Quiet Colonialism: Listening to the Cancuc Uprising of 1712

Abstract

In this article we ‘read against the grain’ of the archive to explore the sound world of an Indigenous rebellion against Spanish colonial rule in Chiapas in 1712. Although this topic has often interested historians and anthropologists, none of them explicitly engage the rebellion’s sonorities. Contending that a focus on sound may allow new features of the rebellion to come to light, we explore the use of sonorous objects and musical instruments in the rebels’ religious worship and military practices. Building on this analysis, we emphasize the place of ideas about ‘quietude’ within practices for violently reasserting colonial power.

In 1716 the priest Jacobo Álvarez de Ulloa wrote to the President of the Audiencia de Guatemala, Toribio de Cosío, to thank him for carrying out reducciones among the Indigenous Tzeltal people of the province of Chiapa, where Álvarez de Ulloa was based. ¹ These reducciones were a vicious campaign of reprisals for the 1712 Cancuc uprising, which had taken place throughout the province four years prior, through which for a brief few months colonial authority had been overthrown, replaced by a political order created by Indigenous peoples speaking Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Ch’ol and which was centred on the town of San Juan Cancuc. Prior to the uprising, the priest wrote, Tzeltales had been ‘ferocious wolves’: disobedient, unwilling to work, foul-mouthed, and — above all — loud. ‘In all of these Towns,’ he said, ‘anything that the Passengers asked in exchange for money, they would give many shouts, calling the eldest or the person responsible to look for it.’ As a result of the reducciones, however, the Tzeltales from the region were now ‘lambs’: humble, punctual, and attentive to the needs of Spanish visitors, for whom ‘all is now very quick, without any shout being heard’. They were, in other words, ‘commotion (escándalo) made into example’. ²

In linking the silencing of bodies with the crushing of a rebellion, Álvarez de Ulloa drew a macabre but culturally widespread connection between colonial violence, moralistic attitudes to sound and ‘noise’, and aurality. In the Spanish Empire, sound and music were of explicit importance for the exercise of domination over colonized and enslaved peoples. ³ Colonial-era discourses relating to sound and music were linked to patterns of physical violence. Concepts of ‘quietude’ and ‘inquietude’ (quietud/inquietud) constituted key intellectual tools for colonial power in this region of the Americas. The antiquated usage of inquietud in Spanish — which in more recent usage tends to refer to ‘restlessness’ or ‘curiosity’ — was a common stand-in for outright rebellion, but it also denoted less violent tensions between people. ‘Urbanity’ (urbanidad) was a synonym of ‘civility’, associated with a state of ‘calm’, ‘peace’, and ‘quietude’, and the areas surrounding them with their opposite. Since ‘urbanity’ also indicated the maintenance of everyday social hierarchies, this word bridged the hierarchized spaces of colonial cities and the acoustic. ⁴ ‘Noise’ (ruido) could also signify subversions of authority, as in the case of a 1663 letter from the infamous Viceroy of Mexico Juan Francisco de Leyva y de la Cerda to the King of Spain describing public unrest after he had jailed an opponent of unpopular changes he had ordered to festivities in Mexico City: the ‘quietude of the Republic was ensured with it […] that I should have intervened in my office to pacify the Noise and Rumour that the cause of this prison had occasioned’. ⁵

In this article, we explore the aural worlds of the 1712 Cancuc uprising, to which the violent reducciones described in the first paragraph were intended to respond. Cancuc was (and is) a small town located roughly fifty miles from Ciudad Real (now called San Cristóbal de Las Casas), itself then a city peripheral to power within the Audiencia de Guatemala; indeed, located in the Highlands of Chiapas, Cancuc was not far from dense jungle terrain, much of which the Spanish never reached. ⁶ Our exploration affords understanding of how violent acts imposed, and were justified by, colonial concepts of ‘urbanity’ and ‘quietude’ in the colonial ‘peripheries’, as well as in cities, convents, or other sites central to missionization. In focusing on a moment of rupture, we argue that attention to a colonial-era noise/domination episteme — in which a range of notions of ‘unwanted sound’ served as a pretext for colonial rule — can highlight how the sensory regimes of empire were imposed suddenly, violently, and reactively, as well as systemically and slowly. ⁷

Much recent scholarship on music and sound responds to what Thompson summarizes as ‘aesthetic moralism’ in relation to noise. ⁸ Within anglophone academia, the spectre of R. Murray Schafer’s exploration of the soundscape looms large over discussions of ambient sound, especially his 1977 volume The Tuning of the World. ⁹ Schafer, the ‘founding father’ of acoustic ecology, tended to lionize ‘silence’ and ‘quietude’ and air anxieties over greater volumes of noise; he also associated urbanization with increased noise. These ideas have been severely criticized in recent scholarship, especially from a postcolonial viewpoint, ¹⁰ but it is arguable that they fare especially poorly when applied to the historical context of Latin America. ¹¹ Accounts such as Baker’s exploration of colonial Cuzco, for example, demonstrate that ideas about ‘harmonizing’ the urban environment were central to Spanish colonialists’ worldview, justifying the spatial ordering and hierarchizing of cities in concentric circles, with Indigenous groups typically occupying the outer edges; thus ‘harmonization’ was synonymous with exclusion. A wide range of scholarship explores the place of music and sound in the colonial encounter in the Americas, ¹² focusing on the use of music for the missionization of Indigenous peoples, ¹³ and on how European-derived musical traditions conditionally, but creatively, included Indigenous musicians and languages in ways that occasionally facilitated anti-colonial dissent. ¹⁴ Scholars have also emphasized that musical performance was often complicit with physical violence during the colonial encounter, as in the case of Glenda Goodman’s work on forced singing. ¹⁵

In what follows, we explore a historical case in which it requires little interpretation to connect aesthetic judgement and ideas about ‘unwanted sound’ to violence against Indigenous bodies, and in which, more than being merely implicitly connected to the physical imposition of colonialism, noise politics was the stuff of colonial violence itself. The ‘quietening’ of Indigenous bodies discussed in the first paragraph was effected through outright massacres of Indigenous populations in the countryside. Indeed, we suggest that at moments in which the colonial ‘order’ suddenly broke down and colonial rule was reimposed by brute force, the binary inquietud/quietud came to perform intellectual work in papering over the epistemological failures of Spanish colonialism.

