A digital archive of the Borderlands Indigenous Episteme
“Indigenous episteme of the Borderlands” is a digital archive of primary sources focused on the decolonial ethnohistory of the indigenous groups that inhabited the region of northeastern Mexico and southeastern Texas during the viceregal period. From a methodological perspective that integrates philology, hermeneutics, ethnohistory of religions and digital humanities, this project proposes the understanding of the territory as a secular cultural region, in which the mobility of indigenous groups, such as the Alazapas and Mezcales, was associated with their worldview and not only with a subsistence economy.
Conceived as the first stage of a digital archive that must grow with the integration of periodic searches in various repositories, for this first installment, the site presents 10 volumes of documents from the General Archive of the Indies that describe the region in the 17th and 18th centuries. Through visualizations such as timelines, mobility maps and textual analysis, as well as introductory studies, the reader-user will be able to contextualize the reading of primary sources and have useful tools for their potential teaching in the classroom.
Finally, the future of the project will be addressed, which proposes a second phase of an anthropological nature, which aims to identify cultural elements of continuity of the indigenous episteme, both in Texas, Coahuila and Nuevo León. This project has been carried out within the framework of scholarships awarded by the US Latino Digital Humanities Center of the University of Houston.
This project consists in a digital archive of ethnohistoric primary sources related to the beliefs and religion of the native American people who lived in the San Antonio Missions and were evangelized by Spanish-speaking Franciscan friars during the 18 century. The mobility maps of the Coahuiltecan speakers during the Colonial period are an essential part of the digital archive and they visualize the relation between mobility and indigenous episteme or cosmovision. This work proposes to carry out a methodological approach that will include philology, hermeneutics, ethnohistory of religions, and ethnography to demonstrate that mobility on the territory of today's Coahuila, Nuevo León and Texas, was part of the cosmovision of the native american people who inhabited this cultural region.
To visualize the mobility and geolocalization of Coahuiltecan-speaking groups, we employed ArcGIS's spatial analysis tools. We started from a pre-found database based on a corpus of ethnohistorical documents located in the Historical Archive of the Franciscan Province of Michoacán, the Franciscan Archive of the Reserved Fund-UNAM, the Franciscan Archive of Celaya, Colegio de la Santa Cruz, the General Archive of the State of Nuevo León, the General Archive of the Indies and the General Archive of the Nation, among others. On this database 18 nations were identified and chosen as pertaining to the research. As it follows, these nations were:
- Alasapas
- Mescales
- Tilijayas
- Pacuaches
- Pausanes
- Pacoas
- Coahuileños, Coahuilas, Coahuiles
- Pacaos
- Pajalate
- Orejones
- Pamaques
- Venados
- Pampopas
- Chayopines
- Tacames
- Manos de perro
- Pihuiques
- Sanipaos
The causes for which each nation appears, the geographic coordinates, years and mentions that allude to each nation were marked down. The number of mentions was counted and specified, and the coordinates were modified to convert them into comma-separated values that were easier to read by the program.
A basemap that could show the topography of the place was chosen as it could be relevant to the research. An integrated dot distribution and proportion map was firstly created, with the data of all nations, with unique and proportional symbols according to the number of mentions and underneath a legend indicating the colors in which the data of each nation is shown. The visible range of the labels with the causes of the mentions was changed to reduce the visual density. In case the causes get in the way of each other or are not visible otherwise, they can always be checked in the original dataset or in the other maps. For the following maps differentiated by nation, the data was processed and separated into different databases in order to have layers to make it easier to distinguish the information. 18 layers were created for dot distribution maps for each nation, the scale of the map may vary depending on the number of elements.
We also worked with Timeline and Google My Maps embedding for showing progress, overlaps and changes over time of the location of these nations. The nations were sorted and added in chronological order in the public database template for visualization with Timeline. To create the maps with Google My Maps, we used for each nation separate columns for latitude and longitude, and kept the columns for causes, references, nation name, and years. The embeds were added as media in the database, and the mentions were used as text. The embedding is navigable and can display the table with all the original data.
To gain insights into the scholarly landscape and research trends related to indigenous communities in this region, we conducted a bibliometric analysis and mapped it using VOSviewer. This visualization product employed an RIS archive from a personal library on Zotero, which collected data from searches on four distinct digital repositories as were: the Texas Archival Resources Online, The University of Texas at Austin Collections, Texas Data Repository and the Spanish Colonial Manuscripts at the Benson Latin American Collection. In each search engine, a natural language search of the nation names mentioned above in, for any of the fields. The relevance to the general research relevance of the results has not yet been examined. For searching terms with more than one word, the use of quotes for the search was preferred, except for the search in The University of Texas at Austin Collections which seemed to yield pertinent results as it was. Each result, commonly a collection, was added as a “Dataset” item in Zotero with its specifications. The format and citation key values were modified to show the extension of the collection or item and the accession or acquisition numbers respectively, as it was something commonly listed in results. VOSviewer enabled us to show the co-occurence of keywords added as tags in Zotero. We tagged the search term, the repository of the item, the location of the repository, the search engine used, and the short title for each item.
