Combining Ecological Knowledge in Mayan Communities
Hilario Poot Cahun is building an environmental science curriculum in the Yucatec Maya language, giving Yucatecan children access to STEM in their ancestral language.
This post was written by Wikitongues intern Daniele Basalone, with assistance from Lydia Quevedo.
In the state of Quintana Roo on the Yucatán Peninsula of southern Mexico, two worlds are circling each other. One world is built by the enormous gray stones of X-làabch’e’en, Chacchoben, and Xel-Há, and the forest that obscures them and their history. The other world rises along the coasts and islands, made of the hotels, resorts, and construction sites of Cancún and Cozumel. Neither world is separate from the other. New asphalt roads laid by the Mexican government take tourists from their beachside resorts to Maya ruins. Going in the opposite direction are Yucatec Maya people, residents of the more rural interior who often find sources of employment on the urbanizing coast.
Hilario Poot Cahun was once a part of the latter group. Hilario is now a linguist, educator, and Maya language activist living in Quintana Roo. Having grown up in the dual worlds of Quintana Roo, Hilario is familiar with the paradox of Indigenous language rights in the area. Due to the economic appeal of the tourism industry, being Mayan happens to be both a barrier and a marketable asset in terms of serving international tourists. In the first case, Indigenous Mexicans have less access to the English and Spanish education they need to compete for jobs in this industry. More broadly, they are at the center of a centuries-long struggle for rights and representation in Mexican society. However, in the second case, tourists are eager for a sense of local culture, and Mayans are typically the providers of Quintana Roo’s unique sense of place.
In Hilario’s case, his community was visited by recruiters from the coast looking for people to staff the hotels and restaurants. Hilario took this offer and began working. While working, he heard about the Intercultural Mayan University of Quintana Roo (UIMQROO), which was offering a degree in languages. He originally planned to improve his English to achieve a better position in the tourism industry, but after completing the bachelors, he found that he had a power to improve the condition of his native language, Yucatec Maya. He says of his realization, “I learned that speaking Maya was not equal to washing dishes and cleaning rooms. I could [now] give power to the things my grandparents did, to ask people to see [the value] in Mayan knowledge.” After this, Hilario left tourism and began his work in language activism.
Upon starting his work, Hilario entered into a long tradition of Indigeneous Mexican activism. Despite its importance now, the immense value of a thriving Maya culture was not recognized by the Mexican government until relatively recently. Southern Mexico played an important role by serving as the crucible of the Zapatista uprising, an Indigenous revolution that erupted in 1992 to protect Indigenous interests and has prompted considerable political shifts in favor of Indigenous communities throughout Mexico. Additionally, as the culmination of constant Indigenous activism during the late 20th century and the treaty signed at the conclusion of the Zapatista uprising, today the Mexican constitution officially recognizes eight Mayan languages. This recognition ensures a number of rights can be enforced by Mexican states, one of which is the right to primary education in Indigenous languages. With around 1.5 million Mayans living in Mexico, 300,000 of whom are Yucatec, this was an essential first step to sustaining the vitality of the Mayan languages.
As an educator, Hilario is now focused on taking an essential second step in maintaining Yucatec Maya. According to Hilario, the current state science curricula simply are not up to integrating Indigenous cultural contexts with science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) benchmarks. A combination of low language prestige and underpaid and undertrained teachers has kept Maya communities from fully benefiting from their linguistic rights. Children who aspire to a STEM career are forced to abandon Yucatec in favor of improving their Spanish, or else face a daunting language barrier as they learn. As a result, Maya languages seem irrelevant to maintain beyond elementary education. Even with universities such as UIMQROO, which offer intercultural language classes and even bilingual degrees for Yucatec and other Mayan languages, Indigenous students are at risk of abandoning their languages for fear that they will be a burden later in life.
Hilario believes that now is a critical moment in the history of the Maya language. He remembers during his childhood that, “At home, at the park, at the school garden, with my friends, all the time we were speaking Maya.” For him and others of his generation, “We were just speaking Spanish in the classroom.” Now, only one generation later, Hilario says when he visits local primary schools to teach Maya he notices that Spanish is the new language of leisure and recreation among the youth. However, once he begins his Maya lessons, the students just need a small push and then they’re speaking fluent Maya. “We have the power to save the language now. Maybe five or ten years [in the future], it will be difficult. The kids now will be parents and they will forget the language and so will their children.”
Teaming up with the Quintana Roo Educational Services (SEQ), UIMQROO, and Marine Conservation without Borders (MCB), Hilario has set his sights on an ambitious goal to revamp the local educational curricula. After designing new environmental science lessons in Yucatec Maya that incorporate Indigenous ecological knowledge systems, he plans to evaluate the curriculum’s success in five Indigenous primary schools, using these as models for further expansion and activism. For him, the true success of the program would be to show students that Yucatec Maya is a language fit for any use. Despite currently working closely on environmental education with MCB Hilario says, “I’m open to contribute [curricula] in other areas, like social issues, history, or new technologies.”
According to Hilario, the vitality of Maya is waning because of a severe reduction in its domains, but he doesn’t see the encroachment of Spanish as the root of this problem. Rather, it is the perception that learning Maya prevents a speaker from using Spanish adequately enough to be professionally successful in Mexico. He uses himself as a counterexample, pointing out that his mother tongue is Maya, but that he speaks Spanish and English as well, and he finds employment and personal fulfillment by using all three. He reminds us that these negative perceptions of Indigenous languages are bound up in colonial and postcolonial racist and classist attitudes. By showing young students that Yucatec Maya can be used in the STEM field, Hilario is dispelling the association between low education and Indigeneuos language use.
One of the ways Hilario’s team is doing this is by examining the Maya lexicon — the set of all the words used in the language — and addressing any gaps. For instance, if Maya lacks a dedicated word for a concept in marine biology, they will create one using existing words and grammatical structures. In many cases, something close to the desired word already exists in the language. Hilario says, “It’s not about making the language ‘pure’ [without loanwords]. It’s abouting reviving words that our ancestors used in the past that no one uses anymore.” By doing this historical linguistic research, Hilario is managing to reinsert the Maya language into the domains of science and technology.
Hilario also believes that promoting the use of the Maya language will help preserve Maya traditions, even as more Indigenous youth become better educated and mobile. He warns, “When a language dies, a kind of life dies.” As a child, he recalls seeing numerous rituals surrounding the key parts of the agricultural season; rituals to ensure rain, good harvests, and healthy crops. Importantly, with these practices come the millennia-old technologies associated with Mayan agricultural practice. When to sow, when to harvest, how to care for crops, and all the other highly technical aspects of farming are essentially connected to rituals performed in the Maya language. Further, participation in agriculture means continued contact and cooperation among a large community.
Hilario is hopeful about the results of his project and similar work across the world. He already sees interest among both children and their parents for the continued promotion of Yucatec Maya. He also feels support among other Indigenous language activists in Mexico and internationally, as well as governmental bodies dedicated to language revitalization. In response to the UN’s declaration of the 2020s as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages he says, “Now we have ten years to work hard on these kinds of projects.” Hilario stresses that keeping all domains — traditional knowledge, social life, education, and work life — connected ensures that Yucatec Maya will continue to grow in vitality and prestige far into the future.
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