“In the Name of the (God)Father”: Baptismal Naming in Early Colonial Guatemala

Abstract

This article examines baptismal naming in sixteenth-century Guatemala in the context of Indigenous adaptation to the sociopolitical upheavals of Spanish-led invasion, forced resettlement, and the imposition of Catholicism. As part of the institution of baptism—the first Catholic sacrament and one that missionaries implemented soon after their arrival in the Spanish Americas—Indigenous baptizees received a European name, as well as spiritual kin in the form of godparents. The distribution of baptismal names in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Santiago Atitlán, a predominantly Tz'utujil Maya community in highland Guatemala, suggests that Indigenous christening marked a break with precolonial onomastic practice. Instead of continuing the Indigenous tradition of naming children according to their birthdate, Maya adults in the Santiago Atitlán area developed new naming strategies that simultaneously located their children in the Spanish administrative sphere and reconstituted local social networks in the wake of colonial disruptions. Furthermore, the influence of godparents on name selection both expressed and reinforced godparenthood's rising significance as the most socially salient Catholic institution in colonial Indigenous society and one that remains vibrant into the present.

By 1519, word had reached the Tz'utujil Maya and their highland Guatemalan neighbors that foreigners had entered Central Mexico. Within two years, that news would be followed by the unprecedented announcement that the strangers had overtaken the mighty Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.¹ The invasion's effects were, in fact, already being felt at home in the Guatemalan highlands, even if the causality was apparent only in hindsight. Unfamiliar diseases had already begun ravaging local populations, paving the way for the Spanish-led military conquest of the region just a few years later.²

Much has been made of this devastating demographic collapse, which, combined with political and economic subjugation under a growing Spanish empire, catalyzed unprecedented changes in Indigenous Guatemalan society. Among the most salient developments was the so-called spiritual conquest, the at times violent imposition of Catholicism by Spanish missionaries and the colonial state.³ Although this process did not erase or replace Indigenous traditions, it fundamentally altered the religious fabric of the Americas. Less is known, however, about the interaction of sixteenth-century demographic disruptions with the religious encounter. How did the breakdown of pre-colonial sociopolitical structures impact Indigenous reception of Catholic traditions? And what opportunities did the revised religious landscape present Indigenous peoples for rebuilding their communities in the new colonial reality?

This article addresses these issues through the lens of baptismal naming practices, based on a detailed case study of the predominantly Tz'utujil community of Santiago Atitlán, Sololá, Guatemala, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Patterns in baptismal naming in the Santiago Atitlán area point to two key developments in Indigenous society within just three generations of initial exposure to Catholicism. First, the frequency and distribution of baptismal names suggest that adults and children in Santiago Atitlán used their Maya personal names on a daily basis, rather than their baptismal ones, which acquired a social function of their own. Unlike Indigenous personal names that were traditionally designated according to birth date, choice of a christening name appears to have been largely the responsibility of parents and godparents. Their development of a novel onomastic strategy suggests not only that Indigenous personal names were assigned in parallel, but also that baptismal names acquired specific, expressly colonial valences. Baptism was, in fact, the primary institutional mechanism for the administrative registration of Spain's Indigenous subjects, especially in the early post-contact generations. Ultimately, the rite proved the most efficient means of assigning Spanish personal names to Indigenous persons and thus incorporating them into the colonial body politic, even if quite literally in name only.

Second, this case indicates spiritual sponsors’ role in choosing their godchild's Christian name and suggests that that role was one component of a much broader process of social reconstitution following the extreme disruptions catalyzed by the Spanish invasion. Baptismal onomastic patterns indicate that godparenthood or compadrazgo was an established institution in Santiago Atitlán by the late sixteenth century, since godparents and especially godfathers appear to have exercised outsized influence on name selection. Spiritual sponsors’ involvement in election of the name that would define the child's colonial subjecthood both expressed and reinforced their status with their compadres and godchildren. Thus, compadrazgo was already becoming an important site for (re)building Indigenous sociopolitical networks, with baptismal naming laying part of the groundwork for the elaborate system of spiritual kinship that persists in the region today.

Following an overview of the early colonial history of Santiago Atitlán, the article continues with a brief outline of the history of baptism and baptismal naming in Catholicism, as well as highland Maya onomastic practices that Europeans would have encountered in the early sixteenth century. Detailed examination of baptismal naming data for over 6,000 Indigenous individuals from the Santiago Atitlán area, including a breakdown of trends by gender and over time, points to Indigenous practices that embraced names that were widely popular throughout the Spanish Americas yet distributed those names according to local preference. I propose that baptismal names acquired specific social functions in Santiago Atitlán's new colonial order and did not immediately supplant Maya personal names in quotidian contexts. Additionally, I argue that Spanish clergy performing the baptisms wielded little control over name choice and that instead parents and especially godparents were the key onomastic actors by the late sixteenth century. Taken together, these phenomena suggest that baptism, far from being a unidirectional imposition by Spanish missionaries onto unwilling Indigenous initiates, developed as an institution through which this early colonial Maya community simultaneously entered into and became legible in the colonial state while (re)forging local social ties in the wake of the devastations of the early sixteenth century.

Sixteenth-Century Chi Ya’ and the Foundation of Santiago Atitlán

By 1519, the Guatemalan highlands were dominated by the powerful K'iche’ Maya, with their capital at Q'umarkaaj, and the Kaqchikel Maya, who had founded their own competing polity at Iximche’ following a late fifteenth-century rebellion against the K'iche’ (see Figure 1).⁴ The Tz'utujil polity, with its formidable fortress Chi Ya’ on the southern shore of Lake Atitlán, was the region's third major actor, although its role may have been downplayed in the major ethnohistorical accounts of that period, which were narrated from a K'iche’ or Kaqchikel perspective.⁵ Despite occasional conflicts with their neighbors, the Tz'utujil retained both their sovereignty and the respect of the K'iche’ and Kaqchikel, due in no small part to their control over trade routes connecting the highlands with the Pacific coastal plains and their lucrative cacao groves.⁶

Figure 1 Map of the Lake Atitlán Area Showing Settlements Mentioned in the Text

Source: Compiled by the author in ArcGISPro from World Imagery (WGS84) basemap © 2021 Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, CNES/Airbus DS, USDA FSA, USGS, Getmapping, Aerogrid, IGN, IGP, and the GIS User Community.

This status quo was upended in early 1524 when thousands of Central Mexican and a few hundred Spanish troops, led by the infamous conquistador Pedro de Alvarado, invaded highland Guatemala. Together with their Kaqchikel allies, the invaders razed Q'umarkaaj and then set their sights on the Tz'utujil polity. After the Tz'utujil executed the Indigenous envoys whom Alvarado sent to Chi Ya’ in April 1524 to offer peace in exchange for submission, Alvarado ordered his troops to attack.⁷ A contingent of Central Mexican, Kaqchikel, and Spanish troops forced the Tz'utujil to retreat across Lake Atitlán in a brief but decisive battle, and Tz'utujil leadership surrendered to Alvarado the next day.⁸

To support economic administration and the more abstract imperial projects of civilization and missionization, the Spanish colonizers soon implemented a policy of reducción or congregación to forcibly resettle geographically dispersed and often ethnically diverse Indigenous populations in new towns laid out according to a European model.⁹ Accordingly, in 1547, the Tz'utujil people who still occupied their hilltop settlement Chwitinamit or who had relocated elsewhere along the southern Atitlán shore after the fall of Chi Ya’ were moved to a new colonial town that the Spaniards named Santiago Atitlán, just across the inlet from the ruins of the Tz'utujil capital they had destroyed several decades earlier.¹⁰ Tribute and labor obligations often pushed the reconstituted Santiago Atitlán community beyond its social and economic limits. According to a complaint submitted to the Spanish crown in 1571, not only had Tz'utujil leaders lost their lands and cacao orchards, but due to dramatic population decline over the previous five decades, their community no longer had even the basic human resources to meet Spanish demands.¹¹ Yet unlike the Kaqchikel or K'iche’, the Tz'utujil never openly rebelled against the Spaniards and at times even supported Spanish suppression of other groups’ resistance.¹² As a result, the Tz'utujil avoided some of the severest punishments—and stricter social and political controls—imposed on their Maya neighbors.

