Transcript

[00:00] [All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]

Emiliana Cruz (EC) [00:10]: I think that what I’m going to do is, it’s like, those stories, I’m going to take them and I am going to find all the place names and I’m going to go into those places. I’m going to see them and I’m going to make a map of the stories because I’m just transcribing and just putting a known thing in the text.

[00:30] [All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]

Yichi Zhang (YZ) [00:35] Hello, and welcome back to AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

My name is Yichi, and this is the second episode of our miniseries on Indigenous anthropology and anthropologists in Mexico. In this episode, I'm joined by Emiliana Cruz, a native Indigenous language speaker and a scholar who you have just heard from. She reflects on her research, her career, and the state of Indigenous education in contemporary Mexico.

EC [01:09]: My name is Emiliana Cruz, and I am a native speaker of Chatino language. And Chatino language is spoken in [the] southern part of the state of Oaxaca. So my research, I do many things, but particularly I focus on the linguistic rights for Indigenous people. And I particularly work with Chatinos.

And to understand the context of the Chatino, we have three Chatino languages. A lot of the times, like people say, like, oh, well, it’s kind of like one language and then you just work with that. And that’s not the case.

First, like, I want to explain to you how it’s linguistically organized. So we have three Chatino languages. It’s kind of like the difference between Spanish, French, Portuguese. They sound similar, but they’re not the same languages, right? And it’s the same thing for the Chatino languages. We have Chatino Zenzontepec, Chatino Tataltepec, and then we have the Eastern Chatino.

And at the Eastern Chatino, we have fifteen varieties, so sometimes the distances can be like super short. Like five kilometers, and there will be a different variety of Chatino.

[02:30] So for my research, I started working with a Chatino language documentation project when I did my PhD at UT Austin. I mean, at the University of Texas, at UT Austin. And there, I met a professor, Tony Woodbury. Him and I, we started this project and all the graduate students joined the project. And for last year, it was our twentieth anniversary. We were really happy to accomplish a lot of research in the Chatino region.

Before we did this, the only people that did some linguistic analysis of these languages were the missionaries. There was also a linguist that was, like, a more recent in 2002, Jeff Rasch, and he studied one of the Eastern Chatino varieties. After that, we came to work and all, to look at all the three languages and also to look into the Eastern Chatino. and I speak the variety of San Juan Quiahije Chatino. 

And that was really nice because we started with that. And based on that, with that variety, we were able to kind of go and study the rest of the other varieties, the fifteen that exist in that region. And before, no one really had done any work on the tones. And these languages are tonal languages. And we have, know more about like Chinese or Vietnamese, but we didn’t really know much about Indigenous languages and their tonal system. So that’s what we did. So that in a sense, we started to look into that.

And I believe that we started doing something that was not only important for the Chatino languages, but also for other Indigenous languages that are tonal.

[04:27] And in Mexico, we have the Otomanguean languages, which I’m assuming that Mario already talked to you about this. So we contributed to some of the larger research that was happening in Mexico in regards to tonal languages.

But as a native speaker of one of the varieties, to me, this is one thing is, like, to do the research and to discover or, like, to analyze all these amazing things that the languages do and that the features, the linguistic features that people are really interested in, what linguists like, right?

But then the reason that I started doing linguistics was because I wanted to create materials for the language. Pedagogical materials.

I decided that once I knew how the three languages worked, then I understood how the other varieties of Chatinos, of the Eastern Chatinos worked. And then we went to a different phase—then we needed to bring back that knowledge to the community.

So I started in 2012 in Oaxaca City. I invited tonologists from different universities, including the U.S. and Mexico. We had workshops for native speakers of tonal languages. We did that for about six years. And that was really important because then we had to give the tools to people to be able to analyze their own tones, and then see the possibility of including the tone representation in the writing system.

