FRAY ANTONIO DE MONTESINO Y SU TIEMPO

SILKE JANSEN
IRENE M. WEISS
(EDS.)

Iberoamericana • Vervuert • 2017

PARECOS Y AUSTRALES
Ensayos de cultura de la Colonia

18

«Parecos de nosotros los españoles son los de la Nueva España, que viven en Síbola y por aquellas partes» dice Francisco López de Gómara, porque «no moramos en contraria como antípodas», sino en el mismo hemisferio. «Austral» es el término que adoptaron los habitantes del virreinato del Perú para publicarse. Bajo esas dos nomenclaturas con las que las gentes de indias son llamadas en la época, la colección de «Ensayos de cultura de la colonia» acogerá ediciones cuidadas de textos coloniales que deben recuperarse, así como estudios que, desde una intención interdisciplinar, desde perspectivas abiertas, desde un diálogo intergenérico e intercultural traten de la América descubierta y de su proyección en los virreinatos.

Consejo editorial de la colección

ROLENA ADORNO, Yale University; JUDITH FARRÉ, CSIC-CCHS, Madrid; PAUL FIRBAS, SUNY at Stony Brook; MARGO GLANTZ, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; ROBERTO GONZÁLEZ-ECHEVARRÍA, Yale University; ESPERANZA LÓPEZ PARADA, Universidad Complutense de Madrid; RAÚL MARRERO-FENTE, University of Minnesota; JOSÉ ANTONIO MAZZOTTI, Tufts University; LUIS MILLONES, Colby College; CARMEN DE MORA, Universidad de Sevilla; ALBERTO PÉREZ-AMADOR ADAM, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa; MARÍA JOSÉ RODILLA LEÓN, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa

Fray Antonio de Montesino y su tiempo

SILKE JANSEN
IRENE M. WEISS
(EDS.)

IBEROAMERICANA • VERVUERT • 2017

La presente publicación ha contado con la colaboración del Programa Hispanex, de la Secretaría de Estado de Cultura, Subdirección General de Promoción Exterior de la Cultura.

Queda prohibida la reproducción total o parcial por cualquier medio de impresión, en forma idéntica, extractada o modificada, en castellano o cualquier otro idioma.

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Depósito legal: M-13576-2017

Diseño de cubierta: Carlos Zamora

Foto de la cubierta: Monumento a Fray Antonio de Montesino, Santo Domingo © Lynne A. Guitar

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO 9706 Este libro está impreso íntegramente en papel ecológico sin cloro

Impreso en España

Índice

Introducción

Agradecimientos

I. ENCUENTROS DESIGUALES: LOS TAÍNO Y LA ENCOMIENDA

Lynne A. Guitar

Changes in the Lives of the Taíno circa 1511

Silke Jansen

El español y el taíno en contacto: aspectos sociolingüísticos de la encomienda

II. EN DEFENSA DE LOS INDÍGENAS: EL SERMÓN DE MONTESINO

Karl Kohut

Pedro Mártir de Anglería: ¿precursor de Montesino?

Bernat Hernández

Un sermón dominico en La Española de 1511 y sus contextos medievales y atlánticos

Raymundo González

Ego vox clamantis in deserto: la estructura de un silencio y la novedad dominicana en La Española, 1511

Ramón Valdivia Giménez

El “sermón de Montesino”: origen de las Leyes de Burgos de 1512

Ludolf Pelizaeus

“Con qué derecho y con qué justicia...?”. El impacto de los sermones de Montesino en el desarrollo del sistema jurídico en las Indias en la primera mitad del siglo XVI

III. EL LEGADO DE LA COLONIA: MÁS ALLÁ DE MONTESINO

Jesús María Serna Moreno

El aporte cultural indígena en el Caribe insular hispano

Irene M. Weiss

Fray Montesino revisitado en También la lluvia, de Icíar Bollaín

IV. VOCES DE DOMINICOS

Luisa Campos Villalón, O. P.

Montesino: portavoz de una comunidad defensora de la vida

Mario A. Rodríguez León, O. P.

Fray Antón de Montesino y los frailes dominicos en Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico y Cuba: una voz profética en El Caribe

Índice onomástico

Sobre los autores

Introducción

Para el año 1500, La Española se había convertido en escenario de una catástrofe ecológica y demográfica que no tiene comparación en la conquista y colonización de Hispanoamérica. En los años que siguieron al Descubrimiento de América, la isla se constituyó en el centro de la expansión colonial de España —con desastrosas consecuencias para la etnia nativa de los taíno¹, que en aquellos tiempos poblaban las Antillas Mayores—. Las enfermedades traídas de Europa, la escasa alimentación, el exceso de trabajo en las encomiendas, el suicidio colectivo y, muy probablemente, también la asimilación biológica y cultural no tardaron en aniquilar a los pueblos antillanos. Contrariamente a lo que ocurre en buena parte de Hispanoamérica, donde el pasado precolombino ha dejado improntas tangibles, en las Antillas son escasos los elementos que dan testimonio de sus primeros habitantes: unos pocos sitios arqueológicos, topónimos, vocabulario para designar la flora y la fauna autóctonas, una serie de artefactos de la vida cotidiana en las zonas rurales y algunas palabras indígenas para designarlos (hamacas, herramientas de trabajo, etc.).

