JULIA TILTON

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Julia Tilton is a reporter focused on energy and climate change. With experience in newsrooms across North America and at NASA, Julia has a track record of delivering impactful digital and multimedia journalism. She has a bachelor's degree from Vanderbilt University in Earth and Environmental Sciences and Spanish.Her byline has appeared in a host of outlets in the U.S. and Mexico, including Grist, The Boston Globe, New Hampshire Public Radio, The Oregonian and The Yucatán Times. She also produces and co-hosts the Daily Yonder's Rural Reporter's Notebook podcast, a bi-weekly series covering climate, politics and culture.

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JULIA TILTON

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JULIA TILTON

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The Climate Storytellers in Our Families

TED-STYLE TALK at NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER
_{July 2024}

Without Language There is No Community

MAYAN RESISTANCE DURING THE AGE OF EXTINCTION
_{August 2023}

In Mexico’s Yucatán region, Mayan communities are rewriting a narrative of endangerment by actively learning, speaking and teaching their 5,000-year old ancestral language.

“Time,” says Pedro Uc Be, “occurs in cycles.” He sets down his glass so that it sweats onto a knit coaster embroidered with a moon. Uc Be looks up from behind his glasses, balanced on the far slope of his nose. He addresses his audience, a grouping of friends gathered in Campeche’s historic center.“Often, people ask me, ‘When will there be rain?’” Uc Be says. “When I respond to them, I simply say that the rains will return.” His gaze travels deliberately across the room. Nearing sixty, Uc Be has eyes that are fierce but kind. He pauses before continuing to speak.“Everything that has happened before will come to pass again,” Uc Be says, offering an explanation. “I do not know on what day or at what hour the rains will come, but I am sure that they will arrive once more.”The cycles, Uc Be says, come from the Mayan sun calendar. They reinitiate every fifty-two years, about the same distance as the generations between grandparents and their grandchildren. This span of five decades seems at once both an insignificant amount of time and an incomprehensible stretch of separation. In Mayan societies, grandparents customarily serve as the primary caretakers for their grandchildren; parents leave home to work for most of the day. During the recent rain cycle, modern technologies have ushered in a drastically different way of life for youth. Today, Mayan children have the ability, in their adolescence, to log in to online profiles and engage with information and perspectives from societies far removed from their own.Growing up in Buctzotz, a town in Mexico’s Yucatán state, Uc Be learned to speak Maya as his mother tongue. The language is that of his grandparents and, before that, of their grandparents. Twenty-first-century Maya inherits its roots from a language first spoken more than 5,000 years ago, according to researchers, including Tomás Pérez Suárez, a professor at the Institute of Philological Research’s Center of Mayan Studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.“Mayan thought unfolds in the ancient tongue,” Uc Be says. His upbringing was marked by a linguistic tradition that has been the custom for centuries. For the grandchildren of his generation, however, this passing down of language is not guaranteed.Today, only 13% of ethnically Mayan children between the ages of three and seventeen speak Maya, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). Socio-cultural forces at play over recent decades have reduced the population of Mayan speakers, who compose Mexico’s second-largest Indigenous language speaker base after Náhautl.Between Mexico’s 2010 and 2020 census collections, the over half-million Mayan speakers in Yucatán state saw their population decrease by nearly 30,000 people within the span of the decade. In the neighboring states of Campeche and Quintana Roo – which together with Yucatán comprise the Yucatán peninsular region – the Mayan-speaking populations also declined, though not as drastically, INEGI data shows. Prior to 2010, it is worth noting that no significant effort existed to record the number of Indigenous language speakers throughout the country.Now, the trends emerging from the recent data collection demand attention. Across Mexico, close to 775,000 people speak Maya, according to the 2020 census. Yet this number represents a continuing decline in the language's speaker base, down 5.9% from what it had been ten years earlier in 2010 when closer to 800,000 people regularly used Maya to communicate.Some have set off alarms with respect to these findings. If one of the most widely-spoken Indigenous languages in the Western hemisphere is suffering from a shrinking speaker base, linguistic experts worry about what could be in store for other, lesser-spoken languages.In 2018, one group of concerned linguists and anthropologists wrote to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (or AMLO, as he is referred to by the Mexican public), urging him to prioritize the conservation of Mexico’s 68 living Indigenous languages during his six-year term. The letter’s collaborators warned that, under the current circumstances, these languages could disappear within two generations as they are increasingly displaced by Spanish.Uc Be, who dedicates his life to activism, teaching, poetry and the defense of Mayan territory, views the present situation in the context of centuries of struggle.“The Mayan language is alive not only because it continues to be spoken after hundreds of years of conquest, but also because it continues to jealously guard the óol of its earliest creators,” Uc Be says, referencing the óol as the Mayan understanding of spirit, or essence.Recent generations have seen technology redraw the front lines of the battle to conserve the Mayan language. Spanish-language television has become commonplace inside the home in the years since Uc Be was a child. Instead of learning the mother tongue of their parents, the newest generations of Mayan children speak a romance language. As in other places around the world, today’s youth sit down in front of screens, consuming the latest products of media algorithms. A few decades ago, they joined older family members at kitchen tables to converse in their ancestral language.As society arrives at a state of globalization unlike any previously in human history, anthropologists, geologists and archaeologists are speaking about the ‘Age of Extinction’ with increased fervor. Apart from the consequences to the natural world wrought by industrializing forces, globalization also threatens culture. Most urgently, the proliferation of languages the world once enjoyed is at risk of diminishing. When languages go extinct, they are literally lost in translation, taking with them generations of history, tradition and knowledge.

