Why X doesn’t always mark the spot: Contested authenticity in Mexican indigenous language politics

Semiotica 2015; 203: 179 – 201

Paja FaudreeWhy X doesn’t always mark the spot: Contested authenticity in Mexican indigenous language politics

Abstract: In this article, I consider competing notions of “alphabetic authenticity” and indigenous authorship among Mexican indigenous authors and activists. Orthographies form a special focus, as choices about them entail envisioning particular kinds of texts and, hence, types of readers. I focus on the divergent strategies – all fundamentally semiotic – that people advocate in developing “authentic indigenous writing” and in using various metasemiotic processes to harness competing authenticities to language revitalization initiatives. I suggest that the friction between these conflicting models is both contentious and generative, producing new possibilities for engagement even as the interstices between them may hide possibilities not yet explored.

Keywords: authenticities; Mexico; literacy; indigeneity; authorship; orthography; language revitalization

DOI 10.1515/sem-2014-0078

1 Introduction: On armies, authenticities, and alphabets Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity.– Coco Chanel

The modernist underpinnings of a concept like “authenticity” are by now widely acknowledged (e.g., Coupland 2003; Bendix 1997; Rampton 1999; Trilling 1972; Wilce 2009), meaning that in academic circles the concept has generally been regarded as intellectually bankrupt. But outside of them, people aren’t listening to us; they are listening to the likes of Coco Chanel instead. In Chanel’s comment

Paja Faudree: Brown University. E-mail: [email protected]

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about fashion – the crystallization of a particular mode of modernist imagining – authenticity is both resource and weapon, staving off the loss of agency and subjectactivating potential threatened by “hard times.” This reading of the concept might be familiar to the indigenous authors, speakers, language activists, bilingual educators, and government officials I discuss here – in short, “language planners” of various stripes. Such people are participating in ongoing work addressing how Mexico’s indigenous languages should best be represented, supported, and positioned for future viability. The wideranging set of initiatives and projects furthering this broad agenda are all anchored, if variously, in the validity of authenticity as a concept. Furthermore, those involved frequently frame their project against a background of hardship: above all, language shift, either as lived reality or lurking threat. Yet they meet this endeavor not from the assumption that authenticity can be taken for granted but rather from the position that it must be described, detached from competing notions, and defended. Thus even as most people engaged in the project are committed to authenticity in the singular, they expect the field of debate to be filled with multiple constructions of authenticity and position their interventions in light of actual and anticipated rival readings.

A key locus of their work is indigenous language literacy and writing. That focus entails a corresponding investment in orthographies as key sites where indigenous languages can be converted from dialectos (dialects) into written languages. This broad project of promoting indigenous language writing and reading is fundamentally semiotic, as graphic signs become authenticated indexes of spoken language. Further, the strategic use of such signs advances the process – following the famous quote attributed to Uriel Weinreich – of amassing linguistic armies and navies. If authenticity is a weapon in the fight against language shift and other forms of linguistic decay, in contemporary Mexico it takes the form of competing battle plans for linguistic militarization whose inaugural move is alphabetic standardization. In contestations over orthographies (see Fenigsen 2011; French 2010; Haeri 2002; Jaffe 2002; Romaine 1992, 2002; Schieffelin and Doucet 1994; Suslak 2003), even single letters can take on a range of competing meanings that implicate multiple orders of indexicality (Silverstein 2003). Such alphabetic conflicts draw upon multiple frames of semiotic representation, including dimensions of language use itself that go beyond phonology and its graphic representation.

Thus disputes over single letters refract contestations over multiple understandings of authenticity expressed through nested indexical orders – as may happen, for example, when the letter X becomes the focal point of disputes. Such disagreements include practical, first order indexical concerns. Does x represent the IPA symbol /h/, as in the contemporary pronunciation of “Mexico” with


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in the country itself? Or does it represent the IPA symbol /ʃ/, the central phoneme in the ethnonym Mexica (often glossed as “Aztec”), the ethnic group from which the country derives its name? But such alphabetic quarrels draw on second and thirddegree indexicality as well. The use of particular orthographic conventions is indexically linked to particular institutional affiliations and in turn to particular ideological commitments those institutions are seen as furthering. Choices about alphabets thus become a question not only of how to deal with the legacies of earlier linguistic work, as some language planners view earlier alphabets as thoroughly implicated in colonial domination (see Errington 2008). Rather, orthographic choice also concerns how to deal with the traces of colonial oppression in the habits modern speakers have developed for representing their words in writing. All the while, certain assumptions undergirding these contestations almost never rise to the surface of explicit commentary, such as the not unproblematic but pervasive view that writing, especially indigenous language writing, is best thought of as representing speech.1

Of course, those wider debates, however much they exceed the more practical ones tied to orthographies in use, are also made possible by phonetic ambivalence at the level of primary indexicality. That slippage is conditioned by the semiotic instability of mappings between speech and written text. It is especially acute in situations where, as is the case for all but a few Mexican indigenous languages, there are no universally established orthographic conventions. In such cases, orthographic ambivalence is magnified by historical process. In Mexico, literacy has been the focus of centuries of state policies and nongovernmental social programs dating from before the conquest. As such, it has been heavily mythologized as a prime mover for social change.2 Mexico’s indigenous intellectuals and linguistic activists frequently stress the ambivalence of this legacy. Take, for example, work by the renowned Zapotec poet, essayist, editor, historian, and public intellectual Victor de la Cruz (1999: 97). In “Tu laanu, ¿tu lanu?” (‘Who are we, what is our name?’), one of his most widely anthologized poems, he invokes the long history of imagining the nation through an alphabetic lens and the crisis of authenticity it has engendered:

1 There is a massive literature addressing this problematic assumption, much of it drawing on Derrida’s work (e.g., 1997). See, for example, Tomlinson 2007 on singing, writing, and speech in sixteenth century European apprehensions of New World song.2 Texts in this robust body of literature include Cifuentes 1992; Faudree 2013; Faudree and PharaoHansen 2014; Heath 1972; King 1994; PattheyChavez 1994.