This work is based, in the main, on archival research carried out in the Archivo General de Indias, with the roughly four thousand pages of documents constituting the colonial record pertaining to the Cancuc uprising and its aftermath. Their contents are in Spanish, although some documents are directly translated from Indigenous languages of the Chiapas Highlands. The documentation of the Cancuc uprising is thus unusually extensive, including interrogations of rebels and Indigenous witnesses, interviews with Spanish and Spanish-descendant criollo captives of the rebels (some of whom were forcibly married or taken as concubines), correspondence between colonial religious and military authorities, inventories of objects, and translations into Spanish of a significant amount of correspondence among rebels themselves. ¹⁶ Equally, this documentation was directly complicit in acts of brutal colonial violence: it contains many confessions of captured rebels and descriptions of reducciones after the uprising in which hundreds of Indigenous people were slaughtered, and documents the torture of Indigenous witnesses and rebels.

As is typical of the colonial archive, the violent means through which this documentation was produced raises questions about its trustworthiness and, in a broader sense, about scholarly strategies in the face of archives’ colonial bias: whether to enact ‘recovery’ of silenced voices, or pursue strategies to make such silences more apparent, or engage in more speculative, reflexive, or creative forms of writing. ¹⁷ We foreground, from the beginning, the colonial record’s ambivalent relationship with ‘truth’, but we also argue that the contents of the colonial record of the Cancuc uprising afford the possibility of ‘listening past what their authors wanted us to hear’. ¹⁸ Music historians have often emphasized the methodological challenge of listening to — or through, beyond, and around — colonial archives. ¹⁹ For this task, Bloechl recommends reading archives ‘carefully and with an ear for what they do not say’ and, in particular, paying ‘critical attention to traces of embodied life’ within analysis. ²⁰ It is vital, on the one hand, to trace discriminatory intellectual processes within documentation through which different concepts related to sound (such as ‘harmony’ and ‘noise’) were marshalled for the purposes of exclusion, othering, and (conditional) inclusion under colonialism. At the same time, in this case it is possible to read the colonial archive in search of a relatively detailed, rich, and multi-perspectival account of the Cancuc uprising. This is for several reasons: first, although it is dominated by colonial writers, this documentation also contains direct translations of Indigenous voices and instances of Indigenous groups addressing each other. Second, since the Spanish colonial authorities were extremely uncertain about the causes of the 1712 uprising, the colonial record is characterized at times by open-mindedness, as well as by closed and legalistic questioning and documentation. Third, and most important, it includes comparatively rich descriptions of musical and acoustic practices — and one of the ‘things that the colonial record does not say’ is that Indigenous sources tend to include more detail about sound and music than Spanish ones. This fact, as we will show, reflects the wider importance of sound, music, and the senses to the ritual, social, and military processes of the uprising.

In what follows, then, we propose to engage in a reading of the colonial record that is against the grain, coming up against the sensory erasures intrinsic to colonial and settler-colonial texts. ²¹ Our exploration of the 1712 Cancuc uprising seeks to listen to and through the flawed documentation of this historical event to the ways in which concepts such as ‘noise’, ‘sound’, ‘singing’, ‘praying’, and ‘quiet’ come to be at stake, and it responds to the mutual imbrication of these concepts with the production, and killing, of Indigenous bodies.

Background

The Cancuc uprising of 1712 has long interested anthropologists and historians. ²² Occurring in Chiapas, then part of the Audiencia of Guatemala, it simultaneously constituted an overthrow and a reversal of colonial rule. The uprising began in the town of San Juan Cancuc in August 1712 and expanded throughout the region in the following months, until the rebels were finally defeated by the colonial army in the same town in November 1712. Thus, for roughly three months, a new political order was established which was — even given the refusal of many neighbouring Indigenous communities to support the uprising ²³ — rooted in solidarity among colonized peoples speaking Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Ch’ol, and for which community organization was central. ²⁴ At the same time, the scholarly interest in the uprising reflects the fact that this was a religious movement as well as a political one. ²⁵

The uprising unfolded roughly through the following sequence of events. In May 1712 the Virgin Mary appeared to a 13-year-old Tzeltal girl, María López, also referred to as ‘María de la Candelaria’, instructing her to build a cross and burn incense by it. This spontaneous expression of religious sentiment was not tolerated by the town’s priest, Simón García de Lara, who asserted that the apparition was ‘an invention of the Devil’. María López was publicly whipped, together with her father and a woman called Magdalena Díaz, both of whom had told her to place the cross in a small house on the outskirts of the town. In defiance of the religious authorities, the residents of the town created a shrine at which to celebrate the cult of the Virgin; it contained an altar, hidden behind a partition formed of palm leaves, on which the rebels placed a bundle covered with cloth, announcing that the Virgin lived there. Seeking authorization for worship, a Tzeltal delegation travelled from Cancuc to Chamula to speak with the Bishop. However, the ecclesiastical authority arrested the delegates and imprisoned them in the regional capital of Ciudad Real, and the colonial authorities ordered the demolition of the chapel; frightened by the Cancuc inhabitants’ insistence on continuing the cult, Simón García de Lara fled the town in July 1712. ²⁶ The rebellion expanded throughout the region and lasted until November 1712, when the Spanish retook Cancuc.

Several seemingly unanswerable questions relating to the uprising connect small-scale details to large-scale questions of world view, belief, and power. Bricker sees the Cancuc uprising as a reaction against Indigenous peoples’ exclusion from practising Catholic ceremonies. ²⁷ Some features of the rebellion — for instance, killings of criollos, the assertion that criollos were in fact low-status ‘Jews’, and the declaration that there was ‘no God, nor King’ — are suggestive of a simple inversion of colonial hierarchies. ²⁸ Such a reversal was facilitated by the region’s comparatively straightforward demographics: as Viqueira points out, while 92 per cent of the province of Chiapas was indio, only 2 per cent was criollo — a tiny proportion of the populace that dominated Catholic and secular hierarchies. ²⁹ At the same time, Mayan communities under Spanish colonial rule were subject to divided authority, which Dehouve and Arnauld describe as distinct ‘hierarchies of power’. ³⁰ Where colonial power was embodied by civil authorities and Catholic religious figures, pre-colonial authority continued in the form of ‘heirs of the old pre-Hispanic priestly hierarchy’ and social elites, whose social power had, since colonial times, been associated with magic and the ability to transform into so-called nagual or spirit animals. Witchcraft or magic was thus not a purely domestic or private matter but was deeply entangled with the constitution of the public and the political. ³¹