Se le atribuye a fray Antonio de Montesino,² a cuya memoria está dedicado este volumen, el mérito de haber sido el primer europeo que vislumbró la catástrofe demográfica e intentó despertar las conciencias de sus compatriotas. El dominico arribó a La Española en 1510, junto con un grupo de religiosos españoles a los que los Reyes Católicos habían confiado la tarea de misionar entre los indígenas antillanos. Allí encontró una sociedad altamente jerarquizada, en la que se empleaba a los pobladores autóctonos en el así llamado sistema de la encomienda bajo condiciones de trabajo cercanas a la esclavitud, que derivaron en las fatales consecuencias ya mencionadas. En dos famosos sermones de Adviento, pronunciados el 21 y 28 de diciembre de 1511, fray Antón de Montesino, en representación de la comunidad dominica, denunció con vehemencia los abusos y la explotación de los nativos que estaban ligados al sistema de la encomienda. Apelaba en ellos al mandamiento cristiano del amor al prójimo, y acusaba a los colonos españoles y a la administración colonial de seguir un comportamiento que los llevaba a perder la salvación del alma, tal como les ocurría a los paganos: todo un escándalo con el que atrajo las iras de quienes detentaban el poder.

La consecuencia inmediata de los sermones de Adviento fue la exclusión de los dominicos de la misión en las Antillas. A largo plazo, sin embargo, la iniciativa de Antonio de Montesino habría de definir el pensamiento de Bartolomé de las Casas, quien más tarde se convertiría en el defensor de los pobladores autóctonos de América. Quedaba así abierto el camino para el surgimiento de la leyenda negra.

Hoy en día se alza en la ciudad de Santo Domingo, en la desembocadura del río Ozama, una estatua de bronce de quince metros de altura en recuerdo de Antonio de Montesino. De parte de los investigadores, sin embargo, ha recibido el dominico poca atención, eclipsado probablemente por la eminente figura de Bartolomé de las Casas. Esporádicos son los trabajos científicos que se han ocupado de la persona histórica del fraile e, inclusive, la recepción y el impacto de sus dos sermones de Adviento han sido solo parcialmente investigados. Teniendo en cuenta estos antecedentes, no es extraño que el quinto centenario de los sermones de Adviento no haya concitado la esperada atención ni de parte de los investigadores, ni del gran público.

El presente volumen está dirigido tanto al mundo científico, como a un público interesado en la historia latinoamericana. Los autores son estudiosos y científicos de Alemania, Argentina, España, México, los EE. UU. y la República Dominicana, que se acercan a la temática desde diferentes perspectivas: histórica, lingüística, antropológica, teológica, jurídica y literaria. El enfoque interdisciplinario permite esbozar una imagen más nítida de la figura de Antonio de Montesino y esclarecer aspectos de la historia de su recepción y de la repercusión de sus sermones en el discurso histórico. Los artículos tematizan una serie de cuestiones que siguen siendo discutidas en los estudios sobre el Caribe, como por ejemplo hasta qué punto es confiable el cuadro de la desaparición de la etnia taína tal como se encuentra en las fuentes coloniales, o qué papel tuvo Montesino en la conversión de Bartolomé de las Casas, que pasó de conquistador y encomendero a ardiente defensor de los derechos de la población autóctona. Con ello, el presente volumen pretende destacar la resonancia de los sermones como factor desencadenante del intenso debate sobre la cuestión indígena que se extendió más allá de la mitad del siglo XVI, aportando elementos de discusión a este momento coyuntural de los inicios de la colonización.

Erlangen y Maguncia, junio de 2016

Silke Jansen
Irene M. Weiss

1. Mantenemos consecuentemente la forma “taíno”, también con el artículo en plural, tratando el gentilicio como nombre propio de la etnia.

2. En el volumen se respetan las variantes del nombre del fraile que corresponden a sus grafías originarias, a saber: Antón/Antonio de Montesino o simplemente Montesino (nota de las editoras).

Agradecimientos

El primer paso en la elaboración de este volumen temático fue el coloquio internacional “Antonio de Montesino y su tiempo”, que tuvo lugar en la Universidad de Maguncia los días 3 y 4 de febrero de 2012, como primer encuentro de estudiosos del ilustre dominico en Alemania. Para la ocasión, fueron invitados investigadores de distintas disciplinas, lo que permitió abordar la figura y la acción de Montesino desde perspectivas diversas y, a la vez, complementarias.

El coloquio pudo organizarse gracias al apoyo financiero del Instituto de Filología Románica (Romanisches Seminar) de la Universidad de Maguncia y de distintas entidades. Agradecemos aquí la generosidad de la Oficina de Promoción de las Ciencias (Inneruniversitäre Forschungsförderung), y del Centro de Investigaciones Socum (Forschungszentrum Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften an der Universität Mainz).

