Mexican Language Research Articles

Exploration of the USA Culture by Mexican Language Students through Reading Chicano Literature

Language students are expected to be conscious of the fact that the target language is an expression of the culture of those societies where it is used in everyday communication. Using literary texts is an important means of fostering and developing the learners’ intercultural awareness. Chicano literature (written by those authors of Mexican origin who permanently live in the USA) can be of special help in this process. Chicano writers’ experiences in their daily encounters with the North American culture can make it easier for language learners in Mexico to explore and understand this foreign culture, and to overcome their own prejudices and stereotypes towards it. Thus, a study was conducted among Mexican university language students to examine the possibility of increasing the learners’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC) through reading literary texts. The survey participants responded to a questionnaire related to the concept of culture and their knowledge of the target culture. They also read and discussed a short story written by a Chicano writer paying special attention to different cultural topics covered in them. On the whole, the study has shown that the learners’ sociocultural characteristics and experiences have an enormous impact on their perceptions of the North American culture. The results can help to optimize the process of choosing and elaborating didactic materials in English as well as class planning and methodology that would develop the learners’ intercultural competence.

The Promise of Spanish Publishing in Mexico and the United States

The publishing industry in Mexico is a distinctive environment due to several elements: the role of the State government as the main publisher or buyer of books, the historic and central role of the Spanish publishing industry in the direction and influence of Mexican market through their affiliate companies, and the influence of the US book market concerning influences and trends. In a country of 120 million people, where the book reading rate is very low, as is the number of bookstores, I explore the changes that are taking place right now in the context of the crisis in the Spanish book market and why I see a promising future for the general interest publishing market in the Spanish language in Mexico and the US.

Abuelita Epistemologies: Counteracting Subtractive Schools in American Education

This autoethnographic inquiry examines the intersection of elder epistemology and subtractive education, exploring how one abuelita countered her granddaughter’s divestment of Mexican-ness. I demonstrate how the grandmother used abuelita epistemologies to navigate this tension and resist the assimilative pressures felt by her granddaughter from school by consistently modeling, at home, a love for Mexican language and culture. I argue that grandmothers play a vital role in rooting young people to their linguistic and cultural assets, a sacred function that many Mexican elders have preserved and brought forward from the precontact era in the Americas to the contemporary era.

Language revitalisation from the ground up: promoting Yucatec Maya on Facebook

This paper looks at current grassroots efforts to revitalise Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of Mexico, in social media and more specifically on Facebook. In contrast to the limitations of institutional language promotion, the inclusion of Maya on Facebook shows the possibilities that social networks offer not only for actual use of minoritised languages but also for advocacy and activism, particularly among indigenous youth. The concept of heteroglossia is also introduced to explain the plurilingual practices of youngsters in Yucatán based on their increasingly complex linguistic repertoire. The main argument is that grassroots initiatives of language revitalisation that focus on local contexts, horizontal linguistic practices, and speakers as final agents are particularly significant in a country with deeply entrenched vertical and often tokenistic policies aimed at the promotion of indigenous languages and cultures.

English Language Teachers’ Professional Development and Identities

This article analyzes the professional development of two English language teachers in a Mexican language center. In particular, it explores the interplay between professional development, identity and agency, and the part played by English language teaching certificates in all of these. Drawing on a case study methodology, which included the use of a series of three interviews and other qualitative data collection methods, the article demonstrates the intimate and intricate connection between teachers’ identities and their professional development. Education implications for policy makers and practitioners are discussed.

LA RETÓRICA DE LOS ANTIGUOS MEXICANOS COMO INSTRUMENTO PARA SU CONVERSIÓN AL CRISTIANISMO

Esta investigación se centra en la Historia Universal de las cosas de Nueva España en su versión más completa y definitiva, el Códice Florentino de 1577. Creemos que Sahagún planeó un vocabulario trilingüe (con base en el diccionario latino-español de Nebrija como hiciera su cofrade Alonso de Molina) y continuó, en medio de su proyecto evangelizador, con la idea (que no concretó) de hacer un diccionario enciclopédico al estilo de Ambrosio Calepino. Finalmente culminó la estructuración de su conocida Historia como un tratado literario que proponía la “clasicalización” de la lengua mexicana y la recopilación de sus formas poéticas y retóricas, con el fin de tener un texto base desde el cual extraer no sólo los vocablos sino el imaginario de estos pueblos antes de la conquista.