Another consequence of the comparatively pacific Tz'utujil reaction to the new colonial order was that this relatively tranquil pocket of the Guatemalan highlands became an early center of proselytization. A Franciscan convent founded at Santiago Atitlán around 1540 provided an important base for missionary activity in the wider area.¹³ And although Spanish imposition of Catholicism was socially, economically, and culturally burdensome, it also offered the inhabitants of Santiago Atitlán instruments which, when adapted to their own needs, would become integral to forging a new society among the congregated survivors, who by the late sixteenth century totaled perhaps as little as 10 percent of their pre-contact numbers.¹⁴ According to Tz'utujil leaders cited in the 1585 Relación geográfica report to the Spanish monarch about Santiago Atitlán, their people had numbered some 12,000 before being drastically reduced by war, epidemics, and forced labor in Spanish gold mines.¹⁵ It would take several hundred years for Guatemala's Maya population, in Santiago Atitlán and elsewhere, to recover from the devastating demographic effects of the first half-century of colonialism.¹⁶

Of the instruments that the new, crown-mandated religion offered for social rebuilding, compadrazgo remains one of the most prominent and persistent across Latin America.¹⁷ The form of “spiritual kinship” that the Church introduced to the Americas in the early sixteenth century and that was widely practiced in pre-Reformation Europe connected godfather (padrino) and godmother (madrina) with godchild (ahijado/ahijada). In the former Spanish colonies, however, compadrazgo has come to privilege above all the connection between compadres (‘co-parents’), as the baptizee's godparents and parents mutually call each other.¹⁸ In early modern Europe and contemporary Latin America alike, compadrazgo relations could be established in various Catholic rites, including marriage or first communion. But since its inception, the most salient context has been baptism. And that rite's status has generally still not been displaced, even in recent iterations of compadrazgo in more unorthodox contexts, such as significant purchases or school graduations.¹⁹

Despite baptism's historical and contemporary significance, studies of its beginnings in colonial Latin America are comparatively scarce, reflecting both the paucity of relevant sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the outsized presence of ethnographers in scholarship on baptism and ritual kinship.²⁰ In a seminal study of compadrazgo in the Spanish Americas, G. Foster proposed that it may have flourished in colonial Indigenous contexts because of its “similarity to native forms” of social networking “and above all [to the] native kinship systems disrupted by Spanish conquest” that compadrazgo ultimately replaced, at least in part.²¹ Indigenous communities’ demographic crisis may have made compadrazgo an essential stabilizing force by ensuring that godparents would step in should a child become orphaned.²² Yet even now, 70 years after Foster wrote, we still know very little about how Indigenous American communities received baptism or how the institution was adapted within an early colonial society that had been ravaged by invasion, epidemic disease, involuntary resettlement, exploitation, and other consequences of Spanish colonialism.

Baptismal records from the early Spanish Americas provide a rare testament to both the administrative success of the so-called spiritual conquest and Indigenous peoples’ reconstitution of their post-conquest societies. One such registry, now archived at the Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano “Francisco Paula García Peláez” (AHAG) in Guatemala City, records the late sixteenth-century baptisms of nearly 3,000 Maya children by Spanish friars in the Santiago Atitlán area, including the participation of over 3,000 adults as parents or spiritual sponsors.²³ Known to scholars for decades but largely unstudied, the manuscript offers a unique record from an early center of Franciscan activity in highland Guatemala. Other colonial-era documents from Santiago Atitlán served a judicial function, which meant that few persons were ever named in them besides local leaders or participants in litigation.²⁴ In contrast, the baptismal registry in AHAG identifies thousands of Indigenous individuals of whom no other trace survives in the archive. Moreover, the predominantly Tz'utujil town has been one of the most intensively studied Maya communities among ethnographers in the last century, due in no small part to its distinctive legacy of early colonial adaptation and cultural survival.²⁵ This long history of scholarship provides ample opportunity to understand longer-term changes in local society and strengthen the historical context for ethnographic interpretation, an endeavor to which the present article also contributes.

Rites of Baptism and Cultures of Naming

Traditionally, Maya children in the Guatemalan highlands, like other Indigenous Mesoamericans, received a personal name that reflected the date of birth according to the 260-day ritual calendar.²⁶ The 260-day calendar, which has been has been in continual use in Mesoamerica for over two millennia, consists of 20 distinct day signs plus 13 numerical prefixes (1–13); each date is composed of one day plus a prefix, so that the calendar cycles through 260 number-day combinations, or 260 dates, before resetting.²⁷ As documented most robustly among Nahua communities in colonial Central Mexico and in twentieth-century ethnographies from across Mesoamerica, the core of a child's calendrical name included one of the 20 day signs, each of which carried a unique mix of negative, positive, and neutral associations.²⁸ The name was chosen in concert with a diviner or daykeeper who not only identified the date of birth but also divined the recipient's destiny based on the day sign's connotations.²⁹ If the birthdate was inauspicious, the day could be adjusted by delaying the child's first bathing, an event which established the child's calendrical name and concomitant destiny.³⁰ As R. Bunzel observed among K'iche’ residents of early twentieth-century Chichicastenango, Guatemala, the numerical prefix influenced prognostication as well, through a combination of associations attached to each numeral and a general association of higher numbers with stronger expression of day sign traits.³¹ By the time the Spaniards arrived in highland Guatemala, however, the numeral was not included in girls’ appellations and only rarely in boys’, mostly among the sons of nobles.³²

The arrival of Catholicism and specifically the imposition of baptism marked a fundamental break in this pattern, even if at first that break existed only on paper. Although Christians have long been divided over how and when baptism should take place—especially over whether infant baptism is permissible and under what circumstances—the rite traditionally marks a believer's formal acceptance of and rebirth within the Christian faith and is considered a prerequisite for true salvation.³³ It cleanses one's sins through immersion “with the Holy Ghost, and with fire” (Matthew 3:11) as reflected by the body's submersion, either full or in part, in water.³⁴ Socially, baptism demarcates one's formal entry into the religious community and thus represents the most doctrinally fundamental rite of passage, being as much a “social birth” as a “spiritual birth.”³⁵ In Catholic tradition, an infant's soul initially exists in a liminal state, when its “ambiguous and indeterminate” status as a non-member in the Christian community renders it vulnerable to irreligious influences or even condemnation to eternal spiritual unrest in limbo should the infant die unbaptized.³⁶ Baptism thus binds one into the stable familiarity of the religious collective, ensuring not only protection of the soul but sociocultural legibility to other community members.

In the heavily Christianized world of medieval Europe, baptism also became an important instrument in state-building. Its role in politically and culturally integrating newly conquered peoples was the subject of active contestation back in Spain, where debates raged over the rite's efficacy in transforming Jews and Muslims into authentic Catholic subjects.³⁷ Although baptism assumed a similar role in the Americas, sixteenth-century missionaries to newly claimed Spanish territories had to convey the rite's significance to baptizees for it to have any spiritual effect. The challenge, then, was rendering the symbolically laden ritual into Indigenous languages whose speakers had no prior exposure to Abrahamic religions, let alone to baptism's doctrinal underpinnings.³⁸ In translating “baptism” into Mesoamerican languages, Catholic missionaries tended to adopt “descriptive paraphrases,” such as the Kaqchikel (mi)xuqasaj ya’ ‘dropped water’ or the K'iche’ uqajik uja’ Dios, ‘the descending of the water of God’.³⁹ Such literal renderings, which emphasized the act of baptism, were easier for Indigenous peoples to observe and for missionaries to explain than the rite's religious significance.

