Courtroom Methods in Mexico

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xlv:2 (Autumn, 2014), 163–186. BETWEEN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND LAW Amos Megged Between History, Memory, and Law: Courtroom Methods in Mexico While anxiously scanning heavily laden, voluminous court records, historians of the early modern era usually encounter a repetitive pattern in responses to an inter- rogation; plaintiffs, defendants, and other interested parties largely gave the same answers to the same assortment of questions. The witnesses almost always confronted a legally determined interroga- tory, established upon a determined protocol, with a certain num- ber of standardized questions, according to precise procedural objectives. Their responses, often seemingly blurred and “empty,” either added almost nothing to the questions or merely repeated verbatim what was already said in previous depositions. Neverthe- less, modern scholars can use this evidence to determine variations in the testimony, ªrst by checking the interrogatorium for the kind of information supplied by the questions and any hints about preferred responses and then pursuing the sources for more information. Scholars should also look in the witnesses’ responses for original, uncontaminated views of events, through individual de- viations from the common schema. By employing such a method- ology, this article distills certain “cognitive schemata” from the variegated testimony delivered in the Spanish colonial court of the Audiencia, arguing that the pattern established by speciªc verbal and nonverbal constructions reveals telling predispositions among both individuals and communities. Firsthand testimony is the most signiªcant. The mental shreds and remnants of past experiences are the objects of such an inquest, not a reconstruction of the past in itself. Testimony is a multifac- eted restructuring of occurrences, never an endeavor to represent a “true past.” For example, informants may well have shaped their testimony to “win their case.” The objectives of lawmakers often concerned heavy political, judicial, and economic contexts, and Amos Megged is Associate Professor of Mesoamerican Ethnohistory, University of Haifa. He is the author of Social Memory in Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerica (New York, 2010); editor, with Stephanie Wood, of Mesoamerican Memory: Enduring Systems of Remembrance (Norman, 2012). © 2014 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_00683 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 164 | AMOS MEGGED those of witnesses represented, implicitly or explicitly, political and societal interests. Such testimonies were obviously produced to shape history. Nevertheless, because the informants were them- selves participants in the events and the episodes as reconstructed, the information that they provide is welcome, since it would otherwise be absent from written sources. Employing a case study of Mesoamerican cultures under Spanish rule during the sixteenth century, this article shows that despite restrictive legal conditions, pervasive “cognitive schemata” are detectable within courtroom testimony. But we must take into close consideration the cultural circumstances that surround it. In early colonial Mexico, deponents’ testimony was the product of a distinct cultural exchange, involving both Spanish and indigenous participants, that was embedded within a particular colonial context involving two distinct systems of writing and rhetoric. The translation, as well as transliteration, of these accounts from one or sometimes two native languages into Spanish entailed substantial changes. Furthermore, we cannot ignore the massive manipulation and intrigue of the native leaders lurking behind the legal scenes, requiring that we distinguish what witnesses were able to recall and what they were determined/instructed to hold back from the Spanish judges. Nor can we ignore the fact that modes of recalling and recording the past underwent profound changes as a direct outcome of the imposition of an alphabet culture. mesoamerican logographic writing systems The pre- Cortesian writing systems gradually adapted to Western conven- tions of alphabetic writing. But, as recent studies in Mesoamerican ethnohistory—including this article—demonstrate, much of their traditional character endured despite the heavy inºuence of Span- ish Christianity. How these sustained contexts affected the trans- mission, form, and content of memory reconstruction in this society is, therefore, an extremely important question. This distinctive cultural exchange, the converging of two distinct systems of writing and rhetoric, is crucial to an understanding of the notion of “cognitive schemata” introduced above. In the pre-Cortesian Maya writing, logograms and syllable signs were combined to form a whole sentence. By comparison, postclassic Aztec writing in central Mexico employed ideographic symbols and phonetic principles through the rebus principle. Aztec Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 BETWEEN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND LAW | 165 name-glyphs, for example, combine logographic elements with phonetic readings. The stylized toponyms, however, were picto- grams that had no association to phonetics. In the Aztec Mexico Basin, the oral and ritualistic enactments that formed the core mechanism of how societies recorded and remembered were in- separable from the written documents. The most common vehicle for the memory of past events, developments, and changes before the shift into written Nahuatl or Spanish was what is usually called “narrative pictography”—a graphic/pictorial representation docu- menting information according to interpretation, thereafter sup- plemented and re-afªrmed by oral testimony.1 Narrative pictography did not transfer the exact wording of a message, only a pictorial representation, transcending the barriers of distinct languages. As Lockhart argues, “The visible artifact was thus only a part of the total communication, which proceeded on two partially independent tracks. The pictorial part could convey some things that were beyond spoken words and had the ability to pass through time unchanged, but the oral part carried much of the burden of narration, formulation, and conceptualization. ...For this and other reasons, the genres of Nahuatl documents before the conquest diverged substantially from their nearest Spanish equiva- lents.”2 Because all of the elements that were absent from the direct vi- sual representation were lost, particularly any abstract ideas, narration had to be accompanied by standardized ideograms that identiªed the various personalities and places. In his article about the change that the indigenous languages underwent during colonial times, Restall emphasizes that the complete replacement of the pre-conquest tradition by alphabetization was far more rapid in the lowland Maya areas than in the Mixtec, Nahua, and Otomi areas, because the Maya did not have a purely pictographic tradition. 1 Camillia Townsend, “The View from San Juan del Río: Mexican Indigenous Annals and the History of the Wilder World,” Medieval History Journal, XIV (2011), 323–342; Federico Navarrete, “Writing, Images, and Time-Space in Aztec Monuments and Books,” in Elizabeth Hill Boone and Gary Urton (eds.), Their Way of Writing, in Scripts, Signs, and Pictographies in Pre-Columbian America (Washington, D.C., 2011), 175–196; Walter Mignolo, “On the Colo- nization of Amerindian Languages and Memories: Renaissance Theories of Writing and Dis- continuity of the Classic Tradition,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXXIV (1992), 301–330. 2 James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indigenous Population of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, 1992), 332–339, 326–392. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_00683 by guest on 30 September 2021 166 | AMOS MEGGED Mixtec pictography was even more deeply entrenched than that of the Nahuatl; it remained unchanged for a longer period of time. However, Restall does not account for the more intensive contact in the central area among the Nahua than in the Mixteca area— another reason for the delay in adaptation and change.3 the native lawmaking process on the eve of spanish colonial rule In Mexico, memory building or reconstruction processes depended critically on commemorative performances, oral recitations, and traditional forms that largely endured the colonial changes. The memorialized discourses of the elders (huehuetlahtolli), delivered as part of traditional law-making proce- dures, lasted well into the midcolonial period. In Molina’s sixteenth-century Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary, the entry “pohua” is given the three-fold meaning of “counting,” “relating a judicial process,” and “a history.” Lockhart adds that “the word also meant ‘to relate, recount, give an account of,’ hinting at the oral recital that accompanied a pre-Conquest document, interpreting and ex- panding on it.” In pre-Hispanic times, a formal speech was closely associated with ritual practice. Bernardino de Sahagún’s Book 8 of the Florentine Codex provides direct instructions about how to “converse appropriately with others,” in a style and context simi- lar to those included in ritualistic chants, which featured modes of repetition and similitudes. Examples of these forms abound within the

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