Mirror of Insult: History of the Antillean Word Sato

In the Spanish of Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, the word sato is used with meanings not found in other Spanish-speaking countries, a geographical peculiarity that is a strong indication of its origin from Island Arawak, a language spoken by the indigenous people of the Greater Antilles.

Let’s look at the meanings of this word according to the Spanish dictionary:

Sato, ta. adjective. 1. Cuba and P. Rico. Said of a dog or cat: Small, of any color, with short hair, wandering and, in the case of a dog, barking. ║2. colloquial. Antilles. Said of a person, especially a woman: Who flirts. ║3. colloquial. Cuba. Said of a thing: Abundant.║4. Dominican Republic. Funny, nice, likeable¹.

Before going any further, we must distinguish the word we are analyzing from the very little used homophone and homograph sato, ‘sown’, which comes from the Latin satus, from serĕre ‘to sow’² and which has no relation to the first. Henceforth, when we speak of sato, we will refer to the former.

In 1836, the geographer and lexicographer Esteban Pichardo included this voice in his Provincial Dictionary of Cuban Words with the following meanings:

SATO, TA. Noun, masculine and feminine. One of the species of small dogs, of the most useless, but barking and wandering ║SATA. familiar. The woman who is flirtatious and expressive in demonstrations of affection with all men³.

In the 1849, 1862 and 1875 editions of Pichardo’s work, the second meaning appears linked to the first: “sata. -familiar- By allusion to the lubricity of the female of that species, the woman who is flirtatious and expressive in demonstrations of affection with all men”^{4, 5, 6}.

In order to demonstrate the Island Arawak word’s origin, we will use the comparative study technique, aimed at identifying lexical and phonetic similarities with other languages of the same family, mainly Lokono, an Arawak language spoken in the Guianas region. According to Kouwenberg, “the lexical and morphological evidence –limited though it is- supports the view that Taino and Lokono are closely related dialects of one and the same language”⁷.

In the structure of the word there are two morphemes: sa + to =sato. The first is recorded in Lokono by C. H. de Goeje as (i)sa with the following meanings: ‘formed’, ‘sound’, ‘good’, ‘beautiful’, ‘child’, ‘young animal’, ‘egg’⁸.

The suffix -to / -tu is a form of the word oto (also utu, otu, uttu), which means ‘daughter’⁹. It also has other functions, including forming substantive adjectives and attributive adjectives when speaking of a woman or of one or more non-rational beings or things¹⁰. Let us look at some examples^{11, 12}:

a. ipirun, ‘to be big’; ipirutu, ‘something big’.

b. wádin, ‘to be long’; wáditu, ‘something long’.

c. ikihi, ‘fire’; ikihi-tu kaspara, ‘flaming sword’.

d. sa, ‘good’, ‘holy’; sa-tu ajia-hu, ‘Holy Word’, ‘The Gospel’.

Due to the multiple meanings of the morpheme sa, the word sato can also have several meanings in Lokono and presumably in Island Arawak. For example, in (d) quoted above, we can see that sa-tu means ‘holy’ in Lokono.

John Peter Bennet, a native speaker of Lokono, records the vocative “satho, ‘my good woman’¹³. C. H. de Goeje notes that it is frequently used in that language to address young women: sá-tu, ‘little sister’¹⁴. Likewise, sato means ‘beautiful’ in Lokono. It is presumable that in Island Arawak this word had the same meanings. So, how did it evolve into ‘flirtatious woman’ when the word entered Spanish?  The answer requires an analysis of the situation of aboriginal women during the process of Indo-Hispanic transculturation.

