8
Names, Naming, and Person Reference in Quiahije Chatino

Introduction

The Chatino language of San Juan Quiahije (Quiahije), Oaxaca, Mexico, is rich with interplay between language and culture in the area of person reference. In this chapter I focus on the discursive use of language and landscape to construct person reference in Quiahije Chatino. The chapter has a large linguistic component, since linguistic analysis contributes to our understanding of how place is constructed and interpreted. Another factor that contributes to this construction and interpretation is the social layering of the community, and the community’s relationship with the national project of assimilating indigenous people into Spanish-speaking society. This project of assimilation fits into a broader context of interest, which includes political reordering, patterns of intense Christianization, and linguistic imposition in indigenous communities. One finding in the study is that the people of Quiahije mediate linguistic impositions on their social life by creating their own naming practices through the use of place-names.

Personal names in Quiahije play an important role in the social and cultural life of the community. Every member of the community has a first name, two last names, and a family name that is derived from a place-name. Some community members also have a nickname. The analysis that follows explores how people from Quiahije engage in person reference in their social lives; how speakers verbally associate an individual with known properties, such as his or her face, name, social identity, or personality; and how tones function in names borrowed from Spanish. The chapter draws on extended participant observation in the San Juan and Cieneguilla communities, as well as metalinguistic discussions with adult speakers.

I was born in Cieneguilla, a village that is part of the municipality of San Juan Quiahije, but I have lived most of my life outside of the community. My interest in the topic of names came from a desire to learn more about social interaction between native Chatino speakers. In particular, I wanted to better understand the crucial role of personal names in the social lives of the people of San Juan. I am a fluent speaker of Chatino, but fluency is not sufficient to understand face-to-face communication and person reference in the communities of Cieneguilla and San Juan. The focus of this chapter is the set of linguistic and communicative rules that make this interaction successful, such as the rules governing tone of voice and other linguistic choices that are used to avoid uncomfortable social situations. Finally, I include a discussion of the geographic aspect of person reference.

In my research I observed and actively participated in hours of conversations in kitchens (figure 8.1) and public spaces, and took video of narratives in which speakers made reference to various people. Further details regarding the participants, types of conversations, and locations will be provided below.

Figure 8.1. Kitchen interaction. Photo by author.

Throughout the chapter I discuss person reference in interactions in Chatino. Section 1, “The Communities,” introduces the community, describes its geographical location, and discusses the ideologies of what I will call “base” and “temporal” home. Section 2, “Ways of Referring to People in San Juan,” introduces the construction of person reference in Quiahije. Section 3, “Personal Names,” discusses how the people of Quiahije receive their names.

The Communities

The seat (cabecera) of San Juan Quiahije has 2,120 inhabitants, while Cieneguilla has 1,330 inhabitants, according to the Mexican Census (2010). Cieneguilla is a separate village (agencia policía) within the municipality of San Juan (figure 8.2). The distance between the two communities is about ten kilometers.

Figure 8.2. Cieneguilla seen from San Juan. Photo by Frida Cruz.

Residents of both communities speak the Chatino language. Chatino is one member of the Oto-manguean language stock and belongs to a genetic subgroup within the Zapotecan branch (Campbell 2013; Kaufman 2007). Chatino comprises three varieties: Zenzontepec (ZEN), Tataltepec (TAT), and Eastern Chatino (Campbell 2011; Cruz and Woodbury 2006). Eastern Chatino, in turn, comprises an internally diverse set of varieties spoken in twenty-one communities, including San Juan Quiahije. There are fifteen varieties of Eastern Chatino in all, each with its own tone system. Most varieties are monosyllabic, except for Santa María Yolotepec (field notes) and San Marcos Zacatepec (Villard 2007). The Chatino of Quiahije is most notable for its tonal complexity (E. Cruz 2011). Phonetically there are twelve tones, and phonologically there are fourteen tones distinguished at the lexical level (E. Cruz 2011; see also table 8.8 in Appendix 8.A).¹

Residents of this area consider San Juan to be “the old place,” but San Juan is a relatively new municipality in the Chatino region. The place where San Juan would eventually be founded was settled in a wave of migration sparked by evangelization. While scholars have not determined the exact year of the migration, some suggest that it occurred around 200 years ago (Wenceslao Cruz Cortes, personal communication). According to oral tradition, San Juan was founded when a few citizens saw a rooster crowing on top of a hill in San Juan (see figure 8.6: #43). Below the hill there was a pond, where residents claimed to see Saint John appear. This caused people who lived in surrounding areas to move to San Juan. Over time this pond dried up, and the local church now sits at its site (see figure 8.3: #92; Wenceslao Cruz Cortes, personal communication). The people from the surrounding areas who moved to San Juan adopted names related to the new places where they settled (see table 8.9 of Appendix 8.A for examples).

