By Joel Thurtell
The first of my peer-reviewed academic journal articles about Mexico’s Tarascan society broke important news about an ethnic group that has largely been overlooked by historians.
Scholars of Mexican history and anthropology were not previously aware that most colonial-era Tarascans around the colonial center at Pátzcuaro:
— Used pre-Hispanic native surnames.
— Native surnames were differentiated by gender.
— They maintained two pools of surnames — one male and one female — with different general meanings. Male names were related to wildlife or outdoors. Female surnames were related to the household.
— Gender-differentiated surnames were transmitted by mothers to daughters and fathers to sons.
— Their surname transmission system provided a means of tracking genealogy among a pre-Hispanic population who had no writing and among colonial indigenous who mostly could not read.
In a future post, I’ll speculate as to how scholars managed to miss out on the surname aspect of Tarascan culture. I’ll also weigh in on how many historians both academic and popular managed to ignore the presence of a second empire in Mexico when Hernán Cortés encountered the Aztec empire in central Mexico. The other empire belonged to the Tarascans in western Mexico. They had a well-organized government, priesthood, and military independent of the Aztecs. In fact, they had a line of forts that held the Aztecs back, and the Tarascans had always defeated the Aztecs in battle.
My article about Tarascan surname customs was published in April 2018 by the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. The article’s co-author is Emily Klancher Merchant, an Assistant Professor in Science and Technology Studies at the University of California-Davis.
Our article’s title is “Gender-Differentiated Tarascan Surnames in Michoacán.” It appears in JIH Volume 48, Number 4, Spring 2018, pp. 465-483. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History is published by MIT Press.
“Tarascan Surnames” is based on data I brought back from Mexico in 1971. Emily helped me interpret the data. I had discovered the Tarascans’ pre-Hispanic practice of gender-differentiated names when I was transcribing data from seventeenth-century church records onto standard data recovery forms. I began to see a pattern in the information married Indian couples were giving priests when they brought their babies to church for baptism. The fathers gave the priest different surnames than their wives.
When I made this discovery, I was living with the priest at Cuanajo, Michoacán, an isolated mountain town some dozen kilometers southeast of the municipal center at Pátzcuaro. Cuanajo people still identify as Tarascan five centuries after the Spanish Conquest. Many of Cuanajo’s residents still speak their native Tarascan language, or Purépecha. I don’t understand Purépecha, but one of the priest’s housekeepers was a Tarascan from Cuanajo. She helped me translate surnames. I began to see that besides having two separate sets of surnames for men and women, the names themselves had separate meanings. Men’s surnames were related to wildlife and outdoors. Women’s surnames were related to the household.
As I work with the Cuanajo and Pátzcuaro parish registers, I am more than ever convinced that they contain a rich trove of data for analyzing trends in mortality and fertility as well as changes in indigenous social structures. Surnames are links between different times in the past. Surname meanings can be clues to ancient social systems and values.
In the JIH article, I showed that fathers passed their surnames to their sons, and mothers bestowed their surnames on their daughters. This custom has never before been reported. If scholars understand that this was happening, they may see a new approach to the study of kinship and family organization among colonial Tarascan people. It is possible to project colonial era practices back into pre-Conquest times. It is also possible to track changes in name-giving practices into modern times.
Following the Spanish Conquest, Catholic priests in the sixteenth century tried to suppress native names, replacing them with Spanish language Christian names. They did not succeed with the Tarascans. Nonetheless, in some places, use of native names waned. But in late seventeenth-century Cuanajo, few people replaced native names with Spanish ones. The rate of native name retention among Cuanajo women was 100 percent. Through the parish registers, we thus can see differing rates of surname retention. I suspect these varying rates are related to the rate of assimilation or mestization going on in different places. The role of women in preserving pre-Conquest cultural practices without apparently being detected by the Spanish priests is another subject I plan to delve into.
In future articles, I will show how these differing surname retention rates are indicators of the rate of erosion or retention of Tarascan culture. In other words, the level at which native surnames and gender-differentiation were retained is a kind of speedometer for the rate of culture change.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