[06:17] So what we will do is that we will have like a ten-day workshop and we will have, like, different topics in the workshop. For the Chatinos that came to the workshops, we will go back to our communities and we will travel to different communities. So then these people, they want to learn how similar or different they were, their Chatinos compared to these other communities. And that was a way for us to also train people how to study the tones of other communities.

And so then we included workshop in the community. We offer classes to children or whoever wanted to come. And so we did that for six years. So then we trained linguists to work in their own languages in different parts of the Chatino region.

And so for the last, since 2017, when I moved back to Mexico, because I was living in the US, when I came back, I started a project with a group of young people that also were going back to the community. In Indigenous communities, it’s really difficult to find a university or, like, you will have high school, but you wouldn’t have a university level.

So those people, there are about six of them, they left the community to go to school and earn their bachelor’s degree. And they were like, well, one of the issues that we all saw and an issue that it was a problem for people in the community was education.

Because what happens is that the teachers, we have what is called Indigenous education, but all the teachers, they don’t use Chatino language as language to teach in the classroom.

So they only use Spanish. We saw that also not just the word used in Spanish, but the level of education that what they get once like they’re out of high school, you cannot compete with the national system in Mexico, especially with the urban areas, because it’s just, it’s very different. It has a lot of limitations.

[08:33] So we’re interested in also looking at having an education that is for the community, because what happens with education is that they create a program for everyone, but they don’t include the knowledge of the local people.

And in Indigenous communities, you have people who know about medicinal plants, they know how to grow corn, they know how to work the land, they know about the environment, they know a lot of things, right?

And also like the organization that people have, their political organization. For example, in my community, the assembly, the whole community decides what would happen in the community, for example, if you want to open a high school or something.

So the whole community will discuss about that and then they’ll vote for it if they want it or not. And so it’s a very democratic system.

But to see that a community can, you know, how it functions, that’s a lot of knowledge that we don’t know how it’s organized, like, how people decide what they’re going to do for the summertime. They will go and they have, like, a ritual that they go pray, you know, to have rain for their harvest. There are a lot of things there that is not being put into the education system.

And so with this group of people that were back, we decided that we wanted to create our own education system, something that these students will come and they will learn about the community, how the community is working, how the community is being organized, and the knowledge that people have. And that includes the language.

[10:18] So we created this school. So I work with these young people to start a project. So then also I trained people how to teach the language. And so then I started working in a elementary school where we have two teachers going to teach Chatino into the classrooms, something that before didn’t happen because we only had Spanish in the classrooms.

But this is run by the community. This is not run by the state, because the state, what it does is that they will give you the teachers with the Spanish program, and then the language part is very minimal if they do it, but a lot of the times they are not interested in language preservation, but the community is.

And so we started working with the local government, we started working with the parents. And also, I think it will have to take all of the entire community to make something like this happen, because without the support of the parents, we wouldn’t be able to do what we're doing.

So we did a survey to evaluate the program. This is the second year that we’re doing this. And we were really happy because the parents, they say, well, we want our children to continue having their Chatino classes.

We want, instead of being one hour a day, we want this to be more time. Ideally, you will have a real bilingual education where you will use Chatino in Spanish, but that doesn’t, it’s not something that we can do with the teachers.

But then with the teachers that we have, they’re from the community and they also are parents, and they have their kids in school as well. And this project is really successful.

[12:05] I’m super happy to see how children are advancing with this, how they even, like, it is not just a benefit of sort of making this their identity as Indigenous children, like, or Chatino people, to be stronger, but also it’s really helping them to feel really proud of who they are.

And the classes that are taken also, it helps them in the other classes as well because the example that I give always to the teachers is like, I say, if I came and taught you math in, let’s say, in Russia, you will probably try to figure out how to understand my Russian and you will probably try to figure out how to understand math.

But what if I come and I teach you math in the language that you speak? It will be very different. You will be able to advance faster than instead of just trying to navigate this, you know, system that is just really boring for the children when they get into school.

