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Emiliana Cruz (Cieneguilla, San Juan Quiahije, Oaxaca, Mexico, 30 June 1971) is a contemporary linguistic anthropologist. She received her doctorate in linguistic anthropology from University of Texas at Austin and currently teaches at CIESAS-CDMX. She is the co-founder of the Chatino Language Documentation Project.
Cruz was born in Cieneguilla, San Juan Quiahije, Juquila, Oaxaca, Mexico, an indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico, and is a native speaker of Eastern Chatino, one of three Chatino languages. She is the daughter of the slain indigenous leader Tomas Cruz Lorenzo [1] The geographic focus of her research is Oaxaca, with a linguistic focus on Chatino. Though her training is predominantly in the areas of grammar, sound, and word structure, with an emphasis on the linguistic features of tonal languages, her work draws together many areas of inquiry. It crosses the disciplinary boundaries of linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, indigenous studies, linguistics, education, and geography. Community engagement is an important aspect of her research, informing her purpose to bridge scholarly and community efforts toward documenting and preserving indigenous languages and linguistic practices. She is committed to the inclusion of indigenous communities in her research. In concrete terms, this has meant training speakers of indigenous languages in native language literacy and pedagogy. [2] The first two sections below outline some of the details of this work. The last explains her recent project on language and landscape.
Cruz has organized a series of tone workshops. [3] In 2012, the first of three summer workshops was held. Each workshop lasted ten days. The three workshops were taught by nine linguists from Mexican and US institutions, including Emiliana Cruz, Anthony C. Woodbury (University of Texas), Francisco Arellanes (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico), Eric Campbell (University of California, Santa Barbara), Christian DiCanio (State University of New York at Buffalo), Mario Chávez Peón (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social), Alice C. Harris (University of Massachusetts), John Kingston (University of Massachusetts), and Justin D. McIntosh (University of California, San Diego).
At the workshops speakers of Otomanguean languages were provided with the linguistic tools for analyzing the tonal systems of their languages. Each workshop hosted fifty students from major Otomanguean groups, including Zapotecs, Mazatecs, Mixtecs, Triquis, Chinantecs, Me’phaas, Matlatzincas, and Chatinos. In the mornings, lectures covered the phonetics and phonology of tone, methods of tone discovery and analysis, and illustrative Otomanguean tone systems, while afternoons involved tutorials for students according to their level, followed by breakout gatherings for each of the language groups. The Chatino student group included speakers from seven Eastern Chatino varieties. The students were young people; most were literacy trainers in a federal program, the Instituto Nacional para la Educación de los Adultos.
This was the first-ever workshop on tones for speakers of languages of the Otomanguean stock. Many of the students have continued to formally study the tonal systems of their native languages and some are producing pedagogical materials to teach with in local schools.
Cruz organized a three-year workshop series for native speakers of Mexican indigenous languages. [4] This series began in the summer of 2015 in Oaxaca City, on the topic of writing pedagogical grammars. This workshop was taught by Professor Luiz Amaral from the Hispanic Linguistics Program at the University of Massachusetts, who specializes in applied linguistics and language pedagogy. The making of pedagogical grammars in any language is a fundamental step toward scholarly research on that language. The workshop series aims to promote dialogue between the fields of linguistics, indigenous studies, and anthropology to produce grammatical and cultural information useful for speaker communities and to support the right of every speaker to understand the linguistic structure of their own language.
Through her investigation of the linguistic structure of Chatino, Cruz also been able to study anthropological aspects of Chatino-speaking communities. Her current research emphases are indigenous peoples’ land rights, and the relationship between language and landscape, and connecting both to the documentation and revitalization of endangered languages. [5] Her project analyzes the connection between the linguistic and physical landscape of the municipality of San Juan Quiahije. This project also explores indigenous ways of talking about the land by telling the story of why, how, and to what extent elder speakers of Eastern Chatino transmit specialized vocabulary and related lexicons to their communities, which are encountering homogenizing influences. Further, it investigates language ideologies and practices as a way of engaging more general topics, such as the effects of Mexican state-building, local development initiatives, democracy, migration, and globalization on the ways Chatinos describe the land.
