Gender-Differentiated Tarascan Surnames in Michoacán

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVIII:4 (Spring, 2018), 465–483. Joel Thurtell and Emily Klancher Merchant Gender-Differentiated Tarascan Surnames in Michoacán Scholars of colonial Mexican history have argued that indigenous pre-Hispanic names quickly fell out of use after the Spanish conquest and that native people in Mexico soon replaced their traditional pre-Hispanic appellations with Spanish ones. This conclusion, though perhaps true in some parts of colonial Mexico, was not true of the Tarascan peoples of western Mexico in the present-day state of Michoacán. Baptismal records in that area indi- cate that most indigenous people continued to identify themselves with Tarascan surnames long after Spanish invaders replaced the Tarascan imperial government and its state-organized religion with Spanish laws and Christian doctrine. These records also suggest that Tarascans had an unusual naming system in which surnames were passed from father to son and mother to daughter. As a result, Tarascan surnames were largely differentiated by gender: Women’s surnames were rarely used by men, and men’ssurnameswererarelyusedby women. Pre-Hispanic Tarascan surnames for men mostly had wildlife denotations, such as Tzintzun (hummingbird) and Cuini (bird), whereas women’s had household associations, such as Curinda (bread) and Tzipaqua (lunch).1 “Aman’s name is one of the main constituents of his person and perhaps of his psyche,” wrote Freud. Although most seventeenth-century Joel Thurtell was a news reporter for thirty years, retiring in 2007 from the Detroit Free Press. Among his awards is the Michigan Education Association’s School Bell Award for his exposé of corrupt financing schemes for Michigan schools. Emily Klancher Merchant is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Uni- versity of California, Davis. She is co-author of, with George C. Alter, Myron P. Gutmann, and Susan H. Leonard, “Introduction: Longitudinal Analysis of Historical-Demographic Data,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLII (2012), 503–518; with Brian Gratton, “An Immigrant’s Tale: The Mexican-American Southwest, 1850 to 1950,” Social Science History, XXXIX (2015), 521–550. © 2018 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., doi:10.1162/JINH_a_01195 1 James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, 1992), 122. For discussions of Tarascan surname use, see Donald D. Brand, Quiroga: A Mexican Municipio (Washington, D. C., 1951), 85, 90–93; Delfina Esmerelda López Sarrelangue, La Nobleza Indígena de Pátzcuaro en la Época Virreinal (Mexico City, 1965), 162–166; Maria de Lourdes Kuthy-Saenger, Strategies of Survival, Accommodation and Innovation: The Tarascan Indigenous Elite in Sixteenth Century Michoacán Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 466 | JOEL THURTELL AND EMILY KLANCHER MERCHANT Tarascans could not read or write, their existence as newborns, as mothers and fathers, and as godparents was affirmed when priests inscribed their names in church registers. That they identified with these often-ancient forms of address re-affirms the importance of names to these parishioners. Not all cultures use surnames; their presence in these books is a gift—a set of clues that may help in understanding social organization and values in remote times for which little other evidence survives. Because they passed from one generation to another, surnames serve as links between different times in the past. A given surname may be recorded in one geo- graphical place and not in others. Research into surname meanings may produce clues to ancient occupations, totemic or clan organiza- tions, descent systems, kinship connections, and religious values.2 This article uses parish registers to examine naming practices in three Tarascan communities—Cuanajo, Tupátaro, and Pátzcuaro— between 1664 and 1690, approximately 150 years after the Spanish conquest. All three of them were converted under duress from their state-organized Tarascan religion to the doctrines of Catholicism. Today, only Cuanajo has retained its Tarascan identity in the form of native language; traditional dress, especially among women; and long-established livelihoods, such as carpentry, weaving, and agri- culture. By examining the names used by parents in records of their children’s baptism, we demonstrate that surname conversion did not occur as rapidly in this region of colonial Mexico as has been (East Lansing, 1996), 80–99, 172–219; for dictionaries used to translate Tarascan surnames, Maturino Gilberti (ed. J. Benedict Warren), Vocabulario en Lengua de Mechuacan (Morelia, 1989); Warren (ed.), Diccionario