But what is interesting is that Spanish is everywhere. It’s on TV, it’s on the radio, it’s everywhere. So children learn really fast Spanish. And as they advance with the Spanish, they ended up feeling like, okay, maybe Spanish is better. Maybe I don’t need Chatino because if I go to the U.S., if I go to the city, I don’t need Chatino.

Everyone speaks Spanish, right? So to be able to sort of reverse a little bit some of that and to set, like, and to look at the value that these languages have, I think that’s something that we’re working with this.

And so that’s a project that I’m working on.

[13:47] But also for research, what I do is that I work on emotions. I’m really interested in landscape and geography, and not in the sort of traditional way, but this is something that to me, the narratives of places and how the emotions and a smell or a color or a vision, what it can give to a person, for example, the technique that I use is that I walk with someone who will take me to the farmland.

The landscape is changing a lot in where I come from because now they’re building roads and a lot of the trails, the traditional trails are disappearing. But I try to go with the traditional trails as we go with the person, I just let the person sort of talk if they want to or tell me something.

But I just want to see what emotions will pop up once we’re passing through some of these areas that are familiar to the person. And sometimes it’s the smell, sometimes it’s the time of the day, sometimes it can be different things.

So we hike and we document as we’re hiking place names, we’re doing toponyms, and we’re doing as well, like, this sort of looking into where and what part of this, because I have a microphone and I’m recording everything. And so I can see when they’re breathing fast, when they’re breathing slow, when they’re young, when they… whatever expression they have, right, with their bodies and not necessarily just looking into the words.

So we hike, we do these trails. Once, like, I’m done with the hike, I draw a map of the area and I locate the stories that are told on the map. And also I get the lexicon that is specific, that is not, like, this is sometimes, like, I find lexicon that are really archaic and sometimes that it’s not something that you will find in a daily routine conversation.

[16:04] That is something that I’ve been doing for a while. I find it really interesting to, like, the things I have found, like I found that before people didn’t use their last names that the government will give of them, but they will use place names.

And so depending on like the family, but where you come from, they will say, oh, so who’s your family? As you’ll be like, oh, above the river, something, the name of the river. So that’s the family, right? So you will use toponyms to say who you are and to talk about your family.

And then I find also that people are really interested in talking about emotions. Once we are outside of the house, like, when you’re sitting down, someone can tell you, oh, I had a great day yesterday, and, but if you take the person to that area where the person was having a great day... So then it’s really interesting what happens with the emotions of that person, like being at the physical place.

So I started this project a while ago because I left the community when I was really young. So I didn’t live from a community. I left there when I was probably about seven years old and my family moved to the city.

And so I used to go home during, like, my breaks or sometimes in some holidays. But it’s not the same thing, like, to live in a community and the things that you learn when you are in the community, when you are, like, in daily, sort of engaging with things that are happening at there, from rituals, from parties, from, like, meetings, from just our working, right? For me, it was just more like when I went home. I’ll be a few days or something or a week.

And when I was transcribing different stories that people told me in different interviews, I always found that people mentioned places, locations that I had no idea where those places were.

[18:08] And then one time I thought, this is, I’m transcribing something that is incomplete. And then I thought, I think what I’m going to do is, it’s like, those stories, I’m going to take them and I am going to find all the place names and I’m going to go into those places and I’m going to see them and I’m going to make a map of the stories because I’m just transcribing and just putting a known thing in the text.

That’s how I kind of started this project and I realized that a lot of the memory of me walking in those places came back. And there were a lot of those places that I knew right now. I was like, oh, yeah, I was like, I was here when I was a kid. And so it was really interesting what happened, even for me. That is a project that I, you know, I just keep doing it. And when I go back in the summers, I’m really interested to see now how children are acquiring this type of knowledge.

Medicinal plants, like right now, I’m really interested to see with mushrooms, because there are a lot of mushrooms that are, like, about twenty type of mushrooms. During the summertime, children and parents, like, families, they go mushroom picking.

