Episode 11 of Whose Voices? podcast | March 6, 2023
Ana Alonso and the shifting attitudes towards Zapotec Indigenous languages
Reviewed by Radhika Bhardwaj
Introduction:
You are listening to Whose Voices?, a podcast from Whose Knowledge?.
Jake Orlowitz:
Hi, this is Jake, and I'm at the Decolonizing the Internet's Languages conference, and I am sitting here with Ana. Ana, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how that brought you to this conference?
Ana Alonso:
Sure. Hi, Jake. I'm Ana Alonso, and I'm from Oaxaca, Mexico. I belong to the Zapotec Community, which is also a community that speaks one of the Indigenous languages that are spoken in Mexico. So, what brought me to this conference? Well, I work with an organization, a community-based organization, and we are creating content for the internet, basically the social media, and on that platform, we are raising awareness about the language, about our culture. And that's what brought me here today.
Jake Orlowitz:
Thank you for introducing yourself. How would you say that you and your community are using your language online?
Ana Alonso:
So, I think that there are maybe two uses that we are doing with the, or how we are using the internet. The first one, I will say that the diaspora community in Mexico and also in Los Angeles, in California, they are using the internet and mostly Facebook to do online transmissions or live transmissions to get connected with the local community. So, they are basically streaming and doing a radio program using Facebook. And sometimes they use the language, sometimes they, they, they send messages in the language, and that's the way that the diaspora community and also the local community is using the internet. And all these interactions are oral. And in our group, or the group I belong to, we are using the internet to we are creating content, basically videos. We are also creating pictures with some messages, and we are also translating some stories. We are using a platform that is known as StoryWeaver, and we are translating stories for kids, and that's the way we are using the internet.
Jake Orlowitz:
That's really interesting. The next question I have is when you look online for your language, what do you find, what exists, and also what is missing?
Ana Alonso:
Well, when I look for the name of my community or about our language, sometimes we find more information related to the culture, and it's written in, in English and also in French and Spanish, but it's mainly written in, in English. And what exists, I think that what we have there or what, what is on the internet about us, it's about our culture and not about the language. And we can't find information in the language. Like reading in your language, this language had a tradition or writing tradition, but it was different from the writing tradition that we know. Like today, it was in a script. It was more like pictures conveying messages or phrases, so that greeting way stop at some point in the past, and it didn't continue. So, now people is trying to write the language, but there are, like, no conventional way to represent the sounds of the language. So, some people are trying to write the language, but we don't have those texts online, for example. I think that what it's missing, it's content about the language. It's missing a lot of content about the language. Eh, not only videos but also writing text. We can't also find audio if someone wants to listen to how the Zapotec language sounds or how, or a variety of Zapotec sounds. We can't find that on the Internet, but now we are trying to put some audios, videos, also conversations, and written text on the internet.
Jake Orlowitz:
So I, I think that gets a little bit into the next question, which is, what do you wish you could create in your language? And also, what is blocking that from happening?
Ana Alonso: