The Generational Gap and the Road to Well-Being: Language and Natural Environment in the Discourses of Indigenous Old and Young in Tlaxcala

Abstract

In this paper, the attitudes of Indigenous people to the problems of language shift and ecological changes are examined through a lens of intergenerational gap. The area under study is the rural and historically Nahuatl-speaking communities of Tlaxcala that experienced urbanization as well as linguistic and cultural assimilation during the twentieth century. A disparity between the older and younger generations is an ordinary phenomenon in such context, but in this case, the interviews recorded with both young and elderly residents show that the gap is probably more perceived than real. In their discussions on well-being and a better future that they wish for themselves and their communities, the interviewees of different age groups raise the same or quite related themes, reflecting on what has been lost in comparison to the past and what benefits the modernity has brought. It appears that such aspects as fresh water resources, amount of trees, and speaking Nahuatl, which declined as a result of the industrialization, have value for the younger community members as well as for the elderly. These shared values still provide an opportunity for a dialog and transmission of knowledge between the two divided generations.

In the memory of Candelario Bautista Galicia (1944–2022), farmer, musician and storyteller.

Introduction

At the scale of major societies, or nations, the problem of intergenerational gap is often considered so trivial that misunderstandings between the young and old generations are mostly perceived as a natural order of things. Margaret Mead, for example, in her book about generation gap (apparently the first notable study of this subject in anthropology), argues that only relatively isolated, “primitive” societies exhibit “postfigurativeness”—a model, in which the main source of learning for the young generation is their oldest relatives and compatriots, while in the industrialized societies members of the same generation are much more prone to learn from their contemporaries and the adults also learn from their children (Mead, 1970, pp. 1, 26, 51–52). The acculturation of migrant and colonized ethnic groups into the mainstream societies is thus seen as a progressive turn in the universal “cultural evolution” (Mead, 1970, p. 51). Certainly, this paradigm is characterized by a considerable degree of eurocentrism and overgeneralization (see e.g. Lohmann, 2004, on the latter tendency in Mead’s research). But with the rise of the value of multiculturalism and dismissal of the evolutionary discourse in anthropology, the very notion of postfigurativeness has acquired a new significance.

The study of ethnic minorities and the process of their assimilation brought forward such issues as intergenerational conflicts and psychological trauma, present not only among those members of an ethnic group who were directly colonized or themselves migrated to a new country but also in the subsequent generations (Feir, 2016; Krieg, 2009; Lee, 2004; Marino, 2020; O’Neill et al., 2018). Although the focus of assimilation studies has long been on migrant groups (e.g. Alba, 2005; Alba & Nee, 1997; Gans, 1992), it is obvious that minoritized Indigenous groups globally experience the same ruptures in the transmission of language and cultural traditions (religion, clothing, cuisine) from one generation to another. The ecological deterioration of natural surroundings is also interconnected with the loss of traditional ecological knowledge in Indigenous societies, as this type of knowledge becomes less relevant for the youth who strive to improve their socioeconomic status in the wider society (Cristancho & Vining, 2009; Russell & Tchamou, 2001).

The recent global revalorization of Indigenous identities, however, has also led to situations, in which representatives of younger and more acculturated generations of Indigenous peoples themselves strive to reconnect to older ethnic group members in order to regain their ties with the ancestral cultures, languages, and ways of knowing (Iseke & Moore, 2011; Nishita & Katsutani, 2022; Pace & Gabel, 2018; Saba, 2017). Although this drive embraces only a part of Indigenous youth, and unlikely changes their lifestyles sharply, it is emblematic in the sense that it underscores the value of traditional Indigenous knowledge in the modern industrialized world. Furthermore, it can boost the self-esteem of the aged populations who still preserve this knowledge.

In this respect, Indigenous “communities in transition”, i.e. those experiencing a shift towards industrialization and assimilation during the last hundred years or less, deserve particular attention. One side of the change that takes place in such communities is visible to the eye: change in the landscape, the ways people dress, and the language(s) spoken in the community on a daily basis. The other side is an inner side of the change, which is manifested in the attitudes and ideologies of community members. If views on the practices that distinguish the character of the community—such as language, customs, and natural environment—vary significantly between the young people and the elderly, it indicates that the transition has been virtually completed.

Since September 2017, when I started conducting fieldwork in Mexico, I was involved in research on the sociolinguistic situation and subjective well-being in historically Nahuatl-speaking communities in Tlaxcala, primarily in the municipality of Contla de Juan Cuamatzi. In addition to a sociolinguistic survey in the beginning of the research, I conducted a number of semi-structured interviews, from half-an-hour to one-hour length, with local residents who were eager to share their own perspectives on well-being and the future of Nahuatl. One part of the interviewees, among whom women and men were both present, belonged to the age group of younger than 35, while another part were people older than 55 years old. In this manner, the study aimed to find out to what extent the views of the older generation, most of whom were Nahuatl speakers, differed from those of the young people, none of whom learned Nahuatl systemically. At first, the primary focus of the interviews was Nahuatl in the lives of interlocutors, but as our conversations were developing, this topic evolved into discussions about the past and the present, and also on well-being—not only in the individual but also in the broader, social dimension of this concept. Most of the interviews were conducted in Spanish and only one was conducted in the local variety of Nahuatl, since in the beginning of the study I did not yet obtain the necessary level of proficiency in spoken Nahuatl.

