This Mouth Is Mine

A warm, witty, passionate cry for living, vital, indigenous languages and the people who speak them.

Despite the more than 200 Indigenous languages spoken in Mexico, including 63 that are officially recognized and celebrated by the Mexican government, linguistic diversity is and has been under attack in a larger culture that says bilingual is good when it means Spanish and English, but bad when it means Nahuatl and Spanish. Y?snaya Aguilar, a linguist and native Mixe speaker, asks what is lost, for everyone, when the contradictions inherent in Mexico's relationship with its many Indigenous languages mean official protection and actual contempt at worst, and ignorance at best. What does it mean to have a prize for Indigenous literature when different Indigenous languages are as far from each other as they are from Japanese? What impact does considering Tzotzil "cultural heritage" have on our idea of it, when it is still being used, and refreshed, and changed (like every other language) today? How does the idea of Indigeneity stand up, when you consider Indigenous peoples outside of the frame of colonialism?Personal, anecdotal, and full of vivid examples, Aguilar does more than advocate for the importance of resistance by native peoples: she offers everyone the opportunity to value and enjoy a world in which culture, language, and community is delighted in, not flattened. "We have sacrificed Mexico in favor of creating the idea of Mexico" she says. This Mouth Is Mine is an invitation to take it back.

Yásnaya Elena A. Gil (Ayutla Mixe, Mexico, 1981) is one of Latin America's leading defenders of linguistic rights. She is a member of COLMIX, a group of Mixe people dedicated to researching, communicating and promoting Mixe language, history and culture. She has collaborated in many projects relating to linguistic diversity, the development of grammar content for educational materials in indigenous languages, and projects documenting languages at risk of disappearance. She has helped develop written materials in Mixe as well as building readerships in Mixe and other indigenous languages. As an activist she has defended the linguistic rights of speakers of indigenous languages, and promoted their use online and in literary translation. Together with renowned Mexican actor and director Gael García Bernal, she has also co-presented a series of documentary films about environmental issues in Mexico.

Ellen Jones is a writer, editor, and translator from Spanish. Her recent translations include Beyond Mestizaje: Contemporary Debates on Race in Mexico edited by Tania Islas Weinstein and Milena Ang (2024), Cubanthropy by Iván de la Nuez (2023) and The Remains by Margo Glantz (shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2023). Her monograph, Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas is published by Columbia University Press (2022). Her short fiction has appeared in LitroMagazine, Slug and The London Magazine .