Yameo

I arrived in Iquitos last night from a four-day trip up the Marañón river (one of the two main tributaries of the Amazon) to San Regis, a village about a four- to five-hour lancha-ride away. My goal was to find individuals who remembered Yameo, a language of the Peba-Yaguan family (which also includes the languages Peba and Yagua spoken on the Amazon proper nearer the Brazilian border). Unfortunately, I was unable to locate any individuals who knew the language, and was surprised to find that all but one individual were unable to tell me that a language named Yameo had even ever been spoken there. Let me walk you through some of my trip.

At 6:30AM Saturday morning I caught a cab to Nauta, a port over twelve hours (by boat) upriver from Iquitos – thus a better starting point for a journey taking me even further upriver. A little bit before 9AM I embarked on the lancha Don Antonio, pictured here (the white boat).

Lancha Don Antonio, Puerto de Nauta

These types of boats constitute the main form of river transport for all individuals living/working up and down the Amazon, Marañón and Ucayali rivers. (Additional lanchas also go up the Tigre river, which is a three-day-long journey that I will be undertaking at the very end of this week to reach Intuto in hopes of finding a speaker of Taushiro.) Individuals of all walks of life (businessmen, indigenous people from farther upriver, families, groups of children, gringos like me) populate its two decks – hammocks are the name of the game. Imagine these boats as large river busses, with venders coming aboard before departure selling snacks and newspapers. Onboard I met a schoolteacher named Nestor from the community of Miraflores, which is approximately two more hours upriver from San Regis. He was very interested in my work and exactly how one might go about “rescuing” these languages (his words) – Kokama is the most prevalent indigenous language spoken in Miraflores he says.

Around 1:30PM I arrived at the port in San Regis, and I realized immediately that this place was more on the map than San Joaquín de Omaguas, as can be seen by the following greeting.

San Regis (as of Monday evening) won a bid against Miraflores to become the next distrito in that region, a coveted municipal status here that typically involves more attention from the local government, more investment from businesses and a series of (infra)structural improvements to the town. However, unlike Nauta, which was the nearest distrito with jurisdiction over San Regis until yesterday, San Regis is not connected to any other urban hub by road, which makes the promises of distrito-hood all the more tenuous. However, rumor has it that the government has planned to continue the Iquitos-Nauta highway all the to San Regis. I'll believe that when I see it – San Regis is separated by complete jungle from Nauta without any intervening communities inland from the river (this is contrast to the distance between Iquitos and Nauta, which was already populated well before a road was built). That said, San Regis already has some civic features that set it apart dramatically from other local communities, as with their new plaza (shown below), completed about six months ago. From here, there are labeled streets with house addresses, something never to be found in San Joaquín.

Plaza, San Regis

Within ten minutes of arrival, I had located these modest lodgings –

My lodgings at Hospedaje Karcoro

However, I was unable to complain about the view from what was essentially my private balcony – the beautiful Marañón up close. 

Marañón River

After rehydrating from the boat ride, I decided to skip finding lunch and immediately set out looking for old people. Going upriver, I crossed a long walking bridge and passed by the house of a friendly-looking woman of about sixty reading in her hammock. I described to her that I was a linguist that studied languages of the region and had heard that a language called Yameo used to be spoken in San Regis. She said they knew that the founders of the village were called Yameos, but that she had never heard of any language by that name. So I turned around, and heading past the plaza, I soon arrived at the house of Manuel Sógoza, who took an immediate interest in helping me locate the elderly individuals I was seeking. We soon came to the house of Fermín Reñido Tanane, approximately seventy-five, who just so happens to be the great-grandson of José María Tanane, one of the two Yameo-speaking individuals with whom the German anthropologist Günter Tessmann worked in the 1920's (according to Tessmann, José María was the elder of the two individuals, and the better speaker). However, Fermín never knew his great-grandfather, and was only able to tell me that his own father and grandfather had told stories about how Yameo used to be spoken in San Regis. What he could tell me, however, was that the antiguos (elders from his childhood) he knew spoke Quechua. This would turn out to be a theme I encountered – Fermín would turn out to the be only individual I located that had even heard of the Yameo language.

Later that afternoon Manuel took me to the house of Fermín's even more elderly father-in-law, Vicente Parana, approximately eight-five, who just so happened to be the grandson of Tessmann's other consultant, José Alberto Paraná. He informed me that he had never heard of the Yameo language, and that he had never even known that his grandfather spoke any other languages besides Spanish and Quechua. According to him, Yameo was the name of the tribu (tribe), but their language was Quechua. He speculated that the famed old patrón of the village, Anselmo del Águila, may have spoken Yameo to his peones, but that that was before his time. He recommended we go see a man named Cristóbal, who was a former teniente gobernador (lieutenant governor, an office held in villages before they have attained the status of having an alcalde 'mayor') and might be able to tell me more. I inquired about all three of the known Yameo speakers, those above, and additionally the one with whom Lucas Espinosa worked, Antonio Manamú. Cristóbal said he had known all of them as a boy, but that they spoke Quechua. Again, the name of the tribe was Yameo, but the language was Quechua. I spoke with a few other elderly individuals during my three-day stay, and was met with the same response each time. Everyone assumed I must be inquiring about Quechua, and had the names mixed up. When they offered to help me learn more about Quechua, I had to politely decline, indicating that it was stories about Yameo that I was interested in.

