Pipiles

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Historical picture from the Pipil town of Izalco
Territory of the rule of Kuskatan (Cuzcatlan)
Glyph of Kuskatan (Cuzcatlan)

The Pipil are an indigenous Nahua people in present-day El Salvador and adjacent areas of Guatemala and Honduras .

history

According to tradition, the area of ​​the rule of Cuzcatlan (Tekuyut Kuskatan, Tēucyōtl Cōzcatlān or Señorío de Cuzcatlán) , which roughly corresponded to the western half of El Salvador, was settled in the 11th century by Toltecs , who were their previous home Tollan under the leadership of the legendary king Cē Acatl Tōpīltzin Quetzalcōātl had left in the second half of the 10th century and from which the people of the Pipil emerged. Cē Acatl Tōpīltzin then founded the city of Cuzcatlan (Kuskatan) around 1054 , located in what is now the La Libertad department in the greater San Salvador area . Archaeological finds in Cuzcatlan and Izalco indicate, however, that the Pipil culture in the area of ​​El Salvador already existed before the year 900 , i.e. the immigration of the Nahua into this area took place before the Toltec rule in Chichén Itzá (in Yucatán ). There were initially a number of Nahua city-states, which were united around the year 1200 under the rule of Kuskatan . By 1400 at the latest there was a hereditary monarchy that existed until the Spanish conquest under Pedro de Alvarado in 1528.

The name Pipil comes from the Nahuatl . The Tlaxcaltek , Nahuatl-speaking allies of the Spaniards were able to understand the nawat of the population of Cuzcatlan. It is said that the Tlaxcaltek soldiers regarded the language of the Cuzcateks as a "childish" form of their language and therefore called them "children". Pipil is translated as “nobleman” in some places, but that is not the meaning of the word here: Pil means “small”, Pipil “child, boy, girl”.

The mythology of the Pipil was strongly influenced by the Maya culture. The Pipil were divided into four sub-ethnicities : Cuzcatlecos (around Cuzcatlán, today Antiguo Cuscatlán in the greater San Salvador area ), Izalcos (with the political center Izalco in today's Sonsonate , known for the production of cocoa and obsidian tools), Nonualcos (which were considered particularly warlike , in the area of Santiago Nonualco in today's La Paz ), and Mazahuas (shepherds who tended white-tailed deer , see the common place name Masahuat in several departments). In 1524 they were subjugated by the Spanish conquistadors under Pedro de Alvarado .

Even after centuries of foreign rule, a large part of the Pipil lived from subsistence farming until the end of the 19th century . Agricultural production was carried out on communal land. This was to change in the years from 1880 onwards, when the government geared the country's economy to exporting coffee . To this end, the communal land of indigenous communities was forcibly privatized in a series of government decrees. As a result, it passed into the hands of a few large landowning families and was converted into coffee plantations. The indigenous peoples were deprived of their subsistence economy and were forced to work on the coffee plantations.

In 1930 the German anthropologist Leonhard Schultze carried out three months of research in the Izalco region . In 1935 the Pipil von Izalco in El Salvador was published by Gustav Fischer in Jena Indiana II - Myths in mother tongue .

Before the book was published, a large number of the people Schultze observed were murdered. In 1932 some of the Pipil farmers rose up against the rule of the large landowners. The main focus of the uprising was in the communities of Izalco , where the Pipil farmer leader Feliciano Ama was active, and Nahuizalco . The resistance of the peasants armed with machetes was quickly broken with machine guns. La Matanza , "the massacre" after the suppression of the popular uprising under Agustín Farabundo Martí by General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in 1932 , is considered to be the end of El Salvador's Pipil. It is said that people were killed simply because of the distinguishing feature that they spoke nawat (pipil) or wore “Indian” clothing. Around 30,000 people, mostly unarmed indigenous farmers, were killed in the process. Feliciano Ama, Farabundo Martí and other peasant leaders were executed. Laws passed under General Hernández made the use of indigenous languages ​​officially punishable.

After all indigenous languages ​​of El Salvador were suppressed and persecuted in the 1930s, only a handful of people still speak the Pipil language, Nawat , while other indigenous languages, including Lenca in the east of the country, have already died out.

Todays situation

Today around 200,000 people in El Salvador and Honduras are considered to be "ethnic Pipil". In the last census in El Salvador, however, only 11,488 people identified themselves as " indigenous ", mostly in historical Pipil areas in the west of the country. Of these, 97 people named Nawat or Pipil as their mother tongue, 62 of them in the Sonsonate department , 22 in San Salvador and 11 in other parts of the country. The linguist Jorge Lemus from the University of Don Bosco in San Salvador, on the other hand, speaks of 200 to 300 native speakers. Since the turn of the millennium there have been individual school and kindergarten projects to revitalize the language.

swell

  1. ^ Paul D. Almeida: Organizational expansion, liberalization reversals and radicalized collective action. In: Harland Prechel (ed.): Politics and globalization 15, 2007, pp 57-97.
  2. ^ Leonhard Schultze: Indiana II - Myths in the mother tongue of the Pipil of Izalco in El Salvador . History of the Marburg ethnology (ethnology). Gustav Fischer, Jena 1935.
  3. ↑ Hugh Byrne: El Salvador's Civil War: A Study of Revolution. Boulder, Colorado, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1996
  4. ^ Alfredo García, elsalvador.com, 28 August 2009: Náhuat, el renacimiento de una lengua - En 2003 quedaban solo unos 200 náhuat hablantes en todo el país. Seis años después, alrededor de 3 mil estudiantes de 11 escuelas reciben clases de este idioma ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.elsalvador.com

literature

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