11

muehlmann__xid-8533747_1_1.pdf

Home >Business & Finance homework help >Accounting homework help >11

SHAYLIH MUEHLMANN University of Toronto

“Spread your ass cheeks”: And other things that should not be said in indigenous languages

A B S T R A C T In this article, I describe the use of indigenous-language swearwords by the younger generation in the Cucapá settlement of El Mayor in northern Mexico. I argue that this vocabulary functions as a critique of and a challenge to the increasingly formalized imposition of indigenous-language capacity as a measure of authenticity and as both a formal and an informal criterion for the recognition of indigenous rights. I argue that this ethnographic case can also be read as a critique of the notion of language as a cultural repository popularized in recent linguistic anthropological literature on language endangerment. For the youth in El Mayor, indigenous identity is not located in the Cucapá language but in an awareness of a shared history of the injustices of colonization and a continuing legacy of state indifference. [language death, indigenous people, politics of recognition, Mexico, swearwords, identity, language ideology]

I n the indigenous settlement of El Mayor in northern Mexico, where only a handful of elders still speak the Cucapá language and everyone else has shifted to Spanish, Cucapá youth have encountered a recent state-sponsored shift to multiculturalism as an interrogation of their claims to an indigenous identity. Military officers, government offi-

cials, and NGO workers increasingly isolate indigenous-language capacity as a criterion for recognizing indigenous rights.

The notion of language that emerges in this political climate is familiar to anthropologists. Indigenous-language competence is elevated to a pri- mary criterion for defining cultural difference through the assumption that there is a necessary relationship between language and culture. In the last few decades, work in anthropology has rejected just such encompassing models of culture as a coherent, bounded system (Clifford 1988; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Ortner 2000, 2006; Roseberry 1989). Parallel critiques in linguistic anthropology have problematized understandings of language as closed systems that correspond to cultural groups and territories (Duchêne and Heller 2006; Hill 2002; Muehlmann and Duchêne 2007).

Nonetheless, many linguistic anthropologists have continued to support claims that language and culture are inextricably related (Harrison 2007; Hill 2003; Nettle and Romaine 2000; Woodbury 1993). This language ideology has been reinvigorated in the scholarly and activist literature on language endangerment in the last several decades as indigenous languages have increasingly competed with, and been replaced by, more dominant lan- guages all over the world. Campaigns to save endangered languages have been connected to efforts to rescue cultural heritage, knowledge, and prac- tices (Crystal 2000; Maffi 2001; Nettle and Romaine 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). Indeed, variations of the proposition “when a language dies, a culture dies” have served as rallying cries for these efforts.

Below, I describe how Cucapá youth themselves critically engage with the assumption that their identity is located in their fluency in the Cucapá language by analyzing two sets of linguistic practices in which Cucapá

“Spread your ass cheeks” � American Ethnologist

swearwords are central. The first set involves boundary marking that distinguishes an insider group from outsiders. The second set of practices prompts a reexamination of the first by showing that boundary-marking practices can also function to appropriate and parody authority and, thus, sub- vert it. I describe how this latter set of linguistic practices emerges in a historical and political context in which in- digenous people are continually called on to prove their au- thenticity under definitions imposed by the state. Cucapá swearwords function both to disavow the assertion that the Cucapá’s identity is located in their indigenous language and to critique linguistic competence as a condition of the group’s access to resources.

The appeal to indigenous people to conform to a partic- ular construction of indigeneity is part of a broader political and historical trend in which international and national law has begun to recognize the rights of indigenous people while simultaneously imposing the criteria that allow for groups to qualify as indigenous people in the first place. Until the 1980s and 1990s, public discourses in many parts of Latin America discouraged politicized indigenous identification and were directed at assimilation (Alonso 2004; Gordillo and Hirsch 2003).

In Mexico, national policy and class-based orga- nizing encouraged indigenous people to self-identify as campesinos, or peasants ( Jackson and Warren 2005). Campesinos constituted a political category meant to rep- resent a distinct social class with common interests and grievances, related primarily to issues of land. They were seen as a key element in the struggle for land reform that would be the cornerstone of Mexico’s social revolution (Boyer 2003). After the revolution (1910–20), Mexico became the first nation-state in the Americas to systematically im- plement agrarian reform. Between the 1920s and the 1970s, millions of hectares of land were taken from the hacien- das, that is, Mexican and foreign-owned estates, and redis- tributed to peasants and dispossessed agrarian communi- ties (de la Peña 2005; Joseph and Nugent 1994). Nationalist ideologies of mestizaje popular during the revolution em- phasized cultural and biological mixing as opposed to differ- ence and further discouraged politicized indigenous iden- tification (Alonso 2004; Jackson and Warren 2005). Even the ideological movement of indigenismo, which ostensibly cel- ebrated multiculturalism, maintained that the full extension of citizenship to indigenous peoples would ultimately come through assimilation (de la Peña 2005).

This began to change in the 1980s and 1990s, when Mexico began implementing neoliberal, multicultural poli- cies and encouraging “cultural recovery” (Hale 2005; Sieder 2002). These policy changes radically transformed the way state actors interacted with indigenous communities, in- troducing a host of government programs, NGOs, and pri- vate foundations to those communities. In El Mayor, these changes have, in some cases, transpired within the span

of a single lifetime and have been experienced as a pro- found contradiction. The very characteristics that, in the past, formed the basis of the Cucapá’s subordination— “backward” customs, a lack of fluency in Spanish, and iso- lation from modern conveniences—have now become the very characteristics that the state requires to recognize their rights.

One night at dusk, sitting on the flatbed of a truck smok- ing cigarettes with Cruz, the father in the family with which I stayed, I tried to engage him on the injustice people in El Mayor had experienced because of these processes.1 After centuries of discrimination on cultural grounds, resulting in economic and environmental marginalization and, eventu- ally, a high level of cultural and linguistic assimilation, the government has now ostensibly changed its attitude toward indigenous people. Whereas Cruz had feared punishment if he spoke his indigenous language in school, speaking Cu- capá has now, just 40 years later, become an informal crite- rion for access to certain rights. I told Cruz that I saw this as the ultimate betrayal by the Mexican government. The state had discouraged Cucapá traditional ways of life in the first place and now dared to require these traditions for it to treat the Cucapá with dignity. Cruz responded blandly to my rant as he exhaled a cloud of smoke: “Yeah, well,” he said, “that’s the great contradiction. Now the government wants us to act like Indians.”

The Cucapá language

My own process of discovering the dimension of language use I describe in this article took place over 12 months of ethnographic research among the Cucapá living in El Mayor. The Cucapá are a transnational tribe divided by the U.S.– Mexican border. Approximately 1,000 Cucapá live in Somer- ton, Arizona, and several hundred more live in the Mexicali valley in the Mexican states of Sonora and Baja California.2

El Mayor is the home of the largest population of Cucapá people in Mexico. The settlement is located on the Mexicali– San Felipe highway (Route 5), which runs north–south be- tween Sonora and Baja California. The road cuts through the Colorado River delta, past the Cucapá pueblo on the east and the Sierra Cucapá Mountains on the west. El Mayor sits at the edge of the Hardy River, a tributary of the Col- orado River, and consists of a scattering of approximately 40 houses—patched together of plywood, cinder block, and tarpaper—an elementary and secondary school, a medical clinic, and an abandoned church.

Until the early 20th century, the Cucapá followed semi- nomadic subsistence patterns coordinated with the Col- orado River’s stages through the year. Their main source of food was fish, but they also hunted rabbits and deer and planted corn, beans, and pumpkins. Fishing has been severely constrained as a result of environmental degrada- tion and government restrictions in the last several decades.

American Ethnologist � Volume 35 Number 1 February 2008

The loss of traditional subsistence activities forced a rapid integration into the encroaching economic systems of the border region. The Cucapá went to work in factories; as farmhands; in construction, trucking, and building roads; selling scrap metal; and, most recently, in narcotrafficking. As today’s elders were entering the Mexican workforce, they encountered a strong disincentive to speak Cucapá because of discrimination against “the Indians.”

Along with the economic pressures these changes have brought, the Cucapá living in El Mayor have also faced a gradual process of cultural assimilation into Mexican soci- ety. The Cucapá, as well as many outside observers, per- ceive that their cultural traditions, including their indige- nous language, are at risk of disappearing.3 In this sense, their sociolinguistic situation mirrors that of the many in- digenous people around the world who are shifting to the economically and culturally dominant languages of their re- gions (Harrison 2007; Hill 1983; Kulick 1992; Mufwene 2001; Mühlhäusler 1996; Nettle and Romaine 2000).

