David Tavárez

• PhD in History and Anthropology
• Professor at Vassar College

Historical linguistics is a discipline with strong interdisciplinary connections to sociocultural anthropology, ethnohistory, and archaeology. While the study of language change and etymology can be traced back to ancient societies in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Asia, a number of important methodological approaches emerged in the late e...

In 1702, after the brutal suppression of a Zapotec revolt, the bishop of Oaxaca proclaimed an amnesty for idolatry in exchange for collective confessions. To evade conflict, Northern Zapotec communities denounced ritual specialists and surrendered sacred songs and 102 divinatory manuals, which preserve cosmological accounts, exchanges with divine b...

Context This article presents a translation and analysis of the only extant formal confession of human sacrifice written in an Indigenous language in the colonial Americas. An analysis of this document, written in Northern Zapotec by the town officials of Yalalag in 1704, provides numerous insights about how a community deployed traditional rhetori...

This chapter sketches out the relationship between speakers’ consciousness and verbal ritual performances, and between ritual language and the social world. It discusses a number of works published in the last two decades, and draws on a variety of examples of ritual speech from societies in the Americas, the Pacific, South Asia, the Indian Ocean,...

This volume offers a collection of innovative chapters that address foundational questions regarding the scope, structuring, deployment, and consequences of ritual language. These works also plumb the relationship between speakers’ consciousness and verbal ritual performances and among ritual language, hegemony, collective authority, and the social...

This volume offers a collection of innovative chapters that address foundational questions regarding the scope, structuring, deployment, and consequences of ritual language. These works also plumb the relationship between speakers’ consciousness and verbal ritual performances and among ritual language, hegemony, collective authority, and the social...

communities. Norton also questions the disciplinary boxes into which scholars place animals. She suggests that, although they largely appear in social and ecological studies, animals need to form part of the ways cultural change is approached in religious studies, specifically in traditional narratives of the missionary theatre. Building upon a gro...

"Rethinking Zapotec Time is an enormous accomplishment [that] will become an important element of graduate education, and a building block for new research ... David Tavárez, a formidable historian and linguist of colonial-era Zapotec and Nahuatl, brings us a book that is informed by two decades of work [which] contributes to ongoing discussions ab...

The study, classification, and standardization of languages by scholars, missionaries, and administrators played a vital and often protean role in the implementation and enforcement of colonial domination. Ongoing scholarship surveys the merging of linguistic investigations and linguistic knowledge with colonial hegemony in the Americas and East As...

This chapter provides a close analysis of the significance of a singular intellectual project that showcases the vibrant religious and humanistic discourse that issued from several Nahua-Franciscan partnerships in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As argued below, this Nahuatl exegesis of On the Imitation of Christ depicts the fine edi...

Rethinking Zapotec Time has been awarded a third recognition: 2023 Best Subsequent Book Award, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. A code (UTXSUMMER) can be used to obtain 40 % off this book at https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477324516/rethinking-zapotec-time/

I am pleased to announce that my book Rethinking Zapotec Time has been awarded another recognition: Honorable Mention, 2023 Social Sciences Book Prize, Mexico Section, Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Interested in the book? A special code (UTXSAA) can be used at https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477324516/rethinking-zapotec-time/

In Rethinking Zapotec Time: Cosmology, Ritual, and Resistance in Colonial Mexico, David Tavárez writes with depth and originality as he engages with challenging colonial epistemologies, yet his work remains intelligible to those outside of his primary fields of inquiry. Undertaking truly interdisciplinary research, across decades, Tavárez serves as...

This chapter investigates the nexus between authority and carefully calibrated and highly patterned actions accomplished through and alongside language. In the anthropological literature, many of these practices are described as belonging to ritual activities, as they instantiate, represent, or memorialize world-changing acts. This exploration focu...

Presentación del dossier monográfico “La imagen de las religiones indígenas en crónicas novohispanas. Nuevos caminos a transitar” Studi e Materiali Storia delle Religioni, 86 (2) 2020. Lunes 20 de septiembre 2021 - 18 HS (Italia) – 11 HS (México). Saludos institucionales de Alessandro Saggioro (Editor de la revista SMSR - Sapienza Università di Rom...

