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 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 , 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 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 sur- name 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 reg- ister 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 the infant; and the forename, surname, race, and residence of the father, mother, and one or two godparents. Slave status was also duly noted, along with the slave owner’s name.4 The earliest Pátzcuaro baptism register, which started in 1597, includes all baptisms, regardless of a child’s race, performed in the local parish church, known as San Salvador. This study begins with data collected in the mid-1660s, when the priests separated the register into an Indian volume, Baptismos de Yndios, 1664–1695, and a non-Indian volume, Libro de Baptismos de Españoles Año de 1664 al 15 Febrero 1686, both of which reside in the archive of the Basilica Church of Nuestra Señora de la Salud in Pátzcuaro. This basilica was the sixteenth-century cathedral of Bishop until the diocesan seat was moved to Valladolid (now Morelia) in 1580; it received basilica status in 1923. In December 1665, the Pátzcuaro-based priests, who also served outlying Indian villages, created a new book, Libro de Baptismos de los Pueblos de Ganaxo y Tupataro, exclusively for baptisms of babies from two dis- tant Tarascan communities located three kilometers apart—Cuanajo and Tupátaro—from late 1665 through 1690.5 This article draws mainly from data in the two registers for Indian baptism; the additional register provides a standard for com- paring priests’ recording of non-Indian infant surnames with their treatment of Indian babies’ surnames, both from Pátzcuaro and from Cuanajo/Tupátaro. The two Indian registers allow a

4 In the Spanish system of ethnic stratification, as reflected in the Pátzcuaro parish registers, español was a person whose parents both were Spanish. A mestizo had one Spanish and one Indian parent. A negro was of African descent. A mulato had one Spanish and one African parent; a morisco had one mulato parent and one Spanish parent. For a discussion of the term morisco, see Martinez, Race and Classification,32–34. For more information about the colonial casta system, see http://www.bellavistaranch.net/genealogy/casta.html. 5 The Libro de Baptismos de los Pueblos de Ganaxo y Tupataro was in the parish archive of the Church of Santa Maria de la Natividad, Cuanajo, June 1971, when the data used in this study were transcribed from it. Information from all three registers is now in digital format and ready to be made publicly available. Quiroga was confirmed as Bishop of Michoacán in 1538. Ricard, Spiritual Conquest,6.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 TARASCAN SURNAMES | 469 comparison of how parents assigned surnames in Pátzcuaro, Cuanajo, and Tupátaro. As already mentioned, Cuanajo is the only one of these three areas still identified as an indigenous community.6

THE TARASCANS In the twenty-first century, 150,000 people speak Purépecha, the grammar and vocabulary of which are not related to any other language. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish conquerors called the speakers of Purépecha Tarascans. The European intruders in 1521 found an inde- pendent Tarascan state with a tax-collection system, an army, and a government-established religion with a well-organized priesthood. Like the whom they had defeated in battle, the Tarascans practiced human sacrifice. They maintained a line of forts on their eastern frontier to thwart Aztec invasion, forging alliances with other ethnic groups hostile to Tenoch- titlan, the base of the . The Tarascans were famous throughout for their knowledge of metalworking. Their rulers’ treasury of and drew plundering Spaniards to this distant province and led to the murder of Tzitziqui Tangaxoan, the last Tarascan cazonci, or king, in 1530. Throughout the sixteenth century, the “intractable” Tarascans resisted Spanish authority, sometimes through armed rebellions or random attacks on lone Spaniards that left the interlopers wounded or dead.7 The modern town and prehistoric city of Tzintzuntzan, situated alongside Lake Pátzcuaro, was the capital of the Tarascan kingdom. The town of Pátzcuaro a few miles south was a pre- Hispanic religious center that the Spaniards chose to be the seat

