October 19th, 2023 (5:00pm – 6:30pm Boston) | In Person & Via Zoom
RSVP: https://bit.ly/RSVP-Observatorio or info-observatory@fas.harvard.edu
American languages have always been of great importance in the history of our continent. In the specific case of Mexico, Nahuatl is a living language that has maintained its vitality while coexisting with Spanish in a large part of the national territory, just as it has provided the Spanish language —as well as others— with relevant lexicon. On the other hand, many Mexican indigenous languages experience a marginal situation, in addition to the fact that in the United States speakers have faced social problems of various kinds for these same reasons. In this panel, moderated by Maria Luisa Parra (Harvard University) and organized in collaboration with UNAM-Boston, the experts Javier Cuétara Priede (UNAM) and Ben Johnson (UMass Boston) will discuss the linguistic influence and social implications of Nahuatl in the Spanish speakers of Mexico and the United States. The event will conclude with a short poetry recital in Nahuatl by the poet and student Sitalin Sánchez Acevedo (Harvard University).
Javier Cuétara Priede is a specialist in the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language, Hispanic phonetics and phonology, speech technologies, and Mexican vernacular languages, among others. He has collaborated as an adviser with the Instituto Nacional para la Evaluación de la Educación (INEE) and the Centro Nacional de Evaluación para la Educación Superior (CENEVAL), in the Spanish areas. He has been the director of the Centro de Enseñanza para Extrajeros at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), in Taxco, coordinator of Letras Hispánicas at the college of Filosofía y Letras, Head of the Spanish Department at UNAM-United Kingdom/King’s College London, coordinator of the Centro de Enseñanza para Extranjeros in Polanco and Culture Coordinator of CEPE at CU.
Ben Johnson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where he teaches courses about Mexico, Brazil, indigenous peoples, and other communities of America since 2012. Despite showing a great interest in indigenous linguistics, his research focuses on the historical and archival side of native peoples in Mexico. He studied History at the University of Chicago, where he wrote his dissertation on the colonial Alcohuacan (Texcocana region), still unpublished. Since then, he has published Pueblos Within Pueblos, a book about the Nahua Tlaxilacalli (also known as “Calpolli”) and a book of translations into Spanish of Nahua documents from Texcoco, Estado de México.
María Luisa Parra is a professor-tutor for the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She received her BA by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and conducted her graduate and doctoral degrees in El Colegio de México. Her areas of expertise are the research on Spanish as a heritage language and pedagogy, second language acquisition and pedagogy, child language development and bilingualism, Latino families and immigration, and immigration and education. She was nominated by ARIST as one of the 6 Most Innovative Professors of 2019.
Sitalin Sanchez is a Maseual ceremonial dancer from San Miguel Tzinacapan, Puebla, Mexico. She writes poetry and was the representative of the indigenous languages’ national poetry slam league in 2020. Currently, she is an MTS candidate at Harvard Divinity School, where she’s researching the intersection of aesthetics, racism, and indigeneity under the supervision of Professor David Carrasco.
Language: Spanish