Figure 8.3. Map of location-based names.

Meanings of the symbols: family with place name, area, pond, sacred place, well, trail.

Looking north from the hill where the rooster was found, one can see a flat expanse of land. This was where residents of San Juan raised animals such as cows and chickens. The people of San Juan remember this place as being full of an incredible amount of netleaf oak (Quercus rugosa), orchids, ponds, and creeks. They describe it as a wetland. San Juan residents did not have permanent houses in the flat area but would go only to visit their livestock and then return to San Juan.

Cieneguilla was settled in the early 1970s, when the Franciscan friar Edmundo Ávalos Covarrubiasa convinced a group a people to move to the flat land (figure 8.4). The group of San Juan residents included Tomás Cruz (my father), Elucterio Jarquín, Odilón Cortés, and many other families. The people who migrated sought independence from San Juan. Their leaders, especially Tomás, dreamed of having a self-sustaining community. They would be able to have gardens and wells nearby—something Tomás believed would not be possible in San Juan due to the local politics and geographic conditions. (San Juan sits on a high mountain, so there is limited room for gardens and little space to build wells for people to have access to water closer to their homes.)

Figure 8.4. The first plane that landed in Cieneguilla (1973). Source unknown.

After forty-five years, the communities of San Juan and Cieneguilla maintain strong family connections but also have political disagreements over state funding. The state government gives funding for projects to San Juan, and San Juan is responsible for distributing the funds. According to the people of Cieneguilla, however, the San Juan municipality is not fair and gives little funding to Cieneguilla.

The split between the communities is relatively recent. This is one of the reasons why the people of San Juan and Cieneguilla speak the same variety of Chatino, unlike other Chatino communities, which speak different dialects. When the families who founded Cieneguilla left for the lower land, they continued to consider San Juan as their permanent home, viewing Cieneguilla as a temporary place.

This view of Cieneguilla as temporary is reflected linguistically in what Hilaria Cruz has called the “base” and “temporary” uses of the verb ‘to go’ (H. Cruz 2008). The verb ‘to go’ temporary is tsa ^J ‘He/she is going temporary’, and the verb ‘to go’ base is kya ^J ‘He/she is going base’. In discourse, San Juan is always the base. For example, even if someone is born in Cieneguilla, the person still uses kya ^J to talk about going to San Juan.

Figure 8.5. Map of San Juan Quiahije and Cieneguilla (Google Earth 2014).

The following cases demonstrate some of the uses of the base and temporal versions of “to go.”

Case 2. Xna ^H is standing in San Juan. She is going back home to Cieneguilla after visiting her relatives in San Juan.

Case 3. Xna ^H is standing in Sʔwe ^F ‘Juquila’, a mestizo commercial town. She is going back to Cieneguilla or San Juan (figure 8.6).

However, in the common speech of people born in San Juan, San Juan is the base, even for people who have moved elsewhere—for example, the many people from both communities who are migrating to Oaxaca city and the United States. They use the temporal form tsa ^J to describe this migration. See the following examples:

The following examples show the base and temporal form of returning. In example i, Josephine is coming to visit. Example j, Josephine is coming back to her home.

Figure 8.6. Map of San Juan Quiahije, Cieneguilla, and Juquila (Google Earth 2014).

My cousin, Lorenzo Cruz, used the above examples to show me the differences between temporal and base forms used to express, for instance, going to San Juan and Cieneguilla. According to him, young people are starting to use base forms for both. Lorenzo is from San Juan and has come to believe the ideology that the “important town” such as San Juan should only be base and not temporal, because the people from Cieneguilla left from San Juan.

Ways of Referring to People in San Juan

Some of the common lexemes used in person reference are neʔ ^A kwla ^A ‘old person’ (respectful); no ^A-ʔa̹ ^E lyuʔ^N ‘girl’; no ^A-kyʔyu ^E lyuʔ^N ‘boy’; ʔi̹ ^A-ma ^K ‘deceased person’; ma ^H-xuʔ ^F ‘old lady’ (disrespectful); mba ^B ‘compadre’ (my child’s godfather); and lyi ^B ‘comadre’ (godmother). When speakers of any language make reference to objects, persons, or events, they do so in terms of the social and linguistic categories of their communities (Hanks 2007). In Quiahije the kinship terms are inalienable nouns. The possessive kinship terms are the unmarked reference form in the communities of San Juan. Social norms learned through religion, family, local government, and other institutions govern social interaction. For example, in Quiahije it is sometimes the case that when people refer to a member of the community or family, as in yʔa̹ ^E Tyu ^B ‘Peter’s mother’, the speaker references some background information. This background knowledge is part of the perspective from which the speaker individuates the referent (Hanks 2007). Research on informal conversation in US English suggests that the simplest way of referring to a person is by first name (Schegloff 1996), but this is not the case with Chatino. There are, however, some similarities in person reference between Yucatecs and Quiahije Chatinos. In both formal and informal conversation in San Juan, the use of personal names is not customary.

