A MIXE RESPONSE. THE CONTRIBUTION OF YÁSNAYA AGUILAR GIL TO THE DEBATE ON THE CRISIS OF NARRATION

Abstract

In 2020 in Mexico and in 2023 in Spain the linguist and activist for the rights of indigenous peoples and Mixe nation, Yásnaya Aguilar Gil published a peculiar collection of essays on linguistic diversity in Mexico. The volume titled Ää: Manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística shows all the strategies that made it possible for the Mixe people to find a path to survival, avoiding the risk of becoming merely a folkloric cultural treasure in Mexico instead of remaining a living, creative and active people. These essays are interrupted by brief quotes from Aguilar Gil’s social profiles, mainly Twitter (X) and Facebook, where she criticizes the Mexican linguistic policies, or she leaves a testimony of her daily life as a bilingual person in a Federal Republic that constantly suppresses plurality and difference. The purpose of my essay is to explore how the strategies that Yásnaya Aguilar Gil can help answer urgent questions: How to overcome the “crisis of narration” (Han 2024)? How to survive as singularities the process that tends to blur any difference to reach the ideal “homogeneous group”, or Geschlecht in the Derridean lexicon (Derrida 2020)? What role do the state and the nation play in this complex dialogue between the indigenous resistance and a criollo state that, as Rita Segato claims, has a masculine DNA (Segato 2018)?