On a gloomy winter day nearly thirty years ago my colleague Jane Walsh handed me a batch of papers that she had found in the National Anthropological Archives, three flights down from my office in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. "Have you seen this?" It was marked Manuscrito en lengua sotzil [Manuscript in the Sotzil Language], surprising because of the scarcity of Mexican material in these archives, and astonishing because it had landed in the building that also housed a Tzotzil Mayanist "expert." The manuscript as well as the expert had been moved some years before from the Bureau of American Ethnology in the Smithsonian castle.

This typed document, a Tzotzil translation of a Spanish proclamation dated 1812, had been donated to the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1930 by William Gates, who had added the following note:

This transcript, together with two others, the large and important Sotzil Dictionary, and the Soque sermons, was presented by Orozco y Jiménez to Dr. Nicolás León, who later sold them to Paul Wilkinson, from whose (second) sale I bought them.

The Bishop's palace was completely looted by the CarranzaAlvarado forces, the brutal leader of which I later encountered as Governor in Oaxaca when I passed through there in 1918. After the looting above, i.e. in the Spring of 1915, my agent, F. J. Smith, was given leave to enter the former library and "help himself." He reported "nothing left."'

The original manuscripts had been found nearby in Comitán around the turn of this century by the Bishop of Chiapas, Francisco Orozco y Jiménez (plate 1), who transferred them to his episcopal library in San Cristóbal, and assigned "M. M" in 1906 to make a copy of the dictionary and the proclamation. My assumption that he was a priest cannot be verified, for there is no one with those initials in the list of priests of the diocese shortly thereafter. The next year the Bishop had the copies delivered to the director of the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnología in Mexico City. It was almost surely the proclamation sent to the museum that was described by the bishop's biographer as "a beautiful manuscript in the Tzotzil language" (Dávila Garibi 1913:8).

Then began a long odyssey for these transcripts as they passed from hand to hand, in Mexico City from the Mexican anthropologist Nicolás León to the American bibliophile Paul Wilkinson, then to the Mayanist William Gates in Point Loma, California, in 1914, then to the bibliophile Robert Garrett in Baltimore in the late 30s. He donated them to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton in 1942, from where they were transferred to the Princeton University Library in 1949. This odyssey is described in detail in The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Domingo Zinacantán (Laughlin 1988). In addition to the Princeton copy, and Gates' typed copy at the National Anthropological Archives, is a photocopy made by Gates, stored in the Wilkinson Collection of Indian Languages at the Library of Congress.

M. M.'s clear hand gave no indication of the identity of the nineteenth-century translator whose task it was to convey to the Indians that they were protected by a new constitution and a new Overseas Ministry that would soon bring prosperity and happiness to all the inhabitants of Spanish America, so long as they remained loyal to the Motherland and did not stray onto the path of Napoleon and the insurgents. But it was clear from the style, the parallel phrases studded with metaphors, the religiosity and moral pronouncements that the original Spanish political proclamation must have read very differently.

Now began the task of locating the Spanish original. In those good old days when the stacks of the Library of Congress were open to scholars, I spent many hours in what turned out to be a fruitless search, despite the discovery of many proclamations dating from that era. The only alternative seemed to be a trip to Spain.

In the summer of 1975, with my family I crossed the Atlantic on one of the last voyages of the Leonardo de Vinci, traveled through France, and then by train from Hendaye across the border to Irun, from where, because our official pass ports lacked official visas, we were set back on the train and deported to Hendaye where, after a long search, I was able to discover a hospice vacancy so that we could celebrate the annual Basque festival before returning to Spain.

For two weeks I trekked from library to library in Madrid, including the newspaper library. Several times I thought the proclamation would be placed in my hands, but it was never so.

Wondering if a copy had been saved by the family of the Duque del Infantado who, as President of the Regency in Cádiz, had signed the proclamation, I secured a letter of introduction from the American cultural attaché and proceeded to the duke's residence. Repeated rapping on huge wooden doors caused them to be opened a crack. An old woman peered out at me suspiciously. When I asked for the duke she replied, "The duke is on vacation on his yacht," and pushed the door tight shut.

