Native Language On Rise In Mexico

by Eduardo Stanley

But far from having the evanescence of a rainstorm, the Native language Mixtec is enjoying a renaissance in the 21st century.

Spoken for at least 1,000 years in the mountainous countryside of the present-day Mexican states of Oaxaca, Puebla and Guerrero, Mixtec already has survived cataclysms such as the Spanish conquest and centuries of brutal colonial administration.

More recently, the language has faced a more beguiling force: the phenomenon of immigration. Hundreds of thousands of Mixtecs have left their homes in southern Mexico, journeying to the industrial centers of northern Mexico or crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to labor in California, especially in the agribusinesses of the Central Valley.

Still, despite the ubiquity of Spanish and English, Mixtec is prospering on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border.

Partly due to a cultural revival in Native Mexico sparked by the Zapatista uprising in 1994, and thanks to the grassroots persistence of Mixtec educators and scholars, more people than ever are speaking the language, one of many in a worldwide movement that seeks to preserve and revive Native languages, from Hmong to Evank to Welsh to Maori.

More than half a million people speak Mixtec today, According to the Mexico-based Academy of the Mixtec Language. In 1930, less than 200,000 spoke it.

"Many anthropologists said that urbanization was going to modernize us and that we would no longer speak our language and turn to Spanish, but it didn't turn out that way -- today our languages have a new life," says Tiburcio Perez Castro, a member of the academy, who teaches Mixtec in the United States.

Not only that, but the oral lingua franca of some of the most remote villages in southern Mexico now is being established as a written language.

"To keep a language alive, writing it is fundamental," says Gaspar Rivera, a Mixtec and University of Southern California sociologist. For Mixtecs living in the United States, the challenges of maintaining fluency in their native tongue "are doubled, because in addition to all the pressures of the Spanish-speaking world, we also have to face the pressures of English," he adds.

Rivera notes that Mixtec communities, both in the United States and in Mexico, suffer from high rates of illiteracy. The spread of written Mixtec, he says, could help address this educational deficiency, and also make it easier for Mixtecs to learn Spanish and English, since knowing how to read and write aids lessons in any language.

Already, mainly through the Office of the Development of the Indigenous people, Mexico is planning to fund programs that will teach Mixtec and other Native languages to migrants living in the United States. The cabinet-level office has an annual budget of $180 million.

One epicenter of the Mixtec diaspora is California's inland agricultural heartland. An estimated 65,000 Mixtecs live in the Central Valley. At a Fresno community center recently, almost 50 people attended a workshop on written Mixtec. Tiburcio Perez Castro, the teacher from the Mexican government-funded Academy of the Mixtec Language, taught participants how to write out the language's basic sounds and words using the Roman alphabet.

"I feel that I learned a lot today," says Leonor Morales, a 33-year-old Mixtec who lives in California and speaks only Spanish. "I want to learn it, and this is a good opportunity."

For Fidelina Espinoza, a 23-year-old Mixtec and the mother of two girls, the motivations are different. "I speak Mixtec, but I don't write it. I know that maintaining my language is very important for my daughters and I."

Their teacher was sent to Fresno, the largest city in the Central Valley, by the academy, which was founded in 1997 and headquartered in Tlaxiaco, in Oaxaca state, Mexico. The academy aims to establish the norms of written Mixtec, lead research and disseminate Mixtec language and culture.

In the Fresno workshop, different variations of spoken Mixtec filled the room. Different Mixtec dialects may use different words for the same object, even though the Mixtecs come from villages in Mexico separated by only a half-day's walk.

Perez Castro explains that a written script for Mixtec will help inhabitants from different villages communicate with one another, since the creation of a standardized vocabulary will smooth over linguistic variants in the rugged countryside where the language originated.

Rufino Dom’nguez, coordinator of the Fresno-based Binational Oaxacan Indigenous Front, says he believes that regular Mixtec-language courses eventually will replace occasional seminars taught by teachers sent from Mexico.

Dom’nguez notes the prestige of a written system may also help erase stigma attached to native languages by centuries of discrimination against Native Mexicans.

"The practical benefits of a written language are obvious," says Dom’nguez. "From public health messages to family correspondence, the writing of our language is a historical necessity."