Roots of Identity: Language and Literacy in Mexico

Despite over fifty years of literacy training by the Mexican government, the National Census records an illiteracy rate of over 70 percent in most Indian communities. This book attempts to discover why so many Indians are illiterate today despite an indigenous literary tradition that dates back to the pre-Conquest period. The author sees language as the main factor explaining the high illiteracy rate in the Indian regions. Although alphabets have been created for most of Mexico’s indigenous languages, there is no longer a literate tradition in the languages themselves, and writing is intrinsically associated with the official and dominant language, Spanish. Indians continue to reproduce their group identity through the maintenance of linguistic and cultural boundaries. How these boundaries have been built over time and how they continue to be maintained throughout the twentieth century form the substance of this book.