6 For the early Pátzcuaro baptism register, see https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:9392- 2LS5-T3?i=4&wc=3NTP-HZ9%3A178768101%2C178768102%2C178768103&cc=1883388; for the baptism register of Indian babies in and around Pátzcuaro, https://familysearch.org/ark:/ 61903/3:1:9392-2GSC-8C?i=192&cc=1883388; for the baptism register of Indian babies from Cuanajo and Tupátaro, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:2:77TV-4HQ?mode= g&i=3&wc=3NTC-ZNT%3A178154401%2C178154402%2C178154403&cc=1883388; for the register of non-Indian Pátzcuaro baptisms, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:9392- 2GSZ-MT?i=4&wc=3NT5-3TL%3A178768101%2C178768102%2C178795101&cc=1883388. Quiroga was confirmed as Bishop of Michoacán in 1538. Ricard, Spiritual Conquest,6. 7 Helen Perlstein Pollard, Tariacuri’s Legacy: The Prehispanic Tarascan State (Norman, 1993), 3–28; Warren, Conquest of Michoacán, xii, 211–236; Buddy Levy, Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs (New York, 2008), 319.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 470 | JOEL THURTELL AND EMILY KLANCHER MERCHANT of their civil and religious administration in the Michoacán region. In Pátzcuaro, Spanish officials built a cathedral, later known as the San Salvador parish church, on the site of a Tarascan temple. Priests from the San Salvador church served Indian and non-Indian resi- dents of Pátzcuaro as well as residents of nearby Indian commu- nities and the more distant Indian settlements in Cuanajo and Tupátaro.8

CUANAJO AND TUPÁTARO Before the Spanish conquest, Cuanajo was located for defensive purposes on a volcanic mountainside 10 km southeast of Pátzcuaro. By 1548, however, Spanish ad- ministrators had relocated Cuanajo to its present site on a plain 13 km southeast of Pátzcuaro and 3 km southwest of Tupátaro, as shown in Figure 1. In 1800, the residents of Cuanajo and Tupátaro still spoke Purépecha, in contrast with those of Pátzcuaro, of whom fewer than one-quarter still spoke the lan- guage. As Tarascan culture and language use changed under co- lonialism in the former Tarascan territory, the area that included Cuanajo and Tupátaro became a small island of Purépecha speakers surrounded by people who had exchanged their native language for Spanish. Hence, Cuanajo and Tupátaro were 10 to 15 km from areas around Lake Pátzcuaro that shared the indig- enous language. By 1940, 97 percent of Cuanajo residents still spoke Purépecha, but Tupátaro was no longer considered an in- digenous community.9 Seventeenth-century legal records describe Cuanajo as a pueblo, or town. Tupátaro is described more ambiguously. Whereas the parish register refers to Tupátaro as a pueblo, civil records describe the place as an estancia (hamlet) or a barrio (neighborhood).

8 Pollard, Tariacuri’s Legacy, 3; José Bravo Ugarte, Historia Sucinta. I. Michhuacan, El Estado Tarasco (Mexico City, 1962) 55; Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of (New York, 1972), 349. 9 Shirley Gorenstein and Helen Perlstein Pollard, The Tarascan Civilization: A Late Prehispanic Cultural System (Nashville, 1983), 24 (“Cuynaho”), 7, 21 (maps), 32 (Table I); Francisco Paso y Troncoso, Suma de visitas de pueblos por orden alfabético (Madrid, 1905), 117, available at http:// babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000001872491;view=1up;seq=11117; Robert C. West, Cul- tural Geography of the Modern Tarascan Area (Washington, D.C., 1948), 9, 14, 10, 14, 11, 17; Legajo I, fojas 3, 4, expediente 40, Archivo General de Notarías del Estado de Michoacán, Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico (hereinafter AGNEM); Claudia Espejal Carbajal (trans. Eduardo Williams), Tarascan Ethnohistory and Archaeology (Los Angeles, 2007), 6 (Figure 2, Map 1), 10 (Figure 3, Map 2), 23 (Table II)—available at http://www.famsi.org/reports/06041/.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 TARASCAN SURNAMES | 471 Fig.1 Pátzcuaro, Cuanajo, and Tupátaro in Modern and Colonial Locations

NOTE Inset shows the three communities in relation to Mexico. SOURCE Map produced by Claudia Walters, Assistant Research Scientist and College Lecturer of Geography, the University of Michigan, Dearborn.