The Chinantec or Chinantecan languages constitute a branch of the Oto-Manguean family. Though traditionally considered a single language, Ethnologue lists 14 partially mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinantec. The languages are spoken by the indigenous Chinantec people who live in Oaxaca and Veracruz, Mexico, especially in the districts of Cuicatlán, Ixtlán de Juárez, Tuxtepec and Choapan, and in Staten Island, New York.
Mesoamerican languages are the languages indigenous to the Mesoamerican cultural area, which covers southern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador and Nicaragua. The area is characterized by extensive linguistic diversity containing several hundred different languages and seven major language families. Mesoamerica is also an area of high linguistic diffusion in that long-term interaction among speakers of different languages through several millennia has resulted in the convergence of certain linguistic traits across disparate language families. The Mesoamerican sprachbund is commonly referred to as the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area.
The Oto-Manguean or Otomanguean languages are a large family comprising several subfamilies of indigenous languages of the Americas. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the family, which is now extinct, was spoken as far south as Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Oto-Manguean is widely viewed as a proven language family. However, this status has been recently challenged.
The Mazatecan languages are a group of closely related indigenous languages spoken by some 200,000 people in the area known as the Sierra Mazateca, which is in the northern part of the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, as well as in adjacent areas of the states of Puebla and Veracruz.
Amuzgo is an Oto-Manguean language spoken in the Costa Chica region of the Mexican states of Guerrero and Oaxaca by about 44,000 speakers. Like other Oto-Manguean languages, Amuzgo is a tonal language. From syntactical point of view Amuzgo can be considered as an active language. The name Amuzgo is claimed to be a Nahuatl exonym but its meaning is shrouded in controversy; multiple proposals have been made, including 'moss-in'.
The Zapotec languages are a group of around 50 closely related indigenous Mesoamerican languages that constitute a main branch of the Oto-Manguean language family and which is spoken by the Zapotec people from the southwestern-central highlands of Mexico. A 2020 census reports nearly half a million speakers, with the majority inhabiting the state of Oaxaca. Zapotec-speaking communities are also found in the neighboring states of Puebla, Veracruz, and Guerrero. Labor migration has also brought a number of native Zapotec speakers to the United States, particularly in California and New Jersey. Most Zapotec-speaking communities are highly bilingual in Spanish.
The Mixtec languages belong to the Mixtecan group of the Oto-Manguean language family. Mixtec is spoken in Mexico and is closely related to Trique and Cuicatec. The varieties of Mixtec are spoken by over half a million people. Identifying how many Mixtec languages there are in this complex dialect continuum poses challenges at the level of linguistic theory. Depending on the criteria for distinguishing dialects from languages, there may be as few as a dozen or as many as fifty-three Mixtec languages.
The Chatinos are an indigenous people of Mexico. Chatino communities are located in the southeastern region of the state of Oaxaca in southern central Mexico. Their native Chatino language are spoken by about 23,000 people, but ethnic Chatinos may number many more. The Chatinos of San Juan Quiahije call themselves neq-a tnya-j and their language Chaq-f tnya-b.
The Triqui, or Trique, languages are a family of Oto-Manguean spoken by 30,000 Trique people of the Mexican states of Oaxaca and the state of Baja California in 2007. They are also spoken by 5,000 immigrants to the United States. Triqui languages belong to the Mixtecan branch together with the Mixtec languages and Cuicatec.
Chatino is a group of indigenous Mesoamerican languages. These languages are a branch of the Zapotecan family within the Oto-Manguean language family. They are natively spoken by 45,000 Chatino people, whose communities are located in the southern portion of the Mexican state of Oaxaca.