In my library research I happened on Benjamin Bentura's El Hidalgo Payanes, a biography of Joaquín de Mosquera y Figueroa, regent and, he claimed, author of the Proclamation, with a paragraph from the Proclamation included in his biography. A search in the phone book produced Bentura's name, but on calling I learned that he, too, was on vacation, but was given his phone number in Zaragosa. Intrigued by my project, he suggested that his daughter could take me to his apartment to search through his library. He promised to phone her and gave me her number and address. At her invitation, I took the elevator up to the eighth floor of a condominium tower, but no, it was not her apartment. With sinking heart I tried another tower and another before I found her. We set off the next morning to her father's apartment behind the bullring. Opening a glassfronted bookcase, I examined eagerly book after book until finally I discovered a book dated 1820, wherein the author, Joaquín Lorenzo Villanueva, one of the deputies of the Cortes imprisoned by Ferdinand VII, writing from his jail cell, called for justice. He wondered how it was possible that his judge could be Joaquín de Mosquera y Figueroa who had written—then followed quotations (not always correct) from that very same paragraph of the Proclamation cited by Bentura. Here was proof that de Mosquera was indeed the author of the Proclamation, but the jailed deputy offered no further information.

Days spent in the Archive of the Indies in Seville resulted in nothing more than my embarrassment as the archivists watched my clumsy attempts to rebundle the dockets as neatly as they had been before I untied them. No luck either in the library of Cádiz. And so with only a paragraph of the Proclamation in my folder we returned home.

A week later, at summer's end, I made my way back to the stacks of the Library of Congress. Disheartened, I randomly pulled a book off the shelf and opened it up to see "Proclama del Duque del Infantado a los habitantes de ultramar" in a collection of documents from the Archives of Guatemala.

The next scene, winter in the episcopal archives of San Cristóbal: a large, dingy room in the back of the cathedral where, for nearly fifty years, bound packets of documents had sat from floor to ceiling, gathering dust and creating a zoo of bookworms.

Marianito, the sacristan, bent double with age, would insert an enormous iron key in the door to let me in. Assuming I was a priest, he asked me to bless his saint pictures! No amount of searching revealed the original Tzotzil docu ment that must have disappeared when the Carranza forces looted the library in 1915.

Who was the translator and what had provoked the Bishop of Chiapa, Ambrosio Llano, to ask for a translation? I pored through the bundles, some ordered in the 1930s by subject, with seventeenth-century parchments nestled between twentieth-century carbon copies in no apparent order. Finally I discovered an enormous collection of the correspondence directed to "my" bishop, Ambrosio Llano. The life and times of don Ambrosio had its own drama when a severe earthquake shook the letters out of my hands. At last I opened the letters of two priests who, protesting their age and their infirmities, declined to do "the difficult interpretation" of translating with such "elevation" the proclamation sent from Spain. But that was all. In dusty bundle after dusty bundle not another word about the Proclamation.

And then one day I snuck upstairs and peeked through a large keyhole: broken pews, pulpits, shelves loaded with ancient tomes, stacks of newspapers and Church missals. A visit from my Jesuit anthropologist friend, Eugenio Maurer, incited me to ask the sacristan's permission to inspect the shelves. In a few moments my companion pulled out a bundle of worm-eaten proclamations, sewn together, including a copy signed by the Duque del Infantado.

Returning to Washington in the spring, I thought, "This is an old man's job, I can do it when I reach that stage of my life." And so the Proclamation was shelved once again.

But several years later I was visited by Lawrence Feldman who, having just returned from Seville, recounted his discovery of four copies of a Spanish proclamation, translated into different Indian languages. One was in Ixil, another in Q'eqchi', a third with the mysterious name "Zeefe," and the fourth unidentified. "Who signed the proclamation?" I asked. "The Duque del Infantado in 1812." Realizing that the passage of time had stripped away any reason for postponement, I began again.

With copies in hand, I phoned Terrence Kaufman, but had great difficulty in reading aloud the Zeefe and the unidentified text. "I thought you had gained experience in reading colonial Mayan manuscripts," he rejoined. "No, appar ently not. I'll send them to you," was my lame response. A few days later he called to boost my spirits with the report that Zeefe was the extinct, non-Mayan language Xinka, and that this was the longest surviving text known to date. The other was Quechua from Peru, identified later by Bruce Mannheim as being of the Cuzco dialect.