This work unites the material collected in these interviews and examines how the topics of language and natural environment, the two aspects that have experienced a profound change in Contla during the last half of a century, are viewed by younger and older members of the community. It also refers to how these views are connected, directly and covertly, to their perception of personal and communal well-being. In this manner, the chapter helps to examine the true depth of the intergenerational gap that developed in Contla communities due to their gradual assimilation during the past century.

San Bernardino Contla Then and Now: Overviewing the Environmental and Sociolinguistic Change

Sixty years have passed since Hugo G. Nutini, who dedicated most of his life career to the research of Nahua communities in Mexico, undertook a study of the social organization of the municipality of Contla, the results of which were later published in his monograph San Bernardino Contla: Marriage and Family Structure in a Tlaxcalan Municipio (1968).¹ Nowadays, the book, apart from being an example of a classical anthropological study embedded in the structural functionalist tradition, also represents an important historical document, providing the reader with a description of Contla communities as they appeared in the mid-twentieth century—the look that no longer exists. Other researchers of Nahuatl-speaking communities in Tlaxcala, such as Hill and Hill (1986), Robichaux (2005), and Messing and Rockwell (2006), attest the fundamental changes that took place in the socioeconomic and sociolinguistic profile of southeastern Tlaxcala communities, including Contla de Juan Cuamatzi, during the last quarter of the past century.

Nutini writes that except for the cabecera, the municipal center, located in the lower part of the municipality, Contla presents a “semi-dispersed type” of settlement, “in which the houses are located in the middle of cultivated plots of land” (1968, p. 28). Most of the private houses, according to the author, “are one-story adobe buildings on foundation of stone and mortar” (1968, p. 36). However, at present, if we visit such sections of the municipality as San Miguel Xaltipan² and San José Aztatla, we find the majority of houses built along the streets and not in the middle of milpas (corn fields). Many of these houses are two-storied and even three-storied buildings, depending on the landowner’s wealth, and are predominantly made of brick and concrete, with flat rather than slanted roofs. There are a very few houses made of adobe that can still be found in Contla; some of them are preserved as family landmarks and some of them at some point became a part of larger buildings, where the newer adjustments were again built of brick and concrete. Most of the households are now enclosed behind concrete walls. The roads, even in the remote sections of the municipality, became asphalted and have also expanded significantly (Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1

A view on the Malintzin volcano from San Miguel Xaltipan, Contla. November 2018. Copyright: Author

These changes also reflected the substantial growth of the population of Contla during the last sixty years: if at the time of Nutini’s research the number of residents was 10,699 (Nutini, 1968, p. 24), according to the national census of 2020 it reached 38,579 people.³ During two decades, 1970s and 1980s, according to INEGI data, the number of residents of the municipality almost doubled (González Jácome, 2009). Obviously, this growth required an expansion of living space and infrastructure, including roads, and the latter meant the easier delivery of cheaper building materials, such as concrete and bricks, from the centers of their production. Thus, not only the improvement of infrastructure led to the increase in labor opportunities and greater influx of material goods due to the faster connections to urban Spanish-speaking centers; it also caused local communities to gradually obtain an appearance of urban zones (Hill & Hill, 1986, p. 11; Robichaux, 2005, p. 65). Foreign investments in the municipal economy (primarily in textile industry), unheard of in the mid-twentieth century, comprised about 92 million USD in the first half of 2021.⁴ The wells, mentioned by Nutini (1968, pp. 35–36), have been largely abandoned in favor of tap water in 1970s (see Hill & Hill, 1986, p. 13). Currently, private households in Contla usually have water reservoirs located on the roof, but their filling now relies more on centralized supplies by the regional water company than on rain water.

Nutini himself noted certain environmental and cultural changes that took place in Contla in the past century. First, it was the draining of barrancas, or ravines that historically divided the municipality of Contla into sections. Whereas contemporary elderly residents affirm that in the times of their parents and grandparents there was always water in the barrancas (see below), Nutini (1968, p. 25) wrote that they become filled only in the periods of torrential rains. Two decades later, Hill and Hill (1986, p. 9) mentioned that people still “occasionally drowned” in the streams coming from the slopes of Malintzi (hispanicized Malinche) volcano during rainy seasons, which is unthinkable today. Both Nutini (1968) and Hill and Hill (1986) attest the decline of traditional Indigenous clothing practices in Contla and other communities of southeastern Tlaxcala. Nowadays it has become even more evident, as even the elderly women do not wear traditional blouses and skirts in Contla (see Hill & Hill, 1986, p. 14) and only the oldest male residents wear huaraches, which were common at the time of Nutini’s (1968, p. 42) research.

