Languages In the World (45 page)

In Mexico on New Year's Day, 1994, 3000 members of the newly formed Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN)
¹⁰
descended from the jungles in the southern state of Chiapas
¹¹
onto the streets of San Cristóbal de las Casas, an important Spanish colonial town. Dressed in black vests and brandishing a mix of ancient weapons and modern assault rifles, they stormed the town hall of San Cristóbal, burning land deeds, and eventually seizing control of the town, along with five other municipalities in the state. The Mexican government promptly issued a military counteroffensive, and intense fighting ensued for 11 consecutive days.

Between 145 and 1000 people were killed in the rebellion, depending on which side you ask. Although an exact death toll is unknown, what is clear is that the Zapatista Uprising, as the 1994 event in Chiapas has since been named, was successful in disrupting the status quo. First, it sparked a wave of protest and rebellion in Mexico that resulted in greater autonomy for indigenous groups. It also happened to disrupt the Mexican political system, precisely as the federal government was poised to implement policies designed to thrust Mexico – its indigenous communities and all – fully into the global economy. Seeing the writing on the policy wall, the Zapatista Uprising was designed to push back against the people, forms of government, epistemological frameworks, languages, and other forces of assimilation pulling southern Mexico further into the modern, postcolonial nation-state.

For seven consecutive decades beginning in the early twentieth century, Mexico was ruled by a single political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, as it is known in Mexico. In Chiapas,
campesinos
‘farmers' and peasants, usually indigenous Maya, and speakers of Tzeltal and Tzotzil, were long forced by elite land owners, usually Spanish-speaking
mestizos
, to cast ballots for PRI candidates in national elections. Locally, PRI influence was evident throughout Chiapas, where they kept a stranglehold on local media, schools, and civic organizations. Spanish was the language of the nation-state, and it was likewise the language of the political infrastructure in Chiapas.

In response to these conditions, the Zapatista Army began to take shape in the 1980s. In the beginning, the movement comprised mostly nonindigenous
mestizos
interested in advocating for land reforms, which were guaranteed in the Mexican Constitution of 1917 but mostly ignored by the PRI. Over time and with the help of the Roman Catholic Church, which was also at odds with the PRI, they began organizing in indigenous communities, helping locals learn how to speak up for their own interests, and speak out against the abuses of the nonindigenous political machinery. As the movement gained momentum, the state – led by the PRI – responded with tactics of fear and intimidation in Maya communities. The communities pressed back, as indigenous men joined the Zapatista guerillas in the jungles of Chiapas, this time ready to take up arms.

As the movement became an army, a non-Maya, Spanish-speaking
mestizo
man known to the world by his nom de guerre
Subcomandante Marcos
emerged as the figurehead for the EZLN. Rumored to be a university professor, Marcos provided the Zapatistas with the anticapitalist energy and focus on social and economic
justice that provided the ideological basis for the uprising of 1994, which, in the Zapatista view, was considered war on Mexico. Marcos planned the rebellion to take place on the eve of the start of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, an accord that created the world's largest trade bloc between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The signing of NAFTA happened also to be a signature policy issue for the PRI. For the Zapatistas, however, NAFTA was considered a death sentence, as poor farmers would no longer be able to compete with the commercial farms in the United States. Although NAFTA did move forward, the uprising of 1994 took its toll on the Mexican government. The Zapatistas managed to retain control of indigenous land in Chiapas, and in 2000, PRI was voted out of office for the first time in seven decades.

As violent clashes between
campesinos
, Zapatistas, Mexican military, and paramilitary groups continued for more than a decade after the uprising officially ended, Chiapas became one of the most militarized regions in the Americas. The violence did not deter the Zapatistas from practicing self-government, and by 2003, they initiated
Juntas del Buen Gobierno
, a community-based, cooperative political system in which pre-Columbian forms of governance are observed. In this cooperative political system there are no parties, and community members serve as officeholders on a rotational basis. Most of the languages of Chiapas belong to the Western Maya language group. These include Ch'ol, Chontal, Chuj, Jacaltec, Kanjobal, Motozinlec, Tojolabal, Tzeltal, and Tzotzil. A few non-Mayan languages such as Zoque, a Mixe-Zoquean language, are also spoken in the region. Just as the indigenous cultures of Chiapas have been influenced from colonial influence – Tzotzils are mostly protestant Christians, while Tzeltals are mostly Roman Catholic – the languages have also been influenced from the history of sustained contact with Spanish. Spanish loanwords are easy to identify in Tzotzil –
bino
(
vino
‘wine'),
martoma
(
mayordomo
‘custodian'), and
rominko
(
domingo
‘Sunday') among others. The /r/ sound in ‘rominko' did not exist in either Ch'ol or Tzotzil prior to contact with Spanish, but entered both languages through Spanish loanwords, and has since spread to some native words. The colonial Tzotzil word
^*
kelem ‘young man' became
kerem
‘boy' in modern Tzotzil. Structural modifications such as these are normal linguistic consequences of language contact and cannot readily be undone, even with the types of strong political intervention that put parts of Chiapas under Zapatista control.