Multilingual policies put into practice: co-participative educational workshops in Mexico

In a national context where the language rights of indigenous people have been recognized constitutionally since 2003, we deal with the following questions: How can bilingual education programmes in Mexico be clearly defined and applied? And what exactly are the final objectives of a bilingual education programme? We shall address the issue of the potential forms and contents of bilingual education from the standpoint of our experience working with schoolteachers, in co-participative educational workshops in two multilingual areas in Central and South-Eastern Mexico, from 2009 to 2012. Indeed, the multidimensional use of native languages and knowledge through workshops held in a number of Mexican languages, in which the participants produce texts and drawings in their own languages, directly raises pedagogical issues on language planning in the classroom. The dominant model for bilingual and intercultural education (BIE) in Mexico today corresponds to that of incorporation through subtractive bilingualism: teaching in the native language, switching then to Spanish in order to teach the official pedagogical contents, and in detriment of language and culture specificities. Our work suggests that BIE could represent a constructive, empowering alternative adaptable to local community contexts.

Deconstructing switch-reference

This paper develops a new view on switch-reference, a phenomenon commonly taken to involve a morphological marker on a verb indicating whether the subject of this verb is coreferent with or disjoint from the subject of another verb. I propose a new structural source of switch-reference marking, which centers around coordination at different heights of the clausal structure, coupled with distinct morphological realizations of the syntactic coordination head. Conjunction of two VPs has two independent consequences: First, only a single external argument is projected; second, the coordinator head is realized by some marker A (the ‘same subject’ marker). Conjunction of two vPs, by contrast, leads to projection of two independent external arguments and a different realization of the coordination by a marker B (the ‘different subject’ marker). The hallmark properties of this analysis are that (i) subject identity or disjointness is only indirectly tied to the switch-reference markers, furnishing a straightforward account of cases where this correlation breaks down; (ii) switch-reference does not operate across fully developed clauses, which accounts for the widely observed featural defectiveness of switch-reference clauses; (iii) ‘same subject’ and ‘different subject’ constructions differ in their syntactic structure, thus accommodating cases where the choice of the switch-reference markers has an impact on event structure. The analysis is mainly developed on the basis of evidence from the Mexican language Seri, the Papuan language Amele, and the North-American language Kiowa.

On the Development of Speech Resources for the Mixtec Language

The Mixtec language is one of the main native languages in Mexico. In general, due to urbanization, discrimination, and limited attempts to promote the culture, the native languages are disappearing. Most of the information available about the Mixtec language is in written form as in dictionaries which, although including examples about how to pronounce the Mixtec words, are not as reliable as listening to the correct pronunciation from a native speaker. Formal acoustic resources, as speech corpora, are almost non-existent for the Mixtec, and no speech technologies are known to have been developed for it. This paper presents the development of the following resources for the Mixtec language: (1) a speech database of traditional narratives of the Mixtec culture spoken by a native speaker (labelled at the phonetic and orthographic levels by means of spectral analysis) and (2) a native speaker-adaptive automatic speech recognition (ASR) system (trained with the speech database) integrated with a Mixtec-to-Spanish/Spanish-to-Mixtec text translator. The speech database, although small and limited to a single variant, was reliable enough to build the multiuser speech application which presented a mean recognition/translation performance up to 94.36% in experiments with non-native speakers (the target users).

The State of Zapotec Poetry: Can Poetry Save an Endangered Culture?