Through a sustained emphasis on Maya and Zapotec fiction, poetry, and theater in Mexico and Guatemala in the last five decades, Indigenous Cosmolectics: Kab’awil and the Making of Maya and Zapotec Literatures provides a thoughtful introduction to the vibrant world of Indigenous authorship and cultural activism in Mesoamerican languages. As discusse...

This essay contends that the path followed by the Dominican fray Pedro de Feria in his Valley Zapotec Doctrina (1564), based in part on a work by fray Bernardo de Albuquerque, was narrower, less adventurous, and more rigid than the one embraced by Saint Dominic, founder of the Dominicans. Although Feria adopted a theological basis to explain in Zap...

Book review: "Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America," by Allan Greer

Podcast on New Books Network: Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America (Colorado, 2017). Edited by David Tavárez. Interviewer: Krzysztof Odyniec. Please select and paste on browser: https://newbooksnetwork.com/david-tavarez-words-and-worlds-turned-around-indigenous-christianities-in-colonial-latin-america...

This chapter sketches two distinct modes of engagement pursued jointly by Franciscans and Nahua scholars as they produced a printed and manuscript corpus that spans the decades between the 1550s and the 1620s, which was impacted by censure and increasingly orthodox evangelization policies. It plumbs into the Nahua-Franciscan confidential mode to re...

This article proposes the idea of refracting memories to understand the transformation of historical memory of Mesoamerican communities in the 17th and 18th centuries. This process is illustrated through the analysis of divinatory manuals that contained references to the arrival of Spanish, and through the Probanza of Yelabichi, a Northern Zapotec...

The notion of a “spiritual conquest,” as opposed to a military conquest by Spanish forces and indigenous allies, was developed in detail in Robert Ricard’s eponymous 1933 work. While the metaphor of a “spiritual conquest” is broadly understood and used, many recent historical works eventually turned their attention to a close analysis of distinct p...

The epistemic assumptions, methods, and rhetoric employed by colonial indigenous intellectuals in Latin America were based on preconquest intellectual labor and literacy systems. These practices were deeply impacted by collaborative projects and historical scholarship undertaken in the sixteenth century, as indigenous elites embraced European liter...

This table presents, at a glance, two correlations: one between the Northern Zapotec and European year count, and another between the Mexica (pre-1507) and European years. It may be used by anyone working on indigenous documents from colonial Central Mexico that feature Nahua or Zapotec dates. It is based on the correlation among the Northern Zapot...

A sophisticated, state-of-the-art study of the remaking of Christianity by indigenous societies, Words and Worlds Turned Around reveals the manifold transformations of Christian discourses in the colonial Americas. The book surveys how Christian messages were rendered in indigenous languages; explores what was added, transformed, or glossed over; a...

Altera Roma: Art and Empire from Mérida to Mexico. JOHN M. D. POHL and CLAIRE L. LYONS , editors. 2016. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, UCLA, Los Angeles. xxvi + 359 pp., 125 figures, 1 table. $75.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-938770-01-2 - David Tavárez

The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America covers religious history in Latin America from pre-Conquest times until the present. This publication is important; first, because of the historical and contemporary centrality of religion in the life of Latin America; second, for the rapid process of religious change which the region is undergoin...

After the conquest of Mexico, colonial authorities attempted to enforce Christian beliefs among indigenous peoples-a project they envisioned as spiritual warfare. The Invisible War assesses this immense but dislocated project by examining all known efforts in Central Mexico to obliterate native devotions of Mesoamerican origin between the 1530s and...

In 1570, the Franciscan friar Jerónimo de Mendieta bestowed a rare gift on Juan de Ovando, then president of the Council of Indies. Mendieta placed in Ovando's hands a small manuscript volume in superb Gothic script with illuminated initials and color illustrations, one of several important manuscripts he had brought to Spain for various prominent...

This chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about indigenous devotion, idolatry, and religious dissent in colonial Mexico. It discusses the periodization and conceptual scheme for idolatry eradication in Mexico and considers the two in terms of the social reproduction of indigenous ritual practices in the elective and collective sphere...

