Leonardo Manrique Castañeda*Department of linguistics/INAH. English translation by Denisse Piñera Palacios.
Porque hablar dos idiomas… es como saber más. Sistemas comunicativos bilingües ante el México plural (Because speaking two languages… is like knowing more. Bilingual communicative systems before a Plural Mexico);1 is a book that perhaps many of us, Mexican linguists, -who have known in the field some of the very varied forms of bilingualism in our country- wish we had written. The point is that we did not, except for occasional and insufficient observations, and so this research, which is now presented to us by Gabriela Coronado and her collaborators, clarifies a situation in which mistaken ideas often prevailed; consequently, it is a very valuable contribution that calls for a broad comment.
Since these notes are not intended exclusively to linguists, it seems convenient to begin by the precision of some ideas they usually employ. “Bilingual” and “bilingualism” are used in two senses: the first is that of the person who speaks two languages – to what extent he/she “speaks them” is an issue we will set aside for now; the second one refers to the coexistence of two languages in a certain geographical area; in a very old book (Algunas observaciones sobre el bilingüismo del Paraguay, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay; -Some observations about bilingualism in Paraguay-) I used the terms “individual bilingualism” and “social bilingualism”. Of course, in situations of social bilingualism there are many cases of individual bilingualism, but it must be understood that the presence of bilingual individuals in a society does not make of it a bilingual society. In her study about social bilingualism in Mexico, Coronado prefers the use of a much more precise label: bilingual communicative system which “does not imply the generalized use or the extensive proficiency of two languages, but which refers us… to the presence of both languages two fulfill collective communicative needs” (p.68). If the first part of the title: Because speaking two languages… is like knowing more might suggest that the book deals with individual bilingualism, the second part: Bilingual communicative systems before a Plural Mexico leaves no doubt as to its subject.
It is more or less evident that bilingualism –I will use this term for briefness purposes, acknowledging that “bilingual communicative system” is much more accurate- is always the product of a historical process that has put two languages in contact; normally one of them is the tongue of a dominant group (politically, economically, militarily or culturally) and the other is that of the dominated group. In this kind of studies, it is common to call them “dominant language” and “dominated language”. In Mexico, the dominant language is Spanish imposed since the conquest, but there is no doubt that the dominated language was not only one, but many, and that, regionally, the historical process started in different times and in different forms, reason why the current situation offers a varied panorama.
Regardless of what we have stated in the previous paragraph, much has been said about Mexican bilingualism ignoring these differences or paying little attention to them; according to Coronado, this was due to the fact that the Indigenist policy had the “explicit intention to finish off the… [native] languages, [considering them]… as an obstacle to progress” (p. 23), so that there were “official[ly] only two sectors… the Spanish speakers and the non-Spanish speakers, that is, the non-Indians and the Indians” (p. 22). Maybe this is why statistical information has generally been insufficient to approach the variety confirmed by anthropologists in the field. Following this tendency we might say, for instance, that monolingual individuals of an Indigenous language in our country are 16.5 percent among those who speak an Indigenous language (numbers from 1990, rounded off estimates, only enough to prove the slopes), but if we consider the states where we find the regions studied by Gabriela Coronado, three of them are below this (Michoacán 9.9 percent, San Luis Potosí 10.6 percent, Puebla 16 percent) and two above (Hidalgo 17.4 percent and Oaxaca 19.6 percent), and so diversity barely sticks out, because the numbers would be different if the data referred exclusively to the studied regions.
Because speaking two languages… has two large parts. In the first one (with an introduction and three chapters) the theoretical foundations and research methodology are described; in the second one, the results of the field studies in nine regions are presented, arranged in three chapters according to certain similarities. Now, let us comment on the chapters.
In the introduction to the first part, Gabriela Coronado summarizes the history bilingualism studies in Mexico. According to her, before the seventies it was fundamental to the “Indigenist policy… to massively teach Spanish to the speakers of vernacular tongues”, in order to incorporate them to the Spanish-speaking nation. Consequently, the studies on bilingualism were mostly oriented towards the pedagogical and schooling problems of teaching Spanish as a second language to the children who spoke one of the vernaculars. She forgets to point out that before that, this policy defended the direct teaching of Spanish –school was taught in Spanish and children would have to learn the language and other school subjects at the same time-, and that achieving alphabetization in the vernacular language was already a triumph; this was not only a pedagogical matter, because it also tried to emphasize the importance of the local language, providing a place for it in one of the most respected institutions by the part of the communities. In this way, contrary to what she affirms, it was not “difficult to foresee that [the] massive teaching of Spanish would lead not to linguistic homogenization but to the generation of a new plurality”.
I agree with the authors when they say that the sociolinguistic approach of the studies on bilingualism begins in the seventies, focusing on the classic topics of contact between languages and “the general discussion on the social determinants of linguistic behavior”, and that in this environment started in 1978 “the study of bilingual populations [working specially with] the sociocultural spaces linked to the continuity or displacement of the languages” –that is, with an innovative approach-, where “I had to face [the] dogma … [of] the inevitable disappearance of the vernaculars”. I believe she is not completely right when she affirms that the disappearance of the Indigenous languages was then a dogma, see for instance my article –published only four years after 1978- “El futuro de las lenguas indígenas frente al español de Mexico ” (The future of the Indigenous languages facing Spanish in Mexico),2 but maybe I am mistaken and we are both heretics, because there are still, although each time less, those who sustain that in a rather short term, all the Indigenous languages will disappear. I disagree even more with Coronado’s affirmation that it was believed “the other [vernacular] languages… ” were an obstacle to progress, because some thirty years before (since the late fifties and around the early seventies) the linguists and students of this discipline at the ENAH fought –not alone, of course- and managed to achieve that the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Ministry of Education) admitted alphabetization in the vernacular language as a norm.
In this introduction by Gabriela Coronado, she narrates how, searching for cases of bilingualism, together with broad processes of Spanish-teaching, she came close to the concepts and studies of anthropology and of Catalan sociolinguistics, developing “what I have called anthropology of language… [which] considers language as a constitutive element of the continuity, transformation and disappearance processes of… [the Indigenous peoples] as social units distinguished from the whole of the Mexican society and, therefore, it focuses on the linguistic community, understood as the cultural, social, economic and political unity where… the sociocommunicative action takes place… ” (p. 22). The concept of linguistic community, is evidently of great importance to the study of bilingualism situations, because it is not reduced to the use of one or another means of communication, but to the communicative interaction in any of the two languages (or more, if it was the case) or in both, even if I fear it is not always easy to determine where the cultural, social, economic and political limits coincide whenever sociocommunicative interaction appears. The notion of anthropology of language, evidently parallel to that of “ethnography of speech” but enriched and broadened, opens to us all the understanding of bilingualism, just as Gabriela Coronado wishes.
Chapter I “Etnografía e interacción comunicativa” (Ethnography and communicative interaction) develops, first in the community and then in the regional level, the situations in which the communicative interactions are given and it mentions which of them and in what circumstances they tend to reinforce the permanence of the native tongue or to displace it. It is a good ethnographical guide to identify relevant situations, except that –in my opinion- it is excessively limited to what can be found in our country (for instance, the agricultural work of Mesoamerican type and its rituals, the cooperation of a “mano vuelta “ type, the “tequio” or “fajina”, the “tianguis”, the municipality, the community meeting). Although there are some comparative data, I still need an ethnographic-sociologic theory of general application. I know this is not exactly a defect, because the work I am reviewing is a starting point (a solid starting point, it has to be said) for this new approach to studies on bilingual situations. I hope that during her journeys to the remote lands of the antipodes, Gabriela will manage to spread the fan of her anthropology of language.
The methodology followed by Coronado and her collaborators is explained in chapter II “Tipología para la diversidad bilingüe” (Typology for bilingual diversity); due to its relevance, I shall comment on it broadly. At the beginning, it is noted that the tendency to the predominance of one or another language is not the same in every community and that the answer to the conflict between the dominant and the subordinate languages can go from the abandonment of the latter, passing through its concealment or its defense, to its imposition over the Spanish-speaking local sectors. Possibly said ratification becomes unnecessary for the linguists and anthropologists, but it is not idle, because many people have the mistaken idea that situations are the same in all the regions where there are Indians and mestizos.
