Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are taking their ancient languages to new territories.
It had been three days since Aroldo's father Aroldo died. Aroldo was still grieving and couldn't even bring himself to tend to the cornfields his father had left him in their community in San Juan Atitan, Guatemala. At dinner, looking at the wood crackling in the stove and feeling the weight of loss on his chest, he told himself it was time to breathe in some fresh air.
Turning to his mother, who was quietly eating beside him, he said in Mam, the
Maya language spoken in their town, "
Nan, waji chix tuj Kytanum Kytanum Mex" - "
Mama, I want to go to the country of white people," that is, to the United States.
Also at Mama, his mother replied to him that she would arrange everything, but first he had to wait until the mourning period was over. A year later, when cousins in California agreed to host him, Aroldo set off. It took him more than four months to descend the slopes of the Sierra Madre, cross the deserts of Mexico and Arizona, and reach the San Francisco Bay Area.
Experts say the rise of indigenous languages in Latino immigrant communities in the U.S. is just beginning to be fully explored - and that has important implications for the communities themselves and their needs.
"The death of my father presented life in front of me, and I realized it was time to face it alone," Aroldo said in Spanish, which he also speaks. Behind him is a photo of his father in a traditional hat and purple hand-knit shirt under a black capixay (a woolen cloak, quite a substitute for a coat) from San Juan Atitan that keeps him warm on a chilly December evening in the Bay Area.
One of the few things Aroldo took with him was his language, Mam, whose roots go far back to the Mayan civilization that ruled Central America thousands of years ago. Today, Mam and other Mayan languages are expanding their influence as native speakers from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala spread them to the United States through immigration.
In recent years, the Mayan languages originally spoken in the Yucatan Peninsula have become so common in the United States that two of them, Quiche and Mam, now rank among the top languages used in U.S. immigration courts.
The San Francisco metropolitan area is one of the top destinations for Latino immigrants. One in four of the Bay Area's more than seven million residents is Latino, most of whom have roots in Mexico and Central America, according to calculations based on U.S. Census Bureau data.
The U.S. government classifies them all as Hispanic when they enter the country, which means from Spanish-speaking countries, although for some of these migrants - like Aroldo - Spanish is not a native language but is used to communicate with people outside their home villages.
Others don't know Spanish at all and speak only the language of their indigenous people, according to several Mayan immigrants and experts interviewed by Juan Pablo Perez-Burgos, a bilingual journalist with more than seven years of experience in human rights and environmental issues.
Photo: bbc.com
"Many Mam speakers come to the United States, and their needs, experiences and history are different from those who speak 'monolingual' Spanish or are not from indigenous cultures," says Tessa Scott, a linguist specializing in Mam at the University of California, Berkeley. "If you call everyone in Guatemala 'Hispanic,' you might assume that everyone in that group is fluent in Spanish, and that's not true."
In California, a new law passed in 2024 requires state agencies to collect more data on Latino immigrants' preferred languages, including indigenous languages such as Quiche and Mam, to better understand and meet their needs.
Mayan words have long been incorporated into different languages through borrowings related to Mayan inventions. In addition to needing different interpreters, Scott said, Mayans and other native immigrants face unique challenges that mestizos or white Latinos don't face and that often go unnoticed when everyone is lumped together under the blanket term "Latino."
"Indigenous people in Guatemala, many of whom are from Mayan cultures such as the Mam, often face strong discrimination and violence from people from a different social category, and this is what often drives them to the U.S. where they can seek asylum," Scott says.
Labeling all Latinos as "Latino" can obscure these complex social, cultural and ethnic hierarchies and prevent asylum seekers from receiving specialized services such as legal and trauma support, she adds.
The growth of Maya communities in the United States has also given their ancient languages new platforms, adding to their long and rich history. While the ruins and carved hieroglyphics of ancient Mayan cities may seem like relics of a civilization long gone, many Mayan communities survived the 16th century Spanish conquest and retained their culture and languages. In places like the Bay Area, Mayan languages can now be heard on the radio, on local newscasts, and even in classrooms.
Photo: bbc.com
"We are as involved in the world as any other society," says Genner Llanes-Ortiz, a Maya scholar at Bishop's University in Canada. "We continue to speak our languages and use them not only to write our history, but also to find new ways to deal with what we care about."
Cigars and chocolate
When the Spanish landed on the coast of the
Yucatan Peninsula in the 16th century, they found about a dozen Maya city-states linked by a shared past but also facing deep divisions. Some Maya rulers saw the arrival of the Spaniards as an opportunity to settle old differences and formed an alliance with the Europeans to defeat the rival cities.
Learning the languages spoken in the area was essential for the Spanish who wanted to preserve these new alliances. And when the peninsula was conquered, they used the local languages to evangelize, govern, and create a new society.
In his travels
through North and
South America, Spanish missionary
Fray Bartolome de las Casas described a widespread indigenous custom: "
absorbing" and "
sucking" burning herbs. In Maya culture, tobacco was smoked and drunk during rituals.
