria de la Natividad parish church in Cuanajo, Michoacán in the highlands of western México. I was transcribing data from a register of baptisms the priest, Padre Luis Arroyo, kindly allowed me to use. The leather-bound tome had the hand-lettered title, “Libro de Baptismos delos pueblos de Ganaxo y Tupataro 1665-1690.” In addition, I found a few entries for Cuanajo baptisms in a general register of baptisms in the Basilica church of San Salvador in Pátzcuaro. I interpolated those entries chronologically into my run of data recovery forms. I have in all 467 data recovery forms for 1665-1690 representing the same number of births and baptisms for the two towns which sit about 12 kilometers southeast of Pátzcuaro.

Typically, the priest did not mention the baby’s surname, except in those very few cases where the baby did receive a second Spanish forename, e.g., “Juan” or “Maria” as a second name. Surnames were recorded as part of the names of parents. I found evidence, also, that these surnames were passed from father to son and from mother to daughter. The surnames, in other words, were gender specific.

As I read the register entries, I noticed that the surnames for parents were Tarascan words. Furthermore, it was evident that mothers had different surnames than fathers, and that mothers’ names were distinctly female as fathers’ surnames were distinctly male. Rarely did a mother have a predominantly male name, and vice versa. Thus, Tarascans had two pools of names, one for boys and one for girls.

The priests rarely entered a second name for infants being baptized, a practice that gives no answer to the question of whether Tarascan parents were passing their gender-related surnames to their children. However, in the late 1680s,  a new priest, Padre Carreno, began adding to the notations for padrinos, or godparents, the full names, racial designations and places of residence of both padrinos’ parents. Invariably, in these notations, padrinos’ surnames are identical to the surnames of fathers, and madrinas’ surnames replicate the surnames of their mothers. I interpret this practice as evidence that Tarascans indeed did pass surnames to children in a gender-sensitive manner. Further proof of Tarascan surname transmission is in the contemporary telephone directory, where a search of popular names, e.g., “Cuini” and “Tzintzun,” reveals people with those surnames living today in the United States. In fact, a few 16h century Nahua names from Central Mexico mentioned by Lockhart also can be found in US phone books, suggesting that — despite Lockhart’s dictum that the practice of native surname-giving ended by 1600 — some Nahua names leaked through to the present.

I am researching the meanings of the surnames. A cursory attempt at translation reveals a substantive difference between the meanings of male and female surnames. A common surname for women is “Curinda,” which means “bread.” A common surname for men is “Cuini,” meaning “bird.” My hypothesis is that a thorough effort at translating Tarascan surnames will reveal what I call a “Good Housekeeping” and “Field & Stream” dichotomy – girls got names having to do with household things, while boys got names related to outdoor things. Whether Tarascans in colonial times were aware of these meanings, I don’t know. I suspect the name-giving system dates to pre-Hispanic times and represents a custom rooted in Tarascan religion, though that theory has still to be tested. The system certainly seems to represent a custom that Tarascans were loathe to abandon. I have evidence of and plan to write further about a period when priests actively tried to replace Tarascan surnames with Spanish names and then abruptly abandoned the effort. Were the priests frustrated in the face of  Tarascan resistance?

I’ve entered the data from my paper forms into my computer and I’ve run queries using Microsoft Access, software that uses Standard Query Language. I queried for a list of Indian names by gender. The raw list contains variations in spelling of what amounts to the same name. Sometimes the same name was written differently by different priests, so that I wound up in some cases with two, three, or even six or seven variations in spelling the same name. I’ve consolidated the names and standardized the surnames by selecting the spelling version with the largest number of entries and noting only that version on the following list.

The names I found in Cuanajo and Tupataro are by no means the total number of surnames in use by Tarascans in colonial times. Kuthy-Saenger found 34 elite surnames. It appears that all but two are male. The female names are Hispanic, e.g., “Castilleja,” and therefore not native. I found eight of the male names mentioned by Kuthy-Saenger in the Cuanajo book. If that 1:4.25 ratio is an accurate reflection of the proportion of Cuanajo surnames to the total pool of surnames, then we could expect that multiplying the total number of Cuanajo surnames times 4.25 would show us the total number of  Tarascan surnames everywhere. But the flaw is this: The 34 elite names don’t reflect the true number of female names. In Cuanajo, I found 38 male names and 52 female names. If we used the ratio of 4.25, then the total of Tarascan male names used everywhere would be 38 x 4.25 = 162. The same arithmetic estimates the total pool of Tarascan female names at 52 x 4.25 = 221. This estimate is strictly hypothetical.

