A warm, witty, passionate cry for living, vital, Indigenous languages and the people who speak them.<\/b><\/p>\n
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. Y\u00e1snaya Aguilar, a linguist and native Mixe speaker, asks what is lost, for everyone, when the contradictions inherent in Mexico\u2019s relationship with its many Indigenous languages mean official protection and actual contempt at worst, and ignorance at best.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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 \u201ccultural heritage\u201d 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?<\/span><\/p>\n 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. \u201cWe have sacrificed Mexico in favor of creating the idea of Mexico,\u201d she says. <\/span>This Mouth is Mine <\/span><\/i>is an invitation to take it back.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n To be or not to be?: Bilingualisms\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n There were, I remember, two kinds of primary school in my hometown and the rest of the region: the \u2018formal education\u2019 schools, where all subjects were taught in Spanish, and \u2018bilingual schools,\u2019 where lessons were taught in Ayuujk (until we had mastered Spanish). The official attitude towards this second type of school was\u2014how shall I put it?\u2014peculiar. Parents generally believed they should avoid sending their children to bilingual schools because it was said they\u2019d 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 \u2018formal\u2019 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 \u2018formal\u2019 system whenever they could. The word <\/span>bilingual <\/span><\/i>was understood to have negative connotations\u2014to be the opposite of \u2018formal.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n On my first trip to Mexico City\u2014I had by then learned to read Spanish\u2014I 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 <\/span>bilingual <\/span><\/i>had positive connotations. And as I\u2019ve 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Soon it was explained to me that no, <\/span>bilingual <\/span><\/i>meant being able to speak two languages: in this case, English and Spanish. It was then I realised that the issue wasn\u2019t the fact of speaking two languages, but <\/span>which <\/span><\/i>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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n To put it simply, I came to understand that being bilingual is not the same as being <\/span>bilingual<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 4 Jan, 2012\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Censoring of Babel\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Turns out it\u2019s 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\u2019t understand. When asked about it outright, his grandfather explained that he spoke \u2018Mexican\u2019 with his friends.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s last surviving Nahuatl speakers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As things stand, it\u2019s clear that in monolingual contexts you\u2019re 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 \u2018other language\u2019 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\u2019s humans speak the same language was because of English.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019phaa (also known as Tlapanec) are spoken every day, how aware of language diversity they are.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve come to realise that, even though Mexico\u2019s big cities are home to many speakers of its different languages, it\u2019s the urban spaces with Spanish-speaking populations that contain the least information about the country\u2019s linguistic diversity. I think this situation is closely connected to a systematic, though invisible, censorship of Mexico\u2019s languages. As far as the school system goes, it\u2019s more important to know\u2014and often to have learned off by heart\u2014the country\u2019s state capitals than the names of Mexico\u2019s languages and the places where they\u2019re spoken. Why is cultural and linguistic diversity not a key topic in learning materials? Seeing as it isn\u2019t, I still often meet people who are surprised to know Maya didn\u2019t stop being spoken in the pre-Hispanic era or that other languages aren\u2019t just dialects. That most people don\u2019t 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\u2019s diverse Indigenous cultures were for years subsumed under the label \u2018campesino\u2019 in reference to often impoverished rural workers\u2014similarly, its language diversity has been hidden within the category of \u2018dialect.\u2019<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n If we don\u2019t even know linguistic diversity exists, it\u2019s 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\u2014both those who speak censored languages and those who, despite living in this country, have never heard of the existence of, say, Guarijio.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So what about you: how did you learn that languages other than Spanish are spoken in this country?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 29 Nov, 2012\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \t\tTranslated by Ellen Jones<\/span><\/h5>\n
This Mouth is Mine <\/span><\/i>is out now from <\/span>Charco Press<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/h5>\n