BABEL IN REVERSE
by Ross Perlin

Beyond an unmarked storefront in the Bronx sits Esteban’s workshop, though today upholstery is out of sight so that a new network of Indigenous interpreters — speakers of a dozen different languages from across the Americas, now living in New York — can gather.

All during Covid, Esteban and a few workers have been going nonstop, reorganizing the entire business. At the height of the outbreak he realized that a certain plastic lining he was making for dentists could be used to make transparent head protectors, “caps” for deliveristas at risk of getting the virus on their rounds. Then supermarkets wanted to sheathe their cashiers in the same plastic. Then taxi drivers started asking him to install plastic dividers inside their cabs.

Esteban came in 1990 from Teopantlán, in the Mexican state of Puebla, where his parents spoke Nahuatl but didn’t want him to speak it. Some 2,000 people have left Teopantlán over the years since, with the largest number settling in Queens. After establishing his business and starting a family in New York, Esteban started thinking more about home. While helping a monolingual Nahuatl speaker who had come to New York look for her family, he realized that he still understood at least some of the language, and he set about re-learning it. He threw himself into Enlace Teopantlán, an organization for the townspeople living in New York, and in 2006 they staged a version of the village’s all-important festa patronal in honor of the saint Santiago Apóstol.

A decade later, Esteban helped organize something even more ambitious: an official visit back to the village for 18 children and teenagers born to families in New York. Their undocumented parents couldn’t go, but the kids were able to meet their grandparents and other relatives for the first time and perform for them the Danza de los moros y cristianos, the Dance of the Moors and Christians, a kind of reconquista re-enactment which has a deeply coded significance in many Indigenous Mexican communities.

The interpreters gathered here today speak not only Nahuatl, but also Tu’un Savi (Mixtec), also from Mexico, as well as Kichwa from Ecuador, Garifuna from Central America, and Mayan languages of Guatemala, among others. I shake hands with the two men nearest, both speakers of Me’phaa (also known as Tlapanec) from the town of Malinaltepec, in the Mexican state of Guerrero. One is a deliverista for a Chinese app used mostly by Asian restaurants. He’s been on the bike for years, had some close calls, and his health is not good. Being a deliverista is a young man’s game, he says. Many of the men around us are doing it, and a significant percentage of the city’s tens of thousands of deliveristas are now Indigenous Mexican and Guatemalans.

Though the Lenape were relentlessly pursued and pushed out over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, some remained hidden in and around the city, and there have probably always been Native Americans coming to and living in the city, even if their presence was isolated and little documented. Since the mid-20th century, however, a new Native New York of unprecedented diversity has come into being. Nowhere else today is such a wide range of Indigenous American languages known and used to at least some degree, even if all of them are even more highly endangered than immigrant languages arriving from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Yet the Native city remains little documented and little known to outsiders.

However flawed it may be, data from the U.S. Census gives at least a sense of how substantial the Indigenous metropolis is. Over 180,000 New Yorkers identified at least partly as “American Indian or Alaska Native” on the 2020 census, forming by far the highest total of any city in the country. The number is more than double the total from twenty years earlier, and the growth shows no signs of stopping, reflecting national trends in miniature.

Among the factors driving this growth are increased Native pride since the 1960s, changes to the census itself, and a fast-growing Latino population with at least some members who identify as Native American. In New York, the majority of those who thus identify say they are also Black, white, other, or some combination. Over two-thirds list themselves as Hispanic/Latino, which is a separate category. Even so, the 180,000 number still likely misses thousands of Indigenous Latin Americans from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, and elsewhere who for various reasons are missed by the census — like those at the gathering of interpreters in Esteban’s upholstery workshop.

Native North American tribal and linguistic diversity is no less substantial in the city, with the city’s American Indian Community House counting members of 79 different tribes as being among its own members in the city today. At least from the early 20th century on, an increasing number of Native people from all over the country, from a wide range of tribal backgrounds, started converging on the city. While some labored in the port, in factories, or in the homes of the well-off, others came to make their destiny as artists or performers by tapping into the fascination of white audiences with all things “Indian”, however offensive and ahistorical the circumstances. “They danced and made crafts and did that from Madison Square Garden to Broadway theaters to expositions at the armories,” according to Rosemary Richmond, daughter of a Mohawk ironworker and a later leader in New York’s Native community.

Beginning in the 1920s, the most extraordinary concentration of Native people in the city was in Brooklyn, where hundreds of Mohawk families from the Kahnawake and Akwesasne reservations — like Richmond’s — created Little Caughnawaga. This full-fledged Mohawk neighborhood spread across several blocks (State, Nevins, Pacific etc.) of what is now Boerum Hill, a zone of multimillion-dollar brownstones. As skilled union ironworkers, Mohawk men famously built much of the city’s skyline. By the 1960s, even as it was changing, the neighborhood was also becoming a focal point for members of many other tribes, including a new generation of New York-born Native activists and artists. Bringing many of the different Indigenous American communities together today nowhere is the city’s flourishing powwow circuit, including Drums Along the Hudson in Manhattan, the Thunderbird Dancers’ annual summer powwow in Queens, and an annual fall powwow in the Bronx, among others.

