Emancipation Through Language: X-ja’il T’aan (House of the Word)
In Resistant Strategies. Edited by Marcos Steuernagel and Diana Taylor. According to the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), there are about 1.2 million Maya in Yucatán, representing 59.5 percent of the state’s population; in 2015 there were a total of 859,607 speakers of Maya languages in Mexico. Although this may seem like a high figure, many of them do not write or read in Mayan. Seeing the Maya students’ courage and perseverance while they learned how to read, write, and speak their mother tongue was inspirational and transformative; they spoke about X-ja’il T’aan (x-ja’il = house, t’aan=word): a non-physical place in which language is incorporated, where living words could become actions to reach Maya culture, to get it back. For years, starting in 2009, I worked with fellow Mexican-American artist and friend Pedro Lasch on our project El Narcochingadazo (The Narcofuckery). Here some of the work done in Yucatán, a space of resistance. This is an ebook project (bilingual) edited by Duke University Press and Hemi Press (NYU).