It is therefore no surprise that the rebellion’s Indigenous leadership combined Catholic marianistas with so-called nagualistas whose authority derived from pre-colonial spiritual praxis. Many leaders of the 1712 uprising professed religious and ritual duties, including some who held Mass and performed Catholic marriage ceremonies. ³² The observation that the most prominent symbols of the uprising were drawn from Catholicism places it in continuity with several other nearby uprisings between 1708 and 1713 (in the Tzotzil-speaking areas Zinacantán and Santa Marta Xolotepec, in the zone of Chenalhó), whose main objects of devotion were Catholic saints. ³³ Other leaders were known as brujos (‘witches/warlocks’) and rezadores, and indeed were chosen to lead for this reason. ³⁴ The latter term, derived from the Spanish rezar (to pray), refers to well-documented Indigenous healing practices which are still common in contemporary Chiapas, in which the healer performs utterances somewhere between speech and song. ³⁵ Meanwhile, some of the rebels described as nagualistas were reputed to be able to shoot lightning, provoke earthquakes and landslides, and create storms. These powers were called upon during confrontations with the Spanish; for example, several accounts mention a woman who attempted to summon a landslide to crush Spanish soldiers during the colonial recapture of Cancuc. ³⁶ Indeed, this case and that of María López both indicate how the tendency for Indigenous women to assume positions of leadership within the uprising was directly related to its religious and sensory syncretism, thus highlighting the mutual entanglement of gendered and sensory silencing within the colonial archive. ³⁷

Much of the scholarship on the 1712 uprising has used the shrine as a way to condense and focus broader questions about the syncretic and divided nature of authority during the uprising. ³⁸ While accounts varied, the shrine was said to contain the Virgin, who began to give orders — most notably, to kill Spaniards. It was also said, however, to contain a sacred stone brought from a nearby cave, and multiple eyewitnesses reported seeing a cat-like creature, with ‘the body painted yellow and black in the manner of a small tiger and […] eyes the colour of fiery gold which shone like fire’. ³⁹ Jan de Vos argues that what these eyewitnesses were really describing was a stone idol representing a jaguar, lying behind or beside an icon of the Virgin. ⁴⁰ The presence of a jaguar, as well as the ceremonial trappings of Catholicism, points towards his argument that ‘in Cancuc the Mesoamerican jaguar and the Christian virgin merged to form a single epiphany of the divine, doubly powerful for concentrating in it the most significant masculine and feminine attributes of both religions’. ⁴¹ We are interested in taking these questions about what lay behind the partition in a different direction. ⁴² We ask: How did the shrine sound? And how did this uprising, and the responses to it, relate to and affect local auralities? As with many other questions that have been posed of the Cancuc uprising, this one is both methodologically challenging to answer and highly intuitive: if distinct ‘hierarchies of power’ were at play within the uprising, it follows that distinct auditory regimes also made themselves heard during this event.

In the section below, we first outline the most clear-cut, substantive, music-related facts relating to the uprising — namely the types, whereabouts, and journeys of musical instruments. This is followed by a section providing insight into the ritual life that emerged around the shrine at Cancuc and the cosmologies at play during the uprising. In a section on ‘sonorities in conflict’, we then discuss the ways that musical and sonorous instruments came to be used during conflict between the rebels and the Spanish. ⁴³ The final section examines ways that criollos and the colonial authorities responded to the uprising. We conclude with a postscript reflecting on the ways that ‘hearing against the grain’ might play out in the case of Cancuc.

Instruments

The 1712 uprising was established and maintained through multiple sonorous practices, including rezos (literally ‘prayers’) oscillating between the sung and the recited or proclaimed, and Catholic litanies. In this section and the next, we explore how these practices connected to authority and power within the rebel movement, and first focus on how they implied the use of different kinds of musical and sonorous instruments. The instruments used during the uprising carried diverse connotations: some, such as guitars and harps, were generally used for private, secular entertainment; others carried associations with secular or military authority (trumpets, drums, bells); many were associated with Catholic ritual life (shawms, trumpets, fifes, drums). ⁴⁴

It is possible to trace the presence and movement of musical instruments through several kinds of colonial documentation, including both correspondence and a number of inventories created by the Spanish when, in November 1712, they retook Cancuc and the surrounding towns. Immediately upon retaking the town, the Spanish produced an inventory of all the items found in the shrine. They also later inventoried other sites, for instance the church in Cancuc after three months and the church in the Ch’ol town of Yajalón (roughly forty miles north of Cancuc). For example, the inventory of the Cancuc church contained instruments typical of Catholic worship and ritual: ‘two dented trumpets and a suit of shawms, all of them without mouthpieces […] A broken organ, flutes […] and two bells’, ‘six altar bells’, and fourteen books, some of which were choirbooks. ⁴⁵ The inventory was followed by instructions on how to redistribute these items among other towns in the province. At Yajalón the Spanish also found various items in a buried box, including eleven small bells and ‘three choirbooks with a suit of shawms’. ⁴⁶

The inventory of the items found in the shrine at Cancuc is the most extensive; it contains roughly a hundred entries, including paintings of the Virgin, distinct kinds of items used during Catholic ceremonies (such as a large number of silver crosses), and five broken rifles. The inventory also mentions several musical instruments: a terno (‘group’ or ‘suit’) of three trumpets, two small bells (campanillas), two harps (one broken and the other very old), ‘two bells that served in this Shrine’, a guitar, and a suit (terno) of shawms. ⁴⁷ It is unlikely that this list is exhaustive: eyewitnesses reported that the shawms and trumpets were accompanied by drums (cajas) and fifes (pífanos) in processions around the town and in announcements (pregones), and it seems likely that these instruments would be kept in the same place. ⁴⁸

Where did these musical and sonorous instruments come from? Although many would have belonged to the church at Cancuc prior to the rebellion, it is notable that the leaders of the uprising made efforts to convince their allies to bring musical instruments to Cancuc. In August the cult sent out a summons to Indigenous groups from the area in the name of the Virgin, calling them to come and worship at the shrine:

I, the Virgin, who has descended to this sinful world call you in the name of Our Lady of the Rosary and order you to come to this town of Cancuc and to bring with you all the silver of your churches, and the ornaments and bells, with all the coffers and drums and all the cofradía [religious brotherhood] books and funds because there is no longer God, nor King. ⁴⁹