And so now I’m interested to see what is the age when children, they start to identify what is an edible mushroom and what is not, and how do they do it. And also how parents teach children how to identify them. And so I kind of, I want to work with children and sort of make a comparison. And so then get to all the way to twelve years and see how that progresses.

It also has to do with, some children learn faster plants because maybe in their families they practice, like, they use a lot of plants or they go out a lot, in some less, but in so that some of the factors are why some of these kids will like learn more plant names. Yeah, so that’s sort of what I do.

And my training is linguistic anthropologist, so I, I do social anthropology. I’m in the social anthropology department and also in the linguistics department. So I’m sort of like, I go both sides.

YZ [20:20]: That’s a fascinating career. So you mentioned this a little bit, does it feel like while you're doing these projects and working with people of your community, next to your community, does it feel like reconnecting and rediscover your own community and cultures and memories?

EC [20:37]: I think I felt more distant with the community when I was living in the U.S., because I would take a longer time to come. Like now I’m here, like sometimes I go like every month to the community. But it’s not the same when you go and do research than when you go to your village.

So I think for foreigners, right, I will say like, okay, I’m going to go do field work. And you have very specific things that you're going to go look for and the topic you want to study. And for me, I am with a research mind, but also I am with the other side that I’m going to go see my grandpa. I’m going to go see my aunts, my family. I’m going to work with young people. I’m going to offer workshops.

So then, it’s sort of having this double identity. And on one hand, I’m a researcher and the other hand, I’m part of the community. And so I have to navigate with both. And I have to see, at points, I have to stop being a researcher. I wouldn’t be able to stop being from there because those are [where] my family is and I am that, right, so, but sometimes I, for example, I’m not always, like, with video recorder, or I’m, like, when I do research I have to do it just like the way we’re trying to do it.

I’m not just taking a camera everywhere and put a microphone in some people’s mouth and I don’t do any of that when I, I have to do research, then I go and ask permission and I explain to them what the research is about and why I’m doing it. Also to put the credit part. I do all the procedures that needs to be done.

[22:27] But sometimes I am in a situation. Let’s say that I go to visit someone and I remember I had this situation. I went to visit a woman at the other side of town.

And when I got there, they were building a home or something like that, but somehow they were having a feast, they were having food. But then I got into the kitchen and where all the women were working. They were having so much fun. They were laughing.

I’m really interested in the humor, because when we talk about Indigenous languages, we’re always thinking about these like serious things. And I’m, like, really interested in how people laugh, right? So then I had never seen a place where so many women were having so much fun and they were just telling jokes at each other and it was laughing for two hours.

And that’s just something. I was like, I wish I had my camera. I wish I had my recorder, but I was like, no, Emiliana. Just enjoy, you know, that, right? Sometimes you don’t have to record it. Sometimes when you record people, maybe you will change that dynamic that they’re having, but it’s their dynamic, right?

So I wouldn’t, like, secretly record or anything. So I will have to tell them I’m going to record, and you have to know that. So I would need to have a lot of permission.

So then it’s just like, well, why would I ruin this fun time? Because I want to get some data. And so then when I have those moments, I just, I feel like I’m so lucky to be able to speak the language, to be able to enjoy that joy that they’re having, that the happiness that they’re having.

[24:13] My grandpa is about ninety-four, and in the evenings, he likes to sit and drink mezcal and talk. And that, to me, I really appreciate the fact that only someone who can hear my grandpa, talk to my grandpa. And that’s, yeah, that’s a gift that I, it’s thanks to my mom, because when we were in the city, my mom didn’t speak Spanish to us.

So we went to school and it was all in Spanish or our friends, they only spoke in Spanish, but our home, only Chatino. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I continue speaking Chatino.

And when I went back to the village, sometimes when young people are not strong with their identity, sometimes they feel ashamed or being Indigenous or speaking an Indigenous language.

In my home, that was something that it was a thing to celebrate. It was a thing that you should be really proud, feel good that you are that. And my father always told us that, oh, you’re so smart.