I n 1981 in Juchitan, Mexico, the local COCEI political party ousted the national PRI party that had been ruling Mexico for decades. This victory gave control to local people (most of them indigenous) over their political destiny. The city of Juchitan is located on Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrow strip of land that connects the Yucatan Peninsula to the rest of Mexico. Spain invaded the region in the sixteenth century, the Mexican government subsumed it into the national system in the nineteenth century, and, beginning in the twentieth century, global superpowers sought passage from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. Yet local people have always fought to preserve their culture and language and to reconcile it with outside influences. This battle has been waged in and with their language, Zapotec, the oldest written language in America. The Isthmus Zapotecs call their language Diidxaza from diidxa’ (tongue) and za (cloud). The Binniza or “People of the Cloud” live in the state of Oaxaca near the Pacific coast. Like many indigenous languages, Isthmus Zapotec has been relegated to the status of a dialect by governmental entities, even though it is as different from other variants of Zapotec as one Romance language from another. According to the 2000 census, Isthmus Zapotec is spoken by between 75,000 to 100,000 people (probably a low estimate). Nevertheless, it has produced one of the most prolific Mexican indigenous literatures of modern times. Carlos Montemayor, a critic and translator known for his knowledge of indigenous literatures, calls it the most important modern literary tradition of all the indigenous languages of Mexico. How could a language spoken by a relatively few number of people stake such a claim? Perhaps because Zapotec poetry expresses itself in a richly musical language, embraces other artistic traditions, and confronts the threat of globalization with its verses. As early as the late nineteenth century, Zapotec poets began to leave the isthmus for Above: Soid Pastrana, Mapa de Juchitan (2011), oil on canvas, 2.5 x 2.5m essay

Ayapan Echoes: Linguistic Persistence and Loss in Tabasco, Mexico

ABSTRACT Ayapaneco is an indigenous Mexican language that—according to a widely circulating story—is dying because its last two fluent speakers refuse to speak to each other. In 2006–07, their case was publicized by Mexico's National Indigenous Language Institute (INALI), picked up by several international news agencies, broadcast on television, and repeated in various media. In this article, I examine the circulation of the Ayapaneco story and its unexpected consequences for the two speakers and the town of Ayapa as well as for other interested parties.

Identidad y reciclaje formal en Ciudad Universitaria

Este trabajo analiza la asimilación de elementos mesoamericanos en la arquitectura de Ciudad Universitaria, tanto desde su contexto de origen, como desde la perspectiva actual, que supone la superación o ruptura con la modernidad. Para fundamentar el tema del reciclaje formal se recurre a la hermenéutica gadameriana y al planteamiento deconstructivista desarrollado por Jacques Derrida. A partir de la valoración del patrimonio artístico de la antigüedad americana, que impulsaron las vanguardias del siglo xx, se explica el interés de los arquitectos mexicanos por incorporar esos valores de identidad al movimiento moderno. La integración plástica y sus modalidades es otro punto a tratar, dada la reelaboración de las tradiciones y mitos mesoamericanos en la pintura a gran escala en edificios universitarios. La importancia histórica y simbólica de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, como institución y reflejo de un proyecto nacional, le ha otorgado un valor paradigmático. Planteamos que, por ello, las soluciones arquitectónicas que allí se concretaron han constituido el modelo y el ejemplo a seguir en la anhelada síntesis entre historia y modernidad. Una mirada actual al lenguaje arquitectónico de Ciudad Universitaria y sus implicaciones revelará continuidades y discontinuidades, realidades y ficciones, que apoyarán al arquitecto del futuro, tanto en la crítica como en la acción.

El náhuatl en Los Ángeles: el papel de la lengua indígena en la creación de la identidad chicana

Nahuatl, although the most widely spoken indigenous language in Mexico, is not spoken by indigenous immigrant communities in Los Angeles as are other languages such as zapotec or mixtec. Rather, it is used by Chicanos, those individuals of Mexican descent living in the United States who seek to recover or preserve their indigenous heritage, in their efforts to create a unique ethnic identity. The present work seeks to understand the role of nahuatl in the creation of Chicano identity. The paper begins with a brief description of the linguistic situation of nahuatl in Mexico. This is followed by an explanation of the relevant terminology and then a description of the methodology used to collect the data on which the analysis is based. Information was collected from interviews with two nahautl instructors who represent different ideologies as well as from observations of a nahuatl workshop and a danza azteca rehearsal. The analysis itself consists of an overview of Chicano ideology in general and a description of the two main ideological groups to which Chicanos can belong based on their perspective of Aztec culture. Furthermore, it describes the specifc linguistic attitudes and behaviors that are direct reflexes of the ideologies peviously presented. The analysis is followed by a brief discussion of the linguistic situation of the Chicanos who live in Los Angeles, and the paper concludes with an examination of the effects that this situation have on the maintenance and/or loss of the nahuatl language.

