Abstract

This text explores the processes of formation of two Nahua writers' collectives from the Sierra de Zongolica who, through language and literary creation, seek to build community and utopian projects. In the midst of an environment of high marginalization, discrimination and persistent struggle, these writers have generated practices and forms of collective organization that, from historical and social circumstances almost always adverse, seek to create projects for the future and social transformation. Through oral history and ethnography, the article analyzes their trajectories and asks how they construct utopias and futures. The article focuses on the creative practices of these two collectives by framing them within the debate on the processes of community building and utopian projects of the future.

Keywords: communities, Nahua writers, future, utopias

nahua writers: community utopias and practices for possible futures in sierra de zongolica, mexico

Two Nahua writers' collectives in Sierra de Zongolica are the topic of this article, which explores how language and literary creation are employed to build utopian community projects. As part of the ongoing struggle against extreme marginalization and discrimination, these writers have developed collective practices and forms of organization with an eye to future projects for social transformation in a historical and social context that is nearly always adverse. Through an oral history and ethnography, the article analyzes the trajectories of the two collectives and explores how utopias and futures are built. The focus here is on the creative practices of the groups and framed within a debate on the processes of building communities and utopian projects for the future.

Keywords: Nahua writers, utopias, communities, futures.

Introduction

In the last three decades, the Sierra de Zongolica -located in the state of Veracruz, Mexico- has generated a current of Nahua writers who have developed a set of emerging practices and strategies to vindicate the production of literature written in their own language, as well as to reaffirm the use of Nahuatl in everyday life. This group of writers is part of a regional movement that vindicates the recognition and affirmation of diverse artistic expressions produced by people of Nahua origin, including painting, music, dance, textile production, as well as writing itself, among others. The literatures created by them are articulated within a utopia that places their communities and language as the central axis to produce visions of the future.2

This article describes the development process of these groups and explores what I call "futures practices". This concept is intended to track and analyze the way in which as social actors, through their practices and relationships, configure possible horizons about their futures. As Arjun Appadurai points out, anthropology has granted very little space to the analysis and treatment of futures; its approach has been rather incidental and fragmentary (Appadurai, 2013: 375). Classical social anthropology scorned its study. Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, in the 1950s, questioned the possibility of moving into the past to stay with an ethnography of empirically observable presents. His students (Max Gluckman, Edward Evan-Pritchard, Edmund Leach, etc.) broke that principle and opened the frontier to the past for British anthropology; however, the future remained an anthropological taboo.

In culturalist anthropology, the influence of historical particularism opened up the discussion a little more. Its interest in the production of historicities allowed it. It is with Margaret Mead -throughout the 1970s- that we see a concern for developing what Robert B. Textor calls an "anticipatory anthropology" (Mead, 2005), which in a pioneering way touched on the issue of futures for anthropology. However, it is only in a more recent period that anthropological efforts have been developed to study anthropologically the role of futures in people's thinking and social practices. We can trace this theme in the recent contributions of anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai (2013) or Rebecca Bryant and Daniel Knight (2019), among other authors, but its development is still incipient in the rest of anthropology.

Can the study of futures be treated anthropologically? This is a question that confronts us with a set of questions and methodological challenges. The future is a temporality marked by uncertainty. However, it often appears in the narratives of the social actors with whom we work in the form of different narratives and utopian practices, which tell us about their expectations, their desires for change and how social agents "imagine" the future, as well as the transition to other ways of life with which they disagree or which they seek to change.3 When these forms of "imagination" take the form of forms of collective action, they produce concrete practices that can be analyzed ethnographically. It is this scenario of practices on which I seek to focus my attention in this article. I understand "future practices" as all those forms of collective action that start from an "ethnographic present", but that are executed with the possibility of influencing the future. This does not imply that in these "ethnographic presents" social agents do not also recover their past narratives, as a form of recapitulation and projection into the future. Looking at the past (from the present) also configures a scenario for producing images of the future.

"Futures practices" approximate what Appadurai has called the "design of possible futures" to which one collectively aspires (Appadurai, 2013: 335), and involve the capacity for action and cultural creation. Utopias fall into this realm of possible futures. Through utopias, agents envision possible horizons of change and action. Although our daily lives are permeated by the weight of habits and routines, it is also true that around them hover a large set of shared longings and utopias that, through collective action, can lead to processes of change and transformation. Undoubtedly, this is a scenario crossed both by forms of cultural creativity and by scenarios of power and social resistance.

