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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT. The Spanish presence in the Southwest during the colonial period is recorded in a number of contemporaneous documents. One such document is the Probanza de meritos of Vicente de Zaldivar (1600-1602), * a 135-folio text that deals with Zaldivar's services as sargento mayor and maestre de campo in the campaign of conquest and colonization of New Mexico under his uncle, Juan de Onate. In addition to their worth as historical sources, these documents also attest to characteristics of the language spoken during the time period. This study is a linguistic analysis of the first section of the Probanza; it includes a brief background of the text along with a more in-depth commentary on its most salient linguistic aspects. The phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical phenomena noted serve to shed light on the history of Spanish in general and on the history of New Mexican Spanish in particular.
1. INTRODUCTION. With the expansion of the Spanish empire into the American Southwest from New Spain came the concomitant expansion of the Spanish language into the area. Like in New Spain, the Spanish that was developing in the American Southwest was decidedly different from that of Castile, which is attested in documents written in these areas during the colonial period. The documents of the Probanza de meritos of Vicente de Zaldivar are no exception. They are documents of a legal nature, so named because they deal with inquiries and witness testimonies regarding the service and merits of Zaldivar in the posts he occupied. (1)
The study of original texts is of utmost importance in discerning the characteristics of the language for a given period, particularly during periods for which we have no oral testimony. The analysis of documentary evidence has been especially useful to the study of the history of American Spanish as scholars have attempted to unravel the various influences that have contributed to the configuration of the language during its period of origins. This style of investigation was introduced to the field in the 1960s and has included such seminal works as Cock Hincapie (1969), a study of the history of seseo in modern-day Colombia, as well as studies of other regions of the Americas, including Alvarez Nazario (1982) on Puerto Rico, Fontanella de Weinberg (1987) on Buenos Aires, and Lope Blanch (1985) and Parodi (1995) on Mexico (Fontanella de Weinberg 1992:22). Before embarking on the linguistic analysis of the New World documents that concern us here, it would be beneficial to provide some background on the central figure of the text and on the text itself.
Vicente de Zaldivar was the nephew of Juan de Onate, first governor and colonizer of New Mexico. In the campaign of conquest and colonization of this new province, Zaldivar served first as sargento mayor and later as maestre de campo, second in command under Onate, after the death of the elder Zaldivar brother, Juan. While Onate took formal possession of New Mexico on April 30, 1598, and established the first capital of the province in July of that year, just a few years later, the enterprise found itself in dire straits. (2) While Onate, Zaldivar, and numerous other men were participating in the expedition to Quivira in the latter half of 1601, (3) many colonists deserted the capital of San Gabriel due to their overall disillusionment with the colonizing effort; chief among their complaints were the harsh conditions, the lack of mineral wealth, and the poor governing of Onate. Zaldivar was sent by Onate to Mexico City in April 1602 to petition for more reinforcements for the enterprise, and the documents of the Probanza de meritos were presented in support of that petition.
1.1. CONTENT OF THE TEXT. The text of the Probanza de meritos can be divided into four discrete sections, which I call Probanza 1-4, each containing a separate interrogatory with witness responses. (4) This study involves the linguistic analysis of the first section which includes various documents drawn up in Mexico City during April 1602 and in San Gabriel, New Mexico during December 1601. Specifically, they are as follows: 1) a petition dated 18 April 1602 drawn up in Mexico City requesting witnesses be called to answer a series of twelve questions that Zaldivar provides, followed by the interrogatory of twelve questions, (5) 2) a petition dated 10 December 1601 drawn up in San Gabriel, New Mexico requesting witnesses to be called to answer an interrogatory of eight questions that Zaldivar provides regarding his services as maestre de campo, followed by the interrogatory of eight questions, 3) witnesses' responses to the interrogatory of eight questions, 4) the opinion of Juan de Onate regarding Zaldivar's services.
The witnesses' testimonies make up the bulk of this section of the text. A total of six witnesses were called; their answers to the questions Zaldivar posed were given before Juan de Onate and were drawn up in San Gabriel between December 11 and December 13, 1601. Witnesses were asked to attest to Zaldivar's positive traits and deeds as maestre de campo, most notably his actions in the battles with the Jumanos and with the Escanxaques, (6) his generosity in outfitting his soldiers with horses and mules, his expertise in peacefully dealing with the Indians, and his general quality of being ready for combat.