Del intercambio interdisciplinario surgió la idea de este libro, que es, a nuestro parecer, único en su temática. Su publicación ha podido ser financiada gracias al aporte del Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte de España, mediante su programa Hispanex, y de la cátedra de Lingüística Románica (Lehrstuhl für Romanistik, insbesondere Sprachwissenschaft) de la Universidad de Erlangen-Núremberg. La revisión formal de los artículos, en las diferentes etapas de su preparación, se la debemos en buena medida a nuestros colaboradores: Alberto Morales Martínez y Manuel Peralta Céspedes, ambos practicantes Erasmus de universidades españolas, y a Thomas Holl-Wagner, Pia Reimann e Iris Häcker, de la Universidad de Erlangen-Núremberg: a todos ellos nuestro sincero agradecimiento.

De los errores que se encuentren en la publicación, muy a pesar de la paciente colaboración de los autores, nos hacemos únicas responsables.

Erlangen y Maguncia, junio de 2016
Silke Jansen
Irene M. Weiss

I.

ENCUENTROS DESIGUALES:
LOS TAÍNO Y LA ENCOMIENDA

Changes in the Lives of the Taíno circa 1511¹

Lynne A. Guitar
Council on International Educational Exchange Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra Santiago, Dominican Republic

Although the Taíno of the Greater Antilles were a Stone-Aged people, it does not mean that they were primitive — it only means they did not smelt metal, but made all of their tools, adornments, and other objects out of stone, wood, bone, shell, and other natural materials. By 1492, when the arrival of Christopher Columbus and subsequent domination by Spaniards put an end to the upward trajectory of their economic and political expansion, they were the principal commercial traders throughout the Caribbean and Circum-Caribbean region, and the most advanced Indigenous peoples of the entire region in terms of trade, agriculture and nutrition, religion and art, and political organization. No longer a tribe, numerous specialists have suggested that the Taíno at the end of the 15th century were about to advance from a tribe to a nation or even from a nation to an empire, at least on the islands of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, which were at the heart of their thriving civilization, which also encompassed eastern Cuba, Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos (Wilson 1990: 2-4 and 29-34).

Fewer than 20 years later, however, by December of 1511, when Antonio Montesino gave his famous anti-encomienda sermons in the city of Santo Domingo de Guzmán, the Taíno people had only four choices if they and any of their culture were to survive: 1) marry a Spaniard so that their mixed-blood children not only had improved immunities to the new plagues that had arrived with the foreign invaders and their animals, but also the rights and privileges of Spanish Christians (García-Arévalo 1992: 245-262); 2) accept Spanish domination and do whatever their encomenderos commanded that they do; 3) flee to another island or to the mainland, where there were no Spaniards — yet; 4) or flee to a cimarrón community in peripheral, less fertile regions of the islands of Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Cuba and Jamaica, as far away from the Spanish-held towns and fortresses as possible. Many scholars have taken for granted that the mass “suicides” reported by Spanish military patrols were another option the Taíno took to avoid domination by Spaniards, but my research into Indigenous customs indicates that was never a part of their cultural repertoire, but appears to have been faulty reporting due to ignorance five centuries ago about the causes and effects of plague.

1. Taíno traders

Too often we use concepts from the modern day to judge conditions of the past, such as the isolation of many of the Caribbean Islands today, which we envision as having been the same in the 1500s, 1400s, and earlier. To the Indigenous peoples who populated these islands beginning around 6,000 B.C., however, water was not a barrier — it was their superhighway! And the Taíno, excellent navigators in their dugout canoes, some of which were large enough to hold 100 rowers plus supplies and cargo, sailed throughout the islands and the Circum-Caribbean mainland. They carried finely textured white cotton cloth, woven cotton nets and hammocks, brilliantly colored parrot feathers and live parrots, elaborately carved items of wood, stone, and other natural materials, elegant baskets and pottery, salt and salted fish, which they traded for exquisite shell bracelets and yuka scrapers from the Bahamas, for guanín and guanines from the Yucatán (a metal alloy combining gold, silver, and copper, guanín was highly valued by the Taíno because it shone more like the sun than pure gold; guanines were large medallions made of this alloy), and they traded for other finely crafted products from all over the region.²

The Taíno’s commercial trade came to an abrupt halt at turn of the 16th century, when plagues set in, carried by the Spaniards and their animals to the tropical Caribbean, where the foreign bacteria and viruses thrived. The Indigenous peoples did not have the built-in immunities that Europeans, Africans, and Asians had developed over centuries of commercial trade, which also included trading diseases — waves of virulent plagues killed tens of thousands of people across the Old World, but the descendants of the survivors were born with immunities that protected future generations. It is conjectured that canoes from the Caribbean carrying trade goods and messages about the arrival of the Europeans inadvertently carried the invaders’ diseases, too, and spread them across the Americas. Thus the death toll spread among all of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas — especially in tropical regions — long before the foreigners arrived on their soil (Cook 1993: 213-245).

