Sabina Cruz de la Cruz and Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz are native Nahuatl speakers from two small towns near Chicontepec, Veracruz, in eastern Mexico.
Called the Huasteca, this region is a verdant paradise bordered by the Gulf Coast of Mexico and the slopes of the Sierra Madre Oriental.
The Huasteca, with its sacred mountain rising up from patchworks of maize fields, epitomizes what Indigenous peoples past and present consider a sacred landscape. Local myths, songs, and rituals—documented by ethnographers Alan and Pamela Sandstrom and ethnomusicologist Veronica Pacheco—commemorate this mountain as a source of water and sustenance, particularly of maize. The mountain’s name, Postectli, means “broken” in Nahuatl and refers to a cosmogonic event in which the god of rain and thunder broke open the mountain to release the spirits of maize, Chicomexochitl (Seven Flower) and his twin sister Macuilxochitl (Five Flower), hidden within. To local inhabitants, this myth explains the region’s agricultural abundance.
The Huasteca is also home to around 450,000 speakers of the Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl, a branch of the Nahuatl language family. Spoken by the mighty Mexicas who ruled the Aztec Empire, Nahuatl was the lingua franca of Mesoamerica before the conquest of Mexico. Having endured centuries of cultural and linguistic suppression, it is in danger of disappearing, with only about 1.5 million native Nahuatl speakers remaining. Nahuatl is also one of 68 languages spoken in Mexico, many of which can also be heard on the streets of Los Angeles—the city with the second largest Mexican population outside of Mexico City.
Sabina and Eduardo give Nahuatl classes at IDIEZ, the Indigenous language institute in Zacatecas, Mexico, which Eduardo directs. They also travel widely around the world, teaching Nahuatl at various universities and collaborating on Nahuatl-language research projects. Recently they contributed to an online Nahuatl Dictionary at the University of Oregon and an online Nahuatl language class at the University of Texas.
They are also members of the Getty Research Institute’s Florentine Codex Initiative and are translating into Nahuatl hundreds of entries to the Getty Vocabularies—an open-source thesaurus on art and architecture. These keywords will enrich a digital edition of the Florentine Codex, a 16th-century encyclopedia of Nahua culture from Mexico, and make its more than 2,000 images searchable. Eduardo also created Nahuatl audio recordings and wrote a modern Nahuatl summary of the conquest of Mexico documented in the codex, so that Nahua children can access a version of history penned by their ancestors.
All throughout their schooling, Sabina and Eduardo say, teachers didn’t speak Nahuatl and didn’t encourage them to study it on their own, claiming the language wouldn’t serve their futures in any way. “The teachers would say, ‘Forget Nahuatl because it won’t help you, it won’t benefit you, it won’t lead you anywhere,’” Sabina remembers. Earlier generations of Nahua students were even beaten for speaking Nahuatl in school. As a consequence, many children feel trauma and shame for speaking their own language and end up avoiding it in favor of Spanish. When Sabina speaks Nahuatl to children in her community, she says, they initially laugh and feel embarrassed to answer back. “They understand everything I say to them but answer in Spanish.”
Defying their teachers’ predictions, Eduardo and Sabina are now internationally sought specialists of Nahuatl and are invited to collaborate on Nahuatl-language research projects and to teach Nahuatl. But IDIEZ’s foremost goal is to foster and revitalize Nahuatl in home communities, Eduardo says. “We have to support native towns with Nahuatl instruction. IDIEZ works with communities to teach children how to read and write in Nahuatl—so they don’t suffer what we suffered.”
Eduardo notes that their efforts extend beyond the language. “When I left high school, I didn’t know what a computer was. And this problem continues to exist in the communities. It is a barrier for those who want to enter university.” IDIEZ is currently in the process of establishing computer rooms in local schools near Chicontepec and offering computer classes in Nahuatl. Funds obtained from teaching Nahuatl to foreigners are channeled back into the communities for these kinds of projects, and in that way make up for the lack of government funding.
Eduardo is also publishing his scholarship in Nahuatl. His dissertation at the University of Warsaw on Nahua concepts of physical and psychological wellbeing, health, and healing is written entirely in Nahuatl—even though some have suggested that he publish in English or Spanish. “But I am writing with my community in mind.”
As part of the IDIEZ team, Eduardo and Sabina aim to raise the regard of Nahuatl and provide more pathways to learning the language. Eduardo has just been hired as a Nahuatl professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Sabina wrote her master’s thesis in education on how teaching Nahuatl in schools impacts Mexico’s national identity, and she continues to foster education in Nahuatl in the communities in the Huasteca. Because Nahuatl learning begins at home, she and her husband are working on a personal project of Nahuatl revitalization: speaking Nahuatl to their baby daughter. They want her to grow up proud of her language and to know how to speak, read, and write it.
Eduardo and Sabina, together with other IDIEZ teachers, work tirelessly so that their culture and language is afforded dignity and respect after 500 years of discrimination and oppression. They want people to recognize that Nahuatl adds to the linguistic wealth of Mexico and the world, and that it is worthy of being taught in school.
