‘Ni Rini’ Ca Beleguí Ca’ the Language of the Stars: An Autoethnography of My Diidxazá Journey Within the Reclamation of Languages in Mexico

As Ayuujk linguist Yasnaya Aguilar notes, languages are at the centre of Indigenous communities, experiences and land ownership struggles; therefore, they are specially targeted by the state as part of its culturally homogenising and controlling endeavours (as cited in Albarran, 2023). Language reclamation projects are a strategy through which Indigenous communities seek to create awareness among learners of the sociocultural meanings associated with a language as well as sharing community epistemologies. Language reclamation projects often arise from within the communities’ preoccupation with language loss. Through an autoethnographic approach, in this paper I trace a language reclamation project developed for Diidxazá (Cloud words), an Indigenous language spoken in the Tehuantepec Isthmus, in the Pacific coast of the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. To understand the relevance of reclamation programs, I locate these efforts in the context of the colonisation of Mexico, the multicultural policy adopted in 1992 and the critiques of nationalism by Indigenous scholars.