The Spanish conquistadors brought few women with them to the lands of America and from very early on they used violence to satisfy their sexual needs. A sadly famous passage in the letter of Michele de Cuneo, one of the men who participated in the second voyage of Christopher Columbus, relates how he raped a Caribbean aborigine who was given to him by the admiral himself¹⁵. Bartolomé de Las Casas repeatedly denounced these practices. In the A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, he refers:

On the island of Hispaniola, which was the first island where Christians entered and began the great devastation and perdition of these people, and which they first destroyed and depopulated, and the Christians began to take the women and children of the Indians to serve and misuse them…¹⁶

In Cuba, the case of Vasco Porcallo de Figueroa, a Spanish nobleman and owner of large estates and numerous encomiendas, who left several sons and daughters, some legitimate and others natural, with Indian women, daughters of caciques, is well known, according to historian Ramiro Guerra¹⁷. The interim governor Manuel de Rojas wrote to the King in 1534 that some revolts of the Bayamese Indians were due to abuses committed with their women¹⁸. When informing the monarch about the situation in the villages of Trinidad, Sancti Spíritus and Puerto Príncipe, Rojas relates:

In all the said three towns there were people who cohabitate without marrying with their own naborías, some of them, and others with their slaves and others with the daughters of Spaniards and women of this land, with as much peace and tranquility as if they were under the law of blessing.¹⁹

In this colonial environment, where the aboriginal woman was considered an object of sexual satisfaction accessible without moral or legal restrictions, the word to express ‘beauty’ and a respectful vocative used by the indigenous population to address women, particularly young girls, was perceived by the Spaniards as a term that identified their potential victims. The association of the word with the practices of looking for a mate, ended up blaming women for the same acts and behaviors they suffered, and in this way the word sato came to mean ‘coquette’.

Victim-blaming is a type of psychological mechanism observed in racist and sexist contexts. Among the factors that gave rise to this type of attitude towards aboriginal women and their descendants are the influence of the patriarchal society from which the colonizers came and the anti-indigenous racism that legitimized colonial domination. Other causes of the generalization of this type of mentality pointed out by social psychology studies are: the tendency to differentiate oneself from the victims as a defense mechanism that reduces the fear of a similar fate and protects the observer from being blamed in case it happens, and the motivational need of people to consider that the “world is fair” and to maintain a perception of control and confidence over the environment¹⁹, ²⁰.

Earlier we referred to the rape of an indigenous woman by the expeditionary of Columbus’ second voyage, Michele de Cuneo. His account of the event includes victim blaming:

When I was in the bout, I captured a very beautiful cannibal woman, whom the Lord Admiral gave to me as a gift. I had her in my cabin and, as she was naked according to her custom, I wanted to take pleasure in her. When I wanted to put my desire into execution she opposed me and attacked me in such a way with her nails that I would not have wanted to have started. I took a rope and whipped her in such a way that she screamed so loudly that you would not believe it. Finally we came to such an agreement that I can tell you that she really looked as if she had been trained in a school for harlots²¹.

It is really incredible that, after struggling desperately and being savagely whipped with a rope -which in ships are usually thick and heavy-, the victim participated willingly and even enjoyed the act, as Cuneo suggests. The parallel with the practice of branding indigenous women as “coquettes” is evident.

The attitude of the colonizers towards aboriginal women was also influenced by cultural differences in terms of sexuality. The pillars of the Christian feminine ideal, such as virginity, sex only within marriage, the inadmissibility of changing partners and modesty, were alien to the indigenous way of life. The negative opinion resulting from this cultural contrast must also have motivated the meaning of ‘coquette’ in the word sato and was one of the reasons why the Spaniards were reluctant to formalize their unions with the natives²² , as can be seen in the aforementioned letter from Governor Rojas to the King of Spain.

It is worth remembering that, despite these differences with the Europeans, in the Arawak agro-pottery society, monogamous unions were established between women and men, with the exception of the caciques, who had several wives, and accounts of the chroniclers attest to the sadness and despair they showed when separated from their loved ones. 

In Antillean aboriginal agro-pottery communities, tasks were carried out on the basis of simple cooperation, the possible division of labor by sex and age, and specialization in different activities²³.  Women were engaged in planting, harvesting, cassava preparation, basket weaving, cotton weaving and pottery, as well as domestic chores. They also participated in ball games and dances, as well as in government and political organization, since the position of cacique was inherited matrilineally and the mother and sisters of the cacique had great influence and even became caciques themselves²⁴. The disintegration of the communal society from which they came, together with colonial sexist oppression, meant a drastic worsening of the situation of aboriginal women, which was reflected in the formation of the first Creole families, many of which were probably single-parent families due to paternal abandonment by the Spaniards. The fact that they were able to succeed in supporting and raising their children can only be explained by the intervention of the community support networks inherited from the tribal social organization, which were transformed but persisted and gave rise to forms of neighborhood interrelationships of mutual aid that to this day characterize Cuban society and constitute evidence of an effective process of transculturation.

