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

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chief of that place, who in their language is called cacique or general. His name was
Guacanarillo, and, to bind their friendship, they mutually made each other presents.
Although a secondary source of the event, this description is consistent with the
description about the cacique in our primary sources’ quotations. The fact that the
writer chose to use the term “benignantly received” seems to match what Columbus and
de Las Casas wrote about similar events which appear to hint a ceremonial greeting of
strangers and a centralized social structure around the cacique. Another important
note is that in this text the writer employed the Italian disjunctive conjunction ‘o’ to give
equal linguistic value to cacique and general which seems to indicate that the cacique
was the element of Taino society who directed war and battle.
However, to understand the Taino sense and possible cosmovision of this term it
is necessary to analyze how its original meaning could have shaped its current
characterization in the Spanish language. According to the Real Academia of the
Spanish language a cacique is, besides an Indian leader: 1)—a person who exercises
an excessive amount of power over a community; 2)— a person who has an extreme
amount of political influence over a certain community or group. It is truly remarkable
that “extreme and excessive power” were the qualities associated with the definition of
this word in Spanish speaking countries today. It seems that the sun-head-upper-island
kind of figure, found hidden in its etymology became what I will take the liberty to call
the abstract—sensorial definition of the term at the current time.
Nonetheless, this term was so powerful, so inclusive, so morphologically rich
during colonial times that it became the substitute for the Azteks tlahtoani and tecutli;
the Mayan halach uinik and the Inca-Quechuan curac. These were synonymic words