By 1511, the Taíno would still have been using their sturdy canoes for fishing ... and to flee Hispaniola, where the Spaniards had established their stronghold. Flight was the option that the Kacike Hatuey, a Taíno chieftan from eastern Hispaniola, chose to escape Spanish dominion. He fled to the island of Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, the Spaniards soon spread their dominion to Puerto Rico and captured him as a traitor. He was burned at the stake in 1512, refusing last-minute conversion to Christianity because he did not wish to go to Heaven if Spaniards were there.

2. Taíno foodways

The Taíno’s foodways provided a plentitude of protein, calories, minerals, and vitamins, but very little fat. They ate much more healthily than Europeans did in the 15th and 16th centuries, which had allowed the Taíno population to multiply geometrically. By 1492, new demographic studies, backed up by archaeological studies, demonstrate that there were approximately 4 to 6 million Indigenous peoples living on just the island of Hispaniola alone, not a mere 200,000, as Spanish chroniclers later reported.³

The Taíno had developed methods of agriculture that were well advanced over most of the slash-and-burn methods of other Indigenous peoples of northern South America and also more advanced than most European farming methods. They constructed konukos, gardens with multiple raised mounds of knee-high loose soil, each mound approximately six feet in diameter (2 meters). The raised mounds ensured that plants’ roots would not rot. In their konukos they planted, all together, yuka and corn, which provided climbing poles for beans, and a wide variety of tuberous vegetables. The beans, in turn, provided much-needed nitrogen for the other plants in the konuko, which included peanuts, hot peppers, and a kind of squash called auyama, whose broad, low-growing leaves kept down the weeds and further helped to enrich the soil after the harvest.

Men and women worked together to prepare the mounded fields, although women later did most of the weeding and harvesting, while children were put to work throwing rocks at birds to scare them away so they would not eat the crops — the birds that were killed went into the pot of ajiaco. Known in English as pepperpot stew, it is still eaten daily by Indigenous peoples of Central America and northern South America.⁴ Nearer their residential areas, which were called yukayekes because of the Taíno’s nutritional dependence on yuka as their principal carbohydrate, they maintained medicinal herb gardens and fruit trees of all kinds. In dry regions, they built irrigation canals to water their crops.

The Taíno raised and ate both sweet yuka and bitter yuka. Bitter yuka, although extremely poisonous if not properly processed, was cooked into flat cakes of casabe bread, which remain fungus-free and insect-free for up to a year, even in the humid tropics, and provide lots of nutritious calories. Sweet yuka is not poisonous and can be eaten boiled, fried, or roasted.

The Taíno supplemented their agricultural crops with the collection of wild fruits, roots, and nuts that were in season, and with a wide variety of proteins ranging from hutías and soledonontes (two small mammals that are both in extreme danger of extinction across the Caribbean today), to manatees (whose rich red meat appears to have been reserved for the families of the ruling class), iguanas, birds of all kinds and their eggs, and a wide variety of fish, conch, crabs, turtles, and other seafood from both fresh water and the sea. Their ancestors also appear to have brought domesticated guinea pigs (conejillos de Indias) with them and dogs.⁵ They raised fish in large traps in many of their rivers, to serve as a reservoir for times of need, and devised ingenious methods for catching large ocean fish and turtles, as well as the aquatic birds that rested on lakes and lagoons in vast quantities during their semi-annual migrations to and from North America and South America. The Taíno also devised efficient methods for preserving meats and fish, including salting and smoking on green-stick constructions called barbacoas (the ancestor of today’s popular BBQs).

Much of the Taíno’s agricultural knowledge has survived, including their gardening tools (in particular the wooden coas for planting seeds and loosening compacted soil) and methods of planting and harvesting by the moon cycles. Note that the Spaniards had to rely on Indigenous knowledge because they did not know what foods were edible in the tropics nor how to grow them, harvest them, or prepare them. It appears, however, that the Spaniards thought that the Indigenous multi-cropped konukos were disorganized, for they insisted on changing to European-style gardens with their row after row of mono-crops, a change that most likely began with the second generation of Indigenous peoples born after European arrival — in other words, about the time of Montesino’s sermons. This change resulted in wave after wave of insect and fungal attacks that have destroyed Caribbean food crops over the past 500 years, and also resulted in the current over-use of insecticides and fungicides. Also, across most of the Spanish Caribbean — most likely as early as the 1500s — the preference for spicy food began to disappear. This apparently happened because the Spaniards did not like their foods too picante, and Spaniards in the Caribbean islands soon outnumbered the surviving Indigenous peoples, unlike in the Valley of Mexico and other high-mountain regions where disease did not wipe out as large a percentage of the Indigenous populations as in the tropics.

The U.S. archaeologist Kathleen Deagan conducted a study of Puerto Real, the only site on Hispaniola where there was a known Taíno village both before and after Spanish arrival. There she and her researchers discovered that the Spaniards changed their foodways drastically after they arrived in the Caribbean, adopting Indigenous foods, but the Indigenous people changed their foodways very little. The major difference after Spanish arrival was that the Taíno began to eat bonier fish than before, for the Spaniards demanded the fleshy, less bony fish. But the Taíno did not include the Spanish vegetables (carrots, beets, onions, garlic, lettuce) in their diets nor did they begin to eat the Spaniards’ domesticated food animals (chickens, goats, pigs, and cows), at least not until much later than the early 1500s (Deagan 2004: 597-626).