Accordingtolegend,VascodeQuiroga,asixteenth-centurybishop, designated carpentry as the craft for men in Cuanajo to learn. He relegated the less-skilled occupation of manufacturing cedar- shake roofing to the men of Tupátaro. Carpentry had become an important activity in Cuanajo by 1601, when the town received an allotment of farm and woodland. The town gained additional land holdings throughout the colonial period. By the early 1700s, Cuanajo was supplying lumber and furniture across Michoacán. By 1715, the town’s territory had been extended to 15.5 cabellerías of land, equivalent to 1,628 acres or 659 hectares. In contrast, late eighteenth-century Tupátaro was, by all accounts, still a col- lection of wooden huts. A 1715 survey measured its land at “barely two cabellerías,” equivalent to 210 acres or 85 hectares. The residents of Tupátaro paid another Indian town, Tacambaro, for the use of

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 472 | JOEL THURTELL AND EMILY KLANCHER MERCHANT its woodlands. Cuanajo had control of its own water supply, but Spaniards controlled the water at Tupátaro.10

INDIGENOUS SURNAMES IN COLONIAL TRANSITION A previous study of naming practices among pre-conquest Aztec, or Nahua, elites found that the Aztecs identified themselves by a single gender- differentiated name. Male names referred mostly to animals and birds or flowers and plants. Female names were associated with germination, sexual intercourse, or fertility, including words like flower, woman, skirt, cornstalk, maize, snake, and vulva. A few women were named for their birth order; others had names that translated to colors, such as turquoise, deep green,ordeep blue.11 Under Spanish rule, Catholic priests and mendicant clerics baptized large numbers of people, bestowing Spanish Christian names upon the converts. For a time in the mid-sixteenth century, people who had a Christian personal name retained their tradi- tional Nahua name as a surname. Later in the sixteenth century, Nahuas were baptized with a Christian personal name, such as Juan, and a surname that was another Christian personal name, such as Diego. Lockhart concluded in his study of the Aztecs that “by the end of the sixteenth century, this type of appellation, con- sisting 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.” A separate study of Nahua naming patterns in Colhoacan in Central Mexico found waning use of native surnames by the late sixteenth century.12 By the early 1600s, the appearance of native surnames in local records had become rare. By the mid-seventeenth century, they

10 López Sarrelangue, La Nobleza Indígena, 76; Legajo I, fojas 17 verso, expediente 40, AGNEM; José Bravo Ugarte (ed.), Inspección Ocular en Michoacán, Regiones Central y Sudoeste (Mexico City, 1960), 21, 22. Legajo I, fojas 4, expediente 40; Legajo I, fojas 17, expediente 40, AGNEM.Acaballería was equal to 105 acres, or 42 hectares. For measurement conversion, see Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico 1519–1810 (Stanford, 1964), 276. Legajo I, Fojas 11 verso, expediente 40; Legajo I, fojas 4 verso, expediente 40; Legajo V, fojas 7, expediente 73, AGNEM. 11 Anastasia Kalyuta, “Naming Patterns in Preconquest Mexica Society,” Dumbarton Oaks, 2011, available at http://www.doaks.org/research/support-for-research/fellowships/ reports/2010-2011/kalyuta. 12 Lockhart, Nahuas, 117–119, 122; Rebecca Horn, “Gender and Social Identity: Nahua Naming Patterns in Postconquest Central Mexico,” in Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett (eds.), Indian Women of Early Mexico (Norman, 1997), 105–122.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 TARASCAN SURNAMES | 473 were in “general disuse.” In sixteenth-century Culhuacan (not to be confused with Colhoacan), surnames differed by gender; men received descriptive second names and females standard- ized second names based on birth order. By the end of the colonial period, Indians were identified by two Spanish names. A study of colonial Nahua society in the found that by the mid-seventeenth century, the pre-Hispanic custom of assigning a single name to a child had changed; at that point, children routinely received two names, both typically Spanish. Second names were Catholic saints’ names or Spanish surnames, like Hernandez, that sometimes denoted social status. They were not, however, surnames passed down from parents to children.13

