The year is 1989, I am 10 years old. My mom, my brother, and I are on vacation on our regular one-week stop in Mexico City before heading out to be with my grandmother in a remote village in Oaxaca. We visit once every year or two years, so there’s much for my mom and aunt to talk about while my little brother and I sit quietly with our cousins inside a Volkswagen Kombi. We’re on our way to visit more uncles and cousins in Nezahualcoyotl, a section of the city named after a young Texcocoan prince who died in 1472 at the age of 70. His father was killed by the Tepenacans whom he later overturned after allying himself with the Mexicas. He came to be seen as a tyrant by some, but he was also a prolific poet and architect who built many schools in his city-state.
My heart understands it
My heart finally understands it:
I hear a song,
I contemplate a flower:
Hopefully, they do not whither!
-Nezahualcoyotl
My cousins, except baby number seven, my aunt explains to my mom, must help with the cleaning and cooking, including the one boy in the group. The five girls also are not exempt from helping with the construction of their home which up to that point was part wood, part sheet metal, and part brick that they are slowly buying with my uncle’s earnings as a street sweeper.
By contrast, I am a fifth grader attending school in the Valley and my brother is a preschooler at a renovated 1800s mansion near our one-bedroom apartment in the criminally-infested Westlake area, just east of Downtown Los Angeles; and it is fully built. Our lives are very different from that of our cousins, yet at that moment we were about to be united by one long-standing issue in Mexico.
I don’t know if the girls sitting in front of us had been there all along or if they had come in later, but suddenly I was paying attention to them. They were two young girls laughing with each other as they whispered, “What are they saying?” They were looking at my mom and aunt who were still having their conversation, completely oblivious of these girls.
But I was not oblivious. I was very aware of them and nothing else. My cousins, my brother, the busyness of the city, they all disappeared. It was just me, these girls, my thoughts, and some kind of feeling that made me want to silence my mom and then have us hide away forever. I was laser-focused on these girls and that moment stayed with me throughout my life. It wasn’t until recently that I found out that this and my other experiences around the same issue had been traumas. After learning this it became a little easier to understand what was going through my mind at that moment and even the girls’ minds.
With all this being said, I also realized that by feeling ashamed of my ethnicity, I also became the sham-er, sometimes quietly, sometimes not, and it is something that I am definitely not proud of and that I am trying to forgive myself for.
Eventually, I realized that these experiences were never about me or the people who shamed us, be it these girls or anybody else, but it was rather about a collective shame around our indigeneity. I know that many people will say that it’s not true and that Mexicans are very proud of where they come from because look at the art they admire with the strong feathered Indians and the colorful blouses they wear, or how they mention the land they are standing on before starting a meeting. But those actions are based on romanticized views of people of the past, it’s as if we are memorializing them and “the wonderful things they left us.” Indigenous people are still present and do not need to be patronized and seen as poor victims whose land was taken from them or seen as museum objects with a “Do Not Touch” sign on their backs. Indigenous people are just as autonomous and diverse as any and to believe otherwise is just a stereotype of them.
Last weekend my mom and I spoke about our family and the shame some still feel speaking their language among Spanish speakers. It doesn’t upset me as much anymore, maybe because we can talk about it now. Although my mom and I have had our differences, as many mother/child relationships do, I feel very proud of my mom and my dad for not allowing others to keep them from speaking their language or from learning to speak, read, and write Spanish, and then learn to understand some English. It was a very courageous thing to do in their world.
In Mexico, there are 68 indigenous languages and the majority of them are spoken in Oaxaca, a fact that I am very curious to know about how that came to be. Here are a couple of tables from a report written by Diego Ignacio Bugeda Bernal for the UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) that give some insight into the different languages spoken. However, what we can’t see from these tables is that each of these languages can be further divided and come to a total of 364 varieties! And then there are languages that have disappeared. By the way, recently I found out that one of the dialects (I believe it was Chichimeca, but don’t quote me on that) has been found to have a phonetic connection to one of the Chinese dialects.
When we're young anything different makes it seem odd or unusual. As a little girl it's not unusual it bothered you. One thing about the Yucatán is the Mayan language is still a constant, and there are only a couple (in southern MX) Mayan dialects, I believe. Throughout MX I didn't realize how many dialects there are, Esperanza. You have so many stories to tell, I hope some day you will write a book.