Time, Space, and Cosmos in Mesoamerica
Dr. David Tavárez
Zapotecs in Northern Oaxaca created sophisticated calendars to help keep track of the passage of time. More than one hundred Zapotec manuals were turned over to colonial administrators and provide rich detail about ritual practices—an unusual collection of indigenous manuscripts, not found anywhere else in Central America.
Dr. Tavárez is an ethnohistorian and linguistic anthropologist educated at Harvard College (A.B., 1992) and the University of Chicago (combined Ph.D. in anthropology and history, 2000). Here is his story in his own words: My full name, following Mexican usage, is David Eduardo Tavárez Bermúdez. I was born in 1968 and attended public schools in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Both of my parents worked as secundaria (junior high) schoolteachers. My father taught Spanish language and literature; my mother was a chemistry teacher. My father comes from a peasant family that had some land and a small dry goods store in Santa María, Chihuahua; my father’s father, David Tabares García worked as a bracero for a few years in the 1950s. The last name Tabares is a common Portuguese surname; I don’t know when my paternal ancestors moved to northern Mexico, but some potential seventeenth-century forebears include the relatives of a Franciscan friar and a man investigated by the Inquisition for practicing Judaism clandestinely. Both my maternal grandfather Julio and my great-grandfather Julián Bermúdez were lawyers and local notables in the city of Durango.
Dr. Tavárez has taught at Vassar since 2003. His research interests include transatlantic/global colonial intellectual exchanges, evangelization and language policies, writing and power in the public sphere, and Nahua and Zapotec societies. At Vassar, he teaches courses on the (ethno)history of Colonial Latin America; religion and colonial rule; language, culture, and society; and on Mesoamerican and Andean societies. He is the author of The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico, (2011; paperback edition, 2013), and a co-editor of Chimalpahin’s Conquest: A Nahua Historian’s Rewriting of Francisco López de Gómara’s La conquista de México (2010), both with Stanford University Press. Tavárez has also authored more than forty articles and book chapters. In 2012, Spanish-language versions of these two books appeared as Las guerras invisibles: Devociones indígenas, disidencia, y disciplina en el México colonial (Mexico: UABJO, Colegio de Michoacán, CIESAS, and UAM) and Chimalpáhin y La Conquista de México. La crónica de Francisco López de Gómara comentada por el historiador nahua (Mexico: UNAM). One of his latest projects is a co-authored volume with Louise Burkhart and Elizabeth Boone, titled Painted Words: Nahua Catholicism, Politics, and Memory in the Atzaqualco Pictorial Catechism, to be published by Dumbarton Oaks. It is a facsimile and critical edition of a fascinating colonial Mexican catechism in pictograms, which was reinterpreted as a genealogical/ historical narrative by a knowledgeable, but anonymous Nahua analyst. Tavárez is also chair of the Mexican Studies Committee at the Conference on Latin American History, and a councilor of the American Society for Ethnohistory. Recently this journal featured an important component of his research project on Nahua humanism: a sixteenth-century Nahuatl translation of the Proverbs of Solomon.
Tavárez is working on a book about the subject of this video: Zapotec views of the cosmos and time.