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Special Commentary
A Reevaluation of the Authenticity of Fray Diego
de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán
Matthew Restall, Pennsylvania State University
John F. Chuchiak IV, Southwest Missouri State University
Abstract. This article analyzes the appearance and content of the surviving archi-
val manuscript of the Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, ascribed to Fray Diego de
Landa (–), the most prominent of the first generation of Franciscan friars in
the Spanish colony of Yucatán. This analysis is placed in the context of the way in
which published editions of the work have been treated and used since the manu-
script’s rediscovery in the s. The authors argue that such treatment has been
based on a misconception of the nature of the Relación, suggesting that this impor-
tant manuscript be viewed very differently by scholars.
Between being written in a Spanish monastery and being discovered in a
Madrid archive, Fray Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán
apparently gathered dust for three centuries.1Since its discovery and first
publication—a partial French edition of —the Relación or ‘‘Account
of the things of Yucatán’’ has become one of the most widely read and oft-
cited pieces of literature to come out of colonial Latin America, second
only, perhaps, to the Florentine Codex. Landa’s text has become a standard
reference for students of Franciscan history, of the history of religious con-
version, of colonial Mexican history, of the history of Yucatán, and above
all of Maya history; the Relación is so ubiquitous a reference for Mayanists
as to have virtually a biblical status.
The purpose of this article is to give all those scholars pause for
thought. For Landa’s text is not what it has commonly been taken to be.
Indeed, the Franciscan friar never wrote a book called Relación de las cosas
de Yucatán; put another way, the Relación as it is known and used today
was not written by Landa.
Ethnohistory : (summer )
Copyright © by the American Society for Ethnohistory.
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Restall and Chuchiak
A Brief History of Landa
A native of the small Spanish town of Cifuentes, the young Fray Diego de
Landa first landed in the newly founded colonial province of Yucatán full of
missionary zeal in the company of Fray Luis de Villalpando. The year was
, just seven years after the founding of the colonial capital of Mérida.
The conquistador-settlers controlled but a corner of the peninsula and still
numbered in the hundreds. Fewer still were Franciscan friars; Landa had
little more than a dozen colleagues to accompany him in his proselytizing
endeavors among a native people who would prove to be fiercely recalci-
trant. Byall accounts, Landa was one of the most driven and energetic of the
Franciscans, devoting himself forover a decade to the creation of aYucatec
church in the form of a network of convents, village churches, and con-
verted Maya parishioners.2By he had become head of the order in the
province.
The following year, however, Landa’s career took a less felicitous turn
—as did the Maya experience of Franciscan missionary methods. Frus-
trated and angered by evidence of ‘‘idolatrous’’ activities in the region of
Maní, where the dominant dynasty of the Xiu had more or less collaborated
in the imposition of colonial rule, Landa instituted a violent campaign of
extirpation.Within a few months as many as four thousand Maya men and
women had been questioned under torture, hundreds had died at the hands
of their interrogators, dozens had committed suicide, hundreds ritually and
publicly punished and humiliated, all as the campaign spread menacingly
across the colony. Then, to the relief of Mayas and Spanish settlers alike,
Yucatán’s first bishop (Fray Francisco de Toral) finally reached the colony
and the campaign was halted (Scholes and Roys ; Scholes and Adams
; González Cicero ; Clendinnen: –; Tedlock ; Tim-
mer ; Restall : –, , –).
By Landa was back in Spain, under a cloud of accusations of im-
proper action and eager to defend himself. The Relación, which according
to a passage in the text itself was penned in, has been viewed by some
scholars as an important part of that defense. Others have seen it as an act
of contrition and restitution for the wrongs done to the Mayas in the sum-
mer of. Another suggestion is that Landa wrote the book as ‘‘part and
product of his recruiting campaign’’ to attract more Franciscan volunteers
to Yucatán, on the assumption that he would be vindicated and allowed
to return (Blom:; Gates : iii–iv; Pérez Martínez : –;
Clendinnen : –, –; Restall : ; Coe : ). These
proposals as to motive all have merit and in addition are mutually compat-
ible, but—as we shall argue below—they are complicated by the fact that
the Relación is not what most scholars have taken it to be.
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The Authenticity of Fray Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán
If Landa did assume that he would be vindicated, he was right, for in
he returned to Yucatán as its second bishop, continuing his efforts to
strengthen the church with little compromise until his death in . The
Spanish colony in the peninsula would outlive Landa by almost two and a
half centuries, while to this day the Roman Catholic Church, still based in
the cathedral in Mérida where Landa worked, is arguably as significant an
institution in Yucatán as it ever was.Yet Landa remains better known—cer-
tainly more infamous—than any of the bishops who have succeeded him.
