Tag Archives: linguistics

Celebrating Zapotec Activism: Oaxaca’s Living Language

Last night I participated in a Zoom conference organized by Dr. Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, The Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, and the Ticha Project at Haverford College, Pennsylvania. The discussion, mostly for indigenous language linguists, educators and students, focused on what it means to be a Zapotec Activist.

The Victoriano Rug — Janet’s great-grandfather’s design

The definition is simple: To recognize that Zapotec is a living, modern language of the present as well as that of the past, to preserve the language and support native speakers, to inculcate the language among young people and pass it on, to make it visible and disseminate it to the global community, to apply social media technology to keep the language vibrant, to acknowledge the diverse group of speakers throughout Oaxaca and the diaspora, and to respect the people and culture that have kept this a living language for millenia. There is pride in being a Zapotec speaker.

While the definition is simple, implementation has challenges, but this Project is undertaking a sea-change in how native language is spoken, written, researched and disseminated.

Janet Chavez Santiago at Galeria Fe y Lola Rugs

I participated in the conference as an observer, and mostly to show support to the Zapotec activists I know in Oaxaca: my goddaughter Janet Chavez Santiago from Teotitlan del Valle, and Fellow for Community Based Learning at Haverford College, with friend Moises Garcia Guzman de Contareras from San Jeronimo Tlacochuhuaya. Both Janet and Moises host faculty and students from the USA in Oaxaca, and travel to Pennsylvania to teach. They are linguist educators.

Zapotec archeological site, Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca

Moises greeted us via video in the courtyard of the Tlacochuhuaya church. He then took us to his family’s milpa where he recalled that the 1695 last will and testament of Sebastiana de Mendoza, translated from the Zapotec, proved that land could be inherited by women to fight male exclusiveness. His mother owns this land and it will be inherited by Moises’ daughter. The document certifies this.

There is a substantial Zapotec speaking population in California who are from Oaxaca. Many have been there for generations. Xochitl Flores-Marcial, PhD, teaches history, language and culture at California State University at Northridge. She earned her doctorate at UCLA, renown for linguistics studies.

Xochitl, a presenter last night, studied and wrote about the ancient guelaguetza system (not a folkloric dance) of mutual support to keep Oaxaca communities strong, independent and interconnected. She emphasized that over 2,500 years ago, Zapotecs carved their ideas and beliefs on stone monuments, pottery and deer hides. They produced texts in their own voices citing intellectual achievements.

Carvings on the outside of the Mitla temple

Poet-scholar Felipe H. Lopez, PhD, emphasized that modern social media is being used to harness 16th Century manuscripts and texts documented by Spanish Dominican friar Juan de Cordova. de Cordova translated a codified logographic and pictographic writing system into Spanish and these documents survive. This pre-alphabet writing of symbols (that correspond to words) and drawings were meant to travel across language varieties.

Here are seven poems in Zapotec by Felipe Lopez.

Zapotec Activist Janet Chavez Santiago, who was instrumental in creating the Teotitlan del Valle Zapotec talking dictionary, discussed what it means to be a Zapotec from this famous rug weaving village. Her family operates Galeria Fe y Lola Rugs.

Handwoven indigo rug with greca design

Some years ago, Dr. Lillehaugen, faculty associates and students created the Zapotec talking dictionary to provide a teaching tool and learning foundation. What they have created are various dictionaries that represent the variety of tobal variations spoken in different parts of Oaxaca. Many of us who follow Zapotec language and culture known that villages in the Tlacolula Valley, for example, do not understand each other because of language variation.

Zapotec Activist Janet Chavez Santiago, who was instrumental in creating the Teotitlan del Valle Zapotec talking dictionary and has presented at international linguistics conferences, discussed what it means to be a Zapotec from this famous rug weaving village. She linked together how language, culture and weaving supports continuity.

She explains that weaving derives from ancestral knowledge. Creativity is express by incorporating the influences of the present. Yarn, she says, is a connection with the past. As she demonstrates the technique of pedal loom weaving on a video we watch, Janet says that her hands express Zapotec traditions and culture. The warp and weft weave a story of the ancients and bring them into our contemporary world. Symbols incorporated in the tapestries translate culture to others.

“We are a living culture, existing in the present and rooted in the past, a community supported by past and present. We do not speak of Zapotec people and language in the past tense,” she says.

