Did you know many Indigenous languages are spoken in D.C.?
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“My indigenousness comes through the language, I think knowing it stays with me and roots me to my mom, to what is left still.” — Alida, a D.C. resident who speaks the Maya Q’eqchi language.
What do ¿Como estas?, Imanalla and Sen Taya have in common? They all mean How are you? in the Spanish, Quechua, and Mayan Mam languages, respectively. Most people may think Spanish is the sole language of Mexico, Central and South America, and parts of the Caribbean. In fact, there are hundreds of indigenous languages still spoken from Mexico to Patagonia—and even right here in the Washington, D.C., area.
For more than a year, Hola Cultura’s team of interns and volunteers has been carrying out interviews with Washington-area speakers of these native languages. To date, we’ve interviewed about 20 indigenous languages speakers who live in the D.M.V. area. In addition to the Mayan languages, Mam, Ixil and Quechi; we’ve interviewed people who speak the Afro-Indigenous Garifuna language, and the South America tongues Guaraní, Quechua, and Kichwa, a language in the Quechua language family.
Besides learning new ways to say things, the project has helped us see more of the layers of complexity and richness of our local communities.
“This project was inspired by a casual conversation Cecilia Castillo Ayometzi, a linguist who worked at the D.C. Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs at the time. At first we were first surprised to learn about the presence of native languages and cultures within the area’s Latino community. The more we thought about it, the more intrigued we were,” says Christine MacDonald, Hola Cultura’s managing director. “We launched this project to celebrate these indigenous cultures that seem almost hidden from the wider world here in Washington.”
Linguistic scholars Gabriela Pérez Báez, Chris Rogers and Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada say the region often broadly called “Latin America” is home to more than 100 distinct language families. More than 400 languages that are part of those linguistic families are still in use, according to “Sociolinguistic Atlas of Indigenous Peoples of Latin America,” published in 2010 by the United Nations Children’s Fund.
Most of these languages have been spoken for millennia, but the introduction of Spanish and Portuguese by European colonizers centuries ago set in motion a system of forced assimilation that led to the loss of languages and other aspects of native culture. The colonial legacy in the Americas shaped governments and other institutions, resulting in indigenous people frequently encountering racism, discrimination, violence and stigmas about speaking in indigenous tongues.
Nevertheless, hundreds of native languages survive to this day only to face new pressures. Gabriela Pérez Báez, director of the Recovering Voices at The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, says many native languages are on the brink of extinction.
Those in danger include indigenous languages that appear to be thriving when you look at the whole “family” such as Zapotec, a language still spoken by nearly half a million people in Mexico. If you drill down to examine the state of Zapotec’s local variations, however, a much more precarious situation becomes apparent, says Pérez Báez.
“Each town has a different variety [of Zapotec] and it can be different enough that from one town to the next, they cannot understand each other very well,” she says. “Two towns over, people won’t understand each other at all.”
Many of these unique languages, Pérez Báez and other experts say, could be extinct within a generation as fewer people learn to speak their ancestral tongues for a variety of reasons. Children growing up today in indigenous communities in Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean, who may have otherwise only spoken their indigenous mother languages, are learning Spanish at school, opportunities that may have been unavailable to previous generations. As Spanish becomes more commonplace in these rural communities, fewer people continue speaking native languages.
Many indigenous languages are not just in danger of being lost in Latin America. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, “increased migration and rapid urbanization often bring along the loss of traditional ways of life and a strong pressure to speak a dominant language that is – or is perceived to be – necessary for full civic participation and economic advancement.”
But there are also some more promising trends. While the colonial histories of the Americas is one of continual disenfranchisement and violence against indigenous peoples, the current historical moment is defined by an emergence of indigenous pride. Some governments in Latin America have embraced widespread indigenous movements. Many now make indigenous language learning a compulsory part of schooling. Even so, some indigenous communities are skeptical about the effectiveness of these government initiatives and continue to preserve their languages and customs through grassroots efforts.
“In the education system, a lot more needs to be done in terms of creating curriculums that allow governments and institutions to preserve the language,” according to Julio, a native of Honduras who speaks the Afro-Indigenous language, Garifuna. “In the health system, in hospitals, even though you will find a significant number of Garifuna professionals, it is not part of the mainstream or it’s not something that has been institutionalized” in Honduras or Washington, D.C.
Given the New World’s brutal history when it comes to indigenous people, perhaps it is not surprising that little information is available about native language speakers in the Washington, D.C., area. When the D.C. Public School System provided Hola Cultura with information about the languages Washington schoolchildren speak at home, no Latin American indigenous languages were listed. Given that Hola Cultura knows of students who speak indigenous languages at home, but who also speak Spanish, it appears that their home languages were recorded as Spanish rather than as their true native languages.