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Xiñee rucaa binni lu gui’chi’ Why do we write on paperne cadi lu guidxilayú: in place of writing upon the land?… …Paraa biree gui’chi’, Where was paper borngasti’ cá lu, that it was born whitegutaguna’ diidxa’ riree ruaanu? and imprisons our words?… …Ni bedané diidxa’ biropa, He who brought the second languageBedaguuti stiidxanu ne laanu, came to kill us and our words as well,bedaguxhatañee binni xquídxinu, came to trample the people of the pueblosícasi ñácanu bicuti’ as if we were wormsbiaba lu yaga, nexhe’layú. fallen from the tress, thrown on the ground.Tu laanu, ¿tu lanu? Who are we, what is our name?

This poem highlights the political underpinnings of writing: writing emerges as a form of enslavement. As Derrida (1997) argued – introducing ideas that have influenced countless ethnographic studies on both literacy and sound (e.g., Cody 2009; Hirschkind 2006) – speech, writing, and the relations between them are never neutral but are always constructed and deployed in specific social settings. But in de la Cruz’s telling, literacy is also tied to what I take to be an ethnic existential crisis that pushes to the fore questions not only of authenticity but also of contamination, borders, and borrowings. De la Cruz suggests that although authenticity is an important guiding principle, measuring it depends on a complicated calculus that must accommodate not only continuity with the past but also resilience and adaptation, thus rejecting any easy compartmentalization between indigenous and nonindigenous lifeworlds. In a conversation with other indigenous intellectuals about autochthonous indigenous activism, de la Cruz seems to take aim at others who worry about the harmful influence of literal and metaphorical “contaminants” like plastics: “All cultures change; if they don’t, they don’t survive. Those that survive will be those that adapt. Today it is much cheaper to use objects made of plastic rather than clay … [Cultural innovation and adaptation] are more important than cultural restoration” (Quoted in Dalton 1990: 83).3 One man’s corruption by the evils of development is another man’s authenticity through selective engagement with modernity.

There is homologous discord on the matter of indigenous language literacy. Some view indigenous literacy as pointless, a waste of resources better spent promoting Spanish literacy and competence; some feel linguistic matters of any sort pale in importance compared to economic and political concerns; others still view literacy in indigenous languages as essential to their survival and the sur

3 Here, as elsewhere, translations from texts originally in Spanish are my own.



vival of the people who speak them. This last – a varied group of people who take indigenous language literacy as a key site for engaging in Mexico’s contemporary indigenous language politics – forms the focus of this essay. Yet though they share an investment in promoting indigenous language literacy, they disagree upon much about this broad mission, including matters of orthographic choice. In this paper, I consider their competing notions of “alphabetic authenticity” and the broad models of indigenous authorship they support. I focus in particular on how these contestations over the future of indigenous languages unfold in Oaxaca. As Mexico’s most linguistically diverse state, Oaxaca is a key venue for language debates, one where national language policies have been forged historically. Because those involved often focus on alphabets, their disagreements are obviously, explicitly semiotic. The awareness, even if tacit, that semiotic representations are at stake engenders complexes of metasemiotic claims as well.

Literacy has been heavily theorized across the humanities and social sciences, yet it has rarely been assessed in terms of authenticity. But for many indigenous language activists and some speakers, authenticity is a powerful lens for evaluating literacy projects. This is largely due to the long history of literacy projects in Mexico, which renders writing – and more specifically alphabets – patently political for many speakers of indigenous languages. The existence of preConquest writing systems in Mesoamerica led Spanish colonists to make indigenous literacy and text production central to colonial rule.4 By Independence, official interest in indigenous language literacy had mostly given way to promoting literacy in Spanish. But in the midtwentieth century, indigenous literacy again became the target of official policy. The postRevolutionary state, teaming with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), began promoting indigenous language literacy as a gateway to Spanish literacy and fluency, part of broadbased efforts to nationalize Mexico’s Indians. In recent decades, indigenous intellectuals – whether activists, authors, bilingual schoolteachers, or government employees – have increasingly promoted indigenous literacy. Their interests, while varied, depart from those of earlier promoters. A key motivation many share is that of developing ostensibly more authentic forms of writing, including more “authentic” alphabets.

I engage with these issues in part as an answer to Coupland’s call (2003; see also 2010) to investigate sociolinguistic authenticities ethnographically. Coupland’s chief intervention is to argue against “giving up too soon on authenticity” (2003: 417). As he says, “authenticity matters” (2003: 417), not only for scholars of language, given their investment in “authentic speakers,” but also for speakers

4 See Restall 1997 for a key review essay on this broad literature.


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themselves, as attested to by the sizable literature on “strategic essentialism” (e.g., Bucholtz and Hall 2004; Hale 2006; Speed 2008; Spivak 1990). My amendment to Coupland’s reading is to suggest that authenticity’s “crisis” looks a bit different in Mexico – and perhaps most postcolonial settings – for speakers and scholars alike. I claim that attending to authenticities ethnographically requires attention to at least three dimensions Coupland either does not consider or treats too lightly. My argument is grounded in my research into contestations among indigenous intellectuals, authors, and activists in Oaxaca. It is based on published work by both Western scholars and indigenous authors working throughout the state and on my own experience working in the region, where I have focused on literacy and literatures in the indigenous languages Mazatec and Sierra Norte Zapotec.

