The 2025 international residencies program brought us the presence of the mixe linguist, writer and activist dedicated to the defense of linguistic diversity and how this defense is intertwined with the vindication of other rights that affect its speakers. If we were to conventionally take the Nation States template and say something more, we would have to say that Gil is Mexican, but we prefer to point out that she belongs to a linguistic community of about 115,000 speakers located in the state of Oaxaca. Mixe speakers name their language ayyuk.
We like Gil who places the evolution of languages in the realm of politics, rejecting the idea that if languages die it is a law of life: only in the case that a language evolves enough to become something else can we certify the “natural” death of a language, but in the rest of the cases the disappearance of a language is closely linked to a history of violence. It goes without saying that the processes of formation and consolidation of modern nation states have been based (among others, clearly) on the denial of linguistic and cultural diversity and on the implementation of a common language through the exercise of power. And the power has always had before it all the means to decimate the alternative communities, either with the physical elimination of the speaking gods (extermination, forced migrations, sterilizations), or with pressure exerted through the legal system and economic, educational and symbolic strategies. And military
She explained in a recent colloquium at the CCCB how the imposition of another language () had led to a whole new conception of the world in that the new words were associated with a whole series of previously unknown meanings, and she found herself having to fit into the imposed concepts ofindigenous o Latinnon-existent in the mix. I didn’t even perceive the difference between nature i culture (for her, the same thing) how comfortable we have become in the West. We know that the first link of colonization is precisely the imposition of a new language (and a whole conception of the world), just as we know from Ngugi wa Thiong’o that the last link of decolonization is the abandonment of the superimposed language.
Interestingly, the state of Mexico itself labels its languages as indigenous, which already reveals the opinion it has of them. In the General Law of Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples, of 2003, all native languages are qualified as national languages, which will have the same validity as Spanish wherever they are spoken. And according to the , up to 68 languages are spoken in Mexico with a total of 364 variants, 64 of which are at high risk of disappearing. To a certain extent, the Mexican law is good news, as it grants a recognition that many of us would already like (with the same formulation, Catalan would be official in the Strip and Asturian in Asturias) and establishes the legal basis for the projection of what we would understand as a normalization of these languages. The Mexican state, which had spread Spanish by erasing the rest of the languages, seems to have taken sides to protect diversity.
But Gil doesn’t swallow it. Despite its apparent defense of diversity (“indigenous languages are an integral part of the national cultural and linguistic heritage”, says the law), the Mexican State would be no more than an ethnocratic artifact that underpins the privilege of the dominant, mestizo and Spanish-speaking class, and therefore relegates the native populations to a role of subordination and a progressive process of forced linguistic adaptation that, instead of preserving diversity, results in homogenization. In this sense, the normalization of languages would be nothing more than a cosmetic state operation as long as it does not intervene in the improvement of the living conditions of its speakers, and therefore as long as it does not fight against structural racism, the degradation of the environment or situations of poverty.
It would be free to compare ourselves to it and see an analogous situation for the but we are not so far from experiencing a process of denormalization through, precisely, the cut of rights, as if we were making a way back. Especially in the city of Barcelona, but not only, problems with access to housing, environmental degradation, job insecurity and the abuses of global technocapitalism are currently at the root of the social decline of the language and the progressive loss of linguistic rights. And languages go nowhere without their speakers.