In order to obtain enough empirical data about this variety and contrast them with the theoretical formulation, there have been field studies although, according to what they explain, dispersion did not permit to cover the whole country. The justification is valid, but we cannot stop regretting two outstanding omissions, the first is the absence of a community of the zone where peninsular Mayan is spoken (Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Campeche), which is a uniform language of broad extension, contrasting with the rest of the bilingual situations of the country. Perhaps the absence of field studies in Chiapas is more sensible, because the political struggle over there has been extremely vigorous and there seems that the defense of the language is not comparable to it; it is very understandable that, given the current conditions in that region, the researchers preferred to desist but, in any case, we lack it in the panorama.
The rich and diverse information about bilingual communicative systems, in which “generalized use and broad proficiency of the two languages must not be implied, but… the presence of both to fulfill the [various] collective communicative needs” (p. 68) was gathered by means of a Cuestionario de usos de las lenguas de Mexico (Questionnaire of usage of the languages in Mexico) which was tested and improved before its systematical use as the main instrument for this research. “The questionnaire… [contains] 146 direct and closed questions with multiple choice options on the usage of languages in the different spaces of interaction… [defined] in the sociocommunicative ethnography,… it refers to the predominant usages in the community… and the surrounding areas, [according to] the image that [the interviewed individual] has of the group behavior…; [however] it is inevitable that in the answers he/she projects his/her own linguistic usage” (p.78, note 13). To each question corresponds one or several categories of the analysis.
What I said above sounds very good, but it is in fact unfortunate that the volume does not include the 146 questions and that it does not indicate to which analysis categories they were designated; this information could not have taken more than three or four additional pages which would have made a very useful appendix. Since the volume lacks the questionnaire, no one can apply it in communities not studied by the authors; perhaps in Yucatán or Chiapas (or maybe in several communities, because it must be noted that four of the nine regions included in the book are located in Puebla), and it would possibly be worthy to contrast bilingual communities of the Northeast of the country which do not have a Mesoamerican base (Yaqui, Tarahumara, Seri); it is also regrettable that they reserve to themselves –of course, accidentally- the right to extend and validate such an important type of research. On the other hand, our ignorance on how questions and analysis categories correspond to each other prevents us from knowing the weight each of them has in the interpretation performed later on. (By the way, it would also be interesting to be able to criticize –in its most objective sense- the questions and their attributions, but we do not even have a few indicative examples of the procedure that was followed).
“The systematized and automatic analysis of the information that was gathered”, in order to determine the types of bilingualism (about which I will elaborate later on), was performed by means of a computerized system whose operation does not result clear enough either. We are told they made two databases with the DBase III Plus software, one for the communities and one for the regions; in both of them (whose content is the same) each questionnaire is a register and each of the 146 questions –with their possible answers- is a field, and here arises my first doubt: since in the heading of chart ID it is indicated that the database cuestcom.dbf contains 119 registers, and given that 97 communities were studied, it would be understood that for most of them only one person was interviewed. I refuse to believe this was the case, mostly because the number of questionnaires per region is far superior, getting closer to six (55 registers for 9 regions, according to chart IE. cuestreg.dbf database), I suppose certain mistakes slipped somewhere in the book, but I have not been able to find where they are.
“Given that the questions were of multiple choice type, each of the answers was assigned… a value”: plus 10 when the usage favored the predominance of the Indigenous tongue; plus 5 for the usage of both with predominance of the Indigenous tongue; 0 when both are used without predominance of any of them or with insufficient data to be able to determine this; when Spanish is preferred the value is -5; and -10 symmetrically as to the positive numbers for the Indigenous language. The use of positive and negative values, in average, “clearly indicates the conditions of the resulting bilingualism”. There is much to say about this:
a. Are these multiple choice questions (that is, questions with fixed answers, so that the interviewed subject chooses one of them) or open answer questions? The consideration and automatized handling of the answers should be different for each case.
b. The classification in a positive and negative way is convenient when the phenomenon that is being valued is symmetrical, but it does not work very well for asymmetrical phenomena, and no doubt those of bilingualism are asymmetrical, because otherwise we could not talk in this work of dominant language(s) and dominated language(s), and we could not say (p. 78) that “the last [type is] a transitory process of bilingualism… [that] leads to monolingualism in Spanish”, which does not happen at all with any of the Indigenous languages, not even in the cases in which they have been imposed on the monolingual in Spanish. The numbers in charts III and IV (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I for both of them) clearly point out if the Indigenous language (positive values) or Spanish (negative values) predominates in certain aspects, although it is not easy to the eye to distinguish the signs straightforwardly, and no doubt the weight of the same number is not the same when it is positive than when it is negative.
In my opinion, it would have been better to use only positive values: 25, 20, 15, 10 and 5 to keep the same distance of five units between weights (even if I do not see the reason to proceed like this); I would rather work with smaller numbers: 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 (or 10, 8, 6, 4 and 2 if somehow the scale from 0 to 10 is convenient). Higher numbers indicate a strong bilingualism, which diminishes as the numbers become smaller.
c. I cannot understand in what consists “the handling of these values… with percentages, according to the answers to each question” (p. 87). Of what are these percentages? Were there several hundreds percent, according to the amount of questions?
On the other hand, the calculation of means (the simplest one was used, the arithmetic mean) to find the central values of series of different size for each question, is correct. The use of means to group the questions regarding the same topic is also correct, because a mean of means equals the mean of all the data. The absolute predominance of numbers constituted by a single figure and hundredths (the high and low limits would be plus 10 and -10), ratifies that this was the procedure they used.
In previous paragraphs I said that I would refer to the types of bilingual communicative systems later on, so now I will do so. Coronado studies bilingualism in the community and in the sociocommunicative networks in the region, but in fact she makes a typology only for the community level. She uses four criteria: socialization, sectors, community fields and national fields, which she thoroughly explains (for instance, socialization, apart from the acquisition of the mother tongue, consists in the use of one or another tongue with different members of the family, the strengthening or weakening of the mother tongue by means of school, and several others); sectors refer to the gender and age of the inhabitants, related to social roles, the way to communicate with the monolingual, differential usages, previous linguistic experience. Community fields are the different spheres (private, public, “official”, etcetera) of the community; national fields are those in which communication is established with foreign institutions. I must say that the distinction between each of the criteria is not always clear to me, for instance “school” takes part in socialization (first criteria), but it is also a community field (third criteria) because it is in the community, but since it is part of the state and national systems that dictate regulations, it also belongs to the national field (fourth criteria); it would not be difficult for me to find that it matters for the sectors (second criteria) and, perhaps with less abundance or dispersion, something similar could be found for “commerce”, “health center”, “municipality”, “church” and others. Once again, I deeply regret not having the questionnaire and not knowing how categories or fields were adjudicated to each question.
Now then, in each of the four criteria four levels were applied: 1) predominance of the native tongue, 2) more participation of the vernacular with Spanish presence, 3) more participation of Spanish with presence of the Indigenous tongue, 4) predominance of Spanish. These levels were codified differently for each criteria, Roman numbers (I, II, III, IV), Arabic numbers (1, 2, 3, 4), first letters (A, B, C, D) and last letters of the alphabet (W, X, Y, Z). Let us note that with this codification the advantage and logic of the positive and negative numbers is lost, in addition to the fact that the smaller numbers (or the first letters) represent a higher degree of bilingualism contrary to what should have been, in my opinion. In the code of each type, there is a symbol corresponding to each of the criteria, starting with I1AW –the native tongue would predominate in the four criteria- and until IV4DZ, which represents the predominance of Spanish in every aspect.
