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

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am”, does not fit Spanish greeting norms of the epoch, like the one described in a
previous page of BDC’s text about the soldier that found Tapia and exclaimed: “God and
Saint Mary of Seville!!”. On the contrary, it seems that Tapia’s answer does not correlate
to the verbose and eloquent Spanish of the period, but it sounds more like an adoption
or a transposition of the Taino expression daka > ‘I am’, the way a servant will answer a
master from a subjugated position and remain quiet after his answer.
However, it is in the prevalence in the use of this word across BDC’s text where
we find the importance of the Spanish adoption of this slaving custom from the
Caribbean to the mainland. Moreover, there are three fundamental mentions in the text,
which I considered crucial in order to establish Taino naboria presence along the
Spanish during the conquest of the continent. This naboria presence, could explain the
survival and introduction of Taino terms into the general subculture of the mainland,
thus ensuring the Taino cultural and linguistic survival away from the Spanish official
records.
The first event was mentioned in page 25 of this thesis referring to “the
kidnaping of Guanexes Indians to fill the ships with slave labor”. The second is
identified in the first mention of the word naboria in BDC’s text as “naborias from
Tlaxcala”. Notably, the use of the differentiative term “from Tlaxcala” seems to indicate
that there were other naborias at the moment of the description of the event.
Furthermore, this event happened at the point in the chronology of the text when other
Mayan or Nahuatl term should have taken over the description of the term. As a matter
of fact, comparable Mayan words might have sounded like: Aj k’oos, j k’oos > ‘servant’ or
Palbil, palitsil > ‘slave’. The Nahuatl terms should have sounded like: tlacotli > ‘slave’,