For search terms that did not yield any results, they were added as "Dictionary entry" items with only the digital repository in which they were searched along with the searched term, the same two data for tags. Occurrences from a minimum of 1 were included. The nodes in the network represent terms, and links between nodes indicate relationships, stronger lines indicate stronger relationships. Weight attributes were used, an element with higher weight is more prominent among the searches. The network visualization is offered and automatically grouped in clusters, there is a possibility to change for an overlay visualization that shows common inclusive dates of the collections. The density map can only be seen as an image, this can show in which automatically generated clusters more results can be found.
37 non-digitized documents were selected from the collection of the General Archive of the Indies at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History for subsequent digitization. In the beginning, identification of the content of the documents was done with the NewOCR program, but the use of Transkribus was preferred along the way because it showed greater accuracy when transcribing automatically. 12 documents were selected for the first version of the digitized collection for their length, relevance to research, mention of nations and uniqueness among the corpus. For the editing of the documents we opted for the modernization of the words and kept an exemplary list of changes made in the spelling.
In the 18th century, five Franciscan missions were established on the banks of the San Antonio River with the objective of reducing and evangelizing the indigenous groups of the region. The difficulty in reconstructing the history and particular identity of these nations presents great challenges for the researcher today. In the present work, it will be shown how the study of a documentary group of religious texts preserved in the Cervantina Library of the Tecnológico de Monterrey provides knowledge about the ethnohistory of indigenous nations whose territory of mobility was in southern Texas and northeastern Mexico.
The Manual for the administration of the sacraments of penance, Eucharist, extreme unction, marriage, thanks after receiving Communion and helping to die well ... is addressed to the confessors of the Indians reduced to the Misiones del Río de San Antonio and Río Grande, which they belonged to the Colegio de la Santísima Cruz of the City of Querétaro. The Manual claims to have been composed by Bartolomé García, apostolic preacher and missionary of the mission of Nuestro Señor Padre San Francisco of said College and Río de San Antonio, in the Province of Texas. It was printed in 1760.
Confessional of Indians in Coahuilteco and Spanish, ms., Without author and without date, attributed to Bartolomé García, possibly elaborated in the first half of the 18th century.
The Manual for the administration of the sacraments has been, since the 19th century, the main source for the linguistic study of Coahuilteco. Orozco y Berra (Geography of languages and ethnographic letter of Mexico, 1864) and Francisco Pimentel (Descriptive and comparative table of the indigenous languages of Mexico or Treaty of Mexican philology, 1862-1865) give the name of Texano or Coahuilteco to the language spoken by indigenous groups from Coahuila and Texas. For this they use the Manual as the main source. The Manual does not identify any indigenous group as "Coahuilteco." Neither the word nor derivations appear in the documentary group. The issue of ethnic denominations and identities of indigenous groups in northeastern Mexico and Southeast Texas has been a topic of discussion among ethnohistorians.
Difference between language and culture: there is no doubt about the existence of a common language shared by the groups in the region, but there is no certainty that the groups were assumed as the same group and as members of the Coahuiltecan culture.
This project is sustained on the premise that despite the differences, sharing a language as a means of communication and the relationship with the Texas missions allow us to address cultural traits as part of a shared worldview to reconstruct the ethnohistory of indigenous groups. Northeast Mexico and Southeast Texas.
Who spoke Coahuilteco and where did they live?
What meanings of ethnohistorical value can we unravel from the analysis of their documented patterns of mobility?
View the maps through the following interpretations:
The processes of migration and sedentary lifestyle are related to the worldview and not only to a subsistence economy.
There was contact with the Nahuas or Madriner Indians, which had an effect on the processes of acculturation, of cultures in contact.
Totemism must have been a shared cultural aspect. Example: the owl.
There are nations that rarely appear in the records that only appear associated with the San Antonio missions.