I focus here on another linguistic component of baptism, however, namely the rite's onomastic consequences for the neophyte. An essential component of Catholic baptism, as for many other postnatal or early childhood rites worldwide, is bestowal of a personal name at the conclusion of the ceremony.⁴⁰ Naming ranks on anthropology's short list of human universals: every society uses some form of personal appellation to identify its members, although the number or elaboration of names may vary widely among individuals within that society according to their standing.⁴¹ Clifford Geertz has written, “The everyday world in which the members of any community move . . . is populated not by anybodies, faceless men without qualities, but by somebodies . . . positively characterized and appropriately labeled.”⁴² A name, whether bestowed formally through ceremony or informally through quotidian interaction, is an intimate component of identity, demarcating a person while simultaneously acknowledging that the person's existence is itself a social construction. According to biblical tradition, the Christian subject, too, was redefined “in the name of Jesus” through baptism by being “dipped, immersed, or poured into the person and identity of Jesus, and [participating] in the sphere of his power, authority and Lordship.”⁴³ Naming, then, has been at the core of the Christian believer's spiritual transformation from the rite's beginning.

The Catholic rite of baptism entails a series of physical actions and a collection of materials that together delineate the event as a ritual. Perhaps the most emblematic of these is the priest immersing the baptizee in water or pouring water over the baptizee's head. The concomitant bestowal of a name, in contrast, is a primarily if not exclusively linguistic action. Consequently, it offers an archetypal example of what J. L. Austin defines as a “performative,” a phenomenon in which “the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action.”⁴⁴ Baptismal naming represents a “creative action” that can “erase” or “enshrine particular, individual pasts.”⁴⁵ Thankfully for contemporary historians, however, that erasure did not obliterate all traces. Mandates issued by the Council of Trent upon its conclusion in 1563 included a requirement that all baptisms be documented in parish registers like that preserved in the AHAG, formalizing a practice that had long been an informal norm in many parts of Catholic Europe.⁴⁶ The baptismal registry supplemented what had previously been an ephemeral verbal performance with a physical performance that, somewhat paradoxically, has left more durable traces than the ritual that it was intended to document.

The practice of bestowing a new designation at baptism was not widely adopted in Europe until the tenth century, when it became commonplace for godparents to choose the child's name, which in practice often was identical with their own.⁴⁷ By the late medieval period, baptismal naming was established as a significant component of personhood in Catholic Europe, motivating a shift toward names with religious symbolism.⁴⁸ In 1566, the Council of Trent ruled that the baptizee should receive a name specifically “taken from some person whose eminent sanctity has given him a place in the catalogue of the Saints,” another reform that merely codified a trend that had been proliferating throughout Europe for centuries.⁴⁹ From a Trentine perspective, christening someone with a non-Christian name, in contrast, would “prove how little they regard Christian piety when they so fondly cherish the memory of impious men, as to wish to have their profane names continually echo in the ears of the faithful.”⁵⁰ For early modern Catholics, bestowal of a baptismal name was a crucial step in identity affirmation,⁵¹ one that became even more crucial in the case of baptizees born into a non-Catholic society.⁵²

For missionaries to the Spanish Americas, then, baptismal naming marked the beginning of an Indigenous person's acceptance into a religious collective that transcended temporal, spatial, and cultural boundaries. In part because of the 260-day Indigenous calendar's ritual and explicitly non-Christian associations, missionaries considered adoption of a baptismal name an important step toward assimilating Indigenous communities into the social order that Catholicism, and Spanish civilization more broadly, provided.⁵³ In highland Guatemala, this process began shortly after the initial invasion in 1524, when the first highland Maya nobles were baptized and given Christian personal and familial names after surrendering to the Spanish-led forces.⁵⁴

But in the colonial Spanish Americas, baptismal naming took on new significance as the primary avenue through which European personal names were introduced among the Indigenous population. Bestowal of a baptismal name during Catholic evangelization of Indigenous Americans instantiated what Michael Silverstein calls “performative nomination” by “creat[ing] an event-origo . . . in relation to which all further tokens of the name will still apply to that unique entity so baptized.”⁵⁵ Baptismal naming is, in essence, an act of designating someone with a specific identity in the form of a linguistic token or name. And although the act may only occur once in a lifetime, each reuse of the name “indexically presupposes that the event of baptism has taken place, in duly proper (!) fashion” and situates that moment in “a presumptive chain of events of usage from baptism to now.”⁵⁶ At the same time, the authority to name is not distributed equally across society; it depends on the relations entailed between name-giver and recipient and “social differentiations” that their roles imply.⁵⁷ Thus, the power to name is the power to “performatively creat[e] a new individual” identifiable “within the religious corporation,” in the case of Catholic baptism, but also in “secular and civil” contexts of the state when that name enters bureaucratic circulation.⁵⁸

The stated goal of naming a Catholic baptizee after a saint was fundamentally spiritual, namely to “stimulate each one [baptizee] to imitate the virtues and holiness of the Saint” and to call upon the namesake to “watch over the safety of his body and soul.”⁵⁹ But when an Indigenous person in sixteenth-century Santiago Atitlán was baptized—always at the hands of a Spanish friar, except in emergencies in which the would-be baptizee might die before a friar arrived—she or he was reborn not only as a Christian but as a colonial subject. With a new name recorded in the registry during or soon after christening, the initiate legally and culturally joined Spain's bureaucratic empire. Later in life, the baptizee could refer to the paper trail that began with the baptismal registry to defend her or his status or privileges; at the same time, that trail ensured the baptizee's inclusion in calculating and enforcing the community's economic obligations to the empire.⁶⁰ The predomination in the colonial archive of Christian names—which were, after all, far easier for Spanish administrators to read and record than Indigenous ones—is an onomastic testament to the Church's crucial role in colonialization and to the intimate entanglement of religion and bureaucracy in defining colonial personhood.

Nonetheless, baptismal naming's social potential was not the sole purview of Spanish missionaries imposing the tradition on their Indigenous congregants. To identify someone as at once distinct within and inextricable from a social collective is to establish, in the words of B. Bodenhorn and G. vom Bruck, a certain “detachability that renders names a powerful political tool for establishing or erasing formal identity and gives them commodity-like value. And it is precisely their detachability that allows them to cross boundaries.”⁶¹ In the early colonial Americas, baptism, and specifically baptismal naming, represented a new forum for Indigenous parents and godparents to shape their (god)child's identity within the still relatively new colonial society. Data from the AHAG registry indicate that residents of Santiago Atitlán probably did not refer to each other in daily interactions by their Spanish personal names, which instead remained largely tools of colonial administration. At the same time, selection of baptismal names was not random, nor does it appear to have been guided by the supervising friar.⁶² By the late sixteenth century, just a few generations after the inaugural baptisms in highland Guatemala, “the power of the name itself” was no longer centered in the child; instead, it was “entangled…in the life histories of others,” most notably of the Indigenous adults responsible for the child's physical and spiritual care.⁶³

The AHAG Baptismal Registry from Santiago Atitlán

The AHAG registry records the baptisms of least 2,889 children in the Santiago Atitlán area during the years 1566 to 1577, 1582, and 1613. These events involved more than 3,000 adult men and women who participated as parents or godparents. That the registry originally recorded a continuous sequence of baptismal entries is suggested by a count of years that runs continuously from 1573 to 1625 on folio 66v. Unfortunately, however, the complete sequence of folios has not been located. Most registered baptisms seem to have been performed in Santiago Atitlán proper. However, occasional mention of other towns like San Pedro La Laguna or San Lucas Tolimán in a heading, an individual entry, or marginalia suggests that a few baptisms may have taken place elsewhere along Lake Atitlán's southern shores (see Figure 1).