His legacy is complex, contradictory, and controversial and is unlikely to
become any less so in the near future.
A Brief History of Landa’s Relación
Central to Landa’s legacy are his writings. This is true, at least, for the
seventeenth and twentieth centuries, as his work appears to have been lost
or ignored in the intervening years. When Landa returned to Yucatán in
he either brought with him a copy of what he had written in Spain in
the s or rewrote that material and added more to it during thes.
Our suspicion is that when he died in he left in Mérida’s Franciscan
convent a vast manuscript containing much of what he had written over
the previous three decades.3References to this recopilación begin right after
Landa’s death and continue for about a century.
The earliest example is found in the response from the encomendero
(holder of a grant of native communities) of the villages of Tabi and Chun-
huhub to the great questionnaires sent out from Madrid in the s,
usually referred to as the relaciones geográficas. Dated January, this re-
port cites four sources for its historical and geographical information: the
cosmography of Francisco Dominguez (about whom we shall specu-
late further below); a relación by the Franciscan friar Gaspar de Najera,
a work supposedly lost but possibly in Spain; the assistance of Gaspar
Antonio Chi, a Maya nobleman who enjoyed a long career as a prominent
notary, interpreter, assistant to the first bishops, and political figure until
his death around ; and a ‘‘recopilación which the most reverend don
Diego de Landa, who was bishop of these provinces, made of this land.’’ 4
This work is mentioned, and sometimes clearly used as a source, by
Yucatán’s Franciscan historians, or chroniclers, during the succeeding cen-
tury. For example, Fray Bernardo de Lizana, writing in , drew infor-
mation from Landa on Maya religion and the spiritual conquest, also men-
tioning that many Franciscans and others had written about Landa, his life,
and his written works (Lizana []: ). By , however, Fray
Francisco de Ayeta, who might be expected to mention the great recopi-
lación as did his predecessors, cites only Landa’s since lost Arte y gramá-
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Restall and Chuchiak
tica. In the final decades of the century the larger work was presumably
either lost or taken to Spain. If the latter was the case, it was very possibly
Fray Diego López de Cogolludo who took it. Cogolludo penned most of
his massive Historia de Yucatán (later published as Los tres siglos de domi-
nación española in Yucatán) in the peninsula itself, beginning in the s,
and then finished it in Madrid, where it was published in. He appears
to draw from Landa either directly or indirectly (through Fray Bernardo
de Lizana, for example), both from passages recognizable to us as they
ended up in what we know as Landa’s Relación,andfromwhatwasvery
likely the recopilación cited by others.5Whether Cogolludo made copies of
portions of the recopilación before he left Yucatán, or whether he simply
transported the entire work from Mérida to Madrid, he may have been—
according to the written evidence currently available—the last person to
use Landa’s putative magnum opus. An additional piece of the puzzle from
the late seventeenth century is the fact that part of the surviving manuscript
of the Relación is written in handwriting of the period—the earliest hand
in the manuscript, in fact—suggesting that part of the Relación was prob-
ably created at this time, and possibly a complete early version of it was
compiled then.
Whether or not the writings left by Landa upon his death in Mérida
were removed to Spain a century later, there remained in Madrid all along a
copy of Landa’s work or a separate manuscript of his. This is clear from the
fact that several authors who never set foot in Yucatán consulted Landa’s
work in the decades after his death. One was Antonio de Herrera y Torde-
sillas (–), whose Historia general was first published in Madrid in
– and who used writings left behind in Spain in by Landa. An-
other was Fray Antonio de Daza, whose Cronica general de nuestro padre
San Francisco y su apostolica Orden was first published inValladolid, Spain,
in . Daza consulted, at first- or secondhand, Landa’s written accounts
of his own activities—a smattering of which survive in the Relación—and
he cites Landa as an exemplary Franciscan in the New World.
To summarize the early colonial evidence, therefore: after his death
in , Landa left copies of his writings both in Spain and in Mérida,
Yucatán; the largest version of his work was very possibly a great recopi-
lación, kept in Mérida’s Franciscan convent until the late seventeenth cen-
tury, when it was either lost or taken to Spain; the Relación we know was
not one of these surviving works but was compiled from an unknown com-
bination or selection of them in Spain, at the very earliest in some early
form in the later seventeenth century.
Meanwhile, almost two centuries passed in which no direct references
were made in surviving published works to the original writings of Landa.