The six witnesses Zaldivar presented to answer the interrogatory of eight questions were the following: Fray Francisco de Velasco, a native of Mexico; Captain Juan de Vitoria Carvajal, a native of Yautepeque, Mexico; the alferez Pero Gomez Duran, a native of Valverde in the maestrazgo of Santiago, now known as Valverde de Llerena, Badajoz; Captain Gaspar Lopez de Tavora, a native of Lisbon; Captain Francisco Rascon, a native of Puebla de los Angeles, Mexico; and the alferez Isidro Juarez (or Suarez) de Figueroa, a native of Jerez de los Caballeros, Badajoz (Hammond and Rey 1953:151-152, 550, 553, 555-556; Snow 1998; Simmons 1991:157; Chavez 1992). (7) All accompanied Onate and Zaldivar on the expedition to Quivira, and all but Gomez Duran were signers of the Relacion cierta y verdadera, the report which narrates the sortie. (8) Of the six men named above, all but Velasco figured in Snow's list of loyal colonists (1998:75-79), those who remained in San Gabriel after the large-scale desertion, and thus constituted some of the founding members of New Mexican society in the 17th century. (9)
1.2. THE MANUSCRIPT. The manuscript is housed at the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Seville, Spain and forms part of Legajo, Patronato 22, which deals with the 'descubrimientos, descripciones y poblaciones de Nuevo Mexico'. The Probanza de meritos is included in Ramo 4 of that legajo which, according to a description provided by the archive, is an 'expediente formado en Mexico a instancias del maestre de campo Vicente de Za[l]divar, en nombre propio y en el del adelantado, gobernador y capitan general de las provincias del Nuevo Mexico, Juan de Onate, sobre cierto socorro que solicitan para su descubrimiento'. The entire text contains 135 folios; the portion analyzed here represents the first 24, which are numbered 219r-242v.
As far as I am aware, the original of the text is lost and the only existing copy is the one housed at the AGI. All four sections of the Probanza represent certified copies, apparently contemporaneous to the original texts. (10) To the best of my knowledge, these documents had never been published in Spanish and are currently being edited for the first time. A translation into English has been done by Hammond and Rey (1953). While the translation is incomplete for other sections of the text, the first section has been thoroughly rendered into English, save a few phrases. Nevertheless, as is characteristic of translations of Spanish documents of the period, there are numerous imperfections and problematic readings. (11)
2. LANGUAGE OF THE TEXT. In linguistically analyzing this type of text, we must bear in mind that the language reflected combines features from a wide array of persons. In the witness responses, for example, while the vocabulary and syntax may indeed reflect the language of the witness, the morphology and phonology are more likely to be a reflection of that of the copyist (Craddock 2002b:61). This text in particular is further complicated because, in addition to the scribe who took down the witnesses' statements, the scribe who copied the documents more than likely also left his mark. While the identity of the original scribe is known, the identity of the copyist is not. (12) Moreover, the text not only includes witness testimonies, but also more formal documents like Zaldivar's petitions and Onate's parecer; features of the language of both the authors and the copyist are undoubtedly present.
With these caveats in mind, I will describe the language of the manuscript. This linguistic analysis presents the principal phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features found in the text, (13) as well as some of its most salient orthographic tendencies. Given the constraints of space, explanations are generally brief and intended to provide an identification of the key phenomena, a concise commentary, and relevant bibliography.
3. PHONOLOGY. Topics included for discussion include Andalusian phonological characteristics, consonantal orthography vs. phonology, treatment of learned consonant groups, and vocalic phenomena such as atonic vowel variation and loss.
