In March 1545, Fray Domingo de Ara arrived in the province of San Vicente de Chiapa to serve the new bishop, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. One of 43, he came to build Dominican parishes among Maya and Zoque peoples. Ara was assigned the Tzeltal town of Copanaguastla, a prosperous center of cotton production and textile manufacturing, located in the southern end of the Grijalva River valley. Among his duties was the study of the Tzeltal language, and some 15 years later, though he had moved on to higher offices, Ara compiled a Tzeltal vocabulary and grammar based on his experience in the parish. A transcription of this manuscript, written in 1616, is today found in the Bancroft Library.
Mario Humberto Ruz’s book is a historical ethnography of sixteenth-century Copanaguastla. Built around an extended commentary on the Ara vocabulary, the work is supplemented by selective archival research and excellent use of a wide variety of secondary sources. The text is descriptive rather than analytical, and recalls the best work of Ralph L. Roys on the Yucatec Maya. Ruz writes knowledgeably and with sophistication on a remarkably wide range of topics, and his study ought to be of enormous interest to anthropologists, linguists, and historians alike.
The early chapters review the bibliographic history of Ara’s manuscript, provide an overview of his career, and survey the history of Copanaguastla from the conquest through the late seventeenth century. In the heart of the book, Ruz uses the vocabulary to describe the economy, material culture, social organization, and religious life of the pueblo. Included are sections on sexuality, illness, hunting and gathering, cotton production and textiles, marriage and kinship, social and political hierarchies, cosmology, and the role of native priests, curers, and witches. A glossary lists archaic Spanish terms and localisms, and an appendix offers a table comparing several hundred Tzeltal words for various flora and fauna with equivalent Spanish and scientific nomenclature.
Anyone who studies native peoples from Spanish-language sources alone will feel sadly impoverished after reading this book. The remarkable detail, subtlety, and complexity suggested by the vocabulary are impossible to find in the kinds of documents that historians more commonly study. Along with this volume, Ruz has prepared an edition of the Ara vocabulary itself, as well as Fray Francisco Núñez de la Vega’s Constituciones diocesanas del obispado de Chiapas. By making these texts available to a wider readership, Mario Humberto Ruz has made an invaluable contribution to Mesoamerican studies.