This feature of the Creole population was the one that most impressed the Franciscan friar Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo, who, as early as 1587, spent some time in Baracoa, and relates in his poem, La Florida, his impressions of the inhabitants of the surroundings of the first village of Cuba²⁵.

Genetic studies allow us to appreciate the scale of these social processes. The research carried out by Marcheco-Teruel et.al. infers that 34.5% of the genetic information present in the mitochondrial DNA of the Cuban population currently comes from Native American women (this genetic information is transmitted only through maternal transmission), and in some provinces the proportion is close to 60%²⁶. There are reasons to suppose that between the 16th and 18th centuries this ratio was significantly higher, if we take into account that the population of Cuba, which in 1774 was 172,600 inhabitants, subsequently experienced the introduction of 750,000 African slaves, more than one million European and West Indian immigrants and around 125,000 Asians²⁷.

The aforementioned study also inferred from the genetic information present in the Y chromosome of the subjects studied, that the ancestral contribution of Native American men in the Cuban population is currently only 0.5%, which is evidence of the intensity with which the conquistadors monopolized indigenous women for sexual purposes. 

In the Dominican Republic, along with the meaning of ‘coquette’, common to the three Spanish-speaking Greater Antilles, sato kept the meaning of ‘funny, pleasant, nice’, close to the original meaning of ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ of the Island Arawak word.

It is evident that Pichardo’s supposition about the origin of the meaning ‘coquette’ of the word sato is false: “by allusion to the lubricity of the female of that species” [sato dog].

As for the meaning of sato, ‘one of the species of small dogs, of the most useless, but barkers and wanderers’, it seems to be the size of this species of animals, the characteristic that motivates its Island Arawak name. Let us remember that one of the meanings of sa in Lokono and presumably in Island Arawak is that of ‘young animal’. Thus, sato also means ‘puppy’ in these languages, which corresponds to the size of the species in question.

The Antillean aborigines possessed a type of mute dog, rather small, which they called aon, which were exterminated in part by the Spaniards, who ate them during the stages of famine that they suffered in the first years of the conquest, while another part was mixed with the European dogs. After Columbus’ second voyage, the conquistadors brought to America large dogs, mastiffs and greyhounds, among others, which they used to fight, hunt, punish and frighten the natives. Over time, some of them became wild and wreaked havoc on the cattle and pigs in the herds and corrals. The natives also adapted to the new canine species, which they began to use in various tasks and as companions²⁸. The existence of canine breeds of different sizes motivated the smaller ones to be called sato, ‘puppy’. Subsequently, the meaning has been extended in Cuba and Puerto Rico to any dog or cat that is not a pure breed.

In Cuba, sato can also mean ‘abundant’, a meaning that seems to come from a metaphor based on the association with the large number of stray sato dogs.

Since the third decade of the 20th century, sato has been registered in the Canary Islands with the meanings of: ‘simple, innocent’, and said of a person or animal, ‘of low height’. Cristóbal Corrales and Dolores Corbella, in their Historical dictionary of Spanish from the Canary Islands consider that both cases could come from ‘sato dog’²⁹.

This journey through the history of the sato word demonstrates the link between the social processes that developed in the Greater Antilles during the Indo-Hispanic transculturation and the entry into Spanish of the Island Arawak words. It also allows us to approach to the interiorities of the process of miscegenation initiated after the conquest that gave rise to the Creole population. In general, this type of studies enriches the knowledge about the cultural legacy of the aboriginal roots in the formation of our peoples and contributes to fill the void that still exists in this subject.

References

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6. ———————-. 1875. Diccionario provincial casi razonado de vozes y frases cubanas. Cuarta edición. Imprenta El Trabajo. La Habana. 
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