Son[i]a #442
Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil
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Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil (b. Ayutla Mixe, Oaxaca, 1981) is a Mixe linguist, writer and activist. From this position, she works to defend the languages and rights of indigenous peoples in Mexico. She sees linguistic diversity as a source of wealth to be shared, like water from a spring: a gesture of resistance and a commitment to the future. And she looks at language as a political tool rather than as cultural heritage: a means through which to build the commons, and to shape thought and the ways in which we inhabit the world. She also carries out this work as part of COLMIX, a collective of Mixe people who study, defend, and promote Mixe language, history and culture in the present, and project it into the future.
In this podcast, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil unpacks the complexities of being Mixe in Mexico and talks about the cracks that appear in an imposed identity. She dismantles the category of ‘indigenous’ as an external, political label, claiming the right to specificity in naming herself: the right to be Mixe. She also objects to the essentialism and folklorism that seek to reduce being and speech. She turns her attention to the power of small structures, to multilingualism, to a defense of the territory, and to maize as a social ecosystem. She denounces the violence of coloniality and of the monocultural state, while also opening up horizons for reinventing communal life by practicing and imagining other ways of being in the world. Here, words are an exercise in freedom, assemblies are a social technology, and memory becomes not ruins, but revolt and future.
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