Isn’t it interesting that the number of female surnames outnumbers the number of male surnames by a large margin?

The process of consolidation and standardization of surnames is ongoing, and I expect to be updating these figures as I correct my work and come to a better understanding of the historical and linguistic implications.

Here are lists of male and female surnames I found in a 25-year run of baptism data for Cuanajo and Tupataro. I’ve also noted the frequency of occurrence of each name; and if there were a gender cross-over, that frequency has been indicated using “F” or “M.”

 

Male  

 

Name                          Frequency                   Gender cross-over

 

1. Amume                                12

 

2. Bahitzi                                    1

 

3. Bazquis*                                  1

 

4. Boxas                                       1

 

5. Chara                                       1

 

6. Chasa                                        1

 

7. Chaxa                                        1

 

8. Chzichzui                                  1

 

9. Cuiristan                                   1

 

10. Cuini                                     155

 

11. Cuixis                                        5

 

12. Cumu                                        1

 

13. Cuni                                           1

 

14. Cuiris                                        10

 

15. Cutequi                                      1

 

16. Czucu                                         1

 

18. Gaysean                                      1

 

19. Goma                                         1

 

20. Hatzi                                        20

 

21. Inune                                          1

 

22. Ni                                                1

 

23. Nuri                                           3

 

24. Onche                                      12

 

25, Pagua                                         1

 

26. Pao                                             1

 

27. Paqui                                          7

 

28. Paua                                           2

 

29. Roxas*                                       6

 

30. Sirangua                                   30

 

31. Tzintzun                                   53                                              1

 

32. Tzitzuiqui                                 45                                             8

 

33. Tzunequi                                    2

 

34. Tzupequi                                    2

 

35. Tzurequi                                 130                                              2

 

36. Uapean                                     30

 

37. Zahpean                                     1

 

38. Zua                                              1

 

* Possibly Spanish

 

 

 

Female surnames

 

Surname                         Frequency                          Gender cross-over

 

1. Baraxas                                        2

 

2. Barba*                                         1

 

3. Bustos*                                         1

 

4. Cana                                            2

 

5. Canana                                        1

 

6. Cani                                             3

 

7. Catahcu                                       8

 

8. Chziqui                                        1

 

9. Chzipagua                                   10                                               1

 

10. Cioui                                            1

 

11. Ciquipa                                         1

 

12. Claxa                                            1

 

13. Condahu                                      1

 

14. Cuatacua                                      1                                              1

 

15. Cuchunda                                   38

 

16. Cuctaorida                                    1

 

17. Cugan                                            1

 

18. Cutagua                                         1

 

19. Cuna                                              1

 

20. Cunda                                            1

 

21.  Cundahue                                     8

 

22. Cuni                                                     1

 

23. Cura                                                     1

 

24. Curi                                                       1

 

25. Curinda                                               71                                               3

 

26. Cuta                                                       2

 

27. Cutacu                                                    1

 

28. Cutagua                                                    4

 

29. Cutza                                                        1

 

30. Cutze                                                         1

 

31. Cuxa                                                          7

 

32. Naqueti                                                       1

 

33. Nispu                                                           9

 

34. Putaqua                                                       1

 

35. Ponce*                                                         1

 

36. Purequa                                                        1

 

37. Putzequa                                                     39

 

38. Quentzi                                                       40

 

39. Seta                                                                1

 

40. Tzihqui                                                           31

 

41. Tzipaqua                                                    211                               1

 

42. Tzitaqua                                                         1

 

43. Tiringuis                                                          2

 

44. Turan                                                               1

 

45. Turari                                                               6

 

46.  Ube                                                                  1

 

47. Veuma                                                              1

 

48. Xaloma                                                             2

 

49. Xara  ?Xari                                                       2

 

50. Xarichu                                                             1

 

51. Xaxi                                                                   2

 

52. Yrigua                                                               14

 

 

 

* Possibly Spanish

 

[1] Maria de Lourdes Kuthy-Saenger, “Strategies of Survival, Accommodation and Innovation: The Tarascan Indigenous Elite in Sixteenth Century Michoacán,” Michigan State University doctoral dissertation, Department of Anthropology, 1996. See Table: “Presence of the Tarascan Elites in Historical Documents,” p. 82 and charts: “Geographical Distribution of Tarascan Lineages,” pp. 85-86.

 

 

[2] James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1992, pp. 117 ff.

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