Gabriela Coronado explains that the possible combinations of the four criteria are reduced to be applied in concrete cases, that it is practically impossible to find them all and that “we should expect certain combinations to be more frequent than others” (p. 77). I would rather say that not only is it practically impossible to find them all, but that theoretically it is very unlikely to find, in a single occasion, criteria (which are global measurements, means of means) that mark absolutely opposed tendencies. In mathematical terms, the combination possibilities of four levels are 256 (that is, 4
I agree with the author when she says we must expect some combinations to be more frequent than others, but I would have liked her to explain why. A reason for this is perhaps that it is unlikely to find contradictory tendencies in a community (they could be socially disruptive) such as those we just saw in the previous paragraph. However, other hypotheses can be made, even if that of a research destined to study bilingualism is slightly slanted: the studied communities are in zones known as “bilingual” and it is possible that the studied individuals tended to carry their “Indigenism” in certain aspects and to underestimate it in others. In any event, the cases in which three of the criteria are in the edge of the Indigenous tongue and only “national fields” is in the second level (I1AX) are twice as many as those in which the four criteria coincides at the maximum usage of the Indigenous tongue (I1AW), there are 22 of the former and 10 of the latter; the sum of them both makes up 1/3 of the researched communities. Then we have, as to frequency (6 or 7 cases) type I1AY –which differs from the already mentioned cases only because the fourth criteria is even higher- and the opposite edge, in which Spanish predominates in the fourth criteria (IV4DZ), or in which the first three are in the second level and the third criteria is inclined towards Spanish (II2BY). The rest of the types, which make up approximately half of the cases, has lesser frequencies and is, therefore, less significant.
I have elaborated on the types of communicative systems of the community because they are –in my opinion- the most valuable contribution of this work to the study of bilingualism, as a whole –of course- with the theoretical foundation that precedes it and with the research techniques (not always really clear, though) and the description of information handling, which is part of the same chapter, plus the case studies that constitute the second part of the volume. Before starting with the second part, I still have to make some observations to the rest of the central chapter of the book.
In the section: “sociocommunicative networks in the region” (seven pages, compared to the twelve pages in which the types of SCB characteristic of “bilingualism in the community” are established), they examine the situations of each bilingual community within its regional frame. Coronado points out that “the fact that there is a type of SCB in a locality does not imply that the other SCB’s of the region are the same” (I would rather say that each community is different from the others), totally justified warning ahead of the way in which the existence of “bilingualism” was determined before: if there were two languages in a region, this was then bilingual, taking for granted that the main districts of the area would speak Spanish and that most of the communities would then speak the Indigenous tongues. Gabriela Coronado has been fighting against this mistaken conception, and this is why she establishes the specific types of SCB of each community. One of the many merits of this work resides in that it shows us the rich diversity of “community bilingualisms” and in that it systematizes their similarities (having the same SCB) within the variety. Complementary to the first warning is the one that status “diversity does not imply incommunication, but the generation of networks where one or another language predominates (or more)”, that is, there are not main districts and communities that live separately, but they are incorporated in complex exchange networks of different types where people favor the use of one or another language.
What was said in the previous paragraph demands the study of each community and its SCB within the context of the sociocommunicative networks of the region to which they belong and, according to the author, bilingual communication systems tend to a certain extent to linguistic reproduction, which is rather of regional character and constitutes the active and conscious political struggle of the Indigenous peoples. We must ask ourselves if there are not also examples of active linguistic resistance of community nature; the case studies, which in the second part of the book constitute chapter VI, seem to prove she is right; notwithstanding the fact that the chapter is titled “the community takes the floor”. I think this aspect deserves more work, preferably with new case studies in other regions. On the other hand, here we regret the absence of the questionnaire and the identification of the questions as indicators, because we cannot imagine which were those used to establish resistance instead of a simple linguistic reproduction.
The last section of this chapter describes the computerized system that was used. I have already referred to these issues when I commented other topics, so I will not elaborate any further on them, although several means of mathematical treatment and statistical analysis could be suggested (correlations, multivariate analysis, etcetera) which could have been useful to show the validity of certain hypotheses or to dismiss some others.
Chapter III (last chapter of the first part) is titled “multicausality of the bilingual behavior ” and here the author presents “some global ideas… [arising] from the repeated review of the obtained data… in the cases that were studied”. In my opinion, this is out of place because it would be better at the end of the set of case studies, summarizing what has been presented to us in them and highlighting the general tendencies –they are more than global ideas- which a good statistical analysis would reveal. The author says that “some [aspects]… show common elements when comparing all the cases, and others present even contradictory answers from apparently similar phenomena” (p. 93), and this is why “the panorama [is] almost devastating for any attempt to generalize” which she nevertheless undertakes, even if she warns us about her “interpretations… being proposals of reflection that require exploration in other cases and by other processes”. I agree with the author when she says that other cases may reinforce or weaken the generalizations, and this is why I have felt so much the absence of studies at least in Yucatán and Chiapas, but I suppose –without completely discarding them- that other processes are not as indispensable as a more exhaustive analysis of the data already available.
When “repeatedly reviewing” her data, Coronado finds that all the regions coincide in some aspects, which she denominates homogenizing tendencies, but in other aspects they differ, sometimes even to the point of giving contradictory answers to apparently similar phenomena, and these are denominated the heterogenizing tendencies. Among the homogenizing ones, she finds a higher usage of the Indigenous tongue in agricultural and construction activities (mostly in rituals), in oral tradition, traditional medicine and the rites of the vital cycle; on the contrary, when before Spanish-speakers, Spanish is mostly used, and this language is better known by male and young individuals. She notices that this homogeneity is not an identity, because there might be two communities with very different SCB which show a higher usage of the vernacular in one of these aspects compared to others of the same community. Except for this precision, she repeats in here what was already said in chapter I and commented again in the first section of chapter II. To a certain extent, it is natural that she repeats herself, because her ideas about the multicausality of the very diverse Mexican bilingualism, whose final articulation –or better, the most recent one- is the theory and method of linguistic anthropology offered in this work, is the product of her observations and works during almost a quarter of a century (see in the bibliography of the book the titles of the publications of which she is the author, co-author or editor); somehow she finds what she had foreseen in the previous chapters, but now we are not dealing with assumptions but we are proved they are so.
The presentation she makes of the heterogenizing tendencies is of a different nature. To begin with, she affirms there are different and even contradictory answers “from apparently similar phenomena”, which might suggest to us that in fact there is no relationship between these “similar” phenomena and the answers, which would lead to the reconsideration of some of the initial hypotheses. Perhaps Coronado realized that certain phenomena she first considered as equivalent (or of the same order or type) are in fact different, and this is why she called them apparently similar, but in that case, she should have said so plainly and shown in what aspects they differ. Then she refers to a series of factors that are not always easy to distinguish from those used to determine the types of bilingual communicative systems, because she mentions socialization, political, economic and religious forces, and the educational system, even if she also refers to the ideological tendencies and to the demographic context, of which she had not talked before. I deal with this a little in the following paragraphs.
The first of the homogenizing tendencies she mentions refers to ideological tendencies, because –according to her- she has already mentioned their importance in the history of the relationships between Spanish-speakers and the speakers of the Indigenous tongues; in this section, she focuses on “the formation of collective identities and the role of the language in this process” (p. 102). She broadly refers to the formation complexities of social identities “as a member of a family, neighborhood, community, municipality, region or social class, up to… a national group” which may be made explicit “differently in articulation moments of contrast with other groups”; one of the more common and visible elements of these identities –which are not defined at any given moment nor ever- is the use of the same linguistic code. Up to this point I agree with the author, but I have objections when she attributes the variety of the situations she has found to an ideology that hides the differences or, on the contrary, that exaggerates them; I think that these “ideologies” have come precisely from the diversity of the cases, but that there are not any other data to support their existence, which becomes a circular explanation of little value.
Then she deals with linguistic socialization, and here she does not add anything she had not said before when she referred to the criteria to determine the types of SCB, because she even uses the same types (I, II, III and IV) and in the same sense.