You speak Chatino, you speak Spanish, and you’re smarter to those people, and you should continue, you know, doing this. So not everyone has that opportunity, right, where they will tell you how important it was to be able to speak the language.

But the one person who taught me the language was my mom. I feel that if I didn’t have that, probably the situation would be really different. Probably I will feel maybe more isolated. Maybe if I did what I’m doing now without speaking the language, well, I’ll probably miss a lot of things. I’ll miss out a lot of, like, the jokes, right? Like these women were doing.

[26:12] And that I think it’s, that’s what I do. But also I’m really practical. And sometimes what we do as researchers sometimes is, we need to stop it. And sometimes people, like, have different needs. Like for example, I had to learn a lot about other stuff to be able to be useful as well.

For example, I do interpretation. I do… one time a woman from my village died at the border while she was crossing the border because she was hit by a car. So we had to like be communicating with the people in the U.S. and the people in the village.

And so then this is, like, your whole summer that you plan to have a summer for research, that’s gone because you have to do something that is practical and people have this situation and that’s more important than the research that you were planning on doing.

So I have a lot of that. I have a lot of, people have, like, sometimes, like, questions about health. So I’ve learned a lot about some of these issues that people are having, diabetes, how does it work? And all of that stuff, like liver.

So I have to learn it because I think, if you have a PhD and you don’t know how that works, then how useful can you be for the community, right? So I always find myself to be learning because we have needs. And sometimes the only thing that we know how to do as researchers is just be researchers.

And so when you are Indigenous and you’re a researcher, then you have those battles that you have to negotiate with them. And I think it is sometimes in academia, academia is very, it’s oriented where people are only publishing, people are doing this amazing research, and we’re very egocentric people.

[28:05] And so we just want to be famous and we want to do these things. So for us, I have talked to a lot of people that have gone to school and they have their PhDs. And I said, you have those tools, then now those tools, you need to apply them for things that are important.

And sometimes, like, if you find yourself doing more, offering the service because you have access to information, you find yourself doing more on that than sometimes writing an article.

I remember when I lived in the U.S., I would be like, okay, I want to write an article about landscape hiking or something. And it just like, it might be so important, but like, for example, the court needed an interpreter because, I don't know, someone is in jail.

And so then I find myself at times, like, thinking, I think it’s important to do research. It’s important to write. I think it’s important to, when I think about this is that research is for the new generations and what I do is just this tiny, tiny part to be able to offer that to the next generations.

But I think we’re sort of doing research and this other stuff that, because we’re part of these communities and we feel that we’re the ones who had access to education. So not many people have access to education. In my community, we were counting one day, like how many of them, they went to their undergrad, graduate degree in. We counted like twelve at the time. That time, a very small number.

We started to see a little bit more, more Indigenous people are getting into graduate programs, but it will be good if we even have more than that, right? But it’s difficult because of the disadvantages that comes with being Indigenous. And speaking a native language and to be able to have access to universities.

[30:07] But I think it’s important to be able to, you know, to have more young people being interested in how we do graduate programs, study their languages or, you know, their cultures, right?

I think anthropology is a beautiful degree. I think it’s, sometimes, people don’t really value anthropology and when I did my undergrad in anthropology, I was like, okay, now what can I do with this?

And I’m sure I can do many things, but I was like, no, better go to graduate school. But yeah, so that’s pretty much what I have.

YZ [30:43]: Are you trying also to kind of merge the Indigenous ways of knowing and feeling into, I guess, established disciplines?

EC [31:25]: I’m not the one who is teaching in the elementary schools. Those are two teachers, Maria Cortez and Jose Canseco. Those are the two teachers. And what I do is that I guide or I support them with training for them to do their work.

And I’m not a teacher. I would not know how to. I do a lot of workshops and I work with children, but after like three hours, I’m like, okay, I’m done. That’s not my thing.

But they’re very cute, but they have a lot of energy. But what I do is I provide the tools for them to have their programs for teaching.

