A warm, witty, passionate cry for living, vital, Indigenous languages and the people who speak them.

Despite the more than 200 Indigenous languages spoken in Mexico, including 63 that are officially recognized and celebrated by the Mexican government, linguistic diversity is and has been under attack in a larger culture that says bilingual is good when it means Spanish and English, but bad when it means Nahuatl and Spanish. Yásnaya Aguilar, a linguist and native Mixe speaker, asks what is lost, for everyone, when the contradictions inherent in Mexico’s relationship with its many Indigenous languages mean official protection and actual contempt at worst, and ignorance at best. 

What does it mean to have a prize for Indigenous literature when different Indigenous languages are as far from each other as they are from Japanese? What impact does considering Tzotzil “cultural heritage” have on our idea of it, when it is still being used, and refreshed, and changed (like every other language) today? How does the idea of Indigeneity stand up, when you consider Indigenous peoples outside of the frame of colonialism?

Personal, anecdotal, and full of vivid examples, Aguilar does more than advocate for the importance of resistance by native peoples: she offers everyone the opportunity to value and enjoy a world in which culture, language, and community are delighted in, not flattened. “We have sacrificed Mexico in favor of creating the idea of Mexico,” she says. This Mouth is Mine is an invitation to take it back.

To be or not to be?: Bilingualisms 

There were, I remember, two kinds of primary school in my hometown and the rest of the region: the ‘formal education’ schools, where all subjects were taught in Spanish, and ‘bilingual schools,’ where lessons were taught in Ayuujk (until we had mastered Spanish). The official attitude towards this second type of school was—how shall I put it?—peculiar. Parents generally believed they should avoid sending their children to bilingual schools because it was said they’d receive a lower quality of education there. These schools had more precarious facilities and the bilingual teachers received a much lower salary than teachers in the ‘formal’ system, where they taught lessons in just one language: Spanish. This was despite most of us children speaking Ayuujk as our mother tongue. Needless to say, the bilingual teachers tried to move into the ‘formal’ system whenever they could. The word bilingual was understood to have negative connotations—to be the opposite of ‘formal.’ 

On my first trip to Mexico City—I had by then learned to read Spanish—I realised, inferring from various adverts and certain conversations, that there were bilingual schools there, too, but that people actively tried to send their children there and that their teachers earned higher salaries. Bilingual secretaries were valued more highly than monolingual ones and I realised that, generally speaking, that same word bilingual had positive connotations. And as I’ve said before, for a moment I thought, as did my little sister back then, that in addition to Spanish most people living in Mexico City also spoke Nahuatl and that it was held in very high regard. 

Soon it was explained to me that no, bilingual meant being able to speak two languages: in this case, English and Spanish. It was then I realised that the issue wasn’t the fact of speaking two languages, but which two languages you spoke. I realised there were different classes of bilingualism and that at least one of them seemed to be undesirable: if you were a teacher, speaking an Indigenous language implied having a lower salary and less prestige within the education system. 

To put it simply, I came to understand that being bilingual is not the same as being bilingual. 

4 Jan, 2012 

The Censoring of Babel 

Turns out it’s difficult, if not impossible, to appreciate something you have no idea exists. Someone told me a story that, as I see it, proves that one of the cruellest aspects of discrimination against speakers of different languages is the denial of their existence. When a friend of mine accompanied his grandfather to a different town, he noticed that, when interacting with friends, his grandfather used words he didn’t understand. When asked about it outright, his grandfather explained that he spoke ‘Mexican’ with his friends. 

That was how, having lived in close quarters with him for several years, my friend finally learned that his grandfather was one of their community’s last surviving Nahuatl speakers. 

As things stand, it’s clear that in monolingual contexts you’re much more likely to learn of the existence of Japanese or Russian, to name two geographically distant languages, than to learn that there is a language called Matlatzinca spoken in the State of Mexico. By doing a brief, informal survey of the first time my friends realised languages other than their mother tongue (in most cases, Spanish) were spoken elsewhere in the world, I realised English was the first ‘other language’ they became aware of. Whether it was school, songs by the Beatles, TV programmes, or a grandfather who did seasonal work in the US, the first time they realised that not all the world’s humans speak the same language was because of English. 

When it comes to bilingual or multilingual families, the story is different. I know a girl who lives in a Spanish-speaking city, asks her mother for things in Italian, tells her dad stories in English and then explains her drawings to me in Spanish. For her, you could say, it’s the existence of a pre-Babelian world that would be strange. In my case, as well as knowing of the existence of Spanish, I knew about Zapotec and Chinantec from people who came to the local market. I wonder about kids who grow up in Tlapa, a city in the state of Guerrero where Nahuatl, Spanish, Mixtec and Me’phaa (also known as Tlapanec) are spoken every day, how aware of language diversity they are. 

I’ve come to realise that, even though Mexico’s big cities are home to many speakers of its different languages, it’s the urban spaces with Spanish-speaking populations that contain the least information about the country’s linguistic diversity. I think this situation is closely connected to a systematic, though invisible, censorship of Mexico’s languages. As far as the school system goes, it’s more important to know—and often to have learned off by heart—the country’s state capitals than the names of Mexico’s languages and the places where they’re spoken. Why is cultural and linguistic diversity not a key topic in learning materials? Seeing as it isn’t, I still often meet people who are surprised to know Maya didn’t stop being spoken in the pre-Hispanic era or that other languages aren’t just dialects. That most people don’t at least know the names of the languages spoken in their country or their state is staggering, to say the least, as is the surprise people show when they discover, for example, that the last five speakers of the Kiliwa language live in Baja California, and that they, too, are Mexicans. The country’s diverse Indigenous cultures were for years subsumed under the label ‘campesino’ in reference to often impoverished rural workers—similarly, its language diversity has been hidden within the category of ‘dialect.’ 

If we don’t even know linguistic diversity exists, it’s hard for us to ask for more information, to demand spaces where we can learn about and enjoy the languages spoken in our own country. Overcoming the censorship of different languages is a necessary, crucial first step towards building a multilingual society. This censorship affects us all—both those who speak censored languages and those who, despite living in this country, have never heard of the existence of, say, Guarijio. 

So what about you: how did you learn that languages other than Spanish are spoken in this country? 

29 Nov, 2012 

Translated by Ellen Jones

This Mouth is Mine is out now from Charco Press.