Community Politics in Language Revitalization

Community Politics in Language Revitalization | Magnus Pharao Hansen

The Role of Community Politics in Language Revitalization: The Case of Hueyapan Magnus Pharao Hansen Paper Given at the 2nd Conference of Mesoamerican Linguistics, California State University L.A. Friday March 6th, 2015

Abstract: This paper discusses how projects of linguistic revitalization may be tied up in complex political contexts at many scales, which both have the potential to strengthen the efforts and to jeopardize them. Using data from the Nahuatl speaking community of Hueyapan, Morelos, I focus on how revitalization can be used as a political tool for communities to leverage a local political identity in competition with neighboring communities before municipal, state and national governments. I argue that the tie between language and local politics is a key factor both in the social processes promoting language switch and endangerment, and in revitalization contexts. In the literature Hueyapan is known as the location of Judith Friedlander’s 1975 ethnography “Being Indian in Hueyapan”, in which she argues that the people of Hueyapan are being forced by oppressive cultural policies to maintain a stigmatizing identity as “Indians” that they would rather be without. The period when Friedlander did her work and in which the indigenous identity was negatively experienced by the community coincided with a break in transmission of the Nahuatl language. Today 40 years later, situation is very different. Though the language is now only spoken fluently by community members 40 and over, a strong movement of linguistic and cultural revival began in 2012, organizing cultural events and language classes for youths and children. This prompts us to attempt to understand what has changed in the community to cause this change in attitudes. I posit three major factors in explaining in the change:

1. An increasingly positive attitude to indigenous groups in Mexican society, including additional governmental resources destined to indigenous communities and individuals. 2. A state level strategy of using indigenous policies to position the state government as politically progressive. 3. A political and economic resurgence of the community of Hueyapan relative to the cabecera community of Tetela del Volcán which has taken place since 2006.

These three factors converge to make it a viable and desirable strategy for the people of Hueyapan to begin to emphasize their cultural and linguistic distinctiveness, which they previously had struggled to erase. I propose that applied linguists would do well to consider how revival projects fit into local political projects, because this kind of knowledge may be useful both in order to be able to predict the degree of community support, and in producing strategies that will be effective in a specific community. Rather 1


than shying away from the political aspects of language revival, they need to be recognized and perhaps even embraced.

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Language Revitalization in Hueyapan Hueyapan is a town in the far northeastern corner of the state of Morelos. The Nahuatl language declined there during the 20th century with the final break in transmission

occurring in the period between 1970 and 1980. People who grew up in the 1970s are

most likely not to have acquired Nahuatl, and almost no people who grew up in Hueyapan in the 1980s speak or understand Nahuatl. In 2013 a group of people in town began a

project aiming at reviving the language among the youths of the town. This project differed from previous small scale revival projects in town in that it was not centered around the small group of cultural progressives that have been the driving force in all past revival

efforts and in that it had an amount of support from the state government. I was in town

when the project was initiated and the organizers approached me requesting me to act first as teacher of the project which I declined, and then as linguistic consultant to the teachers, which I accepted. Over the course of the academic year 2012-2013 the two teachers of the

project taught weekly classes for a group of 80 youths in the age 17-20, and also organized a series of events including the elaboration and placement of signage in Nahuatl,

participation by some students in a state level competition in Nahuatl oratory, the

production of a short play in Nahuatl, and a field trip to a Nahuatl speaking community in Hidalgo. The project also organized a council of parents in support of the project, making the project extend outside of the group of youths and teachers into an actual community

project. Even if only a few of the students involved achieved any level of proficiency in the language, the project was highly successful in terms of improving the general interest in

Nahuatl within the community, as well as in producing positive discourse surrounding the language, and in improving the language’s visibility as a local cultural resource. In this

paper I will provide an analysis of the factors that I believe made the project possible and

enabled its success. They are all factors that have to do with the community’s political and social history.

Hueyapan in the 20th Century: What caused the Decline of Nahuatl?