Don Madaleno, the traditional chief of the Cucapá and one of the elders fluent in the language, spoke pointedly about the reasons for the Cucapá language’s obsolescence: “With all these fights, the fight for the land, for the water, and to fish, we don’t have time to focus on teaching the chil- dren how to speak Cucapá.”4 Historically, their lack of flu- ency in Spanish significantly disadvantaged the Cucapá in similar conflicts over resources and rights. Indeed, Yolanda Sanchez (2000), a local historian of Mexicali, argues that the Cucapá lost a significant portion of their land claims during the revolution because negotiations were conducted entirely in Spanish and, at the time, the Cucapá were almost entirely monolingual in Cucapá. Sanchez attributes their lack of suc- cess in pursuing their claims to their inability to represent themselves legally or even fully understand the processes that were taking place.5

Whereas not speaking Spanish may have impeded their legal negotiations in the past, the Cucapá are now finding that a lack of fluency in their indigenous language and tradi- tions is increasingly delegitimizing their current legal claims. In battles for fishing rights and access to work programs and in appeals for general access to resources and support from the government, the Cucapá’s claims are continually under- mined on the basis of their purported lack of indigenous authenticity. One attack on Cucapá authenticity is leveled on the grounds of incompetence in their own indigenous language. Through an examination of the ways the youth of El Mayor still use the Cucapá language, I describe how they challenge this claim.

What is and is not said in Cucapá

Inspired by the literature on the loss of ecological knowl- edge that often coincides with language death, in particular, Jane H. Hill’s (2003) work on the ecological vocabulary of the

nearby Tohono O’odham community, I originally hoped to do a miniature survey assessing which plants and animals were still known by their Cucapá names. I was curious to know which words people still used, imagining that some ecological vocabulary had survived as a result of the persis- tence of activities in which it was indispensable (perhaps in fishing or in local medicinal practices). When people would tell me in interviews that they spoke only a few words of Cucapá, I would often try to elicit what those words were. This effort almost always met with little or no response. Put on the spot, people could not remember their vocabulary or felt embarrassed pronouncing the words. I would proceed by asking what kinds of words they thought they knew, and they would often say either “the basics” (hello, how are you, etc.) or “groserı́as” (swearwords). They would always refuse to tell me what bad words they knew.

Instead of persisting with this line of questioning, which was not proving very productive, I began listing Cucapá words and asking whether my interviewees recognized them and knew what they meant. This was a much more effec- tive way of determining the vocabulary people still knew, and it was the only way of determining whether they knew groserı́as, and, if so, which ones. Through this line of questioning, I confirmed that groserı́as were, indeed, the Cucapá vocabulary that most people knew. In fact, the smaller one’s Cucapá vocabulary, the more likely it con- sisted of groserı́as. I also found an age-based correlation: The younger generation, both males and females between 14 and 30 years of age, was particularly familiar with the vocabulary.

Cucapá swearwords form an exclusive vocabulary in El Mayor. This was indicated in several ways during the course of my stay. Sometimes my teachers would explicitly say, “Don’t tell anyone this.” At other times it became clear in more expository ways that the vocabulary was not informa- tion that should be easily shared and that, indeed, like all practices of solidarity, the use of Cucapá groserı́as negoti- ates a boundary that, as I demonstrate below, depends on the exclusivity of this vocabulary.

Discovering that an important linguistic practice in- volves a vocabulary that is, by its nature, exclusive presents specific ethical problems for describing this practice in an academic context. Some of the stories I relay in the follow- ing discussion and the vocabulary I describe were taught to me after I had been given formal consent to include this information in my research. It was clear from the way the vo- cabulary functioned socially, however, that publishing these words for an anonymous audience would betray a social con- tract. Accordingly, I provide English translations, instead of Cucapá words, to represent the way the words function in specific contexts. Because I do not intend a lexical analysis but, rather, an ethnography of a particular vocabulary in use, these translations do not significantly compromise the story I tell.

“Spread your ass cheeks” � American Ethnologist

Learning Cucapá groserı́as myself and discovering how they are used was a complicated project. I formally began one day as I sat with a 16-year-old neighbor, Thalia, in her house working through her Cucapá word list. Her grand- mother, Doña Esperanza, arrived and started correcting our pronunciation and helping us add new words. After practic- ing colors, kinship terms, and some practical phrases, Thalia wanted to practice and expand her list of groserı́as.6 At first, Doña Esperanza was slightly embarrassed or uncomfortable that I was hearing these words. Soon she began to find some amusement in my enthusiastic attempts to pronounce dick and asshole in Cucapá. I recalled, in Doña Esperanza’s shift from embarrassment to stifled laughter, that this was not my first lesson with her involving words not listed in Craw- ford’s (1989) Cucapá dictionary. Weeks earlier, I had recorded Doña Esperanza’s story about a witch, whose name derived from a phrase that translates “to spread your ass cheeks.” She translated the name after her performance of the story, under her breath and with a mischievous look, then quickly told me not to tell anyone. Doña Esperanza had the same air of mischief and secrecy on the afternoon that Thalia and I exchanged groserı́as. The next morning, I found the words la gringa is a whore (written in Spanish but with the Cucapá word for whore) affectionately etched into the layer of dust on my car’s back window.

Several weeks and many rehearsals of my new vocab- ulary later, Doña Esperanza and her daughter Manuela in- vited me to a meeting of estranged members of the com- munity, relatives of theirs who identified with Doña Esper- anza’s and Manuela’s political faction. The group was aligned with the Cucapá’s ejido leader, or comisario, rather than with Don Madaleno, the traditional leader, who was supported by another family. I was interested in attending because I had not met the comisario, nor had I met the members of Doña Esperanza’s family who lived outside of El Mayor in La Puerta and Pozo de Avisu. This section of the community felt marginalized for political reasons and by their spatial isolation from the larger Cucapá community in El Mayor.

As soon as the 11 women attending the meeting sat down, they launched into the litany of accusations and com- plaints about El Mayor and Don Madaleno that I had come to recognize as typical among Doña Esperanza’s circle. Af- ter several fairly biting comments about the other family, a woman named Lupita paused to scrutinize me. Manuela had already introduced me as a student, there to learn about Cucapá culture. Nonetheless, Lupita asked Manuela to con- firm that I could be trusted not to take anything back “to the other side.” She explained that on one occasion a journalist had published, word for word, what she had said about the other family, identifying her as the source. Manuela assured them that I was her friend and that they need not worry.

Nevertheless, Lupita still looked worried. After an un- comfortable pause, indicating Lupita’s sustained distrust, Manuela resumed her assurances, explaining that I was her

neighbor (thankfully, she did not mention that I was living with Don Madaleno’s daughter), that sometimes I slept in her house, and that we spent time together every day. Finally, she leaned over and prodded me to tell the group what she had taught me thus far. She nudged me and asked me to say whore in Cucapá. To my surprise, no one reacted to her request. No one responded until I timidly produced the word, at which point everyone laughed uproariously. Then Manuela, look- ing proud, ordered me to say dick, tits and ass, and, finally, wet vagina in Cucapá. All present laughed with surprise as I produced this vocabulary, and Manuela, also laughing, ex- plained that she had had to teach me the words in Spanish, as well. After this embarrassing demonstration of my solidar- ity, the women resumed their discussion in a much easier manner and did not question my presence again.

In several ways, the role of swearwords in this encounter resonates with sociolinguistic work on slang and expletives. In this work, swearing has often been analyzed as a practice of solidarity. For example, Nicola Daly and colleagues (2004) analyze the sociopragmatic functions of fuck and its role as an indicator of membership in a specific community of practice. In the context they examine, swearing, which is as- sociated with a working-class dialect, is a powerful in-group marker and represents a form of “covert prestige” (Labov 1972; Trudgill 1972). In such contexts, the negative affect and strength associated with swearwords in standard settings are converted into positive attributes when the words are used between members of a community of practice. How- ever, such an analysis is not entirely applicable to the above example, in which my performance of swearwords gained my entrance to the meeting. Although my knowledge of the Cucapá words identified me as an insider, my recital of the words also functioned to mark me as an outsider, to warn me that gaining the trust of the group required a public per- formance.

I was not the first outsider to be initiated into the exclu- sive world of Cucapá groserı́as. A story circulates among the area’s NGO crowd about a conservation workshop that was held by a local environmental NGO. During the workshop, one of the conservationists asked Osvaldo, the 29-year-old son of the chief, to teach them some basic Cucapá phrases. They wanted to know such expressions as “hello,” “how are you?” and “see you later” and assumed, as many do, that Osvaldo would know how to say these things in Cucapá. Reportedly, Osvaldo went along with the request and care- fully spelled out the correct pronunciation for each phrase, painstakingly going over his lesson with the eager and grate- ful conservationists. Later that day, when the chief arrived, the conservationists had the opportunity to test out their new phrases, only to discover by the chief’s shocked expres- sion that Osvaldo had taught them swearwords instead of friendly greetings and small talk.