Once again I returned to the San Cristóbal archives, now carefully ordered by community and housed by Angélica Inda in the upstairs room, under the gaze of every Bishop of Chiapas, their portraits lining the walls in red- and black-robed splendor. More pieces of the historical puzzle were fitted together, but never has there appeared the Archbishop of Guatemala's request for Indian translations, nor the Bishop of Chiapa's request for a Tzotzil version, nor any further reference to the Proclamation.

In an effort to set the stage for the presentation of a Tzotzil proclamation in Chiapa, I gleaned the episcopal archives where, apart from Bishop Llano's correspondence, I found only scattered references to life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But in 1993 1 came on a recently discovered and published collection of documents that had disappeared from the episcopal archives (Porrúa 1992). Dating from 1779 to 1782, they chronicle the struggle between Joseph Ordoñez y Aguiar, the "perpetual rector and vicar for His Majesty of the Town of Chamula," and the Indian caciques of that community (Porrúa 1992:254). From these 567 pages of manuscript emerges a vivid portrait of Indians caught in the vise of Church and State, where cruelty, intrigue, and corruption prevailed, where the determination to maintain Maya Indian identity conflicted absolutely with the outsiders' attempts to "civilize" and Christianize the community. Looking in this dark mirror, it is startling, disturbing, to recognize a familiar face, that of the ancestor of today's Chamula.

Though the events chronicled in these documents occurred twenty years before don Ambrosio's arrival in Ciudad Real (San Cristóbal de las Casas) and though they occurred in just one town, it was the major Indian community. The sentiments of the Chamulans were central to the concerns of Church and State in Chiapa.

Chamula was the focus of the only other proclamation known to be translated into Tzotzil, in two columns, with Spanish on the left and Tzotzil on the right. This was a broadside signed by two priests in San Cristóbal de las Casas, in October, 1870, during the War of the Castes, or the War of Saint Rose. In sharp contrast to the benevolence of the 1812 proclamation, this proclamation assails the Indians with messages uncannily similar to those offered in the 1990s by the Mexican government to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Titled "For All the Rebellious Indians to Hear," the 1870 proclamation declaimed:

The Government of this state is disposed to punish severely Indians who have disrupted the public order and to bring them back under the rigor of the law.

But because you are so many and because in our fatherly hearts we hate to take the full measure against you, and because we consider you guided by ignorance and perhaps by terror your leaders instilled in you, the Government has given you eight days to surrender yourselves.

And since you may not understand this, we undersigned have sent you this letter in your own speech, making the following observations: 1. If you surrender within eight days, you will be forgiven, and if not

then you will be persecuted and you will die, either by gunshots or by hunger in your flight.

2. If you do not surrender, not only you but your wives and your children will die. Not because the Government would kill them, but because fleeing into the mountains the poor women and children will suffer terrible hunger, and from hunger will follow death.

3. Pursued, you will be unable to plant, and with no one tending them you will lose your stores of corn, so even those who are not shot will simply die with nothing at all to eat.

4. What you demand is unjust. God, the Most Holy Virgin of the Rosary, your Patron San Juan, San Mateo and Santa Rosa are angry with you, and have brought about the fall of your religion.

5. You were cheated by your leaders. This Galindo cheated you. Many died in your war, but who has come to bring them back to life?

6. The President of the Republic now knows what you have done and is angry with you, and though there are enough soldiers here, now he is going to send us many more, and then you will be brought to an end. Those who are coming do not know you, they do not love you as we do. The proof of our love is that so far we have sent so few soldiers against you.

Everyone in this city is begging the Government to pardon you, but only if you surrender at once and lay down your arms so we can believe you. (Wilson 1972:282-283)

This proclamation essentially heralded the end of Indian armed resistance in Chiapas until our times.

