Nahuatl Nations
Language Revitalization and Semiotic Sovereignty in Indigenous Mexico
Oxford University Press, 2024 · Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language
Nahuatl is claimed by the Mexican nation as a symbol of its heritage, and spoken by Indigenous communities whose relationship to that nation is far more fraught than the symbolism admits. Nahuatl Nations is a linguistic ethnography of that gap — of the political relations between the Nahua communities who speak the language and the state that celebrates it.
Drawing on years of fieldwork across several Nahuatl-speaking communities in central Mexico, and on ethnohistorical and sociolinguistic evidence, the book develops the concept of semiotic sovereignty: the capacity of a community to govern its own linguistic and symbolic resources. It argues that Indigenous languages remain vital as long as they function as languages of political community — and that they can shield that community from outside domination even as the state seeks to expropriate them for its image abroad.
The book follows these dynamics from Nahua towns to regional education systems to the Mexican diaspora in the United States, showing language revitalization to be not a neutral rescue effort but a political field in which communities and the state contend over meaning itself.