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The Authenticity of Fray Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán
Table . Pieces of the Puzzle, Part : Identifying the Manuscript Segments That
Constitute Landa’s Relación
Conventional
Date of
Hand Folios in Original Ms. ‘‘Chapters’’ Hand
1 18–45 – Seventeenth
century
1–17 –
46–50 –
59–67 –
1a 23, 24 (marginalia)
1b 34–44 (calendrical inserts)
1c 4, 5 (textual inserts)
1d 47, 49 (drawings)
1e 67–68 (maps)
250–59 – Late seventeenth/
eighteenth century
2a 56 (paragraph headings)
His manuscripts were not entirely ignored, however, as during this time
the Relación as we know it was compiled (the evidence of this process from
within the manuscript itself shall be discussed later in this article). The
point to be emphasized here is that the image presented by Inga Clendin-
nen of the Franciscan sitting down to write his book in is misleading.6
Landa did not write the Relación as we know it in and leave it on
the shelf in Madrid until its discovery three centuries later by the eccentric
French antiquarian Abbé Brasseurde Bourbourg ().7What Brasseur de
Bourbourg found in Madrid’s Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Histo-
ria in was a manuscript written by different hands at different times
and put together between the late seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries
(see Tables and and the discussion of ‘‘hands’’ below).
Brasseur de Bourbourg immediately saw the value of the manuscript
and published part of it for the very first time in a French edition of .
Yet although he recognized the different hands on the manuscript, he as-
sumed that these were simply those of different copyists working from a
more or less identical original, single, coherent work written by Landa
(Tozzer : vii).
Brasseur de Bourbourg’s assumptions were destined to become part
of the Relación itself. At first, the reaction of the scholarly world to the
French edition of part of the manuscript was slow, as the disciplines
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Restall and Chuchiak
Table . Pieces of the Puzzle, Part : Sequencing the Manuscript Segments That
Constitute Landa’s Relación
Bound Sequence Sequence of Sequence of Folios in Tozzer
of Folios in Folios in and Conventional ‘‘Chapter’’
Original Ms. Brasseur Edition Editions (Gates, Garibay, etc.)
18–45, 1–17, 46–68 1–49, 58, 63 1–68
and fields that would come to embrace Landa’s work were still in their in-
fancy. In the first Spanish edition appeared, edited by Juan de Dios de
Rada y Delgado, but it was influenced by Brasseur de Bourbourg’s edition
and lacked any notations. Its flaws were repeated in another Spanish edi-
tion included in a multivolume presentation of primary sources ().
Landa’s Relación may have been considered important enough to include
in the collection, but it was effectively lost among the hundreds of
other sources contained therein.
In fact, it was not until well into the next century, over fifty years
after Brasseurde Bourbourg’s discovery, that Landa’s Relación saw genuine
and sustained scholarly interest and an accompanying spate of editions in
various languages. Yet still Brasseur de Bourbourg’s legacy persisted. An-
other French version was published in–, but as all four of the earli-
est editions included only part of the manuscript unearthed by Brasseurde
Bourbourg, the full body of that manuscript and its length remained un-
known and unavailable. Furthermore, he had organized the text into chap-
ters, whose titles he had created and which would be repeated in almost
every future edition as though they were Landa’s own. As a result the his-
toriographical foundations were laid for an ambiguous grasp among inter-
ested scholars of the true nature of the Real Academia manuscript.
The situation was only partially rectified in the years –, the
most concentrated period of interest in Landa’s work ever (matched per-
haps by early-seventeenth-century attention and renewed interest in the
mid-s). In came not only the first English edition of the Relación
but also the first edition of the full Real Academia manuscript—edited by
William Gates (: xiv), who offered virtually no notes and little com-
mentary, remarking in passing that ‘‘the original manuscript of Landa’s Re-
lation has long disappeared...[and]musthavebeen materially longer.
The copy we have is a shortened transcript.’’ Although this edition was
published in limited numbers by Gates’s own press in Baltimore, it was re-
printed in by Dover, who have kept it in print ever since; it is today
the only English version in print and is probably the single most widely
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The Authenticity of Fray Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán
read version of Landa’s work.Thus Gates’s assumption of the textual integ-
rity of the Relación, and his use and extension of Brasseur de Bourbourg’s
chapters and division of the work into two ‘‘parts,’’ is more significant than
Gates could have imagined.The following year () saw two Spanish edi-
tions, the first by José E. Rosado Escalante and Favila Ontiveros (the edi-
tors) and Alfredo Barrera Vásquez (author of the introduction), and the
second by Hector Pérez Martínez. All these editors, also following Brasseur
de Bourbourg, observed that the surviving manuscript was incomplete, but
they otherwise accepted it as a single work produced by Landa in .
This run of Landa publications climaxed in with Alfred Tozzer’s
edition, the first and only truly scholarly presentation of the manuscript,
with footnotes greatly outnumbering in words the translated text itself.