Also, what we include in the program in school is that they learn about plants. They go out and they collect plants, they draw the plants, they write the name of the plants and the use of the plant.

What we’re doing is to introduce the knowledge that is already in their homes. Like, sometimes the grandma makes pottery, or the father farms, and look at the cycle of, you know, like, the weather and that. So we put that as part of the program, to ask the parents to take them to the field or make a pot with the grandmother. So the families already do a lot of these things. And some of them, like, they like to embroider, so they also are including embroidering in the program.

But for me, because I teach in CIESAS, so I think that the part of how do we teach and or how we’re taught to teach in the Western societies that, you sit and you do your performance and that.

But with the classes in CIESAS, you have to provide the tools for the students, but also it’s a lot of dialogue. It’s a lot of discussion.

It’s about knowing, what are some of the approaches that people have for learning, because I think we just sit in a classroom and or the teacher is just, like, supposed to give you all the answers.

But then I think one of the things that I have liked doing with the students is that negotiation is set in to have them say, right, or to feel free to say, how do they connect with readings in part of what they do, right?

[33:22] So not to be completely disconnected. How does this article actually apply? Or like, even if you were to think about your own research, like how does that, or how does it work on that?

And I think what we find is that the academics were really into reading all these famous people, right? And sometimes it is an important ground to have. It is important to have the theory so they will be able to do their own thing.

But in anthropology, because I teach in both departments, in anthropology, more and more, we’re really interested in writing from women and women of color, and especially Afro-descended women, Indigenous women, and it’s so different and interesting because we’re not now just talking about the writing of those white males that we’ve been reading forever, right? Then we kind of change that.

I feel that we need to stop reproducing the same anthropologists. It seems that we’re a discipline that continues sometimes to just to think that we’re going to go study and the unknown, right? And it’s just like, well, I think that there is, especially in writing, I find, like, sometimes academic writing is so boring. And it’s just for whoever the people who is going to review the article. And I think if you make it to be these super famous, like, one, then maybe more people will read it, but it’s really limited, right?

Who can read us?

[34:55] And because of the way we write, I feel that I’m very interested in, like, it kind of includes the part of, about me, where do I stand? How do I stand in this? And to have that to be open as part of the writing process.

So I’m really interested in a narrative and I’m more interested to read something that is research, that it can be academic, rigorous academic paper, that is not written in this very traditional way of writing.

There is this writer in Mexico, Cristina Rivera. And I thought when I read her book, and I’m like, wow. She writes about different topics and she doesn’t write about one topic. How there’s some writers that you read for one book and then if you read the other one, it’s almost like, okay, you read the first one and then the rest are similar, right? I’m not going to mention names.

But with her work, Cristina Rivera, I feel like each book is completely different. This is like, different place, different people, different, completely not reconnected, right? I really like that as an approach for writing and academic work.

But I think if we continue doing thesis in a very traditional way, but I feel that writing can be really strict. If you’re trying to just write as an anthropologists and follow the same sort of structure, I just think you can, writing process can be painful, right?

Instead of actually having this opportunity to open up that. And I think the writing can be more enjoyable than the way we do it. I think that part is what I include into my classes, that I include this more, give yourself a chance to say what you want to say, because there are a lot of things that we want to say, but sometimes we think that, oh, well, that is not an academic thing, right?

So I find that more useful because then I think at the writing part, it can be less of that kind of narrow plate of doing research because you kind of open your mind to think about in the bigger perspective and to be able to put yourself in the writing, be able to talk to yourself on the writing. So I like that.

[37:12] I think that the anthropology discipline continues being a little bit traditional in the writing, in linguistics as well. Linguistics is really interesting. It can be super interesting because you can write about... they do more examples of the language and less of the description like anthropologists. Anthropologists, we do different things.

So I do both. So I kind of go back and forth, but I’m really interested in, like, emotions in writing. And I think a lot of us that we do anthropology, we find topics, all the topics that we choose sometimes are topics that are, they’re emotionally not easy topics.