During my research, I often participated in conversations in which personal names were the main topic. On one particular day, I was in Cieneguilla with my family, and a woman came to visit my mother. Since we reside outside of the San Juan area, we do not know the name of every person who lives there. I asked the visitor, ʔwą ^K niya ^K na ^K ʔwę ^K neʔ ^A kwla ^A ‘Miss, what is your name?’ I sensed that the question was invasive, but I was not sure why. The visitor did not answer, but instead laughed to herself. When the visitor left, my mother advised me against asking people for their first names, as this is considered invasive: “People get uncomfortable with those types of questions.” In this community people prefer the use of kin terms for person reference. Since I reside outside the village, sometimes I embarrass myself by using first names inappropriately to refer to people. In contrast, residents learn the rules that govern the use of names at an early age and therefore avoid the mistakes that I might make. After the incident with the visitor, I became interested in understanding person reference in my community. In the following subsections I will discuss person reference using examples of nicknames and kinship terms.

Nicknames

Nicknames are used only in the absence of the named person. The following examples show various kinds of nicknames. They can be based on verbs, nouns, adjectives, or nominalizations of full sentences. The people in San Juan create nicknames frequently and in different ways. One way of creating nicknames is on the basis of a person’s idiosyncrasies. Some people are given nicknames because of their unique physical appearance or for something unusual they once said, as in the following examples.

The following is natural conversation with someone talking about nicknames in San Juan:

Teknonymy

In San Juan the use of first names is uncommon when addressing and referring to others. One way this is avoided is by addressing or referring to people using the name of a relative, a pattern known as “teknonymy.” For instance, parents in San Juan are referred to using the name of their oldest child. My parents were called by the name of my oldest sibling, yʔa̹ ^E La ^Hya ^J ‘Hilaria’s mom’. In addition, locals use teknonymy in a variety of ways (see table 8.1).

The following are some examples of teknonymy in conversation. A father converses with his son-in-law about his daughter (the wife of the son-in-law). When the father refers to his daughter, he refers to her as ‘the mother of the children’. In natural conversation I once saw a woman chasing down a cow. She came upon some young children who were playing and asked to see their mother. When the mother came outside, the two adults had the following conversation:

In example a, the speaker refers to the person she needs to contact as ‘Waldomero’s mother’, using the woman’s son’s name instead of the woman’s own name.

Kinship Terms

In San Juan, kinship terms are commonly used to refer to a person. However, they are rarely used to refer to a relative, mainly because the person already has knowledge of the relationship.

Privacy and intimacy play an important role in how people communicate with each other. Thus, people refer to each other differently when they are at home than when they are in public. At home, children address their mother as ma ^B ‘mom’ and their father as tyi ^B ‘dad’. Outside the home, children avoid directly addressing their parents. Indirect conversation is preferred. The vocative ways parents address their children are ma ^H ‘dear girl’ and tyi ^H ‘dear boy’. The nonvocative term for referring to children is no ^A-xwe ^I ‘little people, children’. In addition, there are two ways of referring to grandparents (see table 8.2). The first is ma ^H steʔ ^A ʔi̹ ^A ‘granny of,’⁵ a form that is alienable and occurs with the possessive marker ʔi̹ ^A. The other form, yʔa̹ ^E steʔ ^I ‘grandmother of’, is inalienable and is inflected for possessor. Of these forms, the alienable one is informal and the inalienable one is formal.

In conversation there are some restrictions on the use of kinship terms when referring to a close relative—such as a mother, father, or grandfather—in that relative’s presence. For example, if I am in a room with my mother, and another person and I are talking about a situation in which my mother is the focus, I would not say, “Then my mother said . . . ” Instead, I would use, “Then this old person said . . . ” If my mother is not present, I would say, “My mother said.” When I am speaking about a person who is not kin, I would say, “The person said,” whether or not that person is present.