Sitting on Doña Katiana’s porch one evening, Cruz proudly told a similar story. One day, a pair of Jehovah’s

American Ethnologist � Volume 35 Number 1 February 2008

Witnesses came knocking on doors in El Mayor, “teaching the word of God.” When they arrived at Cruz’s house, only his twin daughters, who were 16 at the time, were there to receive them. The Jehovah’s Witnesses asked if the girls would teach them how to say something in Cucapá: They wanted to know how to ask for water. Instead, the girls taught them a phrase that literally means ass and vagina but more figuratively translates into tits and ass in English (i.e., it is a phrase used to objectify sexuality by referring to pertinent body parts). The Jehovah’s Witnesses thanked them and moved onto the next house, which was Manuela’s (this was a poignant turn in the story, as Cruz told it, because Manuela is well known for her temper). Cruz continued:

Then they arrived with Manuela. (He begins imitating their high-pitched voices) Hello mam, how are you? We’d like to talk to you, but we also speak Cucapá. Yeah? Yeah. We want to ask you for something. Let’s see . . . “Tits and ass” [i.e., the Cucapá groserı́a]. (We all laugh as Cruz trails off imitating Manuela’s response as she shooed them from her doorstep) Go to hell you! You’re asking for my ass! (more laughter)7

These two anecdotes, like my experience at the meeting, suggest that Cucapá groserı́as perform a boundary-marking role, marking off a group of insiders from outsiders. The role of the swearwords in the two anecdotes about the conser- vation workshop and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, is to force the outsiders to recognize themselves as such. When the con- servationists realize they have been duped or when the Je- hovah’s Witnesses are chased off Manuela’s porch, they are sent a distinct message that they are outsiders.

The anecdotes themselves, or the retelling of the way swearwords were used and the circulation of these stories, perform the inverse function. They mark off a group of in- siders. A dozen similar stories circulate in El Mayor. When they are told, the groserı́as are always said in Cucapá and never translated into Spanish. When those present erupt in laughter, they indicate that they understand the words and, in the process, identify themselves as insiders.

Hill (1983) relays a similar version of boundary marking in a linguistic routine in Nahuatl, a Uto-Aztecan language of southern Mexico. She describes the rapid abandonment of Nahuatl in some communities except in limited contexts such as cursing outsiders and toasting with pulque. Cursing outsiders takes the form of a challenge: A speaker demands, “Give me your sister.” A Nahuatl speaker will know that the proper response to such a challenge is, “No, but I will give you my brother,” whereas a Spanish speaker may merely believe he or she has been greeted and will reply, “Good morning” (Hill 1983:266).

The three examples I have discussed—my own “initi- ation” at the meeting and the stories of the Jehovah’s Wit- nesses and of the conservationists—have important differ-

ences. The audience is constituted in different ways in the first and in the latter two examples. In the first example, my initiation, the audience was present when the utterances oc- curred; in the second two, the audiences are re-created as the incidents circulate as narratives (of course, the story about my initiation may well be circulating by now, too). Swear- words also perform slightly different functions in the three examples. In the case of my initiation at the meeting, my per- formance gained my access to the meeting, as I was even- tually permitted to stay. In the other two examples, the per- formances ultimately restricted access; the witnesses were chased out of the yard, and the conservationists offended the chief rather than impressing him.

However, all three of these examples share a common element: a staged performance that subjects the outsider to the scrutiny of the group. This points to an important dimen- sion of these interactions that cannot be accounted for as functioning at the level of boundary marking alone. Indeed, the symbolic work that swearwords accomplish needs to be understood as negotiating a more complex power dynamic than simply marking an in- from an out-group. To under- stand this dynamic it is necessary to examine another set of linguistic practices in which it is the Cucapá, rather than reluctant or unknowing outsiders, who perform the swear- words.

As it became more clear to me that the persistence of swearwords was a social fact in El Mayor, rather than simply a product of the crowd I had fallen in with, I started approach- ing my friends and returning to my former interviewees to ask what they thought about this—why they thought these were the only words learned by the younger people. Some- times people would respond, “It’s because the young people are ‘groseros’ (rude).”

These comments bear a surface resemblance to the dis- course of nostalgia that Hill (1998) found among older speak- ers of Mexicano (Nahuatl). Hill describes this discourse as expressing nostalgia about days gone by and about a time when people spoke puro mexicano (pure Mexicano). Today, in contrast, the young people speak Spanish, and children come out of school groseros. Unlike Hill’s case, however, in El Mayor the elders were hesitant to argue that speaking Cu- capá was a pure cultural form and a vehicle for social forms of long ago. Their hesitance to make such claims has to do with one of the principal ways that language shift is understood. In general, elders accept responsibility for not teaching the young people Cucapá and explain this lapse as the result of la lucha (the struggle) they find themselves in to procure access to basic resources such as work, as Don Madaleno observed. A discourse of nostalgia around the past did exist, in that elders expressed that the old days were “better,” but it involved reminiscing about a time when fishing was good and residents of El Mayor could support their own families, rather than elaborating a linguistic ideology that grafted cul- tural purity onto linguistic form.

“Spread your ass cheeks” � American Ethnologist

Furthermore, although elders would sometimes be dis- missive of these kinds of linguistic interactions, calling the youth “groseros,” when I questioned them pointedly, the more common response was to tell more stories about sim- ilar encounters between youth and outsiders. Seventy-four- year-old Inez told me a story that proved particularly helpful in explaining how these practices are understood.

Sometimes you go out in the sierra or in the desert and the soldiers are there and they won’t let you pass. They stop you, pointing their guns at you on your own land and they ask you your business. At times like this the chamacos [kids] simply say “Soy Indio” in Spanish and then in Cucapá they say “go screw yourself!” to which the soldiers say “oh,” “pásale” (go ahead).

The form of this interaction initially places the Cucapá chamacos in the same position of vulnerability as the conser- vationists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the anthropologist in the previous set of examples. When the Indian meets the soldier (presumably on the lookout for drug smugglers in this heavily militarized border region of the Sonoran desert), he is asked to prove himself to the soldier, to justify his presence. As in the previous set of examples, cursing the authenticator is the substance of this performance.

Doña Inez’s anecdote supplied a more general context for these utterances. It is a context in which indigenous peo- ple are continually called on to prove their authenticity. They are asked to perform their indigeneity, at great stakes, in a myriad of different contexts by different kinds of authenti- cators. What does it mean when telling an authenticator to “go screw yourself” passes as evidence? To fully understand what it means, below I explore what Cruz said about the “great contradiction.”

The great contradiction: “Now they want us to act like Indians”

A crucial component of state formation in postindepen- dence Latin America has been the capacity of governments to define what it means to be indigenous and to create the conditions for this specific political identity to emerge within the nation (de la Peña 2005:718). The shift from policies of indigenous assimilation to a program of multiculturalism in public discourses in Mexico and other Latin American coun- tries during the 1980s and 1990s represented a significant change in the conditions under which indigenous groups ar- ticulated with the state. The shift in indigenous policy can be understood as the result of political and ideological changes. Beginning in the 1980s, strong international pressure came to bear as various transnational social movements such as environmentalism and human-rights advocacy gained mo- mentum. The concept of “indigenous people” gained legit- imacy in international law with the creation of the United Nations (UN) Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP) in 1982, which created a space for grassroots move-

ments to gain more direct access to the United Nations (de la Peña 2005; Gray 1996). In addition, under pressure from the IMF and the World Bank, many Latin American states agreed to adopt neoliberal reforms, which resonated with dis- courses on diversity, community solidarity, and social capital (Sieder 2002). There were also internal motivations to shift to a multicultural agenda, as it allowed the state to provide favorable terms to certain indigenous groups and to reject the more radical demands of others (Hale 2002; Yashar 1998).

Cruz’s understanding of why policy changes in Mexico started encouraging indigenous identification was largely consistent with this description, although more suspicious. He said that the local government wants the people of El Mayor to “act like Indians” so they can get money for “indige- nous” projects from the federal government and other fund- ing organizations. He explained that the money rarely goes to the proposed projects or the indigenous people but, rather, ends up in the hands of officials to use for their own pur- poses. In El Mayor, people have countless stories of projects that were promised generous support, guaranteed substan- tial outcomes, and then never materialized.

