the irreplaceable vs homogeneity
New Mexican Spanish clings to life
I am deeply saddened by reading of the gradual death of New Mexican Spanish, with its unique (a word vastly overused but completely true here) pronunciation, vocabulary and history. The New York Times provided four audio snippets of its fundamental difference from the castellano spoken elsewhere.
Spanish pronunciation matters a great deal to me as I grew up speaking castellano colombiano which every Colombian in the interior proudly tells the world is the purist Spanish outside of the Iberian Peninsula. It’s crisp, clean, and decisive. Even coastal Spanish, the Afro-Colombian area where the rhythymic cumbia reigns, uses a somewhat different pronunciation.
In Buenos Aires in 1984 a fellow riding on an elevator with me waxed on about my absolutely pristine pronunciation until I realised he thought I was speaking Portuguese. Argentina’s Spanish is so decidedly a mixture of Spanish and Italian, resulting from the nation’s mix of immigrants over the past 150 years, that he professed to not understanding I was conversing with him in castellano. Sounds preposterous on telling but has been a great story for almost forty years, especially because it’s true.
I confess I had never heard of New Mexico Spanish until this morning. I have been to the state only twice but neither visit was to the relatively (until recently) isolated northern tier villages of the Sangre de Cristo range bleed into southern Colorado. We forget that Spain penetrated this region long before the English, Dutch, or French moved up the east coast in the 17th century.
The relatively remote villages had greater relations with the native populations than the Spanish ‘metropolis’ headquartered in the capital of New Spain, which we now know as Mexico City. The traders moving through this area intermarried with indigenous populations, blending the imported Spanish with those oral languages of generations in the mountains.
The loss of this unique cultural attribute probably seems to many as yet another logical step in the ‘Americanisation’ of people in the United States. This misses a crucial point, however. The people who lived in the area speaking New Mexican predated those of us who speak English as our native tongue in the country by quite a bit. Of this there is absolutely no doubt.
Additionally, as the article notes, once this language dies out, spoken by decidedly fewer today than a century ago, there will be little chance of its revival. Certainly people would likely dispute the inevitability of its end by pointing to the concerted national campaign to institute modern Hebrew as the language of what became Israel in the early twentieth century. The circumstances, however, are woefully different: Jews making aliyah to Israel hoped the creation of a Jewish homeland could preclude the gradual annihilation of the religion and its people as occurred in the Pale of Settlement (largely today’s Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and other segments of western Russia) and other portions of the world where pogroms targeted Jews. We know the Nazis sought to exterminate Jews. Stressing a common, historic language to link Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews from around the world became a national project. Today’s young residents of these villages in New Mexico see little advantage in speaking any kind of Spanish as they compete in the future of the United States.
Perhaps a more relevant example would be the attempts to revitalise Irish, Welsh, or even Scottish in the British Isles, or Hawai’ian in the Fiftieth State. While the projects have had some success, each is operating in populations considerably larger than these small but noteworthy populations north of Taos.
I am particularly wistful because we talk so often about heritage in the United States yet we seem to view it in practice as something quite expedible when push comes to shove. Irish are proud of their heritage, particularly on display this week, as President Joe Biden steps foot in Ireland (Norther and Republican) for which we will hear numerous tales of his ancestors departing to come make it in America. Greek and Armenian populations across the country are frequently cited for retaining their cultural strength.
South Asians from India are becoming an ever more powerful voice in politics and business, even though the distinctions within the Subcontinent itself are some of the most prolific anywhere in the world. Three hundred languages thrive in India today, each with a likely role in the diaspora to include native speakers bringing those spoken characteristics here.
Even the hundreds of island languages of the Philippine or Indonesian archipelagoes likely will survive because they are in nations where homogenisation is not yet as successful as in the United States. That does not mean ultimately central governance won’t kill off those tongues and associated cultures but that appears years from where we are today.
Sadly, the most direct comparison to the probable loss of New Mexican Spanish may be the trend at work in China today. There is a huge difference, however: New Mexican Spanish is the victim of natural demographic desire for many of those for whom it forms their heritage to desire opportunities to be part of the new America. Preserving what their families had does not, for socio-economic reasons, rank as highly as pursuing a better standard of living. I doubt few outside the state, much less in the U.S. government, ever heard of this before today’s story.
China’s regime is wiping out different languages, dialects, and speech patterns in a deliberate attempt to break a people with different language, culture, and norms it fears will rebel against it for a variety of reasons. Promoting Mandarin, using ever more Beijing dialect, and other manifestations of central government control is a much more concerted effort to erase differences seen as potentially dangerous.
The Times story reminded us that scholars do study New Mexican Spanish, promote its use in music, in literature, and perhaps the story itself will engender greater pride which somehow gradually reverses this trend towards vanishing. This population was always a relatively miniscule number of people speaking a tongue spoken no where else, a challenge under any circumstances.
But in a society where we claim to protect so much of our past for fear we cannot get it back, this still struck me as a lesson worth pondering. How does a society, even a small segment, protect something unique in the face of endless homogenisation? Does it even matter? Would its loss not be as important to those who spoke the language as other cultural concerns we focus on about day after day? For me at least, it made me delighted to hear of a people who are acting in even small ways to protect their heritage and patrimony knowing their actions matter a great deal. The question is whether they will be able to turn the enormous tide seeming to overtake them?FIN
Simon Romero, ‘New Mexico is Losing a Form of Spanish Spoken Nowhere else on Earth’, nytimes.com, 10 April 2023, retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/09/us/new-mexico-spanish.html