This geographic ambiguity is reflected in the manuscript's linguistic profile: entries from 1566 to 1575 were recorded in Kaqchikel, but from September 1575 almost all entries were recorded in Spanish, although some of those entries include one or more Kaqchikel kinship terms. Although the town of Santiago Atitlán was and remains a predominantly Tz'utujil community, Spaniards had elevated Kaqchikel to the status of a regional language from the conquistadors’ first incursions into the region.⁶⁴ In addition, Tz'utujil is a close linguistic relative of Kaqchikel and K'iche’, two languages which the sixteenth-century inhabitants of Santiago Atitlán also understood.⁶⁵ It is thus reasonable to assume that the registry's language reflects the presiding Franciscan friars’ greater familiarity with Kaqchikel, especially since three of the five missions they had established by 1545 were in major Kaqchikel settlements.⁶⁶ One of these was in Sololá, the capital of the eponymous modern Guatemalan department that was immediately north of Santiago Atitlán, on the other side of Lake Atitlán, and may have been part of Tz'utujil territory before the K'iche’ took control in the mid-to-late fifteenth century (Figure 1).⁶⁷ It is also possible that the Spaniards forcibly concentrated some Kaqchikel-speaking populations in the new town of Santiago Atitlán in 1547 alongside the original Tz'utujil inhabitants of Chwitinamit.⁶⁸ In any case, the Council of Trent had mandated that sponsors be physically present at the baptism, so presumably all adults named in the registry were from the local area or at least close enough to have been able to travel to the event.⁶⁹

Tabulating Baptismal Names

Most of the following analysis relies on basic frequency statistics, namely counts (n =) and percentages that tabulate the distribution of each baptismal name among the individuals listed in the AHAG registry. This method provides a concise overview of late sixteenth-century baptismal naming practices from the Santiago Atitlán area. In addition, it provides a basis for examining name diversity between genders and age groups, and for comparing distributions of baptismal names in Santiago Atitlán with other communities in the Spanish Americas. To my knowledge, there are no published studies of baptismal naming from sixteenth-century Guatemala. However, social historians have analyzed roughly contemporaneous datasets from nearby Central Mexico that, thanks to a similarly early date of first contact with Catholicism, offer important comparisons that will be referenced below.

It is important to note that the degree of thoroughness with which adult (especially male) names were recorded varies substantially. Consequently, the data on adult names from the AHAG registry includes only those parents and godparents who could be reasonably identified as discrete individuals. For men, the most complete entries cite a Spanish personal name and surname, a Maya personal name, a chinamit (‘confederation’) affiliation, and lineage, plus a Maya or Spanish political title. Yet despite the wealth of onomastic options or perhaps because of it, most baptismal entries include only two or three of these designations, at times just one. To the further frustration of today's historian, the combination of names cited for one man often varies between entries, and the orthography for Indigenous names especially is not always reliable. Thus, only men with an unusual name or a salient onomastic sequence could be identified as unique (n = 1542; see Table 1). Several hundred others could not be distinguished and were not included in the data presented here to avoid potentially double-counting individuals. Because this study focuses on Santiago Atitlán's Indigenous population, Spanish friars were excluded from the data as well.

Table 1 Spanish Baptismal Names of Boys and Men (Fathers and Godfathers), AHAG Registry, Santiago Atitlán

Source/Table Detail: AHAG catalog no. A.4.46.1. The Other entry in the Boys’ Names column includes these names with n < 10: Adriano, Alonso, Angelino, Agustín, Bernabé, Bernardo, Bonifacio, Buenaventura, Calisto, Carlos, Cipriano, Cristóbal, Damián, Domingo, Fabian, Felipe, Gonzalo, Gregorio, Hernando, Jacob, Jordán, Juliano, Julio, Laureano, Lázaro, Leandre, Leonardo, Lope, Lorenzo, Lucas, Luís, Manuel, Marcelino, Marcos, Mateo, Matías, Melchior, Michel, Pablo, Salvador, Sancho, Sebastián, Serafín, Simeón, Simón, Tadeo, Tomás, Toribio. The Other entry in the Men's Names column includes names with n < 10: Abal, Ambrosio, Angelino, Antón, Bernabé, Benito, Bernardino, Bernardo, Buenaventura, Cosme, Esteban, Fabian, Feliciano, Gabriel, Joachim, Jorge, Juliano, Lázaro, Leonardo, Lorenzo, Lucas, Manuel, Melchior, Nicolás, Pablo, Rafael, Santobal, Sebastián, Toribio, Vicente. Column totals for % Total do not equal 100% due to rounding.

Unfortunately, the proportion of unidentified persons is even greater among mothers and godmothers, whom scribes usually identified only with a Spanish personal name. Just 61 women could be confidently identified based on a Maya personal or lineage name—usually cited only for single or widowed mothers—or, even more rarely, the Spanish honorific doña.⁷⁰ To compile a dataset robust enough to compare with the baptized girls, most women included in the present analysis were defined tentatively based on affiliation with a male partner. In other words, if a godfather or father could be identified according to the criteria described above, their female partner was also considered a unique individual (n = 1756) (Table 2). Andres Kamb'a’ Tijax, for instance, is listed twice in the registry as a father with Lucía as the mother; he also appears four times as a godfather, thrice with Lucía—presumably the mother of his two children—and once with another woman, Mencía. These women, Lucía and Mencía, were thus counted as separate individuals. One consequence of this solution is potential undercounting of women who shared a Spanish name and were partnered with the same father or godfather. However, this shortcoming is mitigated by the competing possibility of overcounting women who served as mother or godmother alongside more than one man.

Table 2 Spanish Baptismal Names of Girls and Women (Mothers and Godmothers), AHAG Registry, Santiago Atitlán

Source/Table Detail: AHAG catalog no. A.4.46.1. All instances of Catarina (both girls and women) were counted together with Catalina because they are variations of the same name (García Gallarín. Diccionario histórico de nombres de América y España, 234), and some uniquely identifiable women were alternately named in the Santiago Atitlán registry with either spelling. The Other entry in the Girls’ Names column includes names with n < 10: Adriana, Ágatha, Antonia, Apolonia, Beatriz, Clara, Dominica, Engracia, Fresida, Gregoriana, Inés, Jerónima, Juliana, Justina, Lorencia, Lucía, Marcelina, Marina, Martina, Mencía, Micaela, Paula, Potencia, Susana, Teresa, Úrsula, Verónica. The Other entry in the Women's Names column includes names with n < 10: Ágatha, Agustina, Aldonza, Angélica, Antonia, Artanza, Bárbara, Clara, Constancia, Cristina, Felipa, Inés, Leonarda, Margarita, Pedronilla, Teresa, Ulaya, Verónica. Column totals for % Total do not equal 100% due to rounding.