In the Zapatista strongholds of Chiapas where the uprising of 1994 took place, language maintenance is high. Some communities have been successful in stopping or even reversing the cross-generational language shift to Spanish that has been under way since at least the early nineteenth century when Spanish was promoted as the language of Mexico as set forth in Chapter 6. Some Maya languages – Ch'ol, Tojolabal, Tzeltal, and Tzotzil among them – are even considered to be thriving. The vitality of these languages is due to the Zapatista educational system, in which indigenous languages are the medium of instruction but also inform the whole of the curriculum, which is rooted in the Maya tradition of communal living. Because Chiapas is home to nearly 15% of Mexico's total indigenous population and more than 50 distinctive language groups, the focus on local language and culture in Zapatista schools makes sense. The fate of all of these languages is nevertheless at stake, since the issue of land rights remains far from settled.

In 2012, a communiqué issued by the EZLN reached the international press. It read, “Did you hear that? It is the sound of your world crumbling. It is the sound of ours resurging.” On that day, 50,000 Zapatistas – mostly from Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Ch'ol indigenous communities – returned to the streets of San Cristóbal de las Casas. This time, wielding no weapons, they marched in silence, black balaclavas (ski masks) covering their faces in the style of Subcomandante Marcos. The march coincided with two significant events in the intertwined cultural and political life of the Maya and the Zapatistas: the end of the creation cycle in traditional Maya scripture and the fifteenth anniversary of the Acetal Massacre of 1997 in which 45 unarmed indigenous people were slain by a paramilitary group while attending a prayer meeting.

In the 2000s, with PRI out of power, the Zapatistas shifted their focus to the cultivation of civic life in the autonomous regions and the preservation of traditional indigenous culture. This emphasis is now in question, since after more than a decade on the sidelines, PRI – the Zapatistas' primary political antagonists – returned to power in 2012. However, the 2012 march through the streets of San Cristóbal may have also been a signal that, 20 years following the original uprising, the Zapatistas still hold sway in Chiapas.

The island of Hispaniola, located dead center in the Caribbean Sea, is divided between the western third, which is occupied by the Kreyòl-and-French-speaking nation of Haiti, and the east two-thirds, which is occupied by the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic. The two countries are separated by the Massacre River, so named for a bloody struggle between the French and the Spanish during the colonial era. The violent colonial past was matched by an equally violent event in the twentieth century, the infamous Parsley Massacre of 1937.

From 1930 to 1961, the Dominican Republic was ruled by the dictator Rafael Trujillo, known in Spanish as
El Jefe
‘The Boss.' He promoted a cult of personality that, among other things, involved renaming Santo Domingo, the capital city, Ciudad Trujillo ‘Trujillo City.' Trujillo's story is bound with the race–nation–language triad described in Chapter 4. There is evidence that Trujillo used powder and whitening creams to lighten his face in order to appear more European. Trujillo also initiated a so-called open-door immigration policy, in which certain groups, namely the Japanese, Spanish, and Jews, were allowed to seek citizenship in the Dominican Republic. It seems his goal was to lighten the population. He had an equal desire to rid the Dominican Republic of dark-skinned Haitians.

In 1937, as Haitians were leaving the Dominican Republic en masse, Trijillo called in the military to attack the border region and to kill as many exiting Haitians as possible. However, since it was not possible to discern a Haitian from a Dominican on the spot based on apperance alone, a linguistic test was devised. The test exploited the articulatory difference in the pronuncation of [r] between Kreyòl and Spanish. The [r] of Spanish is an alveolar trill, at the beginning of a word like
rojo
‘red' and where a double-r appears in orthography, in a word like
perro
‘dog.' Elsewhere, it is an alveolar tap [ɾ]. In contrast, the sound in Kreyòl is pronounced as a uvular trill [ʀ]. The chosen
word for the linguistic test was
perejil
‘parsley.' On the basis of whether your place of articulation of [r] was the alveolar ridge, or about five centimeters back in the oral cavity at the uvula, you either lived or died. Those who pronounced the word with the Spanish tap were free to go. Those who pronounced it with the uvular trill were killed on the spot. Over the course of a few days, 10,000–30,000 Haitians died. The massacre is known in Spanish as
el corte
and in Kreyòl as
kuoto-a
‘the cutting.' We will say it: there is nothing new under the sun.

Trujillo's Parsley Massacre was not the first of its kind. In Biblical times, the Hebrew word
shibboleth
‘ear of corn' was used by the Gileadites to distinguish the Ephraimites whose language variety did not have phoneme /ʃ/. After the Ephraimites lost a battle to the Gileadites, they went to the River Jordan to return home. As a linguistic test to cross the river, the Gileadites had them say the word for ‘ear of corn,' and 42,000 of them were killed when they replied, “Sibboleth.”

Neither were the language silos created in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II an innovation. In the midnineteenth century, the United States government established similar silos, called Indian Reservations, west of the Mississippi. These reservations were set up on the basis of language difference, partitioning the Cherokee (Iroquois) from the Creek (Muskogean) from the Catawba (Sioux) with delineated boundaries like those separating France from Spain and Germany. In pre-Columbian times, the area of what is now modern-day north Georgia was settled by speakers of Cherokee, Creek, and Catawba who encountered one another frequently.

No one can unscramble an egg. Nor can one reverse the effects of history. Neither do we want to say that pre-World War II Europe or the pre-Columbian Americas were Eden. What we do want to say is that now, going forward, language diversity is not a problem, and it does not need to be resolved, through attempts either to segregate language communities against their will or to eradicate languages deemed undesirable or unnecessary by those in positions of power.