A Spanish-Luiseño-Latin Vocabulary: Pablo Tac and Indigenous Latinidad

Kirsten Silva Gruesz: “A Spanish-Luiseño-Latin Vocabulary: Pablo Tac and Indigenous Latinidad” Aside from a few chapters in Two Years Before the Mast and versions of the Joaquin Murrieta story, early California is all... [ view full abstract ]

Kirsten Silva Gruesz: “A Spanish-Luiseño-Latin Vocabulary: Pablo Tac and Indigenous Latinidad” 

Aside from a few chapters in Two Years Before the Mast and versions of the Joaquin Murrieta story, early California is all but invisible within the conceptual maps of our field. The abbreviated work left by Pablo Tac (Luiseño) addresses this absence. Tac left Mission San Luis Rey for the College of the Propaganda in Rome in the 1830s, living with other non-European converts from around the globe. He prepared a dictionary-grammar of Luiseño along with a historical essay, “Conversion of the San Luiseños of Alta California,” whose elegaic tone can be compared to near-contemporary publications by Native Protestants like William Apess. At the same time, Tac’s writings represent a belated example of a common subject-position in sixteenth-century Latin America: the acculturated indio or mestizo chosen to “master” colonial memory technologies (Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, Inca Garcilaso). Thinking about Tac’s work simultaneously as an early modern contact literature, and as an artifact of nineteenth-century global trade-evangelization networks, upends the spatiotemporal coordinates by which California is located in this field. It also speaks to the lived experience of indigenous peoples from Mesoamerica now living in the U.S., whose alienation from Spanish and from problematic theories of mestizaje puts pressure on existing concepts of Chicano/Latino identity.