In this article I address the development of a group of elementary school teachers who are also writers in their mother tongue and who, over several decades, have developed a utopian project around it. In the narratives of these writers, a linguistic utopia is configured that takes the teaching of Nahuatl and the process of writing the language as a central point of reference and collective action, aimed at strengthening their communities and their own culture. In them there is an old yearning to vindicate the place of their language and to break with the discriminatory treatment that is made of it on a daily basis.4 From this point, in 2022 they created two writers' collectives aimed at producing their own editorial forms in the absence of institutional support. However, behind this initiative there are longer-term antecedents. The article is based on an ethnographic and oral history follow-up of the forms of organization they have developed over at least the last thirty years.

The text is divided into three sections. In the first, I situate the Nahua context in which organized groups of writers operate. From this, I analyze the effect that these forms of writing are producing in the processes of normalization of the Nahua language in the region, as well as in the relationship between orality and Nahua writing. Finally, in the last section, I explore how these processes are being decanted into the appropriation of digital technologies, as a new platform from which they also weave their utopian projects.

Overall, it seeks to argue that all these scenarios of cultural (re)production reflect expectations and struggles for the "possible futures" of Nahua writers and their communities, constructing through them practices that are situated in the present, but that seek to achieve dreams and community projections. Each of the sections described in the article draws ethnographically a way tour of the writers. A crossing They are working together to achieve a utopia of shared futures.

The trip to Xalapa: writing literature in Nahuatl5

In May 2023, twelve bilingual Nahua teachers from the Sierra de Zongolica traveled to the city of Xalapa, capital of the state of Veracruz, Mexico, to make two public presentations in academic spaces at the Universidad Veracruzana.6 Their objective was to present the results of a collective work that they called Creative Writing Workshops in Native Languages. The group was made up of seven men and five women who had participated, since August 2022, in the creation of poetry, riddles, stories and short stories. They had behind them the work developed by two writers' collectives. The first, called the Mixtlahtolli (Nube de Palabras), which is held in the municipality of Zongolica, and the second one in the municipality of Zongolica. Olochtlahkuilolli (Writers Group), located in the municipality of Tequila..

Some of these teachers had had minor personal experience in the production of literary texts, but none of them had previously produced texts for dissemination. The materials produced, in booklet formats of different sizes, were written in Nahuatl, accompanied by designs and with Spanish translations that they placed at the end of each of their publications. They had used for their editorial elaboration basic tools of software for the text layout process (Microsoft Publisher), but the rest of the work was done manually: gluing together sheets of cardboard and paper, sewing them together and lining them with plastic. The material they brought with them was extensive, rich and varied. Fifteen texts, of which they had made twenty prints of each, and which they put up for sale to the public at the end of the session.

Image 1: Writers' collective in the city of Xalapa. Academic Unit of Humanities, Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa, Veracruz, May 8, 2023. Photograph by the author.

The idea of presenting these materials in Xalapa was the collectives' own initiative. They were not invited by any particular institution. They themselves arranged with friends and acquaintances from the university the possibility of presenting their materials publicly in the university spaces and to have a two-day stay in that city. Why travel to Xalapa to present these materials in the midst of a situation surrounded by so little support? What was the spirit behind this initiative, beyond making their materials known and disseminating them? What is the meaning of the expression "to collectively produce writing", which was used during several parts of their presentations? But, mainly, what does all this tell us about the current ways of thinking and producing creative art forms in the regions inhabited by native peoples, such as the Sierra de Zongolica, how do they interconnect with their communities and in what way do they express "practices of possible futures"?

The forms of artistic expression in the Sierra de Zongolica encompass a wide range of manifestations that have always been associated with each other through areas such as ritual and ceremonial production. These forms of expression also appear in other artistic productions of native peoples living in the country. They are not presented in isolated units, but form an active field of practices that are in continuous dialogue and are interconnected by the ritual and cultural (re)production of the groups that (re)create them. The texts of these writers followed this principle, recovering mythical, cultural and ritual aspects in their narratives. But, fundamentally, they made use of writing as a way to vindicate their community identities and to manifest their right to express themselves in their own language orally and in writing, as well as to project these forms of perception and knowledge into the future.

The differences between the production of the diverse indigenous aesthetics and the more westernized forms of art, which think of artistic manifestations as disciplinary units separated from each other, have led to give a lesser treatment to the art produced in the native peoples. Thus, they are enclosed in categories such as "popular art" or "indigenous art" (Hémond, 1989; Arruti, Traldi and Borges, 2014; Goldstein, 2014). However, there is little discussion about the very nature of these manifestations and the manner in which they are as are articulating themselves to the global world, in which they coexist and transit on a daily basis.

