Saturday baroque

All these baroque music videos and not a single harpsichord? Time to remedy that.

Here, Rafael Puyana plays a harpsichord built in 1740 by Hieronymus Albrecht Hass. Notice the three manuals (separate keyboards).

Spanish surnames

I’m puzzled by the signatures I’m seeing on official documents in Spanish from the early 1800s. They seem to contradict some of what I was taught about how Spanish surnames work.

My understanding is that Spanish speakers don’t use their “last” name by itself. This is because they append their mother’s surname after their father’s, occasionally with a de or y between them. So the author of Don Quixote had a father named Cervantes who married the daughter of a man named Saavedra; his son was Miguel Cervantes y Saavedra. But when referred to by a single surname, he’s Cervantes, not Saavedra.

Here’s why I’m puzzled. In 1813 the captain-general of Cuba was named Juan Ruíz de Apodaca, so his paternal surname was Ruíz. Yet he signs himself “Apodaca” alone. My only guess as to the reason is the de in front of his maternal surname, suggesting that his mother’s family was ennobled, so that was the name he preferred to display. It’s just a guess, and not one I’m confident of.

The captain-general supervised the commandant of Pensacola (hence governor of West Florida), a man named Mateo Gonzales Manrique — so, one would assume, “Gonzales” for short. He doesn’t sign himself “Manrique” alone, but “Manrique” is always present, both in his own signature and in his correspondents’ references to him. His signature normally reads “Mateo Gonz^s Manrique.”

The abbreviation could be explained by the fact that “Gonzales” is among the most common Spanish surnames, so it can safely be abbreviated (just as English “William” often became “Wm.”). Still, I’m beginning to doubt that Anglo-American references to this man as “Governor Manrique” were founded on ignorance of Spanish protocol, as I’d assumed. Maybe protocol has changed since the early 1800s.

It’s not a burning issue, so I’m not spending research time on it. But it does nag at me, and I’d love to have someone come along and shed light on the subject.

Y ahora estoy traduciéndolo….

The Spanish Floridas before the fall of Baton Rouge (1810) and Mobile (1813).

I’ve been to the Auburn University library and back to capture legible images of manuscripts from the office of the Spanish commandant of Pensacola, Province of West Florida, composed around July 1813. One moment of discovery last week was pure bliss: a letter from the commandant describing in detail the visit by a Creek Indian party headed by Peter McQueen and fellow Redsticks, seeking guns and ammo.

The Creeks’ story for the Spanish was that they were going to attack the Americans in Mississippi Territory — including Mobile, which the U.S. had seized from neutral Spain three months earlier on the flimsy pretext that it was part of the Louisiana cession from France ten years earlier. (The real reason for the attack seems to be a calculation that because Spain’s government was in crisis it would be unable to punish poachers on its New World territory. This proved correct.) By July 1813, when the Creeks turned up, Pensacola officials thought their city was probably the Americans’ next target.

So the Creeks assured the Spanish that they were about to wreak vengeance on the Americans, if only Spain would spot them some guns and powder. In fact, though, the Redsticks’ prime objective was not to attack Americans, but to win a civil war on the ruling class within the Creek Nation. This was the indispensable first step toward the long-term goal of resisting U.S. expansion and reducing — maybe even to zero — the number of Anglo-American settlers on Creek land. A string of U.S. defeats at the hands of the British and their northwestern Indian allies in the first year of the War of 1812 made this vision seem realistic in 1813.

West Florida, though, was Spain’s most vulnerable province and could not afford open conflict with the U.S. Arming the Indians would certainly give the Americans a pretext for seizing Pensacola and the rest of the province (the Florida panhandle). It also appears that the Spanish commandant, Mateo González Manrique, was not much convinced of the likelihood of the Redsticks’ following through on their aspirations, even if they were serious about them. Today I am translating a document that will do much to either support or refute that interpretation.

Some of the Indians who solicited Gonzáles’ help were attacked five days later by Mississippi territorial militia at Burnt Corn Spring, an event that helped bring on the Creek War with the United States. I am building a case that Americans involved in this war invented evidence for Creek-Spanish collaboration. I’ve written a paper before on competing interpretations of the Burnt Corn fight, including an “official story” that inflated the number of Indian combatants and professed that they were heavily armed and equipped by the Spaniards.

Whereas an inventory of goods given to the Indians by the Spanish commandant confirms that no weapons were provided. So far I’m having trouble even locating gunpowder among the gifts, or indeed anything more deadly than salt and coffee. The commandant’s letter is in a clear hand that comes through well even in these 80-year-old photographic prints (microfilmed about 40 years ago), but the inventory, in a different hand, is exceptionally difficult to read.* So that’s what I’m working on today.

---

* The originals are housed at a Spanish archive I’ve written longingly about, the Archivo General de Indias.

Two more for the record

I happened on this page of Obama front pages from last November — what looks like a pretty comprehensive collection. (But where’s the Guntersville Advertiser-Gleam? The Greene County Democrat? Oh well.)

Anyway, I picked up our two local Spanish weeklies when they each put Obama on the cover, and I still have them lying around. These are from the inauguration, not the election.

You (probably) saw them here first:

Latino announced “Hope is reborn” (Renace la esperanza).

Paisano Alabama was more circumspect: “Now Obama is president” (Obama ya es presidente). A short editorial in the left column begins, “Message to Obama: Don’t let us down.” (No nos falles.)

Moe’s don’t know no Spanish

It’s funny to find bad Spanish on a sign in a burrito restaurant.

’Course, this was that chain restaurant where employees are trained to holler “Welcome to Mo-o-o’es” every time the door opens. The one where you order menu items with names like “Joey Bag of Donuts.” The place is about as Mexican as a frat boy sucking down his fourth Corona.

But still. The sign was one of those bathroom notices that employees must wash their hands before returning to work. This one was designed and distributed by Moe’s central command, to keep any uncool poster designs by state health bureaucrats from disturbing the restaurant’s laid-back atmosphere. To satisfy those same bureaucrats, it had to be in Spanish as well as English. And the Spanish was pretty terrible:

Los empleados deben lavarse los manos antes de regresar a trabajar

My own Spanish is only passable, but I noticed that los manos should be las manos, an error they warn you away from in first-year Spanish. Besides that, the sentence is technically correct, but not idiomatic Spanish. If similar errors were made in an English translation, the result might be:

Employees ought to wash the hands before returning to working

Clear enough, but crude. Not that I’m the best judge of giros idiomáticos españoles, being a gringo and all. Still, Moe’s ought to have done better than this — especially on a notice that gets reproduced hundreds of times.

What really struck me, though, is that this notice is the only Spanish I’d ever encountered at Moe’s. (Borrowed words like “burrito” and “salsa” don’t count.) The chain’s controlled imagery bleaches all the Latin elements out of what they are careful never to call “Mexican” food. Recent TV advertising talks up the fictional Moe as a steak-lovin’ Anglo from cattle country. Moe’s is just the place for people who like burritos but can’t stand Mexicans.

So I wondered: Could the bad Spanish be deliberate? It seems hard to believe that the sign never got double-checked for accuracy before it was printed. Incompetence and indifference are the likeliest explanations. But one can’t rule out deliberation.