The act of smoking these "dried herbs stuffed into a certain leaf," as de las Casas put it, was called siyar in the ancient Mayan language, which later evolved into the Spanish word cigarro and, much later, into the English word cigar, meaning a roll of tobacco leaves. Another Mayan word that has passed into other languages is cacao, the bean from which chocolate is made and which de las Casas himself brought to Europe in 1544.
Today there are more than 30 Mayan languages spoken by at least six million people worldwide.
Although some of them, such as Chicomuseltek and Cholti, are extinct or near extinction, others, such as Kiche, Yucatec and Kekchi, are spoken by about a million people. They all derive from the same language, Pramayan, which was spoken until about 2000 BC.
However, they are so different that speakers of Mam, a language spoken by about half a million people, cannot understand Kiche, and Yucatecas cannot understand Mam. Aroldo says of Yucatec, "For me it's like German" - a language he doesn't speak at all.
For nearly 2,000 years, the Mayan languages had their own written language known as Classic Maya. Consisting of hieroglyphics, it was used only by those at the top of the social pyramid. "If we want to draw a historical equivalence, we can compare Classic Maya to Latin," Llanes-Ortiz says. "It was a language of prestige. It was spoken by the elite, and the rest of the population spoke their own language, which gradually blended with Latin."
Spanish missionaries considered the hieroglyphs pagan and systematically purged them from the Maya. The sons and daughters of the Maya elite were forced to abandon hieroglyphic writing and learn to use the Latin alphabet, and most of the books written by that time, known as codices, were destroyed. But oral languages were tolerated and, under a new cover - the Latin alphabet - survived into modern times.
"The use of Mayan languages was so widespread during colonial times that public deeds, balances, wills, political declarations, and memorials were written in them, but everything was written in Latin letters, which are preserved in the archives of the city of Seville," Llanes-Ortiz says. "Even after Mexico's independence from Spain, Mayan languages continued to be used as a lingua franca in the Yucatan Peninsula."
Photo: bbc.com
Western scholars began studying Mayan hieroglyphics, long suppressed by the Spanish, in the 19th century. Although American and Russian linguists made significant progress in deciphering them during the 20th century, Llanes-Ortiz says a huge breakthrough came in the 2000s, when scholars and native Mayan speakers entered the conversation. That's when researchers realized that hieroglyphs were not just complex concepts, but syllables that formed words.
The involvement of native speakers has advanced the study of Maya languages, and inspired a new generation of Maya to revitalize hieroglyphic writing. Groups such as Chokwoj or Chiikulal Uuchben Tsiib hold workshops, make T-shirts and mugs using ancient Maya glyphs to revive them and pass them on to future generations.
Mayan languages are moving north
Aroldo was five years old when he saw his cousins leave San Juan Atitan for the United States. He didn't see them for many more years, but he listened to their voices on the cassettes they sent from time to time, telling stories of a foreign land.
According to Llanes-Ortiz, the first known Mayans to reach the U.S. came as part of the Bracero program, which brought Mexican workers to bring in Americans who had left to fight in World War II. But the biggest waves came decades later, in the late 1990s and 2000s, when Hispanic migration peaked.
The number of Guatemalans living in the U.S. has grown from 410,000 in 2000 to 1.8 million in 2021, all from a country of only 17 million people. Among these migrants are many Mayans who have settled in states such as Florida and California.
"The first migrants came to the United States, tried their hand and saw how to make real money. Then they told their friends about it, they followed them, and soon they were pulling others along with them," says Silvia Lucrecia Carrillo Godinez, a teacher who teaches the Mam language and lives in San Juan Atitan.
Migration has transformed San Juan from a corn and bean-growing country to one dependent on remittances like the rest of Guatemala. Today, nearly one in five San Juans moves to Mexico or the United States in search of better-paying jobs.
"Migration is what keeps our village going," says Carrillo Godinez. "Moms living in the United States advise their compatriots: learn addition, subtraction, a little Spanish and go to the United States. It's the only way to progress."
For decades, San Francisco's Mayan immigrants settled in the Mission District. But as housing prices rose in the 2000s and 2010s, many of them moved to the East Bay, especially to the cities of Oakland and Richmond. "There's a direct line to Oakland," Scott says. "When I come to San Juan Atitan and people ask me where I'm from, I don't say 'from the U.S.' or 'from California,' I say 'from Oakland,' and they know exactly where I'm from."
Aroldo found a local community connected by Mam and Mayan traditions. They celebrate traditional events and festivals and help each other through neighborhood committees. From time to time, he receives WhatsApp messages in the Mam language: At jun xjal yab - someone is sick; or At jun xjal ma kyim - someone has passed away.
Photo: bbc.com
Like many other migrants, Aroldo views his stay in California as temporary - a place to work until he can return to San Juan Atitan and build a home for his family. Although he still grieves for his father and misses his family back home and the fog-shrouded mountains of his childhood, he finds solace in Mama.
"There are so many paisanos (compatriots) here that I rarely feel nostalgic. Language gets in the way of longing for my land," he says. That's why he always reminds his nephew, who attends an English-speaking school in the East Bay, to speak mom at home. "First comes mom, then Spanish, then English," he tells him.