Pochutec is an extinct Uto-Aztecan language of the Nahuan branch which was spoken in and around the town of Pochutla on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. In 1917 it was documented in a monograph by Franz Boas, who considered the language nearly extinct. In the 1970s another investigator found two speakers around Pochutla who still remembered a few of the words recorded by Boas.
San Juan Quiahije is a town and municipality in Oaxaca in south-western Mexico. It is part of the Juquila District in the centre of the Costa Region. The origen of Quiahije is not known, some people conjecture it might mean "Stone Forest" in the Zapotec language.
The Indigenous people of Oaxaca are descendants of the inhabitants of what is now the state of Oaxaca, Mexico who were present before the Spanish invasion. Several cultures flourished in the ancient region of Oaxaca from as far back as 2000 BC, of whom the Zapotecs and Mixtecs were perhaps the most advanced, with complex social organization and sophisticated arts.
Huamelulpan is an archaeological site of the Mixtec culture, located in the town of San Martín Huamelulpan at an elevation of 2,218 metres (7,277 ft), about 96 kilometres (60 mi) north-west of the city of Oaxaca, the capital of Oaxaca state.
Zacatepec Chatino is an indigenous Mesoamerican language, one of the Chatino family of the Oto-Manguean languages. It is often referred to as ChaqF tinyaJ KichenA tziC, Chatino de San Marcos Zacatepec, or Chatino de Zacatepec as it is distinct from other Chatino languages in the region. Zacatepec Chatino is part of the Eastern Chatino languages. It is spoken in the town of San Marcos Zacatepec, a town of approximately 1,000 people and inhabited by an indigenous group known as the Chatino people. The language was once spoken in the village of Juquila, but is now virtually extinct with two surviving speakers in the area.
Lachixío Zapotec is a Zapotec language of Oaxaca, Mexico. It is spoken in the Sola de Vega District by around 3000 speakers in Santa María Lachixío and San Vicente Lachixío. While many other Zapotec languages have suffered major language shifts to Spanish, most children in these towns are raised with Zapotec and learn Spanish at an early age.
Robert E. Longacre was an American linguist and missionary who worked on the Triqui language and a text-based theory and method of discourse analysis. He is well known for his seminal studies of discourse structure, but he also made significant contributions in other linguistic areas, especially the historical linguistics of Mixtec, Trique, and other related languages. His PhD was at the University of Pennsylvania under Zellig Harris and Henry Hoenigswald. His 1955 dissertation on Proto-Mixtecan was the first extensive linguistic reconstruction in Mesoamerican languages. This was one of several SIL studies which helped to establish the Oto-Manguean language family as being comparable in time depth to Proto-Indo-European. His research on Trique was the first documented case of a language with five distinct levels of tone.
Palantla Chinantec, also known as Chinanteco de San Pedro Tlatepuzco, is a major Chinantecan language of Mexico, spoken in San Juan Palantla and a couple dozen neighboring towns in northern Oaxaca. The variety of San Mateo Yetla, known as Valle Nacional Chinantec, has marginal mutual intelligibility.
San Juan Quiahije Chatino Sign Language is an emerging village sign language of the indigenous Chatino villages of San Juan Quiahije and Cieneguilla in Oaxaca, Mexico, used by both the deaf and some of the hearing population. It is apparently unrelated to Mexican Sign Language. As of 2014, there is a National Science Foundation-funded study and also a National Institutes of Health-funded study of the development of this language.
Tomás Cruz Lorenzo was a Chatino activist and writer from San Juan Quiahije San Juan Quiahije , Oaxaca, Mexico. He belonged to a generation of communalist, indigenous thinkers in Mexico which included Floriberto Díaz and Jaime Martínez Luna. His writings are influenced by anarchist ideas and call for the defense of the Chatino language and culture and for the autonomy of the Chatino land, which extends from the coast to the highlands of the Sierra in southeast Oaxaca. He was assassinated while waiting for a bus in 1989. The murder remains unsolved.
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