This strand of my research concerns the politics of language: the relationship between the political situation of Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and the fate of their languages. It is grounded in long-term ethnographic and ethnohistorical fieldwork in Nahua communities in central Mexico, and it produced my 2024 book Nahuatl Nations.
The organising idea is semiotic sovereignty — a community’s capacity to govern its own semiotic resources, its language among them. I argue that an Indigenous language stays vital for as long as it remains a language of political community, and that it protects that community by regulating who may participate in it. This reframes language endangerment: the question is not only how many people speak a language, but who controls the terms on which it is spoken.
That framing puts communities and the state in tension. The Mexican state runs an ambitious programme to support and revitalise Indigenous languages, yet it also draws on Indigenous culture to brand the nation abroad. Communities, meanwhile, deploy the same linguistic resources in projects of their own, which sometimes align with the state’s and sometimes cut directly against it. Within the Indigenous education system especially, these opposing pulls produce a friction with real consequences for communities and for individual speakers.
Theoretically, the work draws on the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, on Wittgenstein, and on theories of the public sphere — Habermas read through Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner — to treat the public itself as a semiotic construction, in which language and meaning always exist within a microcosm of recursively embedded publics.