Although it is found in some other colonial-period baptismal records, ethnic information was not included in the AHAG registry.⁷¹ Most adult men are attributed at least one Maya name or title, which even centuries later remains a reliable ethnic indicator.⁷² The manuscript's historical and social context also make it exceedingly unlikely that a mother or godmother listed with an Indigenous man would have been ethnically European. Moreover, one can reasonably assume that adults listed with names of entirely European origin are Indigenous because of the demographic history of Santiago Atitlán, which historically was and remains today overwhelmingly Indigenous.⁷³ Several men with all-Spanish names in the AHAG registry can be confidently identified as Tz'utujil leaders, based on comparison with other Maya or Spanish documents that reflect a known pattern of Indigenous persons, especially prominent community members, being identified only by their Spanish names in colonial sources, from as early as the mid-to-late sixteenth century.⁷⁴ Similarly, the names of prominent Spanish conquistadors like Alvarado—whose well-documented 1541 death would have precluded his appearance at a baptism in Santiago Atitlán on May 15, 1569—most probably belonged to Maya elites who had adopted those designations upon their own baptism.⁷⁵

There is, nonetheless, one clearly identifiable Spaniard in the AHAG registry: Sancho Núñez de Barahona, who with his Spanish wife, Isabel de Loaisa, served as co-godparents with another (most likely Indigenous) couple for a Maya girl baptized in 1575. Born in Guatemala to the conquistador after whom he was named and his Spanish wife, Isabel de Escobar y Aguilar, Barahona inherited the encomienda of Atitlán that his father had been awarded by the Spanish crown and married the daughter of a colonial administrator.⁷⁶ This comparatively well-documented, non-Indigenous couple was excluded from analysis. Although it is possible that other Spaniards have gone undetected, particularly as godparents, it is very doubtful that they would be present in the AHAG registry in sufficient number to meaningfully affect the results presented here.

Baptismal Naming in the Santiago Atitlán Area

The data analyzed from the Santiago Atitlán area encompass 2,889 baptizees (1,446 girls and 1,443 boys), plus 1,756 adult women and 1,542 adult men, for a total of 6,187 individuals. Unfortunately, there are to the best of my knowledge no surviving census records from the mid-to-late sixteenth century that could indicate what percentage of the local population was baptized at the time. However, the proliferation of Spanish names in a 1609 roster of Santiago Atitlán's tributaries suggests that few if any residents had not yet been christened by that date.⁷⁷

Baptismal Name Distribution and Diversity

The total roster of persons, and especially males, in the AHAG registry demonstrates considerable onomastic diversity. Nonetheless, adults consistently represent a smaller selection of names than their children. There are 57 appellations shared among fathers and godfathers, compared to 66 distributed among baptized boys (Table 1). The generational discrepancy is even more significant among females, with 32 names recorded for women compared to 47 for baptized girls (Table 2). The greater onomastic variety among a slightly smaller male population at Santiago Atitlán, compared to that of females, mirrors an imbalance that was already apparent in medieval Spain and was replicated in the sixteenth century among Nahuas in Morelos and Culhuacan, both in Central Mexico.⁷⁸ Similarly, among Spaniards and their criollo children born in Mexico City during the same period, 63 different baptismal names are attested among 400 males, as opposed to 51 names for an equal number of females.⁷⁹ Nonetheless, the pattern was not replicated everywhere; in early seventeenth-century Coyoacán, for example, the diversity of baptismal names was relatively even between Nahua men and women.⁸⁰

Despite the range of baptismal names circulating among the Santiago Atitlán population, their distribution is strikingly imbalanced. Almost one-third of boys (n = 462, 32.1%) were christened with just two names, Gaspar and Juan, and three other appellations,—Diego, Francisco, and Pedro—accounted for another 458 boys, or 31.8% of the total (Figure 2A). The disproportionate popularity of these five names is especially striking when one considers that no more than 49 boys shared any other single name (Table 1). The other baptismal names are distributed among the remaining one-third of boys, with 56 of the 66 total names bestowed on no more than 29 baptizees each.

Figure 2a Frequency of Names among Boys in the AHAG Baptismal Registry, Santiago Atitlán

Source: AHAG catalog no. A.4.46.1.

Onomastic patterns for godfathers and fathers are similarly lopsided but reveal different, perhaps generational preferences. Among men, Francisco and Juan collectively account for 518 persons (33.6%), and Diego, Martín, Pedro, and Andrés are distributed among 506 others (32.8%) (Figure 2B). Whereas Juan, Francisco, Diego, and Pedro were popular among parents and children alike, just 29 boys were christened Andrés and an equal number were named Martín. Both names had fallen out of favor locally among parents and sponsors by the late sixteenth century. And in contrast with seventeenth-century Central Mexico, where second or double names were relatively common among females and males alike and may have reflected an integration of pre-colonial Nahua and Spanish naming patterns,⁸¹ double names were apparently rare in the Santiago Atitlán area and limited to boys and men.⁸²

Figure 2B Frequency of Names among Adult Men in the AHAG Baptismal Registry, Santiago Atitlán

Source: AHAG catalog no. A.4.46.1.

The basic onomastic distribution among females is comparable but displays an even heavier skew toward a handful of favorites. Ana proved one of the two most popular names across generations, denoting 286 girls and 324 women (Figures 3A and 3B). Two names dominate among each group: Ana and Catalina (with variant Catarina) together account for over one-third of women (n = 650, 37.0%), whereas an almost identical proportion of girls (n = 540, 37.3%) were christened Ana or Juana. The third and fourth most frequent names, Francisca and Juana, were popular among children and adults alike, but María, the fourth most common girls’ name, represents just 5.3% (n = 94) of godmothers and mothers. Interestingly, female names tended to cluster more than male ones, for adults and children alike: just 69 girls (4.8%) and 54 women (3.1%) bore an uncommon name represented by fewer than ten persons in the AHAG registry (Figures 3A, 3B; Table 2), compared to 161 (11.2%) of boys and 98 (6.4%) of men (Figures 2A, 2B; Table 1). In other words, despite a smaller onomastic corpus, females were more likely share a common name than were their male counterparts, who were more likely to bear an unusual, if not unique, name.

Figure 3A Frequency of Names among Girls in the AHAG Baptismal Registry, Santiago Atitlán

Source: AHAG catalog no. A.4.46.1.

Figure 3B Frequency of Names among Adult Women in the AHAG Baptismal Registry, Santiago Atitlán

Source: AHAG catalog no. A.4.46.1.

Gender and Chronology of Baptismal Names

For both genders, Santiago Atitlán child baptizees represented greater appellative variation than their parents. This trend likely reflects intergenerational expansion of Indigenous exposure to Spaniards and Spanish culture, including a wider range of personal names, as the colonial administration settled into Guatemala. It may also signal shifts in popularity and development of local preferences over time. Martín, for instance, is the third most common name among adult men in the AHAG registry and was among the most prevalent male names in the Nahua censuses from early sixteenth-century Morelos.⁸³ Among baptized boys in Santiago Atitlán, however, barely 2% are called Martín (Table 1). In contrast, the three most common boys’ names in the AHAG registry—Juan, Francisco, and Diego, which collectively account for 42% of male baptizees—were equally popular among adult men (43.3%) (Table 1). A similar distribution characterized Spaniards and criollos in Mexico City, where Juan, Diego, and Pedro were the most common names in 1560 and Francisco had claimed third place by 1600, although the top three names accounted for barely a third of baptizees during either period.⁸⁴ In the early seventeenth-century Nahua parishes of San Jacinto Tenantitlan and San Juan Bautista in Coyoacán, in contrast, proportions were more top-heavy and favored slightly different names than in Santiago Atitlán, with Juan (31%) proving more than five times as popular as Miguel (6%) and next-best Francisco and Domingo (5% each).⁸⁵

Overall, baptismal naming practices in the Santiago Atitlán area seem to have paralleled contemporaneous trends for males in indigenous Mesoamerica generally, at least in terms of onomastic breadth and most popular choices. Generational shifts are apparent in comparing adult men and boys, yet chronological examination of baptizes alone does not reveal any significant year-to-year changes. When considering the 12 consecutive years documented in the AHAG registry, which are also the years for which the greatest number of baptisms are recorded, the most notable trends among boys are a gradual but steady decline in the use of Joseph, from 17 baptizees between 1566 and 1568 to just two in the years 1575–1577, and the rising popularity of Juan, whose use increased from 39 to 81 boys during the same period (Table 3). Naming preferences certainly changed, but their evolution was gradual enough that it is most visible across generations or perhaps, with a more continuous dataset, decades.