After this, she starts dealing with the extralinguistic pressures that influence the heterogeneity of bilingualism manifestations. She calls them the demographic context, political forces, religious forces, commercial forces (on page 108, but on the title of page 113 it can be read “economic forces”), and the educational system. Coronado herself says that “considering the economic forces as a phenomenon separate from the political forces is rather artificial” (p. 113) and yet she thinks it is convenient to treat them separately to highlight certain details; to tell the truth, these two forces have such a relationship with the ideologies, religious forces, demographic patterns and educational systems, that we would have to deal with them all together or –totally justifiably, as an analytical resource- separately. In fact, several of these factors are also found among those used to establish the types of SCB, so that they could have been avoided, or rather, their inclusion in a separate way is valid. I rather choose the latter, as Gabriela has done, except that (as I have already said) its relationship towards the forms of bilingualism probably can not be established and then its inclusion in the analysis is not worthy.
Extralinguistic pressures are discussed on pages 107 to 118, but “as a schematic resource” the tendency of each of them is presented in charts IIA, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and J, together with the type of SCB. I must acknowledge the intelligent solution of giving the same Roman number to all the charts about an issue and the same letter to all the referents of a region, but I must also manifest my disagreement with the treatment of charts II. In them, the use of the signs +, +-, -+, – and 0 (0 having been omitted from the list contained in note number 15) have the same indicative functions they do when they determine the SCB; now why should we not turn them into numeric values as was done with the types of bilingual communicative systems? I think that values +10, +5, 0, -5 and -10 (or one of the codifications I have offered as more practical possibilities) would have made the statistical handling easier, because it is not the same knowing that SCB III3BY of El Nith (Otomí settlement of the Valle del Mezquital) is associated to +-, +-, -+, -, -, -, -, -+ and -, as comparing it to +5, +5, -5, -10, -10, -10, -10, -5 and -10, values that can be added in several ways: -50 (algebraic addition), -5.55 (arithmetic mean, used a lot in the book), or –depending on certain theoretical considerations- the harmonic mean, the geometric mean, or other mathematical resources.
These tendencies were determined, as explained by the author, by the conjugation of the functionality indexes of the languages and the answers given to some questions of the questionnaire at a community and regional level, complemented by the observations performed in each region and the information of the characteristics of each location. Due to the fact that indexes are obtained from the answers to the questionnaires, once again we miss them, in order to know those that were “certain questions of the questionnaires”, which I presume were different, but they could also be some of the same, considered as key indicators. The use of the observations made during the field work and of the additional, partly numerical, information is completely valid, but it would have been very convenient to know if they used a certain way to systematize it in order to guarantee the methodological strictness that characterizes the determination of the SCB.
The introductory pages to the second part of the book (titled “Acercamientos varios a la diversidad” –Various approaches to diversity-) tell us that the author and her collaborators deemed that both the questionnaire and other methodological elements would be equally applicable anywhere, reason why they tried to include in the set certain samples with contrasting characteristics: predominance of Indigenous population vs. Indigenous among mestizo population; away from the media vs. close to the media; with a single Indigenous tongue vs. with several Indigenous tongues; very acculturated vs. with strong cultural resistance; with strong presence of acculturating agents vs. with scarce presence of acculturating agents. Finally, they tried to put data from each of them in the census. Needless to say the difficulties there are in order to create such a sample, mostly if the intention is to find pairs of regions where one variable contrasts while the others are similar, situation that enormously enables analysis. I believe that, despite the difficulties to find the ideal sample, Gabriela Coronado and her collaborators built the best possible sample given the real circumstances, though I still regret there is no presence of Chiapas or Yucatán in the sample.
There is no point in mentioning here the difficulties they found to apply the questionnaire. You may read about them in the book. I will only mention that the Indigenous uprising in Chiapas at the beginning of 1994 excluded all possibility of study in that region, and it also generated in all places a certain suspicion towards the foreigners (greater, I guess, if they belonged to an institution locally perceived as representative of “the government”. In each region, the researchers looked for options of articulation and, in my opinion, they solved the adversities in the best possible way, as shown by their results, though should I have any divergent opinion I shall point it out. For the time being, I will refer to the treatment given to each and all the case studies, which is an undeniable merit, as if they formed a set or whole.
For each of the nine studied regions (later on we will see which regions these are) there is a text that describes the set –location in a state, general features- and the ethnographic and sociolinguistic situation (summarized in the type of SCB) of each of the communities, as well as an interpretation as to how the linguistic and extralinguistic aspects interact. Besides, all the factual information of the texts is presented in different charts and maps on whose characteristics I comment in the following paragraphs.
The forty pages of charts in the second part are almost one fourth of its totality, and we would need to add the six pages of II charts “extralinguistic forces” that belong to the first part and on which I comment in previous paragraphs. Charts I and III do not provide any information on the communities and regions. Charts I are graphics (IA “Spaces of communicative interaction at a community and regional level in interethnic areas”); and charts III summarize the first proposal and the criteria and components to generate the indexes of the bilingual communicative systems: IB, IC, ID. Charts III contain “general information”, charts IV_1 “General types and indicators”, IV_2 “functions and tendencies”, and IV_3 “domains and functions”; the spaces in the codes above indicate the place where the letter that identifies each of the regions appear: A means the Otomí region of Ixmiquilpan; B is the stream of the eleven towns: Purépecha; C is the Mixe region of the Zacatepec district; D includes zones where Nahua, Totonaca, Mazateca, Mixteca and Popoloca are spoken within the state of Puebla; E is the Sierra Noreste (Northeast Sierra) of that same state, where Nahua and Totonaca are spoken; F is Zacapoaxtla, nahua; G, also Nahua, means Cuetzalan; H, is the Huasteca between Hidalgo and San Luis Potosí; J (I is not used not to create a confusion with the roman number) is part of the Tuxtepec district, where Chinanteca and Mazateca are spoken. This way of codification allows us to know the aspect and region to which the chart refers: IIIA would then be “general information of the municipality of Ixmiquilpan”, IVB1 contains “General types and indicators of the Purépechas of the Chilchota municipality”, and so on.
We must notice that in some of the chosen regions, a single Indigenous tongue is spoken (A; B; C; F; G), whereas two tongues are spoken in E and H, and D and J are plurilingual. A single language, Náhuatl, is found in different conditions in D; E; F; G and H. Mazateco and Totonaca are found in two regions each. In this way we could still point out more successes in the search for contrasts when building the sample. We cannot blame the researchers for not always getting all the information they wanted, for instance, there are no charts IIID, IIIH, IIIJ; in the first case, they turned to the professors of the Universidad Pedagógica, to whom they distributed 500 questionnaires of which they got back only 70 (barely 14 percent, and I am not sure of the quality of the answers).
I am interested in commenting on the content of said charts, because their titles do not let us know it precisely: how much “general information” is registered and how? (Incidentally, the codes for the state, municipality and locality are those used by the INEGI, although the authors never say so). The information comprises 29 headings which correspond to some other columns, reason why it was divided in four parts (charts III_1, III_2, III_3 and III_4), in which each locality is identified by means of a numeric code and its own name. In the title of each chart there is also a code and name of the municipality where the localities are located.
Charts III_1 have seven columns (apart from those of the code and name, which I will not count here again, nor in subsequent paragraphs). The first one contains the number of inhabitants of each locality (titled Num. inhab.; I will not provide the titles again, except when I need to discuss them) taken from census data or, when these were not available, from data provided locally (and this is often indicated as “approx.”); occasionally we find both quantities, and it must be noted that even if the difference is sometimes slight (for instance 1 827 and 1 964 for Panales in IIIA1, which means a difference of 7 percent), for some others it is so important (for instance Los Remedios, with 966 and 7 000, where the latter is 724 percent of the former) that it would require an explanation or for the researchers to have looked for a way to validate one of these two numbers. I am afraid that even though the footnote of the chart always reads “the first number corresponds to the information taken from the census, whereas the second number was provided by the communities”, in several charts they made the mistake of inverting the order, because the higher numbers –rounded up to hundredths- are curiously placed in the first place, whereas in the second place we find whole numbers; see for instance chart IIIC1, among others. The second column has the types of bilingual communication systems, but in chart IIIF1 it does not appear on its right place, but moved to its farther right. The third (L. region) and fourth (L. town) columns indicate the languages spoken in the region and community, and I do not understand why it is called “town” in this place. The fifth and sixth columns should contain the numbers of monolingual in Spanish and monolingual in the Indigenous tongue, but the columns are mostly empty. In the last column, also scarce, appears the number of bilinguals. Due to their size compared to the number of inhabitants, it is evident that these three columns take into account only those who are five years old ore more, in the way a census does.