TARASCAN SURNAMES IN THE PÁTZCUARO REGION Scholars have noted the use of surnames by Tarascans of both the pre-Hispanic and colonial eras. One investigator listed thirteen pre-Hispanic surnames that survived into colonial times; another listed thirty- four. Brand noted many surnames with meanings from nature that hinted at “the existence of a totemic system,” but no investigator identified female surnames. Nor did anyone undertake an analysis that could have detected gender differentiation or the passage of surnames between generations.14 Although native surnames may have fallen out of use by the end of the sixteenth century in other areas of Mexico, they re- mained the dominant form of identification in late seventeenth- century Pátzcuaro and surrounding communities, including Cuanajo and Tupátaro. Many parents in those locations identified themselves by indigenous surnames, as is evident in the baptismal registers described above and analyzed in depth below. These

13 Sarah L. Cline, Colonial Culhuacan, 1580–1600: A Social History of an Aztec Town (Albuquerque, 1986), 117–120; Caterina Pizzigoni, The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico’s Toluca Valley, 1650–1800 (Stanford, 2012), 109–112. 14 In sixteenth-century records, Brand, Quiroga,identified six pre-Hispanic surnames (Cuini, Cuiris, Huape, Huapean, Petacua, Tzintzun, and Tzitziqui) in the Cuanajo register (85, 90–93). López Sarrelangue, Nobleza Indígena, wrote that in the sixteenth century, Tarascan people “adopted Christian (fore)names at baptism . . . . In the majority of cases, the primitive indige- nous name was added, in the nature of surname (apellido), to the Christian name” (162–163). López Sarrelangue’s index lists nine of the ten most common male Tarascan surnames and one of the ten most common female Tarascan surnames counted for this study in the Cuanajo register, though without noting gender for any of them. Kuthy-Saenger, Strategies, identified thirty-four elite Tarascan surnames, eight of which this study identifies as male surnames in the Cuanajo register (80–99, 172–219).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 474 | JOEL THURTELL AND EMILY KLANCHER MERCHANT Fig.2 Baptisms by Year and Residence of Father and Mother

registers do not represent the entire population of the area, only those people identified by priests as Indian and those who had their children baptized by the Catholic Church between 1664 and 1690. The record is thus confined to indigenous couples who were involved with the Church and, therefore, likely to identify with their new Hispanic rulers.15 The registers during these years for Cuanajo and Pátzcuaro Indianslist697baptisms—650 at San Salvador, the region’sca- thedral; 46 in Cuanajo; and 1 in Tupátaro. Some of the parents who resided in Cuanajo and Tupátaro brought their children to Pátzcuaro for baptism. Figure 2 shows the number of baptisms by year and the residence of the parents. We classify baptisms by the residence of the mother and the father. Most of the indigenous parents who brought their babies to be baptized lived in Cuanajo (436 mothers and 431 fathers); 92 percent of the mothers and 82 percent of the fathers had Tarascan surnames. Fewer parents lived in Pátzcuaro (224 mothers and 226 fathers), and fewer of them had indigenous surnames (71 percent of mothers and 65 percent of fathers). Only a small number of parents lived in Tupátaro (51 mothers and 51 fathers); the proportion

15 The analysis to follow treats variant name spellings, such as Chzurequi and Tzurequi,as identical. Parents who had more than one child baptized during this period make multiple appearances in this analysis.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 TARASCAN SURNAMES | 475 of indigenous surnames there was comparable to that in Pátzcuaro (69 percent of mothers and 67 percent of fathers). Overall, women were more likely than men to use Tarascan surnames. Men, in comparison with women, had far more inten- sive contact with Spanish people and institutions. Their tendency to adopt Spanish customs earlier may explain why Tarascan women retained their indigenous surnames in larger proportions than men did. Figure 3 shows the percentage of baptisms in which mothers and fathers had Tarascan surnames, by year and residence. Tupátaro is omitted since it rarely presented more than one parent of each sex in any given year. The figure again shows that more mothers than fathers used Tarascan surnames and that Tarascan surnames were more common in Cuanajo than in Pátzcuaro. Furthermore, the decline of Tarascan surnames in the record over time, beginning after 1675, suggests increasing cultural assimilation. That women were relinquishing Tarascan surnames less rap- idly than men may be related to the new and separate roles imposed upon men and women by Spanish society. Men’sbe- havior changed more rapidly than women’s during the colonial period. In Spain’s legalistic, male-dominated empire, men had to contend with outsiders in the colonial bureaucracy more than women did. In pre-Hispanic Tarascan society, women were