Teaching resistance at a little wooden table

Margarita Guzman sits at a table overflowing with words. They are everywhere. They spill from notebook pages and loose-leaf paper. They cover textbooks and dictionaries and hand-made flashcards.“Bix´a beel,” Guzman greets her students, asking how they are in Maya. “Jach ma´alob,” they chorus in response, indicating they are well. The students smile as they settle into their coloring activity, where they will assign the Mayan names to the animals they pencil in, ‘tsí’i’min’ for horse, ‘peek’ for dog. The class is open to all ages, but today it is children who fill the wooden benches beside Guzman.Unlike Uc Be, Guzman did not learn Maya until she was an adult. A tour guide in her home city of Campeche, she began studying the language while she worked to obtain her license. Now, when she teaches weekly classes, she adopts the same hungry curiosity as her students, often searching along with them for a particular word or a pronunciation when one unfamiliar to her arises.“My parents did not speak Maya outside of our home,” says Guzman, who is in her thirties. “They were afraid of the discrimination.”This fear persists today, according to Abigail Uc Canché of the Municipal Institute for Strengthening Mayan Culture in Yucatán state. Mayan youth are often uncomfortable speaking the language of their ancestors in public, Uc Canché has said, attributing prejudice as an inhibiting factor. In some cases, discrimination prompts young people to hide or play down their Mayan language abilities.Even as individuals like Uc Be and Uc Canché work to promote and defend Mayan culture, an atmosphere of discrimination is still potent in the region.In one instance of particularly egregious racism in 2022, the Copal Tulum hotel in the city of Tulum attempted to ban its workers from speaking Mayan, their native language, amongst themselves while at work. In response, the employees organized and filed a lawsuit against their employer, garnering the support of Tulum’s mayor and the human rights commission of the state of Quintana Roo.At Guzman’s table in Campeche, a chalkboard sign reads in Spanish, ‘Cultura es la lengua Maya’. Culture is the Mayan language. As familiar faces turn up to her table week after week, her students’ progress grows evident by their ability to move deeper into conversations, beyond the back-and-forth exchange of greetings.In other parts of the peninsula, Guzman’s efforts are joined by others working to promote Mayan language learning in classroom and non-classroom settings.In Yucatán state, the “Ko´one´ex kanik maaya” (We learn Maya) program has been offering classes to primary and secondary school students since 2018. The program, which began under current governor Mauricio Vila Dosal, is organized by the state government’s Secretary of Education office, known by its Spanish acronym SEGEY. The objective, according to those who teach the classes, is to encourage children to value and promote the Mayan language. As of 2023, the program has expanded to include fifty-nine bilingual instructors in the city of Mérida and in small towns further inland.Amidst current threats to Indigenous communities throughout the peninsula, a certain vigilance has come to accompany the act of speaking Maya. While the pillaging of their culture and way of life are not new experiences for the Mayan people living in the region, recent phenomena have marked a new era of physical invasion into Mayan spaces. In addition to the expansion of often-illegal industrial pig farms which now pockmark the Yucatán, the most visceral manifestation of this territorial intrusion is the construction of the Tren Maya.Slicing through the largest protected biosphere in Mexico, the Tren Maya is a mega-scale infrastructure project which has become a centerpiece of AMLO’s administration. Expected to reach completion by 2024, the train will begin regular operations just as AMLO leaves office. The train’s 1,500 kilometer route will transport tourists – the vast majority of whom are foreigners – from coastal hotel hotspots like Cancún to the inner peninsula and further west to the states of Chiapas and Tabasco.“The truth,” says Uc Be, “is that there is this sheet of darkness hanging over our community which can be labeled as misinformation, manipulation, abuse, lies, division, selfishness, individualism, consumerism as well as many other ‘-isms’ that take the territory by assault and turn it into their field of development through megaprojects called ‘Riviera Maya’ and ‘Tren Maya’ among others.”Uc Be continues by explaining that the commoditization of Mayan people, traditions, and history has devastated authentic efforts to keep the culture alive.“Talking about the community today is exoticism,” he says. “To speak of the Mayan language today is to go to an elitist state institute of language. To speak of Mayan celebrations today is to go to the Xcaret theme park to witness a ‘Mayan’ wedding, a wedding with the same claims to ‘Maya’ as that plundering train and that foreign riviera on land that has been Mayan.”For Uc Be and other inhabitants of the peninsula, speaking Maya is no longer a simple linguistic endeavor. It is simultaneously a valued practice of cultural inheritance and an urgent necessity. Across the Yucatán, in both classrooms and community centers, and between cultural leaders, activists and youth, the people of the peninsula are gathering around a shared goal. They are actively teaching, learning and communicating in their language as an act of resistance.

