where the language is, the people are

12-18, Dec. 2006

I didn’t see Moises or go fishing with Pepe yesterday.  I went to Ameyaltepec instead, with Jonathan (my former instructor), Jeremias (another good friend), and an anciano (whose name I don’t recall).  

The town sits at the head of a mountain spring, to the north of San Agustin.  We made our way up the winding, dirt-pack road, and immediately upon arriving, Jonathan’s role in the community became clear.  Children ran up to him, and smiling residents greeted him as he walked from house to house.  His face lit up.  I’ll have to write about the posada and the “Attack on Ameyaltepec” later, but Jonathan was as welcome a traveler as any other this holiday season.

Ameyaltepacanos are drawn to Jonathan. If I were to guess, I would say that some see him as a source of money and others an object of curiosity.  Here he is, a white man from New York who comes into their village speaking fluent Nahuatl.  He lives in Oapan, and he speaks, in their tongue, of building community centers, investing in computers, and saving a dying language. 

In the late 1970s, Jonathan spent two and half years in Ameyaltepec.  To many, he is a brother, a son and a godfather.  A part of the community, he will forever be apart from it.  Villagers look at him with what I can only describe as strangeness, not unlike they do me.  This isn’t irreconcilable.  It’s just a fact.  If anything, I think that it indicates that Jonathan lives in more than one world.  Perhaps he needs to be all the more considerate in his responsibilities to both.

Jonathan knows more Nahuatl than many of the people of Ameyaltepec and Oapan.  He learned from the elders, and the collective memory of their words exists in Jonathan’s dictionary, a contemporary resource for the language that he has been developing over the last thirty years.  More and more, the younger generations are speaking Spanish.  They are forgetting their Mexicano.

Jonathan says that Nahuatl will effectively become extinct within two generations.  Roughly one million people speak Nahuatl in Central America, although “speaking”, Jonathan says, is a term used by governments that tend to inflate numbers.  “Speaking” could mean to say a working knowledge of the language—knowing it, but as a little-used second tongue. 

Hugo, Emiliana’s seven-year-old brother, for example, “speaks” Nahuatl.  He lives in Cuernavaca, and his Oapan-born mothers and sisters speak to him in their Mexicano.  He can respond in the language as well, but by his admission he doesn’t want to.

There are many others like Hugo in and around San Agustin.  Let’s say that there are approximately a thousand families in Oapan and that each family has five people.   Jeremias says that, on average, one person in every Guerrero family lives and works in the United States.  This leaves us a 1000 stateside, 4000 in Mexico.  Let’s also say that half of the families native to Oapan don’t actually live in Oapan, or that some family members move back and forth to a neighboring city like Taxco while the rest stay.   This leaves us with 2000 people in Oapan at any given time, and another 2000 people living and working in other parts of Mexico. 

My former host family is fairly representative of this sort of movement.  Their immediate family is nine: the parents, Sixto and Eulalia, and their seven children, Olga, Ulyses, Edith, Sonia, Daniela and Anayali.  And of course Pepe.   Sixto has worked in the States.  The oldest, Olga, lives in Guanajuato.   This last trip to Oapan she took Anayali with her.  Ulyses and Edith currently live with an uncle in Puerto Escondido. 

I know that they have family in other parts as well: the tourist hub of San Miguel Allende, for example.  I’ve met other Oapanecos in Cuernavaca, selling their famed neon-colored amate art in a Cuernavaca church square.  Emiliana said that she recognizes many locals there as well.  The mandil, or apron, common to the women of the area is a big tip-off, as is their art. 

The last time that I had seen Ulyses, he was set to finish secondaria (the equivalent of middle school in the U.S.) in a year, although he spent the majority of his time painting ceramic pieces that their family would distribute to vendors or sell themselves for a pittance.   Those pieces are easily recognizable.  Most often they include some sort of animal, are brightly colored, and are accented by clusters of painted dots.  I’ve seen the pottery in Acapulco, Mexico City, Nogales, Tijuana: you name it.  And where the art is, the people are.

Like Sixto and Eulalia’s family, like Jonathan, like me, it’s important to remember that the people come back as well.  Oapan is becoming increasingly permeable.  Within a year, the road into town will be almost fully paved, and Oapanecos will come and go with greater ease. 

The community is already changing.  Some families have X-Boxes.  Others watch American movies on television.  My friends adapted my name, “Power”, from the “Mighty Morphing Power Rangers”, a Japanese action series repackaged in the States and redubbed in Mexico. 

Two generations ago, people spent their entire lives along the river next to San Agustin and upon the mountain in Ameyaltepec, and everyone spoke Nahuatl.   But times are changing, and there’s a new language for it.