Language of the Voiceless: Traces of Taino Language, Food, and Culture in the Americas From 1492 to the Present

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explain the prevalence of the Mayan term over the Nahuatl voices in the rest of the text
as the Spanish that arrived was already intertwined with Taino.
Nonetheless, based on this pre-Columbian connection and given the fact that the
Maya were a far more developed culture than the Taino, we can only argue that the
lexicalization of the terms cúes, cue and cu as spelled by BDC could have had a very
strong Taino influence and that given the familiarity between this two cultures, it could
have been easier for the writers to lexicalize words base on a familiar registry, rather
than try to adjust to the far more removed phonetic of the Nahuatl.
1.2 Duho.
Although this word does not appear directly in the text, there is a certain cultural
description about the rescued soldier Tapia’s appearance, sitting behavior and
demeaner that could be argued to have a Taino connection. The quote reads as follows:
Pues desque Cortés los vio de aquella manera, también picó como los demás
soldados, que preguntó al Tapia que qué era del español. Y el español como le
entendió, se puso en cuclillas, como hacen los indios, e dijo: "Yo soy" 161 .
The quote states that “Cortes did not recognize Tapia and that once Tapia heard
Cortes called him, he stood up and then squatted, the way Indians do”. However,
before we analyze the possible Taino symbolism in this paragraph, it is important to
mention that at that time of the sequence of BDC’s chronicle, the Spanish had not yet
subjugated any of the mainland kingdoms. As a matter of fact, their cultural memory
regarding the natives should have been that of the Caribbean and the kingdoms of
161
(Diaz del Castillo, Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva Espana| Aparato de Variantes, 1632)