What's Happening to Nahuatl?
What's Going On?
I’m moving to Mexico City,” said Isaias, the twentysomething college graduate who became my best friend during my stay in Amatlán. Cowboys on horseback and a truck full of teachers passed us as we walked down the unpaved road from his mother’s house to the house where I was staying. The smell of wood smoke gently wafted through the humid air as we made our way down the road, greeting everyone who passed. Amatlán is in a time of cultural and economic transition. The radios play traditional violin and guitar music; the televisions show Taylor Swift music videos. The teenagers wear tee shirts and leggings; their grandmothers wear hand-embroidered blouses and long, brightly colored skirts. Nahuatl, the language of the Nahua who live in Amatlán, is in transition as well. Nahuatl is the linguistic descendant of the Aztecs, and it is still spoken today throughout Mexico (Suárez 1983:145). However, the people of my generation rarely speak Nahuatl, due in large part to a desire to live a “modern” life and achieve personal and economic success. This change in language is happening quickly; all the adults who grew up in Amatlán speak Nahuatl, and most learned it as a first language. Isaias can still understand some Nahuatl, thanks to listening to his parents, but he can’t speak it. I wondered how young peoples’ identities changed as they stopped speaking Nahuatl. How is This Affecting Young People in Amatlán? Anthropologists and linguists have established the clear link between language and identity. Identity and the self are “fluid, fragmentary, contingent, and, crucially, constituted in discourse,” according to anthropologist Erving Goffman. In other words, the language and manner in which one speaks is essential to how one identifies oneself (Goffman 1959: 17). Today, many native people speak Spanish fluently, but part of being indigenous means identifying as such and speaking an indigenous language (Sandstrom 1991: 67). The Nahua of Amatlán are aware they are indigenous, but do not talk about it openly. Being indigenous is stigmatized, and Amatlán sees other groups as being more “indigena” because “they speak the language”. People see the social, economic, and cultural value of the languages they speak, and they use the language that is valued more (Fromkin et al. 2011: 461). Younger members of Amatlán speak Spanish more often because the jobs they can get in the cities speaking Spanish pay better than work in the village. This leads to rapid cultural change as young people modernize and identify with Western culture (Sandstrom 1991: 348). I learned that adolescents' shift away from Nahuatl is changing how they identify themselves ethnically. Since identity is constituted and perpetuated through discourse, it makes sense that Nahua adolescents may identify more with mainstream Mexican culture than with Nahua tradition. By speaking with the teens and twenties around me, I found that most of the young people in the village identified as mexicano. When prompted if they also thought of themselves as nahua, most said yes, though it was not the primary way they defined themselves. Only a very few ever acknowledged that they were indígena, indigenous, and most who did, did so only after prompting. I found that Nahuatl is important to the youth of Amatlán for two reasons: its cultural relevance and its practical relevance when speaking with elders. But the practical relevance of Nahuatl is quickly fading due to a post-Revolution push across Mexico to modernize all aspects of life and incorporate indigenous populations into the mestizo mainstream (Smith-Oka 2013:30). Nahuatl is stigmatized and associated with being backwards, traditional, poor, and unintelligent, according to many Amatlán teenagers. Spanish speakers, on the other hand, are seen as smart, normal, and modern. Click below to find out more about this false dichotomy between "traditional" and "modern". |