The main aspect of Indigenous culture that has experienced a dramatic shift during the last sixty years is the language. Nutini (1968, p. 24) gives the figure of 8688 speakers of Nahuatl, or Mexicano, in Contla, which at that time constituted 81.2% of the whole population; the vast majority of monolingual Spanish speakers lived in the cabecera. Furthermore, 419 of the Nahuatl speakers of Contla (about 4% of the population) were monolingual (Nutini, 1968, p. 24). In comparison, the results of the 2020 census showed that there were only 4373 Nahuatl speakers (including persons with a minimum of three years of age) living in the municipality, whereas the overall population of the municipality has increased nearly fourfold during the same period.⁵ There are hardly any Nahuatl-only speakers left. In other words, in the beginning of 1960s the community of Contla was largely bilingual, whereas now Nahuatl became extensively substituted by Spanish.

This decline conforms to the evidence presented in Hill and Hill (1986), Robichaux (2005), and Messing and Rockwell (2006), as it shows that the major language shift began in 1960s‒1970s, when the first generation of Nahuatl speakers who had gone through the public school system grew up and, upon becoming parents, did not teach the language to their children. One of the main reasons for this interruption of language transmission was most likely the trauma experienced by that generation as a result of the forceful assimilation practiced at schools, where any sign of the Indigenous culture, and particularly the language, was mocked and persecuted by the teachers, up to corporal punishments (Robichaux, 2005, pp. 76–78). Many members of that generation justified their decision not to speak Nahuatl to their children by pragmatic considerations, seemingly accepting or succumbing to the dominant assimilation discourse, which associated Indigenousness with backwardness and socioeconomic misfortune (Messing, 2007). In recent years, however, when the ideas of revalorization and revitalization of Nahuatl as well as other Indigenous languages have become actively promoted (in both the mainstream public discourse in Mexico and Indigenous communities where a language shift has been ongoing for decades), many elderly Nahuatl speakers, who did not transmit Nahuatl to their children decades ago, started reassessing their life experience and advocating the maintenance of their language in the community. The conversations I had with Contla residents confirmed the existence of this tangible change in local attitudes towards language transmission.

Attitudes of the Elderly and Young People Towards Language and Mutual Communication

When I started conducting my research in Tlaxcala, the first generation of local residents who were not taught Nahuatl in their family settings were already adults in their fifties and sixties. I collected multiple testimonies from this generation, in which they recalled that their parents avoided speaking Nahuatl to them despite using it between themselves, or even directly prohibited their children to speak the language at home. These persons, who still had certain proficiency in Nahuatl, argued that they themselves did not face much discrimination at school, but their parents, who were now in their eighties or late seventies, were scolded and even beaten at school, when they studied in 1940s‒1950s. I also met speakers of above seventy years’ old who described that experience. One of them recounted that while he studied the three grades of the primary school in Contla, he freely communicated in Nahuatl with his peers, and although the teachers did not like it, the children still continued speaking Nahuatl among themselves. But once he moved to a school in San Pablo Apetatitlán (see Messing & Rockwell, 2006, p. 258), he and his paisanos met significant pressure from the predominantly Spanish-speaking environment:

CB (m, 73): So I, there in San Pablo, since here I had already finished the third year, I already could read. And I already could talk to those who didn’t speak Nahuatl there, I didn’t speak Nahuatl there, [I spoke] Spanish. I spoke Nahuatl with my fellow countrymen who went there, there were eight of us from here, eight kids who went to San Pablo, and wherever we met there, we spoke Nahuatl [to each other]. And they, the people there, like kids and teachers [told us]: “Hey, you, what are you saying? What do you say about us? Are you lying to us or what?” [And one of us] said: “No, we are just talking to each other, me and my fellow…”—“But what do you say?” So we explained to them, and they said: “Aaa, so no-no-no-no, we don’t like the way you speak, no-no-no-no-no… Here you speak Spanish, we don’t want you to speak that huanhuanguinguinhuanguentzin, no.” They shunned us. So we had to speak Spanish between us, who were all friends from here, too. We couldn’t speak Nahuatl.⁶ (04.09.2017)

In September 2017, during the above-mentioned introductory survey, a number of people in their seventies maintained that they now tried to pass some of their knowledge of Nahuatl to their grandchildren of school and pre-school age. One man of 61 years old admitted that although his parents spoke to him solely in Nahuatl, he spoke only Spanish to his children when they grew up, but at the same time he was determined to speak the language to his grandchildren when he would have them Another man, of fifty years old, lamented the loss of Nahuatl in his community and the lack of desire of his own adult children to learn it, whereas later he responded that he had not spoken Nahuatl to his children at all when they were young, even though it was his main language of communication with his peers and older people, including his parents. Rather than the lack of understanding of the cause-and-effect relations in this case, his bitterness was probably caused by the inability to overturn the course of time and raise his children in a different manner.

There were other people, for example, a few women in their fifties, who accepted the break in intergenerational transmission as inevitable; one of them said that she had tried to speak Nahuatl to her sons when they were children, but they had not liked it, and now, when they were adults, they asked her to teach them the language, but now she was reluctant to do so. Many respondents, mostly above fifty years old, stated that they would like to see more Nahuatl taught in schools but they doubted that the children themselves would like it. It should be noted that such conciliatory views came from the people who clearly expressed their support for the revitalization of Nahuatl in general, when they were asked whether they wanted Nahuatl to be used more widely in various public domains, such as education, mass media, and health care.