The shift to policies encouraging indigenous identi- fication has benefited many indigenous communities in Latin America. The shift has created a political climate and the legal grounds to argue for territory and rights to natu- ral resources. The indigenous movement has succeeded in creating political parties in Bolivia and Ecuador. Successful indigenous mobilizations in Bolivia in 2000 forced the gov- ernment to cancel plans to allow the Bechtel Corporation to sell the country’s water to its citizens (Laurie et al. 2002). The Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994, protesting the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, was able to force the government and Mexican public opinion to recog- nize the marginalization of indigenous communities in the country (Harvey 1998). Furthermore, constitutional reforms have occurred across Latin America recognizing multicul- tural nations.

These successes, however, depend on performing in- digenous identity according to a definition imposed from outside indigenous communities. The criteria imposed vary minimally across Latin America. Article 2 of the Mexican constitution uses the following criteria to define indigenous people: they must be descendants of the people that lived in the same territory at the beginning of colonization and they must preserve their own social, economic, and cultural institutions. The criteria also specify that indigenous peo- ple’s awareness of their indigenous identity should be fun- damental (although, in practice, this last criterion is rarely emphasized).

Indigeneity and identity, more broadly, are also authen- ticated and contested at the community level in complex ways that may not align with national criteria. Joanne Rap- paport (2005) has shown how the ability to speak to power, or be fluent in the colonizers’ language, has been understood

American Ethnologist � Volume 35 Number 1 February 2008

as a disqualifier of authentic indigeneity. The Cucapá also engage in contentious debate over what constitutes Cucapá identity, which develops a particular gender ideology in op- position to Mexican machismo and traces an ancestral in- habitance, and a history of fishing, on the river from before colonization.

A set of authenticating measures determining who is and is not indigenous endures, despite indigenous groups’ constant resignifying of indigenousness. Ethnographic work on indigenous movements in Latin America has shown over and over again that the binary between indigenous and non- indigenous is never unproblematic. In describing the com- plexity of indigenous identification in regard to language, Jean E. Jackson and Kay B. Warren point out that “cases exist where pueblos do not speak their traditional language, oth- ers where nonindigenous populations do speak a traditional language and still other cases where people speaking a lan- guage feign total ignorance of it” (2005:558). Alcida Ramos (1995:268) even documents a case of one indigenous group, the Pataxó of northeastern Brazil, who no longer speak their indigenous language, but, recognizing the importance of such signs of indigeneity for dominant society, have acquired the language of another indigenous group and strategically adopted it as their own.

The powerful assumption that the authenticity of in- digenous identity is closely linked to the knowledge of one’s traditional indigenous language has resulted in some states requiring a person who has moved out of a community to still speak its language or be classified as formerly indige- nous ( Jackson and Warren 2005).8 Although actual linguistic practices are far too complex for such policies to be entirely enforceable, indigenous-language competence continues to be a primary criterion by which institutional authorities de- fine indigeneity. In El Mayor, indigenous-language compe- tence has been imposed as a criterion of authenticity in a variety of formal and informal ways in restricting access to constitutional rights and to cultural projects and resources. During my time in El Mayor, Cucapá youths’ participation in a culture and conservation project vividly illustrated such authenticating practices at work.

“Do you speak your language?” Language capacity as a criterion for participation

The Cucapá’s indigenous-language capacity is one of a clus- ter of characteristics used for or against the group in different constitutional claims to land and fishing rights, but it also serves as a more informal criterion regulating access to other kinds of resources. Participation in cultural projects is a pri- mary example in which this is evident. As more attention has gone to finding alternate sources of income to illegal fishing, NGOs have proposed ecotourism projects, language revital- ization projects, and cultural restoration projects. Partici- pation in these projects requires a certain level of “cultural

knowledge” and reflexivity. Language competency is often used as the indicator for such qualities. This became par- ticularly evident during the preparations for a mapmaking project in El Mayor.

Santiago, the director of a program for “people, con- servation, and nature” at a binational NGO, initiated a map- making project in the three main Cucapá communities, Pozo de Avisu in Sonora, Somerton in Arizona, and El Mayor in Baja California. I volunteered to help with the preparations for this project before and during my fieldwork: attending meetings, taking notes, and consulting on various aspects of the planning. The project involved training a small team of youth from El Mayor, forming an advisory team of elders and carrying out interviews, then mapmaking with the support of trained cartographers. In a preliminary meeting, Santiago told me that the first criterion in the selection of youth par- ticipants should be fluency in Cucapá. I was surprised that he would impose this criterion, as he had been working with people in El Mayor for over ten years and I imagined had a better sense of the sociolinguistic dynamic. I explained that the fluency requirement would be unfair as none of the youth in El Mayor were fluent speakers of Cucapá.

Nonetheless, at the next meeting of the three commu- nities, which took place in El Mayor in May 2006, Santiago announced that his selection of the team would be based on fluency in Cucapá. It was a disgruntled meeting, as the youth in the group had been unaware that there would be a selection process in the first place, much less one that would effectively exclude them all. One young man, who had been a part of all the preparations, stormed out of the meeting before it was over.

Later that night, long after Santiago had left El Mayor, several young women gathered around the front of our house, gossiping about the meeting, about Santiago’s brand new car, and about the injustice of the selection criteria. Thalia thought that it would be “almost impossible to find a young person here who speaks Cucapá.” As the conversa- tion progressed, the group became more incensed about the whole issue. Here are some of the comments I recorded from that night:

Eva: It’s embarrassing not to be able to speak Cucapá because everyone who comes to El Mayor says: “Tell me how to say this in Cucapá” or, “tell me how to say that.” They think that we have to speak Cucapá because we are Indians. (She goes on to tell the same story Cruz told about the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Cucapá lesson.) It’s not fair—we should be able to work, the young people, even if we don’t speak Cucapá. Santiago is a crazy damn pelón (bald guy).

Lucia: Because we don’t speak Cucapá we shouldn’t get opportunities?

“Spread your ass cheeks” � American Ethnologist

E: (directed at me) Why does he want us to speak Cucapá? Does he speak Cucapá?

Shaylih: He thinks it would be better for the project, give a better sense of the land.

E: Well then instead of buying new cars he should buy us someone to teach us Cucapá!

L: It doesn’t take out my Cucapáness, if I don’t speak it. I have Cucapá blood.

S: You think you’re still Cucapá, even if you don’t speak Cucapá?

L: 100 percent.

In the end, Eva decided not to pursue the mapmaking project (she fell back on her previous plan to find a job in the factory where a handful of women from El Mayor worked and to entrust her newborn baby to the care of a neigh- bor during the day). She did not attend the following meet- ing in June 2006 that was held exclusively for the potential youth participants. Lucia, Victor, Osvaldo, Raul, Ivan, Thalia, and I went. Over beers and burritos at the tourist camp down the road, Santiago quizzed the group about why they wanted to be involved in the project (specifying, “besides the compensation”).

Osvaldo was the most vocal at the meeting; after several previous meetings, he seemed to have learned the style of rhetoric that Santiago was looking for. He started off hes- itantly, saying that he thought it would be a good idea for outsiders to learn about all of the places in the area around El Mayor. Santiago encouraged him to continue, asking what benefit the project would have for El Mayor as a commu- nity. Osvaldo said it would probably be good for some of the Cucapá to learn about the places, too. Finally, after more cajoling from Santiago, Osvaldo said, “Oh yeah and our children’s children . . . ” as if remembering something that Santiago had said in the past. Santiago replied, “You’re learning, Osvaldo!”9 No one else seemed comfortable talk- ing through the course of the meeting, but Osvaldo’s perfor- mance seemed to carry the group.

Finally, the moment came when Santiago asked the group to describe their language competence. “Do you speak Cucapá?” he asked, addressing the whole group. Osvaldo continued in his role of leader and answered this ques- tion without hesitation. “We know the basics,” he said, “you know, ‘hello, how are you,’ ” which he directly translated into “go screw yourself” in Cucapá. After several other giddy ex- changes of swearwords among members of the group, San- tiago seemed to have heard enough. “OK, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, and, seeming to be satisfied precisely by his lack of comprehension, he moved on to make the final arrangements to begin the project.

In this interaction, as in Doña Inez’s anecdote about the chamacos meeting the soldiers in the desert, the Cu- capá youth are asked to perform their indigeneity. The two interactions contrast meaningfully with the first set of exam-

ples I discussed because, in these instances, the Cucapá are subjected to the scrutiny and evaluation of outsiders. When proof of their authenticity is requested, Cucapá swearwords fulfill the request from the perspective of the authenticators while they simultaneously function as a refusal on the part of the Cucapá people who utter them.

In contrast, attempting to join the Cucapá in some man- ner, the conservationists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the anthropologist were asked to perform these very words. In those instances, the Cucapá youth took on the role of the au- thenticators, not just for themselves in those moments but also for the audiences that will continue to hear the stories as they are repeated. In this set of examples the outsiders are subjected to the scrutinizing gaze of the Cucapá.