The first of the six columns that appear on charts III_2 provides characteristics of the Town (according to its title); it says if it is “old”, “modern” or “recent”, and if the settlement pattern is “concentrated” or “dispers”. Regretfully, I must note that the register is not as systematical as it should be: in the first place, is there any significant difference between “modern” and “recent”?, because if there is not, only one of these terms should have been used; I also note that sometimes there is only information about the age or about the pattern, and some others it says “concentrated, disperse”, which is a contradiction, but maybe they were trying to indicate “concentrated center, disperse peripheries”. The second column Resid. pattern refers to whereas the Indigenous and mestizo population are mixed or not; in many cases the percentage is given (I suppose it is approximate) if one or the other are present (for instance: “Indigenous: 30 percent, mestizos: 70 percent”), but we also find “Indigenous” and “totally Indigenous” which should systematically appear as “Indigenous 100 percent” because it is the same. The data of the type of household (third column) are somehow more anarchic (in one of the charts we find percentages of “modern” and “hovel”); I wish they had used this classification all along, but we must note it is hard to establish these numbers, even in an approximate way; instead of “hovel” (somehow pejorative) I would have preferred “traditional”, used (without percentages) in other charts, which means the same as “rustic”; whereas the authors are too prudent when they use terms such as “semi-traditional” and “semi-modern”, and I honestly do not know why in between these terms they use “clay bricks”… does this term correspond to “modern” or to “traditional”? In my opinion, the types of roads used in the third column indicate the practicality of the roads, in a descending order: “paved”, “earth”, “breach” (the three of them used by motor vehicles), “horseshoe” is used only for work animals and differs very little from “path” to be traveled by foot, which is only used in two or three cases of the 97 localities, like “stone pavement”, which could have been assimilated to some other category; each locality has roads of various types. In the communication (fifth) and media (sixth) columns, the words “mail”, “telephone” and “telegraph” are systematically used for the first one of them, whereas “TV”, “radio”, “newspaper”, “magazines” re used for the last one.
Charts III_3, have ten columns, some of which should be grouped under a common title, but the type used, the dividing lines that should not be there, and the placement of the titles make the chart confusing. A very careful reading of the charts –one the interested reader will certainly do- and a comparison with the text, allow us to clarify doubts. The first column, about the economic activities, attributes one or several of them (normally) to each locality. It is a shame that this is not as systematical as we should expect. To begin with, there are several forms to designate what is evidently a single activity (for instance, “trader”, “commerce”, “commercial” and others), but in some other cases we have the following doubt: is “employee” similar to “salaried worker”?, or was “teachers” written in one chart and then grouped in the category of employees in another? I do not want to elaborate on the lack of systematization in this column, but I often perceive they tried to point out all kinds of economic activities, although these were numerically or economically of little significance, whereas in other cases they noted only those that were significant (perhaps the importance of the Mixe musicians justifies the only appearance of “musical” in this column.
Normally, in the second column, there is a heading designated as Tenancy under that of Lands, which is written in a different font and separated by a line, and which besides does not include the third and fourth columns, as it should, because the three of them refer to matters of land. The indicators of the tenancy column are “communal”, “ejidal”, “private” and “small property” (which in my opinion means the same as “private”). In the two following columns, they indicate the presence [marked with an (X)] and the absence (marked with a void) of T and R which, unless I am mistaken, refer to lands depending on rain and lands depending on irrigation respectively. It is not always clear that Sociopolitical organization is a heading that comprises the remaining columns of charts number 3, each of them with its own heading. In the fifth one (organization) we find “municipal” and “municipal presidency”, which is probably the same, as well as “council of elders” (I believe only once), “committees” (very much used, without specifying the type), “of parties” and, only once, “b. communal” (I suppose it refers to a committee of communal property), and oddly enough, not once does the word “ejidal commissariat” appear, which I would expect to find since there is an ejidal tenancy, because in my field works I found this very often and as a very strong political force in several of the regions studied in this book. The sixth column (offices) often contains “civil” and occasionally “civil authorities”, which I would rather call “municipal council” according to the information of the previous column; there is also “b. communal”, whose sense I do not understand here, “order” (a different office to that of the people in charge of the order at the municipal council?), and “communal chief”, whose meaning I do not know. I found really strange that religious offices are not mentioned anywhere, because it is well known that in several regions (Oaxaca is paradigmatic to this respect) the hierarchy of these offices alternates civil and religious offices.
The seventh column is titled meeting. A void indicates –I assume- that in a certain locality no meetings are held; “general” is the most common indicator, sometimes together with “elders” or “past” (same as “elders” in other parts, that is, those who have previously held these offices of higher hierarchy, which in many parts indicates the previous holding of lesser hierarchy offices). The existence or absence of forms of mandatory communal work is registered with an (X) in the eight column.
The ninth column, mostly empty, indicates the presence of cooperative organizations; “shell” and “weavers” appear only in the Otomí locality of El Nith, and very sporadically we find the word “local”. This column seems so little significant due to its scarcity that it could have been elimnated. The tenth column (the last one of this part) registers the presence of national political parties.
Part 4 of the general information chart (III_4) contains six columns. In the first three we find several traditional fields; guided by the texts, it would rather be the use of the native tongue in these fields. In the first one, titled pract. cult. the headings “agricultural”, “agricultural cycle”, “for the rain” (I believe these three are rather equivalent), and “vital cycle” are used; of course, it may also be empty. In the following column, about traditional medicine, there might be a space or one or more of the headings “herbal doctor”, “midwife”, “bone doctor” and, very rarely, “witch”. The third column indicates if in oral traditions there are “songs”, “legends”, “stories”, “myths” (only one case), several of them or none. The two following columns contain information about the communal (fourth) and national festivities (fifth). In the fourth one we find a list, for each locality, of the dates and saints that are celebrated, and only once “those performed downtown” (for the Barrio de Jesús, whose center or downtown is Ixmiquilpan) and “those of the Pentecost religion” (El Calvario, also Ixmiquilpan’s). In the fifth column, “civic” is systematically written (and only once: “school-civic”). As we may see, this information does not seem to be very relevant, reason why it could have been very much reduced or even omitted.
The last column of all is full of information regarding available formal education. We must thank the authors for their use of words –like in most of the columns, as I have already shown- to indicate what schools exist in each community, but it is not always clear enough what they say. For instance, is “bilingual preschool, elementary” equivalent to “preschool, bilingual elementary” or not?; it seems evident that the order in the first formula indicates that they are both bilingual, but we do not know, in the second formula, if it is only elementary school that is bilingual, mostly before other formulas such as “preschool, bilingual elementary, tele-junior high” or “preschool, elementary, tele-junior high”, without any indication as to the language. It is not worthy to comment on all the different formulas –they are more than 20- that appear on this chart; except for the expression “children and youngsters attend schools downtown” (because it does not specify which school is offered by this center and thus we do not understand). A quick view of the others indicates that in all the studied localities there is preschool and elementary school, many times bilingual, some others using only Spanish, and there are a few communities where these schools are “bilingual and in Spanish”. Are these partly bilingual and partly only in Spanish, or is it that in the first grades both languages are used and in the last grades the Indigenous tongue is eliminated? Junior high schools (or their equivalent, tele-junior highs), technical schools and the CEBETA –less frequent- are taught only in Spanish. Convinced of the incredibly important role of schools (I would like to elaborate on my field observations about the attitude of quasi-veneration towards schools in the communities, how they struggle to have them, how much mandatory communal work is devoted to them, but I must not do this) I would have liked it if the information about the school offering had been clearer, perhaps divided in three columns: levels or types available in the locality would appear in the first one and then in the other two we would mark with an (X) if the school in this level is bilingual or in Spanish, or if there are bilingual and monolingual schools.