Even today, many of the most commonly eaten foods in the Dominican Republic, Republic of Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica, are Indigenous dishes or modified versions of them.

3. Taíno religion and art

Fray Ramón Pané was the first of the Spaniards to study the Indigenous people’s religion, which he did under Christopher Columbus’s orders in 1494. It must be understood that Pané was a cleric, a religious man, very Christian (Roman Catholic), therefore his interpretation of the Taíno’s religious beliefs was written down as if they were myths and superstitions. He also wrote that the stories that he tried to piece together were very confusing. Because of this, it is not clear that the Taíno really did worship one supreme God, who was all powerful and invisible, as Pané wrote. That may have been a reflection of Pané’s beliefs, not theirs. It is clear that they had a pantheon of hero stories that had been passed on down through the generations verbally, for they sang their histories during areítos, which were song and dance festivals where everyone in the yukayeke participated to celebrate a good harvest, a good hunt, a good fishing trip, the birth of a new baby, the return of a trading expedition, or sometimes just for fun. Note that both good harvests and bad harvests, the same as good health and bad health, were principally attributed to pleasing the spirit guides — or not.⁶ Pané wrote that the most powerful and popular of the Taíno “gods” were Yúkahu Bagua Mácarocote, who controlled yuka and the sea, and his mother, Atabey or Atabeyra, who controlled the land and fresh water.

Many of the myths and legends that Pané recorded appear to be teaching stories rather than religious beliefs. What is clear is that the Taíno believed in parallel populated worlds — the sky, the land, and the sea — and in guiding spirits called cemís who lived in Koaibay, the Taíno equivalent of heaven, but who could be consulted via special ceremonies and on special occasions that will be described later in this section. Koaibay was often described as an island with its own kacike (chief), Maquetauri Guayaba, where the powerful and unpredictable founding spirits lived. Please note that, just as Christians do not worship crosses or crucifixes, but rather what crosses and crucifixes represent, the Taíno did not worship the myriad physical representations of the cemís that they sculpted, wove, painted, and tattooed onto themselves and the tools, decorative objects, and items that they used in their everyday activities as well as for healing and celebratory activities. They created the beautiful objects as symbolic representations of the divine spirits that created and maintained their way of life.

The recently dead also were said to live in Koaibay, but were able to walk about in the land of the living at night as opias (or upias) seeking lovers and other sensual pleasures. They were only distinguishable from a goeiz (a living human) by the fact that they had no navels and because they “evaporated” at the crucial point in time when lovers join together for mutual satisfaction, leaving frustration in their wake. Again, this latter tale recorded by Pané and some of the Spanish chroniclers appears to have been a story told by the Taíno to keep their children, especially the young women, safe inside their bohíos (homes) at night.

Like the sun and the moon, the Taíno had two equally necessary leaders: kacikes and behikes. The kacike was the chief and represented the sun. He had a multitude of personal cemís, which helped make him more powerful than most of the other Taíno.⁷ With his cemís’ aid, the kacike decided when to plant, when to harvest, when to fish, etc., and how to divide the bounty among his people. He consulted with his cemís in front of all of his people while in a cojoba-induced hallucinogenic trance state on the terrace in front of his caney (his home, but also referred to by the Spaniards as his “palace”). The drug combined the powdered seed of Anadenanthera peregrina and Piptadenia peregrine (commonly called “Tamarindo falso”), with powdered green tobacco (not commonly used or grown today because it is so strong), and powdered shell — the latter has no hallucinogenic properties, but acts as a catalyst to make the two drugs work faster. After announcing what the cemís had told him, if the news were positive, the kacike would call for a celebratory areíto.

The behike was the moon side of the leadership pair. He was the religious leader, healer (healing was accomplished with the help of his cemís), principal artist — because nearly all Taíno art was religious — and teacher. He consulted his with his cemís in an hallucinogenic cojoba trance, like the kacike did, but most of his communications with the divine took place alone, inside sacred caves after prolonged fasts and while he or perhaps his apprentices painted symbolic “prayers” on the walls of the caves. The Taíno, like many other peoples of the past and present, saw caves as portals between parallel worlds. Neither light nor dark, neither here nor there, caves were transitional places where specially trained goeiz like behikes could negotiate with the most powerful of the cemís for mutual benefits. The cojoba trance helped make communication with the cemís easier and more clear for both behikes and kacikes so that they could make the best decisions and negotiations on behalf of their people.