At the meeting I attended, I felt that I was being paraded out in front of an audience dressed up in an uncomfortable costume of words. I knew their meanings, but they still felt foreign and awkward, which contributed to my embarrass- ment. In retrospect, I wonder if the Cucapá youth I observed feel any differently when they are called on to perform their indigeneity. For these Cucapá youth, the condition for their authenticity is that they speak words that, at some level, are foreign to them. In mimicking the forms of the subordina- tion they experience by subjecting outsiders to just such a performance, the Cucapá subvert their own subordination. This combination of appropriation and parody, or “mime- sis” (Pemberton 1994; Siegel 1986; Taussig 1993) is therefore, in fact, a gesture of resistance to the criteria by which they are able to access resources and lay claims to the state.

Therefore, more than simply marking an in- and an out- group, the use of Cucapá swearwords in the second set of in- teractions complicates the assumed hierarchies that these groups presuppose. In one sense, this second set expresses a classic gesture of resistance, constituting a “hidden tran- script” (Scott 1992) or a “critique of power spoken behind the backs of the dominant” (Scott 1992:xii). By reversing roles, subverting their authenticators, and subjecting the outsiders to the very authenticating measures so often used against them, these youth also express an irony (see Gal 1995) fundamental to their experience of what it means to be indigenous.

In the case of the mapmaking project, the Cucapá youths’ use of swearwords was a critique of the assertion that their lack of fluency in Cucapá should deny them op- portunities to work on cultural projects. It was a recognition of the injustice of the criterion and a defiant claim on the resources at stake.

What should and should not be said in indigenous languages

Groserı́as figure centrally in these linguistic practices as more than a means to achieve the boundary marking and subversion I have argued they accomplish. Indeed,

American Ethnologist � Volume 35 Number 1 February 2008

swearwords in these instances are fully intended in their most literal interpretation: as insults. That Cucapá groserı́as are featured in these practices, as opposed to Spanish ones, is also more than incidental. Cucapá swearwords derive much of their potency from manipulating expectations of what an indigenous language should express and by overturning ex- pectations about the kind of knowledge indigenous people should have.

Hugh Brody (2000), the internationally recognized an- thropologist, land-claims researcher, and policy adviser, claims that indigenous languages generally have no swear- words because anger is considered “childish” behavior and, as such, is scrupulously suppressed in indigenous communities.10 Although the popular assumption that in- digenous languages do not feature obscenity is certainly not one that most linguists would subscribe to, the linguistic anthropology literature on indigenous languages implicitly encourages it, if only by emphasizing more “elevated” as- pects of such languages. Partly in reaction to legacies of assimilatory policy and the undervaluing of nondominant languages, linguistic anthropologists have focused on the positive knowledge that is “encoded” in indigenous lan- guages (but see Garrett 2005 and Kulick 1995, 1998 for ex- ceptions). Accordingly, the ecological, medical, and spiritual vocabularies found in indigenous languages have been cel- ebrated and enthusiastically recorded (Harrison 2007; Hill 2003; Maffi 2001, 2005; Nettle and Romaine 2000; Skutnabb- Kangas et al. 2003).

Ramos (1994:78–80) has pointed out that these assump- tions about indigenous knowledge and stereotypes about In- dians conceal an intolerance and paternalism that can eas- ily come to the fore when indigenous people betray these expectations. For this reason, precisely, reporting on the Cu- capá’s linguistic practices is also politically precarious. By de- scribing how these words function, do I unwittingly put forth a negative portrayal of the Cucapá? The possibility exists, given the context of much of the media and academic atten- tion on language death—especially when conceptualized as a tragic, irrevocable loss of precious indigenous knowledge that could benefit all of humanity. Therefore, I hesitate to add my list of Cucapá expressions like “screw your mother” and “spread your ass cheeks” to the more idyllic archives of indigenous languages, such as the Hopi vocabulary, which can still imagine time in superior ways (Whorf 1964), or the O’odham words for the plants and animals integral to their cultural traditions (Hill 2003).

Similar discomfort at exacerbating negative stereotypes is evident in the burgeoning literature on the use of En- glish swearwords by Aboriginal youth in Australia. This work has examined the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people among those charged with “offensive behavior” or “offensive language,” in areas with high indigenous populations and in those with low proportions of Aborigines in their population. David Brown and colleagues (2001) show through a sample

of recorded crime statistics that indigenous people account for 15 times as many language offences as would be expected given their proportion in the community (Brown et al. 2001; Heilpern 1999).

Marcia Langton (1988) argues that this correlation can only be accounted for within the historical perspective of ongoing conflicts between the police and indigenous people (Brown et al. 2001; Cunneen 2001). She argues that swear- ing is a way for Aboriginal youth to exercise their own “le- gal method” by portraying the police and their legal cul- ture as grotesque (Langton 1988). Although this literature has argued that swearing is designed precisely to challenge systems that are perceived as illegitimate and oppressive, it also contains a strongly paternalistic stream that argues that Aboriginal youth do not realize they are using culturally of- fensive linguistic forms. For example, Rob White (2002) con- tends that indigenous cultures’ perceptions of civility are so radically different from those of Western cultures that chil- dren are not penalized for their use of swearwords, which are so routinely used in everyday communication that they are, indeed, not even experienced as offensive. Thus, these culturally confused youngsters perceive themselves as be- ing penalized for a “normal” communicational pattern that “in their cultural universe is . . . not experienced by them as ‘swearing’ ” (White 2002:31).

These two tendencies, to deny that swearwords exist in indigenous languages or to argue that indigenous swear- ing in English is so naturalized that it is unidentifiable as swearing, reflect a deeper ambivalence about indigenous people. The ambivalence indexes a dual stereotype of “the Indian”: on the one hand, as the noble savage inherently fluent in ecological wisdom and, on the other hand, as a violent and obscene substance abuser. White’s (2002) argu- ment that English swearwords are not experienced as such by their speakers neutralizes the possibility that drawing at- tention to indigenous youths’ swearing might contribute to the latter stereotype. In the process, however, the argument undermines the strategic savvy of these speakers by dis- arming their linguistic practices of their powerful discursive effect.

The claims that indigenous languages have no swear- words or that swearing in such communities is too natural- ized to be meaningful can be read as much as a prescrip- tion for what indigenous languages should express as an empirical assertion of what they do express. Evaluations of indigenous peoples’ swearing are filtered through expecta- tions about what these people should and should not be say- ing, which, in turn, are constructed through a set of stereo- types about how they should behave, more generally.

Don Kulick (1995) identifies a parallel tendency in the portrayal of women’s speech in the literature on conflict talk and language and gender: Women are silent or speak sub- missively, with reference to rules of politeness (Lakoff 1975). Kulick (1998) critiques this tendency by exploring women’s

“Spread your ass cheeks” � American Ethnologist

speech in obscene public displays called “kroses,” which are sites of gender negotiations in Taiap, a Papuan language, and by showing how the vulgarity featured in these dis- plays is ideologically opposed to the politeness of speech in men’s political oratories, which downplay tension and disagreement.

The sociolinguistic literature on gender and swearing is also useful for my analysis because it highlights how women’s swearing functions in a range of ways that, against the back- drop of prevailing sociocultural norms and expectations, can provide a powerful identity resource for female speakers (de Klerk 1992, 1997; Gordon 1993; Sutton 1995).11 This work has shown that swearing functions not only as a marker of identity but also as a means of negotiating and actively con- stituting that identity (Sutton 1995). In the case of the inter- actions I observed among the Cucapá, swearing functions not simply to transgress dominant censorships and the au- thority that enforces them but also to creatively respond to and subvert that authority (Woolard 1985).

Although the literature on obscenity is helpful for think- ing through how swearwords may function as a strategic re- sponse, articulated from and constitutive of distinctly gen- dered or ethnic positions (see Weismantel 2001),12 I empha- size that the swearing central to this analysis is distinct from the everyday ways that obscenity is practiced among resi- dents of El Mayor. When obscenity features in displays of anger, as insults, or in playful vulgarity among youth in El Mayor it is always expressed in Spanish, which is indeed the “native” language of the majority of residents in El Mayor.

For the youth, the use of Cucapá swearwords is less about engaging in the sociality of the obscene than about negotiating claims to indigeneity. In all of the ethnographic instances in which I heard Cucapá swearwords used, they were employed in response to a challenge to Cucapá au- thenticity or, as in the first set of examples I described, in a boundary-marking mode. In all of the cases I observed, Cucapá swearwords were uttered in situations in which out- siders were present.