Fig.3 Percentage of Baptisms in which Parents used Tarascan Surnames, by Parental Residence

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 476 | JOEL THURTELL AND EMILY KLANCHER MERCHANT Table 1 Surnames of Parents in Cuanajo

MOTHERS FATHERS

NAME APPEARANCES NAME APPEARANCES Tzipaqua 164 Tzurequi 103 Curinda 36 Cuini 95 Tzihqui 28 Tzintzun 33 Putzequa 26 Tzitziqui 29 Quentzi 25 Siranqua 26 Cuchunda 22 Guapean 14 Cundahue 8 Hatzi 12 Xari 8 Juan* 11 Hiriqua 7 Amume 7 Catacu 6 Manuel* 7 *Hispanic surname.

independent from their spouses; they continued to be so imme- diately after the conquest, even gaining a reputation among co- lonial Spaniards for being fiercely resistant toward any outside influence. The independence of Tarascan women was supported by extended family alignments that allowed the interference of fathers in their daughters’ conjugal relations, behavior that lasted well after the conquest. Spanish priests were unable to replace the pre-Christian extended family structure with a nuclear alignment that placed husbands at the head of their families. These factors may explain why more Tarascan women retained native names than men did in all three communities.16 Tables 1 to 3 show the ten most common surnames for mothers and fathers in each locale. Not all parents used Tarascan surnames. Most of the parents in the three registers were recorded as having Tarascan last names, but several of them had Hispanic names instead. The tables also show that the names most common among mothers were not the names most common among fathers, suggesting a gender-differentiated surname system. Table 4 lists the twelve most common Tarascan surnames found in the two registers, along with the number of mothers and fathers who held them and a translation of the names. These twelve names account for 64 percent of mothers and 49 percent

16 Personal communication with Helen Pollard, April 3, 2017. Felipe Castro Gutiérrez, Los Tarascos y el Imperio Español (Mexico City, 2015), 174–181.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 TARASCAN SURNAMES | 477 Table 2 Surnames of Parents in Tupátaro

MOTHERS FATHERS

NAME APPEARANCES NAME APPEARANCES Curinda 22 Cuini 16 Tzipaqua 10 Onche 8 Maria* 5 Roxas* 5 Cuchunda 3 Miguel* 3 Agueda* 2 Nicolas* 3 Hernandez* 2 Baptista* 2 Catalina* 1 Rogas* 2 Catarina* 1 Cuiris 1 De la Cruz* 1 Cuiristan 1 Gracia* 1 Cuixis 1 *Hispanic surname.

of fathers appearing in the two registers (parents counted sepa- rately for every baby baptized). Given that these names account for 72 percent of mothers and 70 percent of fathers in Cuanajo, not only did more people there use indigenous surnames; they also used fewer surnames. The distribution of these names by gender is highly unbal- anced, although only two names were used exclusively by men and three by women. The translations indicate that men’s names did not always refer to things in nature and women’s to familial, domestic, or food-related items. The name Cuchunda, translated

Table 3 Surnames of Parents in Pátzcuaro

MOTHERS FATHERS

NAME APPEARANCES NAME APPEARANCES Curinda 63 Cuini 50 Tzipaqua 37 Tzitziqui 41 De la Cruz* 7 Tzintzun 18 Nispu 6 Tzurequi 10 Turari 6 Baptista* 4 Cutzumu 4 Guapean 4 Guani 4 Nure 4 Cuxa 3 Agustin* 3 Catalina* 3 Antonio* 3 Xarichu 3 Pasqual* 3 *Hispanic surname.

