A GRADUAL DEATH FOR INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES IN MEXICO
“The desert speaks to me and I listen until I understand, and then I speak back until it understands.” The philosophy of the Mixteco people toward their heritage language is thick.
However, globalization has brought Mexico and its languages to a state where it appears to be significantly monotone. To increase this monotony, the sidelining and marginalization of the Mexican communities has become a significant issue.
Mexico has many languages, 68 in fact, and these languages, as well as its cultural communities, are now a target for such marginalization and destruction. To confirm this, petitions and notes from scholars and the general public have made their way to the Mexican government, to warn of the disintegration of these Mexican languages.
Other factors contributing to the damage are English imperialism, and the lack of provision of resources by the government and other able bodies.
Many children would be smacked or punished in school for speaking their indigenous languages, and were thus discriminated against. This action and discrimination were then transferred to the houshold, where parents at times had no option but to comply with the pressure from schools. One case even reported a school girl hung by her feet for speaking the Nahuati language. However, cases of abuse for speaking these indigenous languages are rampant, and prevail throughout parts of larger Mexico, which pervades the boundaries of schools.
Despite a popular resistance to language denigration, alarge subset of the general public does discriminate against the use of these indigenous languages in Mexico. “The indigenous frequently conceal their languages, an dthe use of these languages, as they risk becoming subject to a discrimination,“ informs one speaker of a Nahuati language, who is multilingual. “The pressure from thegeneral public and from society to conform changes the mindset of the person, and we lose our interest in retaining our traditional.”
There are many factors that increase this stereotyping, including the bias away from these indigenous groups, where, for example, media is not postcolonial, it is colonial: the stories are created by others, and not by the communities themselves. This media positions these communities in denigrative and subjugative ways, such as that, while they are discriminated against, and that they have long engaged in a struggle, at times, this denigration is natural or inevtiable, and also spiritual. Furthermore, the heritage of these indigenous groups is at times framed as mythical and not philosophical, and thus, narratives ignore the complexity of the heritage narratives that blend the spiritual and the philosophical.