Mexico changed forever Aug. 13, 1521 -- the day Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez conquered Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire and site of present-day Mexico City.
Cortez's men destroyed the city, killed thousands of Aztecs, and ushered in centuries of Spanish rule. They also introduced the Spanish language to an area with a variety of indigenous languages, most notably Nahuatl, the official language of the Aztec empire.
As a new book puts it, the Spanish conquest was the most drastic "clash of civilizations" in Mexican history.
"Mexican Indigenous Languages at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century" (Mouton de Gruyter, 332 pages, $132.30, edited by Margarita Hidalgo, tells this story, and looks at how history continues to shape education and government policy in Mexico today.
Indigenous people in Mexico have never fully recovered from Spanish conquest, Hidalgo writes. Yet many indigenous languages have found a way to survive since Cortez came ashore.
The key to language survival, Hidalgo argues, is for indigenous speakers to find a "balance of language maintenance and language shift ... [after] a major disruption."
Reason for survival
In other words, a language can survive if its native speakers -- or even its conquerors -- find a use for it even after a shift in the official or dominant language of a society.
"Spaniards discovered the indigenous languages as they discovered the new lands, and from the onset it was clear that they needed to use them for different functions," Hidalgo writes.
One of those functions was evangelism. Cortez himself appointed 12 friars to learn the indigenous languages in their conquered territory and to use those languages to try to convert native people to Catholicism. These friars even came up with a system to use the Roman alphabet to write Mexican indigenous languages such as Otomi, Matlalzinca, Totonac and Zapotec, in addition to Nahuatl.
"The indigenous languages were perceived as being the most desirable vehicle to spread the Catholic faith," Hidalgo writes. But the friars thought some religious words could not be translated; as a result, "texts written in the Mesoamerican languages were sprinkled with Latin and Spanish words."
Eventually, Spain's effort to make Spanish the language of its conquered territory took its toll, and indigenous languages were pushed to the fringes of Mexican society. Still, many of these languages were kept alive, sometimes through fierce resistance movements to Spanish rule. Hidalgo counts 52 separate resistance movements, many of them violent, in the first five centuries after Spanish conquest.
Today, nearing the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan to Cortez, some of these resistance efforts remain unresolved, Hidalgo writes. While the dominance of Spanish in Mexico is unquestioned and irreversible (unless English begins to overtake Spanish south of the American border, she notes), many Mexicans continue to be bilingual in Spanish and an indigenous language.
Some Mexicans keep alive a spirit of fierce resistance to Spanish. Hidalgo analyzes in depth the violent uprising in the southern Mexican region of Chiapas in 1994. Chiapas has always resisted Mexican rule.
In January 1994, rebels in Chiapas declared war on the Mexican government, took over mayoral offices throughout their region and made a proclamation in the Tzotzil language (one of the few dozen indigenous languages still spoken in the Chiapas region), before a Catholic bishop intervened and defused the tension.
The rebels were protesting the economic policies of the Mexican government, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, Hidalgo writes, but language was a way to express their resistance of mainstream Mexican culture.
Only by learning from episodes such as these, Hidalgo argues, and understanding the nearly 500-year history of Spanish in Mexico, can the nation best decide how to carry out bilingual education and language preservation.
Hidalgo sees a common thread in the initial survival of Nahuatl in the 1500s and the continuing endurance of Chiapas languages today.
"Although these two cases may appear to be distanced in time and space, we learned that the intervention of agents of change was effective in deterring an even more pronounced language shift," Hidalgo writes by e-mail from San Diego State University, where she teaches Spanish linguistics. "If no one had done anything at all, we would know less than we know now."
"Mexican Indigenous Languages" also shows the importance of preserving endangered indigenous languages in the home, Hidalgo says.
"If and when threatened languages begin to disappear from the domestic domain, we can become truly alarmed," Hidalgo writes by e-mail. "Most likely this will be signal of total displacement rather than partial displacement."
Contact Nathan Bierma at email@example.com.