The Language Of History: Stories Of The Spanish Conquest Poem by Dennis Ryan

Monday, November 4 and Friday, November 22,2013; Friday morning December 6, and Saturday morning December 7,2013

"The Tarascans of Michoacán have always called themselves Purhépecha. However, early in the Sixteenth Century, the Spaniards gave the Purhépecha a name from their own language. The name... Tarascos was derived from the native word tarascué, meaning relatives or brother-in-law... Between 1520 and 1565, the population of Michoacán... declined by... some 600,000 people."
- John P. Schmal, "Michoacan: A Struggle for Identity"

"the Nahuatl [Aztec language] name for the Tarascan state [was] Michoacan ("place of those who have fish") .In Purépecha... the name of the state was Irechecua Tzintzuntzani, the ‘Kingdom of Tzintzuntzan'."
- Wikipedia

"Every society and every movement eventually acquires its own particular vocabulary and code of behavior.One does not notice it if one is on the inside; it is those outside who see it.Every army has its uniform.Even the language we speak inescapably molds the way we express ourselves."
- Paul Tournier, The Meaning of Persons

We know what happened at Tenochtitlan—
Cortez held Montezuma captive there,
laying waste to the city andits people;
then at Tzintzuntzan—Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán
murdered Tangoxoan, and the Purhépecha
fled to the mountains for fear of their lives.
The Spanish say conquistar to describe what happened,
(aka genocides) —and afterwards, only the Yaquis
Mayos, and Sinaloas remained... to the far northwest,
de Guzmán slaughtering them, the Cáhita, like all the rest—
the peoples of Michoacán, Jalisco, Zacatecas and Nayarit.
The language of history, historians always falsifies
and misrepresent, takes comfort in half-truths, lies
that exonerate the victors, their victories, their heros
as victims cries echo downthehallways of history.