The corpus of indigenous denominations is made up of ethnohistorical documents located in the Historical Archive of the Franciscan Province of Michoacán, the Franciscan Archive of the Reserve Fund-UNAM, the Franciscan Archive of Celaya, Colegio de la Santa Cruz, the General Archive of the State of Nuevo León, the Franciscan Archive of the Reserve Fund- UNAM, the General Archive of the Indies and the General Archive of the Nation, among others. The numbers of mentions refer to a corpus made up of more than 4 thousand entries from indigenous denominations.
First approximation from a database derived from external research (Sheridan, Frontierization of space to the north of New Spain, 2015) suggests the support of the hypothesis of the mobility maps of the Coahuilteco-speaking groups. The results are the following:
Timeline of the Mobility of Coahuiltecan groups
Collection
Citation
Paloma Vargas, “Timeline of the mobility of Coahuiltecan groups,” Native Texans: The Coahuiltecan Speakers of the San Antonio Missions, accessed October 20, 2023, https://nativetexans.omeka.net/items/show/12.
It has been considered that the reasons for mobility were due to a bound nomadism, which is defined as a system in which people were tied to isolated water sources from where they exploited the vegetation of the mountain (Taylor Walter Willard, “Tethered nomadism and water territoriality: and hypothesis ”, Proceedings and memories of the XXXV International Congress of Americanists, Mexico, 1964) Cyclical nucleation: Settlement strategy, programmed or seasonal aggregation, congregation with ritual base, reification of social condition. Ritual activity consecrates cyclical nucleation centers, defines sacred sites that configure social life (Schaedel Richard “The temporal variants of proto-state societies”, Alternative pathways to early state, Valdivostok, Dal'nauka, 1995, pp.47- 53). "At the center of Schaedel's model is the altar - sacred space - which constitutes the nucleus around which the pattern of cyclical settlement orbits [...] these antecedents and roots must lie in the patterns of movement of the groups of hunters and gatherers. and at the nucleation sites in their programmed or seasonal movements. (Turpin, Solveig, Cyclic nucleation and sacred space: the evidence of rock art ”, Relations, Number 23, Vol. XXIII, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2002”
The Alazapas, speakers of Coahuilteco, created Indo-Christian art in Lampazos, Nuevo León. They must have helped build the mission in the late 17th century (1698). They engraved on the panel of the church's façade motifs from regional rock art: triangles accompanied by a row of stripes. We found these motifs in the Abrigo de las Brujas and in the Cerro de Chiquihuitillos, 40 and 20km south of Lampazos, respectively (Breen Murray, William, “Style, Context and Tradition. Analytic frameworks for identifying Coahuiltecan Rock Art” Boundaries and territories : Prehistory of the US Southwest and Northern Mexico, Antropological Research Papers, 54, Arizona State University, 1998.
The Borrados who spoke Coahuilteco and lived in the San Antonio River, also lived, traveled, migrated, moved, to the present-day territory of Nuevo León. Its ceremonial center could well have been Boca de Potrerillos, where religious festivals involving peyote, frijolillo, mitote must have been held for fertility cults.
Today the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation identifies as the descendants of the native Coahuilteco speakers who lived in the San Antonio Missions during the Colonial period. For example, the American Indians in Texas-Spanish Colonial Missions is an organization whose purpose is “the preservation and protection of the culture and traditions of the Native American tribes and other indigenous people who resided in the Spanish colonial missions” (https://aitscm.org/). This continuity and presence of the Coauiltecans today in the Texan territory is a great opportunity to research the persistence of religious beliefs and the epistemology of this indigenous nation.
The main outcome of the digital archive is to contribute to the understanding of the complexity of the cultural processes of the Texas and Mexico Borderland, and become a useful tool for research and the creation of public policies in educational matters that integrate regional history from a postcolonial perspective.
Paloma Vargas Montes
Research professor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, PhD in History from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and in Hispanic Literature from the University of Navarra. Member of the SNI, level 1. She has published articles, chapters and books on the religious thought of the indigenous groups of Colonial Mexico. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Kansas (2019) and Rice University (2023). She is a grantee of the US Latino Digital Humanities Center of the University of Houston and the Puentes Consortium. She was director of the Master's Degree in Humanistic Studies (virtual) and National Director of the Bachelor's Degree in Hispanic Literature at Tecnologico de Monterrey.
Professor Vargas at the archeological site Boca de Potrerillos, in the north of Nuevo León state, México.
Miriam Natalie Rojas Solís
Research Assistant with U. S. Latino Digital Humanities and professor Paloma Vargas. Bachelor of arts in Spanish Literature from the university Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. Published with Paseo de la Mujer Mexicana and el Gobierno de Nuevo León a book titled Mujeres en la enfermería: vocación y profesión. Successful candidate of the Master of Information and Library Studies from the University of British Columbia.