The rebels also directed similar messages to specific towns, such as one requesting that the rebel principales (authority figures within Indigenous communities) of Comitán and Zapaluta come with ‘ornaments, silver crosses, trumpets, shawms, drums [and] flutes’. ⁵⁰ In September 1712, the rebels of Cancuc sent a letter to the inhabitants of Palenque (100 miles north of Cancuc), requesting that they come to Tumbalá (60 miles north) and receive the Virgin ‘with trumpets and drums’. In one letter, the rebels at Yajalón responded by promising to take a tambourine (pandera) and a drum (tambor) to Cancuc. ⁵¹ Another letter, from the Cancuc rebels to the town of Ocosingo (45 miles east), beseeches the population there to ‘receive this Holy word so that they bring the Ornaments, the Silver Crosses, trumpets, shawms [and] drums’, ⁵² a request which the Tzeltal authorities in Ocosingo enthusiastically obliged; Pedro Zabaleta found the church in Ocosingo empty of ‘all of its silver and ornaments’ and ‘silver insignias’ in January 1713. ⁵³

The journeys of musical and sonorous instruments are also, in some notable cases, indicative of conflict related to the uprising between Indigenous communities themselves. ⁵⁴ During the revolt, the Tzotzil town of Simojovel, which had refused to join the rebels, was attacked by its neighbour, Guetiupa. Houses in Simojovel were burned down and its church bells were stolen, along with ‘ornaments and other precious things’. ⁵⁵ In February 1713, in an attempt by the Spanish to remediate the conflict between the two towns, the residents of Guetiupa agreed to return the bells to Simojovel from Ciudad Real (where they had been carried after Cancuc was retaken), in addition to restoring the burned-down houses. ⁵⁶

Why, as shown by the messages sent in the early weeks of the uprising between the rebels and their allies, were the leaders of the uprising so keen to accumulate these instruments? It is worth noting that other rebellions in Chiapas did precisely the same thing. Music had already been a significant part of other cults to the Virgin which preceded that at Cancuc, such as at Santa Marta Xolotepec. Later Indigenous rebellions in Chiapas also placed great emphasis on accumulating musical and sonorous objects. For instance, an 1868 rebellion was sparked when a Tzotzil-speaking woman from Chamula claimed to have witnessed three stones descend from heaven, and a cult was established to worship the sacred stones. Claiming religious authority, the Indigenous fiscal (a lower-tier figure in the Catholic hierarchy, one level below a priest) leading the revolt ordered the purchase of bells and trumpets. ⁵⁷

A small part of the Cancuc rebels’ demand for musical and sonorous instruments was military: writing from Ocosingo, the criollo sergeant major Pedro Zabaleta noted that rebels from a nearby town had taken the clappers from the church bells ‘in order to make lances [lanzas]’. ⁵⁸ Further, these items were clearly valuable for other extra-musical and extra-sonorous purposes. The musical instruments found in the shrine were expensive, often categorized (apparently by both criollos and Indigenous people) as ‘ornaments’ and ‘precious things’. ⁵⁹ One Indigenous eyewitness reportedly stated that harps were taken into the shrine, along with crosses and ‘other precious silver things from the Churches of the towns that rebelled’. ⁶⁰ Meanwhile, erasures emerge within Spanish accounts which speak to a broader tendency to ‘attribute very little value to sonorous objects’: ⁶¹ these instruments were listed as ‘other’. A summary accompanying the inventory of the Cancuc shrine described its contents as ‘silver, ornaments and other things’, with the latter category including musical instruments; ⁶² a slightly fuller description from the day that the Spanish retook Cancuc describes ‘various silver crosses and various other precious things [alajas]’ behind the partition. ⁶³

This pattern of the erasure of musical instruments is consistent with how the sensory richness of the rebellion is downplayed throughout the colonial reporting on the conflict. Indigenous voices — albeit for the most part those reported by criollo scribes — were more likely to recall the presence of musical instruments at the shrine; for instance, Sebastián Pérez, an Indigenous resident of Mitontic, reported having seen there, alongside ‘[images of] many saints’, ‘a lot of [literally ‘a big pile of’] drums [and] trumpets’. ⁶⁴ Further, as seen above, when the rebels communicated their requirements in letters to each other, musical and sonorous instruments were comparatively high on their list of priorities.

Equally, there is ample evidence that these instruments were of more than ornamental value. The mentions of suits of instruments indicate that they were played together in ensembles; ⁶⁵ multiple accounts describe the performance of these musical instruments by the rebels both within the shrine and outside it. Since the record provides scant information about the kinds of music played, it is important to maintain an open mind. While many historical studies of music in the colonial Americas have emphasized the strength of Catholic and European musical traditions in cities, ⁶⁶ strong polyphonic musical traditions could also emerge in more remote settings, such as the Guatemalan Highlands. ⁶⁷ The musical instruments described at the shrine held associations with diverse kinds of music. For instance, the guitar was most associated with music as entertainment, but most other instruments were linked in various ways to the exercise of authority. Trumpets and drums were used in pregones, announcements emanating from colonial secular authority; shawms, trumpets, fifes, and drums were also used in processions held across Guatemala to commemorate the conquest and mark ‘victory over indigenous peoples, the supremacy of the Spanish monarchy, and the inviolability of the colonial order’. ⁶⁸ These instruments also commonly featured in performances of polyphonic music in Catholic religious ceremonies. ⁶⁹

Yet as well as these musical and sonorous instruments’ connection with Catholicism, the archival record also provides clues linking them to Indigenous forms of ritual expression. It is significant that the instruments inventoried in the shrine are largely identical to those described a few months earlier in the cult to the Virgin at Santa Marta Xolotepec, often seen as the direct precursor to the Cancuc rebellion, ⁷⁰ where a Spanish visitor in May 1712 ‘found a great fiesta of trumpets, drums, shawms […] and the Indians dancing in their old style’, as well as ‘an Indian sitting on the ground, playing a guitar’. ⁷¹ It seems plausible that the guitar found in the Cancuc shrine was taken there by members of the Santa Marta cult, along with the other instruments which they used; if this is the case, we may speculate that aspects of the dancing and fiesta in Cancuc resembled those found at Santa Marta.