In my broader interviews with elderly persons, I came upon similar expressions of sadness regarding the contemporary youth and children who neither wanted to learn Nahuatl nor showed respect to the elderly when they spoke it in public. As one of the interviewees said, “kids make fun of us on their road to school”, when they saw him and other old people talking Nahuatl between themselves. Similar experience was recalled by another woman in her seventies, who expressed regret about the fact that contemporary adolescents could not even recognize Nahuatl when they heard old people talking it:

NF (f, 75): Yes, in the past [all the people] knew Mexicano, but now the girls already… You address them, they don’t understand it. Sometimes I go somewhere with her (a grandchild—GH) and we talk Mexicano, [me and other people] whom I know. Yes, all Mexicano. And she says, she’s looking at us from aside and says: “What are you talking? English?” I’m telling her: “And this is because you don’t understand, you expect English?” English… she just laughs, that’s what it is. (03.08.2021)

Nevertheless, it appears that the elderly feel more comfortable to teach some Nahuatl to their grandchildren, if the latter are still in pre-school age and thus are more attached to them and less affected by the larger society, than to share their linguistic knowledge with their adult children and other younger adults, as the elderly do not hold any expectations about their motivation to learn. For example, I met two male Nahuatl speakers in their seventies, each of whom had a notebook where for many years they had been writing down Nahuatl words and phrases that they remembered and wanted to preserve. Both of them did it independently of any language revitalization activities taking place in their community—it was their personal endeavor that they cherished but were hesitant about making it public. They were more keen to share their work with me, an external researcher with an interest in Nahuatl, than with their children, who probably were even unaware of the existence of these notebooks. As one of these elderly speakers told me, he wanted to leave his dictionary to his grandchildren, not mentioning his children, who were already in their thirties and forties.

For the elderly, their knowledge of the language is not only about the language itself. When we discussed with them the role of Nahuatl in their life, both past and present, they often emphasized the practices and customs that had their proper discourse and terminology in Nahuatl Among those practices, they mentioned scraping magueys (agave plants) for an alcoholic beverage called pulque and sponsoring a religious fiesta as a part of mayordomía—a system of the veneration of holy images, part of a larger social-religious system of cargos, which has played an essential structural role in the life of Indigenous communities in Mexico since the early colonial period (Robichaux, 2005).⁷ The ceremonial practices related to mayordomía have not only been preserved across Tlaxcala but, due to the population growth, they have become richer and more complex (Robichaux, 2005, pp. 66–67); however, in the eyes of the older generation of Contla, the decline of the language causes them to lose a crucial element, something that constituted their uniqueness and intimacy.⁸ This could even be related to the very names of celebrations, as Day of the Dead, which in the recent period has been influenced by North American Halloween tradition. One of the interviewees explained it in the following way:

BM (m, 57): For us Miccailhuitl, or All Saints’ Day, or Day of the Dead, is very different from what is called Halloween in other places, yes. For us Miccailhuitl is a holiday of respect to our dead ancestors, a holiday of… of love, of care for our deceased relatives. We leave them bread, fruit, molli, everything we can, we offer them the best we can, although we know that they won’t come, we still offer it to them as a way to remember them. […] And what is going on with what they brought to us, with Halloween? A holiday of witches, holiday of vampires, ghosts and so on. Demons and all things like that. So, it isn’t our culture, our culture is respect, it is care, yes, to all the things. And this is also achieved on the basis of the Nahuatl language. As long as we try to save Nahuatl and are aware of these values, I think the things could be better. (08.09.2017)

Unlike the elderly interviewees, who were either Native speakers of Nahuatl or at least spoke it freely since childhood, among the younger people whom I interviewed only one woman of 22 years old, spoke Nahuatl as her mother tongue. She was not Native to Contla but to San Francisco Ixquihuacan, a village in Sierra Norte de Puebla, from where a number of residents migrated to San Miguel Xaltipan in late 1990s in search for work opportunities. Although the variety of Nahuatl spoken in Ixquihuacan differs little from the variety spoken by elderly people in Contla, she attested that she had never tried to communicate with any Nahuatl speaker in Xaltipan in Nahuatl. Moreover, an older co-worker of the woman, who proceeded from the same village as she did, affirmed that she never talked to him in Nahuatl as well, saving this language only for communication with her younger sister and, presumably, her parents at home. Asked in the interview whether she wanted to teach her own children Nahuatl, when she might have a family in the future, she contemplated a bit and then replied: “Well yes, it is indeed important… Well, I don’t know, but since it’s being lost, and there are few people who speak it, and so the more people will speak it, the better…”.