Nonetheless, the use of Cucapá swearwords in these limited contexts may well index both a sociality of the pro- fane that is currently practiced in Spanish in El Mayor as well as one that may have been practiced when people were flu- ent and interacting in Cucapá. Although I am interested in this article with what Cucapá swearwords do, as opposed to what they mean, during my interviews and informal conver- sations with elders in El Mayor, cross-cultural comparison of the meanings of swearwords was a running theme.

The central Cucapá phrase that I have analyzed in this discussion is one that I have translated into English as “screw you.” In Spanish, the semantic equivalent of “screw you” translates as “screw your mother” (chinga tu madre), reflect- ing the powerful role of the mother figure in Mexican culture. However, elders translated the literal meaning of the Cucapá expression as “screw your mother, your grandmother, and

your grandfather.” In interviews, the elders who translated this phrase generally agreed that the literal meaning of the in- sult reflected the powerful institution of the extended family in Cucapá culture. This meaning was opposed to the individ- ualism of U.S. culture (in which the insult is to the individual) and to the powerful Mexican preoccupation around the role of the mother. The original meanings that the elders empha- sized hint at the ways these swearwords may have formed a system of obscenity that predated the shift to Spanish.

Whereas elders explained that the literal meanings of the words were different than in Spanish, youth, significantly, translated these insults into their Spanish equivalents, gloss- ing the words as local Mexican swearwords. Indeed, the youth were unaware of the literal meanings in Cucapá. That the youth and elders translate the verb for sexual violation in Cucapá into chingar in Spanish is also significant because of the prevalence and flexibility of this word in Mexican Span- ish and in daily practices of obscenity in El Mayor.

The extensive use of the word chingar in Mexico is fa- mously explored by Octavio Paz in “The Labyrinth of Soli- tude” (1961). Paz argues that the prevalence of the Spanish word chingar indicates that the “essential act of the macho— power—almost always reveals itself as a capacity for wound- ing, humiliating, annihilating” (1961:82). Paz as well as oth- ers (Ramos 1962; Spielberg 1974) have argued that the prin- cipal theme of Mexican swearing involving the verb chin- gar is humiliation. However, José Limon (1994), unsettled by the delegitimizing effect this literature has on the Mexican working class, notes that the verb chingar also expresses an element of social violation. He describes it as a word often used when speaking of political and economic hardships.

That the Cucapá youth translated the swearwords they used into the Mexican verb chingar may indicate that, as it does for Limon’s working-class Mexicans, this lin- guistic practice represents an “oppositional break” (Limon 1994:134) in the alienating socioeconomic conditions youth have found themselves in. When the Cucapá curse their authenticators, they simultaneously claim belonging to a group that has a specific historical relation to the nation- state. Swearwords act as a disavowal of the assertion that the Cucapá’s identity is located in their indigenous language and as a refusal to accept Cucapá fluency as a condition for access to resources.

Unlearning Cucapá: Last words

Some people thought it was strange that I did not already know how to swear in Spanish when I arrived in El Mayor. They said that swearwords are usually the first kinds of words that foreigners learn when they come to the delta. I won- dered about this generalization. Can it be true that, statisti- cally, swearwords are the first words one learns in a foreign language (perhaps after hello and thank you)? Most people I talked to about this in El Mayor certainly seemed to think

American Ethnologist � Volume 35 Number 1 February 2008

this is the case. I was interested in the assertion because it seemed that, in the case of the Cucapá language, swearwords were the last to be unlearned. The long-term implications of this trend struck me as particularly daunting. Twenty years from now, when the ten or so speakers in El Mayor have passed away, swearwords will be the only words spoken in Cucapá.

Paul B. Garrett (2005) argues that swearwords in bilin- gual settings can sometimes form a code-specific genre. He examines how young children in St. Lucia are socialized to “curse” in a creole language that under most circum- stances they are discouraged from using. However, apart from Garrett’s (2005) case and Hill’s (1983) observation that cursing outsiders is one of the limited contexts in which the Nahuatl language is now used, little evidence suggests that swearwords are consistently the final words of dying lan- guages. Interestingly, Kulick (1995) hints that the opposite process may be taking place in Melanesia. One of the many effects of missionization in Melanesia has been the eradi- cation of obscene language in village life. Kulick points out that obscenity was one of the first speech varieties to be- come extinct when Kaluli villagers in the southern highlands adopted Christianity. Although this has yet to happen in the New Guinean village of Gapun, obscene language is associ- ated in that village with “the ways of Satan” (Kulick 1995:536), and Kulick questions whether the rich array of obscenities he documented will survive.

Although the youth in El Mayor are still learning swear- words, I want to be clear that I am not arguing that the last vestiges of their indigeneity, therefore, reside in profan- ity. To the contrary, the strategic use of swearwords in the contexts I have described critiques the very idea that indi- geneity resides in the Cucapá language. Like the elders, the youth believe that what makes them Cucapá is a connec- tion to the land, to the river, and to a history of tension with the Mexican government. Of course, these signifiers involve their own forms of strategic essentialisms, but, crucially, they are not the linguistic essentialisms invoked by often well- meaning anthropologists, NGO workers, and government officials.

For the youth in El Mayor, groserı́as may well seem the only words they need to know in Cucapá. Doña Esperanza often reasoned that it is important for the children to learn Cucapá because “it’s good to be able to talk a language that outsiders don’t understand.” The outsiders that frequent El Mayor seem to agree. When the soldier meets the Indian in the desert, he does not care that he does not know what the Indian says to him. The foreign words prove to the sol- dier that the Indian belongs there, that he is Indian. In the mapmaking meeting, Santiago did not need to know what the youth were saying in Cucapá for him to be convinced of their competence. It was as if his not knowing what they were saying was evidence enough. To the soldier, to the lawyer, to the government official, to the conservationist, it is not the

meaning of the words that matters. Indeed, in part, the very incomprehensibility of these words is what makes them so valuable.

I have argued that it is within this context of repeated appeals for proof of indigenous authenticity that one can understand the use of Cucapá swearwords in El Mayor. Cu- capá swearwords gesture to the irony of these appeals in the context of the long history of injustice the Cucapá peo- ple have experienced—a history that has always implicated their indigeneity in terms that the state has set. The con- cept of “indigeneity” represents the historical insertion of the preconquest population in the construction of the mod- ern nation-state (de Oliveira 1999). Ironically, the Mexican constitution requires self-identification for a group to be rec- ognized as indigenous. Cucapá swearwords declare just such a self-recognition.

However, the Cucapá move one step further from the recognition demanded of them. When the Cucapá offer “go screw yourself” as evidence of their authenticity, they draw attention to the authenticators’ lack of access to the knowl- edge they would need to determine the fulfillment of their own criteria. This acknowledgment draws attention to the limits of the project of “legibility” in which indigenous iden- tification is embedded. According to James C. Scott, the mod- ern state attempts to make the populations it administers more “legible . . . to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics which will be easiest to monitor, count, assess, and manage” (1998:81). As the Cucapá youths’ swearing points out, however, although the use of language as a standard characteristic may render indigenous populations more visible to the state, it simul- taneously perpetuates colonial imaginaries of the Indian as impenetrable and exotic.

Graham (2002) points out that the symbolic value at- tached to indigenous languages as emblems of authenticity gives these languages a special status among signifiers be- cause, in addition to communicating through content, they signal ethnicity at the level of form in the same way as non- linguistic forms such as bodily ornamentation or traditional dress. In this case, from the point of view of outsiders, the referential content does not matter, the form alone serves to authenticate the speakers. However, from the point of view of the inside group, for which these interactions are also performed, the propositional content is extremely im- portant. The linguistic interactions examined here are a par- ticularly sophisticated use of this dual nature of indigenous language as a semiotic medium because swearwords play off the nondenotational significance of indigenous language to outsiders while simultaneously drawing on the referential aspect for the insiders. Whereas the acoustic form of the Cucapá swearwords signifies the youths’ authenticity to the outsiders, the content, which defies indigenous stereotypes, would actually undermine their authenticity if these same audiences understood it.

“Spread your ass cheeks” � American Ethnologist

To curse the unknowing outsider also expresses the Cucapá’s acknowledgment that they do not have control over the conditions of their own recognition. The Cucapá’s awareness of this fact forces us to ask questions about our role as anthropologists in ratifying those very conditions. Al- though some will argue that the essentialisms perpetuated by the ideology of language as the primary conduit for culture are strategic, we have to ask ourselves how strategic this con- ception of language is when it does not align with the views and realities of the local people we hope to advocate for. When linguistic anthropologists insist that language is the “vehicle” of culture, and, indeed, that “when a language dies, a culture dies,” what are the political implications when en- tire populations of indigenous people are learning the dom- inant languages in their given political and economic situa- tions? Indeed, linguistic anthropologists themselves predict that in the next century 50 percent of minority languages will be lost (Krauss 1992; Maffi 2005). What will the ramifi- cations of the insistence on the language–culture link be in 100 years, when the majority of indigenous people will not speak indigenous languages?