Turning now to the Tzotzil translation of the Proclamation of 1812, a close examination of the text showed that it was sprinkled with vocabulary from the neighboring language, Tzeltal. In 1994, when I read the Proclamation to my Tzeltal friend Tziak Tza'pat Tz'it from Tenejapa, a crooked smile crossed his face as he heard how his "elder brothers" in Spain cared so for the Indians of America, and when the Proclamation promised a new age with "good teachers in the schools" he shook with laughter. Indeed, the 1812 Proclamation's promises of good roads, good teachers, hospitals, bountiful crops, strengthened industries and increased trade read like every governor's annual report, less the statistics.

Two priests' letters in the church archives, one sent from Simojovel and the other from Huitiupán (then Gueyteupan), together with the linguistic evidence of the Tzotzil translation itself, suggested strongly that the text was penned originally in Huitiupán. This tropical town in the north of Chiapas, today with a population of 12,000 inhabitants, a majority Tzotzil-speaking, is virtually unknown to the Tzotzil Indians of the Highlands. In the seventeenth century, on the Royal Highway from Ciudad Real to Villahermosa, it boasted three large churches and their Franciscan friaries. In the 1860s the priest asked permission to remove everything from the remaining Church of San Pedro because there were only three or four huts left nearby. Today, a small chapel built in the 1920s is dwarfed by the ceiba tree in the main square. A few old men still wear white cotton shirts and pants, their wives' waists wrapped in dyed blue skirts woven in the Barrio de Mexicanos in San Cristóbal.

It is comfortable to assume that Huitiupán, home of the Proclamation of 1812, with the passage of time has witnessed progress in human rights for its Indian population. Alas, this is far from the truth.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century much of the land in the whole area of northern Chiapas was purchased by a handful of San Cristóbal elite who established coffee fincas and cattle ranches. Arriving in the principal town of Simojovel and learning that the giant ceiba tree in the plaza was considered by the Indians to be sacred, they plied the mayor with liquor so that in a drunken state he gave permission for the ceiba to be cut down. The Ladinos promptly had it felled (surely by Indians) and built a new courthouse, a house of justice.

In the 1930s, when Graham Greene in his The Power and the Glory chronicled the persecution of the priests and the burning of the saints in the neighboring state of Tabasco under the orders of Governor Garrido, a similar drama was being enacted across the state line: "Following the course of Garrido Canabal in Tabasco, the Governor of Chiapas, Victórico Grajales ordered the burning of the saints in the public squares of each town. He prohibited Indian languages and the use of traditional clothing" (Pérez Castro 1989:76). This is remembered in Huitiupán.

A Mexican anthropologist, Ana Bella Pérez Castro, studying the agrarian movement in the region, interviewed the people of Huitiupán in 1983. Their memories are not easily forgotten: "Don Benjamín Mazón hid the people, his peons; he hid them in the woods, that's why there was a delay in giving them land; he hid them so that it would seem that he had no people, so they wouldn't fight, so they wouldn't take away the land, that's why they remained slaves." (Pérez Castro 1989:79)

A son presents, with no apologies, indeed with pride, the life of his father as feudal patrón in the middle of the century, this century. With intimate detail he paints a vivid portrait of Indian serfdom in shockingly recent times:

[His father] had just reached 69 years of age. Some say he had 80 children, and others say no, that there were around 90. What I can tell you for sure is that the late Filemón, my father, was the master and lord of Sacaltic. Many say that the late Filemón raped women, but it's just pure lies. He was good, yes indeed, all the wives of the peons passed through his hands first. When they reached ten or twelve years, he said to their fathers: "Look, now it would be good if you sent me your daughter to work on the finca." And as everyone knew that he was the boss, they sent them. If they did not send them, he ran them off the very j same day, but in all those years he only sent one running. One who for sure was nobody's father.

It's true I didn't see it, because the one I'm going to tell you about, who lives now in the ejido La Competencia...is 45 years old now. But they tell me that one day don Filemón got mad, really mad, because he learned that Isidoro Hernández had a wife who hadn't passed through his hands.

He summoned all the peons, struck Isidoro in the face and the stomach and ran him off the finca. And to teach everyone a lesson he took out his knife and cut off Isidoro's left ear, who departed with the blood pouring down.