Most of the Taíno’s religious beliefs were belittled by the Spaniards, put down as superstitions or as inspired by demons. They tried to supplant their own beliefs upon the Taíno — note that the encomenderos’ contract with the royal crown required them not only to feed and clothe the “naked” Indians under their care,⁸ but also to provide them with a proper Christian education. Nonetheless, the Spaniards did not prohibit the Taíno’s areítos or ballgames. Perhaps they did not realize how deeply religious both activities were for the Indigenous peoples? Thus some of the Taíno religious customs and beliefs remained alive throughout the early encomienda period, although they began to fade away after the Dominican friars were successful in substituting Christian missions. Some of the religious customs and beliefs, however, remain to the present day because of the “cultural convergences” that occurred between Taíno and runaway Afri can peoples in the cimarrón communities, far from Spanish dominance.⁹

As already mentioned, most Taíno art was religious — even domestic implements for daily use, like lowly yuka scrapers, often bore elegantly sculpted images and symbols of the Taíno cemís. About the only art objects that were not particularly religious were products produced for commercial trade. In the western most part of the island, Spanish chroniclers reported that the Kacika Anakaona supervised a large workshop where women created elaborate bowls and other objects carved and sculpted out of “ironwood”¹⁰ that were in particularly high demand for commercial trade.

4. Taíno political organization

The principal area in which Taíno lifestyles had disintegrated by 1511 was their political system. As the U.S. archaeologist Kathleen Deagan has carefully pointed out through most of her published works,¹¹ Spanish systems replaced Indigenous systems throughout the Caribbean in nearly all aspects of the “public sphere”, which was male dominated. Those aspects included all levels of the political and religious leadership systems. Indigenous systems, albeit modified, stayed intact in the “domestic sphere”, however, because most households were run by Taíno women.

The Taíno’s original organizational structure was one wherein each yukayeke — some of which had between 5,000 and 10,000 inhabitants — had its own kacike, and the physical extent of his power was his kazikazgo (his chiefdom). The kacikes of the smaller kacikazgos had to obey and pay tribute to more powerful kacikes, creating a pyramid of power, with only a few at the top. In fact, in 1492, there appear to have been five supreme kacikes on the island of Hispaniola and one on Puerto Rico.

5. Conclusion

At first the Spanish administrators and encomenderos ruled through the islands’ kacikes, in the same way that the crown attempted to negotiate and deal diplomatically with any foreign state. By 1511, however, respect for the kacikes was breaking down. It was, in part, the uncertainty of not knowing how long they would be able to reap the rewards of the Taíno labor tribute that caused the encomenderos on Hispaniola to mistreat “their” Indians. They attempted to get as much labor out of the natives as quickly as possible at the least cost. This was spurred on by the goal of getting rich quickly and returning to Spain, where they could live as proper Spanish noblemen — which was much preferable to living as a nobleman on the primitive frontier island of Hispaniola.

Perhaps as justification for mistreatment, it became more and more common for Spaniards to refer to the Taíno in their letters and reports as “primitives” and “barbarians”, as less than fully human because their beliefs, values, and customs were so different from Spanish beliefs, values, and customs. For example, instead of finding the natives ripe for conversion because they were “without religion”, as Columbus had initially described them, the Taíno were now said to practice demon worship.¹² Instead of lauding the Taíno for their disregard of personal wealth and material possessions, as they had in the past,¹³ Spaniards began to use their “lack of interest in profit, surplus, and savings [...] as proof of Indian irrationality and thus evidence of their lack of ‘humanity’”.¹⁴

Descriptions of the Taíno’s konukos as “intensively cultivated”, like Columbus’s first glowing reports, changed to disparaging descriptions of them as “disorganized”. And instead of any demonstration of appreciation for the nutriatious diet of the Taíno — whose foods were keeping the Spaniards alive, since imported food supplies rotted during the long voyages and Spanish staples did not grow well in the tropical climate — Spaniards began to describe the Taíno as weak and sickly because their food base was “casabe and water”, not good red meat and wine like Spaniards. Their “weakness” was often invoked as the cause of their rapid population decline.¹⁵ The encomendero-turned-Dominican-friar Bartolomé de las Casas wrote: “[T]he Spaniards began to behave as though they were the natural rulers, and as though the Indians were their subjects and vassals; or, rather, their chattel slaves” (Las Casas: Book 2, Chp. 10).

By the time of Montesino’s sermons in late 1511, the Spaniards in the Caribbean were becoming more possessive, more didactical, less willing to negotiate with and defer to the Taíno kacikes. And it is clear that the Taíno’s pyramidal socio-political structure — which had been on the cusp of empire in 1492 — was all but destroyed. The Spanish chroniclers, however, mistook the Taíno’s political disintegration and drastic numerical decline for extinction. The Repartimiento Census of 1514¹⁶ listed fewer than 26,000 remaining Taíno on Hispaniola, but it only focused on workers, so the count is inaccurate, especially with regard to children and the elderly. Also, the census does not take into account all of those Taíno women who married Spaniards and had children with them, then were all listed on the censuses as “Spaniards” (see Guitar 2006). Nor does it take into account the multitudes of Taíno who survived the plagues and famines, but ran away to less fertile and more inaccessible regions of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico or to the mainland — how can you count people who have run away and are hiding from you?

