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Throwback: Nahuatl Nations! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_06: This episode is sponsored by Archeo Gato Tours.
• 0:04
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• 0:09
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• 0:15
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• 0:27
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• 0:33
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• 0:39
  SPEAKER_06: Or just follow the link in the show notes.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_06: Now, on with the show.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_04: You must excuse me.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_04: This hasn't been easy in the number.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_04: But you've learned a lesson.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_04: A lesson in honesty.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_04: Honesty to yourself, and honesty to others.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_04: That lesson will stand you in good step money and money.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_04: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_04: I've always heard that honesty is the best honesty.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_04: Now I'm catching on why that's some why that's some why that's some.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_06: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to yet another episode of Tales from Aslantes, the show where we explore Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican archaeology, history and culture, and we also combat the spread of disinformation about those very topics.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_06: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_05: And Rubenaniano Tlacatekat.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_05: What is up, Dr.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_05: Tlack?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_05: Oh man.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_05: If I had a dollar for every time someone asks me what is Chicano Heritage Month?
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_05: I think I'd be a millionaire by now.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_05: Have you been getting any questions about what Chicano Heritage Month is?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_06: Uh quite a bit, yeah.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_06: Like people are are are asking me, like, is that like an official thing?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_06: And I'm like, yeah, we made it an official thing.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_06: Like, what whose permission do you need?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_05: We don't need anyone else's permission.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_05: We as Chicanos, we declared it, and so it is.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, you know, that's part of uh self-determination, baby.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_06: Exactly.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_06: And and anybody familiar with Chicano history should know that we've never needed permission from anyone to do anything ever.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_05: Exactly.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_05: I want to give a shout out to one of our listeners who reached out to me recently on Facebook, uh, that they're doing Chicano things up in Oregon.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_05: So shout out, you know who you are.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_05: Um, apparently they're they've been doing uh celebration for about 50 years in in some part of Oregon, celebrating um the migrant farm workers and and uh the end of the harvest season and they call it Festival Mexicano or something to that effect.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_05: And so he's like, Yeah, that's the way we're celebrating Chicano History Month up here.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_05: I'm like, so shout out to to that part of the the states.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_05: And uh if any of any other Chicano festivals are going on that we aren't aware of, please reach out to us and uh we'll make sure to give you a shout out and and give you uh a nod in that direction so we can acknowledge what you are doing in the different parts of these uh good old US of A states.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, you know, it'd be cool if uh next year when August rolls around, we get a uh we collect dates and information for all any and all events happening across the country, and we just promote a calendar of events type situation, right?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_05: Hell yeah.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_06: Sounds good.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_06: And then after that, a paid holiday.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_05: Right?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_05: A whole month go on vacation, like they do up in Europe.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_06: Speaking of Europe, yeah, speaking of Europe, nice segue.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_06: Our guest today is coming at us straight from Europe.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_06: We are how do you is it pharaoh or pharaoh?
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: I've I've always wondered.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's a good one.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: In Danish, it's pharaoh, but I wouldn't uh do you invite anyone to uh give it the German pronunciation that could seriously hurt your throat if you try it?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_06: Well, we are joined today by our friend and colleague, Dr.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_06: Magnus Farau Hansen.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_06: Uh he has a a new book, yeah.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_06: Magnus Far Out Hansen.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_06: He's gonna start calling you that.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_06: You should put that on your business card and quotation marks.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_06: Magnus Far Out.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_06: Far Out, yeah.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_06: There you go.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_06: Uh Dr.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_06: Hansen has a new book now out called Nahuatl Nations.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_06: And uh what's does it have a subtitle?
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_06: Does it have a uh it does?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_06: What might that be?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_06: Nahuat Nations.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, language revitalization and semiotic sovereignty in indigenous Mexico.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_06: Hell yeah.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_06: That's a mouthful.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but we we like having those.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, academics, you have to have a long ass name, right?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, otherwise, what are you doing?
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, right.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_06: If you're not using you gotta put that big brain to to good use there, uh Magnus.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_06: But that's a great name, Nawat Nations.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_06: That's a very cool, uh, cool title.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_06: And congratulations on the book, man.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, congratulations.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you very much.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_06: I think that's a good idea.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_05: That is definitely a feat to to be able to go from dissertation, because this is based on your dissertation, right?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_05: So it's it's uh quite an accomplishment to be able to go from dissertation to book.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm I'm uh it was uh it was uh I actually thought I wasn't gonna make it, but then COVID came and and I was just stuck in a lucky you in a room for a while and they had to do something.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_06: Had some time on your hands.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_06: Well, COVID screwed up uh a trip that I was gonna take with you to uh to Mexico, man.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_06: I was very bummed out by that.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it's screwed it all up that entire year.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_06: So for listeners who who don't know you and don't know your work, can you give us a little bit of background on uh on the life of young Magnus there?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, so I'm I'm from Denmark, so there's not really anything very natural in ending up uh studying uh Native American languages in Mexico or elsewhere.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but that was sort of um how it went from me just having when I was a kid an interest in languages in general, and then I wanted to study languages that were different from the ones they were teaching in school.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: So in Denmark we study English and German and um Latin and uh Spanish.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: I I did it in high school.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: Are most people in Denmark multilingual?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: To to one degree or other, yeah.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, most people have very functional uh English, at least, and many people also have good German.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I wanted to study something that was way different from any of that, and uh then I was into so you may have heard about like this in uh in Germany there's this thing called where they play Indians there's uh they do that, so they dress up at the end of the year.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: I've seen that and when I was uh like 12 or 13 years old, I was doing that a lot myself, and I didn't, of course, like have any frame of reference of doing that.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: I thought it was cool, and and and uh I wanted to understand what that meant to be that.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: I was reading like Bury My Heart at Wounded Need and all those things, and and sort of being very sympathetic to a way of life that I thought I understood something about, but wanted to know more about.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: So, in that way, it was uh a little bit of that combination of the interest in languages and then the interest in in indigenous cultures of the Americas, um, that that sort of made me take that interest.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: And uh then um I I started in university when I was 18 and um I entered a program.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not like in in the States where you sort of can do different courses, like you you enter into a program and that's what you do.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I did Native American languages and cultures.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so um, and at that point, what we were studying mostly in that um department was Nahuatl, because one of the big Nahuatl linguists, Una Sanger, was a professor um at that point uh at the University of Copenhagen, and she was sort of she made me uh take this interest in in um in Nahuatl.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: Basically, it was in a little bit forced on me because I thought I was going to be studying uh North American uh indigenous languages or north of Mexico, anyways.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but we had three years of Nahuatl requirement.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: So I took three years of intensive Nahuatl with uh Unasanger and some other teachers, and uh then having done that, I kinda I really liked the language and I really liked the uh I felt I was getting better at it, of course.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but then I also felt I wanted to study the language in its living setting because we were of course only studying written texts from the 16th century.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: So um what people call classical now is what we studied.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: But I had really always wanted to have like the experience of hearing it and of trying to speak it and of engaging and and uh interacting uh and learning from the people who spoke the language that I was gonna learn.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: So I asked her, um, my my uh teacher Una Sanger uh if she could recommend some place in Mexico that she would want me suggest that I go if I wanted to learn how to really know the language as a spoken living language.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I know she was she's done a lot of field work all over Mexico.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh she has a house in an uh indigenous community in Guerrero, an hour speaking community.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: She's worked in Durango, she's worked in Puebla.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: But she said, No, you should go to Morelos.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: There's a town there uh called Weyapan, and this is where you you should go because that's a an that's pretty similar to what we've been studying here.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then she wrote me a letter uh of introduction in Spanish, and I brought that letter and I went to Weyapan and showed them this is me.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: This is me.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: Please this is Una Sanger, you've never heard of her.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: But uh it it uh how old were you at this time?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: I was uh like 22, I think.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so you're just a you're just a little kid.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: I was a youngster.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I showed up and they received me super well, and and yeah, and it became in many ways this uh uh a second home of mine, also because I ended up after some some years returning.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: I I uh met my wife there and uh and now I have family in Wayapan Morelos, and that's where I did most of my uh initial now learning uh as a living language.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: And it's also um described those experiences in in one of the chapters in the book.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_06: So Wayapan, my first uh exposure to Wayapan was in the book.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_06: Um I can't remember who wrote it, the being Indian Judith Friedlander, being Indian in Wayapan.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_06: Friedlander, that's right.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_06: And a part of that book that really um you know stuck out to me was how and it's somebody we've spoken about on this podcast before, but uh Juan Luna Cárdenas uh used to go to Wayapan, correct?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_06: And uh and in in what sort of capacity was was he going to Wayapan?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_06: That that's a wild story.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it really is a very wild story.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: I I also I also came uh to Wayapan prepared by having read that book, of course, and some other texts have been been published in that variety, and I I tried to do my homework in that way, but I wasn't prepared for that story about what that movement meant.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um so Judith Friedlander sort of describes how in the 50s and 40s, um when this Mexican nationalism was at its height in Mexico City and and in the political establishment, um, and they also were very much uh trying to integrate this uh indigenismo in in the national politics of different ways.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh a group of people uh came to Weyapan, or actually, I think probably first some people from Weyapan went to Mexico City to one of the meetings of uh of the movimento uh de la restauración de Anahuac, Confederado, whatever.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: MCRCA.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: You mentioned it almost every show, this this movement, right?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's been Movimiento Confederado, Restaurador de la Cultura de Anahuac.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly, yeah, that one.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: So they went to one of those meetings and and they they met uh Juan Luna Cárdenas, and uh he came to Weyapan because he thought it would be a very good idea um to teach the Nahua people there about Aztec culture and how they were supposed to uh to be.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: So he created a little bit of um a movement or a or a circle of people, young people mostly in Wayapan in the 40s and 50s, who were studying his ideas about what is what being Azteca is supposed to be like.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: So he used that word, of course, a lot.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: And if you read his materials, that's that's sort of the that's also if you read um other other uh other um writers, even indigenous writers from that period, that that is often how they would identify as Aztecas, right?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um yeah, because that was a part of the nationalist language.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh they so they did this little movement and um and he was sort of uh so you guys say what capacity?
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um but uh that capacity turned out over time at least, it may have been different in different parts of the process of how this group developed, but towards the end he was almost in the capacity of a cult leader and um sort of semi-god.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_05: Oh yeah, yeah.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah, wild.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: So he married also a uh woman or probab more likely a little girl in the world.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I was gonna say very, very young, right?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, she was like what 14, 15, maybe, if that.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: And um, and uh there was this is this maybe this is on the level of rumor, right?