GLENN MARTíNEZ, Mexican Americans and language/Del dicho al hecho!

Glenn Martinez, Mexican Americans and language/Del dicho al hecho! Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2006. ix, 128 pp. Pb. $15.95.This slender volume is offered as an introductory text on this topic, presumably to university undergraduates. In the Introduction, Martinez states: “Mexican Americans and language offers a linguistic overview of some of the central issues in the Mexican American language experience [emphasis in original], giving students the background needed to respond to the multiple social problems that interface with the language differences that exist in the Mexican American minority population” (p. ix). The goals of the book thus explained, in the final paragraph of the Introduction the author reveals the conversational style that he will take for the rest of the chapters, using second person for the reader and first person for the author: “After reading this book I hope you will be able to bridge the gap between el dicho (saying) and el hecho (doing) and will be able to look at the Mexican American language experience in a way that will encourage you to seek out change and improvement for the Mexican American communities that exist throughout the United States” (xi). On the face of it, this style may intend to make the academic content to follow less intimidating to students unused to reading challenging texts and academic jargon. However, it also makes for a very personalized approach to the issues that he addresses, a type of “critical discourse” in effect, in which his interpretation of the research presented appears not to be open to dissension or debate.

Rolling in Ditches with Shamans: Jaime de Angulo and the Professionalization of American Anthropology (review)

Reviewed by: Rolling in Ditches with Shamans: Jaime de Angulo and the Professionalization of American Anthropology Guillermo Bartelt Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz . Rolling in Ditches with Shamans: Jaime de Angulo and the Professionalization of American Anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 359 pp. Cloth, $59.95. The subtitle of Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz's biography of Jaime de Angulo (1887–1950) might lead one to think that he was a major player in the professionalization of anthropology, when he actually ended up as one of its casualties. Initially trained in medicine, de Angulo entered anthropological linguistics when the shift from self-taught status to academic training was taking place in the early twentieth century. Linguistics was then still a stepchild of ethnology, and only a handful of universities could offer advanced courses. By 1924, however, the Linguistic Society of America had been founded, with its journal Language appearing the next year. Furthermore, the breakthrough concept of the phoneme in conjunction with Edward Sapir's indifference to ethnology may have accelerated the move towards a separate disciplinary identity. Interestingly enough, though, according to Leeds-Hurwitz it was Franz Boas rather than Sapir who first began to argue for autonomous institutional status. Thus, by the time de Angulo began to study American Indian languages, amateurs were only tolerated if their work was of professional quality and if a particular ethnographic area could not be covered by an academically trained linguist. Nevertheless, as Leeds-Hurwitz points out, de Angulo was not only a member of the "invisible college" of Boasian anthropology, albeit a marginal one, but he also met the then-implicitly-agreed-upon criteria for a professional in anthropology: contributions to journals and conferences based on fieldwork data analysis. Fascinated by speculations about the genesis of the human mind, de Angulo had set himself ambitious research goals dealing with psychology and formal logic from the language angle. An indefatigable fieldworker, he analyzed a total of thirty native Californian, Southwestern, and Mexican languages, and Sapir as well as Boas, both of whom extended him a large number of research grants, regarded his descriptive work as being among the best produced at the time. Notwithstanding de Angulo's idiosyncratic approach to phonetic symbols, which frustrated Boas, he was far ahead of his time in other areas, such as the organization of lexis into semantic fields instead of alphabetical word lists. Since [End Page 191] Boasian linguistics required the collection of oral texts on which grammatical analysis was to be based, de Angulo also became interested in the classifications of myths, and his suggested genres resemble very much those of later folklorists. In addition, he clearly understood the Indian concept of creation as an ongoing process of the remaking of the world, and he recognized the essence of oral tradition in its performance and repetition of narrative details. Unfortunately, Leeds-Hurwitz neglects to connect these insights to the development of Dell Hymes's ethnography of speaking or to the emphasis on performance in folklore studies in the 1960s. Also noteworthy is de Angulo's finding of folk taxonomies for automobile engine parts based on anatomical comparisons among the Pit River Indians. A similar process of linguistic acculturation among the Cibecue Apache of Arizona was reported thirty years later by Keith Basso. Leeds-Hurwitz offers no speculation regarding de Angulo's possible influence on this prominent ethnographer or on Basso's perhaps deliberate ignoring or ignorance of de Angulo's prior discovery. However, the most glaring omission of Leeds-Hurwitz's assessment of de Angulo's possible influence on later generations of anthropologists has to do with de Angulo's proposal that ethnographers should write like artists. It would seem that de Angulo in this case was clearly a precursor of Clifford Geertz, who a few decades later encouraged ethnographers to regard themselves as writers of literature. Regarding fieldwork practices, de Angulo was convinced that "going native" was the best way to discover what a native culture was like. As a Spaniard, he seemed to delude himself into having a special rapport with Native Americans by passing himself off as a "non-white" and claiming to belong to the "Castilian" tribe. Although Leeds-Hurwitz offers textual evidence...