In a more or less recent period, a movement has emerged in different regions of the country that struggles to question the limits of art and the boundaries that exclude or tend to make indigenous art invisible, objecting to the scope of thinking in such a way. Undoubtedly, these visions express forms of social resistance (De Parres, 2022), as well as configure the construction of local and regional utopian projects. This vindication of art and, in particular, of writing, is also present among the inhabitants of the Sierra de Zongolica.

The Sierra de Zongolica is part of the Sierra Madre Oriental. It is located in the center of the state of Veracruz. This mountain massif is interconnected with two other large mountain ranges: the Sierra Negra and the Sierra Mazateca. Together they form the orographic system called Altas Montañas, which extends between the borders of the states of Veracruz, Puebla and Oaxaca. It is an area of high marginality and strong processes of territorial expropriation and historical dispossession (Reyes, 1963; Aguirre Beltrán, 1987).

Nahua communities established there since the 20th century xii (Aguirre Beltrán, 1986: 20) have a long history of cultural reproduction. Their prolonged permanence in the region has coexisted with different onslaughts and processes of linguistic denial since the Spanish colonial period, aggravated by the policies that, throughout the centuries, have been implemented in the region. xix and xxThe indigenous populations were incorporated into the national homogenization project (Brice, 1986; Aguirre Beltrán, 1993). Since the liberal reforms of the xix and the period of proliferation of rural teachers (during almost the entire first half of the twentieth century), the language was subjected to a continuous process of cultural mistreatment, which left its mark on the region's population.

However, starting in the late 1980s, a group of Nahua teachers emerged who began to question the process of invisibilization of the language, which they experienced firsthand during their childhood in schools and, later, as young teacher training students. In some of the accounts and interviews with them7 The feeling of unease gradually brought them closer together and made them think about the possibilities of reversing this process of discrimination. First, by realizing a long-cherished utopian dream: to revalue the use of the language and its writing. This marked the beginning and development of a linguistic-community utopia. This activity would take shape little by little, first in the organization of the collective Xochitlahtolli (which we will refer to in the following section) and, later, in the development of collective Olochtlahkuilolli and Mixtlahtolliwho led this utopia.

The process of creating collectives

Olochtlahkuilolli is a group of nine people (four women and five men). All of them are Nahuatl speakers. Except for one woman, who is originally from the Huasteca, the rest (eight) were born in the Sierra de Zongolica, but come from different communities: two are from the municipality of Atlahuilco, two from the municipality of Zongolica and four are from the municipality of Tequila. Most of them live in Tequila (six of them) and the rest live in towns that are less than twenty kilometers from that town: one in Tlilapan and two more in Atlahuilco. They have in common that they are indigenous education teachers. The vast majority of them teach in multi-grade elementary schools belonging to the General Directorate of Indigenous, Intercultural and Bilingual Education. This means that in their school groups they attend at the same time to children who may come from two or more educational levels. There are also a couple of preschool teachers. Finally, to complete the profile of this first group, it is important to mention that their age range is very diverse, ranging from 27 to 60 years old, and brings together different generational experiences.

The collective meets once a week, on Tuesdays at 4 p.m., at one of the teachers' homes in Tequila. They only break this rule during vacation periods or when there is a school activity set by the Ministry of Public Education (Sep) or by school supervision, which makes them concentrate on the activities set out in the school calendar. The work of the collectives is carried out on their own and in a totally free manner. The group was formed by the teacher Ramón Tepole González, originally from the municipality of Zongolica, is the organizer and promoter of both collectives. He has a frenetic work rhythm. During the week he teaches preschool classes in the morning in the municipality of Zongolica, and on weekends he teaches an undergraduate course at the National Pedagogical University (Universidad Pedagógica Nacional).upn) of Orizaba.

Tepole had never before dedicated himself to literature, but he sees himself as a natural promoter of the Nahuatl language. He had participated twenty-five years earlier in another collective that had a strong influence on him, the group Xochitlahtolli (Palabra Florida), which I will talk about later. The creation of the Tequila collective -which emerged at the same time as the Zongolica collective- sought to create the necessary conditions to stimulate both the production of local literature and the dissemination of non-institutionalized mechanisms to reinforce the learning of Nahuatl in schools:

It is not that there is no literature in the Nahuatl language. It does exist, but not in a systematic way. Not as a task. There have been writers in the Nahuatl language. But it was necessary to work more on this part here [in reference to the Sierra de Zongolica] Why?... because there is a great lack of texts in the schools in native languages and particularly in our language [...] we said: Teska moneki masewaltlahkuiloski? Why do we need to write in our language? That was a question. Who is going to do this writing work? -Akin kichiwas inon tlaikuilolistle? Where are we going to go to bring those topics that are needed to write? -Kanin sekinkuite tlayehyikolmeh tlen sekinmihkuilos? And then, how are we going to disseminate all this work? -Kenin seki nextis inin tlatekispanole? The purpose of the workshop, as well as to produce these works, was to identify the talent of writers in the Nahuatl language. That is to say, to try to find colleagues who liked writing and fortunately there were!... and here they are... There are the materials (teacher Ramón Tepole González, May 5, 2023, Xalapa, Veracruz).8