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: But what I was told by the people that I lived with who had been there and had been part of that, is that basically what they were saying uh when she got pregnant, that child would be the second coming of Whitzilopochtli.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_05: Something to that effect, right?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, because isn't the story I'll talk about this in my dissertation.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he actually was named Whitzilopochlipochli, right?
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: He was a mechanic in Wayapan and he was a huge man.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, everybody I've I've talked to tells him about talking about how big and strong he was.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: And uh the person who told me most about it is that his his face was like a stone mask carved, like carved like a stone mask.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: So this is what I've been told about Witzel.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: They just call him Witzel.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and he was uh rodeo uh bull rider in the town, and he was he was like a so the the name was apropos, yeah.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: He was uh he he lived uh he lived that identity and and and died young.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um but but that it he he was basically uh one of the results there.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: But then how that happened sort of the when he was born, the the the group sort of fell apart.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: But when I came to Weigh Up and there were still some people there who had been part of that group and who who really spoke so much about Juan Luna Cárdenas, and and he was the wisest person who ever knew uh he was the one who had ever known the most about Nahuatl and and uh the truth about that.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so there were people still believing in that that system, and and many of them had taken names of of uh of uh Mexica Tlatwanis and uh and uh had still these ideas that that what the people around them, the kind of Nahuatl they spoke, that was wrong, like they were all doing it wrong, they shouldn't be even be doing it if they couldn't be speaking now right.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and the right nawet is the now that uh Juan Luna Cardanas had showed them in the books.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um and that was uh uh very fascinating, right?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: That you could be in the midst of a community where people speak that language and still think that it's wrong, like it's the wrong way we're doing it, right?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_06: Um well that's something that you touch on in the book, right?
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_06: So it is yeah, getting into this whole idea because you'd mentioned Mexican nationalism and and you know, there's this idea of what constitutes a nation, right?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_06: And and you get into that in your in your book, but there's this idea of náhuatl um purism, you call it, and uh because I I I'd even been told that when I was in Mexico and somebody asked me what I was doing, I was like, Oh yeah, I'm going to Cuentepec, and you know, I'm I'm trying to learn Nahuatl.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_06: And they're like, Oh, well, they don't speak real náhuat in Cuentepec.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_06: You need to go to Guerrero to learn real Nahuatl.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_06: And it was just odd to me to hear a Nahuatl speaker say that about another community, and like, no, no, don't go there, come to us because we speak the the the the real stuff.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_06: And I guess a lot of it comes from the the level of loan words and mixture with the Spanish language, but that that can't be helped, really, right?
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_06: Nobody's speaking a quote unquote pure form of Nahuatl.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: So so I I think that there's uh there's several things in it uh that I also try to sort of unpack in the book that some of it is it is this idea that that if you mix it with Spanish, it's less pure.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: But uh another part is also um the nationalist ideology of Nahuatl as a language of the Mexican nation, exemplified by the classical variety that they teach at the universities and that and all those.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: But then there's also this other way that, and I don't know which of them it was that you met when they told you not to go to Quentepec, um, because it could have been the other witches that every town also has some purists who are local purists, and they'll say, We have the right now here, so don't go over there because they're speaking it wrong, right?
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: So it might have been someone who who knew the Guerrero variety and considered it better than the one in Quentepec.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: But of course, if you go to Quentepec, they're likely to say it that theirs is the right one and that they're speaking it right uh wrong in Guerrero, unless they have these ideas that come from mostly from scholarship of different sorts, that the real or well, also from school and education, that the real Nawadl is the written Nawadl, and the earlier written Nawadl is always, of course, purer and better and more official than whatever is being written now, right?
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: So, so there's all these ideas about what is the is the right way to do it, and and they're all the time they're in conflict.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_02: So there's whenever there's uh that's one of the premises of the book, that there's these different forces or movements or groups trying to um to strengthen the language, but they often have different ideas about what language it is that they want to strengthen and how, uh, and that can be very uh cause conflicts, just questions about how to write now what whether to use K and W or whether to use the the the colonial um style orthography and stuff like that.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: And and it can be very conflictive, and of course, in the end, it means that some people are going to say, no, what I can't start speaking this language or teach this language.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know what's the right stuff.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like how I I'll just stay out of this and just speak Spanish.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that that is the the risk that I'm I'm really trying to to uh sort of point to in the book that it's it's much better for the language to just let it flow, let it be where it lives, right?
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_05: Um so your your background is in linguistics, right?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, it is.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_05: Uh well it's that's the approach that you're bringing to to to the book, to to the study.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_05: And I'm thinking, isn't there I'm not sure what it's called, I'm not a linguist, but isn't there because this sounds very similar to, for instance, the way that people from back east refer to people who talk uh and speak uh English in the south or in Texas.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_05: Definitely they're always saying, Oh, they don't they they speak it incorrectly or they have a really uh uh hake way of of of you know pronouncing words in the south or in Texas or out west or what happens.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_05: It's the same thing.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_05: Uh I'm hearing that that's kind of What's happening here?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_05: I I think that maybe maybe it's sometimes we tend to overthink things that are just as simple as you know people having variations and thinking that their form of speaking the language is better than the people from the next town over, right?
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_05: Like it's just as simple as that sometimes.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: It is that simple, but there's one couple of things that are less make it less simple in the Nawa case.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: And one case is of course that for English, there's a very, very standardized language that you have to learn to do to engage in education.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: That if you want to have a teacher grade your paper and and make it, you have to write it in a certain way, right?
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: But in Nahuatl, there's no single uh standard that can be put as the sort of neutral standard, right?
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: And and and and any attempt at putting one there is going to have political implications because it also means that whichever groups of now speakers have something that is closer to that standard is going to have somehow more power or have an easier time uh acquiring that standard and so on.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: And then the other ones will be stigmatized, and of course, that's also the case for English, right?
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_02: So lots of speakers of English in in the United States and in in the UK speak varieties at home of English that if they they would know that if they wanted to be like a lawyer or a politician, they would have to change their way of speaking and and acquire a different Well, I don't know about that.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_05: That seems to be out the window nowadays.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: Some places at least, right?
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh it's certainly just shifting a lot.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I hope it's gonna shift also in in terms of how uh now it can be more of a language that has a more diverse standard, right?
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: So that all the speakers of Nawa can be see themselves as having not the wrong kind of knowledge.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_05: So I guess what I'm hearing from you is that aside from the fact that there is such a thing as classical Nahuatl that is taught taught in the in the universities and and and uh colleges and such, right?
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_05: Besides that, there isn't a standard uh method of teaching contemporary Nahuatl because every community has their own version of it and no one can agree as to which standard should be the one that's taught across the board.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_05: Right?
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's one thing, right?
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then the the other, the next step is that there's also uh the argument that I'm really making is that the only way to make Nahuatl important enough to keep passing it on is by using exactly the kind of Nahuatl that one's community is is actually speaking.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I guess that that that leads me to my to my question is that how because in Mexico you hear a lot of people uh show disdain toward indigenous languages by calling them dialects, right?
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_05: So in this case, we do know that these are variations, meaning they're dialects of Nahuatl.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_05: If if if they're all dial, if every town or every community has their own dialect of Nahuatl, how do we how do we approach something as uh uh close to a standardized language that these all dialects are a variation of?
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_05: Or is it gonna be the case that it's always gonna be a variation hence dialect in perpetuity because each town wants to keep doing it their own way?
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• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: So I think so, first of all, I think that uh from a linguistic point of view, um there is uh no uh non-political way of distinguishing between what is a language and a dialect.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um it is entirely the question of what is the political community that chooses something as their standard language, that's a language, right?
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: And if they don't, if it's something else but it's similar, then it's a dialect of whatever we've chosen as a political community as our language.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: So it's my my I'm from Denmark, and we have a very uh very uh uh um special situation, and which is very good for illustrating this principle, but is that in Sweden they speak essentially a dialect of Danish.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: In Norway, they also speak a dialect of Danish, except that if you go to Norway, they will say that Denmark and Sweden speak a dialect of Norwegian, and in Sweden they'll say, or at least that's what they would say if we didn't have three separate governments and three separate nation states.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, right.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_02: So that's basically it's when the nation states are formed, that's when those three dialects become three languages, with us each with well, actually, the nor Norwegians have two standard languages, and the Swedes have one, and we have one, right?
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_02: So in Denmark, we also have dialects of Danish, but any of those, if it had been the one spoken in the capital, would have become the standard Danish language.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a political decision and a political process of forming a nation that turns a dialect into a language, and with uh indigenous communities, it seems like what you get are um sort of like mini nationalisms.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_06: Um that's been my observation, especially here in New Mexico where we have 19 Pueblos and the Navajo Nation and the Apaches.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_06: You see a lot of this uh inner conflict, and uh like that's the only way I could describe it is like a mini nationalism that exists.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_05: The mini nations.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, and that is exactly why it the nation uh from the dissertation title, it was just an outnation.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and then uh luckily I I uh I realized it has to be a plural because that is what the entire argument of the book is that every now town that decides that our language is our language, right, we want to protect our language, is a nation and has their own national language, right?
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_02: So that's why I don't speak about Maudl.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I do speak about Mao dialectology, which is sort of the study of how it varies, but I don't speak about dialects of Naudla anymore.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: I speak about Maun languages.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: So to me, I think that that is that is the the the the political action is to give the language well I I'm not giving anything, but I'm um conceptually realizing that it belongs to a political community, and and their the political community is who decides what is the right language for them.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then uh my job as a linguist is only to help them describe it if they want me to do that, help me help them produce materials, help them in any way that they ask me to.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_06: Well, one of my one of my favorite stories in the book is, and I remember when this happened, is you're discussing how the Mexican government tries to kind of co-opt uh the Nahuatl language is sort of like the the national language that represents indigenous Mexico, right?