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NAME MOTHERS FATHERS TRANSLATION Tzipaqua 211 1 Lunch, flower Cuini 0 161 Bird Curinda 121 2 Bread Tzurequi 4 114 Thrush Tzitziqui 7 71 Flower Tzintzun 2 52 Hummingbird Tzihqui 29 1 Heart of wheat Putzequa 28 0 Gray hair Siranqua 0 27 Root Cuchunda 25 0 Slug/snail Quentzi 25 0 Pain Guapean 1 18 Son

as slug or snail, though exclusive to women, may have referred either to culinary snails or to snail shells for personal adornment. The fact that women adopted some “male” surnames and men some “female” surnames indicates that a once strictly bifurcated system had begun to erode. However, most people with names traditionally as- sociated with the opposite gender lived in Cuanajo, where the pre- colonial naming system would likely have been strongest, judging by the high proportion of parents there who used Tarascan, rather than Hispanic, surnames. Therefore, we should caution against reading the occurrence of fathers with “female” surnames and mothers with “male” surnames as evidence of cultural assimilation. Table 4 does not reveal how men and women acquired dif- ferent surnames. To obtain a better sense of surname transmission, we must look at two generations. In those rare cases of babies hav- ing surnames in the baptismal registers, the gender-differentiated surname system does not seem to have been in play, possibly because priests were trying to alter the system or obscure it from official view. Hence, we cannot use the baptismal registers to ob- serve the transmission of surnames from parents to babies. The registers also fail to include surnames of grandparents. They do, however, include the surnames of godparents ( padrinos and madri- nas) and occasionally those of the godparents’ parents. The listing of these surnames appears to have occurred only between 1687 and 1690, on the initiative of Padre Juan Carreno, opening a small window on the inheritance of surnames between generations. During those years, 88 percent of the twenty-six entries that

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 TARASCAN SURNAMES | 479 included the names of Tarascan padrinos’ parents had the same surname as their fathers and none the same surname as their mothers. Seven of the eight entries with the names of madrinas’ parents had the same surnames as their mothers and none the same surname as their fathers. This pattern strongly suggests that Tarascan surnames were inherited from the parent of the same sex. For the most part, priests did not list a surname for the babies that they baptized. In the non-Indian register for Pátzcuaro, only one baby acquired a surname—Nicolas Joseph, baptized on July 23, 1665. In the Cuanajo register, only twenty-five children are listed with surnames. The fact that all but one of these children received Hispanic surnames different from that of either parent suggests that baptism was a mechanism for Indian children to ob- tain Hispanic identities. The single holdout, the baby Nicolasa Tzipaqua, received her mother’s surname, the priest seeming to have followed the broader pattern of Tarascan surname inheri- tance. By contrast, in the Indian register for Pátzcuaro, priests con- sistently listed surnames for babies baptized between 1666 and 1668. Fifty-two records, comprising nearly all the records for those three years, included child surnames, but virtually none did so before or after them. All but one of these babies received their father’s surname, regardless of whether that name was Tarascan or Hispanic and regardless of gender. The one who did not receive her father’s surname, Maria Nispu, baptized December 17, 1668, received her mother’s forename and surname, presumably because she had no father listed. Explanations for these naming practices are not given in the registers.

KINSHIP The Tarascan and Spanish systems of surname transmis- sion have a superficial resemblance in that women of both groups retained their natal family names after marriage. However, whereas Tarascan women retained surnames inherited from their mothers, Spanish women after marriage usually retained the family name of their father. The Spanish practice was patrilineal, while Tarascan descent followed both lines.17