Often playing a prominent role are Puerto Rican and Dominican New Yorkers who identify as descendants of the Taíno people murdered, enslaved, or forced into hiding by the Spanish colonizers from the 16th century on. The revitalization of Taíno identity and attempts to reconstruct the language have also coincided with the coming to New York of speakers of one of the largest living Indigenous Caribbean languages, Garifuna.

Most Garifuna people see themselves as descending from enslaved West Africans who escaped onto the island of St. Vincen and mixed with Indigenous Caribbean people, adopting the local language from the Arawakan family and transforming it over time with layers of French, Spanish, and English loanwords. Though likely very different from Taíno, the survival of Garifuna in New York, one of its major centers in the world, is an extraordinary tale.

Led by their Chief Joseph Chatoyer, the Garifuna rose up against the British in 1795 and were exiled to rural villages along the Caribbean coast of Honduras and Belize, with smaller numbers going to Nicaragua and Guatemala. (William Henry Brown’s Drama of King Shotaway, the first know play by by a Black playwright in the United States, dramatized this uprising on a New York stage just 28 years later)

In the 20th century, tens of thousands of Garifuna, if not more, arrived in New York, from sailors and merchant marines in the 1930s to a broad-based migration of entire communities after 1965. Garifuna asylum seekrs continue to come to the city today, fleeign gang violence and the Honduran government’s violent seizure of Garifuna land for tourism development.

Many Garifuna from Honduras and Guatemala, speaking Spanish in addition to Garifuna, settled among other Spanish speakers in Harlem and later the Bronx, where the largest community lives today. Belizean Garifuna, who began shifting to English under British colonial rule, settled mostly in Anglophone Caribbean parts of Brooklyn, with many today around East New York and Brownsville.

Of Guatemala’s twenty-two Mayan languages, speakers of K’iche’ seem to be the most numerous in New York, dispersed throughout the city but with the largest number along the D train’s route through Bensonhurst and Bath Beach and marked out by the sky-blue awnings of half a dozen Guatemalan bodegas under the elevated tracks. Speakers of Mam have small communities in East Harlem, the Bronx, Staten Island, Queens, and Morristown, New Jersey. There are also speakers of Q'anjob'al, Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, and other Mayan languages — all of which are now among the most commonly encountered languages on the U.S.-Mexico border, though there is still little recognition of and provision for this reality.

New York is also unquestionably the capital of the Ecuadorian community in the U.S., with an estimated 300,000-plus in the metropolitan area constituting some two-thirds of the national total. Since the 1990s, a substantial portion have been undocumented rural migrants from the south-central Andean highlands of Azuay and Cañar provinces, many of whom speak diverse varieties of Kichwa, the country’s major Indigenous language. Ecuadorian Kichwa in turn is part of the wider language family linguists call Quechuan, which is spread across the Andes and beyond throughout the former Inca empire. Thus are there smaller numbers of Peruvians and Bolivians in Brooklyn, Queens, and especially New Jersey who also speak their own distinctive Quechuan languages.

For all Indigenous Latin American New Yorkers, the centuries-long pressure to shift to Spanish is intense and carries over to New York, where people usually live with Spanish-speaking mestizo neighbors and may continue to experience discrimination at their hands. This goes some way towards explaining why outsiders, including city government, have remained unaware — and still often are — about the Indigenous background of many of the new migrants.

This has been true even and especially where they are most numerous, in Mexican New York. Unlike long-standing Mexican-American communities elsewhere, New York’s dates largely from the 1990s and 2000s and consists overwhelmingly of migrants from the more heavily Indigenous states of Puebla and Guerrero. Specifically, many come the arid, rugged, and marginalized region known as La Mixteca, where a highly diverse array of Mixtec, Nahuatl, and Me’phaa varieties, among other languages, are spoken.

There is such linguistic diversity even just among Indigenous Mexican New Yorkers that connections between groups often necessitates Spanish, which people may learn or improve in New York. Though the largest contingent in the city speak Mixtec languages, with over half a million speakers in Mexico and perhaps tens of thousands of speakers in the city, there is linguistic variation from pueblo to pueblo. Like most Indigenous languages, the language is traditionally oral, though there are increasingly attempts to write and create materials in the language, as well as to use it in new domains and transmit it — with great difficulty — in the harrowing context of migration and social change.

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©2022 Text by Ross Perlin