On February 28th, the Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project held the inaugural Nahuatl Workshop “Yoltajtol, A Word from the Heart.” The workshop had the twofold goal of offering an introduction to the Nahuatl language and showing to the participants that Nahuatl is a constitutive part of present-day indigenous peoples’ worldview. Along with basic grammar and vocabulary, the workshop offered an overview of the multiple ways in which contemporary indigenous communities express their experience of life, death, love, respect, memory, faith, and solidarity through language. Nahuatl, as explained in the three-hour session, needs to be understood as language with a rich history but with an even richer present. Through short stories, myths of origin, and songs, the participants of the workshop delved into the connection between Nahuatl and the worldview of present-day indigenous communities in Mexico.

Professors David Carrasco and Scott Sessions, scholars of Nahuatl and Mesoamerican religions at Harvard Divinity School, introduced the theme of the workshop and stated that listening to Nahuatl native speakers is critical to get a sense of the language’s vitality and engage in a respectful approach to the culture of indigenous communities. The workshop was led by Francisco Sanchez Conde, a Nahua writer, interpreter, and oral tradition researcher from San Miguel Tzinacapan, Puebla, Mexico. For over thirty years, Mr. Sanchez has been a member of the Taller de Tradicion Oral (TTO), a research organization with the goal of retrieving and preserving the tales, myths, and history of San Miguel Tzinacapan as recounted by the community’s elders. During those years, the TTO has published several compilations of tales, myths, traditional medicine, herbology, and a volume on the history of the town.

In the first part of the workshop, Mr. Sanchez provided an overview of the demographics and social situation of indigenous communities in Mexico, with a special focus on the Nahua people. With 1.7 million members, the Nahua people is the largest indigenous group in Mexico. Within this group, Mr. Sanchez noted, there are important differences: “There’s diversity among us. Depending on the part of the country we live in, we Nahuas use different variants of our language. For today’s workshop, I will be sharing the variant we use in San Miguel Tzinacapan.”

During this introductory section, the participants learned about the history of San Miguel Tzinacapan, a Nahua community located in the Northern Highlands of Puebla, Mexico. Mr. Sanchez explained that multiple versions of the founding of the town circulate among the elders. Some date the first settlement before the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century whereas other attribute the founding of the town to the population movement that followed the fall of the Aztec Empire. The TTO, Mr. Sanchez explained, has compiled and kept a record of all these versions, as they’re part of the oral tradition of the town. 

However, the elders of Tzinacapan also recount a mythical origin of the town. To introduce the participants to the sound and grammatical richness of Nahuatl, Mr. Sanchez distributed printed copies of Sentiopil, the son of maize; Tzinacapan’s myth of origin, which he then proceeded to read out loud. After reading the tale, Mr. Sanchez distributed English and Spanish translations of the story and led a comparative exercise, in which participants pointed out interesting passages in either the English or Spanish translation. Then, Mr. Sanchez repeated the same sentences in the Nahuatl original and explained the translation process.

In doing so, Mr. Sanchez talked about the main differences between Nahuatl and Spanish, as well as the highly metaphorical and even poetic etymology of Nahuatl words, which posed a challenge to translation. He then shared with the participants the story of how the TTO had to grapple with the challenge of creating a grammar that would suit Tzinacapan’s Nahuatl variant and enable the members of the TTO to put the community’s oral tradition in writing and translate it into Spanish. “[Developing a grammar] is a challenge that took decades. We wanted a grammar that was useful for us and for the community. One that we could easily learn, teach, and use to write and read. Other Nahuatl grammars and styles are useful in academia but are made for scholars, but we needed something for our context.” Mr. Sanchez emphasized.

The analysis of Sentiopil sparked a long and engaging conversation between Mr. Sanchez and Professors Carrasco, Sessions, and Jennifer Hughes. Through this conversation, participants got a sense of the multiple Pre-Columbian elements present in the myth of Sentiopil. In this way, participants without a background in Indigenous or Mesoamerican studies were able to get a sense that the Nahua worldview and history are deeply embedded in the language, and that Nahuatl acts as a repository of the memory of the people that use it. As Prajakta Kharkar, a Harvard Kennedy School student, stated:

“All my (far too many!) questions were answered so patiently by Mr. Sánchez, Professor Carrasco, Professor Sessions, and other Nahuatl language experts. I left the workshop with a new understanding of this culture that, until two weeks ago, I didn’t know anything about.” After the workshop, Kharkar hopes to develop an AI chatbot capable of holding conversations in Nahuatl that could contribute to the efforts of preserving and revitalizing the language in regions where it is getting lost.”

This workshop highlights the importance of fostering continuous dialogues between scholars and researchers of Nahuatl and contemporary Nahua communities and speakers. As Mr. Sanchez noted, some of the insights on Sentiopil provided by Professor Carrasco were a total surprise for him. In the same way, Professor Carrasco mentioned that if not for the workshop, he wouldn’t have heard of Sentiopil as currently known by present-day Nahua speakers. Such an exchange of knowledge allows for a more complex and nuanced analysis of indigenous knowledge, which could be useful for both scholars and indigenous communities. It also confirms that the study of Indigenous languages ought to be carried out as a constitutive part of the populations that use them, keep them alive, and make them evolve. The richness of present-day Indigenous languages can only be approached if the conditions, culture, and worldview of their speakers is considered and treated as a constitutive element of the language.

Evelyn Isis, a Harvard Divinity School student, shared that the workshop made her realize that “a language is inseparable from the people and will continue to develop to reflect today’s Indigenous peoples’ experiences. So, after this seminar, I feel it is crucial to continue learning from Mr. Sánchez and others from their community to properly understand the language and not sever it from the heart of the language, which is the people.”

The workshop marked another chapter in the Moses Mesoamerican Archives’ enduring commitment to collaborating with Mexican scholars, and even more so, with the Indigenous peoples of Mexico. In a field where Indigenous peoples have often been treated as objects of study, the Moses Mesoamerican Archives and Research Project’s agenda is radical. It welcomes Indigenous people into a horizontal dialogue with an open heart. As Alfredo García Garza, a Harvard PhD candidate in Religious Studies, reflected on the workshop: “It’s important that we, as scholars, are open to being challenged by the communities that we study and write about. This workshop was an amazing opportunity for us at Harvard to learn from and be in conversation with the Nahua people themselves.”