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In the state of Morelos, and in the rest of Mexico, the norm is for indigenous towns to have lost their language. In Morelos the genocidal disruption of the Revolution caused

indigenous languages to almost disappear from the state except for a handful of localities, one of which is Hueyapan. This makes the first question, why it survived there.

After the Revolution, Hueyapan became part of the municipality of Tetela del Volcan

founded in 1937. Tetela del Volcan was itself a rural town with indigenous roots, but in contrast to Hueyapan it had a local elite that was not indigenous. They had established

themselves in Tetela as merchants during the second half of the 19th century and during the Revolution they succeeded in maintaining good relations with both the Zapatistas and the

Government, ensuring their continued prosperity. Tetela itself, as well as Hueyapan, was at this point part of the municipality of Ocuituco. In the 1930s when things had calmed down after the revolution, the elite families of Tetela and Hueyapan led a movement for

municipal independence which they achieved in 1937 during the presidency of Lazaro

Cardenas, the same year in which each community received their ejido land grants. The new municipal status was predicated on two conditions: the Municipality would not be eligible for state resources, and it would not be allowed to raise taxes. The question of

which of the two towns would become the cabecera, was not difficult, even the people of

Hueyapan realized that Tetela with its local elite would be the logical choice, and they even signed a document known locally as El Pacto “The Pact” in which it was stipulated that the

presidency of the municipality would always be occupied by a Teteleño, and that Hueyapan would only be represented in the cabildo with two síndicos. There were two main reasons this was agreeable to the people of Hueyapan at the time, one was that they were

selfconscious about the fact that hardly anyone in Hueyapan had any formal schooling. The town had a small rural school run by local teacher Eligio Perez, but probably no one in

Hueyapan at that point – including the teacher – had received more than elementary school

education. Secondly, Hueyapan was physically severed from the cabecera by the wide gorge in which the river Amatzinac flows, making the trip to non-remunerated town meetings in

Tetela strenuous and time consuming. In the 1950s Hueyapan in fact the two sindicos from Hueyapan filed a formal complaint about having to travel to Tetela so often, in which they 4


stated that they would not attend any more meetings, since the costs in lost labor time made it too hard on their families.

In this way, the political arrangement between the two towns meant that there was very little political integration of the municipality. Hueyapan was in effect an isolated town,

dependent on Tetela for administrative purposes, but receiving little or no resources from

Tetela, and having little or no representation in municipal politics. In Hueyapan there were

two main attitudes to this arrangement, a progressivist one which saw it as imperative that Hueyapan develop the tools to contest Tetela’s hegemony by emphasizing education and

the building of infrastructure, and a conservative one which considered continued isolation the best strategy.

At the same time the mode of production in Hueyapan, at least for many people, was in fact partly based on its isolated status. In the last decades of the 19th century, Mexico

experienced a boom in the consumption of Marijuana among the lower classes, which made this plant an important cash crop for many rural Mexicans. When marijuana was outlawed in 1923 it became an even better cash crop due to the rising prices, but it had to be

produced in out of the way areas where the federales had no access. Marijuana had a long

presence in indigenous communities where it had been integrated into the local herbarium, and for much of the 20th century it was an important crop both in Tetela and especially in Hueyapan which was better protected from government control. This meant that the

political and geographical isolation of Hueyapan was in fact beneficial to a significant

segment of Hueyapan’s population. Marijuana production was concentrated in the towns outlying barrios, whereas the central barrio was the seat of the town’s cultural elite, including those with church affiliations and the teachers – and the division between

progressive and conservative political views mirrored this division. So did the decline of

Nahuatl, it was the families of the town center who were more outwards oriented, valueing education and the relations with the outside world who first started emphasizing Spanish over Nahuatl, whereas the people in the outlying barrios maintained the language longer. But even well into the 1970s Nahuatl was still the native language of most people in the

central barrio, and the main language in which town politics was formulated, and a crucial medium in which local political identity, as distinct from Tetela, was embedded. 5


So it was the political, physical and legal isolation of the town of Hueyapan, which was for

much of the 20th century a kind of outlaw public, that made Nahuatl survive in there as long as it did.