Other young interviewees, who were born in Contla, as a rule, could be characterized as language “rememberers” (see the classification of endangered language speakers in Grinevald & Bert, 2011), i.e. who knew only a few words or phrases in Nahuatl. According to them, their parents or grandparents occasionally taught them a word or two, or, upon hearing Nahuatl words in conversations of their older relatives, the young themselves asked to explain what this or that word meant, and the elderly explained it to them. The common declarative attitude among the young people whom I met was that, while they did not at all avoid learning Nahuatl, they were not presented with such an opportunity on the part of speakers from their families or were too shy to show initiative and ask their parents or grandparents to teach them. One of them did say that if she had asked her father to teach her, he would have most likely agreed. It is, of course, impossible to verify how conversations would develop in a real situation if an elderly member of the family were to offer a younger relative to teach her/him Nahuatl and/or a younger relative would ask an elderly one to teach her/him the language on a regular basis. According to the young people, an important factor here is the level of intimacy (or, as another young interviewee characterized it, límite de la confianza, ‘confidence limit’) with elderly persons who speak Nahuatl:

YA (f, 34): There are indeed moments, in which we say “What are they talking about?”, we get this curiosity… to know, “What is that they’re saying?” And well, maybe we don’t dare [to ask] at that moment—if I know the lady, I may ask her, but if I don’t know her, then like no, better not to ask her, she may be annoyed because… so I just keep listening to their conversation, although maybe I don’t understand what they are talking about at that moment, but… it would still be important. (28.11.2019)

Afterwards, my interlocutor said that in order to learn Nahuatl from the elderly, the youth should project an interest not only in the language itself but in the persons who speak it. But this is again where the generational gap, according to the testimonies of other young people, created a considerable obstacle—even if a young person respects the elderly (and not only members of their own families), there are differences in both the manner of communication and the worldview that can discourage them from approaching an older person for advice or even a mundane conversation. Therefore, the youth refrain from making the first step in communication.

A notable testimony came from a teenager, who, discussing the traditions of his community, emphasized the role of the language component in them:

EA (m, 17): There are quite a few things that the old people discussed among them [in the past], and most of them they didn’t discuss in Spanish. Because then, with my grandparents, they spoke together in that manner, and I was there, but I couldn’t understand them, it was necessary to ask them what they were saying or so. […] Without the language, we won’t do the things as they did, or how can I say, we can’t do [them] as we won’t know the things of the past. (05.10.2018)

Surprisingly, this corresponded to the deliberations of elderly residents, whom I interviewed earlier, who put a clear emphasis on the linguistic aspect of tradition.

As can be seen above, the young interviewees in general expressed concern about the fate of Nahuatl, but I also encountered an opinion that the language would persist no matter what. The fact that the opinion’s holder did not speak Nahuatl himself did not worry him, as he still believed that he would learn it in the future, so that not only he but his future children would also learn to speak the language. It appeared that for the majority of young interviewees Nahuatl was a matter of interest but not a crucial element of their identity. However, I also met a young man who, despite being a language “rememberer” himself, argued that knowing and pronouncing words in Nahuatl, learned from his parents and grandparents, made him feel special against the mainstream society, which has not been sympathetic to Indigenous languages and their speakers:

EB (m, 28): So, when you speak Nahuatl, you feel superior in something else. When you speak a native-native language, something that is yours… I, for example, as I’m telling you, when I come and speak it there, at SAMS or WalMart (refers to the stores in the city of Tlaxcala—GH), like that, I feel superior in something. This is my ego. And something that I feel very well. It’s my pleasure, I like it very much to speak like that. And the people didn’t look at me well when I spoke like that. But it doesn’t matter to me. I am doing this because I like breaking rules. Because I like it, because I don’t want to lose it. (17.09.2018)

He was also proud to pass the little knowledge that he had to his daughter, although he was divorced with her mother, who did not approve any use of Nahuatl. This remarkable perspective, although uncommon, demonstrates that attitudes to Nahuatl among the young adult generation in Contla can vary and can surprise the elderly speakers who are skeptical of the youth’s desire to learn and maintain the language.

Attitudes of the Elderly and Young People Towards Natural Environment and Its Change

In the beginning of my research in Tlaxcala, the ecological transformation of the community did not especially interest me, as I wanted to focus primarily on the sociolinguistic transformation. But in our discussions about past and present with elderly members of Contla communities other than the municipal center, where the environmental change was more recent and experienced by still living residents, it became clear that this subject evoked equally strong emotions and reflection as did the language. As in the case of language, the prevalent feeling among elderly residents was that something inherently valuable had disappeared from their lives with the change of the landscape, an aspect that the younger generation could not even properly value as they were born too late to witness it.

