Dr. Sonia Kania is professor of Modern Languages at the University of Texas at Arlington where she teaches courses in study of the Spanish language and linguistics. Dr. Kania is a collaborator in the Cibola Project, which is concerned with the edition and publication of documents of the Hispanic Southwest from the 16th-18th centuries. Her research focuses on Colonial Mexican and New Mexican Spanish and historical dialectology. She has published numerous articles in those areas and is author of Mexican Spanish of the Colonial Period: Evidence from the Audiencia of New Galicia (Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2010).
Fronteras: Congratulations on the publication of your new book, Vicente de Zaldívar’s Services to the Crown: The Probanza de Méritos (1600). The book is not only a transcription and translation of colonial document from New Mexico but also a linguistic study of the syntactical and morphological features of the Spanish used in the text. Can you briefly tell us who Zaldívar was and explain what a probanza de méritos is?
Sonia Kania: Absolutely. Zaldívar was one of Juan de Oñate’s nephews. As your readers probably know, Oñate was the first governor of New Mexico. At the time of Oñate’s New Mexico campaign, Zaldívar was twenty-five. The family tree is actually quite interesting. Zaldívar is referred to as Oñate’s “sobrino” in the text, but according to English-language family terminology, he would be considered a “first cousin once removed,” since he was the son of Oñate’s first cousin (Vicente de Zaldívar I). This is through their bloodline relationship. Through their relationship established by marriage, Vicente Zaldívar II is Oñate’s nephew in the English-language sense since his father (Vicente de Zaldívar I) married Magdalena de Mendoza y Salazar, who was Juan de Oñate’s stepsister. This means that Oñate and Zaldívar I were not only first cousins but also brothers-in-law, so Zaldívar’s son would be Oñate’s nephew. The family was very important in the colonial history of New Galicia. Juan de Oñate’s father Cristóbal was one of the conquerors of the area and served as governor during the time of the Coronado expedition. He was also one of the co-founders of Zacatecas. The Oñates and Zaldívars had many mining interests there. Vicente de Zaldívar II was born in Zacatecas and returned there after the New Mexico campaign, where he became a successful miner.
As far as the text goes, the probanza de méritos y servicios is a genre of documentary text that had its origins in medieval Spain and was later brought to the New World. Since nobles were unable to pay subjects for their work on their behalf in advance, they instead offered future rewards and favors. So, subjects learned to record and certify services that they performed for their superiors. In this type of document, the petitioners first presented their méritos, i.e. their lineage and the earlier services of their ancestors, followed by their servicios, i.e. deeds and exploits that had benefitted their superior. While petitioners usually sought specific rewards or favors, such as land grants or the use of coats of arms, in Zaldívar’s case, the document appears to have been drawn up for record keeping, apparently to be used for a future claim.
Fronteras: Before we get into the specifics of some of your research findings, and Zaldívar’s career, a very basic question: if a Spanish speaker from Texas in the year 2022 could travel back in time to 1600 to speak to Vicente de Zaldívar and his contemporaries in Mexico City or New Mexico, would this bilingual time traveller be able to understand their Spanish?
Sonia Kania: That’s a great question. I think that they absolutely would, especially if they have had experience interacting with people from other cultures who speak different varieties of Spanish. Like with present-day examples of dialect-contact through travel, the biggest hurdle would probably be vocabulary. The travellers in question would have to know that frezadas refer to ‘blankets’, gallinas de la tierra to ‘turkeys’, and vacas de Cíbola to the ‘American bison’. Just like in the present time, context clues would be really helpful! Otherwise, the Spanish they hear would probably sound a little formal or old-fashioned, and they would have to figure out the proper forms to use when addressing people, depending on their social status: vuestra merced, vos, tú? In a highly stratified society, using the right form of address was very important. Finally, in other cases, they might hear forms that have fallen out of use in mainstream Spanish but that are still used by certain speakers, especially in rural areas, ansí, for ‘así’, muncho for ‘mucho’, onde for ‘donde’, truje for ‘traje’, etc.
Fronteras: Your book will be of interest to historians for many reasons, but we were struck by how it illustrates how the Spanish imperial bureaucracy worked, and what criteria the Empire used to reward and promote military officers. What are some things about these questions that readers will glean from the structure and contents of Zaldívar’s probanza?