First, though Coupland’s analysis is not at odds with a focus on history, he does not foreground the importance of historical context. Yet in Mexico’s contemporary indigenous language politics, understanding the social work accomplished by competing constructions of authenticity crucially depends upon viewing them in historical context. In Mexico – and likely other places as well – engagements with authenticity are often read in deeply historical terms. Second, attending to authenticities requires analyzing not just the different varieties of a given language – in Coupland’s terms, “establishment” varieties (national, standard, official, etc.) versus “vernacular” ones – but the multiple languages at play in a given ethnographic setting, and their relations to each other. In Mexico, and perhaps much of the postcolonial world, both scholars and speakers engage with “authentic speakers” through other axes of differentiation – above all, that of monolinguals versus bilinguals, with the monolingual indigenous language speaker often serving as the unexamined epitome of the “authentic speaker.” What often goes unrecognized in such formulations is the naturalization of both particular means of engagement and particular categories of representation – issues I turn to below. Third, studying authenticities requires attention not just to the plural form that authenticities take but also to what social work is accomplished by that multiplicity. Building on Anna’s Tsing’s ideas about the generativity of “friction,” I argue that the conflict between different forms of authenticity can be productive. Thus, as I explain below, some “orthodox authenticities” espoused by indigenous intellectuals and disfavored by scholars are not merely useful as strategic essentialisms. They also throw unto relief and render tenable other models of authenticity – what I call here “alternative authenticities”: more fluid, dynamic, emergent models of authenticity that, among other things, tend to be valued by scholars. The value of those “alternative authenticities,” though often not recognized as such, depends crucially on the very “orthodox authenticities” that the more emergent models of authenticity explicitly reject.



2 Orthodox authenticities: “Alphabet first” and weighted bilingualism

In this section, I discuss orthodox authenticities among Oaxaca’s language planners and activists: views that are not only widely held by indigenous intellectuals but are also institutionally backed. I focus on the dominant “alphabet first” approach, which takes linguistic normalización – above all, orthographic standardization – to be essential. I examine how the relatively small differences of opinion among language planners as they engage with alphabetic writing – over, say, the validity of particular letters or how to mark tone – may have momentous political consequences (see Schieffelin and Doucet 1994). Despite these differences, indigenous intellectuals espousing orthodox authenticities not only share the view that language standardization is essential, but also share similar stances with respect to bilingualism and its role in indigenous authorship. In the next section, I contrast these orthodox authenticities with alternative authenticities: views that while held by some prominent indigenous intellectuals are at odds with orthodox views.

Foucault’s (1977) famous essay on authorship begins with the rhetorical question, “what matter who’s speaking?” But for many of Mexico’s indigenous authors, answering that question also depends on attending to who is reading. Indigenous language authorship is inseparable from matters of orthographic choice, which are at least as political as the choice to write in indigenous languages in the first place (see Faudree 2013). Orthographic choice is also a function of the politicallyinflected agenda to target – if not simultaneously create – particular audiences. The historical imposition of prescribed orthographies is crucial for understanding how indigenous intellectuals in Mexico approach indigenous literacy. Producing indigenous alphabets is part of the project of redressing histories of domination by reorienting indigenous language literacy more firmly towards native indigenous language speakers – and hence away, for example, from the taintbearing interests of colonial friars or twentiethcentury protestant missionaries. Thus those focused on devising standardized alphabets are simultaneously building reading publics and fostering crossvariant orthographic unity. This is especially so in places like Oaxaca with deep linguistic diversity.5

5 Note that the focus here is on intervariant unity at the level of writing, not at the level of speech. While I have on rare occasions heard indigenous language activists suggest it would be valuable for speakers of different variants to “speak more alike,” their primary focus is on promoting orthographic unity that will allow unified reading and writing practices.


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Language planners who focus on such “practical alphabets” draw on authenticity in at least two ways. First, “authentic” alphabets are viewed as having a different ontology than previous ones because they are devised by indigenous speakers themselves rather than by outside observers. Second, they are ostensibly aimed at an audience of native (“authentic”) speakers. In both cases, the history of indigenous language writing and speech are directly relevant, particularly in terms of how that history colors present practices surrounding indigenous language alphabets. One legacy of that history is that only a few indigenous Mexican – or, indeed, Amerindian – languages have standardized orthographies, and those that do generally have few variants. In languages with great internal diversity, often no standardized alphabet exists even within the same broad language variant.

Of course, not everyone views such orthographic variety negatively – after all, the SIL’s entire approach is based on “splitting” rather than “lumping,” on customizing orthographies to particular variants rather than standardizing orthographies across them. Indeed, not only is the SIL not troubled by the lack of crossvariant standard alphabets, they have been actively skeptical about the possibility of doing so, at least concerning some attempts to standardize Oaxacan languages. In contrast, many indigenous intellectuals view orthographic variety as a profound problem. Since early 2011, I have participated in periodic meetings of what was originally called the Comité Interinstitucional del Proceso de Planeación Lingüística en Oaxaca (The InterInstitutional Committee for the Language Planning Process in Oaxaca), later renamed the Comité Interinstitucional para las Culturas y Lenguas de Oaxaca (The InterInstitutional Committee for the Cultures and Languages of Oaxaca), or CICLO. This broadbased coalition consists almost entirely of indigenous intellectuals holding positions at a range of governmental and nongovernmental organizations. At every meeting I have attended, the importance of working towards orthographic standardization was emphasized, part of the broader pursuit of normalización. That ongoing process makes visible the presupposable regularities of indigenous languages – by producing grammars, pedagogical materials, etc. – while also creatively producing new regularities of use, by producing and disseminating standardized alphabets.