As well as recognizing the range of musical and sonorous possibilities suggested by these instruments, it is worth highlighting that the accumulation of instruments at the shrine contributed to the broader concentration of objects, ritual activities, and multi-sensory richness (acoustic, olfactory, and visual) on this site which was characteristic of Indigenous worship of Catholic saints. ⁷² In the following section, however, we attend in more detail to specific accounts of musical performances at and around the shrine and the ways that they implicate different sources of authority.

Sound and Religious Authority at the Shrine

Those participating in the production of the colonial record about the uprising were continuously engaged in the question of whether its sounds and senses implicated Catholic or pre-colonial beliefs, because the answers to this question influenced how they went about supressing the rebellion. The rebels are most ostensibly depicted as taking ownership of Catholic religious authority, as part of which they sang the Catholic litanies and hymns. ⁷³ Equally, many voices during and after the uprising raised suspicions that the rebels were practising pre-colonial rituals. For instance, on a tour of bloody reprisals against the rebels at the beginning of 1713, the sergeant major Pedro Zabaleta wrote continually to Toribio de Cosío of alarm at the presence of ‘witches’ and ‘rezadores’, who were ‘freely walking around [van sueltos]’ the towns around Cancuc. ⁷⁴ Zabaleta was far from a disinterested party: he was suspected of having provoked the rebellion by his mistreatment of Indigenous people, and indeed was prosecuted for this in 1715. ⁷⁵

By the time the Spanish retook Cancuc, they had already heard a number of rich descriptions of ritual practice within the shrine. The following testimony is found in a letter sent by a Spanish lieutenant from the recently conquered city of Petén, whose inhabitants had described the shrine to him:

They fervorize [fervorizar] in the cleared space before an altar covered with palm leaves where they say the Virgin resides, which no one knows, only a young girl of 12 or more years old enters and leaves and gives orders to an Indian who they say is her father, and he tells all of the diabolical orders; they have images of saints from different towns […] on the sides of the frontispiece covered with the petate, where the litany is sung after the Indians enter the gate and a prayer is made to them fervorizing their wickedness, which is practised in a house used as a shrine, that in the church they pray [rezan], they perform baptisms and marriages and celebrate their festivities, everything is governed by Indian maestros [choirmasters] of the towns, fiscales, and sacristans. ⁷⁶

These descriptions present the shrine as a multi-sensory site; they also cover descriptions of dress (especially use of the Catholic vestments), the burning of incense, and the decorative use of flowers on the floor and on top of, or close to, sacred objects.

In most descriptions, the musical and ritual world of the shrine resembles a Catholic one. Indeed, interrogations tended to fixate on the question of whether rebel leaders had held Mass and other Catholic ceremonies without permission. This was a complex question, since in Chiapas — partly as a consequence of the mono-ethnic nature of the populace — Indigenous people could hold a range of positions of religious authority permitting them to conduct services, including fiscales, maestros de coro (choirmasters), and sacristans. ⁷⁷ The rebels are frequently described as ‘praying’ (either rezando or holding oraciones), reciting the litanies, and singing hymns such as the Te Deum and Salve Regina. Just after the reconquest of Cancuc, Juan Pérez, an 18-year-old native of the town, provided a description of the shrine’s inauguration ceremony, saying that after María de la Candelaria had declared an end to paying tribute to the Spanish Crown, ‘there was celebration around the shrine, the whole town attending and the fiscales and maestros singing the litanies’. ⁷⁸ Juan Gómez, a 30-year-old from Ocosingo, described the same event even more vividly:

They made the house or shrine with the help of neighbouring villages, and once it was made they returned to the milpa [polycultural smallholding centred on maize] where they found the said Virgin, and they carried her in all solemnity with banners, a cross, ceremonial candle-holders, bugles [clarines], snare drums [cajas], shawms, and fifes [pífanos], reciting the rosary and litanies, and they placed her in said house or shrine. ⁷⁹

Held as the cult to the Virgin was established at Cancuc, musical performance during this ritual event upended religious authority; it effected the rebels’ wider aim ‘to renounce the Spanish priests [specifically Simón García de Lara, who later fled] and replace them with an Indian priesthood’ embodied by the lower-ranked maestros de coro and fiscales who sang. ⁸⁰ As Bricker observes, this act effectively constituted ‘a declaration of war against the colonial regime’. ⁸¹ At the same time, it is possible that the auditory cultures of such ceremonies also incorporated pre-Hispanic elements. For instance, many accounts describe how in addition to the incense, flowers, candles, and food that the rebels offered to the images of Catholic saints, rezos were chanted; ⁸² yet we need not take accounts of ‘prayer’ which employ the word rezo at face value. On occasion, this term specifically describes the recital of litanies or the rosary at the shrine; yet from the colonial era until the present, the term has also denoted a pre-Hispanic healing practice which lies somewhere between speech and song. ⁸³ It is widely noted that fourteen years prior to the uprising, the Bishop of Chiapa, Francisco Núñez de la Vega, had condemned the activities of the so-called nagualistas, shamans who imitated the litanies in order to practise witchcraft:

They recite first the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Credo, and Salve, and they start to moan over that part which contains the enchantment, breathing out and in according to the quality of the enchantment cast. In the third moan they make the third cross, saying, silently, the words that are imperatives in virtue of the pact with the Devil. ⁸⁴

Documentary evidence for the practice Núñez de la Vega described is conserved in a Tzeltal healing ‘spell’ by an Indigenous inhabitant of Ocosingo, transcribed in the original language by the priest of the same city. ⁸⁵ Given the coexistence of pre-Hispanic and Catholic authority in the Cancuc cult, it is highly likely that such syncretic practices were present.