Indigenous language is at risk. The Ticha Project is designed to protect, preserve and promote Zapotec. Many Oaxaca children do not learn Zapotec unless there is a village operated pre-school (like there is in Teotitlan del Valle). This is a language of the grandmothers. The project aims to give accessibility to native speakers, to expand access to those who want to learn, to instill cultural awareness and pride, and to use the Internet to connect Zapotec speakers in the Diaspora.

As I watched my friends and saw video of the land where I live, I was reminded about how much I miss being in Oaxaca and having this deep connection to people and place.

Plowing the milpas to plant corn, squash, beans

Juchitan, Oaxaca Endangered Language (Zapotec) and Poetry Project

This video is about helping to keep an ancient language — Zapotec — alive. This project is based in Juchitan, Oaxaca, in the Isthmus at the southernmost end of the state and is about preserving Isthmus-spoken Zapotec. It combines poetry, art, and film making. Thanks to reader Mary Ann Walsh for sending it our way! Zapotec has many different spoken variations or dialects. Villagers in the Oaxaca valley may not even completely understand each other because of linguistic differences. One thing is for certain, young people, as they migrate to cities for jobs or want to assume more “modern” ways, are giving up the language of their forebearers. Centro Cultural y Academico San Pablo in Oaxaca is also committed to language and culture preservation.

Liza Bakewell, MADRE: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun, Gets Oaxaca Welcome

http://wp.me/pRHvb-pB

My friend and Oaxaca colleague Shannon Sheppard writes about her experience reading the book, her impressions, and connecting Liza with both the local and ex-pat community in Oaxaca. I think you will find her comments entertaining and informative. Click on the link above to read

My mobile office is now two feet from Highland Lake in Bridgton, Maine. Thank goodness for 3G and my iPad. There is no Wi-Fi here nor is there a landline. It is definitely a retreat and I can bring the world in as I choose. Liza Bakewell is on a neighboring lake about an hour from here with her daughters. She and I plan a meet-up next week.

Last night, Stephen and I had dinner with Nancy Coleman and Dulcie Whitman at Vignola in Portland. Great restaurant with even better friends. Nancy attended the Women’s Creative Writing and Yoga Retreat last March. It inspired her to write and submit to national literary journals and she is getting great response! Dulcie just completed the MFA and is teaching. My hope is to connect them with Liza who is bring together Maine women writers.

What an extraordinary world we live in! Now, for the lake.

Book Review — Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun by Liza Bakewell

Liza Bakewell takes us where we may never have thought to go:  Down Mexico’s dusty back roads and cobblestone alleys, across neighborhood plazas lined with madre-derrogatory grafitti, through bustling markets, in a high speed car zig-zagging the wrong way down a one-way street, in provocative conversation with wise and deferential men, sequestered on the coast of Maine deep in contemplation, in lively debate with feminists, and befuddled and amused by encounters with people at all social and economic levels, including one’s own children.

Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun is not your everyday discussion about Mexico – her culture, history, politics, women’s issues (and men’s, too), language, social structure, and how a people come to define and understand self.  Yet it includes all of this!  Bakewell’s premise is that language informs culture and vice versa.   After reading this book, I understand and agree.  It opened my eyes.  Mexico is an idiomatic maze and “madre” plunges us into the cultural and linguistic depths, revealing the mysteries and idiosyncracies of this most beloved and maligned noun.  And, this most beloved and maligned country!

Madre the book

Some have described this book as a “memoir,” and in some limited respect that is true.  Yet it is much more than that because the academic discussion (Bakewell is a professor of linguistic anthropology at Brown University) about the etymology of “madre” prevails throughout.  But the book is flavored with slang, the vernacular, curse words, and romance.  It describes her personal and professional quest to understand this most complex of Spanish nouns.  It is human, engaging and real.

Most importantly, this book is entertaining, witty, clear and insightful.  It is a must-read for anyone who is thinking about visiting Mexico or who is living there.  Understanding the culture helps one enjoy the travel, and this will definitely bring you enjoyment before or during your stay.

Bakewell examines what the word “madre” conjures up in Mexican society, and how it defines manhood and womanhood.  She takes us on a journey to explore gender roles, relationships, customs, traditions, church doctrine, and stereotypes.  The perilous journey is a metaphor, I believe, for the evolution of the word — one small, simple word now infused with powerful emotion: manhood, womanhood, honor, obedience, pride, machismo, “fight to the death,” and identity, plus all that is disparaging, insulting and base.