Many indigenous writers and educators have taken this “alphabet first” approach, claiming that achieving a standard alphabet can be a foundation upon which to expand language revitalization initiatives. Such alphabets are indeed an achievement, often the outcome of years of debate. In Oaxaca, arguably the most successful case of crossvariant standardization was led by the Mixtec organization Ve’e Tu’un Savi (‘House of the Voice of the Rain’), which finally agreed upon a panMixtec alphabet after seven years of discussion (Romero Frizzi 2003). Among intellectuals promoting this “alphabet first” approach, all other steps –



including the direct promotion of indigenous language literacy – must wait. As expressed by the late Carlos Montemayor, a leading Mexican public intellectual and longtime supporter of indigenous authors:

The development of the Indigenous writer is a more laborious and delayed process than that of the Mexican authors who write in Spanish … [It is] influenced by many aspects … [including] the choice of which alphabet to use. Up to now, the definition of these alphabets for Indigenous languages has been done solely by official institutions … [Thus] Indigenous writers … [must] rethink almost everything having to do with their language from the very moment that they decide which alphabet to use. Other challenges, such as their formal literary training, come later. (Montemayor and Frischmann 2005: 5)6

Debates about alphabets can be contentious because people adopting what I call “orthodox authenticities” may conceptualize “alphabetic authenticity” in very different ways. For some, it is anchored in genealogy. Creating “authentic alphabets” requires purging them of all traces of externally derived alphabets: earlier orthographies devised by people who were not indigenous, and that are viewed as directly linked to state projects of oppression. However, even those agreeing on these issues may disagree in the face of challenges rooted in specific phonological and dialectal features of the language in question. Not all indigenous language planners push for a single alphabet that democratically and inclusively represents a language’s speakers across all variants. For example, indigenous linguists trained by the Protestant missionarylinguist organization Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) tend to follow its approach of customizing orthographies to particular variants rather than standardizing across them. Others, however, actively pursue crossdialect standards. The project takes on added political punch when coupled to a claim I have heard many Oaxacans make, including the renowned Zapotec author Javier Castellanos (e.g., 1994): that Spanish colonizers promoted dialectal variation in order to foster division within indigenous groups. Though this idea is at odds with Western historical linguistic research (which places such divisions much earlier), written texts can often bridge spoken variants with relative facility. Indigenous intellectuals in Oaxaca frequently stress this. Doing so makes alphabetic standardization not only recuperative but politically calalyzing as well, as written texts hold out the possibility of uniting variants that would be mutually unintelligible when spoken, creating a potential substrate for political unity.

Realizing a universal, crossdialect standard can be difficult, however, as born out by Suslak’s account of arguments about the letter Ö among Mixe

6 This essay appeared in both English and Spanish; this excerpt is from the English version.


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intellectuals (2003). There, conflicts over particular orthographic choices centered on how they might differentially privilege or marginalize speakers of certain variants (see also Schieffelin and Doucet 1994). Similar tensions have animated disagreements among Mazatec authors and intellectuals over the letter X. It has been used since the eighteenth century to represent the phoneme corresponding to the IPA symbol /ʃ/. Those incorporating the letter include preRevolutionary orthographies used by Catholic priests; midtwentieth century orthographies used by SIL missionary linguists; and more recent alphabets used in publications by state institutions including the national Secretariat for Public Education and the government agencies responsible for interfacing with indigenous populations (the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) and its successor, the Comissión para el Desarollo de los Pueblos Indígenas (CDI)). Thus generations of Mazatec speakers have learned to read their native language, at however basic a level, using the letter X.

Many Mazatec intellectuals do not find this problematic. In the Mazatec highlands, the materials currently used in the region’s bilingual schools were devised in consultation with some of its most prominent intellectuals, and bilingual schoolteachers across the region routinely use alphabets containing the letter X. Other Mazatec intellectuals, however, oppose the letter. They stress that the disparity between the phonetic value of an X in a Mazatec text and the X in, say, the names for both the state and the nation – where X represents the IPA symbol /h/ – is a practical problem, confusing fledgling readers. Others have more political critiques, linking contemporary use of the letter to its use by colonial Spanish priests and numerous other outsiders – people who, in the words of one Mazatec author I interviewed, “came here to change my people.” But people may also claim that using the letter privileges those who speak the same variant as the Mazatec authors who assisted in creating them. Such objections rest on third order indexicality, too, as when language planners from different towns read orthographies through the prism of regional rivalries. And so the letter X – or any other single letter that similarly emerges as a focal point for disagreement – can become an emblem of deadlock.7

For those pursuing an “alphabet first” approach, even once a practical alphabet has been agreed upon, other conflicts arise. Most turn on competing ideas of authenticity, particularly regarding readers. Most indigenous readers will have some experience, however minimal, of one or more of the existing alphabets intellectuals are trying to displace. They will view the new orthography as authen

7 This case parallels other ethnographic work examining orthographic choice and the politics of representing sound, including Becker (1995) on the Burmese orthographic system, Briggs (1996) on Warao “vernacular healing,” and Samuels (2004) on vocables in doowop.



