Voices of Mexico no. 109

Our Voice

A gigantic treasure trove bursting with choruses and polyphonies, voices circulate throughout Mexico, as diverse as they are profound and original. Outstanding among them are the heirs to the ancient indigenous American civilizations that give the country a singular, incomparable linguistic, literary, and cultural wealth. Popular wisdom expresses it very well: “Like Mexico, there is no other.”

The issue of Voices of Mexico that you are holding in your hands seeks to allow you to at least monitor some of those socio-linguistic, ethno-cultural, and, at the same time, socio-economic expressions that continue to modulate through more than 60 languages and hundreds of dialects. These are voices that 500 years ago cleaved all the horizons of what is today Mexico and beyond, and some of whose expressions, such as the sacred, part of the medical, and even the playful, had to enter into the sphere of hidden languages, clandestine invocations, and buried prayers after the Spanish conquest.

These are narratives that remained around the hearths of rural homes and today are spoken in the peripheries of the great cities; not only Mexican cities, but those further North, while their speakers grow vegetables and harvest fruit in the two Californias, Texas, and Oregon, or offer their labor in the service sector of the economy, in hotels in the Mayan Riviera and even New York. Their efforts will translate into remittances that will later become disruptive in musical, gastronomical, and textile languages in the fiestas of their communities of origin, fighting to avoid the disintegration that comes with growing indigenous migration.