Stolen words returned to the classroom

According to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), there are currently around 3,000 languages worldwide that face at least some risk of disappearing. In Campeche’s neighboring state of Tabasco, international attention was drawn to a small village when, in 2011, the number of speakers of Ayapaneco dwindled to a few elderly individuals who lived there. When those speakers were children, their language, known also as Nuumte Oote, was used by their families and fellow community members. A few generations later, the number of speakers with knowledge of their ancestral tongue has reduced drastically.The case of Ayapaneco’s severe endangerment follows the trajectory of other Indigenous languages. In twentieth-century Tabasco and other parts of Mexico, Spanish became the dominant language of instruction in schools. During this time, institutions prohibited students from speaking the inherited languages of their families, sometimes enforcing the rules with harsh punishments.Canada’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century residential schools for Indigenous youth – where it has been estimated that over 6,000 children lost their lives – left a similarly grim legacy with respect to Indigenous languages. The aftermath of the abuse and cultural loss propagated by these schools is discernible today across Canada’s First Nations. Although the country today records 70 living Indigenous languages, in 2016 just 16% of Canada’s Indigenous population could speak one fluently. As is the case in Mexico, this population of speakers rests on the perpetual brink: between 2006 and 2016, the measure of fluent speakers dropped by six percentage points.In recent years, members of Canada’s First Nations have made significant efforts to rescue their languages from extinction. Cree, the most widely-spoken Indigenous language in Canada, is now being taught in schools across the Alberta prairie lands. In the same region, four First Nations signed an agreement with the Canadian Parliament in 2018 to regain control of educational decisions, enabling them to design their curricula with the Cree language, traditions and culture. Over the decades between 1996 and 2016, the percentage of students learning an Indigenous language in public schools increased by eight percentage points.With Canada reeling from the discoveries of mass, unmarked graves at sites that were previously residential schools, it is an ongoing force of resistance for Indigenous communities to reclaim their languages.During the Covid-19 pandemic, the urgency of these resistance movements accelerated. The virus seriously threatened the elderly in communities where they are keepers of their ancestral languages. In Brazil, where there were 190 endangered languages recorded before the pandemic, the deaths of Indigenous elders jeopardize the legacies of entire cultures. Aritana Yawalapiti, the 71-year-old leader of the Yawalapiti people, died from Covid in late 2020, leaving his son to salvage his ancestral tongue. By bringing the language under intensive study at the University of Brasília, 42-year-old Tapi Yawalapiti is creating a textbook for teaching future generations. The death of his father left only a handful of fluent speakers of the Yawalapiti language, which, like the rest of Brazil’s endangered languages, is at risk of disappearing. Efforts are in place to document, transcribe and teach the Yawalapiti language, returning it to classrooms in the rainforests of Brazil’s Xingu National Park that the community calls home. Family members of the late Aritana Yawalapiti teach what they can of the language in schools. Since his father’s passing, Tapi understands he is working to prevent another death. Determined to resurrect a way of communication on the verge of extinction, Tapi continues his father’s legacy as the keeper of a language passed down for centuries. He fights for Yawalapiti to live on.Throughout the Americas, pockets of resistance are emerging. Some Indigenous leaders are taking to classrooms, encouraging students to identify with their languages. These efforts bring a reverence to the painful history of colonization, where words were once stolen in the same educational spaces.In Campeche, Uc Be worries about the state of his mother tongue as the words flowing from his community's classrooms are still predominantly Spanish.“They are whitewashing the minds of girls and boys for a televised school, which is why our written word has to address this issue,” Uc Be says. “As legitimate children of this land, we cannot keep a complicit silence, much less become the voice of our enslavers in the name of democracy or development.”Considering the generations that have come after him, Uc Be emphasizes the importance of producing Mayan literature. Written words, Uc Be says, are timeless representations of thought and heart. They can communicate identity and spirit even after those who penned them have passed on.“To write Mayan literature is to put selected seeds of all colors between stones that the earth protects, molding the flesh of new life,” Uc Be says.

***

Na´. Yuum. Chiich. Lits´in. Ch´i´balil. Mother. Father. Grandmother. Little brother. Family.Neat handwriting lines a sheet of paper with the Mayan words for family members. Guzman works her way through the list deliberately, allowing a few seconds to pass between each pronunciation of a new word. Nudged against Guzman’s right hip is a little boy who bears a striking resemblance to her. As the class continues, Guzman turns her attention to the boy periodically, offering encouragement as he feels the new words on his tongue. The smallest student at the table, the six-year-old, is Guzman's son, learning the language of his grandparents alongside his mother.

***

Long after Guzman’s wooden table has been folded up and her class has finished for the day, the air in Campeche suddenly becomes thick. There is a rumbling overhead. Droplets fall slowly from the sky. All at once, there is water. It cascades downward. The rains have come.

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