The first concern focused on the industrialization of the water supply. Although elderly residents acknowledged that the installation of water pipes prevented their community from suffering from water shortages, and that it was necessary in light of the population growth, in their eyes it was accompanied by the abandonment of a part of their heritage, towards which they harbored nostalgic feelings:

NF (f, 75): There are forty years since we have tap water… Earlier, we had water from the well, we had a number of wells, very deep ones, of seventy-five meters, eighty meters. We drew water with a rope, people drew water with a bucket, like that, in primitive way. […] Earlier, we weren’t so many people as today, before we grew up, our grandparents told that in their time they went to take water from the streams, even some non-Indigenous persons⁹ did so […] and the water collected [from there] was clean-clean-clean… (03.08.2021)

The wells, of which nowadays only the upper part is preserved at best, in this discourse were more than just a water source—they were a monument of human, communal effort that required a long period of time to reach the alleged depth by digging, and likely a popular spot for social interactions. When industrialization came to San Miguel Xaltipan and the roads in the community, according to the words of another interviewee, were widened, state authorities also sent a team of engineers with modern equipment, community members carried pipes, and the wells were instantly dug up, with pipes installed, and then the holes were covered up with earth. At that time, none of the residents opposed this change—it was perceived as the progress through technology—but in effect, it also marked the moment when water became the property of a water supply company and not of the community.¹⁰

It is notable that the memory of crystal clean water in the barrancas, which already was the thing of the past at the time of Nutini’s research, has been preserved through generations, and even more notable that this memory is contrasted with the contemporary experience of tap water. The allegedly pure fresh water that was available to everybody, from the perspective of the elderly, symbolizes the pre-industrial epoch, while industrialization and contamination transformed the once clean streams into waste and mud containers, in which the appearance of water during rainy seasons can only cause mud slides and soil erosion. The contamination, gradually accumulated throughout the years, was noticed by elderly residents not only in the water but also in the air and in the sky itself:

CB (m, 73): Now, the manner of our life, in comparison to what I [remember], it’s very different. Why? Because when there was, let’s say, sixty or sixty-five years ago, we saw the blue, clean sky. And now we don’t see it as blue as it was, we see it grey, it has changed its color. And I recall, in that epoch, when I was a kid sixty-five years ago, there were mesurcos, or boundaries. We call it mesurcos in Nahuatl,¹¹ and a boundary, that corresponded to a boundary [between land properties], was a row, and these rows were all of magueys. For example, every two meters there was a maguey… And now there aren’t any. (04.09.2017)

The shrinkage of magueys, or agave plants, in Contla thus did not only mean the decline of traditional practices for extraction of agave juice, but also the loss of green hedge method for marking boundaries between lands. This method needed a replacement, which h was provided then by concrete and cement. Apart from magueys, the diminishment of vegetation in the local communities included also fruit trees, such as apple, pear, peach, and plum. In some households, they constituted an additional source of income, but it also turned out that for Contla residents, the value of fruit and fruit trees was not merely economic. When asked whether her community looked more attractive today or when she was young, one of the elderly interlocutors answered:

NF (f, 75): Earlier I think it was more beautiful. Because there were many trees. We had mesurcos, magueys. […] And after one maguey was used up, people planted another one, so that the mesurcos remained intact. Earlier it was different. There was a hell of a lot of fruit. So much that my father sold it, he carried it in baskets, carried it to Santa Ana, who knows where dad sold it. At that time there were so many various fruits, and I planted them at my property, so besides mesurcos, there were many fruits, pears, apples, all cultivated at home. Now you saw, there’s nothing. Everything has been used up, now all have become people of jobs, everybody lives from a job. Earlier was one thing and today is another thing. (03.08.2021)

In general, elderly residents do not deny the positive developments—they acknowledge that was harder in the past than it is today. In past times, everybody had to work in the field and only a few could make a living from working in the textile industry (which started to develop in Contla only in the mid-twentieth century); now the choice of occupations is much broader and profits are higher. But the sentiments about greener and cleaner community life remain strong, and the prevalent view among the older generation is that these qualities can never return.

The younger residents of Contla were already born and bred in the new, densely populated and industrialized environment, but that does not mean that they are not able to value things, both material and spiritual, associated with the pre-industrial epoch. Those of them who used to hear stories about the past from their parents and grandparents or those who have visited and stayed in other, less urbanized Indigenous communities, can express a feeling of deprivation that unites them with the elderly. This feeling, for example, can be provoked by a piece of tradition that they discover in other places and cannot find in their own community of origin. For example, one of the interviewees spent a significant amount of time working in San Isidro Buensuceso, a community on the southwestern slope of Malintzi, where the majority of population still speak Nahuatl (see Nava Nava, 2016), and recalled the local practices of steam bathing, or temazcal:

EB (m, 28): I asked them: “And why do you lay out ocoxal (dried, sand-like resin of ocote pines—GH)? Because in my community I bathe in a temazcal and there we don’t lay out anything, we only put some sacks, cartons, so that you don’t get burnt…” They tell me: “No, actually ocoxal gives you a rich aroma.” So when I got inside… indeed, it emitted a rich aroma. Very rich. And in the case of mothers, when they are pregnant or have recently given birth, they bathe them seven times in a temazcal, with ocoxalito… It’s like a ritual for the Lord, and [the head of the family] goes to collect ocoxal to the mountain, and then arranges a bath for his daughter or daughter-in-law, so that the baby would be healthy. So I learned it there, and during vacations, when I came back home […], I said to my dad and mom: “Listen, mom, and why don’t we put ocoxal here?” She says: “Well, actually, [this custom], it’s already lost.” It was completely lost. (17.09.2017)

One aspect of this story is a regret for the lost tradition, but under a closer look, it becomes clear that this loss occurred due to an environmental change as well. San Isidro Buensuceso is not only a more conservative community in terms of the retention of the Indigenous language and culture in comparison to Xaltipan, the interviewee’s home village. It also borders the conifer forest on the upper slopes of Malintzi volcano, where ocote, or Mexican pine, is the prevalent species. This forest is currently threatened by illegal logging (Jiménez Laguna, 2021). In pre-industrial times, the same forest also reached the upper part of the Contla municipality, but after the forest boundary moved upwards and a whole day’s journey was required to collect ocoxal, this practice, as it seems logical to assume, died out. For an elderly community member, who can still recall how the wood was used as a construction material (Nutini, 1968, p. 36), the connection would be clear, but not so for a younger one, who has seen much less interaction with the forest.