The invitation to form the collective was initially extended through maestro Tepole. However, some teachers invited others, generating small links and networks of shared interests. For example, one of the teachers, who was the principal of an elementary school in Atlahuilco, invited another teacher from the school who had a "taste" for writing. This young man has been a dancer since the age of eight, the grandson of a former dance captain, and had also had previous personal experiences around poetry:

I... I was invited by the director of my Work Center. She says: "Hey, they are going to start doing some work, what do you think? And I said: "Well, go ahead, let's write". As I was telling you the other time, I think I already had some things there... and I said: "Well... well, just the same... here are the improvements, or, let's see what... what else can be done, can't we? [...] So, that's how we started to integrate my colleagues... and then, afterwards, we started to see that, well, there was something else... to start creating something different (interview with Adán Xotlanihua Tezoco, September 5, 2023, Tequila, Veracruz).

For its part, the process of formation of the Zongolica collective, Mixtlahtolli, also bears many similarities to the one in Tequila. In this case the group is made up of nine people, five men and four women. Coincidentally, there is also one person who comes from the Huasteca, but in this case it is a man. Most of the teachers live in Zongolica, but there are a couple of people who travel from communities in the interior of the municipality to attend the work meetings that take place on Monday afternoons or sometimes on Sunday mornings.

Like the collective Olochtlahkuilolli, The work sessions usually last two to three hours each week and end with a meal, which is shared collectively at the end of the work sessions. During the first stage of the formation of the collectives, the workshop sessions were mainly about how to write Nahuatl. As I will discuss below, Nahuatl has not yet completed its writing standardization process. The meetings also reflected on what kind of stories should be written and how to write them. According to Isabel Martínez Nopaltecatl (the youngest member of the collective Olochtlahkuilolli), the discussion and review of the materials is developed collectively, based on the following steps:

We write our texts... and, with the support of maestro Ramón, [to whom] they are sent... we continue revising them individually [...] There comes a second stage, which is collective writing. We all get together. We analyze the texts, we project them. In this second phase, we have two moments. In the first moment, the writer reads his or her complete text. If the text is short, we read it in its entirety, but if it is a short story, we read it in parts. We read the first part and once the reading is done paragraph by paragraph, we say: "What did you understand?", because we must not forget that, although we are writing for ourselves, we are also writing for the public and especially for our communities. They are the ones who are going to read... then we start giving each other opinions: "Well, I understood this". I clarify that, in Nahuatl, because we speak Nahuatl... [The writer] tells us what he meant to imply. Many times we really understand those texts and we say: "Well, I understood what you meant to say" or not. There comes another moment, the word review [...] to try to scratch our brains and try to recover words [...] These analyses we do really take time... four hours, two hours, sometimes three... sometimes we do it at home... but it's worth it, why? Because in these moments we learn collectively.

This process of revision of the materials has led the members to build a constant reflexivity on the processes of writing and linguistic standardization, but also on the communicative conditions of the literature they produce, as reflected in the above quotations.

In both groups, it is possible to identify two main tendencies that led them to join the collectives, which are not at odds with each other. The first derives directly from their training as teachers and their involvement, i.e., commitment to the language. Several of them suffered linguistic and/or cultural discrimination in their youth, which led them to take a stand in favor of the dissemination and defense of the language. The difficulty of finding materials in Nahuatl led them to seek mechanisms to produce them themselves and embark on the field of writing. In this process, some have discovered or affirmed other skills that place them more on the road to full literary production.

Discovering this situation has been the result of a collective process, but also of individual processes of perceiving writing, literature and the potential of each one. For some, their incorporation into the collectives was the result of a search for pedagogical instruments that would make possible the teaching and transmission of the language. However, in some other cases, participation in the collectives motivated them to see writing as a way of thinking about themselves, exploring the meaning of their communities. In this regard, I reproduce the following dialogue, produced in the context of one of the interviews:

Interviewee: From my conception or from my perspective... I don't know if I should call it a trajectory or from my experience... writing in Náhuatl is... evidence, it is a testimony that we are here, that we exist [...] And that is the why. But, in that why, in that search for the why, we also not only leave evidence, but we also become, we become co-participants of... of what is today, of what exists... You become part of... If you don't write Nahuatl, you become a being that... that is only there, isn't it, non-existent, lifeless. So, if you write, you become a co-participant, you become someone who exists and leaves testimony, you leave evidence... of the realities of a community... to these generations and to future generations. So, I think that is the essential part. If we glimpse it from art, from art as well.
Interviewer: Is writing in Nahuatl an art?
Interviewee: Writing in itself is an art, from my perspective... More so when you talk about your community (interview with Adán Xotlanihua Tezoco, September 5, 2023, Tequila, Veracruz).