Nonetheless, gradually the progressives won the day. In 1947 they succeeded in building a

road to the neighboring community of Tlacotepec, connecting the town with the rest of the state. The road building project was promoted by the teachers, who lobbied the state

government for resources. They only received dynamite and a truck, but no laborers. The

teachers then used the school children as a source of labor, working on the road with picks, shovels and dynamite in class time. Hueyapeños who participated tell about these

experiences as a formative moment in their sense of community. With the help of the SEP

and the cultural missions they also brought more schools to town, and by the 1940s several locals were studying to become teachers. In the same period, Hueyapan started being

serviced by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, who provided some services and economical support, but which required the community to be visibly “Indian” in order to qualify for

handouts. Simultaneously with the arrival of the INI and the SEP in Hueyapan, a group of

neo-Aztec cultural activists arrived in the town, with the aim of making Hueyapan the locus of a renaissance of neo-Aztec religion. In this way representatives of the urban Aztec nationalism movement took it a their responsibility to make sure that the Indians of

Hueyapan were the right kind of Indians – and legible to the state as such.This dynamics of a culture based patron-client relation between the state and the community, led to the paradoxical situation described by Friedlander as “forced identity”.

At the time when Judith Friedlander wrote her famous ethnography of the community, the

progressive ideas were clearly dominant, particular in the town center where she lived in a family of teachers. And in the progressive view, being an “Indio” was clearly and

unequivocally a bad thing. Teachers were encouraging parent’s not to speak Nahuatl to

their children, so that their schooling would be easier and they would have a better chance of succeeding in the national labor market. Many Hueyapeños who were children in the 1960s and 70s tell that their parents spoke only Spanish to them, although they spoke Nahuatl among each other, and that they only learned Nahuatl “in the streets with my

friends”. At this point Nahuatl was no longer a language of politics in Hueyapan, only a 6


language of intimate relations among friends, compadres and family members. The local public sphere in which political discussions were carried out was Spanish speaking. But simultaneously with the opening of Hueyapan to new ideas, technologies and

infrastructure, the Marijuana industry became more lucrative and more violent. A few

families had prospered particularly from the trade, and they began feuding. Throughout the 1980s and 90s violence was endemic in Hueyapan, and it got the reputation of being a

closed of narco-town in the other towns in the area. The town had its own justice system, based on lynchings of outsiders who committed crimes in the community, and in some

periods police presence was not tolerated. Consequently it was the army that conducted the frequent drug raids, arresting hundreds of Hueyapeños in the 1990s. In a period of

several years in the late 1990s the town was occupied and controlled by the military. This was what finally ended the marijuana business in town, but it also sent a large number of

Hueyapeños searching for other places to live and other places to work. Many hundreds, or

perhaps even thousands, of them traveled to the U.S. as undocumented migrants, and began sending money back to their families. Given that Nahuatl had exactly been best preserved in the rural barrios where Marijuana production was more prevalent, the anti-drug

campaigns and feud violence between marijuanero families had the effect of undermining

the last stronghold of Nahuatl in the community. When I arrived in Hueyapan in 2003, this was the situation I found: the youngest speakers I could find in the town were in their

twenties, but the majority was in their fifties or above, and there was little sign that the younger generations had any interest in the language whatsoever.

What is causing the renewed interest in revitalization of Nahuatl in Hueyapan? The current broad community interest in the local revitalization of Nahuatl in Hueyapan could not have been predicted in 2003. Today however, the language is spoken with

considerable fluency by several handfuls of youths under the age of 20, who have learned it through deliberate efforts. And today the general attitude in the community is that the

language “ought to be saved” (“se debe rescatar”), even among those who are not personally invested in doing to.