As far as I can judge from my conversation with young people in Contla, a significant part of them are not inclined to reflect on what has been lost as a result of the municipality’s industrialization. In interviews, when we started talking about the environment, they usually expressed concerns over the roads that had not been paved and their maintenance. The positive aspects of the industrialization overweighed the negative ones for many. One of the interviewees, when I asked her to compare the older times and modern times with regard to the communal well-being, answered:

YA (f, 34): We can say that now we have better services. As I told you, before there were surcos, o mesurcos, or lanes, and now we have streets, so… so there is a progress from [what was] fifty years ago comparing to now, yes, because there is already a system of roads, there is centralized tap water, because earlier, I still remember it as a kid, the water was very scarce… […] [There were] persons who had wells, and we went to buy water from them, so the water was very scarce… […] The persons who had wells, they were like upper class, because they had water, right? and in that case the people who didn’t have it, had to go to bring [water] for cooking, for drinking, in order to wash clothes they also had to go to another place… […] So as others tell me and as I myself see it, it has been a progress, maybe not at a large scale, but it has been a progress, and we have benefited from it, because now we have roads, means of communication… […] There are still some roads in the upper part [of the municipality] that are made of dirt, but I actually feel there has been certain progress, because the principal things, like roads, water, electricity, now we have it all. (28.11.2019)

Such an obviously more practical view of industrialization, in comparison to those disclosed above, also presents a critical perspective on the traditional organization of water resources, mentioning the issue skirted by the elderly interlocutors: the inequality that existed between those who had a well (or had resources to dig it) and the rest of the population. Hence, it is also evident that sentiments about the old times can eclipse certain social issues that underline the need for change. But at the same time, the push for progress does not prevent all the youth from noticing the pitfalls of industrialization as well as its benefits (Fig. 7.2).

Fig. 7.2

A road in San José Aztatla, Contla. September 2017. Copyright: Author

Thus, another young interviewee expressed an opposite view of the environmental change that has affected Contla, focusing on the damage done to the ecology and economical sustainability of the local communities. His deliberations on this subject came forward right after I asked him how he thought the community’s well-being could be improved. In his view, the current landscape presented the evidence why people should be educated to understand that well-being is generated not only by consuming resources, but also by creating them.

RS (m, 29): Before, I remember that I was [told], that this part from here and up to there was still sown, with what was corn, certain vegetables, fruits, and… and we lived on this, actually. And now we don’t. No, because this part became like they built it up, they made… so I think that, talking about education, [it is important to tell people] that if I build, if I do something, I also have to think how to create, how to produce my food as well. And without relying on the industry, without relying on… for example, here, instead of growing your own tomatoes, you go and buy them, or corn. Earlier you had this here, but now you go and buy canned corn. […] My mom told me that here, where the chapel stands now, there was flowing water. And there were many trees. And what I got to know is that the landlord of that place decided to cut down the trees, and then the water stopped flowing. So I believe that the lack of water is caused by the lack of trees.” (02.08.2021)

For the interviewee, these issues not only indicated that the community needed to shift towards the greener and more sustainable environment, but, moreover, he had a will to contribute to that shift himself:

RS: I also talked to my brother and said… I explained to him the same thing, that the lack of water is created by the lack of trees and… many things, but trees are my priority. And he said “Ok”, he said to me: “So I don’t know, brother, how do you want to do things?”, he tells me, [and I answer] “Well, we have to aim for a group, we form a group, and we start with cleaning the road, and then after we look what can be done, we plant trees and… do what was done before and save all this, right?” So that we can live as before in terms of resources, but with the abilities that technology gives us and with the ability to purchase stuff. […] It is necessary to look for persons of our generation, more or less of our age. (02.08.2021)

The seeming idealization of the state of environment in the past is secondary here—the more important is the desire to aspire to that ideal and try to regain the ecological benefits of the pre-industrial environment. Such a proactive approach among the local youth is probably unique and it is uncertain if it indeed results in regular and organized planting of trees, as my interlocutor envisioned. However, what is also remarkable here, is the understanding that the work of that sort should be done by involving a number of people rather than individually. It is also possible that the motive for organizing a group of activists lies not only in a desire to pursue more significant practical outcome, but also in the ability to stimulate a social change together with an ecological one, by disseminating the ideas of sustainability around your peers and persuading them to take part in a constructive work for the common good.