Tozzer removed Brasseur de Bourbourg’s chapter headings and commented
in his brief introduction on the nature of the Real Academia manuscript,
mentioning some of the irregular features further discussed in this article
below and describing the efforts by France Scholes to find in Spain ‘‘the
original or another version’’ of the Relación. However, Tozzer never elabo-
rated upon the implications of the nature of the manuscript, as though its
features were a curiosity that did not undermine its integrity—the latter
reinforced by his presentation of a single, unbroken translated text. A few
further comments on the manuscript’s irregularities are buried in the volu-
minous footnotes.
Recently the scholarly utility of Tozzer’s translation has been called
into question. His declared method certainly seems problematic. In short,
he used a team of assistants, with the base translation made by Charles
Bowditch from Brasseur de Bourbourg’s French translation and ‘‘then cor-
rected’’ with the Rada y Delgado and Brasseur de Bourbourg transcriptions
of the Spanish original, and further ‘‘corrections and emendations’’ stem-
ming from suggestions by five other contributors, including Tozzer, with
only Eleanor Adams apparently looking at the original manuscript (Tozzer
: ix). Tozzer also seems to have relied heavily on Jean Genet’s –
French edition both for his translation and notes. No doubt as a result of all
this, Michael Coe (: ) recently dismissed Tozzer’s English version
as ‘‘unreliable, since it is based on a French translation of the Spanish.’’ In-
deed, comparing Tozzer’s and Gates’s versions to the original manuscript,
the fallibility of Tozzer’s method becomes clear; some passages are better
glossed by Gates, despite Tozzer’s (: x) damning of Gates’s translation
as ‘‘a free one.’’8
Still, Tozzer’s edition was a majorachievement.Yet even if one accepts
that Tozzer made enough of the Real Academia’s appearance and nature,
and produced a close enough translation, his edition soon went out of print.
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Restall and Chuchiak
For three and a half decades Landa and his work returned to being an ob-
scure scholarly curiosity. The reasons for this are no doubt many and not
central to our concerns here, but one contributing factor was probably the
political climate in Mexico, as a form of indigenismo became incorporated
into the institutionalization of the revolution, exposing figures like Landa
more to dismissive conquistador/inquisitor stereotypes than real scholarly
investigation. Another was the failure of the Carnegie Institute’s endeav-
ors in Yucatán to ignite a continuation of scholarly investigation into the
peninsula’s history after the Carnegie ceased its sponsorship (which de-
clined in the s and was terminated in; Coe:). Related to
this was the fact that Ralph Roys, the Carnegie-related figure who wrote
the most on sixteenth-century Yucatán, never held a university post and
thus never created a school of students to continue his work. Yet another
may have been the role played by Eric Thompson in stifling the develop-
ment of Maya epigraphy during these decades, as Coe (: –) has
argued. A fifth and final factor may be the further development of the study
of colonial Latin American history in the early and mid–twentieth century,
with its emphasis on political events, major institutions, and, eventually,
social history as based on demography.
The relevance of all these factors is supported by their changing situa-
tions in the s, which was when interest in Landa and his Relación
returned. In that decade the Partido Revolucionario Institucional–built
system in Mexico entered a crisis of legitimacy. A new generation of an-
thropologists returned to the work of Roys and his Carnegie-sponsored
colleagues in order to build upon it, while colonial Latin American histo-
riography took a dramatic turn toward new social and cultural topics and
concomitant methodologies. Finally, in, Thompson died.Within a few
years Maya epigraphy experienced a series of breakthroughs that would
lead to the decipherment of most Maya hieroglyphs by the early s,
an extraordinarily rapid development, considering that scholars had been
working on ‘‘breaking the code’’ for two centuries (ibid.). Landa’s rele-
vance to epigraphic history is of course his inclusion of an apparent rosetta
stone to Maya writing, what he called an ‘‘A, B, C’’ of glyphic signs with
phonetic values.This Maya ‘‘alphabet’’ had been created by Landa, or one
of his colleagues, by asking a Maya informant how to write in glyphs each
Spanish ‘‘letter,’’ which of course the informant heard as a syllable, accord-
ing to Castilian pronunciation.The false alphabet produced as a result was
just about right and wrong enough to confuse generations of would-be epi-
graphers—whose task was made all the tougher by the woeful quality of
published reproductions of the glyphs, a problem not clearly outlined until
fairly recently (Stuart ). But it also contained the phonetic clues that
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The Authenticity of Fray Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán
enabled epigraphers, no longer hampered after by Thompson’s over-
bearing domination of the field, to decipher the glyphs (Gates : ; Coe
: –, –).