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National Politics: The Law of Linguistic Rights 2003 was also the year in which the Government passed the General Law of Linguistic

Rights, which recognized indigenous languages as co-official national languages, granted the right for indigenous peoples to receive government services in their own languages,

and established the National Institute for Indigenous Languages (INALI). This legal change was itself a result of both global and national political processes. Since 1992 Mexico had constitutionally been a multicultural nation. Multiculturalism as a national model had

emerged from a series of critiques of the ethno-national state, and the emergence of human rights discourses that increasingly focused on cultural rights of minorities. These

discourses made the assimilationist policies that countries across the globe had pursued in relation to their minorities go out of fashion, and multiculturalism became the new

paradigm for the liberal and progressive state. Locally in Mexico, 1994 saw the Chiapas uprising which brought indigenous politics into national focus, and which successfully generated political sympathy for indigenous people in the wider public. Subsequent currents from South America specifically the paradigm of interculturality, a kind of

multiculturalism 2.0 fueled by critiques of multiculturalism as a neoliberal strategy of governance rather as a guarantee of functional cultural rights, was introduced to

indigenous education in Mexico. Taken together all this means that currently in the

Mexican public debate, indigeneity and indigenous peoples’ rights is a hot topic, and one that is actively used by media and politicians, mostly as a bid to moving humanitarian

votes. While outright racist comments are still found in the Mexican debate and covert or

implicit racism is even more frequent, it now has the same kind of status as outright racism in has in the US, which means that it is generally not condoned and those who express it are castigated by the media and commentators. Contemporary Indigenous cultural

expressions, including language, are much more frequent in the media and public space

than they were before (when mostly archeological indigenous cultural expressions were ever given significant attention in the national public). 8


State Policies: Indigenous Policy in a Progressive State After two periods of right wing PAN rule, 2012 saw the election of leftwing PRD politician Graco Ramirez as the state governor of Morelos. In spite of the fact that Morelos’

indigenous population is quite small an accounts for less than two percent of the

population, his election platform prominently included several promises aimed at the

state’s handful of indigenous Nahua communities. Significantly he promised to work for

offering indigenous communities a chance to become independent municipalities under the law of Usos y Costumbres. Among his first actions as governor was appointing a director for the process of municipalization, this was the filmmaker and anthropologist Francesco

Taboada. A major project undertaken by the new administration was a project aimed at

promoting education by giving college age youths an education stipend, the Beca Salario, conditioned on participating in a one year program of social work. Conditioned cash transfers has been one of the main social policies with which the Mexican state has

promoted social development and education, and the Oportunidades program has been considered widely successful in promoting education. The difference between Ramirez’

Beca Salario and Oportunidades, is that while in Oportunidades development is seen as a

family based process and the conditions are predicated at the family level, Beca Salario is community oriented and sees participation in community based projects as a way to

improve community cohesion and promote development, and furthermore the specific

projects that counted towards receiving the stipend were decided by the community. In

several of the indigenous communities, as well as in communities where the language had

not been spoken for decades, the community requested support from the state to organize language classes teaching Nahuatl to the youths, which would then count towards their

stipend. Responsibility for organizing these courses fell to Taboada, since it was argued

that in order to qualify for status as indigenous municipalities having a living indigenous language in the community was a requirement. In this way the state tied both individual access to economic resources for youths as well as the political project of becoming

independent municipalities to the teaching of Nahuatl – creating a strong incentive for

communities to start Nahuatl revitalization projects, and for youths to participate in them. 9


Local Politics: Identity as a Resource But the fact that Hueyapeños suddenly embraced their traditional language in this way

cannot simply be explained by the reference to incentives implicit in national and state

level policies. That would evade the questions of why the community would be interested in political independence in the first place, why they would precisely choose language

revival as the strategy to achieve this, and why 80 individual youths among the different options for social work would choose language learning.

As described above the decline of Nahuatl in Hueyapan is linked both to the process of

collective reorientation towards the national public and its values, discourses and political networks, and also to the processes that have promoted out migration of Hueyapeño

people to cities and to North America. Ironically both of these processes can now be said to have been reversed so that where they previously discouraged the use of indigenous

languages they now encourage it. Firstly, the prominence of positive discourses in relation to indigeneity and indigenous languages in the public sphere means that where

Hueyapeños who were oriented towards the national public would previously be most

likely to come into contact with negative discourses about their cultural roots, they are now more likely to meet positive discourses. This process is quite simply the way that linguistic ideologies in the national public sphere trickle down into the communities changing local behavior – a well described finding in linguistic anthropology.