Orality, writing and linguistic standardization: a long-term journey

For some of these teachers, discovering themselves as writers has been part of a journey. A journey with different temporalities and symbolic constructions. For the trip to Xalapa, the two collectives decided to have commemorative shirts made, which they wore during their stay. Not all the members of the two collectives were able to attend, although most of the people belonging to both groups, twelve in total, were able to attend. During the creation of the collectives (one year ago), each group generated, in addition to their names, their own symbols; in particular, distinctive shields for each of the groups (see image 2).

Image 2: Coats of arms designed by the collectives. On the left is that of Mixtlaltolli. In the center, that of Olochtlahkuilolli. On the right, that of Ma Moyoliti Nawatlahkuilolli.

The shield of the Mixtlaltolli has a black and white image of a smiling peasant, seen in profile, emerging from a cloud. The image is accompanied by a pre-Hispanic virgula symbolizing the gift of speech; and, in Nahuatl, the word olocholli, "bouquet" or "bunch", which metaphorically can also be translated as "group" or "collective". The denomination of the group closes this set: Mixtlaltolli"Nube de palabras" (Word Cloud).

The collective's coat of arms Olochtlahkuilolli has a diagonal drawing, which shows one of the colored sashes worn by the Nahua women in Tequila, as part of their traditional clothing. In the superior part of the shield appears again the virgula of the gift of the word (in colors); and, of its rounded part, the letter O of Olochtlahkuilolli. The last elements of the coat of arms are the figure of a bird and the word "bird". Tekilan, as an allusion to the patronymic in Nahuatl of the locality, Spanishized as Tequila.

For the trip to Xalapa, the collectives decided to create a third shield that would identify them as a group. To create it, they took the traditional fa-ja and included it in the shield, but in different colors than the one that appears in the collective's emblem. Olochtlahkuilolli. They placed the sash in the center, in the shape of a U and, in the middle of this representation, they placed the image of an armadillo holding a pencil in one of its hands. On the shield they placed the phrase in Nahuatl: Ma Moyoliti Nawatlahkuilolli, which translated into Spanish means: "May the writing of the Nahuatl language revive". With this denomination and coat of arms they presented themselves during their trip to Xalapa.

The relationship between images and words is a characteristic that not only appears in the shields of the collectives. It is present in a general way in all their texts. In the poems, for example, the stanzas are separated into units and are always accompanied by an image; stanza and image are placed on separate pages. On the other hand, the translations of the poems into Spanish appear in a continuous way, without images, so that image and text (in Nahuatl) form the same communication circuit.

The images do not appear in a dissociated way or as vignettes detached from what is meant in the text. The images were designed by two local Nahua cartoonists and reviewed and discussed in the workshop meetings. Inspired by the situations raised in the stories or in the poems, these artists made their designs following contemporary lines. When I noticed this relationship between image and text, I asked the person in charge of the groups, Ramón Tepole, about it, to which he replied: "That's right... it's something new we are doing..., but that's how it was before. Only the other way around, when the tlacuilos they had to put letters to their writing."

Thus, for them, writing in Nahuatl is not something new. Perhaps that is where the expression comes from: Ma Moyoliti Nawatlahkuilolli - "That revive the writing of the Nahuatl language". For the members of the collectives, writing already existed, but in other forms. The action of "reviving", in this context, is to transform the orality of Nahuatl into another form of writing, in this case alphabetic. But they do so with a full awareness that there were other forms of writing (ideographic), which was lost due to colonial imposition. For this reason, the presence of images and written words in their current texts is extremely interesting. A way of marking the loss of other ancient forms of writing and the project of creating new ones.

In the same way, the allusion to the more remote past of writing marks the insertion of other temporalities in the discussion. It takes us back thirty years, when the teachers' collective was created. Xochitlahtolli, that preceded the most recent collectives: Olochtlahkuilolli and Mixtlaltolli. This group of Nahua teachers pioneered and became involved in the defense of Nahuatl in the region and began to generate a utopian project that, long before the formation of the current collectives, embarked on the discussion about the defense of the language.9 In interviews with older teachers the reference to this period is extremely explicit.