That experience in fieldwork and you maybe you found something that you had, like sort of an idea that maybe something like this is the reality, but then that you come to the reality, the reality is more complicated.

So I think it, to not be able to write from your heart about that reality, it can be difficult emotionally for someone who does your work. But yeah, so that’s it.

YZ [38:18]: All right, final question. since we talk about your research on emotions and feelings, what would be the general feelings for you in doing all these projects and research?

EC [38:19]: Well let’s see… it’s interesting because I always wanted to do anthropology, like, since, I don’t know, like, since I was a kid. I always liked plants... if I would redo this, I think I would do the same thing. I really like what I do. And how does it feel? Well when I was growing up—there is a lot of racism in Mexico, towards Afro-descendants or some Indigenous people, towards poor people.

But being raised in a society that is really violent towards Indigenous people and growing up in a home that, the value that the language had or who were as people was something that, it was really valued, that it was important, that it was something that we were people, that we’re part of this place, right?

We have our own history. But then I think that no matter what, right, we’re not alone because the violence that our ancestors had to go through as well is something that continues.

I think that there is a lot of depression in Indigenous communities. And when I think about depression, when I think about some of the issues that Indigenous people, like, find themselves in, well, if you don’t even have the basic needs, like you don’t have access to medicine, your education is not, like, your language is not even being valued in education, you sort of, basically, it's just that.

And then the stories that you’re being told, like, I remember my mother, when we were kids, she would tell us about her mother. And then she will also tell us about the mother’s mother.

So when I think about, like, the narratives that go in our families and you think that it’s horrible, right? And my grandma died from miscarriage, something that, she should not die like that. So you see people that their babies were also, couldn’t have access to medicine.

[40:32] So when we think about the amount of pain that we have in those stories, even way back, and so we have our own story in our present time that is, you live in, you’re experiencing this violence in your own, sort of, your daily life. When someone will say, okay, if you don’t have money, you cannot have that.

If you can’t have your education in your language, because it’s not important in your language, that is the sort of daily thing that people live in, that is the reality. So when I think about why is it that I do what I do, it’s just because I think it is important for new generations to see that they can, that their language is important, that their lives matter, that they should have access to medicine in their own language, that they should have an interpreter if they need to go to the doctor.

They should be able to have access legal, right, in their languages. So for me, for being a linguist and anthropologist, I’m not someone who like, in the village, I’m not an engineer, but I’m like, okay, I designed the house or I’m going to tell you now how to do this road. Physically, you can’t see it, right?

Like, so my contribution to this thing is not something that will be like, oh, I mean, Emiliana is a great architect.

[41:57] But what I do is that I insist that what who we are as people, what we have is very important in that. It’s not that Spanish is a bad language. Languages, all languages, are beautiful.

But because of the racism in Indigenous people, the position of the language or what people have to go through is because they are Indigenous people. That’s why they go through what they have to go through.

So to me, I can be an example of the possibilities that young women can do. I had access to education, but not because I was wealthy or because I had everything.

I had to work. I worked through entire education. And they can do that, right? They can value who they are.

Because once you figure that out, who you are, where you stand, and know that you have rights like anybody else, and then there’s so many possibilities.

I find when I go to my village, like I talk to people and I’m like, wow, only if this person had access to education, that person, like, it’s just that I’m amazed with the level of knowledge, how intelligent these people are. And it’s just that, right?

So I was talking to this one guy and he says to me, oh, you’re so smart. You have a PhD. You speak English, you speak Chatino, you speak Spanish. Me, I only speak Chatino. I barely, I can communicate with the government people when I’m, he was talking about when he was an official.

And I said, okay. I said, that’s a good thing to ask me because this is what I know. Or, this is what I think.

[43:54] There are two types of schools. One school is the school of life, the school of, you know, school that you went to. And then there is another school, like the one that I went to, that I learned how to read and I know how to write papers and that. I said, but this is one thing.