The shrine witnessed intense celebrations throughout the rebellion’s several months of existence, including many lasting throughout the night. Such continual celebrations defied colonial censorship, such as a 1658 decree which had prohibited Indigenous people in Chiapas from holding celebrations outside of the feast day of a town’s patron saint and ‘the eves and days of Corpus Christi and Easter’, and prohibited Indians from ‘representing histories of their people [su gentilidad] with or without long trumpets’. ⁸⁶ In turn, according to one ladina from Ocosingo who was captured by the rebels, the religious ceremonies at the shrine ‘frequently featured music’. ⁸⁷ Accounts suggest that night-time at the shrine tended to feature instrumental music, and the music performed in the day, during processions around the town or to invite new objects for devotion into the shrine, was more likely to be sung. Sebastián Hernández, a 25-year-old man from nearby Cuxtitali who had been taken captive by the rebels, described how at the shrine, drums (cajas), trumpets, and bugles (clarínes) were played throughout the night, where the litanies would be recited by the fiscales in the day and evening. ⁸⁸ At least one celebration that lasted throughout the night was held privately among the leaders of the rebellion. ⁸⁹

In turn, several accounts link musical performances — including those late at night — with syncretic rituals involving the sacred stone that witnesses saw at the shrine. ⁹⁰ Ceremonies involving sacred stones and music had already been noted by observers in this region, such as in Francisco Ximénez’s Historia de la provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala. ⁹¹ Indeed, in Chiapas, sacred stones, music, and sound were unified in the form of so-called ‘singing stones’ (piedras parlantes), which inspired an uprising in the 1860s in Chamula. ⁹² The fact that the sacred stone celebrated by the rebels was found in a cave may be significant; close to Cancuc there were ‘sacred sites where the rebels went to request the intervention of spiritual entities for the “war” against the Spanish’, including a cave ‘where prayers [rezos and plegarias] were performed to ask for help from the gods of lightning’. ⁹³ One Tzeltal inhabitant of Ocosingo, who claimed to have been drafted into the rebel army on pain of death, had witnessed the placement of a stone into the shrine, wrapped in cloth and covered in ‘flowers from the mountains’: ‘when they placed said bundle into said Shrine they were Praying [rezando] the Hail Mary, and after placing it they sang the alabado [songs of praise], all those who were in said place’. ⁹⁴ The following description from August 1712 by an Indigenous resident of Bachajón called Jacinto Pérez indicates that instrumental music had a ritual connection with the stone which was expressed during the night:

By day they put the aforementioned stone on a platform, and they light candles [encienden luces] and burn incense. And by night, they put it on a table in the aforementioned shrine with a girl [María López] who is just of marrying age, and with different instruments they play music. ⁹⁵

These descriptions were later complemented by the testimonies of captive rebels after the uprising and mixed-race ladinos who had been taken hostage by the rebels.

The presence of pre-Hispanic belief at the Cancuc cult was a point of controversy among the rebels themselves, especially between military and religious leaders; things came to a head when during the uprising, the leader of the rebel army, the marianista Nicolás Vásquez, had several competing leaders captured and whipped or killed. ⁹⁶ In asserting the primacy of the uprising’s military wing amidst the competing roles of pre-Hispanic and Catholic beliefs, Vásquez made reference to music: seeking to convince the rebels to ‘forget our ancient rites’ and leave behind ‘the ancient word’, he promised that there would be a ‘drum and bugle in each church’. ⁹⁷ It is clear, then, that musical instruments were directly implicated in the claiming of both Catholic and pre-Hispanic spiritual authority and in the mediation of coexistence and competition among the same.

Sonorities in Conflict

The colonial authorities’ interest in documenting the kinds of ritual performances that took place at Cancuc was motivated by reprisals against the rebels, yet music and sound were central to the violent conduct of both parties in the uprising. On the one hand, the rebels are described as forcing their captives to sing — something that, as Goodman points out, has been characteristic of war from the colonial era to the present. ⁹⁸ On one occasion a cantor in Cancuc named Jacinto García was whipped on the orders of the rebel leaders ‘for not having gone punctually to sing at the shrine’, ⁹⁹ and an Indigenous resident of Yajalón complained that he had been forced to worship in the shrine for two consecutive days and nights. ¹⁰⁰ Several ladina hostages in Cancuc testified that as the Spanish military approached the town, they were taken to the shrine to pray, with one stating that this was ‘so that there all together they should pray [resasen] and ask that the Virgin should give them the Victory that was promised against the Spanish, who they called Jews and demons’. ¹⁰¹ These cases tell us that the emergence of the sonic world around the shrine did not occur spontaneously or out of a consensual consciousness of resistance. ¹⁰²

On the other hand, the Spanish accounts of the conflict tell us about a world view oriented around both the political and the acoustic notions of ‘quietude’. They repeatedly complain about the noise made by their Indigenous opponents, especially relating to the rebels’ use of musical and sonorous instruments during battles. These accounts also tell us about the violent means through which the Spanish sought to quieten such rebellious ‘noise’.

The colonial record often describes the Chiapanecan people’s use of music and sound in war, such as among the nearby Tzotzil population of Chamula, noted to have ‘charged at the Spaniards with great shouts, accompanied by the music of trumpets, horns, and kettledrums’ in a sixteenth-century battle. ¹⁰³ There are several accounts of military confrontations during the Cancuc uprising in which the presence of sound served to escalate hostilities. One company of soldiers, led by the mayor of Tabasco in December 1712, camped near the town of Huitiupán. Here they encountered a group of hostile residents, giving rise to the following encounter:

I was fortunate to be able to camp on the opposite bank of the River from this town on Friday the sixteenth of this current year at ten o’clock in the morning, where I found a portion of Indians in this part who allowed themselves to be seen with notable shamelessness of clamour [algazara] and peals of bells, drums, bugles, and flags provoking me with Challenges […] the voices were perceived clearly and distantly from one side to another, and the Impudence of their Barbarities, [but] I exhorted them with loving words Indicating them the Merciful and clement will of the King Our master in whose Royal name I offered them the General pardon Repeatedly, which only served to give new encouragement to their inattentive resolution, what barbaric spite in reciprocating the neglect, and such indecency against Our Majesty the King. ¹⁰⁴

What this writer describes as his attempt to speak with ‘smoothness’ so as not to ‘enflame the perverse ones’ was typical of a broader paternalistic effort to maintain the populace in a state of calm (sosiego) through certain kinds of vocal performance. ¹⁰⁵ Similar kinds of performance were also used in response to disturbances by Spaniards and Spanish-descendant criollos; for example, an attempt by the colonial authorities to resolve a violent clash in 1702 following an excommunication in the city of Mérida involved using ‘persuasive words of temperance and much civility’ to calm down a rebel delegation which was ‘Raising [i.e. fomenting unrest] and breaking out in loud Voices all the People’. ¹⁰⁶

A later military encounter occurred as the Spanish army, headed by the President of Guatemala, sought to reach Cancuc in mid-November 1712, but were unable to pass a trench dug at the Tzeltal town of San Martín. Forced to camp the night on a nearby hill, a group of two hundred Spanish soldiers sneaked behind the trench and attacked the rebels from the rear, most of whom scattered. Following this,

the rest of our army remained, and then His Honor the President ordered the said Town of San Martín to be burned down to punish these rebels who were provoking us the whole night, in our sight, with bugles, drums, and lights. ¹⁰⁷

While these violent reprisals responded to the idea that playing music throughout the night constituted a ‘provocation’, we have already noted that intense musical performances that lasted the night were a continual feature of the syncretic expressive life of the uprising. A musical misunderstanding was clearly at play here of the kind that characterized initial, conflictive, encounters between Europeans and Indigenous populations during colonialism.