I love Bakewell’s discussion about the dualities and conflicts of Mexican identity and womanhood as exemplified by “The Malinche” and her alter-ego counterpart, Dona Marina.  They are one and the same woman, the first “bad and forbidden” and the second “baptized, good and pure.”  I see this drama danced out every year in the Danza de la Pluma that reenacts the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs.  Through this description, we come to understand who is the whore and who is the virgin, the themes that recur in the recesses of the language and icons hanging from every rear view mirror.

Bakewell explores the mixed messages and signals, expected behaviors, and role definitions for women and what constitutes femininity.   She describes Malinche, the translator for Cortes, and how her name became synonymous with traitor and betrayal. An indigenous woman from the southern coast of Mexico enslaved since childhood, passed from one tribal group to another, she was given to Cortes by her captors.  She was multilingual because of her circumstances.  Yet, she was redefined during the 1857 revolution as the antithesis of the good Mexican woman.  Mexican feminists are branded as Malinchistas.

Madre is about paternal creation and the power of the church to define and control.  It explores the subtle meaning of Virgin and Eve, and what constitutes purity.  The dilemma of madre in Mexico, according to Bakewell, is that the church believes the bride, once married is Eve, not the Virgin, and vulnerable to all the transgressions put before her.  Like Eve, Malinche was the mother of the first mestizo (indigenous Indian and Spanish blend), child of Cortes.  While Eve listened to the snake, Malinche listened to Cortes, betraying her people.

I imagine Liza Bakewell asked me to review this book because of my association with Oaxaca and love for Mexico.  In 2009, she spent the year there on sabbatical as a single mom with her twin daughters finishing up the manuscript in preparation for publication.  She talks about it being a warm, welcoming, safe and nurturing place for herself and her young children where she could bring her madre journey to a close.

Here, while she wrote, she also discovered that the liberal revolutionaries of 1857 – Benito Juarez, Melchor Ocampo, and Justo Sierra — politically reinterpreted what it meant to be a woman in Mexico.  In their endeavor to liberate Mexico from the stranglehold of the Catholic church they replaced one set of padres for another.

Ocampo, in his “Epistle,” defined the virtues of woman to be “self-abnegation, beauty, compassion, shrewdness and tenderness, and must give and shall always give her husband obedience, affability, attention, comfort, advice and treat him with reverence due to the person who supports and defends us.”  Ocampo’s “Epistle” became required reading at state civil marriage ceremonies  until 2007, when Mexican feminists asked individual states to replace it.  Most have, but Oaxaca has not.  The Epistle outlines perfection and impossible expectations for women to achieve.

The quest for the meaning of “Madre” was not a straight path.  Just like the taxi driver zigzagging the wrong way down a one-way street, “Madre” the book takes one turn and then another, to describe how “madre” the word came to include derogatory meanings in the Mexican Spanish language.  It caused me to sit up and take notice about our own gender slurs and how we casually use them until they become embedded in the vernacular and we are no longer conscious of the meaning.

Just as you are beginning to think that you understand, Bakewell starts a discussion about the articles “el” and “la” and “los.”  Spanish is organized by the system of la and el,” she says.  If you are confused about which article to use, consider  el amor (love), el sexo (sex), el matrimonio (marriage), el prenado (pregnancy), el embarazo (pregnancy), el parto (childbirth) and el nacimiento (birth).  Why are these words “masculine?” she asks.    A friend of Bakewell’s who studied Indo-European languages, traces it to the concern about descent lines – the patrilineage.   Culture and language are powerful padres.

Finally, Bakewell asks us to consider the origins of madre and padre.  She delves into the sounds of mmmmmm and ppppppp.   MMMMMmadre.    PPPPPPPPpadre.  She takes us to the very essence of birth, identity, survival and continuity.  She describes the mmmm sound as internal, humming, soothing, nurturing and nourishing.  Pppppppppadre is the force of spitting out, putting one’s imprimatur in the world, the first attempt at aggressiveness for what we must do to make our way as human beings.  One is internal and the other external, almost synonymous with how our bodies and reproductive organs are purposed.   She describes how the sound origins across languages and cultures are consistent.  Fascinating. Try these sounds and you’ll see what I mean.

Anyone who travels to or lives in Mexico, studies Latin American culture, history, art, Spanish language, or anything related MUST read this book.  Furthermore, there are no madre insults in Italy and very few in Columbia, Chile and Argentina.

Madre IS made in Mexico.

And, if you want to know the expletives, you’ll have to read the book!  They are plentiful.

Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun, by Liza Bakewell, W.W. Norton & Company, 2011.  ISBN 978-0-393-07642-4.  You can order the book direct from Dr. Bakewell.