tic or inauthentic based on any number of factors: how faithfully it represents the variant they speak in daily life; its proximity to the alphabet around which they have developed habits; how local politics might or might not have influenced the outcome, a judgment directly related to how they position themselves with respect to the particular language planners involved. Similar issues arise when indigenous intellectuals attempt to promote literacy itself. While the country’s bilingual schools nominally promote indigenous literacy, few indigenous intellectuals claim such schools promote indigenous literacy in a serious way. Most, therefore, attempt to “fill the void” by promoting indigenous literacy through workshops and other ad hoc arrangements administered by individual writers, teachers, or local organizations. Perennial problems include funding, manpower, and factionalism: the individuals spearheading such efforts often do so “on their own time,” on shoestring budgets, and may be situated along any number of local social fault lines. This makes attendance at literacy workshops exclusionary in practice if not in theory, as participation (and nonparticipation) is linked to a range of social identities, including religious and political ones.

Authenticity is important in at least one other way as well, concerning how alphabetic standardization is tied to bilingualism. In Mexico, the vast majority of indigenous language texts are published in bilingual, Spanish/indigenous language editions, with authors generally producing both versions of a given text. There are many factors that support this norm. For example, it allows indigenous literatures to be read by audiences of nonnative speakers: other indigenous authors and readers, as well as nonnative supporters like Carlos Montemayor. But for present purposes, I stress the relationship between this norm and the practices through which native speakers read indigenous language texts. Unlike readers of Spanish and other standardized languages with institutionalized scripts, readers come to an indigenous language text with less stable expectations about how speech will be represented graphically. With few exceptions, people learning how to read and write in an indigenous language are already at least marginally literate in Spanish – or, as with children, they are in the process of becoming so inside a wider social system where Spanish has a massive advantage. In even the most remote indigenous communities, the vast majority of written texts – from newspapers to calendars to labels on packages to political posters to graphics on TV – appear in Spanish.

Thus unless indigenous readers are familiar with the alphabet in question – as with authors working in the orthography they use habitually and often helped devise – uncovering the relationship between phoneme and grapheme is largely a process of trial and error, an exercise in experimentation, as the reader tests the written symbols against guesses at which spoken words are being represented. In bilingual editions, the Spanish version is a crucial part of this process: speakers


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use it to “decode” the indigenous language version, comparing the Spanish text to the indigenous one while measuring the written indigenous text against the language when spoken. In more than a hundred instances of watching indigenous people read texts in their native languages, the method I have most commonly observed involves speakers tacking back and forth between the indigenous language version and the Spanish one, while simultaneously pursuing a similar – and rarely silent – process of comparison between the written indigenous language text and the spoken language.8

This is one reason that indigenous authors and intellectuals publish their work in bilingual editions, despite the ideological conflicts it might produce. For revival projects explicitly geared towards strengthening indigenous languages and diminishing the power of Spanish, it is potentially an ironic contradiction that indigenous literacy, as a key vehicle in revival efforts, is so thoroughly tied to the use of Spanish. As a means of resolving this tension, those espousing an “alphabet first” approach also commonly hold particular ideologies of bilingualism. These carry with them particular notions of authenticity, part of the complex I call “orthodox authenticities.” In this view, the indigenous language version is always the primary, “authentic” text, and the Spanish version merely a translation. On the record, almost all of the indigenous authors I interviewed from across the country hold this view, claiming to write the indigenous language version first, and from it produce the Spanish translation. This, in turn, is tied to their insistence that the indigenous language is their first language. Even though most writers aim from the beginning to produce work that will appear in bilingual editions, they state publicly that they produce texts in the indigenous language first and then translate them into Spanish. The national grants for writers in indigenous languages require as much, and judge the quality of the work – with the possible exception of widely spoken indigenous languages such as Nahuatl or Yucatec Maya – based on the perceived quality of the Spanish version. At the same time, the indigenous language texts are the key to the author’s legitimacy and authority, both for speakers from the same speech community as the author as well as for those from outside it.

This majority or orthodox view was recently articulated with unusual clarity by the renowned Isthmus Zapotec poet and essayist Victor Terán. Given in a scathing commentary at the summer 2010 Encuentro de Escritores Zapotecos (Encounter of Zapotec Writers), it was later published in the state newspaper, Las Noticias (Terán 2010). Entitled “Escritores indígenas: en qué lengua se piensa

8 See Faudree 2013 for a fuller discussion of the complex issues surrounding who constitutes the readership for indigenous language texts.



cuando se escribe” (‘Indigenous authors: In which language do they think when they write?’), the essay decries what he calls “opportunistic writers”: those who, in order to win national competitions for indigenous authors, merely pretend that their “language of inspiration” is the indigenous one. Terán states that in contradistinction to their explicit claims, most indigenous authors actually do the opposite: they write in Spanish first and subsequently translate their work into the indigenous language. While his editorial gives lucid expression to the orthodox view about the locus of authenticity in bilingual indigenous authorship, it is a voice enflamed by perceived threats. Those threats are represented by views and practices of indigenous authorship and literacy that align with what I call “alternative authenticities”: models of authenticity that take a different view towards bilingualism and indigenous authorship, as well as towards the importance of standard alphabets and normalización more generally.