Don Filemón liked things to be right. That old man who was here began as a child earning 20 cents for a whole day's work. From six to six. And that other one told me he worked one week for don Filemón, and the next on other people's cornfields. The deceased had a shop and sold to us on trust. When someone wanted to leave he said to him, "Very well, you can go, but pay me first."

Those who did not get up early to work he scolded and put them to work on Sundays from six til noon, for nothing. But it's true he never whipped anyone, as many of the bosses used to do here.

He said to those who had plenty of work, but were very lazy; "Now you're going to get it straight, loafers." And he sent them to bring firewood, to pick corn, tobacco and bananas. They say that people used to be stronger. They each carried loads of 50 kilos on their back, from here to Simojovel where the deceased sold his things, because others took them out directly by plane.

On this finca the deceased had about 60 women, but don't think they all lived with him. When they were little they worked in his house and then each one went to their but and did the best they could. Most of them married other peons (don Filemón himself found husbands for them), and others left. When he was tired of one and wanted to have another join him, he just sent first for the father to advise him of it ... Yes, my father, the late don Filemón, was a lecher! (Pérez Castro 1989:68-69)

In 1993, ten years after Pérez Castro's study, I sought the aid of Samuel Robledo, a Ladino of Huitiupán I had met the previous year who knew some Tzotzil. He had led my wife and me through chigger-infested fields (we later learned) to see the ruins of the church and monastery of Santa María Asunción, the patron saint. Hidden in the jungle, fragments of the huge walls were pulled together and apart by tangles of roots and vines. To check on the Tzotzil vocabulary of the Proclamation of 1812 and its possible similarity to the dialect of Huitiupán he took me to interview his old compadre, Tranquilino Moreno Espinosa. Together they confirmed my suspicion that the text had been penned in Huitiupán.

Though Sr. Robledo was pink-cheeked, he proved to be entirely fluent in Tzotzil, explaining that he had come as a young child to Huitiupán. I asked if he knew of don Filemón Penagos' reputation as a lecher. Nodding his head, he

continued in Tzotzil: "I was brought up in Sacaltic. I saw don Filemón cut off the ear of Guadalupe—his name is Guadalupe, not Isidoro—Hernández, who lives at La Competencia. As a boy I once saw don Filemón stroking the legs of a little girl. Then he ushered her into his room, and when she began to cry I heard him tell her in Tzotzil, 'Shut up and suck your candy!"' I asked about don Filemón's son: "He died recently; same name, same habits."

As I left Huitiupán, I gave a ride to a hitchhiker who turned out to be one of the 150 soldiers encamped at the edge of town, with the duty of protecting the remaining fincas from Indian "invasion." On Oct. 16 [1993] more than 1,000 state police in Chiapas, Mexico, violently evicted a group of indigenous campesinos who had been occupying the Huitiupán mayor's office for a week in a local political dispute. More than forty protesters were beaten and wounded in the attack and five were arrested. The campesinos were to meet that day with state authorities and release the mayor, who they said had been "arrested by the people" (La Jornada, 17 October, 1993). In a 1993 report, the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center (CDHPRO) reported that Chiapas accounted for 63.8% of the 3,387 human rights violations against indigenous people recorded in Mexico for 1992 (Weekly News Update on Nicaragua and the Americas, #196, October 31, 1993, Courtesy of Carter Wilson.). Great horned serpents of various stripes are still alive in Chiapas!

The "why" for this study generates no easy answers. The Spanish proclamation is a model of conciseness. Sent to all the colonies of America and Asia, it was a valiant effort to restore Spain's hegemony, but shortly after its issuance, absolutism under Ferdinand VII returned with a vengeance. It became an irrelevant, forgotten document. I could find no copy in Spain. I only know of copies in the archives in Seville, Guatemala City, Lima, Mexico City, and San Cristóbal. I know of only five books that give it a mention: two bibliographies, two biographies, and the plea written by the jailed deputy. It is likely that it, just as the 1812 Constitution itself, promoted a demand for liberal government throughout the colonies, establishing a mind-set that would no longer tolerate abuse, contributing to the revolutionary cause, to the irresistible desire for independence.