Compadrazgo ‘Co-parenthood’

To refer to their compadres, or godparents, people use terms that indicate the compadrazgo relation: ‘nli̹^M ‘my comadre’, and mban^M ‘my compadre’. This is clearly due to the influence of the Catholic Church. The most important coparenthoods (or godparenthoods) are created in two main events: baptisms and weddings. Since time immemorial, the parents of a couple who wish to marry must sanction the marriage after discussing the relationship between the families. If a pending dispute is discovered, the marriage will not be approved. The reason is that coparenthood is like becoming one family. In San Juan a woman does not take her spouse’s patronymic last name; she keeps her last names. I interviewed a woman from San Juan who said that her parents did not let her marry the person that she wanted to marry. This was due to some past issues between the two families. The following is her story:

The above story shows the importance of creating a new family in marriage. However, stories like this are more common among older generations. Nowadays, young people find ways to get married even without their parents’ consent.

Infant baptism is a ritual that was extremely widespread among the people in San Juan, though it is no longer universally practiced, due to the influence of the evangelical church, whose adherents prefer a later baptism ritual. When a child is born to Catholic parents, they seek a married couple to be the godparents of their child. To choose a godparent they use the same strategy as is used in marriage, since they need to make sure there are no past conflicts with the prospective godparents. More recently, people create coparenthood by selecting godparents when children graduate from different stages of school. In these cases, it is not necessary to review the history of the relationship between the families.

Describing People’s Identity

Self-reference in Chatino is a form of identification. The term for a Chatino person is a compound, neʔ ^A tnya ^E. Neʔ ^A means ‘person’. The meaning of tnya ^E is unknown in Quiahije, though other varieties of Chatino would call this ‘work’. The following sentences are examples of self-reference and of the lexemes that are used for referring to oneself (table 8.4).

We now turn to Chatino names for other groups of people. Geographically, San Juan neighbors one mestizo town, Juquila; the rest of the neighboring towns are Chatino villages. Table 8.5 lists names for some of the neighboring people.

Personal Names

In addition to the unofficial forms of reference discussed in the previous section, every citizen in San Juan has an official name listed on Catholic Church and government records. In modern Mexico the act of giving a person a name is standard from a legal and cultural perspective, and having a name recognized by the state is considered part of one’s social identity. Naming in San Juan takes place upon baptism, which serves as an important cultural rite of passage (Smith-Stark 2000).

Official Names

Every Mexican citizen must be registered with the government when he/she is born. The official name consists of a first name and two last names in Spanish. The parents submit the name of the child, and the civil registry records it. It is important to mention that the practice of naming is changing; some people choose names for their children that they hear in the media or on the Internet, television, or radio. In the last twenty years, there has been a massive migration to the United States, and many children come back home with English names, for example, Ke ^Fvi̹ ^J ‘Kevin’.

In addition, in colonial and postcolonial Mexico the government forced people to follow exogenous naming systems in order to identify individuals accurately and to have better control over the population. Currently, every citizen of San Juan has to be registered. Up until a few years ago people had to walk eight hours to register their children, but now the government visits the community to register people. In the following subsections I will discuss in detail the practices of linguistic borrowing names of the people of San Juan. To adequately understand these practices, it is important to note that the Chatino speakers of San Juan were forced by the Catholic Church and Mexican government to speak Spanish. This has led to diverse patterns of linguistic borrowing between Spanish and Chatino.

Names Derived from Spanish

The official first names and last names of the people of San Juan are all derived from Spanish. The first research on the borrowing of proper names in Chatino started with Kitty and Leslie Pride in their dictionary of the Eastern Chatino of Panixtlahuaca, a town neighboring San Juan, where a moderately distinct dialect of Chatino is spoken (Pride and Pride 2004). They made a list of about seventy names that were derived from Spanish. Table 8.6 shows a list of names from Quiahije and Panixtlahuaca that are derived from Spanish.

Traditionally, names in Spanish were taken from saints’ days listed on the calendars. These calendars were brought by priests to the village of San Juan during evangelization (Wenceslao Cruz Cortes, personal communication). The pre-Hispanic traditions of naming in San Juan are unknown, though it is possible that Chatinos shared or adopted the practices of nearby Zapotecs and Mixtecs: “In pre-Hispanic times, Mexican people had four names (Horcasitas 1973). The tonaltoca, which was from a calendar; tlalticpactoca, a name of the period of occurrences; a god’s name; and a dignitary’s name. The Mayas from Yucatán used a patrilineal and matrilineal last name (Roys 1940). The Zapotecs used a calendar for naming. The Mixtecs used the calendar and at the age of seven got another name” (Caso 1977, quoted in Smith-Stark 2000; translation mine).