For each region, immediately after charts III we find charts IV, divided in three parts and equally separated by means of letters for each region: IVA1, IVA2, etcetera. Two parts contain communal indexes; the first one gives us “general types and indicators”, the second one presents “functions and tendencies”, and in the third one we find regional indexes (domains and functions). Due to the fact that the authors have discussed these concepts in the texts about “the communal level” of ethnography and communicative interaction and in those of typology for bilingual diversity, and since I have partially commented on them, I will limit myself to critically review the structure of the charts, regretting once more the absence of the research questionnaire.
In the other three parts of these charts, the first column identifies the community by its name (we must note that here it is referred to as “community” -which in charts III was designated as “locality”-, and that the useful column of codes in previous charts disappears here). The first four columns of charts IV_1 have as heading the criteria used to determine the types of bilingual communicative system: “socialization”, “sectors”, use in the “community” and “national” fields. In each column appears the level reached and, separated by means of a space, the index from which it derives. To tell the truth, I would prefer the inverse order, because the index is the directly obtained value –mean of the values given to certain questions-, whereas the level is the generalized translation of an index. However, if this is a minor remark, it is not so for the case of several mistakes that can be seen as to the assignment of a level. Due to the fact that to the answers of the questionnaire the authors assigned values +10, +5, 0, -5 and -10, these are the limit points of the series of means. Indicators I, 1, A, and W translate means between the maximum number possible (+10.00) and +5.01 (because the authors estimated up to hundredths); indicators II, 2, B and X correspond to means between +5.00 and +0.01; indicators III, 3, C and Y cover the rank -0.01 to -5.00; and the indicators of higher level IV, 4, D and Z refer to values between -5.01 and -10.00. A brief review of the first cases of the charts show that they were wrongly attributed: Dexthó III -5.23 (should have been IV), El Nith Y -5.43 (instead of Z), Orizabita III -5.08 (falls in level IV, regardless of the fact it is so close to the limit), San Juan Carapan III -5.31 (is IV); Acachuen B +5.72 (should have been A), Totontepec B +5.11 (also A), Ayutla II +5.23 and 2 +6.40 (in both cases it is in the first level: I and 1). How often are these mistakes? I do not know, because I only checked the first three regions and it is possible that this does not happen with the other six, but from those I reviewed I can say that both for the Otomí and for the Mixe languages, the three mistakes in each of them account for 9 percent of the total of attributions and that, for the Purépecha region, the two mistaken numbers represent 5 percent; for Ayutla, two mistakes account for half of the criteria. Even assuming that the limits the authors established are not those I have derived from their book –which does not seem so, according to a quick review- then there is a lack of clarity in the explanation of the typology and of the computerized system they used. Of course, maybe some of these are simply typographic mistakes, in whose case we would only regret the carelessness.
Let us go on with the columns. The fifth one is titled “predominance” which, undoubtedly, refers to “the preponderance in the use of one or another language in the different sectors of the population and in the different spaces of communicative interactions” (p. 79). We assume that if the same system was followed, a positive index indicates the predominance in the use of the vernacular (for instance, El Nith, with +1.00); and a negative sign indicates that Spanish is predominant (for instance Orizabita, with -1.67). Due to the fact that predominance refers to the use “in the different sectors… and spaces of interaction…”, for the Otomí region I explored the relationship between this column and that of “sectors” and I did not find the correlation we could have expected: in three of the six localities, the sector and predominance indexes vary in the same sense (and not in the same amount, as would be expected), in other two localities, the variation is inverse but at least they have the same sign, and for the other three, one of their indexes is positive and the other one is negative. Perhaps we could establish a direct correlation in the first three cases, but it would be inverse or null in the others, reason why, for the set of the Otomí region, there is no correlation. The brief review of the relationship between predominance and sectors shows similar results, and therefore we can conclude that the indexes of predominance are generated from certain answers which differ, at least partially, from those used to estimate the other indexes. There is no choice; there must be reasons to explain these discrepancies, but if we do not know the questionnaire and the questions for each index, it is impossible for us to assess them.
The two last columns of the first part of charts IV gather information about the presence of monolinguals, in the Indigenous tongue (sixth column), and in Spanish (seventh column), in a rather vague way, because they only mark it in both columns by means of the words “yes”, “no” and “a little”, with some exceptions (“a lot” is used nine times, and only in the chart referent to the Huasteca; “very few” and “-” are used only once in each). We must remember that at the end of the first part of charts III we see the same two columns and one more about bilinguals, almost entirely empty except for the occasional appearance of some number taken from the census. In some places they are intrusive. If the available numbers from the census are sporadic and these are barely reliable (p. 79), we could have done without the columns on charts III and could have only taken into consideration “the opinion of the speakers themselves”, which is frankly subjective(p. 80).
The three first columns of the second part of charts IV contain the indexes about functions (which, by the way, appear in a different order than the one used in their introduction on page 91): the Indigenous cultural function, the national function, and the political function. I will not comment on them because I think the other four columns are more interesting, about indexes and tendencies, titled: “Persistence”, “Loss”, “Interethnic” and “Resistance”. It is not evident how we must interpret these figures; if the authors are congruent they must refer to the predominance of the use of the languages (with a positive sign for the Indigenous, with a negative sign for Spanish) in the same way they should be congruent for the estimation of the criteria for the typology. There seems to be no problem for the reading of the “persistence” column: in Atlalco, with +10.00, the use of Nahuatl strongly persists in general, as described in the corresponding text (p. 271). A completely opposite case in this sense is Tanaquillo, with -10.00, where only Spanish is used by a population that, according to what we are told (pp. 163, 165), is originally Indigenous, but with many immigrants; lesser figures with negative sign –which are only approximately one third of the localities- would indicate an always more reduced usage of the vernacular language, and increasing figures with a positive sign would indicate the predominance of the use of Spanish and, therefore, a more emphasized loss of the Indigenous language.
In my first glance to the charts I expected that the column “loss” was going to indicate opposite indexes to those of the previous column, because I thought that the higher the persistence, the lesser the loss (and vice versa), but I found this was not the case; I assumed then that they might vary in the same sense because to a higher persistence would correspond a higher use of the Indigenous tongue under the heading of loss which, -according to this- should be interpreted in an inverse sense to that of its arithmetic value, but I could not find a clear relationship either. In fact, these indexes do not indicate an objective reality, but the subjective attitude of the interviewed subjects towards the languages, and this is why they can easily oppose to the types of SCB and among themselves, as evidenced by the text about Atioyan (p. 218): “paradoxically, as we have seen in other cases, there is a contradiction between the indexes that refer to the [real] use of the languages… [and] the consideration about their future… ” (Atioyan is a type III2BY: Spanish predominates as to socialization; as to sectors and in the communal domains, Náhuatl predominates; in the national domains, Spanish is more used; the -2.71 index indicates a weak persistence, because it favors Spanish, and the +3.33 loss index, indicates that the interviewed subjects believe that the Indigenous tongue is not being lost).
The penultimate column, “interethnic”, indicates which languages are used in interethnic relationships, or rather, which of them is considered by the interviewed subjects as the one that predominates in this function. The text of Barrio de Jesús says: “we explicitly register a lesser acceptance of its loss [Otomí’s] and a manifestation of bilingualism as to interethnic relationships” (the figures of the chart are +1.67 and 0.00). In the same way this text omits the reference to the indexes of persistence and resistance, in many other cases the texts do not refer to all the indexes, although they appear in the charts.
The last column contains the resistance data. Due to the fact that, as the author explains in the body of the study, more than a communal phenomenon, resistance is a regional fact –when a certain number of communities get together in a vindicating struggle- it becomes rather strange that a column is devoted to it in the charts about communal indexes.