3.1 ANDALUSIAN PHONOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS. In examining the language of an American Spanish document, it is common practice to analyze the text for traits characteristic ofAndalusian Spanish. These include, but are not limited to, 1) seseo, (14) 2) aspiration and loss of final /-s/, 3) yeismo, (15) 4) neutralization of final /-r/ and /-1/, 5) aspiration of /x/, and 6) loss of intervocalic /-d-/. These features are present in Modern Andalusian Spanish, and given their documentation in Medieval Spanish texts from the South of the Peninsula (Frago Gracia 1993), it is theorized that they were brought to the Americas with the large numbers of Andalusian colonists and thus contributed to the dialect mixture and leveling during the period of origins of American Spanish. The maintenance of some or all of these Southern features in a particular geographic variety of the Americas ultimately depended on subsequent waves of immigration and the area's ties with Andalusia during the remainder of the colonial period. (16)
The most salient Andalusian phonological feature, seseo, is abundantly documented in this first section of the Probanza de meritos. Examples attesting to the merger of deaffricated /ts/ with /s/ are found both in the portions drawn up in Mexico City as well as those written in San Gabriel, New Mexico. Examples follow in (1): (17)
(1) a. San Gabriel, 1601:
alferes (2), arcabuseacen, bes (vez), bos (voz), colicitud, consierto, dies, flechaso, flechasos, hisiese, madures, nasio, nessecidad (3), nessesarias, nessesario (3), ocacion (4), ocasiones, persuacion (2), Saldibar, Saldiuar (7), Samora, saserdotis, sesase, Sibola
b. Mexico City, 1602:
acresentamiento (2), apasible, nessesario (2), nessesarios (2), ocasiones, pasificacion, pasificados, pasificar (2), pasificos, passifico, pretencion (2), p[r]etencion, rredusiendo, rriquesas, Saldibar (3), Saldiuar (8)
It is not surprising to find seseo documented in this text given the time period and the similar documentation in other parts of the Americas from the 16th and 17th centuries (Lapesa 1956, 1957; Cock Hincapie 1969; Parodi 1976; Kania 2000). Since New Mexico was colonized by natives of Mexico and others who had already spent considerable time in the New World, as well as by Spaniards from Andalusia and other areas characterized by the use of seseo, it is expected that this pronunciation would triumph in the new process of dialect mixture. Examination of the information found in Snow (1998) yields demographic data regarding the regional origins of the settlers in New Mexico which confirms this. Snow lists 560 individuals whose names or references appear in the papers of the New Mexican expedition. Of those individuals, he is able to identify the geographic origins of some 340 colonists--183 from Spain, 141 from the New World, 13 from Portugal, and 3 from other European countries. Of the Spaniards, the areas most highly represented include Andalusia, with 69 colonists, Castilla la Nueva with 35, Extremadura with 23, Castilla la Vieja with 15, Canarias with 11, and Vascongadas with 10. (18) As seen in these data, Andalusians represented the single largest group, with 37.7% of the total number of Peninsular colonists identified, which echoes similar demographic data presented by Boyd-Bowman (1956, 1963, 1967, 1974, 1976) for the Americas as a whole during the 16th century. Of the 141 New World colonists, the most important areas of origin were New Spain (85 colonists), New Galicia (50), and New Vizcaya (4).
Snow is also able to identify the origins of 112 of the approximately 149 loyal colonists who remained in San Gabriel after 1601. Of those who stayed in the capital, 54 were from Spain while 52 were from Mexico. Again, Andalusians represented the single largest group of loyal colonists with 19, or 35%, followed by Castilla la Nueva (10) 18.5%, Extremadura (8)14.8%, Castilla la Vieja (5) 9.3%, and Canarias (3) 5.6%.
Of the six witnesses who provided responses to the interrogatory plus the scribe who took down the witnesses' responses, four were born in New Spain, two were natives of Extremadura, one was of Portuguese origin, and one, Juan Gutierrez de Bocanegra, was from Castilla la Nueva. It is reasonable to suppose that all were seseante, save Bocanegra, who may have still maintained a distinction between the two phonemes /s/~/[theta]/ and /s/, instead of adopting the speech modality of the American koine, which was most likely characterized by wide-spread leveling of the two phonemes at the turn of the 17th century. Unfortunately, given the unknown identity of the final copyist, we are unable to make any definitive pronouncements regarding his influence in representing the speech of the witnesses, yet his speech was probably also characterized by seseo given the abundance of examples that were copied in his hand.
The weakening of /-s/ is another Andalusian phonological feature documented in early American texts (Boyd-Bowman 1975, 1988; Kania 2000). There are several examples that may attest to the same phenomenon in this section of the Probanza de meritos as in (2):
(2) le salieron (fol. 224r8-9) (19) la[s] cosas (fol. 225r4) le rrequirio (fol. 230r28) se les perdio (fol. 238v41) no se les perdiera (fol. 238v44)
Le salieron is found with the plural referent cinco soldados, and le rrequirio with the plural referent los yndios. The hypercorrect examples se les perdio and no se les perdiera are used with the single referent, Vicente de Zaldivar. Most of these examples are related to the use of the...
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