4 Ajaw 8 Sip. Drawing by Jorge Pérez de Lara

To Know Where We Are From: The Writing of the Ancestors reaches Zinacantán

Today, as the days are growing longer, we celebrate the special day 4 Ajaw, which commemorates the anniversary of the beginning of the Long Count Era on 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u in 3114 BC—and again on 4 Ajaw 3 K’ank’in in 2012. May the world be made anew once again. This month, we hear from Ana Guadalupe de la Torre, a first-time recipient of a MAM mini-grant from Zinacantán, Chiapas, Mexico. Ana originally proposed to work with fifteen young Tzotzil Maya from Zinacantán, but interest in the workshop was so great that the numbers quickly swelled to forty students! We are very inspired and encouraged by the work Ana and her colleague Susana Patricia López Díaz are doing in teaching their curriculum in Tzotzil, and we are so happy to support her and her community learn the script of their ancestors for the first time. Thank you to all of our supporters for making this work possible.

Bats’i kolavalik,

Michael Grofe, President
MAM

Introductory Workshop to the Reading and Writing of Maya Hieroglyphs in Zinacantán, Chiapas

Students deciphering the text on Stela 12 from Yaxchilán.

Zinacantán is located in the Highlands of Chiapas, and it is a town inhabited by women and men who speak the Tzotzil language. This place is called Sots’leb, which means ‘Place of Bats’. Here we still conserve ancestral traditions, respect for the sacred hills, the planting of the sacred corn, the main food for all of us, ceremonies in gratitude for water, carrying and elaborating traditional costumes on the back-strap loom. All of this cultural richness, and the knowledge that we have inherited from our Maya grandfathers and grandmothers—in every generation it is lost, weakening, losing the essence and meaning of each bit of knowledge. In this town most people speak Tzotzil, although now only the elderly speak Tzotzil with the essence and meaning of each word they communicate. Young people today speak a mixture of Tzotzil with Spanish, because of the influence of the mass media, the educational system that is completely in Spanish, and that there are no materials or subjects in the Tzotzil language. Also, because there are parents who no longer communicate with their children in Tzotzil, a higher percentage of the entire population can not write In the Tzotzil language, so the interest in speaking and writing in our language is increasingly lost. Continue reading →