As we say, the last part of charts IV shows regional indexes, so it would have been more convenient to assign a different roman number to them (it would be charts VI, because three small charts V conclude the chapter titled “Andando comunidades” -Traveling through communities-). Its seven columns have the headings: “d. [same] traditional [domain] “, “d. national”, “predominance”, “f. [same] cultural [function]”, “f. political”, “f. interethnic” and “resistance”. In the book, the differences between the bilingualism of a community and that of the region to which it belongs are discussed; in fact, that is why Gabriela Coronado prefers, which is totally justifiable, to talk about bilingual communicative systems. For those who have worked in the communities, the fact that each community differs from all the others and that, in order to understand their “bilingualism”, we must know how the languages are used inside and outside the community, within the regional frame, might seem almost a Perogrullo’s truth. However, this is not equally obvious for us all; it is not obvious for our colleagues of different orientation (who, for this reason, do not work in communities) and less so for other sectors; thus, one of the great merits of this work resides in that it shows us the large differences between each of the communities of a region, as well as between the regions taken as a whole. The indexes must be the synthetic expression of what is said in the corresponding texts: apart from the fact that the text does not always allude to all the aspects codified by the indexes, there sure is an additional problem.
Unfortunately, we are not clearly shown how we must interpret the indexes that, in different charts, seem to refer to the same or to a very similar issue. For instance, the general indicator “communal” (in this paragraph I use the headings as they appear in charts IV), the communal indicator “Ind. culture” and the regional index “d. traditional” have similar and yet different referents, as indicated by the values I exemplify with Orizabita –community of the Otomí region of Ixmiquilpan- which are, in that order: -2.31, -4.57 and -0.60; it is true that these three values have different headings, and that the terms “national”, “national cult. ” and “d. national” are not the same either; however, there are others which are almost the same, such as “interethnic” and “f. interethnic” or exactly the same, such as “resistance” (last column of the second and third parts). I do not deceive myself, “interethnic” and “resistance” as communal functions are different from “f. interethnic” and “resistance” as regional functions, but I have a hard time trying to understand why they give the indexes for each locality instead of giving the data per region; the values (also for Orizabita) of “interethnic” are -5.33 and -6.86, of “resistance” are -1.43 and 0.00, which apparently suggest a certain congruency between the communal and regional indexes, but this is not always the case. In Ichan (Purépecha), the indexes of “interethnic” are +2.33 (communal) and -4.57 (regional); what does this distance of 7.9 between a positive index for the community and a negative one for the region mean, also given for the community? (the mean, resource often used by the researchers, of the indexes on regional “interethnic” of the Cañada de los Once Pueblos is -8.54).
If I have elaborated a little on my comments about the charts –which occupy approximately one fourth of the pages of the book’s second part- it is because their reading and interpretation demand a certain effort. The same information presented by the charts in figures is explicitly given in the texts regarding each of the studied regions, with the huge advantage that it is not necessary to interpret the rather flat language used in them. Each text starts by a general description of the region (with physical, historical and other data) followed by the more detailed descriptions of each of the communities, -in the order the indexes are presented in the charts, so that their figures may be compared with the verbal explanation (which is not a simple task, as I have shown). The correspondence between the text and the charts is not perfect –and apparently there was no intention of making it so- as I have said, not all the indexes are explained and there often are, on the contrary, verbal comments that give a much richer and more informative scenario of the conditions of the bilingual communicative system to which the authors refer. If someone is interested in knowing the diversity of the studied SCB, he/she may do without the charts and not lose much, gaining celerity at the same time. I would risk to recommend this way of reading. The view of each region is complemented by means of maps, on which I will comment later on; but right now, I will rather refer to some little defects.
We must note that this book has very few misprints. I found the omission of some full stops; there are one or two missing letters, and in the last line of chart IlC the figures are moved towards the previous column.
In my opinion, the writing is rather tiresome. Along the work, I found that what was said in the book in a line and a half or two could have been said in one, but I will not provide examples of this in order to save us some space. Sometimes there have even been certain editing mistakes, such as: “it is possible to find groups of Indigenous origin that had kept communicative practices in Otomí” (p. 144) instead of “that have kept, or “…actions taken in defense of the land or protection of racism… ” (p. 264) (which, according to the context, should be “protection against racism” of which the Indians are victims). There is also a strange use of certain terms: on page 146 we read “the Pentecost religion” which would rather be “Pentecostalist”, although they could have also repeated the form “the evangelic sector”, which they use on the previous page, or “Protestant religion”, on the following; I must acknowledge that the three terms do not designate exactly the same thing, but here they refer to a same group.
Once in a while, we find a concept that seems to be wrong, but who knows if it is so, perhaps it only looks as if it was mistaken because of the editing. Some of the most evident examples of this are: “In this locality people work communally in… faenas … although the participation of the members of the evangelic religion has not been achieved” (pp. 149-150); I believe it is more likely that, in time, everybody (as Catholics they once were) will participate in the faenas and that those who converted to evangelism would have stopped taking part in them. Another example: “work is done by means of faenas… in order to improve the community, and in it must participate all the chiefs of family as a requisite for their membership”: apart from the lack of agreement (“faenas… in it”), we are not told to what membership they refer, although we can assume that the compliance with the faenas grants them full recognition as inhabitants of the San Nicolás quarter.
In my opinion, the repeated use of the expression “Spanish-speaking merchant gunmen”is not appropriate when dealing with the Huasteca of Hidalgo (p. 272). I do not doubt that certain individuals actually had the three characteristics, but I believe it to be rather impossible that all merchants were at the same time gunmen and Spanish-speakers, or that all Spanish-speakers were merchants and gunmen; I think that we are before a formula filled with political sense, opposite to the formula “macehuales”, used with complete intentionality in religion; if I am right, the authors of the chapter should have said so if they wanted to adopt both terms, and not only let them in inadvertently. Is it right to say that social groups are “bearers” of political projects? Did they really intend to say that Catholicism is “the official religion”, or do they say it (p. 273) unintentionally? The authors are quite careless when they talk about (p. 275) Nicanor Santos, in the text, and of Gonzalo Santos, in a footnote, as if they were two separate people, when we are talking about the same cacique Gonzalo N. Santos from San Luis Potosí, also known as “El Alazán Tostado” (“The sorrel-colored mare).
In an extensive work such as the one on which I know comment –and with such a careless editing- it is easy to find many other cases like the ones I already mentioned in the previous paragraph, but it is absurd to increase the examples. I will only stop on something that caught my attention: “Here we find a… Cereso, through which the complaints of the region are sent to the state capital” (p. 187) Is it true that the Centro de Readaptación Social (Social Readaptation Center) (pompous and politically correct name for a jail) works as an official channel of the community before the authorities located in the state capital? Although surprising, the truth is I believe what Coronado and her collaborators say to be true, which turns out to be very enlightening, just like the reading of all the regional cases and their local peculiarities which were researched with so much effort and which are now offered to us.
The titles of the chapters and the sections in which they are divided are well chosen and they invite the reading, so that I will limit myself to quote them with some brief additional comment. Chapter IV, “Andando comunidades” (Traveling through communities), studies the bilingual communicative systems of the Otomíes of the Valle del Mezquital, Hidalgo, who have Ixmiquilpan as their regional center (to which correspond charts A), of the Purépechas of the Cañada de los Once Pueblos, region which has Carapan as headtown (charts B) and the Mixe district, Zacatepec, Oaxaca (charts C); it concludes with a section where the authors compare these contrasting regions, different answers, whose differences are summarized in four brief charts (V), with means for each of the three regions -for fourteen of the columns- that make up charts IV. It is a shame that we do not find similar charts in the other chapters.