3 Alternative authenticities: Counter-ideologies in Mexican indigenous writing

Orthodox views of authenticity in Mexican indigenous language politics are plural and “messy” but have a robust core. They coalesce around specific models of bilingual authorship, centering on the importance of standard alphabets and normalización. Yet there are also countervailing views and practices. These involve failing to adopt the “alphabet first” view or rejecting it altogether; resisting the hegemony of standardized alphabets by writing in alternative orthographies; or adopting alternative views of indigenous language authorship, particularly with respect to bilingual text production.9

These “alternative authenticities” have been variously suppressed. To date they have little if any institutional backing; they are not codified into formal policy, and hence are varied and plural. My evidence for such views is

9 Note that because indigenous intellectuals and authors are public figures, I normally use their real names; I adopt that approach earlier in this paper. In this section, however, I avoid naming the individuals I discuss, and keep their identities anonymous. Because many of the practices I relay here run counter to the dominant views discussed in the previous section, they were told to me or my colleagues in confidence – in itself a testament to the hegemony of orthodox views of authenticity. Because the social circle of those involved in indigenous language politics in Oaxaca is relatively small, I avoid ethnic designators as well because they could easily index particular individuals. For similar reasons I uniformly use male gender terms: despite the increasing prominence of women, men remain dominant in indigenous authorship and activism, and using female gendered terms might disproportionately “out” the women whose alternative and controversial views I discuss.


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correspondingly anecdotal; it draws from my own experience working over many years with indigenous language authors and activists and discussing the state of Mexico’s indigenous language politics with other researchers. Yet collectively, these assorted experiences underscore the importance of taking seriously Coupland’s call for examining authenticities ethnographically. Even more than is the case for the authenticities I classify as “orthodox,” the views falling under the “alternative” umbrella are profoundly varied. Furthermore, the “authentic speakers” adopting them are, as Coupland says, “very much more interesting than we had assumed” (2003: 425). Attending to the social work that alternative approaches accomplish alongside orthodox ones is important for understanding how specific constructions of authenticity play a role in social life. Furthermore, given the unequal status these different authenticities have for Western scholars, attending to the different kinds of social work they accomplish has the potential for increasing the reflexivity of scholarly practice. Academic researchers, myself included, are not neutral participants in the debates I discuss here about the future of Mexico’s indigenous languages. Indigenous language activists and planners often seek out such scholars as experts, whose explicit opinions as well as unexamined assumptions about what constitutes authenticity can have powerful effects on how conversations about the future of Mexico’s indigenous languages unfold and lead to action.

In terms of countervailing views of orthographic standardization, one case I can point to has been less suppressed per se than merely marginalized: the Day of the Dead Song Contest in Oaxaca’s Sierra Mazateca. Founded about thirty years ago, this revival project aimed to further indigenous language literacy while valorizing local musical performance practices. The central element of each song entry is a written text of the Mazatec words. However, though most involved in the contest – including, most notably, the judges – are strong proponents of the “alphabet first” approach, the song contest itself adopts a policy of “orthographic heterodoxy.” Authors are free to submit texts using whatever alphabet they choose, including either institutionally backed orthographies or idiosyncratic ones adopted by particular authors (Faudree 2013). The approach has been highly generative, fostering widespread participation of individuals with varied socio economic and educational backgrounds. Yet the utter novelty of its flexible approach to indigenous language writing goes largely unrecognized by local people (and in some cases is even disparaged); outside the region, the contest is largely unknown and relatively invisible.

Indigenous authors who take the “alphabet first” approach tout its benefits, but its capacity to institutionalize language revitalization also has a dark side. Off the record, I have been told about several cases where indigenous authors suffered because they did not write in standard orthographies adopted by other in



digenous people. In one case, the author found his master’s thesis rejected by his committee on the grounds that it was not “sufficiently professional”; after heated discussion, the fact that he did not write his thesis using the orthography that one committee member helped devise became the key point of contention. Once his thesis was passed, the author faced similar problems in publishing it. Protestants who became indigenous language authors through the SIL’s assistance likewise complain that their perspectives are marginalized in discussions aimed at devising panethnic alphabets. This is, in part, political: in most language groups, intellectuals credentialed through secular state institutions dominate conversations about linguistic normalización.

Similar tensions are faced by indigenous intellectuals whose views of the bilingual nature of indigenous authorship conflict with orthodox views. Indigenous authorship in Mexico fundamentally depends upon being able to produce bilingual work. The fact that indigenous authors produce their own Spanish translations in itself suggests that indigenous literary production is more complicated than the orthodox view admits. As seen from reading practices, the text itself is fundamentally bilingual: these are synthetic, bi-linguistic texts whose “meaning” lies not in one version but rather in both as they interact within the same integrated but bifurcated entity. This reorientation towards text has much in common with Woolard’s discussion of “bivalency” and “strategic bivalency” (Woolard 1998; Woolard and Genovese 2007); both share an impulse to embrace Bakhtinian multiplicity and hybridity. But the forms of textuality at work in this case also differ from those Woolard discusses. Rather than depending on the construction of bivalent sign complexes capable of functioning across multiple codes, the texts constructed by Mexico’s indigenous authors depend on preserving and even heightening the boundaries between the codes in question, even as those codes become firmly harnessed to each other in the context of bilingual publications. The textual ideologies surrounding such texts can explain how at least one indigenous author I know of claims the Spanish version serves to highlight the poetic and rhetorical wealth of the indigenous language version, alongside which the Spanish version appears impoverished and inferior. Such forms of textuality fundamentally problematize standard models of translation relying on single language “originals,” replacing them with a more complex, dialogic understanding of how texts work.