I could find no edict from Spain calling for the translation of this proclamation into native languages, and yet its existence in four Indian languages of the Captaincy General of Guatemala and in one of Peru implied that such an edict must have been dispatched to the colonies. A tip from Bruce Mannheim provided the missing piece: a bibliography of Peruvian documents revealed that the Quechua translation of the Proclamation had been printed in Lima in 1813 by order of the Archbishop who, in his letter to Spain, referred to "[letter] #121, according to which the Minister of State of Your Excellency requires that as soon as the Proclamation is translated and printed for the inhabitants of these kingdoms, copies of it be sent in triplicate, as I was notified by His Most Serene Highness in the decree of August 30 of the past year. Consequently I enclose a published copy of the best translation of many that were done so that Your Excellency be so kind as to inform His Most Serene Highness" (Rivet 1951:247). The bibliographer, Paul Rivet, commented, "Because of its historical interest and rarity we reproduce in full the text of this proclamation" (Rivet 1951:247).

All pertinent royal decrees were routinely sent to both the civil and religious governments. But the destruction of their archives in the military turmoils of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, together with the difficulty of penetrating the surviving Church archives, has impeded the discovery of other translations of the proclamation into Indian languages of Mexico and South America, and possibly native languages of the Philippines. With its particular concern for "the Indians, that beautiful portion of mankind, inhabiting America," this proclamation called not only for the colonists' loyalty, but also for a new, national respect for Indians.

These translations emphasize the Regents' intention that Indians be aware of the new political order.

To my knowledge, this is the only Spanish decree ever sent to the colonies with specific instructions that it be translated and printed in the native languages. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the number of Indians literate in their mother tongue must have been limited, but the elite, both in Peru and in Tlaxcala, did publish texts in their own language. The Viceroy of New Spain issued edicts in Nahuatl that warned of the perils of following the rebel Hidalgo. Although directed primarily to the inhabitants of northwestern Mexico, for whom Nahuatl was not even a first language, their number indicates that the local government considered it appropriate to communicate to the Indians in native languages, not only in Spanish. Perhaps it was under the influence of the Peruvian deputy to the Cortes, Inca Yupanqui, and the Tlaxcalan deputy, José Miguel Guridi y Alcocer, who were the most eloquent spokesmen for the Indian cause, that this order for translation of the Proclamation was promulgated. It may be taken as a reflection of the sincerity of the liberal deputies of the Cortes of Cádiz.

We can dare to surmise about the general historical significance of the Proclamation of 1812, but locally we are without a clue. If the Tzotzil proclamation was read in the churches, if it won the Indian parishioners' loyalty to the Metropolis and gave them a new sense of self-respect, for this we have no evidence.

While there are Tzotzil word lists, grammars, catechisms, and sermons from the 19th century, this is a unique survival of Tzotzil narrative from that period. There are no earlier narratives of any length. The mixture of Tzeltal with the Tzotzil is puzzling. Perhaps it was a deliberate ploy of the anonymous friar so that his translation would reach the speakers of both languages. Huitiupán was situated on one of the main routes from the Chiapas Highlands to the Caribbean Coast and so would have been visited by many speakers of both languages. Today, Indians living along the border area of Tzotzil and Tzeltal are fluent in both languages.

There is no way to judge from the available historical records what the significance of the Proclamation was in the nineteenth century, either nationally or locally, but in company with contemporary decrees and correspondence, it opens a window on the years just prior to independence: a chapter of Spanish, French, and local Chiapas history that has been allowed to slumber on the shelves. Who of us would dream that for the officials of that time Napoleon and his spies were like the "red scare"? This was a period of high hopes, of dark intrigues, of failed aspirations, when Church and State worked at times in union and at times in great conflict, when the general public in 1812 celebrated in Spain and in America the birth of the Constitution, and two years later, with equal gusto, its premature death. In the foreground strutted Napoleon and Joseph Bonaparte in combat with Lord Wellington; just behind stood Ferdinand VII and his premier, "the Prince of Peace," then Alexander of Russia, the "fanatic insurgents," the "wise men" of Cádiz, archbishops, bishops, captains general, and an anonymous friar all imploding on the lives of the Tzotzil Maya Indians of the Province of Chiapa. Or maybe not.