On the other hand, after the uprising was suppressed, music was also vital to the perceived restitution of the colonial ‘order’. After they retook Cancuc, with hostilities concluded, the Spanish soldiers burned down the shrine; they then entered the town church, knelt, and sang the Te Deum canticle. ¹⁰⁸ In Ciudad Real, the Bishop of Chiapa recounted how, upon hearing that the Spanish had retaken Cancuc,

full of tears, tenderness, and confusion […] I then ordered the bells ring for two hours, and with the clergy, my counsel [cabildo], and the sacred religions assembled we went to the Cathedral Church, where dressed as Pontifical with the assistance of all the ecclesiastical [order] of the city of Don Pedro Gutiérrez [we] sang Te Deum Laudamus and we followed him Procedurally through the entire Church, leaving through a Door from which we continued through the Plaza and entering through the other door, we finished it before the Most Holy Lady of Charity, on whose day, which is that of the Presentation, did achieve VS [Your Lordship] and we all achieved through him such a great triumph to continue Singing Salve and the litanies with thanksgiving prayers. ¹⁰⁹

This moment also accompanied an aural demonstration of military power: the bells, according to an account given by the lieutenant Pedro Gutiérrez, became more intense at midday, when they were accompanied by a ‘roar of all the bocas de fuego [firearms]’. ¹¹⁰ This sound was of evident military effectiveness: one native of Cancuc told his Spanish interrogators that on the day that Toribio de Cosío’s army reached the town, the rebels had fled to the hills and to their milpas ‘due to the fear they felt of the noise made by the [Spanish army’s] bocas de fuego’. ¹¹¹ These accounts afford a level of insight into people’s responses to belliphonic sounds during the uprising, how sound was vital to the projection of power, and how sound was used to regulate the emotions of the civilian population of criollos in Ciudad Real, who had suddenly had to reckon with their vulnerability.

These accounts are part of a broader pattern in which conflict was taken to reveal an underlying ‘noisiness’ to Indigenous peoples. One witness described how, in early September 1712, the rebels had killed the Spanish civil and religious authorities at Guetiupa ‘with much noise and racket [algazara]’. ¹¹² A group of Spanish soldiers that visited Huistán in the early weeks of the uprising, meanwhile, were forced to retreat after being ambushed: ‘They heard great shouting [gritería] of Indians and noise of battle.’ ¹¹³ As is evident from such accounts, the record of the uprising describes sound through a partisan and discriminatory anti-Indigenous frame by, for example, the selective deployment of the word ‘noise’ (ruido). Public announcements in colonial cities — pregones — were given ‘to the sound of caxa and clarín’; indeed, this phrase is used repeatedly in texts that describe how the Spanish spread news of the ‘pacification’ throughout towns in the province. ¹¹⁴ By contrast, pregones given by the rebels in Cancuc are recorded as having ‘been proclaimed with the noise [ruido] of caxa, clarín, and chirimías [shawms]’, implying both a sense of acoustic disorganization and that such ‘noise’ was detached from or not coordinated with the orders themselves. ¹¹⁵ The underlying practice described — simultaneously communicating news and forming a public through musical performance — was the same.

Such rhetorical tricks were not a minor detail: the politics of the ‘noisy other’ was fundamental to the Spanish response to the Tzeltal revolt. ¹¹⁶ In correspondence among the Spanish, the response to the uprising is described through a series of continuously recurring concepts that connect the political and the aural — ‘peace’, ‘quietude’, ‘calm’ (sosiego) — while implying hyper-violent acts. The concept of quietude was central in the documents which founded the war council that eventually defeated the insurgents, ordering actions so that ‘there is achieved peace, and calm in said Province, the risen Peoples are reduced, and those that have occasioned these inquietudes are punished’. ¹¹⁷ Among many allusions to the concept in correspondence between colonial figures, the Bishop of Chiapa exhorted Toribio de Cosío to maintain ‘the entire circle of your governance in the peace and quietude which has been experienced of it’. ¹¹⁸ A letter from the Viceroy of New Spain to de Cosío, meanwhile, asked that the suppression of the rebellions be ‘efficiently applied for the quietude of the risen Towns’ and praised the ‘reparations which have been implemented for [these Towns’] remedy and quietude’. ¹¹⁹

Why was ‘quietude’ such a prominent concept in these texts, emanating from the centres of the colonial hierarchy’s power? Although this term is a common, if under-discussed, feature of Spanish colonial rhetoric, it is arguable that it played an especially important role in the Spanish responses to the uprising. As pointed out in the previous section, the Cancuc uprising fomented epistemological and acoustemological ambiguity, which arose as competing belief systems collided. It is worth noting that during the previous century, as Viqueira points out, Spanish inquisitors had effectively ceased witch-hunts in Spain. ¹²⁰ In Chiapas, Indigenous populations had suffered a series of crackdowns on their ritual practices in the seventeenth century. Their ritual calendar had been severely restricted by a 1658 decree, and they were largely excluded from leading Catholic ceremonies. ¹²¹ Some such prohibitions against Indigenous ritual continued well into the twentieth century, ¹²² with the effect that syncretic healing chants which open by invoking Christian deities and saints are still widely practised.