But more significantly, the process of emigration seems also to have provided some of the basis for the revival. First migration produced a new set of economic processes in the

community, specifically cash flow in the form of remittances. This cash flow, produced economic growth, increased access to education and increased social status of the

community of Hueyapan as a whole relative to the cabecera community Tetela del Volcan. 2001 was the first time a Hueypeño broke the pact and decided to run for municipal

president, 2006 was the first time a Hueyapeño succeeded, and 2012 the second. Whereas Teteleño presidents had previously used clientelistic practices such as vote buying with

success and the different parties had established local clienteles that supported them in the 10


elections, the community now realized that if they grouped together and supported a local candidate they actually had a chance of gaining power.

This new political situation also completely changed the power balance between Tetela and Hueyapan and with Hueyapan now threatening to take the lead. Municipal budgets are always delicate, and Teteleño presidents had often counted on external resources

dedicated to development of indigenous communities to fund infrastructural projects in Hueyapan, whereas the municipality’s own funds were largely allocated in Tetela. This policy was not followed by the new presidents from Hueyapan, which instead took

advantage of the fact that Hueyapan but not Tetela was eligible to receive funding from CDI, to undertake large development projects in Hueyapan, while also allocating significant municipal sources to the town for normal every day expenses. This threat to Tetela’s

political and economic dominance prompted old conflicts between the two communities to be rekindled, especially over water rights and state transportation concessions. These

conflicts had violent outcomes in several instances, which created a strong incentive in

Hueyapan to embrace community identity. But where Hueyapeños had previously been

easily cowed into submission, they now actively used discourses of Indigenous rights to

defend themselves, and in the public debate that ensued Tetela came out looking like an

aggressor (which in fairness they were) and a colonial power (which really they werent). In this way the use of indigenous rights discourses became an important political tool with which Hueyapan could address local grievances – and move towards a goal of political

independence of Tetela, a goal that Hueyapeños could not even imagine just fifty years ago. When Javier Montes of Hueyapan was elected to municipal president in 2012, he even

changed the municipal motto to the Nahuatl phrase “titekitigan tonochtin sejkan”, meaning “let’s all work together”, ironically the new lemma was a simultaneously a plea for

reconciliation between Tetela and Hueyapan, but phrased in Nahuatl it also symbolized the new political status of the indigenous community of Hueyapan, and the political importance of indigeneity itself.

At the same time something was happening among the Hueyapeños abroad. Many of them had now been outside of the community for decades, many of them only maintaining

contact with their families and community through phone calls. Most Hueyapeños in the 11


U.S. are located in New York City and here a small ex-patriate community started to

emerge, using the internet as a platform for cultivating hometown nostalgia. Websites and facebook pages with idealized photos of Hueyapan started appearing around 2010, and

throughout these media expatriate Hueyapeños engaged in ‘diversity talk’ (Faudree 2015). Some of them even took contact to Judith Friedlander, and when the Hueyapeño Municipal President of Tetela visited the migrant community New York in 2013 Friedlander

participated in the reception, dressed in the traditional Hueyapeño tzinkweitl, that is today only used by a handful of women outside of ceremonial or folkloric contexts (or in the

context of online beauty contests for Hueyapeño girls which have been held annually at the facebook group “Mi Hueyapan Morelos” the past couple of years). Clearly the combination of nostalgia, and localocentric pride, motivated a renewed perspective on their cultural

traditions among the Hueyapeños in the U.S. – who increasingly came to idealize their local heritage and tradition. During the celebration of the patron feast of Sto. Domingo in 2014,

the folkloric element took a new importance as the feast was billed as “first national festival of folklore”, and the students of the language course carried out a theatric performance including a recreation of the traditional local wedding ceremony in Nahuatl.