The Taíno were not wiped out, nor were many of their customs, beliefs, and values. Growing evidence for the past 25 years — among which is historical, ethnohistorical, archaeological, anthropological, demographic, linguistic, and mtDNA evidence — proves that thousands of Taíno survived to merge over the centuries with Europeans as well as with the Africans who were brought as slaves to the islands of the Caribbean. They became today’s Dominicans, Hai tians, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Jamaicans.¹⁷ The new voices calling out of the desert about cruelty and tyranny committed against the Indigenous peoples of Hispaniola and the rest of the Greater Antilles, are crying out for more accurate information about Taíno survival instead of a focus on their mythical extinction. Fray Antonio Montesino would be proud of the new movement.

Bibliography

Editions

ANGHIERA, Pedro Martyr D’ (1989): Pedro Mártir de Anglería, primer cronista de Indias: Décadas del nuevo mundo. Santo Domingo: Sociedad Dominicana de Bibliófilos.

LAS CASAS, fray Bartolomé de (1994): Historia de las Indias. Obras completas, vol. 1-3. Primera edición crítica. Transcripción del texto por Miguel Ángel Medina, fijación de las fuentes por Jesús Ángel Barreda, estudio preliminar y análisis crítico por Isacio Pérez Fernández. Director de la edición Paulino Castaneda Delgado. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

PEÑA BATTLE, Manuel Arturo (1970): La rebelión de Bahoruco. Santo Domingo: Impresora Dominicana.

Studies

ARRANZ-MÁRQUEZ, Luis (1991): Repartimientos y encomiendas. Madrid: Ed. Fundación García Arévalo.

COOK, Noble David (1993): “Disease and the Depopulation of Hispaniola, 1492-1518”. In: Colonial Latin American Review 2, 213-245.

DEAGAN, Kathleen (1990): “Sixteenth-Century Spanish American Colonization in the Southeastern United States and the Caribbean”. In: THOMAS, David Hurst (ed.): Columbian Consequences. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 259-267.

DEAGAN, Kathleen (2004): “Reconsidering Taíno Social Dynamics after Spanish Conquest: Gender and Class in Culture Contact Studies”. In: American Antiquity 69, 597-626.

DEREN, Maya (1983): Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. New York: McPherson & Company. (Originally published in 1953 by Vanguard Press, Boston).

GARCÍA-ARÉVALO, Manuel (1992): Santo Domingo en la ocasión del quinto centenario. Santo Domingo: Comisión Dominicana Permanente para la Celebración del Quinto Centenario del Descubrimiento y Evangelización de América.

GUITAR, Lynne (2006): “Boiling it Down: Slavery on the First Commercial Sugarcane Ingenios in the Americas (Hispaniola 1530-1545)”. In: LANDERS, Jane (ed.): Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 39-82.

GUITAR, Lynne / FERBEL-AZCÁRATE, Pedro / ESTÉVEZ, Jorge (2006): “Ocama-Daca Taíno (Hear me, I Am Taíno): Taíno Survival on Hispaniola, Focusing on the Dominican Republic”. In: FORTE, Maximilian C. (ed.): Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival. New York: Peter Lang, 40-67.

HOFMAN, Corinne L. / BRIGHT, Alistair J. / BOOMERT, Arie / KNIPPENBERG, Sebastian (2007): “Island Rhythms: The Web of Social Relationships and Interaction Networks in the Lesser Antillean Archipelago Between 400 B.C. and A.D. 1492”. In: Latin American Antiquity 18, 3, 243-268.

RODRÍGUEZ DEMORIZI, Emilio (1971): Los dominicos y las encomiendas de indios de la Isla Española. Santo Domingo: Ed. del Caribe.

SCHWARTZ, Stuart B. (1978): “Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil”. In: American Historical Review 83, 1, 43-79.

TANNENBAUM, Frank (1992): Slave and Citizen: The Classic Comparative Study of Race Relations in the Americas. Boston: Beacon Press. (Originally published in 1947).

VERANO, John W. / UBELAKER, Douglas H. (1992): Disease and Demography in the Americas. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press.

WILSON, Samuel M. (1990): Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

1. Specialists in Puerto Rico and the U.S.A., among other places, are attempting to reconstruct the Taíno language. They have requested that we use the letter “k” to represent the hard sound of the letter “c” when writing words such as “kacike,” “yuka” and “Kiskeya,” instead of a “c” like the Spaniards use, to ensure that the pronunciation is correct. I have followed that practice in this work.

2. For a well researched and concisely written description of the complexity of this Caribbean and Circum-Caribbean trade network, see Hofman / Bright / Boomert / Knippenberg 1992.

3. A summary of the various demographic arguments can be found in Verano/ Ubelaker 1992.

4. Sancocho, the delicious stew so beloved by Dominicans, is a non-spicy descendant of ajiaco.

5. Although the Spanish chroniclers said that the Taíno ate the dogs, this appears to have happened only after the arrival of the foreigners and the onset of plagues and famine.

6. I prefer to use the term “spirit guides” instead of “gods”, for the latter seems to me a very European concept.

7. It is likely that every Taíno man and woman had his or her own personal cemí, often a deceased relative or friend who was their special advisor during life.

