Refracting Memories: Two Colonial Zapotec Narratives about the Spanish Conquest

Abstract

This article proposes the idea of refracting memories to understand the transformation of historical memory of Mesoamerican communities in the 17th and 18th centuries. This process is illustrated through the analysis of divinatory manuals that contained references to the arrival of Spanish, and through the Probanza of Yelabichi, a Northern Zapotec text that narrates the military and spiritual conquests and the ethnogenesis of Zapotecs, Mixes, and Chinantecs, as if they were part of the same process. The second document, introduced in a lawsuit in the 1750s, allows us to analyze how collective interests refracted the events of the conquest to form a series of enchained memories that shaped colonial Zapotec identity.