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_06: And at the time there was a um, but it's all performative because they don't bother to actually learn how to speak any variant of the language, much less classical Nahuatl or or you know contemporary Nahuatl.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_06: And I believe it was a um a candidate for the presidency went into a community and he was trying to say tlasokamati miyak, and instead he said tlashkali miak.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: That was like President Enrique Peñanieto when he was.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, many many tortillas.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, this this kind of uh uh leads me to a question.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know if you have the answer for this, Magnus, but um, like for instance, before the arrival of the Spanish, and we know that the Triple Alliance was kind of like the head of state of the nation of if you want to call it the Confederación the Nahuac, whatever you want to call it, the Aztec Empire.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_05: Did I know that they didn't really impose their their uh religious views on everyone because you know they felt like people should be allowed to I guess continue to worship the way they wanted to, but in terms of the language, the lingua franca of the of the Confederación or the Azteca Empire, was it was do we know if it was the Nahuatl that was spoken in quote unquote la capital uh in Tenochtitlan that was used across the board and was imposed over those those other uh variations from Nahuatl in out in the countryside or or so I think that one we we don't know, but what we think, what I think, and what uh some other scholars think, uh particularly uh the linguist Karen Dakin has written about this, is that probably what are now considered the the dialect area of the periphery, so the what is spoken on the west uh Pacific coast and all the way down in southern southern um Veracruz and into Tabasco um might very well have been remnants of uh lingua franca nahuatl.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_02: And there's some documents early documents that have this kind of uh now um that is um in some ways you could say that it's simplified a little bit.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: So it doesn't have the tl sound, it has some some some phonological traits that are simplified, it introduces some new grammatical forms instead of the ones that are difficult in in colonial or in the the Mexican Central Mexican Nahuatl.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that probably uh there was a lingua franca that was a Nahuan language, um, prior or perhaps even to the the emergence of the the Mexicaled uh triple alliance, but it would have been probably a variety that was um more like the the the peripheral varieties, and then of course with the with the arrival of the Spaniards, then we know how the the conquest uh moves from central Mexico to the north to the south with Spaniards, with auxiliary troops who spoke the central Mexican variety anymore.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, then we can see that that also is brought, for example, to Guatemala, to El Salvador, and um very likely also all the way up north, right?
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_05: So the periphery now it would be the kind of the equivalent of what Esperanto was supposed to be, in a sense.
• 33:20
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• 33:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yeah, I I think so.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, I th I I kind of like the the term lingua franca because that is uh of course a language that was spoken by the Frankish Empire and which seems to have been sort of spoken also perhaps by stratas along the Pacific, uh no, not Pacific, the Mediterranean uh coasts in the sort of the actually some more or less the same period.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: And it was basically a kind of uh Latin mixed with Frankish uh Germanic uh language, right?
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think that's that's probably more or less what happened in in Mesoamerica.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_02: That there was this uh a language variety spoken by traders, maybe adopted by by uh other communities, uh and then as these kinds of contact languages go, it it it loses some of the things that it has in the in the more refined varieties and becomes sort of uh a second language, just so the way that that uh that English is now, maybe.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that even if you arrive in Denmark and you want to buy something, you can go pretty much anywhere and ask for it in English, and they'll understand you at least, and they'll probably be able to answer you, right?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: In a in a somewhat and then you can demand and say speak American.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, speak American.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_06: Well, speaking of of lingua franca, one thing that I thought was cool in the book that not a lot of people are probably you know aware of is how and and I forget who it was, was it Philip the Second who made Nahuat the um like the official language of New Spain?
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, there was a period there in the yeah, it was like a 70-year period where they they made Nahuat the official language of New Spain until and I'm pretty sure it was Philip II, and then I think Philip IV was like, nah, we ain't doing that anymore.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_05: But my question was so did the criollos also speak it, and were they also Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, okay.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_06: Is were the criollos speaking it, and what version of Nahuatl was it that they were trying to impose on all these other indigenous communities, right?
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_06: Because that was the the the reasoning behind doing this was initially they wanted the priests to learn the languages of the individual villages that they were converting, but then they were like, there's too many goddamn languages in this country.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_06: Um, just make everybody learn Nahuat.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_06: And so, like this different form of imperialism, right?
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_06: And so the priests will learn Nahuatl and they'll force the nate all natives to learn Nahuatl in addition to whatever language that they speak, but that would make conversion easier because then they could use Nahuat as like the the language of conversion, right?
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_06: Um so yeah, were criollos learning it too, and what what variant of Nahuatl were they imposing?
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_02: So I probably the best uh evidence we have to answer that question is the Manuel de uh Pedro Arenas, which is an actual phrase book, a Nahuatl phrase book.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's a book used by people who only spoke Spanish to communicate with people who only spoke Nahuatl.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_02: And uh if you look at that book, it came out in 11 editions, the last one in the wow, in the 19th century.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: So it must have been in use and it must have been very useful for people who were traveling in the countryside.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's like it has like it has little sections on what how to say if you arrive in a town and you want to find a place to eat, or how to like a travel log.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's a travelog, it's also how to talk with your servants, many of many of them.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's like if you want your maid to cook you this, then you say this and stuff like that.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_02: So they were doing something with the language, they were using the language in in many, many um many contexts.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: So there's also examples like uh Sor Juana uh Vilacruz, who who has some little snippets of Nahuatl in there and some of her viencicos and stuff like that.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, mostly I think to sort of give like this sort of uh like flavor to it, yeah, like a local country.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_02: Mexican flavor, right?
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_02: Right, yeah.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then you have uh like actual scholars working very seriously with the language, um like uh and uh clavigero and uh and um Faustino Chimarpopoca, who was an outspeaker, but also an intellectual working with the language as a translator, as a teacher, as a as uh as a member of the uh Academy of Geography.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um so so there were all kinds of different ways of engaging with the language, but there's no doubt in my mind that it was it was uh very common and very useful for the people, also criollo people in central Mexico to use the language when they were engaging with the uh indigenous classes who made up them who made up the bulk of the society still at that point.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_06: And and you note in the book how uh Nahuatl was even uh used up here in New Mexico with the uh the phrase aputos timikis.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was you when you showed me that document curly, I that was I was wow, that's incredible, because that that one phrase it's it's uh it encapsulates this entire history of the of the language, right?
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_02: And in it's Nawas who have accompanied the first uh Spanish uh uh colonizers, colonists in in New Mexico, right?
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_02: They must have come there as maybe what auxiliary troops, sheep herders, whatever.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and they've speak they've been speaking Nahuatl, and then they've engaged with the local people there in New Mexico as well, because who the person who says this is an Akama uh warrior uh who's who yells this at a Spanish uh soldier brandishing a Spanish sword, right?
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_05: So he means he means what he's saying, but that an Akama person threatens a Spaniard in Nahuatl is and that and that the expectation that also the Spaniard is gonna understand what he's saying, yeah.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: So he would yeah, like that's the language you're gonna use, right?
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_05: Because that's the lingua franca as you're talking about, right?
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: Even at that point, right?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's wild.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_05: Do we know if this is like the first instance of a native language being written in in uh European script or Latin script in in the what is now the United States, maybe?
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I don't I wouldn't I wouldn't think so, no.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: No, I think there are earlier ones from some of the the chronic chronicles, right?
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it's definitely the earliest uh example of now's being spoken in in what is now the US.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it's wild.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_06: And if you go through these historical documents, because I pour through them and I keep seeing two words pop up.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_06: Uh they have like a one word that's just a generic word for translator, and it's uh tekitato.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_06: Um and then for Nahuatl speakers specifically and Nahuat translators, they call them Nahuatatos, and but they spell it N-A-G-U-A-T-A-T-O, Nahuatato.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_06: So if you don't know what you're searching for, like if you're trying to use a contemporary or classical Nahuatl orthography, you would miss a lot of these words while you're searching the documents because they're not gonna pop up.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_06: You have to know what you're looking for.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, the interesting, or what also is the case, is that of course most historians who've been working on on early documents there have not been interested in what was going on with Nahuatl.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like they were interested in what was going on with the Spaniards, with Acro and the other Pueblos, so they haven't been looking for those.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_05: So that was just that that phrase well, because even still today, the the the dominant narrative in terms of the settlement of the southwest by by the uh the Spanish is that it was Spanish, and yeah, with the understanding that there was, like you were saying earlier, auxiliary indigenous people who were brought in, namely Tlaxcalans who were used to settle the space, but it's always framed as Spanish.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_05: Even the Tlascalan people get subsumed under the Spanish label because over time a lot of these Tlascallan peoples become sort of honorary Spaniards in a sense, and and and they could even petition if they become uh prominent figures in their communities, and once they've settled a space, they can go from being Tlaxcalan to being a quote unquote Espanol, right?
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_05: So Espanol at that time.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_02: Elevated now speakers, even because they were never conquered, they were allies of the allies, exactly.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_02: So so they they also may have seen themselves already at that point as something that was quite distinct from whoever they were they saw themselves as the ones who were doing the colonizing.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_06: And when when you're searching these documents, it's important to search for terms like uh lengua mexicana.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, um, and that's one thing that not a lot of people understand because I saw this video a while back where people were it was such an obnoxious video where they were like, There's no such thing as a language called Mexican, and and they were going off on how there's no Mexican language, and I was like, Well, actually, they're used to being for sure.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_06: It it was called, and to this day, right, there is a specific variant that still calls the language Mexican.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_06: I don't know.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_02: There are many that where they still consider themselves Mexicans.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_06: When I was in um in Morelos and uh I met some kids who were there selling like those uh Woven bracelets, right?
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_06: They're selling with your name.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_06: You could get one with your name.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_06: And uh they walk up and I'm eating at this restaurant, and I'm out in the patio, and these kids walk up, and uh they're asking me if if uh I wanted to buy one, and I said, uh and they looked at me and they were like, What?
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_06: And then the dad came to talk to them and they were like, él habla mexicano, right?
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_06: So that's like that's even how they how they describe it.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_06: It was like he speaks Mexican, and um interestingly and sadly enough, uh I was kicked out of the restaurant uh for talking to these kids in a lot.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_06: They they made the kids leave, and well, they walked up and they were like uh no hablas groserías aquí, and I was like, what and so they uh they made the kids leave, and so I was like, Well, if they're leaving, I'm leaving, you know.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_06: So I didn't even pay, I just got up, and uh I spent the rest of the day hanging out with these kids and their dad and uh just cruising around uh where was I?
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_06: It was in Cuernavaca.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so wait, Carly, what I'm hearing is that you're one of these people that does not does not pay their tab at the end.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I just any excuse.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_05: Any excuses to run out on the bill.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_05: This is bullshit over the table and shame on you, sir.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_02: But but it it's a real problem because linguistic discrimination like that exists and and um and is of course the major reason that in so many now it's speaking communities the language is not being taught to kids, right?
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_02: Because they know that they can face that sort of a situation if they speak the language still in the wrong places, um and and um that is in spite of like I'm I'm uh this I'm guessing would have been maybe a decade ago or more.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this was like 1996, 1997.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_02: Because one of the things that I point out is that it the a lot of the overt discourse about indigenous languages in Mexico has changed a lot.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: So that it's being appreciated to a much higher degree than it was even when I arrived in Mexico in in the early 2000s, uh, where this was also very common, people would be saying, Why would you want to learn something like that?
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's useless, useless like and they would say that about also their own language in the community, and now they don't do that anymore.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_02: So there's something that's changed politically that makes it more um appreciated, but still there's an undercurrent where it it the discrimination still happens, right?