17 The baptism register for Indian residents around Pátzcuaro lists Spanish women who were madrinas, or godmothers. In three entries, unmarried Spanish madrinas had the sur- name of their fathers; in a fourth case, an unmarried Spanish madrina had the surname of her mother. Three married Spanish madrinas identified with a family name from their natal side, although it is not clear whether it was their father’s or mother’s surname.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 480 | JOEL THURTELL AND EMILY KLANCHER MERCHANT Little is known about pre-Hispanic Tarascan kinship practices. The Tarascans did not have written records before the arrival of conquistador Hernán Cortés. The most important window into pre-Hispanic life is a description of their history and society written by a Franciscan friar based on interviews with Tarascan nobles and priests and presented to Spanish Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza as the Relación de Michoacán in 1541. It details monogamous and polyg- amous practices chiefly among nobles, noting that both nobles and commoners were inclined to marry relatives, but makes no mention of the dual-naming practice or gender-differentiated surnames. Mesoamerican Indian cultures generally evince a bilateral kinship organization with a patrilineal bias. The pre-Hispanic Tarascans ap- pear to have followed a different path, double unilineal descent.18 The pre-Hispanic Tarascan system involved two completely different lines of property inheritance, one for fathers and one for mothers. Certain items passed along the mothers’ line and others along the fathers’ line. Descent could be traced back many generations. Each inheritance belonged to either the mothers’ or fathers’ side but not to both. This Tarascan gender parallelism may hearken back to the pre-Hispanic practice of the Incas and Aztecs. The Incas believed that men descended from a common man and women from a common woman, and both sides inherited their property and status accordingly (the Aztecs shared this inheritance pattern). Men and women also had different priests.19 A kinship system tied to inheritance of property might explain why the Tarascans persisted in transmitting their indigenous sur- names in the traditional manner. Castro Gutiérrez suggested that the Tarascans’ continued custom of living with extended families in colonial times created conflict with the Spaniards. Spanish civil

18 For a searchable version of the Relación de Michoacán, published by El Colegio de Michoacán, see http://etzakutarakua.colmich.edu.mx/proyectos/relaciondemichoacan/rm/indiceRM.asp; http://etzakutarakua.colmich.edu.mx/proyectos/relaciondemichoacan/rm/indiceRM2.asp? id=69&mostrar=2; http://etzakutarakua.colmich.edu.mx/proyectos/relaciondemichoacan/rm/ indiceRM2.asp?id=72&mostrar=2. According to Robert Wauchope (ed.), Handbook of Middle American Indians (Austin, 1967), “Although there are many mentions of Tarascans in the litera- ture . . . , it is impossible to reconstruct a viable native system from the published sources” (221– 222). Abernardino Verástique, Michoacán and Eden: Vasco de Quiroga and the Evangelization of Western Mexico (Austin, 2000), 98. 19 Personal communication with Kuthy-Saenger, December 13, 2012; Karen Vieira Powers, Women in the Crucible of Conquest: The Gendered Genesis of Spanish-American Society, 1500–1600 (Albuquerque, 2005), 15–27.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 TARASCAN SURNAMES | 481 governors promoted the nuclear family because it multiplied the number of households to be taxed. Ecclesiastical authorities pre- ferred nuclear families with a male head; they viewed extended families that preserved ancient lineages as undercutting Christian principles of social unity. Inheritance through the maternal line meant that daughters looked to their fathers for authority rather than to their husbands. Tarascan extended-family organization de- stabilized preferred Spanish family units that, in the Spanish view, were supposed to be headed by a husband. Even though they had been able to vanquish the Aztecs, Tarascan men tarnished their image by failing to fight a single battle against the encroaching Spaniards. The Homeric warfare between Spaniards and Aztecs gave way in Michoacán to ten years of increasing humiliation for men. The brave resistance of Tarascan women, however, frightened the Spaniards—for example, when Spaniards tried to plunder the treasury of the cazonci, or Tarascan king. Women do not appear to have concealed their surnames, since they regu- larly revealed them to priests. Yet those names were unknown to outsiders. The descent system that grounded the dual set of names was even less visible. Tarascan women who took risks to protect their leader’s treasure might have been reticent about how they conferred names and property to their children.20 Gender-differentiated surnames that were passed from parents to offspring of the same sex may shed light on Tarascan family or- ganization both before and after the conquest. If surnames helped to reveal who was descended from whom, thus clarifying inheri- tance, members of Tarascan society may have been reluctant to let go of them. Transmission of the gender-sensitive surnames helped to maintain that system. The roots may have been ancient, but issues of property were as current as the last birth or death. For a largely illiterate population, surnames likely served as guides to ancestry, ensuring that everyone knew a person’s position in his or her lineage. The priests’ record keeping preserved, and possibly even promoted, the survival of a pre-Hispanic system opposed to the very principles that they were preaching. The gender-differentiated surname system reached beyond the function of providing genealogical markers. The names within

