Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil
Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil
In this podcast, Mixe linguist, writer and activist 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.