It is difficult to determine whether these practices were part of Chatino customs. Even the Chatino elders do not know their ancestors’ naming practices. I am not aware of any person who has a Chatino name based on the practices mentioned in the quote above. All names, to my knowledge, are derived from Spanish.

Last Names

Official last names, as mentioned above, are actually two names: a patronym and a matronym. In San Juan there are few last names. Out of 300 speakers, I found 30 last names. If shared last names indicated a consanguineous relationship, it would seem that everyone was related. However, people regard their last names as imposed by the Catholic Church, so they find ways of distinguishing blood relatives from nonblood relatives despite common patronyms. People with the same patronym can marry one another, so their children end up with the same surname as both patronym and matronym, e.g., Cruz Cruz.

Place-Names

The family names in Chatino are unofficial names that are based on where one’s family lives. Every member of the community has a family name. When a family settles in a particular area of San Juan, it will adopt the name of that location and transmit the name to the next generation of the family. A similar phenomenon was found historically in English, for example, Hill, Overbrook, Woods.

In figure 8.6 one can see that people in San Juan mainly settle around the church (#92). There are many aspects of landscape that are considered for use in informal last names, such as place descriptions, ponds, fluids (urine, saliva), animals, rivers, sacred places, plant names, and architectural constructions such as wells and churches, and trails. Table 8.7 lists the distribution of places used in family names in the new settlement of San Juan Quiahije.

Locatives

In Chatino, like many languages of the world, speakers use body parts to talk about location. For example, in English, speakers at times use “the foot of the mountain” to refer to the base of a mountain. An instance of this in Chatino is the following:

In example a, the referent is a glen, which is in the forest of yka ^E kyji̹ ^B. This glen is named after a particular tree.

A number of family names use body parts to refer to location. The following examples are of family names referring to places around trees. While the particular trees mentioned in the names often no longer exist, they remain in the memory of the people in San Juan.

The following examples use body parts in conjunction with more permanent locations:

The next example uses an inset body part to refer to a place. The natural interpretation of the name used would be that the family lives above the anthill. The story told about this place is that in the past it had many anthills, which explains how the family that lives there got their name.

A long time ago, people did not use latrines. When they had to go to the bathroom they went to an empty area, in particular a hill named lo⁰ nte̹ ^I kyʔi̹ ^C ‘poop mountain’. The people who lived in that area were named neʔ ^A lo⁰ nte̹ ^I kyʔi̹ ^C ‘people of the poop mountain’ (#61 on map).

The complete list of place names of San Juan can be found in Appendix 8.A.

Conclusion

In this article I explored naming themes of indigenous knowledge by analyzing the connection between the linguistic and physical landscape of San Juan Quiahije municipality. Like many indigenous communities, the speakers of Quiahije Chatino are undergoing a rapid shift away from the indigenous heritage language toward Spanish.

Why, how, and to what extent do elders transmit speech about the land to their communities, which are encountering homogenizing influences? Meandering to and from issues on our journeys, elders offered counternarratives to the dominant one of broader social, economic, and political change: of Mexican state-building, local development initiatives, democracy, migration, and globalization. This was a conscious struggle on their part to articulate the value of the landscape to Chatinos. Place and species names in Chatino languages refer to aspects of the surrounding environment, such as the ecological or cultural uses of the noun in question.

The Quiahije local government is giving new official names for place-names. The assigned names included erroneous Spanish translations of Eastern Chatino lexicons. For example, for kqya ^C tan ^B, Eastern Chatino for ‘mountain and oak tree’, authorities gave cerro de manteca, Spanish for ‘mound of lard’. Authorities also borrowed words from Mexico’s Catholic heritage, the names of Christian saints, which now appear on official maps and new street signs.

Despite these impositions of nonindigenous personal and place-names, many older means of referencing social life and landscape remain common in the everyday life of Chatino communities. Chatinos name each other not only according to a Spanish-derived system of names set at birth, but also according to the actions they and their families take as members of a Chatino town. Perhaps the most striking difference between the ways of naming is that church and state mandate the first, while the community shapes the other. But it should also be noted that the second way is grounded in a community space; that is, in a particular place and between people in relationships. Those relationships cannot be transplanted. These ways of naming were found to occur in common circumstances, such as when Chatinos select coparents at the church in San Juan, when a woman chases a cow in Cieneguilla, and when Chatinos talk about friends. It is a way of naming rooted in the way the community lives, so it is inseparable from an understanding of Chatino culture.