Chol Ritual Language
with Terrence Lee Folmar, Heidi Altman, Ausencio Cruz Guzmán, and Bernardo Pérez Martínez
©1996 J. Kathryn Josserand and Nicholas A. Hopkins

The Contexts of Ritual Language Use

Tila has been a major population center of Chols from the Colonial period to modern times. Of Tila’s 35,000 residents (Valdez and Menéndez 1987), the great majority speak Chol in their daily life (Attinasi 1973: 3-4). The Tila area has a Chol-dominated social life that preserves institutions formed shortly after conquest and resettlement. The Ladino, or non-Indian, component of Tila’s population is quite small, a provincial urban elite of shopkeepers and landowners, plus a resident Catholic priest and several nuns. Even most of the Ladinos speak Chol fairly fluently, and while most of the town-dwelling Chols also speak Spanish, their primary language use is Chol, and the Chols who live in the colonias and ejidos are less likely to have good control of Spanish. This rare urban setting for an indigenous language offers research possibilities unmatched elsewhere.

In addition to being urban, Tila has an extensive repertoire of ceremonial life that provides contexts for the use of Chol that do not exist in other communities. The isolation of this community is about to come to an abrupt end, as a major road project will soon connect Tila directly with the Spanish-speaking Gulf coastal lowlands, a development that can be expected to have significant consequences for the sociolinguistics of what has been a very conservative, traditional, Chol-speaking community.

The modern and perhaps also Pre-Columbian importance of Tila lies in its annual pilgrimage cycle, culminating in the events of Corpus Christi week each spring. Many thousands of pilgrims, Indian and Ladino, crowd the mountaintop town, sleeping in Medieval-style pilgrim halls, patronizing the extensive commercial fair which fills downtown streets for many square blocks, and celebrating Catholic masses with mariachis after making the arduous climb up the facing mountain to an anthropomorphic stalagmite image associated with the Pre-Columbian deity Earth Owner, and with the Catholic Christ.

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