Dr. Cruz’s collaborative project on Chatino language selected for 2024 Watson Conference
December 19, 2023
“Reawakening: Reclaiming Chatino Prayers and Political Speech,” a collaborative project facilitated by Dr. Hilaria Cruz and others, will be one of twelve collaborative projects featured at the 2024 Watson Conference. Scheduled for March 7–9, the hybrid project will produce collaborative translations of Chatino prayers into English and Spanish.
Speakers of the Chatino language in Oaxaca, Mexico, perform prayers and speeches—composed with parallelism, repetition, and metonymy, typical patterns of pre-Columbian poetic traditions—in all aspects of daily life. The performance and transmission of these art forms is quickly declining due to migration of youth to Mexican and US cities and because public schools in the region only teach Spanish. Twelve of these prayers were published by anthropologist Carmen Cordero Avendaño de Durand in her 1986 book, “Stina Jo’o Kucha (Our Sacred Father Sun).” The Chatino texts were presented in blocks of texts, written by hand in an orthography that contemporary Chatinos cannot read. Chatino language activists, faculty, and students will come together to translate these Chatino prayers into English and Spanish so that Chatinos can incorporate them in their daily rituals as well as allowing larger society a window to these magnificent oral traditions.
Dr. Cruz, Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Comparative Humanities, will co-facilitate the project along with:
- Tuesday Shaw, a third-year student at UofL studying philosophy and humanities with a concentration in cultural studies;
- Dr. Clare Sullivan, Professor of Spanish in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages;
- Cody M. Smith, a third-year student of middle and secondary education and French at UofL;
- María Elena Méndez Cortés, a language activist, write, and performer of traditional Chatino poetics and prayers from Cieneguilla, San Juan Quiahije, Oaxaca; and
- José Vásquez Canseco, a community activist, musician, and writer from San Juan Quiahije, Oaxaca.
For more information about this collaborative project and the Watson Conference more generally, click here.