The process of transforming Nahuatl orality into writing is the subject of a wide-ranging discussion involving linguistic anthropologists, public and state organizations (such as the Academia Veracruzana de las Lenguas Indígenas - Academia Veracruzana de las Lenguas Indígenas - AVILI) and the Ministry of Culture.aveli), federal public institutions (such as the National Institute of Indigenous Languages (Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas - INLAI), the National Institute of Indigenous Languages (Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas)inali), public educational agencies, non-governmental organizations and, of course, the Nahua teachers of the region themselves. The awareness of this process is in fact a third focus or line (in addition to the pedagogical and literary ones), which led to the creation of the Sierra de Zongolica collectives. For some of its members, the production of writing in Nahuatl is, in practice, a way of participating in the process of Nahuatl standardization.10 From the perspective of the creator of both collectives, writing in Nahuatl and producing texts takes a step beyond the strictly political and theoretical discussion of these processes, which has been going on for several decades, in meetings involving specialists and speakers of Nahuatl from various regions of the country, including some of the Nahua teachers from the Zongolica collectives.

Since the enactment of the General Law on the Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples (lgdlpi), enacted in 2018, not only created a legal framework for the protection of the languages spoken by the country's native peoples, but also generated a process of legal regularization of the writing systems of indigenous languages. From this point on, the inali has published those writing standards for the languages on which consensus has been reached, under the legal structure granted to it by the lgdlpi. In this way, standards and alphabets have been published for languages such as Chol, Mam, Mayan, Mayan, Mazatec, Otomi, Yaqui and many others.

However, Nahuatl has not been able to reach this point of consensus. As the indigenous language in Mexico with the most speakers in the country, Nahuatl has not been able to reach this point of consensus,11 distributed in different regions and with multiple dialectal variations, consensus has been an arduous, exhausting and inconclusive process. In the Zongolica region, the way out has been to write. Not to wait or to wear oneself out in the process of discussion about national standardization, but to take the necessary steps to move towards writing, seeking to make writing a factor in the dissemination of the language. For the Nahua teachers of the highlands who are members of the collectives, writing is a way to strengthen the processes of orality, especially among groups of children and young people who are increasingly losing the use of the language, due to factors such as linguistic displacement caused by migration, linguistic discrimination and the loss of the use of the language in the family context. For the members of the collectives, the absence of writing limits the work of teaching the language, both inside and outside the classroom:

There is a great need in schools for texts in native languages and particularly in our language [...] writing should serve to strengthen the development of orality [...] we have to move from orality to writing... And why is that? Because unfortunately our languages are being lost [...] to provide schools with texts in Nahuatl from the highlands, in this case, in order to have the possibility of practicing the reading of Nahuatl [...] to promote a more elaborated orality of the Nahuatl language, based on the reading of texts that recover the culture of the region [...].the texts that were written by our compañeros [referring to the texts created by the collectives] were born from their thoughts, born from their hearts (teacher Ramón Tepole González, May 5, 2023, Xalapa, Veracruz).

The process of transitioning to these processes of writing the language relied on the research work of some linguistic anthropologists who were in the Zongolica region beforehand. This fact has coincided with the practices and organizations that, decades ago, some of the Nahua teachers who currently make up the two aforementioned collectives undertook in this direction. The background of the collectives Mixtlaltolli and Olochtlahkuilolli was another collective called Xochitlahtolli (Flowery Language), which emerged at the beginning of this century, but which began to be imagined ten years ago.12

Xochitlahtolli was a collective formed by a group of Nahua teachers from the Sierra de Zongolica, most of them already retired: Eutiquio Gerónimo Sánchez, Ezequiel Jiménez Romero, the brothers Rafael and Roque Quiahua, Jorge Luis Hernández, the teacher Santos, Mariana Alicia García Pérez and Ramón Tepole González (creator of the present-day collectives Mixtlaltolli and Olochtlahkuilolli). The collective Xochitlahtolli in 2004 produced a small bulletin (now defunct) which disseminated teaching materials, short stories, legends and other narratives that teachers in the region used to teach their courses, in the absence of teaching materials created by the official indigenous education institutions. The bulletin published one hundred copies in its first edition, produced manually, and sixteen issues were published over several years.

In 2004, the teachers of Xochitlahtoli decided to apply to the Support Program for Municipal and Community Cultures (pacmyc), under the General Directorate of Popular Cultures, for the preparation of a modern Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary, in which they invited the linguist of the ciesas-The researcher was Andrés Hasler Hangert, who at that time already had a long history of linguistic research in the region.