8. The Taíno of both genders considered themselves “dressed”, meaning ready to step outside their homes in public, if they were wearing their armbands and leg bands. Married women also wore naguas, a cloth draped over their lower stomachs and genitals; the more noble the woman, the longer her nagua. For ceremonial occasions, kacikes and behikes wore exquisitely woven and embroidered capes, and kacikes also wore headdresses and elaborate belts.

9. For more about cultural convergence between the Taíno and Africans, see the appendix of Deren, both 1953 and 1983.

10. After 1500, when the Spanish arrival, plagues, and famine had severely disrupted customary Taíno lines of political inheritance, there were several females recorded who held the position as kacike, but Anacaona was the most famous. There are various Caribbean tree species referred to as “ironwood”, but most commonly it is a kind of dark-wood pine whose scientific name is Casuarina equisetifolia.

11. In particular, see Deagan 1990: 225-250.

12. Oviedo condemned all Indian peoples as idolaters and followers of the devil. Even Martyr, however, who was generally sympathetic, described the Taíno’s cemí figurines as “small images representing little demons” (Anghiera 1948: 167).

13. Pedro Martyr d’Anghiera, especially, waxed poetic about the simple life of the Taíno: “I believe, then, that these islanders of Hispaniola are happier than other [peoples]... because they live naked, without weights, without measures, and, above all, without mortiferous money in a true golden age, without calumnious judges and without books, satisfied with the goodness of nature, and without worry for the future” Anghiera (1948).

14. The quotes are actually from Brazil, where the native peoples “refused to respond to the objective conditions of the market created by the Portuguese”, so the Europeans began to describe the Indians as “congenitally lazy and undependable” (Schwartz 1978: 47-50). Frank Tannenbaum 1992, too, observed that the concept of private property “precipitated the most serious conflict between European and Indian culture”, causing “far more problems than religion, language or other obvious cultural differences” (Tannenbaum 1992: 402).

15. See Anghiera (1989: 89): “Recognize that the island bread offers poor nourishment for those accustomed to our wheat; this circumstance occasions the weakening of men’s strength.”

16. The 1514 Repartimiento is available in Rodríguez Demorizi 1971, which provides an excellent analysis of the material. The most recent analysis of the repartimiento and its effects on Hispaniola is Arranz-Márquez 1991.

17. For an in-depth exploration of Taíno survival and the myth of their extinction, see Guitar / Ferbel-Azcárate / Estévez 2006.

El español y el taíno en contacto: aspectos sociolingüísticos de la encomienda

Silke Jansen
Universidad de Erlangen-Núremberg

1. Introducción

Ya en tiempos precolombinos las Antillas constituían un espacio cultural caracterizado, en gran parte, por diversas constelaciones plurilingües y por formas híbridas de expresión. En la isla de La Española, que a principios del siglo XVI era el corazón del imperio colonial, había establecidas, según Las Casas, al menos tres etnias que utilizaban distintas lenguas indígenas:

Desde el siglo XIX se conoce a la lengua más importante de La Española, denominada por Las Casas “lengua universal de toda la tierra”, con el nombre de taíno. El taíno, lengua amerindia de la rama arahuaca, se estableció en el siglo XVI en el Norte de las Antillas, entre Bahamas y Puerto Rico, particularmente en las Antillas Mayores: La Española, Cuba y Jamaica. Debido a las enfermedades introducidas por los conquistadores españoles en América, la malnutrición, los excesivos trabajos forzados en el marco del primer intento colonizador y la asimilación biológica y cultural, los taíno desaparecieron como etnia pocas décadas después de la llegada de los europeos, antes incluso de que pudieran surgir detalladas descripciones etnográficas. Por ello, a pesar de su papel clave en la historia del contacto cultural entre Europa y América, es muy poco lo que se conoce de ellos y de su lengua.

Antes de que los taíno desaparecieran por la catástrofe demográfica y por los procesos de asimilación cultural, biológica y lingüística, su lengua, en las Antillas Mayores, coexistió varias décadas con el español y pudo imponerle ciertas características que se mantuvieron inclusive después de finalizado el período colonial, en particular a través de numerosos préstamos lingüísticos que se conservan, en considerable cantidad, en el español caribeño y otras variedades americanas, o también en diferentes lenguas europeas (cf. p. ej., los vocablos maíz, yuca, batata, hamaca, cocuyo, manatí, maní, ají, etc.). Hoy en día es casi imposible indagar ya en detalle en qué medida se puede remitir la extinción de las lenguas indígenas en las Antillas al exterminio físico de los taíno o a su asimilación cultural y lingüística en el contexto de la misión y de la colonización. Sin embargo, de las fuentes se deduce claramente que un número no pequeño de indígenas debió haber adquirido el español a través del intercambio con los colonizadores. La presente contribución intenta echar algo de luz sobre este capítulo hasta ahora apenas investigado del contacto hispano-indígena, prestando especial atención a los contextos en los que había una clara convivencia de ambas partes. Se dejarán, en cambio, de lado las formas esporádicas de intercambio, como, por ejemplo, los viajes de exploración o el comercio.