Sonia Kania: Two immediate things come to mind. One is the importance of lineage, which harkens back to your first question about the document type called the probanza de méritos y servicios. When researching the various witnesses that took part in Zaldívar’s probanza, I was struck by the close familial ties among the witnesses, as well as the colonists more broadly. I already mentioned the relationship between the Oñates and the Zaldívars. In addition, one of the witnesses, Francisco de Sosa Peñalosa, was a soldier in Vicente de Zaldívar I’s army, and another, Diego de Zubía, grew up in Vicente de Zaldívar I’s household. These two (Sosa Peñalosa and Zubía) were also related by marriage—Sosa Peñalosa was Zubía’s father-in-law.
And yet another witness, Leonís Tremiño de Bañuelos, was the son of Baltasar de Bañuelos, who was a business partner of Cristóbal de Oñate who, as I mentioned earlier, was Juan de Oñate’s father. But I guess it makes sense that you would want your most trusted associates with you if you are going to travel thousands of miles into unknown territory and try to set up a colony. The second big theme that readers will undoubtedly notice is the propagandistic nature of the questions and answers. Almost all the witnesses have the same glowing things to report.
They all toe the company line and have pretty much the same propagandistic assessment, in other words, that the punishment of Ácoma was necessary in order to avenge the deaths of the Spaniards that the Acomans had killed in December 1598, among them Zaldívar’s brother Juan. If you read between the lines, though, I think that Oñate and Zaldívar know that they must do damage control because they make a big point of mentioning that the decision to go to war had been vetted by the all the colonists and the clergy and that it was determined to be just (guerra justa).
Fronteras: In 1599, Zaldívar commanded a punitive expedition against Acoma pueblo, which resulted in the death of over 500 Acomans and the capture of hundreds more. You note in your introduction that in 1614 Oñate and Zaldívar were found guilty of cruelty to the Indians. In your text, the Probanza, does Zaldívar or any other informant show any awareness of his having gone too far in this campaign or is the whole affair presented as a military triumph for which he should be rewarded?
Sonia Kania: This is another great question. None of the witnesses that Zaldívar calls shows any hint of their having gone too far. They all toe the company line and have pretty much the same propagandistic assessment, in other words, that the punishment of Ácoma was necessary in order to avenge the deaths of the Spaniards that the Acomans had killed in December 1598, among them Zaldívar’s brother Juan. If you read between the lines, though, I think that Oñate and Zaldívar know that they must do damage control because they make a big point of mentioning that the decision to go to war had been vetted by the all the colonists and the clergy and that it was determined to be just (guerra justa).
Interestingly, one of the witnesses, Fray Francisco de San Miguel, must have had a change of heart regarding the treatment of the Indians later on. In the Trial of the Indians of Acoma, San Miguel agreed with the definition of guerra justa (just war) and that the Acomans should be punished. After the punishment of Acoma, he worked serving the Tewa Indians. He learned four different native languages to aid in his ministry but found it difficult because of the abuse of the Pueblos. In a public meeting in San Gabriel in September 1601, which was convened to discuss the movement to desert, he advocated the abandonment of New Mexico, citing the grinding poverty, the isolation, and the mistreatment of the Indians in order to get food. Fray Francisco joined those who deserted the colony in 1601.
…the most important feature of New World Spanish that is believed to have originated among Andalusian settlers is seseo, which is a type of pronunciation by which words like casa ‘house’ and caza ‘hunt’ are homonymic, both pronounced with an “s” sound. This contrasts with Castilian Spanish, which uses a sound like English “th” for the second of the two words.
Fronteras: In one part of your analysis, you corroborate features in the probanza that correspond to the Spanish spoken in Andalucia, Spain. Can you explain what features confirm this, and indicate whether this was common among Spanish expeditionaries in the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?
Sonia Kania: Sure. First of all, when a historical linguist works with a colonial text, it is customary to analyze it to try to discover traits that are characteristic of Andalusian Spanish. I won’t go into all the nitty gritty, but the most important feature of New World Spanish that is believed to have originated among Andalusian settlers is seseo, which is a type of pronunciation by which words like casa ‘house’ and caza ‘hunt’ are homonymic, both pronounced with an “s” sound. This contrasts with Castilian Spanish, which uses a sound like English “th” for the second of the two words. In addition to being present in modern Andalusian Spanish, this feature is documented in medieval Spanish texts from the south of the Peninsula. It is therefore theorized that it, along with other “Southern” features, were brought to the Americas with the large numbers of Andalusian colonists and contributed to the dialect mixture and levelling during the development of Latin American Spanish. The maintenance of some or all of these 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.
