Xochitl and the Way of Humanity

A day or two before the term begins, I look up the names in the roster.  I started this practice early in my teaching career, back in California, because of a lack of familiarity with some names that I had come across and, therefore, to watch out for how students pronounced them when they introduced themselves.

One name stumped me.  It was "Xochitl."

I had never seen that name before.  Those days, when Alta Vista was the go-to search engine, there was no way of figuring out from the Web how to pronounce anything.

It was class time.  I was ready to learn how to say Xochitl.

She said her name that sounded like SHO-Chee.

The always curious me then asked her where that name came from.

It was Aztec.

Nahuatl.

Students have no idea how much they have taught me over the years.  I am glad they don't charge me tuition for it and they pay me instead!

Similar to how the Bastard Empire harshly and suddenly interrupted the history and thought of Tamil, the Spanish did that same--and worse--to Nahuatl.

Nahuatl is what we call a group of two dozen interrelated languages spoken mostly in central Mexico for the past 1,500 years and by 1.5 million ethnic Nahua people today. The lingua franca of the Aztec Empire, Nahuatl was decreed the official language of the Spanish colonies in 1570, and was used as the language of missionary work in indigenous communities. Scholarship arose around the language. Catholic Nahua elites proudly spoke their native tongue, using it to record ancestral histories. Then, in 1696, King Charles II decreed Spanish to be the one and only official language. Nahuatl survived, but in remote communities or in the hushed conversations of working-class urban Nahuas.

It is bizarre that a king who lived a huge ocean away, who never even visited the land, would impose his language, religion, customs, and more on a people who had been living their own lives for thousands of years!

Of course kings and warriors fought over territories.  But, this "enlightenment" colonialism was something else.  (Trevor Noah and John Leguizamo address this in their own ways.)

The author, David Bowles, writes about the "soft, melodic rhythms" of Nahuatl.  But, language is not merely about the language.  It is about the traditions, the thought, the myths, the explanations of life.  It is about our very existence that all of us, anywhere on this planet, try to understand.

Aztec thought recognised a need to gather the broken bits of oneself and rebuild, discarding those elements that hamper enlightenment and happiness. It’s a self-directed therapy that echoes in the sacred tale of our creation.

I like the way the author phrases it: "gather the broken bits of oneself and rebuild, discarding those elements that hamper enlightenment and happiness."  He refers to this as what "the philosopher Gloria Anzaldúa called the Coyolxauhqui Process."

Rediscovering the unadulterated indigenous myths of Mexico can help both Mexicans and Mexican Americans clarify their sense of self, of belonging to something greater, of being the latest in a long line of heroic and noble souls that have sought to balance chaos and order in North America for millennia. Psychological healing and health arise from such a perspective.
But using Classical Nahuatl as a way to harness the Coyolxauhqui Process and find spiritual equilibrium in the midst of nepantla? That is Tlacayotl, the Way of Humanity. A gift bequeathed by the ancients to all of us, their biological and spiritual children alike.

 The Way of Humanity.

And, oh, what does Xochitl mean?  Flower.