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I wanted to I'm glad you brought that up because I wanted to bring it back to like the communities like Wayapan, where you were um uh doing your your studies, and also like Milpa Alpa Mil Milpa Alta comes up in some of the early accounts of the things that the MCRCA was doing, Luna Cárdenas, those folks.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_05: And I think in in your book, if I'm if if I read it correctly, um you're trying to make also the case that it's because of what Luna Cárdenas and and those guys were doing in those communities, and I think you mentioned it earlier that that it's part of the decline of the usage and the continuation of the language.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_05: And I and I and I think that there is something to that, but maybe I don't know, maybe I need to go back and reread it, but it seems like maybe there's a little overstating going on here.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_05: Like there's too much credit, I think, being given to the I think, I think naturally over time, as you were just saying, people because of shame and other outside factors, or just the fact that you know uh indigenous languages in the communities aren't seen as a way forward and and progressing, that that's also coming that's happening here in the US as well.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_05: A lot of indigenous languages have gone extinct and are continuing to go extinct because they're not seen as something that's valuable for the advancement of the individual or the community.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_05: So, while I I I accept the notion that these guys, the the mexicanistas that were going into the communities, were adversely affecting those communities.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think that maybe we give them too much credit for what's happening with with the I think that that's that's only uh uh one place that I would make that argument, and that's way up and specifically, because that happened, like where he actually went there and he was there, and there was this group of people who were actively out there telling their own uh people from their own community that they were speaking wrong, yeah and creating this this narrative of the way we speak here is wrong.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_02: And and in many other towns that that's not the case, they still speak the language and they'll keep speaking it.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_02: And in other places, it is, as you say, mostly a question about like it doesn't offer any opportunities for for uh uh progressing, uh my for taking my life where I want my life to go or my business life.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_02: So we we we don't use it anymore, right?
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_02: So all of those processes exist, and it it's only in the specific case of Weyapan where I would I would want to throw blame on uh on uh you're very very specific.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's wayapan.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well got it.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_06: And then wayapan, so Juan Luna Cardanas.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_06: I would imagine he had a a pretty good grasp then of the Nahuatl language if he was able to communicate with people in this community, right?
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_06: Or was he just speaking to them in Spanish?
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I do think he spoke uh something more like uh his version of of uh colonial now, it's classical now, right?
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_02: Because he had studied it.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's no he was he worked for the the government as uh like the director of one of the linguistic offices uh under under um President Karnas.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_02: So so of course he knew what he was talking about, uh um to a to a degree, right?
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_02: But he also uh clearly didn't appreciate that there could be different ways of speaking the language, and that he also made up the word isachilan.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he made up several words, he made up a lot of words.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_02: I recently bought his little grammar, uh and it's it's fun, it's fun.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_02: There's some weird stuff in there, uh, there's some uh odd language, there's a uh far-out uh orthography system that he's the only one in the world to ever have used.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so so uh he's he's worth studying just for like for seeing, like yeah.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_05: Well besides besides ishachilan, I mean that term has now over the years been expanded uh and been pronounced itzachilatlan.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_05: Like people have the more syllables, the better.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_05: You know what I'm saying?
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_05: Like they complicated the term to sound make it sound more complex and more deep than it actually was.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_05: It was just ishachilan, which he came up with for the continent, right?
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_05: For the Western Hemisphere, if I'm not mistaken, that's what it meant.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, but also, I mean, he also claimed uh maybe you know more about this.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_05: Um, that that uh Azteca invented the hamburger and they called it the pachola.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_05: Do you know anything about this?
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's I I uh I don't have any any evidence to say they didn't.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, just just running it by you, man.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_05: Aztec hamburgers, kids.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_05: Pacholas.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_02: So that would have been uh sholot meat, meat, dog meat.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_05: Oh man, I can't go there, right?
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_06: Or or massat, right?
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_05: Maybe masat, probably deer meat, no?
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_05: I mean or turkey, probably turkey because a turkey is originally from or quail.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_05: I could see it being quail.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_06: There was always like quail for one hamburger, dude.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, in uh well, they were small, they were sliders, said show.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_06: So in in Wayapan, you mentioned this organization, uh Chimal Nawatlahtolet, which yeah, one that's a dope name for an organization, it's like uh the shield of the Nahuat language, right?
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_06: Um, metaphorically speaking, like the protector uh of in defender of the Nahuatl language, and you go into the work that um they've been doing.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, can you just expand on that a little bit?
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_06: Can you tell us a little bit about this organization?
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_02: So that started up as uh as a Nahuatl uh class taught in the town of Wayapan um as a way for youths in Nawa uh in Wayapan to fulfill a requirement of community service in order for them to get a scholarship from the state government in Morelos.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_02: And one uh uh youth in Weyapan, he had recently come back from the US, he had been uh in New York for most part of his his childhood, and then he came back to toyapan and um he sort of took the lead in finding out because this was when the the leftist government started coming in uh in the different states.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_02: So they had a leftist governor in in Morelos, uh Graco Ramirez, and he was giving out these becas, these uh uh scholarships to youths so that they could um study um post post uh secondary uh school, right?
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I guess it's sort of in between college and high school with that level of schooling.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_02: But of course, many people they need money to be able to do so because otherwise they'll have have to uh get a job and and contribute to their family economy in some other way.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_02: So they he was doing that by giving these uh scholarships, and then uh the uh uh criteria for getting it was you had had to do some sort of community service.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_02: And this youth, uh Alex Maya, uh he made it uh he petitioned if it could be okay to consider it community service for the young kids to participate in an hour course so that they could uh study the language, and then by doing that they would have fulfilled their community service requirement.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_02: And about 80 young people in Wyoming, and this is the point where hardly any speakers of below 30 years of age.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_02: And then all of a sudden, a bunch of young uh youngsters around uh uh 17, 18, 19, maybe even a little bit younger, some of them, uh start going to classes, start learning the language, start taking an interest in learning the language.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_02: And when I was uh when I was I I arrived in Weyapan and that would have been about 10 years before that, I I was able to uh find just one teenager who spoke now, who had been who had grown up with his uh grandparents.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_02: So this is a big deal that 80 80 young uh teenagers decide that they want to learn the language and that they want to spend their uh Saturdays uh in a very tiny, uh noisy classroom uh studying this.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then uh they are the ones who founded this uh uh Chimalnahuatlatolle um organization, I guess it's a sort of a civic association, um with the with the purpose of continuing that work after the the Stipend uh the scholarship program ended.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_02: So in a way, I think that that is the the best outcome that could have been from a course like this, that it actually motivates young people um to do something like that and take it up as something.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_02: They're still working on it, they're still carrying out activities, and when I go to Wayapan, they can they converse with me in Nahuatl and uh and uh they use the language.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_02: It was a very positive uh thing.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_06: So what do you think of because you you you devote like a whole chapter to us wacky Chiganos that are uh uh reclaiming the Nahuat language as a heritage language, and you mention uh specifically Jan uh Garcia and his organization.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_06: Um what do you think of or groups like that?
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_06: Because man, that guy is he's he's as close to fluent as anybody I've I've met, man.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_06: He's he's really good.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, he's he's he's so impressive.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I and uh I sort of I I'm um I'm mentioning some of the sort of what you what what you might call the the political tensions that sometimes arise between this nationalist approach to Nahuatl and uh how that is often used in some uh Chicano communities as as a way of connecting to a Mexican national heritage, uh and also at other times to a Mexican indigenous national heritage that is less uh state-driven.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then in other cases, uh where it almost becomes a uh, well, it's not not almost, it becomes a way to actually engage directly with indigenous communities in Mexico and build solidarity with indigenous organizations in Mexico.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that Jan is a very good example because he participates in political meetings uh with now speakers, now communities in Mexico, and uh the work that he does in in LA is used by uh now speakers in communities in Mexico, so they can read the like Frankenstein that he translated with uh Doriano uh De Posteco.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_02: They can use his uh comic book materials and all those things.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_02: So he's actually engaging directly with those communities and building these sort of of um practical relations of strengthening the language that I sometimes uh some of the other situations that becomes a little bit more um uh uh tenuous or conflictive when there are these ideas about uh that come from from this very nationalist perspective of there's one right way of speaking the Nahuatl, and the people who come from Mexico up here up here, like they're not doing it right.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_02: So basically you you can see some some cases where where uh now speakers are again being told that they're not gonna be able to do that.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, telling people how to speak their own language.
• 58:44
  unknown: Yeah.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_02: And and I think that that is that is that has some that's has some of the same problems that uh Juan Luna Carnas uh had when he came to Weyapan in the in the in the 40s.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm trying to be sort of pointing out both what I think is is is really uh incredibly strong uh ways of of building the solidarity from the bottom up between indigenous groups uh of different types on both sides of uh the river, uh and also some of the tensions that come from this nationalist heritage of uh championing Nahuatl as the language of the Mexican nation.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, absolutely.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_06: And I know that Jan, in the newest version of his book, and I have it right here, he has this book, Learn Nahuatl, Language of the Aztecs and Modern Nahuaz.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_06: Um, he went all in with this um the modern how does he refer to it?
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_06: The modern Inali uh orthography.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_06: And in your book, you you refer to you call it the analytic orthography.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_06: Is that is that comparable to the modern Inali?
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_02: Because I know both what what you're pointing out as so at the point when I was writing the book, the Inali hadn't decided yet.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_02: And they they haven't published the final version of the of their their choices yet, right?
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that's why I don't call it that in the book, because they had not uh made that choice yet when I was reading.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_05: And for our listeners who might not know what Inali stands for, what is that?
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas, so the National Institute of Indigenous Languages, which is sort of the main government buddy in Mexico that uh is developing support for indigenous communities, uh the languages of indigenous communities specifically.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_05: Um but in a sense, are they trying to standardize the way that Nahuatl is written?
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_05: And in that sense, is that kind of in conflict of like what we were talking about earlier, the the the Patrias Chicas and the way that they see themselves as speaking their own languages in their own communities?
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes, they are.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and of course there are good reasons for wanting a single uh orthography.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_02: There are good reasons for doing that.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but the problem is that when you have communities where they already have a writing tradition and they're using a different one, they that they like and that they're attached to, and they have already taught children and so on, they're not going to be happy when they have to change it, right?
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_02: Or when somebody asks them to.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_02: And especially what nobody in Mexico likes that the government comes and tells them what to do.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, which is also the case in the US.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_02: Understand right.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_02: I was gonna say that's basically everywhere.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_02: So some people may in fact choose the other one just because that you not least says to use that one, right?
