For over two decades, many Indigenous people have been concerned with the fate of their mother tongues and have studied them in order to document and revitalize them. In this presentation, I will speak about my own ethnographic and linguistic work in the municipality of San Juan Quiahije, my birthplace. I will discuss some of the methodologies I have implemented with people in this municipality, in situ narrations in particular. I have a program of going on walks with elders, in which they share stories about their lives and the community. In this talk, I also present the dialogues generated in this municipality between young people and elders in order to spark interest in the language through oral histories, which make it clear that exchanges between these two groups of people are increasingly infrequent. One thing that can be learned from this work is that, though most of the people in San Juan Quiahije speak Chatino, very few young people learn the specialized vocabulary for flora, fauna and toponyms. Finally, I argue that Indigenous people are not the only ones who should be concerned with the preservation and revitalization of Indigenous languages in Mexico.
(Cieneguilla, San Juan Quiahije, Oaxaca, 1971)
Emiliana Cruz Cruz is a linguistic anthropologist who has conducted field work with young day laborers in the Yakima Valley, as well as in the Chatino region of Oaxaca and in Chiapas. Her lines of research are primarily centered on the fields of education, linguistic rights, territory and linguistic documentation and revitalization. She is currently a research professor at the Mexico City campus of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS). She has won the University of Massachusetts’s Distinguished Community Engagement Award and she forms part of the Dialogues between Indigenous Academics collective. Her publications include the recent We Must Keep Our Future From Slipping Through Our Fingers: Tomás Cruz Lorenzo and the New Chatino Generation, the result of a collective effort with Chatinos, and Theoretical Reflections on the Function of Linguistic-Anthropological Field Work: The Contributions of Indigenous Researchers from Southern Mexico, a collaboration with Indigenous academics.