The Secret Language

 When your family of four shares a bedroom, other people’s conversations become background noise. But one night when I was about 11, lying quietly on my top bunk, I noticed that while my dad talked to his mother on the phone in Spanish, she answered in a different language. I’d never met her because she lived in the small Mexican village where my dad was raised. 

When he hung up, I pestered him with questions: “What’s she saying? Why do you two talk so differently?” My dad told me that she spoke Nahuatl (which, I would learn, is one of almost 70 Indigenous languages recognized as national languages in Mexico). She understood Spanish, which we all spoke at home, but she wasn’t fluent.

I asked if he could teach me Nahuatl. He refused because “it wasn’t widely spoken.” 

The American history I grew up with centered European main characters like Columbus, and featured the occasional Native American guest. It had not occurred to me that there might be “Native Americans” in parts of the Americas other than the United States, until one day in junior high I got an assignment asking me to define the word “indigenous.” I turned to my mom for help, and she told me it referred to people whose ancestors were the first known inhabitants of a land. I asked if her family was Indigenous, and she said no. 

I directed the question to my dad, but before he could answer, my mom jumped in and commented that his mother was surely Indigenous. He answered her with a curt “yes,” a tone that was different from his usual cheerfulness. “So, does that mean you’re Indigenous?” I asked him.

He frowned and avoided looking at me while he vehemently denied it. I couldn’t understand why this topic was so uncomfortable. I tried to question him further, but he wouldn’t respond. 

What was wrong with being Indigenous?

I thought Duolingo had every language under the sun, but it turned out Nahuatl was not one of them. As my curiosity about my heritage grew, I learned that 1.6 million people speak it, mostly in central and western Mexico, and it’s widely recognized as the ancient language of the Aztecs. I asked some of my older relatives to teach me, but they said they were too busy.

My parents had made it a rule that at home we were only allowed to speak Spanish, because they wanted us to have close relationships with our family. However, though Spanish is my first language, I couldn’t read or write it properly during middle school. At the same time I struggled with social studies and ELA, because my difficulties with English grammar weakened my essay writing. Now, I couldn’t decipher what I was reading online about Nahuatl in either language. A sense of shame loomed over me. Did I even have a language I could call mine? 

I decided the simplest way to lessen my sense of inadequacy was to learn how to read in Spanish, and become a better reader in English. The COVID shutdown at that time meant I didn’t have much school instruction, so I spent hours reading novels in both languages. As my fluency grew, Nahuatl drifted to the back of my mind.

Guerrero Pride

My interest rekindled when I attended the spring club fair during my freshman year. I joined Ballet Folklorico, my school’s Mexican folk dance club, because I loved dance and wanted to learn more about the origins of Mexican music genres. The club represented music from various states, and I developed a sense of ownership over my culture. In the instances where my dad’s state, Guerrero, was featured, I would proudly announce, “Yes, this is my song.”
 

The summer before sophomore year was my quinceañera. I decided I wanted a Charro theme— a style associated with Mexican horsemen. Everything had already been picked out, except the songs I would dance to.

I decided that my surprise dance should be songs from my dad’s hard drive, because my earliest musical memories were formed on weekends when he’d practice for DJ gigs, something he used to do on the side. Although my dad was secretive with me about his heritage, in his DJ work he played songs in Nahuatl. I decided to dance to one I found on his hard drive: a catchy tune by El Coyote de Guerrero: Xochitl Motelana. 

My dad wouldn’t translate the lyrics for me, but I used the song anyway. After the party, other relatives expressed surprise at my interest in learning the family’s language. They assumed no young person was interested in learning Nahuatl. 

The lyrics of the song went on my list of things I anticipated translating.

In 10th grade, my Ballet Folklorico team performed the Guerrero song “El Baile de la Iguana” during our spring show in front of the whole school. My parents couldn’t be there since their schedules were packed. 

Our family felt like a burning matchstick: bright at the moment, but precarious, with smoke remnants that would quickly become untraceable, forgotten.

The five dancers in the club decorated our hair with flowers and dressed in our single-color practice skirts along with cheap off-the-shoulder blouses, which was all we could afford. We made up for simple costuming by delivering a performance that was undeniably Guerrerense. Everything on stage went off smoothly, and there was loud applause. 

