A Ballgame Story Reworked as Anti-Myth in the Relación de Michoacán: Kingship, Identity, and Remembrance Forgotten in a Tale of the Origin of the Spaniards

Abstract

Existing analyses of a Tarascan (Purépecha) narrative contained in the Relación de Michoacán about a ballgame contest have focused only on the paradigmatic relations between the characters in this story. Additionally, these paradigmatic understandings of this particular ballgame narrative have only been formulated in coordination with what is known of characters in related stories that contain similar elements. Resulting interpretations based on the paradigmatic relations of characters within the story and comparison with other stories explain the meaning of the story as an allegory of celestial phenomena, as all other such stories have been interpreted. This article goes further than those studies by applying a syntagmatic approach that analyzes the sequential action and transformations of the story itself. Paradigmatic or symbolic meanings are incorporated within such an approach, with the recognition that such relations are the subject of transformation through the plot of the story. By using this method, I show that the total transformations of the story are best explained as an ‘anti-myth’. In an ‘anti-myth’, a foreign entity is explained as the opposite of some aspect of indigenous society. The ball game story in the Relación de Michoacán functions as an anti-myth because the remains of a dead ancestor are transformed into a deer that is a post hoc mythological precursor to the Spaniards’ horses. Through this transformation the horses, as fetishized vehicles and sources of Spanish power, are represented as the results of an indigenous failure to remember one’s ancestors which immediately precedes that transformation. The point of the story is revealed to be an effort to understand the nature of the Spaniards’ power, and to indigenize that power in order to reclaim it.