Seen in this light, the colonial authorities’ legal response to the uprising, contained in a decree issued by the President of the Audiencia de Guatemala at the beginning of 1713, was somewhat scattered and confused. The decree opens by noting how ‘the 32 risen towns of the province of Chiapa are now completely reduced’, and makes seven different orders, each of which imply different understandings of the causes of the uprising: poverty, provocation by the Spanish beneficiaries of enforced labour, and the notion that the apparitions were ‘tricks’ carried out by the Devil. Several take measures against growing poverty among Indigenous people. For instance, the decree prohibited the sale of gunpowder to any Indigenous person in the province, on the paternalistic grounds that the Indigenous populace was growing poor through spending money on it for use within celebrations of towns’ patron saints (although sources indicate that gunpowder was already extremely scarce among the Indigenous populace). It also responded to the unfair distribution of meat for festive days. At the same time, the decree asserted the Church’s authority over popular spirituality and belief; its first and most prominent act was a prohibition against publication in any form, oral or written, of miracles or apparitions which had not been verified by the Catholic Church:

Special care to not permit that any Indian divulge, publish, believe, nor persuade others respect to, apparitions or other new miracles not being qualified and approved by the Ecclesiastical order, and if from some other source they should try, and publish on the same case they should incur pain of death. ¹²³

This decree also described how criollos had forced Indigenous people to work ‘with violent means, and inappropriate words, and that they have received several insults and inconveniences’, and ordered that these criollos ‘attend to their repair’. Ideas about vocal ‘smoothness’ and ‘temperance’ as means to quell rebellions and maintain colonial rule lurk here beneath the surface.

What we wish to suggest is that ‘quietude’, enforced through brutal reducciones — massacres of the Indigenous population — constituted a violent simplification of the symbolic and sensory richness that accumulated around the uprising, which (as the January 1713 decree suggests) the colonial authorities struggled to understand. The idea of quietude was rooted in the epistemic violence through which Indigenous sonorities were artificially dismissed as ‘noise’ while Spanish ones were not, which was enacted through the colonial record itself. The binary inquietud/quietud was, of course, a key conceptual underpinning of colonial (and even post-independence) rule across the Americas. What we want to suggest here, however, is that during and after the 1712 uprising, this binary constituted something akin to a ‘dead zone of the imagination’; ¹²⁴ it permitted the colonial authorities space precisely not to think about what had motivated the rebellion in the act of exercising violence. The church authorities in the region had long engaged with epistemological problems relating to Indigenous ritual performances, such as the question of whether traditional songs were ‘honest’. ¹²⁵ The ideal of quietude, however, underpinned a ‘willful hermeneutic ignorance’ which manifested in ‘a systematic and coordinated misinterpretation of the world’ and thus facilitated colonial violence. ¹²⁶ It allowed the colonial authorities to sidestep complex questions about syncretic Indigenous belief systems that they were unable to resolve.

Postscript

Ochoa Gautier theorizes a multi-disciplinary ‘concatenation of silencings’ in the colonial and postcolonial operation of power, in which cultural practices such as poetry, literature, and folklorism were complicit. ¹²⁷ This term is useful for describing the ways that the Cancuc uprising was both documented textually by the Spanish and responded to. Yet within such a concatenation, ‘silencing’ took place in a violent and direct sense that ought not to be overlooked. In thinking about histories of colonialism and its aftermath, we emphasize the continuing need to think beyond the metaphorical and symbolic, and reckon with the role of sound in the mutual imbrication of physical and epistemic violence within colonial systems. ¹²⁸ ‘Quietude’ constituted a dominant colonial utopia, in which the realms of human behaviour and aurality were simultaneously disciplined. In a context such as colonial-era Chiapas, with a large majority Indigenous population, this concept further allowed the Spanish to exert domination amidst a set of circumstances that they did not understand. Even almost a century later, at the twilight of colonialism, rulings by the colonial authorities remembered the 1712 uprising as a ‘noisy rebellion’ (ruidosa sublevación) which demonstrated the ‘natural ferocity and arrogance of the indios of Cancuc’; this logic was still invoked to justify repressive actions against the Tzeltal inhabitants of Cancuc. ¹²⁹

One means of reading the archive against the grain, which we have pursued here, is to attempt to listen and sense through it by paying attention to the journeys of musical instruments, sonorities, and categories of sound that were at play during the uprising. While challenging — involving poring through documentation whose purpose is not to record information about music — we suggest that this endeavour has the potential to amplify key ways in which the uprising was experienced and perceived by its Indigenous protagonists, who, we argue, placed higher importance on the role of sound than did their Spanish opponents. At the same time, this act must contain within it a recognition that the archive’s complicity with colonial violence was partially composed of the construction of a colonial acoustemology. Criollo scribes and writers directly and unsubtly facilitated massacres by writing about quietud, inquietud, ruido, algazara, and other concepts related to sound, and their intellectual work stood in for real understanding of the auralities of those who participated in the uprising.

Jan de Vos claims that ‘the pitiless exploitation of Indigenous communities produced in them an uncontainable desire to rebel against injustice’; ¹³⁰ although the uprising was suppressed, the event and some of its repercussions lasted in the collective memory, and the Virgin is fervently celebrated in Cancuc until the present. Memories of the uprising continued both locally and through official celebrations. After 1712, the colonial authorities sought to impose a ‘memory of punishment’ on the inhabitants of Cancuc, forcibly resettling them to a new settlement called Nuestra Señora de Presentación y Santo Toribio — named after the President of the Audiencia de Guatemala who defeated the rebels in battle. ¹³¹ The memory of the uprising was made official across the Audiencia de Guatemala through the celebration of the Feast of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary on 20 November. ¹³² Equally, these histories, and the auralities they imply, escaped colonial control, maintained in part through shared sonorous practices. On a visit to the town of Chamula, Toribio de Cosío, the Governor of Guatemala, offered fifty silver pieces and the title of governor for four years to Indigenous residents who would give away María López’s location. At the beginning of March, indications grew that she was still in the zone:

According to some sources, she was with a widowed captain to whom the Indians attributed the power to throw lightning bolts, and who assured her that she would finish off Ciudad Real in a short time. According to other versions, she was staying in a milpa on the outskirts of San Pablo Chalchihuitán, and when she entered the town, bells rang in her honour. ¹³³

Until the present, inhabitants of the town of San Juan Cancuc still celebrate the uprising; ceremonies include an ensemble comprising harp, fourteen-string guitar, violin, and trumpet. Tzeltal principales still conduct ceremonies in some sacred sites which, although they are agricultural rituals, also commemorate what they consider to be their ‘war with the Spanish’ and their subsequent abandonment by the Virgin. Further, a canvas given to the forcibly resettled inhabitants of Cancuc after the uprising to remind them of their defeat is currently kept within the town’s church. While the origins of this canvas are known, it has been locally re-signified: called Jalame’tik ta Liansa (the Virgin of the Canvas), it is venerated as a divine image. ¹³⁴ Hearing the archive against the grain, we suggest, also ought to imply listening out for these kinds of memorial redress, outside the archive, in the present.