The use of Cucapá swearwords also indicates how aca- demic and state appeals arguing for the recovery of cultural wealth may sound to indigenous people. These appeals ar- gue that cultures are important to “save,” not just for the good of a specific community but also for the benefit of national patrimonies and, indeed, for all of humanity. From this per- spective, it does not matter if saving the Cucapá language, for example, is a priority or even an interest in El Mayor, be- cause it is in the interest of humanity, more generally. Neither is it relevant that people no longer speak Cucapá because of centuries of racism and marginalization that have come in the form of environmental injustice, suppressed livelihoods, and economic and social assimilation.

Turning back to the great contradiction to which Cruz referred so casually, how do the Cucapá make sense of the fact that, after centuries of repression and discrimination on the basis of their cultural difference, they are now being told that they should act like Indians? How do they respond to claims that their speaking Cucapá is not only what makes them who they are but is also inherently valuable to all of humanity? I think, by now, one can guess how they might respond.

Notes

Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Bonnie McElhinny and Jack Sidnell for comments on various drafts of this article. I am also grateful for suggestions from Max Ascrizzi, Joshua Barker, Bar- bara Bodenhorn, Gastón Gordillo, Monica Heller, Michael Lambek, Joaquı́n Murrieta, Abigail Sone, and the anonymous reviewers at American Ethnologist. I am indebted to the residents of El Mayor for making this research possible. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Questions of Evidence: Ethnography and Anthro- pological Forms of Knowledge conference at Cambridge University

and at the Workshop on Language and Neoliberalism at the Univer- sity of Toronto in 2007. Funding for this project came from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Interna- tional Development Research Centre (IDRC). The final preparation of this manuscript was carried out at the School of Advanced Re- search (SAR) and was supported by the Ethel-Jane Westfeldt Bunting Fellowship.

1. Cruz is a pseudonym as are all the names that appear in this text.

2. For a detailed ethnography of the U.S. Cucapá (Cocopah in English), see Tisdale 1997.

3. The Cucapá language is from the Hokan–Yuman stock. A series of linguistic descriptions of the Cucapá language exists, which James Crawford compiled during his doctoral research between 1963 and 1965. Crawford went on to publish a dictionary of the Cucapá lan- guage (1989) as well as a collection of Cucapá legends in Cucapá and English (1983).

4. The Cucapá in El Mayor offer a range of explanations for why their indigenous language is obsolescing. Whereas the political ex- planation is most common among activists, such as the chief, oth- ers give economic explanations and still others explain the language shift as a consequence of the breakdown of certain social structures in the community. Elders tended to take responsibility for the lack of language transmission to younger generations. Instead of claiming that the children did not want to learn or did not make an effort to learn Cucapá, most elders linked the lack of linguistic reproduc- tion to the political and economic situation in which parents were too busy struggling to subsist or too involved in conflict with the government to teach their children.

5. Laura R. Graham (2002) provides a vivid example of how dom- inant political groups at times deliberately manipulate indigenous monolingualism to their benefit. Graham describes how, in a dis- pute over the demarcation of a Waiapi reserve in Brazil, officials barred the Indians’ translator from participating in a critical official meeting during the legal negotiations.

6. Thalia, at 16, knows more Cucapá words than her peers and her mother, she has a genuine interest in learning more, and she is often mentioned by other community members as the youth who is most competent in Cucapá.

7. In all transcriptions I have edited out significant interruptions, pauses, and so on, that are not relevant to the analysis and that make the anecdotes more difficult to follow.

8. Another primary assumption about what constitutes authen- tic indigenous identity is that indigenous people are natural con- servationists (Bamford 2002; Chapin 2004). The discourse of the ecologically noble savage assumes that the preservation of nature necessarily preserves indigenous cultures, and vice versa, because indigenous people are seen to have an essential relation to nature, just as they are assumed to have an essential relation to language (Muehlmann 2007). Recent work in anthropology has shown how indigenous peoples have also strategically engaged with the envi- ronmental movement by manipulating these assumptions (Conklin and Graham 1995).

9. In this instance, Osvaldo uses propositional content as a way of displaying his identity to outsiders, in contrast to linguistically displaying his identity at the level of form (as occurs through the use of swearwords). Graham (2002) calls these strategies of “rhetor- ical engagement” and argues that learning these rhetorics enables indigenous people to engage in broader discursive contexts as well as procure resources from outside of their communities.

10. An array of ecoblogs have circulated and reinforced this assertion (see, e.g., http://porena.blogspot.com/; http://www. gnosticminx.blogspot.com/2007 05 01 archive.html; http://blog. fastcompany.com/archives/2006/08/14/innovation and com-

American Ethnologist � Volume 35 Number 1 February 2008

plexity.html; http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/08/06.html). When I presented the previous section of this article at a confer- ence, the first question I received from the audience was from a linguistic anthropologist who had worked with an indigenous group in Alaska. She prefaced her question by saying: “In the indigenous language I studied, there were no swearwords.” She went on to question whether the swearwords I had described were actually indigenous in origin, suggesting that perhaps they were an adaptation since colonization. I discuss the indigenous origin of Cucapá swearwords later in the text. Here, it is noteworthy that the researcher should express such strong doubts that swearwords would exist in Cucapá in the first place.

11. It is noteworthy that everyday practices of obscenity in El Mayor, as well as the specific practices of swearing I describe in this article, are not gendered in the ways that swearing is seen to be in much of the literature on language and gender. In El Mayor, men and women swear with similar prevalence and creativity. This may be related to the prominent role that women play in El Mayor in every realm of decision making and as major economic contributors to the household. Indeed, the Cucapá I interviewed and spoke to in El Mayor often explained that the central role of women is one of the characteristics that differentiated them, as a group, from Mexicans more generally.

12. Mary J. Weismantel (2001) describes a similar use of swearing in playful transgression and invocation of ethnic hierarchies in the Andes. She shows how the popular cultural character of the Indian chola (a market woman and a subordinated figure) as well as the cat- egories of the “mestiza” and “indio” are drawn on in verbal contests as insults that invoke racial difference. She argues that use of these hierarchized ethnic categories, underscored by race and sex at play in the market, draws attention to their unnaturalness. Racialized in- sults uttered in Spanish, such as “llama woman” and “mule woman,” are invented to invoke absurdity and are designed to enrage one’s opponent in marketplace verbal conflicts (see also Seligmann 1993). Much like the contexts in which the Cucapá youth I describe mo- bilize their indigenous swearwords, in Weismantel’s marketplace, every conversation is structured by inequality. The marketplace is the space where racial boundaries merge and overlap as whites, mestizos, and indigenous people interact.

References cited

Alonso, Anna M. 2004 Conforming Disconformity: “Mestizaje,” Hybridity, and

the Aesthetics of Mexican Nationalism. Cultural Anthropology 19(4):459–490.

Bamford, Sandra 2002 On Being “Natural” in the Rainforest Marketplace: Science,

Capitalism and the Commodification of Biodiversity. Social Analysis 46(1):35–50.

Boyer, Christopher R. 2003 Becoming Campesinos: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian

Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacán. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Brody, Hugh 2000 The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping

of the World. Vancouver, BC: Douglas and McIntyre. Brown, David, David Farrier, Luke McNamara, and Sandra Egger

2001 Criminal Laws: Materials and Commentary on Criminal Law and Process in New South Wales. Sydney: Federation Press.

Chapin, Mac 2004 A Challenge to Conservationists. World Watch 17(6):17–31.

Clifford, James 1988 The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-

versity Press. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff

1999 Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony. American Ethnologist 26(2):279–303.

Conklin, Beth A., and Laura R. Graham 1995 The Shifting Middle Ground: Amazonian Indians and Eco-

Politics. American Anthropologist 97(4):695–710. Crawford, James Mack

1983 Cocopa Texts. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1989 Cocopa Dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Crystal, David 2000 Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cunneen, Chris 2001 Conflict, Politics and Crime: Aboriginal Communities and

the Police. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Daly, Nicola, Janet Holmes, Jonathan Newton, and Maria Stubbe

2004 Expletives as Solidarity Signals in FTAs on the Factory Floor. Journal of Pragmatics 36(5):945–964.

de Klerk, Vivian 1992 How Taboo Are Taboo Words for Girls? Language in Society

21(2):277–289. 1997 The Role of Expletives in the Construction of Masculinity.