In the year of Thompson’s death, a new English edition of Landa’s
Relación appeared, the third to date. Edited by the British scholar Anthony
Pagden, it did not remain in print, but it compared well toTozzer and Gates
and brought renewed attention to the Relación, contributing to Dover’s
decision to pick up Gates’s version a few years later. Meanwhile, a more
easily acquired Spanish version of the text, an edition from the prolific
Mexican press Porrúa that had come out earlier (Garibay K. ), went
back into print. Interest in Landa and his work persisted during the s
and s: Maya epigraphy and Maya studies in general became a veri-
table industry (see Coe ); the Yucatec events of were treated to a
well-received study by Inga Clendinnen (), which stimulated ongoing
interest (e.g.,Tedlock; Restall:–); colonial Yucatán in gen-
eral received more attention than it had since Roys’s day (Farriss ;
Jones ; Patch ; Quezada ; Restall ; Thompson ; and
many articles by Manuela Cristina García Bernal building on her mono-
graphs of and); and a reappraisal of the spiritual conquest even-
tually turned to Yucatán (Chuchiak ). As a result, Landa’s Relación
has never been so read and so frequently cited.
A Reevaluation of the Relación
Despite the favorable climate for the use of the Relación in the past twenty-
five years, however, the standard Spanish version of reference has been
Angel Maria Garibay K.’s () Porrúa edition, with its unreliable tran-
scription and lack of notes or extensive introduction. Meanwhile, the only
widely available English edition has been the unadorned Gates version,
with the now very rare Tozzer the standard edition of scholarly reference;
Pagden tends to be ignored, somewhat unjustly. Furthermore, not a single
one of the many editions of the work adequately reproduced the drawings
and illustrations, which have either been partially omitted or poorly re-
drawn—as clearly demonstrated by George Stuart () with respect to
the glyphs. As Stuart (ibid.: ) remarks, ‘‘None of the existing editions of
Landa’s Relación fulfills all the needs of the scholar seeking the total context
of the original manuscript’’ (emphases his). These circumstances inspired
us to produce a new edition of the Relación, and having made a provisional
translation from the Porrúa edition, we determined in the summer of
to consult the original manuscript in the Real Academia de la Historia.
When we saw this manuscript, we were stunned. The irregularities of
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Restall and Chuchiak
the manuscript mentioned in passing by some other scholars (e.g., Barrera
Vasquez in Rosado Escalante et al. : vii; Tozzer : viii; Stuart :
; Coe : ) are not only immediately apparent, but it is clear upon
first reading of the document that their implications are far more serious
than has been realized. These irregularities fall into six categories.
First, the inscription on the title page indicates that the manuscript we
have is not the entire manuscript that Landa must have written. It reads:
Relacion de las cosas de Yucatán sa-
cada de lo que escrivio el padre fray
Diego de Landa de la orden de StFran-
Cisco
[Account of the things of Yucatán taken
from that which the padre fray
Diego de Landa of the Order of Saint Francis
wrote]
A little below this and to the side is written:
Esta aqui otra relacion de las
cosas de la china
[There is here another account of the
things of China]
Those whose attention was drawn to this title page (from editors of the
manuscript such as Tozzer and Gates to commentators such as Coe) have
tended to take this as evidence that Landa wrote a longer work called the
Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, from which the extant manuscript is an
excerpt or set of excerpts. This assumption, we suggest, is only partly cor-
rect. First, the inscription does not state that this is an excerpt from a work
of Landa’s titled Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, only that the excerpt
is in substance, and not necessarily by title, an ‘‘account of the things of
Yucatán’’ taken from a body of writings by Landa. Second, there is no evi-
dence or indication that the inscription goes with all the material in the
manuscript, which, as we have mentioned already, was written in differ-
ent hands and different times. Third, the reference to ‘‘another account’’
and la china, ‘‘China,’’ or ‘‘the Far East,’’ strongly suggests that the copy-
ists were part of the large-scale effort by the Royal Academy of History
to write a comprehensive history of the Philippines and Spanish activities
elsewhere in East Asia—an effort mandated by Royal Cedula in the eigh-
teenth century.9Our supposition is therefore that in the course of collecting
reports by Franciscans on mission activities going back into the sixteenth
century, a notary or historian’s assistant confused a late seventeenth cen-
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The Authenticity of Fray Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán
tury copy of some Landa material with other relaciones by Franciscans and
mistakenly placed it among the source reports for this project. In this way
the Landa manuscript may have been taken from where it had been sitting
since the seventeenth century, perhaps within the royal archives in Siman-
cas, and later—when it became useful to royal historians in the eighteenth
century—deposited in the library of the Real Academia de la Historia in
Madrid (where Brasseur de Bourbourg found it).10
The second irregular feature of the manuscript is its multiple hands.
