The IDIEZ Project: A Model for Indigenous Language Revitalization in Higher Education

The Zacatecas Institute for Teaching and Research in Ethnology (IDIEZ) is a Mexican nonprofit corporation founded in 2002 and associated with the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas. In cooperation with Macehualli Educational Research, our nonprofit corporation in the United States, we provide scholarships to indigenous college students who are native speakers of Nahuatl, train them to work as teaching and research assistants, and involve them with Western scholars in collaborative projects designed to revitalize and develop their language and culture. This brief essay is divided into two parts. First, I would like to share a few anecdotes that mark in my mind fundamental moments in the development of our work. Second, I discuss a series of principles, in many cases emanating from the anecdotes, that guide our activities; they may be of use to other institutions of higher education that have academic programs for native speakers of indigenous languages.

Important Moments

In 1990 nine young Nahua students from the Mexican Huasteca region were invited by Antorcha Campesina, a Maoist political organization within the Partido Revolucionario Institutional, to attend high school in the city of Zacatecas and participate in the group's political activities. After graduating, the majority of them left Antorcha Campesina and continued their studies at the Zacatecas State University (UAZ), taking advantage of the institution's room and board scholarships for low-income students. More important, they began inviting friends and relatives from back home to study in Zacatecas, creating a social network that to this day informally supports more than fifty indigenous high school and undergraduate students from the states of San Luis Potosí, Hidalgo, and Veracruz, as described by Angelina Belmontes Martínez (La migracion de indigenas nahuas de la Huasteca potosina, hidalguense y veracruzana que realizan estudios en la Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas [Zacatecas: Universidad Autónoma de Zactecas, 2002]).

During the latter part of the 1990s I was working as a professor in the Humanities Division at the UAZ, teaching Hispanic literature courses and a workshop in classical Nahuatl. A colleague in the Economics Department, Rodolfo García Zamora, told me that he had two students who were native speakers of Nahuatl and asked me if I would like to meet them. I will never forget that meeting. Urbano Francisco Martínez, from the village of Chapulhuacanito, municipality of Tamazunchale, in the state of San Luis Potosí, and Delfina de la Cruz de la Cruz, from the village of Tepecxitla, municipality of Chicontepec, in the state of Veracruz, told me: "Nosotros casi no sabemos hablar náhuatl. Nuestros papás y nuestros abuelos sí lo hablan en la casa. Pero nosotros, no. Sólo entendemos un poco." (We don't know how to speak much Nahuatl. Our parents and grandparents do speak it at home. But we don't. We just understand a little.)

Here were two indigenous college students denying a fact that I became aware of soon afterward: both were 100 percent fluent in the language and practiced all aspects of the culture. This policy of denial took many forms. I remember visiting the UAZ law school library searching for students to recruit into our program. Ofelia Cruz Morales, who is now a lawyer as well as a permanent teacher and researcher at IDIEZ, would turn her head and scrunch down into her seat, hoping I would not notice her. Every one of the students who has worked at IDIEZ has suffered systematic and continuous physical and/or psychological abuse coercing them to abandon their native language and culture. It does not matter what the Mexican Constitution says; it does not matter that there is a National Institute of Indigenous Languages; and it does not matter that there is a bilingual primary education system. The truth is that one of the goals of Mexican society and its institutions is to erase indigenous languages and cultures from the face of the earth.

I began practicing conversational Nahuatl for one hour per day, first with Urbano and then with Delfina, paying them twenty pesos per hour from my federal research stipend. We...