Table 3 Distribution of Boys’ Baptismal Names in Santiago Atitlán by Three-Year Period (1566–1577)

Source: AHAG catalog no. A.4.46.1

The most common girls’ names in the AHAG registry were Ana, Juana, and Francisca, with María a close fourth; collectively, they applied to a clear majority of 64.1% of baptized girls (Table 2). In contrast, Catalina, Ana, and Francisca were the clear winners among adult women and together account for 52.7% of that group, a majority that increases to 65.9% when including fourth-place Juana. These baptizee records resemble findings from early colonial Coyoacán and Culhuacan, where María, Juana, Francisca, and Ana were the most common designations among Nahua females.⁸⁶ The strong preference for María in Coyoacán likely signals “an incipient but modest Marian devotion” in these Nahua communities.⁸⁷ The rise in that name among baptized girls in the Santiago Atitlán region during the late sixteenth and into the early seventeenth centuries, just a few decades before the Coyoacán baptisms, may indicate a similar expansion of local Marian tradition.⁸⁸ Indeed, the Santiago Atitlán area saw a steady increase in the number of girls named María between 1566 and 1577, up to 43 in 1575–1577 from 31 in 1566–1568 (Table 4). Nonetheless, as among baptized boys, there are no major onomastic developments among girls during the 12 consecutive years when baptisms were recorded in the AHAG registry. The most prominent shifts are a gradual decline in the use of Cecilia, from 11 baptizees in the years 1566 to 1568 to just four in the years 1575 to 1577, and the steady rise in Ana, from 49 in 1566–1568 to 79 in 1575–1577 (Table 4).

Table 4 Distribution of Girls’ Baptismal Names in Santiago Atitlán by Three-Year Period (1566–1577)

Source: AHAG catalog no. A.4.46.1

Despite some similarities with early colonial Coyoacán and Culhuacan, onomastic distributions for Santiago Atitlán females diverge more from trends documented elsewhere in Mesoamerica during the same period compared to the men. Among Spanish and criollo females in Mexico City, for instance, María, Juana, Mariana, and Ana were the four most common appellations in 1580, but collectively accounted for a much smaller percentage of females in Mexico City (40%) than in Santiago Atitlán where Ana, Catalina, Francisca, and Juana accounted for 65.9% of women.⁸⁹ By 1600, Isabel—a name assigned to just 1% of Santiago Atitlán girls (n = 14)—had replaced Mariana as the third-most common name in Mexico City, and although the top four names had become more frequent, they still barely reached a collective majority of 50.3% of females.⁹⁰ Similarly, Magdalena and María, the most common female names in the mid sixteenth-century Nahua dataset,⁹¹ were not particularly widespread among Santiago Atitlán adults, each accounting for just over 5% of mothers and godmothers. Only María saw a meaningful increase, to over 13% among baptized girls (Table 2). Local repertoires of names varied as well: multiple top-20 names in early seventeenth-century Coyoacán like Dominga, Pascuala, Nicolasa, or Melchora, each with several dozen attestations among nearly 2,200 females, do not appear even once in the AHAG registry.⁹²

Why female names in the Santiago Atitlán area would have diverged more than male names from trends elsewhere in New Spain is unclear. A reasonable hypothesis is that in the heavily male-dominated colonial society, Indigenous men and women would have been less frequently exposed to and thus less influenced by Spanish trends in female naming, especially considering that the few Spanish women living in sixteenth-century Guatemala were concentrated in the capital of Santiago de Guatemala, over 50 km southeast of Santiago Atitlán.⁹³ It is also possible that such gender-based social divisions in the early post-contact generations—including the fact that all friars conducting the baptisms were male—resulted in less standardization in female baptismal names. From this perspective, the Santiago Atitlán-area data may not diverge from contemporary patterns so much as simply reflect one snapshot of a broader range of diversity in female baptismal naming across the indigenous Americas.

Baptismal Name Repetition and Colonial Subjecthood

A minority of parents in the Santiago Atitlán area repeated baptismal names among their same-sex children, but the practice was common enough in the AHAG data to suggest that Maya rather than Spanish names were used to refer to people on a daily basis.⁹⁴ At least 83 fathers had two or three children christened identically, for a total of 179 offspring with the same name as at least one sibling. Occasionally same-name siblings were born to two different mothers, but in most cases both parents remained the same.⁹⁵ In a handful of families, name repetition could have been a means of onomastically replacing a child who had died, an event that was retroactively annotated in the AHAG registry for some baptizees.⁹⁶ Juana and her husband Martin Díaz Ajtz'ikinijay, for instance, had two sons christened Gaspar in 1569 and 1572, respectively, who both perished sometime after their baptism. Similarly, Juan Chapen and his wife Isabel lost three sons, of which the first two were named Gaspar; one was baptized in October 1569 and the other in June 1572, and undated annotations retroactively marked them as deceased.

Yet the replacement scenario does not explain most cases of same-name siblings. Parents whose child passed away did not necessarily reuse that baptismal name on a same-sex newborn. Andres B'otan No'j Tz'ikin and his wife Ana, for instance, lost a daughter who was christened Juana in 1567, but their three daughters baptized between 1569 and 1571 included two Franciscas and no Juana. Likewise, of seven children Diego Lopez Kojaw Q'anel and Isabel had baptized, the first, Lorenzo, died sometime later, yet their second son (who also passed away) was named Francisco. Their third son, baptized more than four years after Francisco and more than six years after Lorenzo, was called Juan.

There are insightful counterexamples in the other direction as well. At least five fathers had onomastically paired boys and paired girls; in other words, they had multiple repeated names within one household, with no indication that any of the children passed away while the registry was still in use. Francisco Pusul Aq'b’al Q'anel and his wife Francisca, for example, baptized all three of their sons Juan between 1570 and 1576. Bartolome Kok'ix Imox and Catalina took an especially systematic approach, christening both daughters María and both sons Bernardino between 1568 and 1575. Usually, the recycled names were among the most popular generally—Ana, Francisca, and Juana for girls and Diego, Francisco, and Juan for boys. Yet recurrences of rarer ones, like Diego Tekuna’ Ayu's two Ambrosios or Bartolomé Rodríguez B'ak’ajol's two Claras, strongly suggest intentional repetition. In other words, it is highly unlikely that these unusual names were selected by the baptizing priest, for example, or determined by the feast day of birth or baptism.

It is possible that parents assigned the same baptismal name to multiple children to make it easier to remember during interactions with colonial administrators and clergy.⁹⁷ It is unclear, however, whether they reused names with clergy approval. Sarah Cline suggests that repetition of baptismal names among Nahuas siblings indicated “that the cleric did not know his parishioners well, for he might have hesitated to baptize siblings with the same name.”⁹⁸ Indeed, among the collective 179 children in the Santiago Atitlán area with inter-sibling repetition, only 12 sibling pairs, all from different fathers, were baptized by the same friar, and always on different dates. In addition, more than two dozen friars oversaw the baptisms recorded in the AHAG registry, and archival sources indicate that clergymen in Guatemala were generally quite mobile during the late sixteenth century.⁹⁹ This situation would have made it more likely that friars would not be well known to the families whose children they were baptizing and vice versa.