Another element of the revitalization project that puts the effect of migration, education

and economic development into focus is the fact that the driving forces in the project were

a youth who had himself grown up in New York, and returned to Hueyapan, and his mother who had also lived in New York for 10 years before returning, and a local teacher who had taught in the indigenous bilingual school system and had taught several in the community

of Cuentepec – the only fully Nahuatl speaking community in Morelos, and finally a teacher who had taught two years in a Nahuatl language academy for Chicano children in Los

Angeles. This shows the role of education and experience outside of the community in

making locals reconsider the value of the language. It also means that whereas the Nahuatl language in the 1970s was associated with a lower class peasant identity it is now

connected to a middle class identity, and seen as a sign of cosmopolitanism, educational

ambition combined with local community values and a solidarity with the local community. This radical reevaluation of the language in a new political context seems likely to provide the best possible conditions for a language revitalization project. 12


What Produced the Conditions for this Revitalization Project: A Summary In summary it seems that political developments at all levels, have converged to produce a situation in which many Hueyapeños are increasingly interested in signifying their local identity and in using Nahuatl to do so. Among the most important components in this change at the various political scales I have identified three main processes: • •

Changing discourses at the global and national level.

•

economic incentives.

Policies encouraging communities and individuals to revitalize languages through Political and economic resurgence at the community decreasing political and

economic dependency on other communities and increasing the value of cultural difference as capital.

Within Roland Terborg and Laura Garcia Landa’s (2013) ecological model of competing pressures, the changes can be seen as a simultaneous reversal of pressures against the

Nahuatl language at several different levels of the ecology. But while Terborg’s model is individualistic in its focus on social pressures and its effects on the linguistic choices on

individual speakers. Rather, the observations in Hueyapan suggest that instead of social

pressures molding individual behavior, it may be relevant to look at language shift and its reversal less as a psychological process, and more as a political process. While we can see

each of the political changes taking place did create new motivations for individual choices, they would have been unlikely to manifest in the form of a revitalization of the language except within a sociopolitical context where it was a feasible strategy for Hueyapan as a community to use its language as an ethno-political marker. Language Revival: More Political Than We Think? Linguists studying language endangerment and revitalization are of course aware of the role of politics, particularly educational policy and language policy and processes of 13


marginalization of minorities in causing language endangerment. And they are also

increasingly aware of the fact that the community support necessary for successfully

carrying out a revitalization project is inevitably tied to political processes within the community of speakers. Nonetheless, the case of Hueyapan, in which a community

revitalization project developed spontaneously, without the need of outside impetus from linguists, show just how effective political processes. It also suggests that attempts at

promoting language revitalization in communities that continue to be politically dependent on and dominated by on non-indigenous communities may a waste of efforts. While

language revitalization is often conceived of and described as a kind of activity that is

ideally politically neutral, perhaps it is time that we recognize it as necessarily tied to the political status of the community. While we may analytically identify single parameters

pressures that motivate individual behavior and single them out for intervention – it seems likely that the instead of seeing language as a tool with which the individual engages and

interacts with the world, it we ought to also recognize the fact that language is also a social tool, with which a community relates to other communities, and that the socio-political

aspect of language, is a more powerful factor in processes of cultural revival and linguistic revitalization.

Interestingly this reverses the paradox that often sees social and economic development as detrimental to the preservation of cultural distinctiveness, because such processes entail a higher degree of interaction with the majority community. Instead it seems that

development may exactly provide the infrastructure that can empower a community to reclaim their language in order to use it as an instrument for the pursuit of political strategies.

Works Cited:

Faudree, P. (2015). Singing for the dead, on and off line: Diversity, migration, and scale in Mexican Muertos music. Language & Communication. 14


Friedlander, J. (1975). Being Indian in Hueyapan. New York: St. Martin’s Press Terborg, R., & Landa, L. G. (2013). The ecology of pressures: Towards a tool to analyze the complex process of language shift and maintenance (pp. 219-239). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

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