11 Molina, Alonso (1984). Confesionario mayor en lengua mexicana y castellana (1569) [Major con- fessionary in the Mexican and Castilian language]. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. (Roberto Moreno provides a facsimile edition of Molina’s manual for confession).
12 Mundy, Barbara (1996). The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográfi cas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (This book examines the methods, questionnaires, and failings of the imperial project of mapping the totality of Spain’s possessions).
13 O’Gorman, Edmundo (1942). Fundamentos de la historia de Améric [Foundations of the history of America]. Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria. (O’Gorman lays out the ground for reflecting on the philosophical conquest of America.)
14 Quinones Keber, Eloise (1995). Codex Telleriano- Remensis: Ritual Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript. Austin: University of Texas Press. (In this facsimile edition, Quiñones Keber offers an exhaustive study of the contents, style, and history of this major pictorial colonial codex).
15 Rabasa, José (1993). Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. (This book traces four moments in the semiotic invention of America).
16 Rabasa, José (1996). “Pre-Columbian pasts and Indian presents in Mexican history,” Dispositio/n 46: 245—70. (This essay examines the Codex Mendoza and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s Rabasa, José Alboroto y motín de los indios de México [Uprising and riot of the Indians of Mexico] as two modalities of constituting Indians as subalterns).
17 Rabasa, José (1998). “Franciscans and Dominicans under the gaze of a tlacuilo: plural-world dwelling in an Indian Pictorial Codex,” Morrison Library Inaugural Lecture Series 14. Berkeley: Doe Library, University of California. (A page from the Codex Telleriano-Remensis provides an entry point for reflecting on native critical thought).
18 Rabasa, José (2000). Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (This book analyzes forms of writing violence in aesthetic, legal, descriptive, and historical colonial texts).
19 Sahagún, Bernardino de (1950–82). Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. 13 parts. Trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles Dibble. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research and University of Utah. (Original manuscript ca. 1579). (This is a bilingual edition of the Nahuatl versions of Sahagún’s monumental Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España; it also includes a bilingual volume that contains prefaces, additions, and appendixes written in Spanish).
20 Sahagún, Bernardino de (1993). Adiciones, Apéndice a la apostilla y Ejercicio [Additions, appendices to the apostilla and daily exercise]. Nahuatl text and Spanish translation, ed. and trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. (Original manuscripts ca. 1574.) (In this transcription of Nahuatl texts with Spanish translations, Anderson collects what is known as Sahagún’s s doctrinal encyclopedia).
21 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti (1988). “Can the subaltern speak?” In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 280—316. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. (This chapter provides a complex argument concerning the discursive constraints that constitute the impossibility of subaltern speech).
22 Vera Cruz, Alonso de la (1968). Relection de dominio infidelium & justo bello (A discussion on the dominion of unbelievers and just war). In The Writings of Alonso de la Vera Cruz. Vol. 2. Trans. Ernest J. Burrus, SJ. Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute. (Original manuscript 1553—4). (Burrus offers a bilingual Latin and English edition of the lectures Alonso de la Vera Cruz delivered at the University of Mexico on the dominion of unbelievers and just war; volume 3 contains a photographic reproduction of De domino).
Further Reading
1 Rabasa, José (2006). “Ecografías de la voz en la historiografía a nahua” [Echographies of voice in Nahua historiography], Historia y Grafí, 25: 105—51. (This article defines echography as a method for examining voice in Nahua historical writings).
2 Wood, Stephanie (2003). Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. (As the title implies, this book examines the ways the Nahuas viewed the Spanish invasion with the intent of transcending conquest, that is, victimization).
3 The Popol Wuj: The Repositioning and Survival of Mayan Culture
Carlos M. López
The history of the Popol Wuj as both a collection of texts recorded among the indigenous peoples of Guatemala and also written down in the manner of the western canon is a history of successive repressions, recoveries, and appropriations. In the Popol Wuj we can see the distortions introduced in the texts as a result of their conservation within systems of registers and epistemological frameworks differing from the original, thus becoming tainted by Western culture paradigms. For this reason, the Mayan text can be seen as one of the most visible and illustrative cases of what occurred with many other belief systems existing in the Amerindian continent during the European colonization.
Currently the title Popol Wuj refers to a collection of tzijs — truths, stories, narratives, wisdom, and traditions — originating from the highlands of present-day Guatemala, dating from before the Spanish invasion lead by Pedro de Alvarado in 1524. Father Ximénez’s manuscript, containing the oldest available version today (ca. 1701), is housed in the Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, USA, as one of the documents bound in the volume cataloged as the Ayer MS 1515. It is important to read the Popol Wuj for two major reasons. First, because it is the most complete and intelligible surviving cultural record of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies. Secondly, because part of the epistemologies, cosmogonies, philosophical trends, and values contained in some of its tzijs could become the seeds of new thought if they enter in contact with our contemporary worldviews. A great deal of the contents of the Popol Wuj could offer alternative points of view for revisiting most of the ominous challenges arising from the current relationship between humans and nature. This Maya-K’iche’ text is not a book of solutions or revealed truths that will save us, but it offers different approaches to the way we think and feel. It is perhaps for this reason that Mayan cosmogonies might allow us to enrich our own epistemological perspectives.
The reading of such texts implies a significant risk. Given their profound discrepancies with our Western epistemology, we cannot avoid the tendency to invade, distort, overlay, or absorb their “non-Western” views. Because the Maya have been subjugated by Western powers for over 500 years, the reading of their texts is not a simple literary exercise. In this case there is contact with a cultural artifact bound by a long-standing system of oppression. Thus, a reading from the Western-dominant perspective implies an inevitable invasion of native discourses which becomes a new form of scholarly colonization. An alternative reading should seek to avoid this risk. In this chapter I will discuss the repercussions of the inherent dilemmas arising from readings of historically colonized texts.
The texts of the Popol Wuj — which originate from many diverse sources — are arranged in three main sections. The first part comprises the tzijs, which recount the origin of life, of plants, animals, and human beings. The creation of humans is the centerpiece of these tzijs, and is presented in four successive stages: the creation of animals, the creation of the Earthen Man, the Wooden Man, and finally