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A year after leaving Montaña Alta, crossing the border and arriving in New York, Yoloxóchitl Marcelino asked for a job in a restaurant in Brooklyn. Now that he tells it, he is about to cry. “A woman chef served me, I didn’t know what her origin was, but she spoke Spanish and yet she served me in English,” he says. “He asked me, ‘What do you need?’ I understood certain words, but not to maintain a dialogue. I told him: ‘Well, I’m here to ask for a job.’ And she tells me: ‘You come to ask for a job and you don’t know how to speak English? ‘How many years have you been in the United States?’ I told him that he had been here for a year and a half. ‘And you haven’t learned to speak English? This way you will never find a job. When you know how to speak English, come back.’ That was his response.”
Yoloxóchitl Marcelino wipes away his tears. He is 32 years old and has three children. He wears his hair down to his shoulders, wears a red huipil and shows others that she embroiders herself with square fabrics and yarn and crystal threads, which her mother sends him from Mexico. With fretwork weaving, she creates figures that end up being hearts, birds or animals of all kinds.
He lives in Kingsbridge, a neighborhood of more than 10,000 inhabitants, where the majority speaks English, one of the largest retail commercial districts in the Bronx, located many miles from Alacatlatzala, the town where Yoloxóchitl was born in the State of Guerrero, where some 1,500 people who make their living by weaving palm hats, and where Mixtec, the language of rain, is spoken. It is the third most spoken indigenous language in Mexico, and in it there is no word love, nor the word health, nor the word pineapple.
Yoloxóchitl alternates her work cleaning the homes of New York families with her work as an interpreter from Mixtec into Spanish and her activism as a member of the Council of Native Peoples. Yoloxóchitl still does not know English, and he does this work, among other things, because he has suffered from not being able to express himself.
“It is easier for migrants who can speak the Spanish language to communicate a need. Many here speak Spanish, it is easier to ask where a hospital is, or certain things. However, indigenous migration is very different because we come from places very far from cities, we have no knowledge of how the system works, the hospitals, how everything works,” he explains.
In 2019, through the Transnational Peoples Network in New York, Yoloxóchitl learned about the organization CIELO, established in California, which provides resources for migrant indigenous communities. “This way I could understand a little more about what acting is,” she says. At first he was afraid of not doing it well. Mixtec has 81 linguistic variants. In interpretation, she says, a word can have many meanings. “So if we don’t interpret correctly, we could harm people.”
There are words that do not exist in Mixtec. In the language of Yoloxóchitl, for example, there is no literal translation of the word health, and there are no others such as “project” or “program.” That’s when it’s up to the interpreter to do her job. “In our communities, the word love is not very common, but you can express emotions like saying ‘I love you very much’, or ‘you are very important,’” she says. “Sometimes people think that it works like when you translate from English to Spanish, that there are exact words, but in our communities it is different. We have names for fruits or vegetables that only exist in our communities. In my community there is no pineapple, because it is a cold region, and therefore there is no translation of that word,” she says.
The CIELO organization helped several interpreters in New York with training in the medical or legal area. They provided training with trained people. “That helped us learn, to find a way to explain, to understand the construction of words to be able to do this service better.” Today, while some interpreters receive calls, others make arrangements for appointments, support efforts to repatriate bodies of deceased migrants, or are intermediaries if someone needs to communicate with lawyers, doctors, or the courts.
On December 18, 2020, a group of people from indigenous peoples met in the central Union Square in Manhattan to create the Council of Native Peoples in response to the need for interpreters to help indigenous migrants, unprotected by institutions.
“There were many people who came from indigenous peoples, people from Oaxaca, Guerrero, from other communities or nations like our brothers from Ecuador, and we began to meet,” says Yoloxóchitl. “Since then, we have been seeking to exercise the linguistic right. We want people to be able to access the information they need in their language. Whether it’s when people go to the doctor or have problems with their housing, we want our community to know that they have the right to have a person interpret in their language and that person has the ability to do so. We seek to raise awareness among our people, to make them recognize that they speak an indigenous language in order to improve the service for them.”
Yoloxóchitl has seen how many people from indigenous peoples deny that they speak an indigenous language for fear of being discriminated against. He knows that Linguistic violence exists, it is not a myth, and those who cannot communicate suffer from it daily.
“There are people who take advantage and commit discrimination, including robbing our people, because our people do not know where they can go, who can help. Many scare them by saying that if they report a situation, they will have to go to their countries, since they do not have an immigration status here,” she says. “That is the way they have always exerted pressure on our people, and that is the constant fear, because since there is no information in our language, people cannot know that they have the right not to be removed from the place where they live.”
That is why, together with the Council of Native Peoples, they seek to raise awareness among institutions, including the Consulate of Mexico, so that they take care of the unmet needs of these communities. “Many people could not communicate and our own institution did not know that there was this difficulty in the community. The Consulate did not provide interpretation service. And although we are among all migrants, our needs are very different from those of others,” he maintains. “The most important thing is to make our communities visible, so that they know that we speak languages and continue to resist through migration, preserving our customs.”
If you think about it, Yoloxóchitl has been interpreting languages since she accompanied her grandmother to Tlapa, a city in her department, and acted as her interpreter. “I have realized that since I was a child, since I had the opportunity to learn Spanish, I have had to interpret in the community itself. I remember traveling with my grandmother and she told me to ask how much tomatoes cost, how much sugar cost. So I asked, I mean, I have been interpreting for a long time, but I didn’t know it was a job,” he says.
On the cold days of New York, far from family, Mixtec is for Yoloxóchitl a connection with Mexico, with Alacatlatzala, and with those he left in the High Mountains. “The most beautiful memories, when I started and learned to speak it, were with my grandmother. That is why Mixtec is a strong connection to our family. My grandparents did not have the opportunity to learn Spanish. Sometimes my grandfather would tell me: ‘Read me what the book says and tell me.’ So I told him and he said: ‘Oh, does that say all that?’ There are many things that stay in your memories.”
Yoloxóchitl knows how difficult it is to try to communicate something and have no one understand it, as happened to her grandmother on visits to Tlapa. “It’s the same thing that happens to me today when a person speaks to me in English. I think that was what helped me a lot to take this on responsibly,” he says. “There are many people in my community in New York who speak little Spanish, they are understood in a very complicated way, or it is difficult for them to explain themselves, and there are others who do not understand anything. Many think that we are in the 21st century and everyone speaks Spanish. Well, it’s not like that”.
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