There is our friar who struggled with "the difficult interpretation" of the Proclamation so that its elevated tone would be conveyed to the Indians and simultaneously reach their hearts—a task he carried out loyally, weaving an elaborate tapestry of metaphor, bedizened with horned serpents, whirlwinds and jaguars, converting a political decree into a moral exhortation, and yet a task that this conservative friar, believing in the divine right of kings, must have performed with deep misgivings.

The pages that follow present a theater of the absurd, a fabulous history with myriads of details as if set in the Milky Way. The reader will not be comforted with an historical "argument." Seldom is there a logical, reasonable explanation for the existence or significance of these realities that time and again warrant the adjective "incredible." Those familiar with Chiapas will be amazed at the parallels with current figures and events. The political-religious strife of the town of Chamula in 1778 reads like today; Indian caciques, supported by the government, refusing that their people be catechized, have run the priest out, and caused many Chamulans to flee to San Cristóbal. In both periods we see a bishop moderating between the conservatives and the liberals (Ambrosio Llano, Samuel Ruíz), a government representative who strives valiantly, but in vain, to gain rights for the Indians (Mariano Robles, Manuel Camacho), a conservative church official who works against the bishop (the archdeacon and the papal nuncio), eloquent revolutionary military leaders (Matamoros and subcomandante Marcos) and bands of ill-armed insurgents who lurk in the woods.

In 1993, 181 years after the friar spoke of rights for the Indian population of Chiapas, for the first time since 1527, the Indian merchants of Hidalgo and Oaxaca were prohibited by the mayor of Cholula in the state of Puebla from selling their handicrafts at the patron saint's fiesta because he did not want "animalitos" in the streets. Racism in Mexico is not limited to Chiapas.

The historical images that parade through this book lead up to and follow the proclamation that promised all good things for the colonists in return for their loyalty. It was drafted in Tzotzil-Tzeltal by an unknown friar who, attempting to speak for the government and the Indians, embellished his phrases with strings of metaphors. And so Napoleon and his spies and, between the lines, the "fanatical insurgents," become great horned serpents, whirlwinds, and jaguars. And now it is subcomandante Marcos, the masked, also non-Indian representative of the Indians who, having absorbed their metaphorical vision, proclaims, "we are the mountain," "we are the people of the night, the Tzotzils, the bats."

It is my hope that this serpentine tale, doubling back on itself again and again, will proceed with fresh surprises. In Mayan style it will entertain, often with levity, the great hardships of the Indians of Chiapas.

Throughout the history of Chiapas, from Napoleonic times until now, the local powers at all levels have proclaimed that they can solve the problems of Chiapas with no outside help. Only their own sovereignty is relevant. Any exter nal influence is an intrusion. The fallacy of this view is obvious; the economic, political and social reality of Chiapas has been, and still is, dictated in large part by mysterious external forces. For this reason, I do not present the "Tzotzil" proclamation at the beginning of this study, but rather focus on the situation from the other side of the ocean, coming closer and closer, through New Spain, to Guatemala, and, finally, to the province of Chiapa where one can see the authentic Chiapanecs at work.

Having set the scene on both continents I will present the regent's Old World proclamation, followed by the friar's New World proclamation. Then I will compare the two documents from a variety of perspectives—historical, philosophical, literary and linguistic—to show how our anonymous friar sought with great style to reach the hearts of his illiterate Indian "younger brothers." I then return to the events in the two continents that rendered the regent's and our friar's efforts exercises in futility, so that their words that I have quoted in full, the products of their lofty designs, are reduced to forgotten scraps of history.

My technique mirrors that described by Hannah Arendt, discussing the contribution of the German historian Walter Benjamin:

"The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d'étre in a free-floating state, as it were. It definitely was a sort of surrealistic montage." (Arendt 1968:47. Courtesy of Carter Wilson.) In Benjamin's own words:

It is the "attempt to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations of reality, its scraps as it were" (Arendt 1968:11).

"The writing consists largely of quotations—the craziest mosaic imaginable" (Arendt 1968:8).

"Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions" (Arendt 1968:38).

Beware!