The Language Situation in Mexico

This monograph will cover the language situation in Mexico; a linguistically very complex country with 62 recognised indigenous languages, the de facto official language, Spanish, and some immigrant languages of lesser importance. Throughout the monograph, we will concentrate on three distinct challenges which we consider relevant for Mexican language policy. The first area of interest is the challenge of the multilingual situation where there is conflict between Spanish and the indigenous languages, most of which are in danger of shift. This situation has many consequences both for education and for linguistic human rights. The second challenge that is discussed is that of foreign language teaching, which is a growing need in the Mexican education system, just as it is for any economically developing nation. In particular, English is in high demand at all levels of education; in turn, this development creates new demands for teaching staff. The third challenge dealt with is Spanish as the language of 90% of all Mexican citizens. While we recognise the role of Spanish as constituting a threat to the indigenous languages, it also plays an important role as a symbol of national identity and has developed a diversity of local varieties. Overall, Mexico has the greatest number of speakers of Spanish in the world and it is a major source of such cultural commodities as films, books, music and theatre. In addition, Spanish itself poses serious educational challenges, with regard to literacy.

Not Ours Alone: Patrimony,Value and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico

Foreword, by June NashAcknowledgments1. Introduction: Inalienability, Value, and Collectivity2. The Santa Fe Cooperative in Guanajuato, Mexico3. Labor, History, and Historical Consciousness4. Recent Challenges and Responses5. Realms of Patrimony: Mine and House6. Patrimony, Power, and Ideology7. Veins of Value, Rocks of Renown: An Anthropology of Mined Substances8. Mexican Languages of Patrimony: Land, Subsoil, Culture9. Conclusion: Not Whose Alone?Appendix 1. Historical Silver Prices from 1975 to 2002Appendix 2. Aspects of Mineral Production in the Santa Fe CooperativeNotesWorks CitedIndex

Grammar of the Mexican Language with an Explanation of its Adverbs by S.J. Horacio Carochi (1645) (James Lockhart, trans. and ed.); Spoken Cree Level I. (C. Douglas Ellis); Nishnaabemwin Reference Grammar (J. Randolph Valentine)

Grammar of the Mexican Language with an Explanation of its Adverbs by S.J. Horacio Carochi (1645) (James Lockhart, trans. and ed.); Spoken Cree Level I. (C. Douglas Ellis); Nishnaabemwin Reference Grammar (J. Randolph Valentine)

Consecrated Transactions: Of Marketplaces, Passion Plays and other Nahua-Christian Devotions

Consecrated Transactions: Of Marketplaces, Passion Plays and other Nahua-Christian Devotions

JAMES LOCKHART (ed.), Grammar of the Mexican language, with an explanation of its adverbs [Compendio del arte de la lengua mexicana] (1645), by Horacio Carochi, S.J. UCLA Latin American Studies, 89. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pp. 544. Hb $65.00; and JAMES LOCKHART, Nahuatl as written: Lessons in older Nahuatl, with copious examples and texts. UCLA Latin American Studies, 88.

JAMES LOCKHART (ed.), Grammar of the Mexican language, with an explanation of its adverbs [Compendio del arte de la lengua mexicana] (1645), by Horacio Carochi, S.J. UCLA Latin American Studies, 89. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pp. 544. Hb $65.00; and JAMES LOCKHART, Nahuatl as written: Lessons in older Nahuatl, with copious examples and texts. UCLA Latin American Studies, 88.