In this context, however, it is notable that Fray Gonzalo Méndez, a Franciscan credited with a plurality of at least 44.5% (n = 1288) of all baptisms in the AHAG registry, oversaw the christening of all 12 same-sex sibling pairs with the same name. Although some siblings were baptized up to four years apart, Fray Méndez, along with Fray Pedro Gallegos, oversaw one pair's baptisms just four months apart. This record shows that Fray Méndez was likely in residence in Santiago Atitlán or at least visiting quite frequently between 1567 and 1574. Indeed, he was elected guardián (‘superior’) of the Santiago Atitlán convent in 1570. He is said to have been quite proficient in Tz'utujil, Kaqchikel, and K'iche’, and is cited several times in the 1585 Relación geográfica as a key figure in Santiago Atitlán's reducción, even if he was not in fact the first Franciscan in the area.¹⁰⁰ The same report singles out Fray Méndez as having proselytized, baptized, and married much of Santiago Atitlán's population prior to his death on May 5, 1582.¹⁰¹

It seems unlikely, then, that Fray Méndez was entirely ignorant of families reusing baptismal names among their children. Perhaps he was less concerned with the name than with the sacrament and willing to tolerate local onomastic preferences as long as the children were being formally inducted into the church.¹⁰² In fact, repetition of baptismal names among siblings was not uncommon in medieval and Renaissance Spain and other parts of Europe, where shared names could reflect parents’ particular devotion to the eponymous saint or their desire to commemorate deceased ancestors, for instance.¹⁰³ Both motivations are attested in seventeenth- through nineteenth-century San Cristóbal Totonicapán (Figure 1), where K'iche’ parents’ are said to have preferred “the names of the most well-known and revered saints in that place, such as Catalina, María, Ana, Isabel for females; and Francisco, Diego, Cristóbal, Juan, Sebastián for males.”¹⁰⁴ Yet onomastic repetition could also be motivated by familial ties, as a late eighteenth-century priest discovered when he tried, to little effect, to have the San Cristóbal Totonicapán parishioners baptize their children after the saint on whose day they were born, rather than after their forbears.¹⁰⁵ Comparable dynamics of parental intention may have undergirded repetition of baptismal names in some families in late sixteenth-century Santiago Atitlán. Or perhaps this approach to naming amounted to tacit acknowledgment that the baptismal designation was a formality with little to no bearing on the child's identity in daily life.

Ethnohistorical and ethnographic evidence from across the Maya region robustly supports the inference that Indigenous calendrical names, not baptismal names, were used to distinguish persons day-to-day in and around Santiago Atitlán, even several generations after the introduction of Catholicism.¹⁰⁶ Evidence from Santiago Atitlán proper, however, is limited to a unique entry in the AHAG registry dated May 27, 1576, that identifies a baptizee by three names, including his Maya one. Tellingly, the boy shares baptismal (Francisco) and lineage names (Ch'akom) with his father, but his calendrical name, Tz'ikin, is distinct from his father's, which is Kanu’. Similarly, 12 mothers or godmothers in the Santiago Atitlán registry are attributed a Maya name consisting of the feminine marker (i)x- prefixed to the day name (for example, Xtz'ikin, Ixe'y), in addition to their Spanish baptismal designation. Yet, just as Cline observes about the Morelos area, Maya adults listed in the AHAG registry obviously remembered their Christian names, regardless of how (in)frequently they used them, since they were able to produce them for the baptismal entry.¹⁰⁷

Baptism provided missionaries and colonial bureaucrats with an immediate, tangible solution for incorporating the crown's new subjects into its religious and administrative jurisdiction. But instituting the use of Spanish personal names in Indigenous daily life would take many generations longer. Even in 1643, colonial officials visiting Panajachel, a Kaqchikel town on the northeastern shore of Lake Atitlán (Figure 1), complained that persistent recording of Indigenous rather than Spanish names in baptismal registries and other parish records created bureaucratic confusion when compiling the padrón or census to calculate local tribute obligations.¹⁰⁸ To address the problem, representatives of the Guatemalan audiencia issued several appeals in the 1640s, urging that the Indigenous population be forced to use exclusively Spanish personal and family names—not only for “easier understanding in writing them in padrones and baptismal registries” and maintenance of accurate tribute records, but “in order that they thus forget . . . and remove the serious offensives that they committed against Our Lord God” during the precolonial past.¹⁰⁹ To Spanish officials, Indigenous names were a reminder that the colonial projects of civilization and evangelization remained incomplete.

Godparents’ Roles in Name Selection and Transmission

Onomastic strategies that Maya communities developed for christening represented fundamental shifts in how personal names were selected and the role of social relations in that process. Although “it was common for mothers and fathers to have the same baptismal name as their same-gender children” among Nahuas in mid sixteenth-century Morelos, transmitting a baptismal name from parent to child was not the dominant pattern in the Santiago Atitlán area.¹¹⁰ Examining parent-child naming practices, including cross-gender examples (for example, father Francisco > daughter Francisca or mother Juana > son Juan), indicates that just 6.9% (n = 200) of the 2,889 children shared a baptismal name with at least one parent. Such infrequency mirrors the trend documented in colonial Culhuacan.¹¹¹

The presence of a Franciscan convent in Santiago Atitlán and the Franciscan order's general predominance in the region by the late sixteenth century may explain the frequency of Franciscos and Franciscas in the AHAG registry, just as the Dominican presence in Central Mexico is thought to have promoted use of the name Domingo among colonial-period Nahuas.¹¹² Yet Francisco and Francisca are more frequent among adults than among baptizes in the AHAG registry, and both names were quite common in Dominican-administered areas as well.¹¹³ The name of the friar overseeing baptism offered no discernible onomastic inspiration, nor did the names of major imperial and Catholic leaders in distant Europe. No Santiago Atitlán children seem to have been christened after the sitting pope—the only relevant name used was Gregory XIV, but he occupied the office for less than a year in 1590-91, several decades after the last Gregorio or Gregoriana was entered in the AHAG registry—or the reigning Spanish king. Three boys were christened Carlos but only in the early 1570s, over a decade after Charles V's death, making it unlikely that they were named after the Habsburg regent.¹¹⁴ Only two boys were baptized Felipe, both in 1568, but there is no evidence that either instance represented an explicit reference to the reigning Philip II, especially since one of those boys may well have been christened after his father, also called Felipe.

Unfortunately, the AHAG registry records only the date of baptism, so there is no way to evaluate whether the birthdate's coincidence with a particular saint's feast day influenced onomastic choice.¹¹⁵ However, references in the Kaqchikel Xajil Chronicle suggest that by the late sixteenth-century, community leaders in nearby Sololá were having their children baptized within a few days of birth if circumstances allowed.¹¹⁶ Assuming that the same schedule applied in Santiago Atitlán, dates of birth and baptism would not have been far apart. Nonetheless, comparison with eighteenth-century San Cristóbal Totonicapán suggests that saint's days were not common guideposts for baptismal naming; there, Franciscan priest don Vicente Cabrera took it upon himself to attempt to establish that custom in the early 1770s, without success.¹¹⁷

Nonetheless, there are a few cases in the AHAG registry in which the child's identity was clearly impacted by the feast day on or near the date of baptism. The most obvious examples date to Palm Sunday (Spanish Domingo de Ramos) in 1569, 1570, and 1575, when three boys were christened Domingo Ramos and one Francisco Ramos. In addition, at least eight boys were baptized Pedro and one Pablo either on or the day before the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul on June 29. In an exceptional case, all 14 children baptized on July 25, 1574, were christened Ana or Diego, with the sole exception of one boy called Jerónimo. The fact that the next day, July 26, marked the feasts of Saint Anne and Joachim in the Catholic calendar probably explains why all six girls were dubbed Ana, but the association with Diego is less clear. Perhaps it was a nod to the fact that the apocryphal Protevangelium of James, whose name is sometimes rendered in Spanish as Diego, offers the earliest known account of Saint Anne's life.¹¹⁸