20 Personal communication with Kuthy-Saenger, December 13, 2012; Castro Gutiérrez, Los Tarascos, 177–178.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 482 | JOEL THURTELL AND EMILY KLANCHER MERCHANT the two gender-differentiated pools relating to wildlife for men and to the household for women were grounded in the sexual duality of pre-Hispanic Tarascan cosmology. Cueráuperi, the cre- ator of earth and paradise, who possessed both genders, was the source of sexual fertility. Pre-Hispanic Tarascans believed the sun to be male and the earth female. A naming system linked to their ancient gods and worldview would have made Tarascans under Spanish rule—especially women, as explained above—reluctant to relinquish names that resonated with an ancient identity.21

Attentiontotheuseofgender-differentiated surnames and the practice underlying intergenerational surname transmission offers a new approach to the study of kinship and family organization among both precolonial and colonial Tarascans, leading to a deeper understanding of the meanings behind these surnames. Although Tarascan women willingly offered their female surnames to priests for registration, the existence of that separate list of sur- names was invisible from early colonial times until the present. A deeper knowledge of gender differentiation and the significance of female names may improve our understanding of the role that women played in both precolonial and colonial Tarascan society. Moreover, differing degrees of native surname retention could well be helpful in charting rates of cultural change in various places. Future studies could go beyond the Tarascan region and search for indige- nous surnames among Nahua speakers in Central Mexico and other areas where native people have lived in Mexico. This study also offers historians of religion a case study of the tension created by priests im- posing a Eurocentric, patrilineal structure on an aboriginal culture. More broadly, the Spanish clerics, as well as the anthropological and linguistic evidence that they preserved through meticulous bap- tismal registration, are certainly worthy of further scrutiny. Mexican parish registers provide a rich trove of data for analyzing trends in mortality and fertility and changes to indigenous family structures. Tarascan surnames, gender differentiation, and dual descent offer opportunities for tracking relative rates of retention or loss of indige- nous surnames and gender differentiation in different places. Twenty- three places in Michoacán have baptism and marriage registers that

21 Verástique, Michoacán and Eden,21–22; Justin Kaplan and Anne Bernays, The Language of Names (New York, 1997), 211–225.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JINH_a_01195 by guest on 25 September 2021 TARASCAN SURNAMES | 483 date back to the 1600s; more places have only baptism registers. A study of Tarascan surnames in Michoacán could track the pace of as- similation in multiple communities. An example of how such a study might be helpful involves West’s cultural geography of the Tarascan region, which has served as an important guide to differing rates of assimilation in Michoacán for seven decades. The shadings in West’s maps indicate levels of Tarascan language retention in different areas in the pre-conquest era and in 1750, 1800, 1850, and 1940. A parish register study could calibrate the trend more accurately and chart it continuously.22 Works about Tarascan history and social organization here- tofore have omitted gender differentiation. Brand was curious about indigenous surnames and their meanings. He was in- trigued by the animal names, but he was not aware that they belonged exclusively to males. Struck by the pace of assimila- tion in Quiroga (formerly Cocupao), near the north shore of Lake Pátzcuaro, he found that Tarascan surnames had mostly disappeared by the nineteenth century, although the Tarascan language survived there for another century. His observation that after the Tarascans of Quiroga had lost their indigenous language, they still identified as Tarascan suggests that language is not the sole indicator of cultural identity and that another index, such as gender differentiation, may be useful.23 Brand’s brief examination of a late eighteenth-century Quiroga baptism register brought him close to a discovery of gender differ- entiationinparents’ surnames—though at this point in Spanish, not Tarascan—but as he wrote, “unfortunately, lack of time prohibited [him from] doing more than scanning a few pages.” Similarly, twelve examples of Tarascan married couples with different Spanish surnames appear in the Pátzcuaro Indian register for the years 1664 to 1673. One topic for further investigation might be the transitioning from Tarascan to Spanish gender dif- ferentiation. Freud’s point about names might not have gone far enough. Naming structure, not just names, might be embedded in the psyche.24

22 West, Cultural Geography, 12, 14, 15, 16. 23 Brand, Quiroga, 93. 24 https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939L-9QJS-W?i=5&wc=3NB2-168% 3A178882401%2C178882402%2C178882403&cc=1883388.

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