Not one but two principal compilers created the Relación, with the assis-
tance of an uncertain number of additional copyists and illustrators (see
Table ).
The third feature is related to the second, being the different types of
paper used. The only one of these that carries a recognizably dated water-
mark is the paper used by the compiler we have called Hand in Table
and is dated to the later colonial period, when the transcription and con-
struction of this third part of the Relación was thus carried out.
The fourth feature of the manuscript is its disjunctive style.This is ap-
parent from published editions but is highlighted by the coincidence of the
most blatant breaks in narrative and topic with shifts in hand, paper, and
the inclusion of small gaps between sections in some parts of the manu-
script. There are also several abrupt breaks between folios as well as mis-
matched folios out of order. Previous scholarly editions addressed few or
none of these inherent structural problems. Moreover, previous editors at-
tempted to ‘‘patch up’’ the manuscript in order to make sense out of several
sections but failed to bring overall coherence to the manuscript.
For example, on three pages (folios and r–v) these gaps are filled
with headings that read, respectively:
Porque cofas hazian otros sacr-
ficios los Yndios.
[For which things the Indians made
other sacrifices]
Parrapho VII: de la manera d/ay de ferpi-
entes y otros animales ponçoñofos.
[Paragraph : of how there are serpents
and other poisonous animals]
Parrapho VIII: de las auejas y su miel y cera.
[Paragraph : of the bees and their honey and wax].
The second two of these headings are either written by a different hand
or written in a different handwriting styled by the same compiler copying
out the material before and after them. Either way, the creation of these
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Restall and Chuchiak
headings and their orthography—an imitation of print, with such features
as unjoined letters and initial ‘‘s’’ resembling an ‘‘f’’ without a truncated
horizontal stroke—was a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century convention
used in the preparation of a manuscript for publication (an example is
Lizana’s abovementioned Historia, republished in facsimile in ).
This means that some part of Landa’s work, perhaps his entire recopila-
ción, was not only prepared for publication with this scribal ‘‘typesetting,’’
but part or all of it may have been actually typeset. It is also possible that
the work was published. Although one would expect at least one subse-
quent reference to such a publication, even if no copies survived, a local
press in Spain might have produced a dozen or so copies, with a trace of
them waiting to be discovered in an obscure Iberian archive. The fact that
there are notations at the foot of some of the manuscript pages, letters and
symbols that could be printers’ marks, further suggests the small but tan-
talizing possibility that the copyists were working from a printed edition
of Landa’s recopilación.
In Brasseur de Bourbourg’s organization of the manuscript he found,
he dubs these two headed sections chapters and , not and , but
uses the original headings. The fact that all but three of the headings in
Brasseur de Bourbourg’s edition (and, following him, almost all other edi-
tions) are invented by him, with only these three in the original manuscript,
is never made clear—let alone the implications of their styling and num-
bering. (An additional clue as to the organized nature of the larger work
or works is found at the end, when the text refers the reader to ‘‘Chapter
’’ and ‘‘Chapter ,’’ neither of which, in number or topic, are in
Landa’s manuscript.)
Indeed, it is also possible that the section of the Relación from which
‘‘paragraph ’’ and ‘‘paragraph ’’ come was not written by Landa at all.
The evidence for this is threefold. First, this would explain why this section
of the book was ‘‘typeset’’ and yet there is no other evidence of a Landa
publication. Second, this explains why the section is on a topic unrelated
to the rest of the Relacíon, namely the natural history of Yucatán. Third,
the larger body of historical evidence on Landa’s life—his letters and the
commentary about him by contemporaries—confirms a passionate interest
in Maya history and culture, the spiritual conquest, and the topics of the
rest of the Relación but no interest at all in natural history. If Landa did not
write this part of the manuscript, who did? One good candidate is Fran-
cisco Dominguez, a contemporary of Landa’s who spent time in Yucatán,
who wrote on such matters in the peninsula, and whose cosmography
was one of the sources mentioned above for the answers to the relaciones
geográficas questionnaires filled out in the colony in –.
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The Authenticity of Fray Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán
The fifth feature of the manuscript is the order of its sections. The
various portions of it have been bound in a manner that seems not to pay
attention to narrative or thematic order; as Tables and indicate, the
manuscript has not been bound according to the numbering sequence of
the folios. A ‘‘correct’’ sequence of sections is not made apparent either by
reading the manuscript as it is bound nor by reading it according to the
sequence of its folios. Brasseur de Bourbourg did the latter—reorganized
the manuscript according to its sequence of folios (but not with respect to
the whole document, as he only published part of it)—and others have fol-
lowed him. There are two remaining problems, however. One is that, as
mentioned above, this resulting text still lacks narrative and thematic co-
herence. The other is that it is not certain that the folio numbers were on
the manuscript when Brasseur de Bourbourg found it; it is possible that,
having reorganized the text in a way that seemed logical to him, Brasseur
de Bourbourg then numbered the folios himself.The Relación as it is known
in print is therefore a somewhat arbitrary sequence of sections that are in
the manuscript bound in a different and likewise arbitrary manner.