“Una mirada sesgada” (A biased look) is the title of chapter V, and the bias of the look consists in that many people believe that the vernacular languages do not exist anymore or that they are disappearing little by little, but the reality is different. In order to highlight the great regional diversity, the authors worked in more than 50 localities in some thirty municipalities in the center, north, west, south and east of the state of Puebla, where Náhuatl is spoken (together with other languages in some of them; they also study another municipality that belongs to the state of Veracruz; these figures appear on charts D, E, F and G). To tell the truth, if the authors -Coronado shares credits here with Mota and Ramos- had treated with the same detail all the studied localities, the research on the variety of linguistic behaviors in Puebla would have represented a very meritorious study on itself, somehow equivalent to the complete book, but they preferred to treat in a very superficial way the general scenario (some 30 localities, charts D). We need to see more closely and with more detail the eastern region of the Sierra Norte (charts E) -Zacapoaxtla occupies as many pages as the general scenario- two neighboring municipalities, also from the sierra, Zacapoaxtla (charts F) and Cuetzalan (charts G).
The final chapter, under the tilte “La comunidad toma la palabra” (The community takes the word) gathers four cases in which, with different intensity and with their own particularities, the vernaculars have been taken by their speakers as instruments for their political struggles. Apart from the introductory sections to each part, the regions and the operation (not static, but constantly adapted to the given conditions) are given in the headings “lengua, identidad y lucha por la tierra: la Huasteca Hidalguense” (language, identity and struggle for the land: the Huasteca of Hidalgo) and “monolingüismo ante racismo: la Huasteca Potosina” (Monolingualism before racism: the Huasteca of San Luis Potosí), because they are in a same region, and even if their struggle strategies are not the same, both indexes appear on charts H. The two following sections refer the situation in the district of Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, due to the construction of the dam Miguel Alemán and to the eviction suffered by the native population; charts J contain the indexes relative to the recovery of the Mazateco and Chinanteco identities before and after the construction of the dam. The book concludes with some pages that gather all what was said on the second part and proposes the role (or roles) that bilingualism may play in the future.
More than twenty maps geographically locate the studied regions and localities and complement the incredibly rich information of the work. It is a shame that some defects somehow reduce their merits. Six of them, the size of four pages, serve to locate the studied regions. Map 1 is a map of the whole country, highlighting (with a thick line and the number appointed by the INEGI) the states where the questionnaires were applied, and within each state we see the studied zones in different shades of gray. Maps 2, 3 and 4 respectively, present the municipal division of Hidalgo, Michoacán and Oaxaca, highlighting the municipalities studied in the chapter titled “Traveling through communities”. The municipalities of Puebla on the chapter titled “A biased look” are given on map 11, and those of the Zacapoaxtla and Cuetzalan zones are specially marked; except for that zone, for the others we are given the location, name and type of SCB of each locality. On map 14 we find the status of Hidalgo and San Luis Potosí together, to highlight the municipalities that belong to the Huasteca, which are partly studied in the chapter titled “The community takes the word”; The Tuxtepec district of Oaxaca, also studied in this chapter, is signaled inside its state on map 19. The characteristics of these maps are very useful, mostly for those who are not familiar with the location of the vernacular-speaking groups, but we do not find the scale that was used in any of them, which misrepresents a little the reader’s idea about the extension of these groups.
The other maps are printed in a two-page size. This reduction makes many of them almost illegible, both because the lines of the drawing almost fade in some parts, and because the labels were printed using a font that is half the size of the one used for the footnotes; we can read the maps of the Purépecha region and of the Huasteca of San Luis Potosí, but those of the Otomí region and of Cuetzalan cannot be easily read; the maps of the Mixe region, Zacapoaxtla, the Huasteca of Hidalgo and of the Tuxtepec district are practically illegible. Because of the editing difficulties of bigger maps, perhaps it would have been convenient to use in them a thicker drawing. None of the maps indicates the scale, which is necessary given the fact that to each map was applied a different degree of reduction.
There are two maps for each of the studied regions, which I have noted in the previous paragraph. These two maps are both on a same base of a very fine drawing, but this delicacy is considered a quality when the map keeps its original size; however, it originates problems when the map size is reduced. The base maps graphically register localities, roads of various qualities, rivers, lakes and dams, which is an advantage when the printing is only made in black, because the inclusion of other geographic elements would encumber the map with lines and it would then become very confuse.
The authors tried to show the disperse or concentrated character of each locality, representing their constructions by means of dots (I assume, in an approximate way), and so the reality of the absence of real physical limits between certain communities is reflected; although this does not happen often, because this form of representation may originate curious things. For instance, a breach, which does not connect to any other breach or road (paved or not), comes out of a dot-free zone (and house-free as well), then it goes near a concentration of dots and ends where the dots become scarce again. Can we understand a motor vehicle road to which motor vehicles cannot have access? The various road qualities (paved, earth, breach, and path) have different symbols, but I think that the “earth road” is more prominent to the eye than the “paved” one, when the opposite should have happened, but this is not a very significant defect. The representation of currents and water bodies is very clear. The maps provide the names of all the localities within the area, as well as those of the rivers, lakes and dams.
In the first of the two maps for each region, the authors add to the names of the studied localities the types of bilingual communicative systems that correspond to them. The thing is that the typography in which the type of SCB is presented is the same as the one used for the names of localities, and therefore in several maps we have difficulty to read them, but I still believe they chose a good layout. The second map shows communicative networks, that is, the various localities with which the one studied communicates, specifying if said communication is performed in Spanish or in the vernacular. Communication between one of the studied localities and any other (all the localities of the area and the significant unities outside the map area are taken into consideration) is represented by simple curves that link them without following the roads; this is a convenient resource, because it provides an instantaneous view of the network structure and it does not conceal or duplicate the road system registered by the map. The language used for communication is indicated by simple lines (Spanish) and by sequences of arrows (vernacular), and in some maps a central line links the arrows, whereas in others the arrows appear alone; when the use of the two languages is asymmetric, both lines are drawn, using arrows to mark their respective direction. All this is very good, except for the fact that these networks are drawn on the map that represents the SCBs which, at the same time, appear on the base maps, and so the collection of symbols and lines causes certain difficulties for visual differentiation; I think the networks should have been drawn on simplified versions of each map.
This review has been long because I have commented sometimes extensively on certain aspects that, in my opinion, could have had a better treatment, as well as on other controversial points (very few, to tell the truth). I have been less generous when pointing out the merits, because they defend themselves, but I tried to be just when pointing them out. I hope that those who read this review will feel invited to read a very valuable and informative work; in the same way, I hope that Gabriela Coronado and her collaborators will understand the purpose of my comments so that, if they consider them justified, they will take them into account when they continue their research on this field of study in the future. The subject is interesting in itself, as scientific knowledge, but the usefulness it must have for the policies of language undertaken by the governmental agencies and the speakers of the vernaculars is more important, because in order to duly formulate them it is essential to know the varied reality of “bilingualism” in the meticulous and systematic way this book presents. I doubt –and I think this work supports my view- that nowadays the expression given by the title of the book is general, Porque hablar dos languages … es como saber más (Because speaking two languages… is like knowing more), but I trust that each time more speakers of Indigenous tongues will make this formula their own, perhaps partly with the support of this work.
Glossary
Mano vuelta: reciprocal cooperation commitment.
Tequio: Task or labor performed to pay tribute.
Fajina: Labor. Additional task performed by peasants during the afternoon.
Tianguis: market.
Ejidal: relative to the ejido: in Mexico, village lands communally held in the traditional Indian system of land tenure that combines communal ownership with individual use.
Faena: labor. Extra work or overtime.
Macehual: ordinary Indian, subject to tribute.
Cereso: Centro de Readaptación Social (Social Readaptation Center).
- The complete reference to the book is: Gabriela Coronado Suzán (with the collaboration of Juan Briseño Guerrero, Óscar Mota Gómez and María Teresa Ramos Enríquez) Porque hablar dos idiomas…es como saber más. Sistemas comunicativos bilingües ante el México plural (Because speaking two languages… is like knowing more. Bilingual communicative systems before a Plural Mexico); Mexico, CIESAS/SEP-Conacyt, 1999. [↩]
- Colección Nuestro Idioma, 7, Comisión para la Defensa del Idioma Español, Mexico, 1982, pp.81-95. [↩]