Hasler's work played a very prominent role in the process that led the Nahua teachers of Zongolica to adopt a writing model of their own. In 1982, as a product of the recently created Gulf unit of the ciesasIn the city of Xalapa, research was promoted in the Sierra de Zongolica. Throughout the eighties and part of the nineties, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán was interested in stimulating the recruitment of scholars in the area of social and linguistic anthropology. As a result, several undergraduate theses in linguistic anthropology (following a mainly community approach) were developed in towns such as Zacamilola, Los Reyes, Cotlaixco, Xochiojca and Soledad Atzompa (see Hasler, 1987; Paniagua, 1986; Alarcón, 1988; Torres, 1987; Luna, 1988; and Yopihua, 1992).13

After his thesis on Zacamilola, Andrés Hasler decided to take his research work further and delve deeper into the dialectal variations of Nahuatl throughout the sierra. This ambitious project led him to study, for two decades, both the processes of dialectological differentiation of highland Nahuatl and the search for common traits. He also dedicated an important part of his work to compare them with other variations present in the country, in Tlaxcala and Michoacán. From his work he published two books on dialectology and grammar of modern Nahuatl in Zongolica (Hasler, 1996 and 2001), which were an important reference, taken up by the Nahua professors from Xochitlahtolli, who read and discussed much of these materials with Hasler.

The teachers' invitation for Andrés to participate in the elaboration of the dictionary served to reinforce this relationship even more. In some conversations with members of the collective about that period, they still recall the camaraderie and the bonds of friendship that were woven during the elaboration of the dictionary between the linguist and the group of Nahua professors. The academic exchange and friendship provided the Nahua professors with scientific tools to further strengthen their project of producing their own model of writing. In the presentation of the Nahua dictionary the professors pointed out:

We intend to contribute to the diffusion of our language and with this to contribute elements of discussion about the alphabet that will be used to achieve the desired standardization. It is essential that the Nahuatl speakers of central Veracruz write our language, and from this we can see what is the best way to have a unique alphabet (Geronimo et al., 2007: 3).

In that same dictionary they placed an epigraph that stated: "To those who have lost their indigenous identity. To those who believe in the development of the language nawatl. To the writers in the language nawatl" (Geronimo et al., 2007: 2). As can be derived from both quotations, the dream of materializing a writing model had greater scope: to influence the renewal of the Nahua identity in the highlands, to strengthen the language and to produce writers who would contribute to these objectives. A palpable and long-cherished utopia that, between the publication of the Nahua dictionary (in2007) and the formation of the collectives Mixtlaltolli and Olochtlahkuilolli(in 2023), had its development.

Future practices, digitization and technological appropriation: the latest journey

In Zongolica Nahuatl there are two main terms to refer to the future: nimanwhich refers to the immediate future, and yakapankawitlwhich refers to a more indeterminate time, which will take place in a more distant future. In some cases, when I asked some of the writers in the collectives, they also referred to the future in a more metaphorical way (as is their language), as a "tomorrow": mostlaThe future: something that could happen in a shorter, nearer, more palpable time in the future. One of them expanded the idea and stated the following: "The future can also be said from today, it is a future that does not yet exist, but you think about it; for example, when you say 'see you tomorrow'" (interview with Adán Xotlanihua, September 5, 2023).

In the processes described throughout this text, it is possible to visualize how these expectations of future times were built over different time scales. But also through different paths, different journeys and practical senses about what may or may not come. Mostla alludes to an uncertain future, but one in which there is a certain margin of action. In "tomorrow" there is a certain degree of action-commitment. Another reference arose from a conversation with one of the members of the collective OlochtlahkuilolliAdán Xotlanihua Tezoco, who made reference to the expression itech mostlatika -future scenarios". This expression reflects the idea that "tomorrow" can be read from a present, from a "today". There is no guarantee that the action will take place, because it does not yet exist: it depends on multiple factors, not entirely controllable. Nevertheless, there is a subject(s) who, in principle, can, through their practices, imagine, trace or produce "possible futures". Future practices are always a power. What is to come, what is later, what will come after, tomorrow, are not completely alien to the present and to the social agents that can produce it or that can be affected by its development.

Talking to the older writers of the collectives and evaluating what they have achieved so far, they speak of a long journey. Thirty years ago there was a sense of unease, of nonconformity. They imagined something different and began to get together, to network with each other. The original project was not to create a writers' collective (they did not even imagine it that way), but to promote the language, to produce materials in Nahuatl. This proposal led them to embark on the creation of a dictionary and, later, a newsletter. Through this bulletin they saw the first collective emerge (Xochitlahtolli), and the bulletin became didactic material, used by several teachers in the Sierra deZongolica: "We sold it for five pesos... just to recover the ink and printing... but it was a pleasure" (Ramón Tepole, September 17, 2023). Xochitlahtolli disappeared. Several of the teachers who had been part of it retired and a new period of lack of support elapsed until the emergence of the collectives Mixtlaltolli and Olochtlahkuilolli. Several trips, a long utopian journey.