In Language and Masculinity. Sally Johnson and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, eds. Pp. 144–158. Oxford: Blackwell.

de la Peña, Guillermo 2005 Social and Cultural Policies toward Indigenous Peoples:

Perspectives from Latin America. Annual Review of Anthropol- ogy 34:717–739.

de Oliveira, João Pacheco 1999 Ensayos en antropologı́a histórica. Rio de Janeiro: Univer-

sidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Duchêne, Alexandre, and Monica Heller, eds.

2007 Discourses of Endangerment: Interest and Ideology in the Defence of Language. New York: Continuum.

Gal, Susan 1995 Language and the “Arts of Resistance.” Cultural Anthropol-

ogy 10(3):407–424. Garrett, Paul B.

2005 What a Language Is Good For: Language Socialization, Lan- guage Shift, and the Persistence of Code-Specific Genres in St. Lucia. Language in Society 34(3):327–361.

Gordillo, Gastón, and Silvia Hirsch 2003 Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities in Argentina:

Histories of Invisibilization and Reemergence. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8(3):4–30.

Gordon, Michael 1993 Sexual Slang and Gender. Women and Language 16(2):16–

21. Graham, Laura R.

2002 How Should an Indian Speak? Amazonian Indians and the Symbolic Politics of Language in the Global Public Sphere. In Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America. Kay B. Warren and Jean E. Jackson, eds. Pp. 181– 228. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Gray, Andrew 1996 The Arakmbut of Amazonian Peru. Providence, RI:

Berghahn Books. Hale, Charles R.

2002 Does Multiculturalism Menace? Governance, Cultural Rights and the Politics of Identity in Guatemala. Journal of Latin American Studies 34(3):485–524.

“Spread your ass cheeks” � American Ethnologist

2005 Neoliberal Multiculturalism: The Remaking of Cultural Rights and Racial Dominance in Central America. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 28(1):10–28.

Harrison, K. David 2007 When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Lan-

guages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harvey, Neil 1998 The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democ-

racy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Heilpern, David

1999 Judgement: Police v Shannon Thomas Dunn, Dubbo Local Court. Alternative Law Journal 24(5):238–242.

Hill, Jane H. 1983 Language Death in Uto-Aztecan. International Journal of

American Linguistics 49(3):258–276. 1998 “Today There Is No Respect”: Nostalgia, “Respect,” and Op-

positional Discourse in Mexicano (Nahuatl) Language Ideology. In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Bambi B. Schief- felin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, eds. Pp. 68–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2002 “Expert Rhetorics” in Advocacy for Endangered Languages: Who Is Listening, and What Do They Hear? Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12(2):119–133.

2003 What Is Lost When Names Are Forgotten? In Nature Knowl- edge: Ethnoscience, Cognition, and Utility. Glauco Sanga and Gherardo Ortalli, eds. Pp. 161–184. New York: Berghahn Books.

Jackson, Jean E., and Kay B. Warren 2005 Indigenous Movements in Latin America: Controversies,

Ironies, New Directions. Annual Review of Anthropology 34:549–573.

Joseph, Gilbert, and Daniel Nugent 1994 Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Ne-

gotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke Uni- versity Press.

Krauss, Michael 1992 The World’s Languages in Crisis. Language 68(1):4–10.

Kulick, Don 1992 Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization,

Self, and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinean Village. New York: Cambridge University Press.

1995 Speaking as a Woman: Structure and Gender Arguments in a New Guinea Village. Cultural Anthropology 8(4):510–541.

1998 Anger, Gender, Language Shift, and the Politics of Revela- tion in a Papua New Guinean Village. In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, eds. Pp. 87–102. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Labov, William 1972 Hypercorrection by the Lower Middle Class as a Factor

in Linguistic Change. In Sociolinguistic Patterns. Pp. 122–142. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lakoff, Robin Tolmach 1975 Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper and Row.

Langton, Marcia 1988 Medicine Square. In Being Black: Aboriginal Culture in “Set-

tled” Australia. Ian Keen, ed. Pp. 201–226. Canberra, Australia: Aboriginal Studies Press.

Laurie, Nina, Robert Andolina, and Sarah Radcliffe 2002 The Excluded “Indigenous”? The Implications of Multi-

Ethnic Policies for Water Reform in Bolivia. In Multicultur- alism in Latin America: Indigenous Rights, Diversity and Democracy. Rachel Sieder, ed. Pp. 252–276. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Limon, José 1994 Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in

Mexican-American South Texas. Madison: University of Wis- consin Press.

Maffi, Luisa 2001 On Biocultural Diversity: Linking Language, Knowledge,

and the Environment. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institu- tion Press.

2005 Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Diversity. Annual Re- view of Anthropology 34:599–617.

Muehlmann, Shaylih 2007 Defending Diversity: Staking out a Common, Global In-

terest? In Discourses of Endangerment: Interest and Ideology in the Defense of Languages. Alexandre Duchêne and Monica Heller, eds. Pp. 14–34. London: Continuum.

Muehlmann, Shaylih, and Alexandre Duchêne 2007 Beyond the Nation-State: International Agencies as New

Sites of Discourses on Bilingualism. In Bilingualism: A Social Approach. Monica Heller, ed. Pp. 96–110. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2001 The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press. Mühlhäusler, Peter

1996 Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region. London: Routledge.

Nettle, Daniel, and Suzanne Romaine 2000 Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages.

Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ortner, Sherry B.

2000 The Fate of “Culture”: Geertz and Beyond. Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press.

2006 Anthropology and Social Theory. Durham, NC: Duke Uni- versity Press.

Paz, Octavio 1961 The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. New

York: Grove Press. Pemberton, John

1994 On the Subject of “Java.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Ramos, Alcida 1994 The Hyperreal Indian. Critique of Anthropology 14(2):153–

171. 1995 Sanumá Memories: Yanomami Ethnography in Times of

Crisis. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ramos, Samuel

1962 Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Rappaport, Joanne 2005 Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Exper-

imentation, and Ethnic Pluralism in Colombia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Roseberry, William 1989 Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History,

and Political Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Sanchez, Yolanda Olgas 2000 A la orilla del Rı́o Colorado. Mexicali: Colonia Pro-Hogar.

Scott, James C. 1992 Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1998 Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the

Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

American Ethnologist � Volume 35 Number 1 February 2008

Seligmann, Linda 1993 Between Worlds of Exchange: Ethnicity among Peruvian

Market Women. Cultural Anthropology 8(2):187–213. Sieder, Rachel, ed.

2002 Multiculturalism in Latin America: Indigenous Rights, Diversity and Democracy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Siegel, James T. 1986 Solo in the New Order: Language and Hierarchy in an In-

donesian City. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove

2000 Linguistic Genocide in Education—Or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove, Luisa Maffi, and David Harmon 2003 Sharing a World of Difference: The Earth’s Linguistic,

Cultural and Biological Diversity. UNESCO, Terralingua, and World Wide Fund for Nature. Electronic document, http:// www.terralingua.org/UNESCO%20publication.pdf, accessed May 20, 2007.

Spielberg, Joseph 1974 Humour in Mexican-American Palomilla: Some Histori-

cal, Social, and Psychological Implications. Revista Chicano- Requeña 2:41–50.

Sutton, Laurel A. 1995 Bitches and Skankly Hobags: The Place of Women in Con-

temporary Slang. In Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self. Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz, eds. Pp. 279–296. New York: Routledge.

Taussig, Michael T. 1993 Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses.

New York: Routledge. Tisdale, Shelby Jo-Anne

1997 Cocopah Identity and Cultural Survival: Indian Gaming and the Political Ecology of the Lower Colorado River Delta. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona.

Trudgill, Peter 1972 Sex, Covert Prestige and Linguistic Change in the Urban

British English of Norwich. Language in Society 1(2):179–196. Weismantel, Mary J.

2001 Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

White, Rob 2002 Indigenous Young Australians, Criminal Justice and Offen-

sive Language. Journal of Youth Studies 5(1):21–35. Whorf, Benjamin Lee

1964 Language, Thought, and Reality; Selected Writings. John B. Carroll, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Woodbury, Anthony C. 1993 A Defense of the Proposition “When a Language Dies, a

Culture Dies.” In Proceedings of the First Annual Symposium about Language and Society–Austin. Robin Queen and Rusty Barrett, eds. Pp. 101–129. Texas Linguistic Forum, 33. Austin: University of Texas, Department of Linguistics.

Woolard, Kathryn A. 1985 Language Variation and Cultural Hegemony: Toward an In-

tegration of Sociolinguistic Theory and Social Theory. American Ethnologist 12(4):738–748.

Yashar, Deborah J. 1998 Contesting Citizenship: Indigenous Movements and

Democracy in Latin America. Comparative Politics 31(1):23–42.

accepted June 20, 2007 final version submitted September 20, 2007

Shaylih Muehlmann Department of Anthropology University of Toronto 19 Russell St. Toronto, ON M5S 2S2 [email protected]