When I came home, I barged into my parents’ room, puffy yellow blouse and all, and told them how everyone had cheered. Their first question was whether anyone had made negative comments or insulted our dance. Although I reassured them that no one did, they remained skeptical, assuming someone must have made fun of us. 

Through social media and history lessons, I started to better grasp the shame surrounding Indigenous ancestry and learned it is a common phenomenon among people my dad’s age and older. It began with class discrimination in Mexico, which intersects with their heritage—many people of indigenous ancestry live in low-income agricultural towns. It continues in the U.S.—rampant racism, discrimination, and political rhetoric reinforced my family’s self-consciousness.

From talking to relatives, I also started to understand that, in part, my lack of knowledge resulted from their reluctance to show their culture. At every family reunion, I’d ask, “So, when will someone teach me Nahuatl?” But nobody would teach me a single word. I hoped my participation in Ballet Folklorico would signal to my parents that our culture could and should be unapologetically celebrated. 

Around that time, my family and I visited the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. I wandered into a section called the “American Family Immigration History Center Record Search,” where visitors can search through records of family members who arrived at Ellis Island. 

But my parents crossed a desert, not an ocean, to immigrate, so there would be no record of my relatives here. 

I’d always thought my goal of learning Nahuatl was to talk with family members. At Ellis Island, longing for more tangible clues about my family’s past, I amended my intentions: This language was one of the only ways to understand who my family was, because one group of people after another decided that our culture needed to be either changed or destroyed. First, there were the colonial powers; then modern, classist Mexicans dismissing us; now there’s also discrimination against Mexicans from some U.S. citizens.

All this oppression and discrimination seemed to have left my family with a shattered sense of who we were. Some relatives were deeply defensive of our dialect in public. My dad grew silent and lowered his head when anything related to his native language or culture came up. Our family felt like a burning matchstick: bright at the moment, but precarious, with smoke remnants that would quickly become untraceable, forgotten. As I moved through the museum, I thought, “We have the right to exist.”

My Dad Names the Colors

Thankfully, others shared the same sentiment, and small changes in the world helped my quest. In September of my sophomore year, Mexico’s annual Independence Day celebration was broadcast around the world. It showcased children singing in dialects and dancing in their traditional clothing, right there in front of Mexico’s National Palace in Mexico City. The fearless performers and supportive commenters on the livestream attested to the fact that Indigenous culture wasn’t hiding itself anymore. Attitudes had changed. 

The summer before junior year, I traveled to the village my dad came from in Mexico and learned a handful of phrases from his family. That meant a lot to me, but not a single word came from my dad.

Still, I felt accomplished as I researched more about my dad’s home region and town. I carefully compared these histories to family stories I wrote down. On my own, I learned that in the early 1800s Central American sailors brought music to the coast of Acapulco, where the residents forged it into the Chilenas I love today. I knew about artisans who still make Cajitas de Olinala, an ornament box fashioned from that special fragrant tree and homemade paint.

On Indigenous Peoples Day here in New York, my high school held presentations that covered blood quantums and other white settler classifications. It was both exciting and relieving to finally receive in-depth information about present-day Indigenous communities, after only catching glimpses in U.S history courses.

I decided to try a new way of getting my dad to talk to me about his, our, culture. I pondered, What are the basics of any language? What do kids learn first? I found on my phone a Spanish-to-Nahuatl translation on a chart of colors.

Then I asked my dad if he could verify that the color names in the chart were used in his town. He took my phone for a moment and looked puzzled.

“No, that’s not how we say it,” he replied. A few years ago, the conversation would’ve ended there. Yet now he spoke the Nahuatl words for the colors he knew, and I learned them from him. 

Since then, there’s no more awkwardness when I ask about family history, and my dad doesn’t mind translating for me anymore. I believe he opened up for a mixture of reasons: my constant nagging, more visible acceptance for communities like ours, and perhaps the growing representation of content creators from towns like his.

It is up to the current generations to peel away the layers of shame imposed onto us from so long ago. In retrospect, those layers were built as a form of protection. But it seems that hiding ourselves is no longer necessary. I hope that I’ll recover my family history someday by conversing in Nahuatl with the elders of my community. Because we all have the right to exist through word, song, photo, and memory.