There are abundant examples of seseo in the Probanza, which can be detected by spelling errors—someone who distinguishes between the two sounds would be less prone to make errors when writing them out. It is not surprising to find seseo documented in this text since similar documentation is found in other parts of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including New Spain and New Galicia. Since New Mexico was colonized by first- and second-generation criollos and other settlers 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 that pronunciation type would win out in the new process of dialect mixture.
Even though the text is very formal and legalistic, we can still glean knowledge about what the language was actually like at the time—for instance, what kinds of words did they use to describe their surroundings, to name the new reality, to refer to the different elements of the new society that they were creating. Obviously, they were not going to reinvent the wheel, so at first, the words they used were the ones that they brought with them.
Fronteras: How does the probanza’s language track with what we know about the development of Spanish in New Mexico, a region frequently cited for the linguistic specificity of its spoken Spanish?
Sonia Kania: One of the aspects of the text that I most enjoyed was the fact that it represents a record of the language used by some of the original colonists to New Mexico. Even though the text is very formal and legalistic, we can still glean knowledge about what the language was actually like at the time—for instance, what kinds of words did they use to describe their surroundings, to name the new reality, to refer to the different elements of the new society that they were creating. Obviously, they were not going to reinvent the wheel, so at first, the words they used were the ones that they brought with them. In a separate study, I analyze the vocabulary of the text and show that many elements of what is today considered typical of New Mexican Spanish can be traced to the original colonists. I mentioned the words frezada for ‘blanket’ and gallina de la tierra ‘turkey’, which have long been considered quintessential New Mexicanisms. These are documented in the text. Unfortunately, words like these are dying out in the Traditional New Mexican Spanish dialect due to the language attrition (new generations not speaking the dialect) and standardization (influence of more normative varieties). Even though we cannot stop the demise of this dialect, it is important to document its features in the words that the early colonists brought with them. I think this serves to honor its cultural legacy as the oldest European language variety of the United States.
Fronteras: A question about methodology for readers who may be unfamiliar with the discipline of historical linguistics. How do you parse and sift through the language of the past to draw conclusions about the evolution of that language? What are the tools that you use as a historical linguist?
Sonia Kania: Thank you for asking this question. As a philologist, the most important tool that I work with are either original texts or faithful electronic transcriptions, followed by databases and secondary sources like dictionaries and historical grammars. Digital databases that use faithful editions as their source texts are super helpful for data gathering purposes. I’m somewhat old-fashioned, so what I usually do is read the text and look for things that catch my eye, depending on what it is I am studying. If it something related to the sound system, I look for a spelling error that would suggest that the person who wrote the text pronounced the word a certain way. If it is vocabulary, I note interesting words and use secondary sources to find information about the word—what is its etymology, when was it first documented in Spanish, etc.? I then use databases to gather additional information about the word to build its history. Databases are also indispensable if you are trying to trace the evolution of a change in the language. For example, I recently studied the loss of the future subjunctive in Spanish. Being able to compare data from texts across the centuries allows you to tell the story of the change, or at least as accurate of a story that you can construct with the available evidence, which obviously has to be written since voice recording does not emerge until the nineteenth century.
Fronteras: Thank you for this conversation Dr. Kania. What’s next for you now that you have finished this mammoth project?
Sonia Kania: Well, I wish I could say that my next project was to rest and recover from the work of the past two pandemic years, but I have several projects lined up. One of them is another book project with a colleague at Western Oregon University. She and I will be working with some of the early chronicles and other narrative texts that deal with the exploration of what is now the Southwestern United States. We plan to work with at least five texts to analyze the way these early explorers named the new reality that they encountered. This is important because the Spanish that was developing on this side of the Atlantic was becoming distinct from Peninsular varieties as it was undergoing a process of Americanization. To put an example, when faced with phenomena unseen before, Spaniards had two choices: adapt an existing Spanish word or adopt the indigenous word. An example of the first is the word for pineapple, piña, whose original meaning ‘pinecone’ was expanded to include the fruit because of its similar appearance. The second option resulted in the incorporation of thousands of indigenous loanwords into the Spanish language. We are actually going to present on this topic at the International Congress on the History of the Spanish Language in León, Spain, very soon. In this case, we are working with Cabeza’s de Vaca’s Relación from 1542. We analyze the various semantic extensions, like calling the American bison “cows,” as well as the loanwords that he incorporates in the text, and how these processes compare with those of other texts of the period.
Image credit: Cover tile designed by Christopher Conway.
