“Si la información traduce”: Mixtec Translation, Health Education, and the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Oaxaca

In the mid-twentieth century, processes of translation remained central to Mexico’s health education campaigns in rural Indigenous communities. In the multilingual state of Oaxaca, Indigenous co-translators collaborated with Protestant missionaries from the Instituto Lingüístico de Verano (ILV/SIL, Summer Institute of Linguistics) to produce health education materials for various federal institutions. Indigenous translators not only provided word-for-word translations but also translated concepts of health, disease, and body across different languages and cultures. This article argues that these co-translators produced new and locally intelligible understandings of health in translating concepts from Spanish to Mixtec (an Indigenous language). Using bilingual health pamphlets, the article underscores the centrality of uncredited Mixtec collaborators who contributed to state-sponsored development projects in the 1950s.