Conclusion
The sum of all these irregularities is this. The manuscript of the Relación
that is the source for all editions and readings of it is an arbitrary collection
by three or four compilers, probably made at different times but all after
Landa’s death, of excerpts from what may have been either a larger multi-
volume work of Landa’s (possibly already ‘‘typeset’’ for publication) or a
collection of writings by Landa that did not comprise anything we might
grant the integrity of a book (the very definition of a recopilación).
Portions of the manuscript may not have originally been written by
Landa. It is also possible that the compilers were unwittingly or without
concern drawing from Landa’s papers, meaning both writings by him and
writings by his informants and contemporaries that were collected by him.
Among such shadow authors could be Francisco Dominguez, Francisco
Cervantes de Salazar, Gaspar Antonio Chi, all mentioned above. Chi is a
good candidate for such a role because he was the nobleman son of a Maya
priest-scribe and was educated by Franciscans and prominent in early colo-
nial Yucatán as an intepreter, among other things. We know from other
sources that Chi was both extremely well versed in Yucatec history (Maya
and Spanish) and very close to Landa in the years before the Franciscan’s
return to Spain. The similarities between some of Chi’s writings and pas-
sages in the Relación have been taken as proof of his influence (Restall:
–), but one must wonder now whether they are not proof of more
Tseng 2002.8.28 08:47 6698 Ethnohistory / 49:3 / sheet 191 of 252
Restall and Chuchiak
than that. Another possible shadow author of parts of Landa’s Relación is
fray Gaspar de Najera, a contemporary of Landa’s, a speaker of Yucatec
Maya, and the author of a similar relación, long lost.
Therefore, just as we can no longer be so certain that what we read
in the Relación was all Landa had to say on a topic (for example, his blithe
dismissal of the events of can no longer be read as that, as the com-
pilers may have chosen to skip over lengthy passages discussing that year),
so also can we no longer be certain that every word is Landa’s.
Does all this mean that the Relación is not authentic, a fake? The short
answer is no; it is not a fake. The long answer is that the Relación that
is so widely read and cited is not the authentic, coherent work it is taken
to be—and that may never have existed. Its lack of overall textual integ-
rity means that the work cannot be treated as an authentic window onto
Landa’s thoughts and feelings of the s. We must thus view as specula-
tive and ill-supported, albeit eloquent and tempting, Clendinnen’s (:
) description of the Relación as ‘‘a tender remembrance of beloved things
past’’ that, while ‘‘a very odd document’’ that we have in ‘‘defective form,’’
possibly contains ‘‘allusions, omissions and emphases which could reveal
something of Landa’s tacit response to the terrible events of.’’ Further-
more, even if the Relación is viewed not as a whole but as a source on spe-
cific and isolated topics, scholars cannot take for granted the authorship
and dating of particular passages—let alone the reliability of published edi-
tions, as detailed above.
But the Relación as a complex and messycompilation, one that should
be handled as gingerly as, say, one of the colonial Maya compilations
knownastheBooks of Chilam Balam, is nevertheless an authentic product
of lost oras-yet-undiscovered late-sixteenth-century observations and writ-
ings by Landa (or by Landa and his contemporaries). As such, it remains
an invaluable primary source on sixteenth-century Yucatán and on Maya
civilization.
Notes
At least part of the manuscript, or the work upon which it is based, appears to
have been written by Fray Diego de Landa while he served as Maestro de Novi-
cios at the Spanish Franciscan convent of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo. For
information on Landa’s activities at that convent, see Lizana:; also see
Ayeta : r.
The Franciscan chronicler Diego López de Cogolludo (– []: book ,
chap. ) wrote a hagiographic account of Landa’s activities in his massive
seventeenth-century history of Yucatán. Also see the discussion of Cogolludo’s
coverage in Clendinnen : . More information on the Franciscan order
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The Authenticity of Fray Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán
and Landa’s role as a missionary among the Maya is found in González Cicero
. For a more recent interpretation of the Franciscan role in the ‘‘spiritual
conquest’’ and conversion of the Yucatec Maya, see Chuchiak .