When Ramón Tepole is asked if the utopia has been achieved, he says emphatically no. "We are still in the struggle," he says. Now in the collectives there is talk of writing, of literature, of didactic projects, but support is still not forthcoming. Nevertheless, they continue to create, disseminate and edit their own texts, with scarce resources and their own schemes. The latest "journey" is on the Internet platforms. This is not entirely new, since 2009 they have been making use of different social networks and the internet to disseminate content about the Nahua language and culture of Zongolica. Ramón Tepole maintains two pages, one created in August 2009 and another one created in June 2020. He also maintains a web page, on the WordPress site, where he has been disseminating different linguistic materials since 2009.

However, a few months ago, the person in charge of the two collectives created a TikTok page, where he uploads content in Nahuatl on a daily basis. The boom that the TikTok videos have reached in the Sierra de Zongolica caught his attention. In the last meetings of the collectives (August and September 2023), the conversation turned to this topic. Ramón Tepole sets the capsules he uploads to music, placing texts in Nahuatl, with their respective translations into Spanish. He then adds his voice, repeating short phrases in Nahuatl. At the top of the tiktok he has placed a sign, asking those who view the capsules to repeat the phrases in Nahuatl, and below it another sign asking them to disseminate the material (see image 3). It is, he tells me, "an instrument for people to hear, repeat and read Nahuatl. So that the language spreads.

The tiktoks created by Tepole rescue all kinds of situations. He started posting aspects and topics related to local culture, as well as thoughts; but he has been diversifying the contents more and more. Currently he has uploaded more than a hundred tiktoks to his page. He regularly observes the frequency of views and followers of the capsules and, based on this, he makes decisions about the new content he will create. His excitement at seeing the gradual growth of followers makes him envision the use of the platform as a new modality for teaching and disseminating the language, with the vision of the possibilities that this tool offers him.

Image 3: Tiktoks as a tool for Nahuatl pedagogy. Three examples of tiktoks by Mtro. Ramón Tepole.

He regularly expresses this emotion at meetings of writers' collectives, where he exchanges questions with the younger ones on how to attract more followers to his page, how to use the technology more effectively. The appropriation of the platform has captivated him and makes him even more hopeful about the possible future that this technology can offer him in the dissemination of the language. His journey, along with several other colleagues from the collectives, has taken him from a newsletter to the production of written texts and, now, to the elaboration of capsules and hypertexts. We will see what possible futures will be built from this proposal.

Final thoughts

Throughout this article I have sought to document ethnographically the scenarios through which a group of Nahua teachers have gone through in order to pursue a dream: to vindicate and reaffirm their language and culture. Through the construction of "future practices", these social actors have been building images of themselves on a daily basis, but they have also implemented different paths and practices to achieve these utopian goals and projects.

The process to generate these projects has taken several decades. They have gone through several proposals and have not followed a unilinear process. It is amazing to observe the persistence of their actions which, despite the indifference or denial of public policies, has not made them give up. On the contrary, they continue to seek strategies and new ways to try to channel their utopian projects and dreams. The creation of shared desires and wishes has made them build new forms of social action, as well as create over time different groups and collectives. It is a continuous process that requires a high degree of persistence and patience.

Futures appear in multiple ways in the narratives and social practices of the social agents we work with on a daily basis. On many occasions they are manifested in the form of narratives that tell us about the social injustices experienced and the expectations to produce changes. They also appear as forms of resistance and as strategies to develop practices that seek to concretize transformations and achieve utopian dreams. They appear in the form of goals and objectives set to think about tomorrow and/or to imagine it. What do we think of the future, how do we perceive it, what images do we use to shape it, what role does it play in the production of practices and forms of action? It seems to me that these are relevant questions that must be addressed anthropologically.

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Carlos Alberto Casas Mendoza is a social anthropologist. D. in Social Sciences from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (unicamp-Brazil). Professor-researcher at the Universidad Veracruzana. Member of the snilevel 1. Teacher with profile prodep. He has co-edited the following books: Anthropological and transdisciplinary perspectives. Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana, 2023; Historical-anthropological views on the frontiers in Latin America. Salmanca: edua, 2014; Emerging subjects: new and old contexts for negotiating identities in Latin America.. Mexico: Eón, 2013; Comparative views on borders in Latin America. Mexico: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2010.