This chapter examines Bishop Juan de Zumárraga's disciplinary humanism and use of public exemplary punishment in Central Mexico. It considers the execution of Nahua nobleman, don Carlos Chichimecateuctli, for crimes against the Christian faith and argues against the claim that his execution illustrated the transition from harsh public punishment to...

This chapter examines differential social articulation of alphabetic writing by native colonial authors and the appropriation of European literacy practices by indigenous specialists which led to the clandestine circulation of ritual and devotional texts in Nahuatl and Zapotec. It provides four relevant case studies. These include the partially lit...

This chapter focuses on the extirpation policies that emerged in Oaxaca when secular priests took the lead in the legal and doctrinal confrontation of native ritual practices in Central Mexico during the period from 1571 to 1660. It describes the activities of various secular extirpators under Bishops Juan Bartolomé de Bohórquez e Hinojosa, and Fra...

This chapter examines a major development in the fourth and final extirpatory cycle in Central Mexico which extended from the 1720s into the early nineteenth century. These include the increase in native sorcery accusations in the Toluca Valley, the end of punitive experiment of the prison of idolaters in Oaxaca, and the growth of local factionalis...

This chapter analyzes the bureaucratized extirpation campaign led by Bishop Ángel Maldonado in northern Oaxaca during the period 1702–06. It describes native responses to this campaign and evaluates Maldonado's inventive extirpation experiment in Villa Alta. This chapter also examines Northern Zapotec clandestine devotions through two case studies....

This chapter examines the two transitions in idolatry eradication in Central Mexico from the 1660s to the second decade of the early eighteenth century. These include the change in institutional practices in the archbishopric of Mexico that framed the consolidation of the diocesan tribunal into the Provisorato de Indios y Chino and the escalation i...

This chapter evaluates Chimalpahin's modification to the manuscript of Historia de las Indias y Conquista de México. It analyzes Chimalpahin's motivation for producing this manuscript and suggests that his “hybrid” La Conquista is the sole extant attempt by a colonial American indigenous author to appropriate and modify a historical narrative by a...

This volume presents the story of Hernando Cortés' conquest of Mexico, as recounted by a contemporary Spanish historian and edited by Mexico's premier Nahua historian. Francisco López de Gómara's monumental Historia de las Indias y Conquista de México was published in 1552 to instant success. Despite being banned from the Americas by Prince Philip...

In this essay, I analyze a sample drawn from a corpus of about 107 alphabetic texts that were produced in a clandestine manner by Zapotee ritual specialists in northern Oaxaca, Mexico, during the second half of the seventeenth century. I argue that these texts represent an unusual appropriation of the Latin alphabet and of European literacy practic...

In 1704 and 1705, some 103 copies of the 260-day Zapotec ritual calendar and four collections of ritual songs were handed over to Bishop Fray Ángel Maldonado by elected Zapotec town officials of the province of Villa Alta, Oaxaca. This article analyzes the multiple religious and social meanings of these calendars by focusing on two main issues: con...

This essay argues that our current knowledge about the so-called “extirpation of idolatries” in New Spain is the product of a peculiar combination of historiographic silences. In other words, the myriad negotiations between Central Mexican natives and ecclesiastical authorities in the 17th and 18th centuries are still underrepresented in the histor...

This paper translates and analyzes references to eclipses in two seventeenth-century Zapotec calendrical booklets. These booklets are part of a corpus of 106 separate calendrical texts and four collections of ritual songs that were turned over to ecclesiastical authorities in 1704 and 1705 as part of an ambitious campaign against traditional indige...

Sometime after the summer of 1703, a strange traveler journeyed to several Zapotec-speaking communities nestled in the rugged geography of Villa Alta—an alcaldía mayor northeast of Oaxaca City in New Spain. He wore a pectoral ornament around his neck—a gift from the Benedictine friar Ángel Maldonado, a newly appointed bishop who had arrived in Oaxa...

Sometime after the summer of 1703, a strange traveler journeyed to several Zapotec-speaking communities nestled in the rugged geography of Villa Alta—an alcaldía mayor northeast of Oaxaca City in New Spain. He wore a pectoral ornament around his neck—a gift from the Benedictine friar Ángel Maldonado, a newly appointed bishop who had arrived in Oaxa...