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, people are like that.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_05: You know, as a Chicano, I can appreciate that because we Chicanos like we um have our own Chicano English and our own Chicano Spanish, and we spell things a certain way and pronounce things a certain way that don't conform to English uh language standards and Spanish, or at least Mexican Spanish standards, and so we get it from both ends in terms of the criticism.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_05: And so I can appreciate what these communities are going through when they have some outside entity coming in and saying, You have to do it this way now because we have decided that it's the best way.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_05: So, uh, in one sense, I I mean I do understand what the Inali is doing, they're trying to standardize the way that it's written and taught so that there's there can be uh an agreement across the board where people can communicate effectively and not wonder what the other one is saying.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, but on the other hand, I also like sympathize with the communities and say, No, but this is the way that we're doing it, and you should respect that.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_05: So you have to find a balance in there somewhere.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_05: And what do you think that that is?
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_02: So, what I always say is that it doesn't matter the how you write it, it matters that you write it.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like, so if people can read what you write uh in Nahuatl and it reaches your audience, and they feel that that is the right way that that they want to read their language, then you've do you're doing it right, right?
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_02: And and I also always say it doesn't matter which writing system you choose, someone will eventually tell you it's the wrong one.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, believe me.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I've been using the K and the W since like 1998, you know, it's so contested that people get angry, and then when I saw the Nali version come out and they use the K and the W, I've I kind of felt vindicated, like yes.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_06: But even then, um, as you've pointed out uh once or twice, Magnus, I don't use the S, I use the Z.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_06: So even the way I write is like a mixture, like my own personal preference.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_02: That's the that's the Juan Luna Cardinals in you still, yeah, yeah, it really is.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_05: So Juan Luna Cardana's uh had his good moments and his bad moments.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_05: That was one of the good ones.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_06: His Z were his Z were on point.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_06: Um well I was speaking to um uh Victoriano uh Deposteco and uh and I I gave him a copy of uh of the calendar that that we publish and he looked at it and he noticed he he gave me some feedback on like a better way to to spell some of the words to write out some of the words, but he actually liked the Z too.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, and and he asked me why do you use the Z?
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_06: And I said, Well, I think it looks it's just personal preference, but I think it looks stronger than an S.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_06: So just like as a graphic designer, when I was laying it out, I just liked the way the sharp edges of the Z just appealed to me visually, you know.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_06: And he was like, Yeah, yeah, I could see that.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_06: But he had some really good feedback on um on the way that some of the words were being written because a lot of times when you're using the inali, like that strict inali style, you lose the slight, like that H almost that aspiration, um, mach quili.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_06: And he was like, You're you're not getting that H in the Mach Quili.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_06: So he was like, maybe added an H before that K, just so you that so that that sound is present.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_06: Um, so yeah, it's it's just interesting, like having all these different conversations about orthographies and what should be used, because when people talk about, well, you should only there, there's like these pute unquote purists who are like, no, you should just use the way that the Spanish priests were writing it.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, Well, the Spanish priests were using symbols that we don't even use anymore, you know, and they and no, and none of them were very consistent in the Palocci were uh none of them were consistent in how they wrote it, so they there's not one classical knowledge uh that was actually being used.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_02: The the systems that are now not classical now are recent uh systematizations of those conventions, right?
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_02: They've been standardized by ones by Andrews, uh Campbell and Kartunen is the one system that has the the ages and and then there's the other system that uh Michel Launay uses that comes from the the Jesuit tradition that marks the the glottal stops with with the accent marks, right?
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_05: But it also depends on the language that the frame of of mind.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_05: Like if you're an English speaker and you see an H in a certain context, uh it'll it'll sound like a hard H, and in certain contexts it might not.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_05: And the same thing in Spanish, the H is sometimes silent in Spanish, and so it you have to know the rule, so you have to have some familiarity with the language before you can even begin to understand those.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_05: It's complicated.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_02: But I always think of like so when Shakespeare was writing, there was no no such thing as standard English orthography.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like he never had to take a spelling class, he never had to have anyone tell him don't spell it like that.
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_02: He was just doing it the way he liked, right?
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_02: And imagine if if half of his time had been spent on uh discussing with other other people how he was supposed to write every word instead of just writing, how much Shakespeare would we have?
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_02: Well, probably a lot less, right?
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_02: He he had the freedom, the orthographic freedom to just write.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and of course, today we we have the uh like we have now a standard, well, a couple of different English standards, right?
• 1:07:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I had to change some things also in the way that I had been taught to write English because in in the book, because there's British English and there's American English and all those things, right?
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_02: So um, so that makes it a lot easier, we don't have to choose, but it's not an uh necessary to write great literature or to read it or appreciate it to have a completely standardized orthography.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_02: Neither do we, as long as we can read and write.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, so back off, purists.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_06: Well, in the book, something that I wanted to touch on that really interested me and fascinated me is you talk about these uh cases of Nawa rebellions and um just communities rising up.
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_06: But there was this instance where a uh conflict broke out in Puebla in the starting in the 1960s and it was all about you know land and and reciprocity and the way that the story is told, it it even includes um Laloc, basically, as Laloc.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah, it's it's a it's a pretty amazing.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_02: Can you speak just a little I mean just what you have in the book, you know, you don't have to uh divulge maybe I can I can just give it a little bit of of context is that in the in the 70s and 80s there were actually quite a few uprisings in indigenous uh communities in in Mexico and in in now-speaking areas also.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um and um historically or historians have often described these and sociologists as uh campesino rebellions or agrarian movements and stuff like that.
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_02: But most of them, which is actually the case if you look at most of the agrarian movements in Mexico, I would say that may be an unwarranted uh um generalization, but many of them were in fact uh both agrarian but also indigenous, um, like people who spoke indigenous languages.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_02: And what Taggart shows is that not only did they were they uh campesinos who spoke uh Nahuatl, they were also actually understanding their own movement in ways that are specific to Nahuatl culture.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so in this case, in in uh Huitziland de Sardan, it was a it's a case it's a town where sort of um after um after Mexican independence, these um indigenous republics, Indian republics, which was the way that indigenous communities governed themselves in the colonial period, they were uh dismantled, uh, which also meant that the the protections against having uh outsiders move into the communities were often dropped.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_02: And that meant that many uh indigenous communities very quickly had an elite of um non-indigenous outsiders come in and buy up the land and become the majority politically and and uh in some cases also numerically, and that's what had happened in Witzilan de Serdan.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um so there was an elite that a political elite of within this system of in Mexico they they often call caciquismos or uh caci casco, where you have like political leaders that let their uh political leadership go through sort of uh uh and and inherit it to their kids or their uh family members and form little dynasties and and and rule a community over several generations to their own benefit, of course.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_02: And often to the detriment of small landowners that are often the ones that that are indigenous and speak indigenous languages.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_02: But in Witziland, this conflict uh became very strong, and actually in the 70s and 80s became an armed conflict, uh with many deaths and and um it it's it it it was actually very terrible, and and you can see in the way that Taggart uh described it that they it it was very hard to talk about it because how can you talk about a political conflict that may have caused uh deaths in your family, that may have put yourself in harm's way if you talk about the wrong people in the wrong way.
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_02: And what he sort of shows is that they use these um moral fables or yeah, like an allegory allegories uh that draw on Mesoamerican ideas about how you should behave, about consequences when you break religious or moral taboos.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_02: So if you are uh it it one of the stories tell about a president, a municipal president, which is sort of the mayor, um, who breaks various moral taboos, and that can be just something like not being res uh uh showing reciprocity.
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_02: If someone gives you something and you don't give back, that's a bad thing.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and stuff like that he was doing in in in different ways in the in in the story, and then he experiences the consequences, which is there's actually a couple of different versions of those stories, but one of them is a flood because he basically manages to piss off a person who has the rain god as his uh Nawal, his or his uh his or his soul representative over what we can call those kinds of how I think is actually in the called in that in that community.
• 1:13:19
  SPEAKER_02: So on the day, if you're born on the day that's ruled by the by the rain god, then you can have a rain god soul, which means you're a rain god.
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_02: And those are the kinds of people that he manages to to uh piss off uh by breaking these um reciprocity to booths, and then the town is flooded, and only the people, the poor people who live up on the high sides of the hills are the ones that are saved, right?
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_02: So so there's a there's a uh a justice, a retribution uh that saves the the poor people in the story.
• 1:13:54
  SPEAKER_02: And and that's a way for these Nawa peoples uh in Wisiland to talk about these political conflicts without talking about them politically, um making them into something that in some ways it's is actually a stronger claim, right, or a stronger way of of telling the story by making it something that is epic, divine, uh spiritual, moral at the same time.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that that really shows that that that that these uh agrarian conflicts, at least by some of the people who participated in them, were understood as also an a kind of an ethnic or cultural clash, right?
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_02: That goes back to those first uh conflicts from the the colonial encounter.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_05: I was I was I was gonna ask you, I was I mean, this is reminiscent of like, for instance, um uh the Discourses of the Elders, and there's a book that came out not that long ago recently by Sebastian Purcell uh called The Discourses of the Elders, the Aztec Wawetlatoli, a first English translation.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_05: And I wanted to see if you had read it and to get your opinion on this book, and um because I I find it interesting in some parts and and and in other parts, I was curious about some of the things that he has to say, but I wanted to get your take on it if you've read it.
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_02: I uh read about 20% of it.
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_02: I bought it recently and I I got it uh in I read the the four the preface and the foreword and then I read some of the translations.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I have to say I was prepared to hate it.
• 1:15:37
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, but uh it I didn't okay when I was reading it.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I it uh I I I read some other stuff he had written, and and I've in generally I have a a little bit of a problem with this the more uh Nawa philosophy, scholarship tradition, and that some of that like that basically I I don't like that very much either in his in the preface, right?
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I think he says some things that I would disagree with there, but right then when I came to his translations and I was prepared to say, okay, this is gonna be terrible, but it was it was decent, it was good.
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_02: Good.
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't find any like aggravating things that I would have called.
• 1:16:16
  SPEAKER_02: So you would recommend the book, despite your the translation part looks to me, not having read all of it yet, but the translation looks absolutely reasonable.
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_02: And this is a book that uh I think that there's uh I'm not completely sure if it's the same version or and that's why this is called the first translation of the Wimit Letholia because there's another one by by uh Maxwell and Hansen, which was uh absolutely that's probably the meanest, nastiest, and also completely correct uh review of a book ever is the rebook review of their translation of the the uh the other Wimit Litholian.
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_02: So I was thinking this could go bad, but it it it looked very okay.
• 1:17:02
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, yeah, because I'm I'm like halfway through the book myself, and and there's some things that I find interesting, like um the way that because this was obviously uh recorded after the Spanish invasion, right?
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_05: And so they're trying to preserve some of the wisdom of the elders and and how how people should behave in public, right?
• 1:17:23
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, you know, you talked about taboos and about the systems of reciprocity in the community, and that's kind of what this is about as well.
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_05: It's teaching the young people not to forget some of the ways that that the Nawa or uh Mishika Steka communities uh behaved in public, you know, how to how to treat others, how to how to carry yourself in public so that you don't have uh you don't give people something negative to say about you.