This model of indigenous authorship poses some challenges to the hegemony of Spanish. The bilingual texts that are its cornerstone become iconic representations of democratic parity in which indigenous languages and Spanish interact on equal footing. Yet the political economy surrounding indigenous language text production, and the processes by which such texts are evaluated, continue to be structured by entrenched linguistic hierarchies. In both


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the production and critique of indigenous language writing, Spanishspeaking readers and supporters – including indigenous intellectuals who speak other indigenous languages – have much greater influence than do indigenous language speakers (see Faudree 2013 for a fuller discussion of these dynamics). These social aspects of text production place enormous importance on the Spanish version, often privileging it over the indigenous language version. Given that, one would expect at least some authors to follow precisely the path that the author Terán disparages: that of writing in Spanish first and subsequently translating their work into the indigenous language.

Indeed, many authors seem to be doing just that in secret, but few will admit to it publicly. Take, for example, a recent winner of the Nezahualcoyótl Prize, Mexico’s highest for indigenous language writing. He confessed privately to writing the Spanish version of his winning manuscript first; in fact, he indicated he barely made the deadline the prize committee gave him to submit the indigenous language version. The judges’ handling of the situation suggests this alternative model of indigenous authorship is an open secret, yet one far too risky for authors to espouse publicly.

Let me offer another example. On several occasions, indigenous language speakers who are also highly bilingual in Spanish have commented to me that when reading indigenous texts the Spanish version “reads better” than the indigenous language one, which has idiomatic echoes of the Spanish version. This suggests either that the Spanish version was written first or that the two were written simultaneously (see Hill 1985 for similar dynamics among Mexicano speakers). I know of only one prominent indigenous intellectual who has been consistently outspoken in insisting – both in print and in interviews with me – that he is fully bilingual, having grown up speaking both his “native language” and Spanish. He has repeatedly insisted, at least privately, that “we need to change the discourse” – to allow for greater public acceptance of the importance of bilingualism, and to develop an ostensibly more “authentic” model for indigenous authorship, one that more accurately reflects the bilingual realities surrounding the lives of indigenous authors and the production of indigenous literatures. Yet to my knowledge even he has never claimed publicly to write in Spanish first and translate into the indigenous language second. Rather, he insists that he produces the two versions in concert. While in itself this is a demonstrable departure from dominant national metapragmatic stances regarding text production, it still conserves elements of the orthodox authenticities by suggesting that writers who produce the Spanish version first are, in essence, “fakes.”

The multiplicity of authenticities at play in the realm of the “alternative” comes even more fully to the fore when we consider performance practices surrounding indigenous language texts; here, the matter of what is “fake” and what



is “real” becomes even more complex. Just as most indigenous authors publish in bilingual editions, so in most public readings of their work the authors alternate reading texts in Spanish and the indigenous language. On most such occasions, the audience will consist of some people who understand only the Spanish version and some who understand both. I know of more than one indigenous author who sometimes reads texts in Spanish that, in terms of referential content, are different texts entirely from the indigenous language versions. From the perspective of the orthodox authenticities discussed here, such an act is profoundly inauthentic, at best engaging in a gentle prank and at worst making a mockery of the entire project of indigenous authorship. However, if one views such acts through the lens of the alternative authenticities discussed here, new meanings become possible: competing ways of reading such performances and of interpreting the author’s intent begin to emerge. Perhaps the author is privileging referential content when reading in Spanish and highlighting prosody and musicality when reading in the indigenous language (cf. Friedrich 1986); perhaps the author is setting up a new association between the two texts, with each being read as a metaphor or a metonym for the other; perhaps the author is indexically marking the boundaries around an “authentic audience” that consists entirely of those who recognize the discrepancy between the two texts; perhaps the author is engaging in a more explicitly politicized form of ingroup marking, a velvet vindication where those who only speak Spanish are secretly made to look like fools to everyone else.

But these are mere speculations. However widespread the practice is, it is to my knowledge never recognized publicly. Until it is, these questions cannot become the subject of conversation and debate, let alone part of the process by which people measure the artistic and social work that indigenous authors do. Yet making visible the need for such work speaks to the ongoing importance of ethnographic investigation into the culturally and historically specific ways that ideas about authenticity are constructed and deployed.

Furthermore, not only do these different understandings of authenticity stand at odds with each other, but they may take the form of internal inconsistencies within the stance of a given individual. For example, the author mentioned above who calls for “changing the discourse” towards greater public acknowledgment of the bilingual process of text production has also been a staunch advocate of the “alphabet first” approach to literacy. He sees the work of indigenous authorship as rooted not only in devising standard alphabets but also in modeling their appropriate use for other “less professionalized” indigenous authors. This speaks precisely to how the unpredictable messiness of authenticities may become visible once scholars embrace them as plural and analyze them in aggregate, stressing both their positive meaning and their contrastive value. Doing so


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allows scholars to observe how authenticities bump up against each other, dislodging received wisdom even as they propagate new dogmas.

4 Conclusion: Towards “changing the discourse” in Mexican indigenous language politics

Let me close by summarizing my key points. First, following Coupland’s call (2003) to examine authenticities ethnographically, I argue that there are at least two clusters of authenticities at play in contemporary indigenous language politics in Mexico: those I call respectively “orthodox authenticities” and “alternative authenticities.” Both are plural and internally varied, with both categories carrying within them different notions of authenticity. Together, these two broad classes of authenticities highlight certain shortcomings in Coupland’s formulation. I suggest that a fuller understanding of how authenticities are constructed and used requires us to attend to: a) historical context, particularly the history of language contact; b) not only different registers or variants within the same code but also how multiple codes, including variations within them, may be placed in relationship to each other; and c) the social work accomplished by the plurality of authenticities.