I said, let’s say it, like, one day I lost my job. And then I need to work. Do you think I will survive in the village?

I said, not a single day. I don’t know how to farm. I have no idea when I can plant corn. I have no idea what I need to do, like how to prepare the soil to do this. And I say, another thing. I say, I only know a name of one bird in Chatino. I say, how many do you know?

There’s many, many, many. I said, you know plants, you know trees. I don’t. I said, but I went to school and I have a diploma and apparently I have a PhD and I have no knowledge.

But the one that you have, I’m, like, not even near the knowledge that you have. But in this society that where we value more diplomas, then, and apparently what I have is that I’m smarter than you are. I said, but to be honest, I don’t feel that I was smarter than you because I have a diploma, right?

Although, I said, I have more possibilities, but the knowledge that you have should be recognized. Those are values that like so, many of us, especially people who live in the urban areas, we have no idea about those things.

[45:40] Like, I don’t know place names. I don’t know when it’s going to rain. They tell me, well, it’s not going to rain. Like, you see the rain coming over there? It rains when it comes in that side. So those things are like, I just think that it’s cloudy day and it looks like it’s going to rain, and that’s my idea that it’s going to rain. But they’re like, no, it’s not going to rain there. But that knowledge, I don’t have that, right?

My feeling is that not only education can just be a book education, right? I think it’s important to use those tools of education to be able to provide whatever you can for young people, especially young people, because I think those are the ones that needed the most, especially now that in Mexico, we’re living in times that are not safe, at times, for young women.

These examples, we need more women going to school because they will see that they can do it, too. And to me, when I see young women doing amazing stuff and I’m like, yeah, we’re capable of that and much, much more. So I’m really happy to be able to teach people how to write a language. Some of them, they want to write a love letter.

This is great. Some people want to study the language. Some people, they just want to be able to write. And some people like are not that fluent in the language. So then I provide some ideas of how they can study the language. And so I think the language is a big component to their culture.

[47:10] And we in Mexico, in the world, like, Indigenous languages are dying. So communities, these languages are still really vibrant. They’re still, like, spoken by everyone. And, but, we don’t know if that will continue, right?

We don’t know. So I think if we’re trying to do whatever we can for this not to happen, because I think this is something that is important because language is not just a language.

I mean, we know that, we’re academics. But for Indigenous people, it’s just like, it’s science. It’s our history. It’s not just this way of communicating.

It has a lot in it. And so I think, like I was saying today, right, we have a way to explain about how to grow food, how to heal, how you feel, and all of that is science, right?

And so I feel that my contribution to this is precisely, like, to say, yeah, this is a language that works like this. I get so happy when I’m teaching a grammatical system to young people and they suddenly, they realize that, and I use all the languages to compare and I say, oh, Spanish works like this and our language works like this.

Sometimes, like, the plural, we have one mark for animate and then for inanimate, meaning that for living things and for not living things, and they just, they go crazy. So I mean, yeah, it’s so, when you make people excited about those things, when they discover the language, they’re like, wow, that’s amazing.

So we spend a lot of time, sometimes hours, studying our language and just, we’re happy doing it. That, to me, to make these young people excited about this, it makes me really happy.

YZ [49:02]: Thank you. Thank you so much.

[49:03] [All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]

YZ [49:04]: To me, this conversation has been both very informative and deeply moving. The ongoing efforts of anthropologists, activists, Indigenous community members fighting for educational rights and reforms deserve our attention and support.

I want to thank again and deeply all the colleagues I met in Mexico for your help and generosity. I give special thanks to my reviewers and our sound engineer for their thoughtful comments and assistance throughout the post-production process.

I also want to thank our fellow podcasters and friends for their continuous interest and support.

To learn more about the communities, people, stories, and ideas shared in this series, please visit our website at culturalanth.org. That’s C-U-L-A-N-T-H.org.

My name is Yichi, and thank you for joining us today for this episode of AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. We look forward to connecting with you again soon.

[50:18] [All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]