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_05: You know, don't be don't be chatty, don't be gossipy, you know, carry yourself with respect and dignity, all those ways of comportment, right?
• 1:17:58
  SPEAKER_05: But then they also interject um the the imposed ideas of Catholicism and belief in in the one God and Jesus and the Lord and all this stuff.
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_05: And and so I'm wondering if there's if if some of these um wisdom of the elders prior to the imposition of Christianity where they are going back to tlaloc, might they have been uh more geared towards specific uh um uh teteo uh that that pertain to whatever it is that that's being discussed.
• 1:18:32
  SPEAKER_05: For instance, if it's related to rain, it would be tlaloc, if it's related to the earth, it would be something else, right?
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_05: Do you can you do you have any information on that, any knowledge on on it's it's super hard to to to to say.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_02: I think that what I I um I think you can sort of rescue some of that from those because all the texts that we have for obvious reasons are infused with Christianity to various degrees, yeah.
• 1:18:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that that very competent historians, uh of which there are many, are exactly doing that work of finding out what so what would this have been like without the Christianity?
• 1:19:11
  SPEAKER_02: What could we probably by looking at other sources and how they represent those those uh moral principles?
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_02: How could we we uh propose that an original system of morality and and and and um justice and all those things would have looked, right?
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_02: But but it's you can't do it in a way where you say this is the original it's always gonna be an approximation, right?
• 1:19:38
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it it that's the only way you can get at it, right?
• 1:19:41
  SPEAKER_06: Well, another thing we have to understand is so the these Nawa informants, right?
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_06: They had all been educated in the Colegio the Tlatelolco, right?
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that there are some other ones, but yeah, that was one of the main ones.
• 1:19:55
  SPEAKER_06: And so they were well, my point being that they were learning Latin, like these things were learning Latin Greek and Hebrew because of that, they were engaging with a lot of literature in Latin, so they were adopting like the rhetorical styles of these Latin authors.
• 1:20:14
  SPEAKER_06: So you also have that, right?
• 1:20:16
  SPEAKER_06: Like, like, is this really how they spoke?
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_02: And they're also and there are also kids who were in many cases taken from their parents at like 10 years old and brought into a monastery, raised like with with uh heavy discipline by uh friars who inculcated the right ways to do everything and tell them that this is the true culture, this is how you should be doing it.
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, that's also what they were writing with, right?
• 1:20:42
  SPEAKER_02: So um it's it's a very hard task, and you can sometimes find some texts that are a little bit seem to be a little bit freer of it, like just the way that you, if you look at the at the Florentine codex, if you read the Nahuatl side, there's much less Christianity than in the in the Spanish side, which of course Sagun knew that the censors of the Inquisition or whatever body of the church would be reading those to find out whether he was teaching Christianity correctly to them and telling them that their own stuff was bad.
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_06: Um I always liked that, that you could compare the side by side and be like, Well, that's not really what that's saying.
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_06: You know, what they wrote in Nahuatl isn't exactly what it's saying in Spanish, so that's pretty cool, you know.
• 1:21:26
  SPEAKER_02: It was like sometimes you have the annals and you have other types of texts where you can see that they've had a little bit more freedom to do what they had done, or that's a greater amount of input from elders who might not have been uh been indoctrinated as much, and so on.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_06: Well, the thing that gets under my skin is when people will just outright dismiss things like the Florentine Codex and just be like, Well, that's a post-conquest document, so you can't believe anything it says.
• 1:21:55
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, What yeah, well, that's a that's a good that's a great way of giving yourself the leeway to invent whatever you like.
• 1:22:04
  SPEAKER_06: Exactly, and that's what they that's almost because that's what you're left with, like yeah.
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_06: So I'll tell them, all right, so you don't you don't want to read the Florentine because it's post-conquest and it can't be trusted, but you trust this guy who's telling you, you know, whatever that Sit Lali means the first star or whatever, you know, the whatever nonsense they're making up.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_05: That's because they're elders, Curly, I thought you knew.
• 1:22:30
  SPEAKER_06: But that's a good way to keep people in the dark, too, is you you encourage them not to read stuff like this, so they're not engaging with it in a meaningful way, and they're not coming away with some understanding of what the ancestors actually thought, and it makes it easier to control, right?
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_06: You tell them, well, you can't trust that, you just trust me.
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_06: I'll I'll tell you.
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_02: I'll I'll tell you what it yeah, and I think like what I like to do, and I haven't done with this book yet, uh, because uh is that I like to read the translations side by side and say, so what is Leon Borti and Librado Silva Galliana saying?
• 1:23:06
  SPEAKER_02: What is uh Sebastian Percell saying, what is Craig uh Hansen and uh Judith Mac Maxwell saying, uh and and how what are what is the actual text in the North side, right?
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_02: That that lets you form your own opinion.
• 1:23:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's uh it's sad, but there's still not enough now scholarship on YouTube that we can just uh watch YouTube videos.
• 1:23:29
  SPEAKER_02: We do have to do our own research in the old-fashioned way.
• 1:23:33
  SPEAKER_06: Shocking.
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_06: Well, getting back to way up on which is where you have the most lived experience, right?
• 1:23:41
  SPEAKER_06: Um, you mentioned that that they're governed now, they're governed by uh Consejo Indigina, uh an indigenous council, yes, and that their council spokesperson is also referred to as uh Tlatwani.
• 1:23:58
  SPEAKER_06: And do they do they use like all you know Nahuatl um?
• 1:24:05
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah, do they use the other terms?
• 1:24:08
  SPEAKER_06: Just just Tlatwani?
• 1:24:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:24:10
  SPEAKER_02: So so what they what they had is that they they used to have sort of the as almost most uh municipal councils have in in Mexico, is that they have this the colonial Spanish cabildo structure, uh where you have like a presidente municipal before it was a gobernador, and then you have like a different offices, you can have síndicos, you can have fiscales jueces, yeah, jueces, and then you have all these different uh positions in the cabildo, and what they when they became an independent municipal indigenous municipality, because that's what the their way to becoming independent was only because they were recognized as an indigenous community, because usually they would only allow uh new municipalities to be formed with many more um inhabitants.
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_02: So when they did that, they changed the structure.
• 1:25:07
  SPEAKER_02: So there were two different factions in Wayapan, one that just wanted to keep the same structure and just become a normal municipality with a uh presidente and uh and a cabildo, and then another group that says, No, if we're gonna be an indigenous uh municipality, we're also going to have an indigenous type uh structure of government, which means that we will have a council of elders and then we will we will have a speaker.
• 1:25:34
  SPEAKER_02: So, what they have now is this an uh council of elders and a speaker, and then they also have, of course, officials with specific tasks in the government that sort of like you need someone to take care of the um seguridad pública or whatever, right?
• 1:25:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um so they have that, and then they also have all the other little uh groups or not big groups that are the ones that take care of the bienes comunales, so that's the common property that is held by the community, and and that's it like a different organization that has its own democratic uh system, the the groups that take care of the water supply and all those.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_02: So they have like a much more um uh like a very grassroots democratic system in that way, except that they do go to elections to vote for who is going to be the uh Tlatwani or um presidente municipal, is what it's called from the outside, right?
• 1:26:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so they vote for that, um, and then they bring in and in the in the other days, they the whoever was voted as the president would bring in their planilla to take up the cavito.
• 1:26:46
  SPEAKER_02: So they would put their own political faction in power, and they still do that.
• 1:26:51
  SPEAKER_02: So in a in a certain way, it's very similar to what was there before, it's just called something else.
• 1:26:57
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's a different way that they're using the public assemblies um to make decisions in a way that's similar to how they all have always done it, um, but with uh somewhat higher stakes.
• 1:27:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because um before when Weyapan was a part of the municipality of the Tela, uh you would vote about certain things and then the government would make the decisions.
• 1:27:24
  SPEAKER_02: But here they do have also some a sort of uh direct democracy for many types of of decisions, where they meet up at the plaza and the people who are there make the decision, right?
• 1:27:35
  SPEAKER_02: And that that's a very direct form of democracy, and also one that can, in some cases, be gamed a little bit by whoever brings the most supporters, right?
• 1:27:44
  SPEAKER_05: When I was reading this part of your book, it reminded me somewhat of uh a recent episode that we did.
• 1:27:50
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know if you listened to it, um, where we talk about the segunda consigna de Annahuac back in the late 80s and how um the Activists, the political activists around Mexico City were organizing themselves in kind of a similar way, where they were electing their own sort of um uh governments uh that were very localized to communities, to certain sections of the city, where they were gonna, you know, it was a very populist kind of way of approaching government, which they were trying to model, supposedly uh based on their understanding of uh Mexica Astric indigenous ways of a political organization, and that's kind of like they were following the tradition of them and mandato de Cuatemo, and now this is the second one.
• 1:28:34
  SPEAKER_05: And I know that there's probably no connection between what's going on at that time in Mexico City and these communities, but I don't know, there's there's probably some connection in there somewhere.
• 1:28:44
  SPEAKER_02: I think the connection is that this is an old way of organizing politics in in indigenous communities in Mexico, that probably it's very similar to how many communities governed themselves prior to colonization, in the sense that they would also have assemblies.
• 1:29:03
  SPEAKER_02: They would also, in many cases, we know that they must have had some sort of uh of not just like we think of these uh almost as little little dictatorships, right?
• 1:29:13
  SPEAKER_02: When we think of of city-states with a ruler, uh but many of them were confederations with several factions uh of of um of society uh working together to find out the ways of they wanted to organize.
• 1:29:27
  SPEAKER_02: So Tlaxcala, the Tlaxcala Confederacy, of course, is is is an an example of that, but it looks like a lot of of Altepet may in fact have been organized by different Kalpulies who came together and sort of made these sort of uh more democratic.
• 1:29:44
  SPEAKER_02: I I didn't want to say democratic, but it's it's closer to like if our populist or popular or communal decisions is communal, is actually the right word because that is communalism, communalism is exactly what what uh in political theorists in Mexico have been developing as the language in which to describe this indigenous form of government, yeah.
• 1:30:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's communalism, communality, communalism, and yeah, and that's also why I I tend to go with instead of of of calling dialects, uh, do what uh the the late um great Mexican linguist uh Leopoldo Valinias called them, which is communalicts, so the language of the community, right?
• 1:30:26
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, that's cool.
• 1:30:28
  SPEAKER_06: Add that to the toolbox, yeah.
• 1:30:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a that's uh that I was very happy to add that.
• 1:30:33
  SPEAKER_06: One of the things that always irks me when I'm you know, you read a history book about the Mexican Revolution, when they refer to Zapata, they always kind of gloss over you they'll say that well, he was he was named like the the head of his community council, right?