Grande de la Lengua de Michoacán. Tomo II. Tarasco-Español (Morelia, 1991); Pablo Velasquez Gallardo, Diccionario de la Lengua Phorhépecha (Mexico City, 1978); Raoul de la Grasserie and Nicolas Léon, Langue Tarasque Grammaire Dictionnaire—Textes Traduits et Analysis (Nendeln, Liechtenstein, 1968); Mauricio Swadesh, Elementos del Tarasco Antiguo (Mexico City, 1969). The people known to the conquering Spaniards as “Tarascan” had no word to describe themselves; they may well have lacked a sense of ethnicity. Their closest self-description is their word Purépecha,orcommon person.Inmoderntimes,Purépecha has applied to both language and people; in the past until recently, Tarascan was the word generally used. This article refers to the historical ethnic group and language as Tarascan and the modern population and language as Purépecha. Felipe Castro Gutiérrez, “Identity and Ethnicity in Colonial Michoacán: Corporatism, Social Contract, and Individualism among the Tarascans,” in Andrew Roth-Seneff, Robert V. Kemper, and Julie Adkins (eds.), From Tribute to Communal Sovereignty: The Tarascan and Caxcan Territories in Transition (Tucson, 2015), 134; Warren, The Conquest of Michoacán: The Spanish Domination of the Tarascan Kingdom in Western Mexico, 1521–1530 (Norman, 1985), 7. 2 Sigmund Freud (trans. A. A. Brill), Totem and Taboo (London, 1938), 185. Leslie G. Pine, The Story of Surnames (Rutland, Vt., 1966), 10–12. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 TARASCAN SURNAMES | 467 documented elsewhere. Our finding that rates of indigenous surname retention were higher in Cuanajo—the only community still identified as Tarascan—suggests that naming practices may be an important index of assimilation. Furthermore, revelations about the assignment and inheritance of family names may add to an understanding of Tarascan family and kin organization both before and after the conquest. THE REGISTERS “The parish priest . shall register their names in a book.” So ordered the Council of Trent in 1563 in its “Decree on Reformation” that stated rules for the baptism of infants. Baptism, one of the seven Catholic sacraments, was the firststeptowardthe salvation of the individual soul for eternal life. The people who took part in the ritual of baptism were few but nonetheless important in the view of the Church. They included the priest who performed the baptism; the infant who received baptism; a godmother (madrina in Spanish) and/or godfather ( padrino), who received the baptized child from the priest; and, ideally, both the mother and father within whose marriage (a sacrament that also required registration) the child was conceived and born. The ritual of anointingachildwithholywater and oil bound these people in a spiritual relationship that could not be severed by human interference. The parish priest’s actions at the baptismal font were backed by the holy authority of the Church, the leader of which in Rome was believed to have the endorsement of God. Governmental documents may have been the creations of mortal men, but the sacramental registers were the work of God, accomplished through his deputies on earth. The Trentine councilors ordered priests to “carefully inquire” about the participants and warned of consequences “if through the fault or negligence of the parish priest anything be done contrary hereto.” The Church-certified record of parentage guaranteed that anything less than full Spanish blood meant a lesser stature in this rigidly structured society.3 3 http://traditionalcatholic.net/Tradition/Council/Trent/Seventh_Session,_First_ Decree_and_Canons.html; William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parish- ioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, 1996), 164. Catholic priests pressured Indians to be baptized, attempting to remove the stigma through public baptism. Robert Ricard (trans. Lesley Bird Simpson), The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley, 1966), 89, 83–95; María Elena Martinez, “The Language, Genealogy, and Classification of ‘Race’ in Colonial Mexico,” in Ilona Katzew and Susan Deans-Smith (eds.), Race and Classification: TheCaseofMexican-America(Stanford, 2009), 25–42. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 468 | JOEL THURTELL AND EMILY KLANCHER MERCHANT The rules outlined by councilors in northern Italy are re- flected with varying degrees of consistency in the records inscribed by priests in colonial Michoacán. Each entry in the baptismal register is a long-hand record of information directly related to the ritual: the date and place of the baptism; the name of the officiat- ing priest; the forename and race of

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