While it may seem a minor oversight, the failure of official government data to accurately capture residents’ native languages leads to an erasure of the diverse indigenous presence in D.C. The implications of this erasure are far-reaching. Students placed in English-Spanish emersion classes often struggle academically as they try to learn two languages at once. It’s not uncommon for indigenous students to be relegated to remedial learning programs when teachers fail to recognize the language barrier, according Pérez Báez and other experts.
Barbara Knowles and Jessica Zhinin-Yanqui, public school teachers in Ossining, N.Y., say it was a revelation when they discovered they had native Kichwa speakers among their students. Many of the middle school and high school students were struggling in classes taught in Spanish, which made sense considering Spanish, it turned out, was not their native tongue.
With the backing of their school district, the two started learning some Kichwa, a powerful experience for Zhinin-Yanqui, an Ecuadoran-American, who hadn’t previously been aware of the depth of her own Kichwa roots. They reached out to a Kichwa Hatari, a New York City community organization and radio show reviving the Kichwa language and cultural pride, and shared what they learned with other teachers and local officials.
“It’s a hard thing to measure but you do see notable changes,” mostly by creating an atmosphere of respect and trust with Kichwa-speaking students and their parents, Knowles says. Incidents of what could be called Kichwa shaming—peer-pressure to hide indigenous roots—also declined among their teenaged students, who began to feel more comfortable acknowledging the language barrier that was holding them back academically.
“I think having that (Kichwa pride) helps,” says Knowles of her Kichwa students who are struggling to gain fluency in both English and Spanish at the same time. “It helps not being under the radar. It helps being able to ask for help when you don’t understand something. We are definitely seeing more graduate.”
But that “under the radar” experience appears more commonplace for indigenous languages speakers in the Washington-area and throughout the country, experts say. The challenges of stigmas against indigenous people are compounded by a lack of native language interpreters and translators in the United States. In a number of Hola Cultura’s interviews, respondents spoke to the difficulty of communicating when services are not available in their native language.
One speaker of the Maya language Mam says that he sought out a translator at the hospital when his baby was born. He wasn’t comfortable speaking fluently in Spanish, but he made do with the Spanish translator on duty, assuming the hospital did not have a Mam interpreter.
“When you cannot defend yourself (in words), you are considered stupid or ignorant and it’s probably because you don’t know how to say something,” says Alida, another Guatemalan speaker of the Maya Q’eqchi language. She is also fluent in Spanish, but struggled when she first came to the United States, experiencing discrimination as a result of her lack of English fluency at the time.
A general lack of understanding of the complexity and completeness of many of these languages also persists, according to several people we interviewed.
“Guaraní is not a dialect, but a true language. It has lexicon, grammar, structure . . . in short, it has everything that Castilian [Spanish has] — including its own literature,” says a speaker of Guaraní, a language spoken in the Andean region and Southern Cone of South America.
This sentiment is shared by Julio, who speaks Garifuna, a language spoken in parts of Central America, the Caribbean, and northern coastal regions of South America.
“Anything that you find in any language you will find it in the Garifuna language . . . and that’s one of the most impressive things about the Garifuna culture; it is endangered but good work has been done by our ancestors to try and preserve the language so far,” he says.
While the people we interviewed expressed a variety of opinions, there were some common themes. There’s an overwhelming desire to continue speaking and passing on the languages; and to build community with others who speak the same language. It is clear that many immigrant communities in the United States preserve indigenous languages as a part of their distinct identities.
- A Garifuna-speaker named James stresses the importance of the performing arts as a means of preserving the language, especially as the language has been lost due to suppression dating back to colonial times.
- Rosita, a Guaraní speaker, mentions that when she came to the United States, she “met many people from [Paraguay] . . . and we mixed Guaraní and Spanish because it feels as if one is in Paraguay.”
- Julia, a Quechua speaker from Bolivia, discusses how the Pachamama concept of living in harmony with nature was ingrained within her; and how she has passed this knowledge down to her U.S.-born son.
- “What’s ours is ours and nobody can take it away from us,” is the way one Maya Mam speaker puts it. He says he looks forward to teaching the language to his child, a language he sees as a reflection of the vitality and resilience of his culture and heritage in the face of overwhelming attempts to suppress it.
Through Hola Cultura’s Indigenous D.C. project, our organization hopes to support these communities by celebrating the culture and indigenous languages spoken locally in the greater Washington area. Read all of our Indigenous D.C. stories on our special projects site, Hola Cultura Más. This is an ongoing project that we will continue expanding on over time. To contribute, contact Hola Cultura to join our team of interviewers, make a donation, or give an interview as a speaker of an indigenous language.
— Pavithra Suresh
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