• 1:30:50
  SPEAKER_06: And in in reality, he was named Calpuleque.
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_06: And to me, like those two things mean very different things.
• 1:30:57
  SPEAKER_06: And and if you're named a kalpuleke, then that if you talk about that, instead of just saying, you know, well, yeah, he was council president and then he did this.
• 1:31:07
  SPEAKER_06: But once your frame of reference shifts to Zapata was named Kalpuleke, then that opens up this door to like, oh wow, so what does that mean?
• 1:31:15
  SPEAKER_06: And how far back does that go?
• 1:31:18
  SPEAKER_06: Like, were they they were drawing from these traditional ways of of community governance uh during the Mexican?
• 1:31:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think they were still practicing.
• 1:31:26
  SPEAKER_02: He he was born in Anquilco at a time when most people in that area spoke Nahuatl.
• 1:31:30
  SPEAKER_02: That was the Nahuatl community he was born into.
• 1:31:33
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I think that they still had that government there, and that it was it's just a continuation of the colonial uh indigenous governance that was still active there.
• 1:31:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and I and I and precisely I agree that it's important to have the terms because it's not the same thing when we when we come and describe a community using like the Spanish comil builder terms, if those people who are in the system are using a different set of terms themselves, because that means that they're they're understanding it differently.
• 1:32:06
  SPEAKER_06: Uh Calpule is not just the same as uh council president or whatever council president or whatever, right?
• 1:32:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's it it's not.
• 1:32:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it it glosses over that entire uh indigenous uh political, social, um, and and and also linguistic infrastructure that that has that operates in me.
• 1:32:30
  SPEAKER_06: I see a lot of people online make the argument that there's no way that Sapata spoke Nahuat.
• 1:32:36
  SPEAKER_06: And I find that unlikely considering where he was born and where he grew up and the majority of his his troops.
• 1:32:46
  SPEAKER_06: Um I I would think that if he wasn't fluent, then he he had to have had at least a working understanding of the language and had been able to communicate with people.
• 1:32:55
  SPEAKER_05: Well, don't we have like a like a record of a speech that he supposedly gave in Spanish?
• 1:33:01
  SPEAKER_05: I mean not Spanish, I mean uh Nahuatl.
• 1:33:02
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, well, there's the book, the the manifestos of Zapata and Nahuatl, and then you have first first hand uh uh testimony, right, uh from when they went into Milpa Alta and and allegedly Zapata uh addressed the entire community in Nahuatl.
• 1:33:20
  SPEAKER_02: The tradition of of wanting Zapata to not be uh an indigenous leader and to not be uh an outspeaker um comes from a mixture of some historical um theoretical frameworks, particularly a Marxist way of reading Mexican uh revolutionary history, where you want to have uh classes of production forces opposing each other so it becomes agrarianist.
• 1:33:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and then it's less important or perhaps not important at all that they, the campesino class, were also uh in many places majority indigenous, uh, because what you see as the the important part of the conflict is is the class perspective, the class struggle.
• 1:34:09
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's another uh another part of Mexican historiograph historiography that wants to depict Zapata as a dandy, yeah, fancing around in fancy clothes and what uh in Guernavaca, and and he did that on some photos that are very well known, right?
• 1:34:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh with with full uh like a bicharro, yeah.
• 1:34:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um but but that is in itself, like why wouldn't indigenous people do that if they had the money to dress up fancy?
• 1:34:39
  SPEAKER_02: Of course they would.
• 1:34:40
  SPEAKER_02: If they were like the leader of an entire like he at one point he had most of Morelos, parts of Puebla, parts of Oaxaca, parts of uh of Guerrero, uh maybe not Oaxaca, uh in his uh actual like he was the leader of all that.
• 1:34:54
  SPEAKER_02: Why wouldn't he dress up fancy?
• 1:34:55
  SPEAKER_02: Like of course he would.
• 1:34:57
  SPEAKER_05: Um and of course you wouldn't see these historians make this the the the same argument from uh the opposite perspective, right?
• 1:35:04
  SPEAKER_05: Why is general um such and such, you know, not like a campesino if he's if he's leading campesinos, right?
• 1:35:12
  SPEAKER_05: Like it's uh it's always the criticism towards the indigenous that that they're called the dandies or they're called the show-offs or this and that to try to diminish their stature, right?
• 1:35:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's essentially a racist argument.
• 1:35:24
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's been some I have I have a uh I have another uh chapter out uh recently in which I talk about the the uh demographic transition in Morelos away from uh being a majority indigenous state.
• 1:35:40
  SPEAKER_02: And what turns out is that Womek, who is one of the historians who has has uh written a biography of Zapata in which he describes him as as not indigenous, uh is based on bad a bad reading of the Mexican census uh of 1900 and of 19, I forget if it's 10 or 20, but uh what happens is that there's a shift in the way that they categorize speakers.
• 1:36:09
  SPEAKER_02: So in the 1900s, uh 1900 census, when you they went out to ask people, do you speak what do you speak?
• 1:36:18
  SPEAKER_02: What is your language?
• 1:36:20
  SPEAKER_02: Then if the person said, I speak uh mexicano, but I also speak Spanish, then they would only put down Spanish, and the census uh instructions tells the pen people who are taking the census if they do speak Spanish, you put Spanish, and then it doesn't matter what other languages they also speak.
• 1:36:39
  SPEAKER_02: So anyone who who could speak Spanish well enough to answer the survey would be put down as a Spanish speaker.
• 1:36:46
  SPEAKER_02: That of course means since most uh indigenous peoples are bilingual and speak both Spanish and the indigenous language, they would have been taken down as Spanish speakers in the 1900s.
• 1:36:59
  SPEAKER_06: Like a demographic erasure of indigenous people, yeah.
• 1:37:04
  SPEAKER_02: And then uh yeah, they're they're erased basically, right?
• 1:37:07
  SPEAKER_02: From a that's not what they're counting.
• 1:37:10
  SPEAKER_02: They were, of course, at that point they were interested in how many people we can talk to in Spanish.
• 1:37:14
  SPEAKER_02: They weren't interested in finding out how many indigenous people are there.
• 1:37:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but then after the revolution, they count again.
• 1:37:21
  SPEAKER_02: And then they count, now they count both.
• 1:37:25
  SPEAKER_02: So they count the indigenous language and Spanish, right?
• 1:37:30
  SPEAKER_02: So now you can if you're bilingual, you're you're an indigenous language speaker in the survey after that, and the numbers are almost the same, which is crazy, right?
• 1:37:41
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what they that's why uh uh woman ends up saying, Well, actually, basically nothing happened.
• 1:37:47
  SPEAKER_02: There was like 10% indigenous people in uh 1900, and there are like 10 p 10 indigenous people after the revolution, so basically it was the same.
• 1:37:59
  SPEAKER_02: But what is the difference hidden in these numbers is that the first sentence is only monolingual Nahuatl speakers in 1900?
• 1:38:08
  SPEAKER_02: 10% of Morelos, more or less, only spoke Nahuatl, and you could not have a conversation with them in Spanish or they would have been put down as Spanish speakers.
• 1:38:17
  SPEAKER_02: And in in that basically would probably mean that more than half of the population of Morelos in 1900 would have spoken Nahuatl.
• 1:38:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right, and after them, it's only 10% that speak any Nawat at all.
• 1:38:32
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 1:38:34
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a huge demographic shift, like uh a very large group of Nahuatl speakers that disappeared from the state.
• 1:38:42
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, we know why they disappeared because they killed them and they said that they were going to kill.
• 1:38:47
  SPEAKER_06: Well, one of the most boneheaded arguments I've ever heard about Zapata is well, he couldn't be indigenous, he has a big old bigote mustache, yeah.
• 1:38:57
  SPEAKER_06: And I'm like, which is could be which is uh an odd comment to make.
• 1:39:04
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, it's like tell me you've you don't hang out with indigenous people.
• 1:39:08
  SPEAKER_02: Well, well, people do that even like with pre-colonial stuff.
• 1:39:11
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's Ketzel Coedl is uh European because you he has a beard.
• 1:39:16
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah, it's it's ridiculous.
• 1:39:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that's like that's just it again, it's just racism, and and it's everywhere, right?
• 1:39:24
  SPEAKER_02: People can grow beard anywhere.
• 1:39:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's just a question of how many grow beard mustache, degrees of beardness, yeah, yeah.
• 1:39:34
  SPEAKER_05: Mine's all patchy.
• 1:39:36
  SPEAKER_05: I can't, I I couldn't.
• 1:39:37
  SPEAKER_05: It's like it's like that meme uh of the family guy where they show the the color code, and you know, but instead of the colors, it's the beard, yeah.
• 1:39:45
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, the mustache size, yeah.
• 1:39:47
  SPEAKER_06: The mustache and the beard size.
• 1:39:49
  SPEAKER_06: So, how many people today with according to the best data, how many people speak Nahuat as um their first language?
• 1:40:02
  SPEAKER_02: Or speak Nahuat at all, actually?
• 1:40:09
  SPEAKER_02: I don't have that number uh exact in my head, but I know that it's almost up around two million.
• 1:40:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I thought.
• 1:40:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, that identify as not speakers, and that um that can include any degree of speaking, uh, because it's self-identified, right?
• 1:40:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's a it's a very big shift from from the 2020 and 2010 censuses, it's going up the number, um, which I think has to do in in a in an important degree with it no longer being as stigmatized to say yes, I do speak Nahuatl.
• 1:40:49
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, in wayapan, I can see that people when I came there in the 2000s, people say, No, I don't really speak it.
• 1:40:55
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just I don't know, don't ask, don't ask me, go somewhere else, right?
• 1:40:59
  SPEAKER_02: Go over to those guys who were with uh Juan Luna Cárdenas because they're they say they're the best, right?
• 1:41:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but but now people will say yes, proudly, yes, I speak it.
• 1:41:09
  SPEAKER_02: This is my language, and I think the same is happening many places in Mexico where people who had been uh taught to be ashamed of it now feel empowered to say, Yes, this is my language.
• 1:41:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm proud of my language.
• 1:41:23
  SPEAKER_05: So, what qualifies a person to be considered as someone who is of a person who speaks now?
• 1:41:29
  SPEAKER_05: Do they have to speak it fluently?
• 1:41:31
  SPEAKER_05: Do they can they be like chicanos and you know speak it half Spanish and half Nahuat?
• 1:41:36
  SPEAKER_05: Or I mean, how how do they measure that?
• 1:41:39
  SPEAKER_02: No, they don't.
• 1:41:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's entirely self-identifying.
• 1:41:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so it does include uh like I don't know, college students who took a uh language course.
