Esai Cervantes ’20 is raising the visibility of indigenous and Native American students and culture on campus.
Cervantes, a biology major with minors in anthropology and environmental science, has created opportunities this semester for his peers to connect with language and culture indigenous to the Americas.
This semester, he’s leading a workshop that introduces people to a modern version of the Nahuatl language, spoken in the Huasteca region of Mexico that runs along the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a language commonly known as “Aztec,” since it was the language of the Mexica empire, but it’s alive and well today as the second-most spoken language in Mexico. In fact, several words and phrases in Mexican Spanish—that also carried into English—have their origins in Nahuatl, such as chocolate, tomato, and coyote. A closely related language, Nawat, is also spoken in El Salvador.
Thanks to a Nahuatl language group, Tlahtoltapazolli, Cervantes started learning the language at their weekly workshops workshops in Los Angeles last year. His growing passion for it carried over into his courses, including Conversation on Hispanic Culture, where he read aloud a Nahuatl poem for his classmates. After chatting with his professor, Doreen O’Conner-Gomez, about his excitement and interest in Nahuatl, the workshop was born.
Around the same time, he began considering his ethnic identity. He’s happy thinking of himself as Mexican-American, or Hispanic Latino—but at the same time, “there’s unfortunately been some erasure of our roots,” he said.
The majority of people of Mexican descent have indigenous Mexican and European heritage, while Mexicans who are solely indigenous are the second-largest group. During the long period of colonization in that country, European ancestry was prized over the indigenous. According to Cervantes, some Mexican American families may not acknowledge or celebrate their indigenous heritage.
“That’s not really a conversation talked often in households—the conquests, colonialism,” Cervantes said. “I started looking more into my identity and I really wanted some kind of visibility of who we are.”
That desire prompted him to found the United Indigenous Peoples and Nations Club, a new group on campus that celebrates indigenous identities and culture. The club holds its first official meeting this week, and aims to provide a space for indigenous students to connect with a culture that, for a variety of reasons, may not have been available to them growing up.
As club president, Cervantes looks forward to hosting events on campus that highlight students who identify as indigenous and invites all students to celebrate Pan-American culture.
“I think it would be great to see the diversity of the indigenous peoples of America,” Cervantes said.
Looking beyond graduation, Cervantes plans to attend graduate school. He’s crafted a curriculum that prepares him to become an ethnobotanist—someone who not only understands local plant life, but also its cultural significance. It’s a job about, among other things, expertly discovering and understanding connections to history and cultural contexts, and sharing that with others.
Cervantes is well prepped.
Connect with Indigenous Culture
The Nahuatl workshops meet in the Language Lab (Deihl 117) on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4:30 p.m.
The United Indigenous Peoples and Nations Club has its first meeting this week on Oct. 17 from 12-1 p.m. in the Office of Equity and Inclusion. Future meetings will be held in the Johnson Hall Living Learning Center classroom.
For more information about the workshop or the club, contact Cervantes at etorres4@poets.whittier.edu.