While I did not have my hopes set high for finding speakers of Yameo, I was surprised by the sheer lack of memory of any language named Yameo whatsoever. Unlike situations I have experienced related to Omagua work, I at no time felt like any of the people with whom I spoke were trying to hide their knowledge of the language from me – people seemed to be sincerely attempting to remember a language by that name, but could only make reference to the ethnonym of the indigenous group. (One man likely in his forties told me that his great-grandmother had been a Yameo, wearing a pampanilla [indigenous clothing item] and everything – this all according to his own grandmother – but that she spoke Quechua.) I am now beginning to believe more and more Tessmann's assessment of the language's vitality in the 1920s (I had had other reasons to doubt his drastic assessment of the language based on his assessment of the state of Omagua at the same period in time). Apparently he was only able to locate three individuals in the 1920s who remembered the language, and that they were all elderly (Espinosa found a separate individual roughly in the following two decades). Additionally, there were only about fifty individuals in the community that identified themselves as ethnically Yameo, while all others considered themselves san reginos. Out of both groups, all had become dominant in either Quechua, Kokama or Spanish. It seems to me, then, that the elders left in the 1920s were the tail end of a generation (perhaps born in the 1850s or 1860s) that learned Yameo as children. It seems that even other elders roughly their age no longer spoke Yameo, even if they considered themselves ethnically Yameo. This puts the death of the Yameo language and ethnicity considerably farther in the past than I had speculated.

Coincidentally, while in San Regis, I was taken to the house of Juan Cahuasa Mucushua (shown with me below), a sixty-two year old man known by many to speak several languages (some thought one of them might be the one I was looking for). It turns out that he speaks Jívaro and Murato (aka Candoshi), two languages spoken primarily on the Pastaza river, a tributary of the Marañón considerably upriver from San Regis. 

Elicitation session with Murato speaker Juan Cahuasa Mucushua

Seeing as my luck had run out on Yameo in a relatively short amount of time (and seeing that I had wait 'til Tuesday to catch the Don Antonio downriver), I decided it would be fruitful to do a few hours of elicitation work with Juan on Murato, a language which is lacking in documentation as well, but one which is still vital, primarily on the Manchari river, a tributary of the Pastaza. Working with him was an enlightening experience for several reasons. First of all, he is fluent, which adds a whole set of new dynamics to an elicitation session that I have not experienced in my previous work on Omagua. Second, Murato is a morphologically far more complex language than Omagua, which meant that a given word may appear in a variety of forms that are only slightly varied from one another. Given that I had no command of the language whatsoever, I was unable with the time I had to tease apart many of these distinctions. In total, I worked with him four hours, collecting about 150 words and a variety of sentences – basically enough to tempt me to study the language further but leave me totally confused. Nonetheless, I am eager to see how the data I collected on Murato stands up to existing data, and to think about possibly studying it further in the future. While the Manchari river is a difficult area to carry out fieldwork (both because of its distant location and dearth of Spanish speakers), I learned from a schoolteacher in San Regis that there is a Murato family living in Bexeida, a village up a small tributary from Payurote, which is slightly downriver from Nauta on the Amazon.

While my lodgings were hospitable enough, I was ready to leave San Regis, as I no longer had a real purpose there. Also, one may imagine that living in a cement building like the one shown above would be a step up from the type of lodgings we had in San Joaquín, but such buildings often have their downsides. For example, indoor plumbing done wrong is far worse than an outhouse, particularly when the same room is also your shower, is on the bottom floor which never gets any sun, and thus never dries out. In the jungle, you either have to go all the way with the indoor closed-off thing, or not at all. Manuel's family fed me breakfast in the mornings (one particularly tasty breakfast of sábalo, a fish species), and in the evenings I ate dinner made by a woman who sold food on the edge of the plaza (some very yummy majás). Unlike San Joaquín, San Regis has an entire culture built up around cooking food for others, as a principal source of income for many women is selling food to passing boats, for which San Regis seems to be a regular stop. Some of the franticness of this enterprise is captured by this picture.

I am unsure yet as to when I will be leaving for Intuto, as boats to that area of the Tigre appear to be less predictable. Rumor has it that a lancha will be arriving in Nauta on Saturday or Sunday, so I need to investigate further. This week I aim to sort out what little Murato data I collected to get it off my hands, read all the extant material on Taushiro and also continue work on Omagua. I will likely work with our Omagua consultant Amelia an additional day, as there remain some outstanding questions that I fortunately have the time to have answered.