• 1:41:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they're also included if they choose to identify as non-speakers in the survey.
• 1:41:53
  SPEAKER_03: Interesting.
• 1:41:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um but that would have to be a lot of those to take the numbers up from about uh just above one million to almost two, right?
• 1:42:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that would be a lot of college students uh claiming to be non-speakers.
• 1:42:06
  SPEAKER_02: But maybe, maybe uh there are some.
• 1:42:08
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if uh yeah.
• 1:42:12
  SPEAKER_02: So and there's no way of knowing.
• 1:42:14
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 1:42:15
  SPEAKER_06: In in your in your book, you do touch on this idea of and I don't see them as often now, but there were these memes going around that were um like mock nahuat, you call it.
• 1:42:28
  SPEAKER_06: Uh just kind of racially tinged memes uh meant to make fun of uh at least the way I took it was to make fun of indigenous people and the and the way that they would try to speak Spanish.
• 1:42:42
  SPEAKER_06: And you show some of these these uh these memes on here, and it's basically taking a Spanish word and adding TL to the end of it.
• 1:42:52
  SPEAKER_06: So it's very lazy humor one, and uh it's just I don't know, it's not funny and it's shitty.
• 1:42:59
  SPEAKER_06: Like I just get annoyed when I see this stuff.
• 1:43:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I should say luckily those memes are not really circulating anymore, they're dead, but I do see places where Mexican youths trying to be edgy are producing them in writing on like Reddit and those kinds of places.
• 1:43:18
  SPEAKER_05: But that's an old Mexican tradition.
• 1:43:19
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, growing back even as a kid, I remember hearing people jokingly, you know, saying things in in Spanish but adding uh suffix to it in in jest, right?
• 1:43:33
  SPEAKER_05: Um maybe uh you know, as a kid you don't really think much of it, but yeah, if if you really take it out to its uh extreme, you can see the the racial connotations that it has.
• 1:43:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:43:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think that's that's of course it it it in some contexts it it can be uh innocent to do that, and in other contexts, specifically contexts where it contributes to circulating, like those memes are very clearly like sort of made to mock, right?
• 1:44:03
  SPEAKER_02: And they may not always be meant to do that, but at the same time, they sort of index uh they they sort of point towards like ideas of Indian backwardness of whatever, like uh these old stereotypes of that that like uh in Mexico is associated with the word indio, for example, which is what all nobody really uh wants to use that word anymore because it's become so derogatory and so loaded with negative stereotypes that that of course that word is a purely a slur in Mexico now, uh which it wasn't in the colonial period, for example, it was uh um so those stereotypes are being circulated sometimes in those memes, even when they're not the present, because just by hearing the TL at the end of what some word it brings that stereotype into mind, which is how these things work, right?
• 1:45:01
  SPEAKER_06: Um, and then the people that are making these memes can't even pronounce the TL sound correctly, anyway.
• 1:45:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so that's yeah, that's the other there's the one of the things that I have there is is that it I think it's part of this cultural struggle in Mexico where where words like whitexican and uh chairo and uh uh naco and all these kinds of words that some groups of Mexicans use to mock other groups or stigmatize or or focus on social distinctions between different different types of class identities.
• 1:45:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think it plays into that, right?
• 1:45:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um so um the the idea being also of course like at the at the current political stage where you have like leftist government that is uh pro-indigenous rights, at least in discourse, and then you have like uh uh classical neoliberal conservative um uh uh faction that is more about business, right?
• 1:46:09
  SPEAKER_02: Money business, and don't really promote cultural values unless they they tie into their business interests.
• 1:46:17
  SPEAKER_02: And those are sort of facing off by using those words against each other.
• 1:46:21
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's the the chairos are associated with uh with like the Morena Party and and and this movement of of uh social economical progress progressives, and then the idea of the white Texacans as which is of of course a way of saying like Mexicans who think that they're Americans, um, or think they're white or act white or whatever it was, that kind of a stereotype uh are associated.
• 1:46:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's a the slur that is being used in the other direction.
• 1:46:53
  SPEAKER_05: Well, today I say, sir, the chicanteca is the best thekard.
• 1:47:00
  SPEAKER_06: The chicanteca.
• 1:47:01
  SPEAKER_06: Aho Meteo.
• 1:47:03
  SPEAKER_06: So I just want to ask you when somebody buys your book, which they should, um, what is like the main thing you want to come you want them to come away with from the book?
• 1:47:16
  SPEAKER_06: Like what's the central thesis of your book that you really hope makes its way through the pages?
• 1:47:23
  SPEAKER_02: I hope that it will give an appreciation of the way that is many things to many peoples and many communities, and that this is exactly what makes it valuable, that it is something specifically to someone because of what it means in their own context.
• 1:47:46
  SPEAKER_02: So whether that is uh uh Calpuli de danza in New Mexico or an indigenous community in in Puebla or um wherever, what makes the language important is the role that that community gives it.
• 1:48:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that is what makes the language stay alive.
• 1:48:10
  SPEAKER_02: As long as there are people who say this is our language, we're going to use it, we're going to take care of it, then it'll stay alive in that community.
• 1:48:19
  SPEAKER_02: And there's no way we can go out and tell other communities, or any community can go out and tell other communities that they should be speaking it in a certain way, or even that they should be speaking it.
• 1:48:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's the decision that is always made communally.
• 1:48:34
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why it's important to form communities and be part of communities and think communally when we want to work with uh with languages that are at risk.
• 1:48:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think that um that is something that I think many linguists are learning, many anthropologists are learning it, uh, that we need to respect the sovereignties of indigenous communities.
• 1:49:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and that really what we should do is uh as as scholars is to focus on how we can participate in that community com communality in a way that the community uh uh values.
• 1:49:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then we can choose whether we want that community to be the Mexican national community and the ways that they engage with the Nao language, an indigenous community somewhere, uh uh Calpuli de Danza or a Chicano organization, and we can choose which communities we participate in and how we engage with the language in that context.
• 1:49:40
  SPEAKER_02: And that is what's what makes the language live.
• 1:49:43
  SPEAKER_06: Well stated.
• 1:49:43
  SPEAKER_06: Well said, yeah.
• 1:49:45
  SPEAKER_06: So uh, how would people get in touch with you online?
• 1:49:48
  SPEAKER_06: Are you on Twitter?
• 1:49:49
  SPEAKER_06: Are you on Instagram?
• 1:49:50
  SPEAKER_06: Do you have a blog you would like to push?
• 1:49:53
  SPEAKER_02: I am uh I'm uh chronically online, I'd say.
• 1:50:00
  SPEAKER_02: So yes, I'm on all of those and uh I I'm uh happy to uh generally answer questions and comments and receive uh nesses.
• 1:50:14
  SPEAKER_02: Take the bait.
• 1:50:15
  SPEAKER_02: I are I always take the bait.
• 1:50:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I undo debates and I do um yeah, whatever.
• 1:50:22
  SPEAKER_06: So is it uh your full name, Magnus Farrell Hansen?
• 1:50:26
  SPEAKER_06: People should look for, or is it just Magnus Hansen?
• 1:50:28
  SPEAKER_02: You can uh in most contexts you can skip the Hansen and still find me.
• 1:50:32
  SPEAKER_06: Okay.
• 1:50:33
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there's only one.
• 1:50:34
  SPEAKER_02: And if you put Magnus Hansen, you you've you find a Star Trek character instead of me.
• 1:50:40
  SPEAKER_02: That sounds right.
• 1:50:40
  SPEAKER_02: So Magnus Farrow is is my Twitter uh handle and uh also my Facebook thing, and then of course I have a blog uh called Nahuatl Scholar, um that I uh I I write something on uh every a couple of times every year.
• 1:50:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I just put up um uh nowhat summary of the introduction cap chapter um that uh because the book is in in English, and I wrote the book in English because the dissertation was in English and also because I want uh English speakers to read it because uh they're the ones uh that are most likely to be able to give me a job and read me and all those things.
• 1:51:23
  SPEAKER_02: So uh really I I feel of course that I should have also written the book in that one, but now I'm doing uh as uh a chapter by chapter summary on my blog.
• 1:51:32
  SPEAKER_02: Oh so any speakers out there uh who also would like to know what the book is about, they can follow it there as a sort of uh serial.
• 1:51:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:51:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's every month or so.
• 1:51:43
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna put up a new chapter.
• 1:51:45
  SPEAKER_05: That's very cool.
• 1:51:46
  SPEAKER_05: So one of the things that I took away from our conversation and your book is that you know you have all these Patrias Chicas uh in Mexico, all these Nahuatl nations, and I like the fact that uh you included the Chicano community in there.
• 1:52:00
  SPEAKER_05: So we're part of the broader diaspora of the Nahuatl nations.
• 1:52:03
  SPEAKER_05: So so thank you for including us in there.
• 1:52:05
  SPEAKER_05: Absolutely.
• 1:52:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think you definitely fit and belong.
• 1:52:09
  SPEAKER_06: And um, I I wanna I wanna read you real quick my favorite quote from this whole book.
• 1:52:15
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, uh it's just one sentence.
• 1:52:18
  SPEAKER_06: My friend Curly Tlapoyawa, for example, has told me of his dislike for speaking Spanish.
• 1:52:28
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it's on record, it's on record.
• 1:52:32
  SPEAKER_02: You can cite that in your in your Wikipedia article.
• 1:52:34
  SPEAKER_02: That's gonna be cited now.
• 1:52:36
  SPEAKER_06: There you go.
• 1:52:37
  SPEAKER_06: Well, thank you so much for joining us, man.
• 1:52:41
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:52:42
  SPEAKER_06: Um, Queen's English in this house.
• 1:52:46
  SPEAKER_06: Um, yeah, thank you for joining us.
• 1:52:48
  SPEAKER_06: Uh great book.
• 1:52:50
  SPEAKER_06: Congratulations again.
• 1:52:51
  SPEAKER_06: I really enjoyed the book.
• 1:52:53
  SPEAKER_06: And uh everybody out there should buy it and read it and engage with it.
• 1:52:58
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, we're gonna put a link to buy the book in the show notes.
• 1:53:02
  SPEAKER_06: So if anybody wants to grab it, you could go there.
• 1:53:30
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you for listening to Tales from Osatlantis, a project of the Jamali Institute of Mesoamerican Arts.
• 1:53:38
  SPEAKER_06: If you enjoy the show, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.
• 1:53:43
  SPEAKER_06: You can do this by visiting Tales from Osatlantis.com and clicking Support the Podcast.
• 1:53:50
  SPEAKER_06: Your continued support will help keep the podcast ad free and independent.
• 1:53:55
  SPEAKER_06: Until next time, Timo Itaze.