The work of a Spanish chronicler in Mexico City offers an interesting clue as
to Landa’s writings in the s. Francisco Cervantes de Salazar began work
in the capital in on a history of New Spain and, because he had become a
ubiquitous presence at the viceregal court by the time Landa visited in–,
he almost certainly would have met the Yucatec bishop. The similarities be-
tween parts of Landa’s Relación and Cervantes de Salazar’s Crónica de la Nueva
España suggest that the two actually exchanged written drafts of their work,
meaning that Landa brought copies of his writings with him to Mexico City
and that he was still putting his recopilación together in the final years of his
life. The chief scholar of Cervantes de Salazar’s work is Agustín Millares Carlo
(, , ).
Pero Garcia, the encomendero of the Maya towns of Tabi and Chunhuhub, wrote
that information concerning the province could be found in the ‘‘Recopilación
que el reverendisimo don Diego de Landa, Obispo que fue de estas provincias
hizo de esta tierra.’’ In other words, he does not claim to have seen the manu-
script, only that it exists. See Garza. For brief reference to Najera’s activity
with Maya leaders inYucatán, circa , see Restall:–; for discussion
of Chi, including translations of all his contributions to the relaciones geográfi-
cas, see Restall: – and in press. For other biographical information
concerning Chi and his role as an assistant to Landa and as a coauthor of the
relaciones, see Jakeman ; Strecker and Artieda ; Hillerkuss ; and
Karttunen: –, .
The possibility that Cogolludo drew from Landa via Lizana is made likely by
the fact that Cogolludo makes no direct reference to a Landa recopilación, only
to lesser writings (e.g., Cogolludo –: ); presumably on these grounds,
Ignacio Rubio Mañé, in his introduction to Cogolludo, states that Cogolludo
had no knowledge of Landa’s work (ibid.: xliv). Both references pointed out by
Paul Sullivan, personal communication.
‘‘After the committee had entered its judgement, in the quiet of a Spanish mon-
astery, he wrote his Relación’’ (Clendinnen : ).
Tozzer’s (: vii) version of this assumption, for example, is that Landa wrote
a longer version of the Relación in in Spain, took it to Yucatán with him
in , later sent copies to Spain and that one of these copies awaited Brasseur
de Bourbourg’s discovery.
It would be tedious to list all the passages that we feel Tozzer,Gates, and others
have misunderstood Landa and such passages are indicated in the notes to our
edition of the Relación in progress (Restall and Chuchiak n.d.), so suffice to
mention a brief selection of the many such moments. Tozzer (: ) trans-
lates vivieron sin mujeres muy honestamente, in so-called Chapter (Garibay K.
: , checked against the manuscript, as are all quotes in this note), as ‘‘their
wives lived honestly’’ instead of ‘‘they lived decently without women.’’ In Chap-
ter (Garibay K. : –) Landa tells of friars being sent to Yucatán
with the approval of the Montejos, los cuales edificaron un monasterio en Mérida;
the text means that the friars built the monastery, but both Tozzer (: )
and Gates (: ) attribute the act to the Montejos.Tozzer (: ) glosses
a reference in Chapter (Garibay K. : ) to los sacerdotes as ‘‘the secu-
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Restall and Chuchiak
lar clergy,’’ when the reference is clearly to the Maya priests, the ah kinob.In
Chapter (Garibay K. : ) Tozzer (: ) misreads temor as amor,so
that ‘‘love’’ appears in his translation instead of ‘‘fear,’’ and both he and Gates
(: ) gloss allende as ‘‘away from’’ and ‘‘beyond’’ (Tozzer : ) instead
of ‘‘in addition to’’ or ‘‘besides,’’ again changing the meaning of a sentence.
On the missionaryconnections between Spain, Mexico, and East Asia, see Trejo
, Schütte, and Gómez Canedo .
The official creation of the Real Academia de la Historia occurred by royal
order of King Philip V on April (see Alberola Fioravanti : ). In a
second decree dated, the same king gave the academy the official duties of
serving as the only official chronicler general [cronista general] and chronicler
of the Indies (see Altolaguirre : –). Starting in that year, the official
historians who constituted the Royal Academy began to collect and compile
a library of materials from other royal archives so that they could write com-
plete histories of the Indies. No doubt during this period (post) they col-
lected or came across Landa’s manuscript (or the known copy made from it).
The Royal Academy was housed first in the Royal Library (–) and then
later in a house on the Plaza Mayor of Madrid (–). It was therefore
not until that the Royal Academy came to be housed in its present loca-
tion, where the Landa manuscript is now held; it was in the academy’s previous
location on the Plaza Mayor where Brasseur de Bourbourg supposedly ‘‘dis-
covered’’ Landa’s manuscript in . For a more detailed history of the Royal
Academy, see Nava Rodríguez : –.
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