Given the traditional Mesoamerican practice of naming children after the day in the 260-day calendar on which they were born, the Catholic practice of naming a child according to the saint's day would have been a conceptually easy practice for Maya parents to adopt. Friars may have even encouraged it, as don Vicente Cabrera did in San Cristóbal Totonicapán, considering that it had been very widespread in medieval Spain, although not across all Catholic Europe.¹¹⁹ Yet christening the child after the feast date closest to the day of baptism does not appear to have been particularly common in late sixteenth-century Santiago Atitlán.¹²⁰ Interestingly, despite Santiago being the patron saint of the reducción, no children or adults in Santiago Atitlán were christened after him, and only three boys were baptized with an alternative form of his name, Jacob.¹²¹ Instead, the most common pattern in the Santiago Atitlán area, albeit still practiced by a minority, was naming the baptized child after a godparent, a practice that had been widespread in Catholic Europe for centuries.¹²² Of the 2,889 baptizees in the AHAG registry, 14.3% (n = 413) share a baptismal name with at least one godparent and most commonly with the godfather, including in cross-gender correspondences. Among the 21 godchildren of Diego Méndez Chi'a’l and his wife Juana, for example, there were four Diegos, five Juans, and two Juanas. Similarly, of 12 children sponsored by Juan Gómez Lakab'alam Imox and his wife Francisca, three were called Francisco, three Juan, and one Juana. Likewise, the one Domingo Ramos baptized on Easter rather than on Palm Sunday was almost surely christened after his godfather who shared the same uncommon name.

The AHAG registry data point to godparents as the most salient inspiration for local Indigenous parents’ selection of a baptismal name and thus suggest that the institution had already assumed a significant role in Indigenous society, within three generations of first Spanish contact. In naming their child after the new padrino or madrina, Indigenous parents acknowledged “the primacy of the [compadrazgo] system's social function” above its nominally religious function.¹²³ They also recognized the godparents’ importance in the institution of baptism and, consequently, in the family's life moving forward. Whether friars in highland Guatemala actively promoted this onomastic practice is unclear, but it is hard to imagine that they would have preferred it over christening a child out of devotion to a particular saint.¹²⁴

Closer examination of the AHAG registry, particularly of names shared among spiritual siblings, hints that sponsors influenced their godchildren's names in other ways as well.¹²⁵ Among 83 Santiago Atitlán area families with a total 179 same-sex siblings who shared a baptismal name, 35 families’ onomastic twins were also spiritual siblings by virtue of sharing a godfather and, in most cases, a godmother. Furthermore, 173 godfathers collectively sponsored a total of 1,195 baptizees who shared a name with at least one spiritual sibling, including cross-gender adaptations (for example, Pedro and Pedronilla). Most godparents had only two or three godchildren with the same name, but some had six or seven who were christened identically, increasingly the likelihood that godparental influence was decisive in naming the baptizees.

In some cases, recurrence of a baptismal name may simply reflect its general popularity; Juan Bautista Pérez Koy B'atz’u's 19 godchildren, for instance, included three Anas, three Pedros, one Francisca and one Francisco, two Juans, and five Juanas. Such onomastic clustering may have been unusual, but the individual appellations certainly were not. Still, other godchildren shared uncommon baptismal names such as Ágatha, Clara, Cipriano, or Simeon. For example, Baltasar López Ajkujay Ajsemetun and his wife Isabel sponsored 39 godchildren of whom three were called Agustina, two Bárbara, and two Fabiana—three names that collectively account for just 3.4% (n = 49) of all baptized girls in the AHAG registry. Hence, the names’ concentration among these spiritual sisters was probably shaped, if not directly guided, by the godparents. Interestingly, however, very few same-name spiritual brothers or sisters were christened with the names of their spiritual sponsors. In other words, godparents did not tend to name more than one godchild after themselves, if any at all.

Conclusion

Baptism represented perhaps the most salient Catholic sacrament imposed in the Indigenous Americas, and baptismal naming offered a clear bridge between religious, cultural, and political colonization. Even if baptismal designations did not immediately supplant Indigenous ones in daily life, they mediated interactions with Spanish clergy and administrators and made Indigenous persons more legible in their eyes. Superficially at least, baptismal naming, even more than the baptismal act itself, marked an individual's conversion from one religion to another, especially for colonizers seeking evidence of successful proselytization. The widespread dominance of Christian personal names across Spain's former colonies today further suggests that the names stand as one of the more enduring cultural legacies of colonization as well.

At least equally important, however, was the role of baptismal naming in demarcating an Indigenous person's integration into the Spanish body politic. Most if not all surviving bureaucratic traces of colonial-period Indigenous actors refer to them by baptismal name, often to the exclusion of Indigenous personal names—a deeply intimate, individualized “loss of self-presence” and expression of colonial control and elision.¹²⁶ At the same time, parents developed strategies for shaping how their child was referenced in the new colonial order. In many instances, they christened the baptizee with a name already widely popular in the community, if not in their family. In doing so, they made Indigenous persons legible to the Spanish administration but shielded individual identities under layers of shared names. Whether or not it was an intentional act of onomastic resistance, the approach nonetheless made it harder for the bureaucratic state to administer its subjects. Ironically perhaps, baptismal names generated just as much demographic confusion for Spanish officials trying to identify individual tributaries as the less familiar Indigenous names had, as Fray Pedro Antonio Cortez complained in a 1783 letter accompanying a census for San Pedro La Laguna: “It is a lengthy process, and very tiresome, to check the baptismal registries . . . where there are many [who are] already dead, and one finds many with the same personal name and surname, and one has to make a concordance for each one of them.”¹²⁷

The case of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Santiago Atitlán suggests that baptismal selection of personal names marked a formal departure from Maya tradition as well. The Catholic approach of christening children after the saint on whose feast day they were baptized or born presented a formally close correlate to local Indigenous practices, according to which infants were named based on date of birth and calendrical divination. Baptisms from the Santiago Atitlán area, however, suggest other factors at play. Rather than derived from a particular day in the ritual calendar, the christening name was associated with a Catholic saint, and often with a participating adult. Parents and especially godparents appear to have exercised significant agency in selecting baptismal designations.¹²⁸ This pattern presumably diverged from precolonial tradition in which the local daykeeper was tasked with establishing the name through prognostication, a process in which “the personhood of the name-receiver” occupied the fore.¹²⁹ Even if the baptismal appellation was not used for daily interactions within the Indigenous community, it identified the Spanish subject before the colonial administration and was typically the first personal name, if not the only one, recorded in legal documents like testaments or witness testimonies.

Godparents’ role in christening baptizees in and around Santiago Atitlán attests to the early establishment of compadrazgo in Indigenous communities as they forged their space in colonial society. Some adults sponsored dozens of baptizees and in many cases seem to have influenced how those children were christened. Thus, within three generations of the first baptisms in highland Guatemala, compadrazgo had developed from a model of spiritual kinship imported from early modern Europe into an Indigenous institution through which Maya inhabitants of the newly congregated colonial town forged social bonds across households. Even if godparenthood initially had been “only a formality” with which the Santiago Atitlán population complied to fulfill the basic requirements of baptism, that was no longer the case by the late sixteenth century.¹³⁰ Indigenous participants were adapting the socioreligious institution to serve their purposes, in part by redirecting the “moral force” inherent in the “the act of naming” from recipient “back on the name-giver.”¹³¹ The displacement was certainly meaningful in the eyes of Spanish clergy, who vigilantly monitored the success of missionary efforts among their Indigenous congregations and considered baptism a key step on the route to Indigenous salvation. But the salience of baptismal naming also refracted beyond the giver and recipient to parents, godparents, and other spiritual kin as they forged the new bonds of early colonial Maya society.