This latter point brings the case of Mexican indigenous language politics into dialogue with other recent work in linguistic and sociocultural anthropology. In particular, my argument here is in conversation with Tsing’s work (2005) on the ability of “friction” – points of conflict and disfluidity in erstwhile “global flows” – to produce new forms of collaboration and engagement. My argument also parallels Kroskrity’s work (Kroskrity 2009; Kroskrity and Field 2009) on “ideological clarification.” Kroskrity sees this as a useful strategy for indigenous communities to adopt in pursuing language renewal and activism, but he also recognizes it as potentially risky because it elicits conflicts that might otherwise remain latent. In Mexican indigenous language politics, the “friction” between orthodox and alternative authenticities brings to the surface the often inexplicit indexicalities at work in competing orders of indexicality surrounding such matters as orthographic choice and publication practices. The indexicalities illuminated by the tension between competing authenticities include the ideological loadings that a particular alphabetic choice or a particular model of indigenous language authorship may carry, with implications for the terms on which particular writers and readers are recruited to participate in – or be marginalized by – given indigenous language initiatives. As a result of such “ideological clarification,” new issues become open to debate and negotiation. Thus, for example, Terán’s pointed



and public defense of some of the key indexical commitments of orthodox authenticities has apparently become – if my conversations about the piece with other indigenous authors are any indication – the subject of at least private conversation and critique.

Viewed alongside the orthodox authenticities that dominate Mexico’s indigenous language politics, the alternative authenticities discussed here make clear that only within particular ideologies of indigenous authorship – those in which the indigenous language version is considered the “original” and the Spanish version the “translation” – does writing in Spanish first constitute a violation. The same is true of the performance practices discussed above: only within certain ideologies does reading aloud as paired doubles two referentially divergent texts – one in Spanish, the other in an indigenous language – constitute an inauthentic move: an attempt to hoodwink at least some members of the audience. Within that ideology it would be anathema to claim, for example, that for indigenous authors – a la Samuel Beckett, whose own translations into English of his original French texts have become the authoritative versions – translation becomes the instrument of perfection. Yet “changing the discourse” about indigenous language authorship – and recasting the authenticities on which “the discourse” depends, including the particular signs that index it – would come closer to acknowledging the fully bilingual nature of the work indigenous authors do. Furthermore, doing so would make visible new elements of their artistic skill, including how they strategically draw on the resources of two radically different codes. Nonetheless, for now such positions remain marginalized, subject to the kinds of critiques that Victor Terán and other established indigenous authors launch and that rely on orthodox authenticities.

But while embracing these alternative authenticities may be unusual among established indigenous authors, my new research suggests that a generational shift may be under way. Such shifts may be tied to broader demographic changes as well: the latest census indicates that bilingualism may be on the rise nationally, particularly among speakers age thirtyfive or under (INEGI 2010). And interviews I have done with younger indigenous authors and activists imply that many are adopting language ideologies that more explicitly embrace the im portance of bilingualism. They seem much more interested in publishing pri marily in Spanish, reading that choice not as a sign that indigenous languages are “losing ground” but rather that spoken indigenous languages and cross ethnic conversation are both more important focal points than are indigenous language publications.

Finally, this case points out the special purchase a semiotic approach affords in elucidating the social work accomplished by competing authenticities, and the generative potential the friction between them can produce. Placing semiotic


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practice at the center of analysis foregrounds the sometimes recursive, sometimes productively disjunctive process by which conflicts among authenticities are focused not on objective realities – not on particular types of people or practices as natural kinds – but on the signs that come to index them in complex networks and hierarchies of representation. Furthermore, a semiotic approach highlights the material dimensions of language contact. In the synthetic, bi linguistic texts that are the cornerstone of indigenous language text production in Mexico, the presence of each language version qua script authenticates the entire textcomplex as “authentically” indigenous. This process involves a semiotic dynamic whereby the ostensible other is at once positioned as oppositional yet necessary. This dynamic echoes Basso’s discussion (1979) of Apache joking genres, whereby authentic Apache selves and the interactional styles that display and instantiate such selves are defined through contrast with White selves and their opposing, inauthentic interactional styles. In Mexico, similar commitments to contrasts underpinning particular models of indigenous authorship, and the particular histories of language contact they engage, have powerful material effects with wideranging implications for the lived reality of indigenous languages and the quotidian experience of those who speak them. Thus this case exposes a site where other scholars working on authenticities might productively turn, as different and even competing authenticities become an entry point for understanding not only the ideological underpinnings of investment in “authenticity” but also the material stakes of taking the concept seriously.

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BionotePaja Faudree (b. 1977) is an assistant professor at Brown University <paja_ [email protected]>. Her research interests include language and politics, indigenous literary and social movements, the interface between music and language, and the ethnohistory of New World colonization. Her publications include “How to say things with wars: Performativity and the temporal pragmatics of power in the Requerimiento of the Spanish Conquest” (2012); Singing for the dead: The politics of indigenous revival in Mexico (2013); “The annual Day of the Dead song contest: Musicallinguistic ideologies, piratability, and the challenge of scale” (2014); and “Tales from the land of magic plants: Textual ideologies and fetishes of indigeneity in Mexico’s Sierra Mazateca” (2015).


Why X doesn’t always mark the spot: Contested authenticity in Mexican indigenous language politics

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