chichimeca

[Diel, Lori]

I have been researching the painting to which you refer.  I believe you are providing a metaphoric interpretation, but a more straightforward reading of the imagery is called for.  The painting references a historic event in which an indigenous man was ordered to be attacked by the dog (controlled by the Spaniard) presumably for refusing to accept Christianity (notice the rosary Marina holds and the sword held by one of the indigenous men).  The dots at the bottom do reference years (a total of 41) but these are meant to be counted from Cortes's arrival, as is stated in an associated alphabetic gloss in Nahuatl.  My reading of this gloss follows, but if any of the Nahuatl specialists out there have an alternative translation, I welcome hearing it.  My reading of "ynauh xiuyoc..." as "4 years later..." makes sense historically, but I'm not sure if it works linguistically.

Ynacico marques ya onpoualxiuitl once  axcan ynauh xiuyoc yn ya miq tlatoque
The Marques [Cortes] came 41 years ago, 4 years later the tlatoque died.

This translation suggests the annotation was added in 1560, and the events depicted happened in 1523.

Best,
Lori B. Diel


---
Lori Boornazian Diel, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Art History
Dept. of Art and Art History
Texas Christian University


-----Original Message-----
From: nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org on behalf of Susan Gilchrist
Sent: Sat 10/28/2006 2:41 AM
To: nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
Subject: [Nahuat-l] chichimeca
 
Thinking about it a different way, I wonder if the
Coyoacan picture<http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/4912/3197/1600/b73-1599-trial-Cholula-1519.0.jpg>relates
to the wolf
of Gubbio <http://www.assisiweb.com/foto/Pienza_SF_PB200102b.jpg>
and the story of the
wolf<http://www.wtu.edu/franciscan/pages/intro/gubbio.html>in the
Little
Flowers of
St. Francis <http://www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/flowers1.htm>.
In other words the horrible dogs the soldiers
brought with them must have made it hard for
Dominicans to explain the word play in "domini
canes" and even worse for Franciscans to tell the
story of how St. Francis was able to persuade a
wolf to be nice to people. Plus as the person on
the Dominican website explained, dogs can
stand for priests in general.
So maybe the rope that's attached to the dog in
the picture (or possible to the person the dog is
attacking?) hasn't got anything to do with
"chichi-mecatl" and instead is there to make it
clear that the situation is under the control of the
soldier. It's worse than a wild animal, represented
by the well-behaved coyote in the place sign (or
the dog glyph for one person's name).
That would make sense in European terms where
it would be commonplace to say men were capable
of worse behavior than animals. The idea of a
picture that's recognizable is something that I think
is also a European element (as in Pliny's biography
of Apelles), since the dog is drawn in a European
way.
I was thinking about the Coyoacan picture in terms
of the good dog-bad dog opposition in Murner's
Logica Memorativa<http://webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic20/hoeltgen/fig11.html>,
which might be something that
actually was brought to Mexico fairly early.
I'm still puzzled by the word chichi, even as a loan
word from another language. Were there just wolves,
coyotes, and the dogs we call chihuahuas? Did people
call European dogs perros?
Thank you to John Sullivan for the reference to the
gourd tree in the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca and to
Pablo Garcia for the reference to the Gran
Chichimeca Xolotl.
Susan Gilchrist
http://elboscoblog.blogspot.com/


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