The accent on the young, made by the interviewee, is also notable: it may reflect plans to seek participation among the more active part of the community, but it may also indicate the aforementioned difficulty to cooperate with the older generation, as well as the expectation that they would not accept young people’s ideas due to the worldview differences. It did not come up in our conversation how the older generation might contribute to such a project, but since it was their memories that gave incentive to the idea of re-greening the community, and in general they had more experience in horticulture than Contla’s youth, it would be appropriate for me to ask then if the elderly people could also play an active role in that project.

Discussion: Combining the Opposites

The qualitative study that lies in the basis of this work is not without certain limitations. First, the number of interviewees recorded hardly constitutes a representative picture of how the local society generally views the issues of language, environment, and well-being. Another limitation comes from the fact that I interacted with the persons who were willing to share their experience and thoughts with me and trusted me enough to give me their consent for recording our conversations. I have been perfectly aware that there are plenty of people in Contla who would not regard me, a white foreign researcher, as trustworthy, or for whom the issues that interested me are of no real concern. In addition, there is a possible limitation caused by what Bernard (2006: 241) calls “the deference factor”—when the interviewee tells the interviewer what the latter expects to hear, or what the former thinks that the latter expects to hear.

Here it should be noted that I found the elderly residents in general more open to converse with me and inclined to share their stories. My younger interlocutors could be divided to those in their late twenties—middle thirties and those in late teens or early twenties. While the former manifested more socially and ecologically oriented thought about well-being, the latter showed reluctance to talk about complex social topics. In addition to shyness and possible lack of trust towards me, their aspirations were more orientated towards outside the community. They put more emphasis on individual well-being, which in their eyes was associated with opportunities to study and live an independent life, with traveling to new places and making acquaintances with people from those places. Proceeding from the socially disadvantaged groups, they could perceive an incentive to focus on issues immanent to their community as an attempt to keep them within the circle from which they mostly wanted to leave. In this situation, the elderly, feeling that the youth seek to move away from them and neglect their authority,¹² may be more eager to share their knowledge with an outsider if the latter shows an interest in them and their experience.

However, in the interviews my younger interlocutors also wanted to show that the lack of connection with the elderly was a two-sided problem. According to their words, their older relatives also tended to look at them critically and were somewhat reluctant to share their knowledge with the youth. One of the interviewees (EB, m, 28) even said that the elderly “do not want to share [traditional knowledge] because they feel inhibited… because they feel that we are going to take something from them”. But sometimes, as can be seen from the example of YA (f, 34), young people can look positively at this issue, admitting that it is also their responsibility to show their respect and curiosity towards the elderly and their knowledge (here, notably, it was also the oldest of the younger interviewees who expressed that view).

In essence, we have two virtually opposing age groups who are apt to reproach each other for mutual indifference. This situation acquires the form of a vicious circle, in which the elderly do not place much trust in the young, since the latter, in the former’s opinion, hold very different values from them. Indeed, the contemporary young residents of Contla were socialized in a different language, different environment, and therefore in a different culture, but it is also important to take into account that the older generation themselves contributed to the change that created this rupture. The young people, feeling the distrust on the part of elderly, are also wary to approach them for any kind of communication, thus persuading the elderly in the young’s lack of respect. Hence, it is not fruitful to evaluate the fairness of each group’s allegations to each other. Rather, it is useful to look at possible points of convergence in the discourse of the young and the elderly, which would show that the generational gap, despite its obvious existence, is not as solid as it seems to many representatives of the opposing generations. Of course, the opinions demonstrated in the interviews are quite diverse with contrasting points of view within each generational group, but this is precisely what shows that one generation’s views of another are too generalized.

Referring to the attitudes towards the heritage language, we can see that although the vast majority of young residents do not speak Nahuatl (and even those few who are proficient in Nahuatl do not speak it outside the family), the interviewees from the respective age group maintain that they would like to learn it if they were given the opportunity. Even if the “deference factor” played a role here, such ideas as the reasoning that Nahuatl should be learned in order better to understand the tradition or the use of linguistic knowledge as a means to “break the rules” could hardly be provoked by any of my questions or my own views known to the interviewees. This shows that regarding the local youth as entirely disinterested in the linguistic heritage can block the opportunity of reconciliation between the distinct generations for the purpose of language transmission. The young people, in their turn, do not take into consideration the experience of forced assimilation at schools decades ago that undoubtedly contributed to the elderly’s unwillingness to transmit the language—a traumatic experience of which the contemporary youth have been spared. None of the interlocutors who spoke about the reluctance of their elderly relatives to share linguistic or other traditional knowledge with them, mentioned the discrimination that the past generations had suffered.

As regards the attitudes towards the natural environment, the misunderstanding between the generations in this case is not so evident, as the elderly people mainly contemplate this issue in romantic terms, considering the change of the landscape as irreversible, and the young people rarely reflect on the environmental loss that occurred before they were born. However, in those rare cases, when the feeling of loss is shared by the young people, and more remarkably, when this feeling prompts them to take action, it indicates that for such young persons the greener environment constitutes no less a value than for the elderly, who remember it from their life time. Therefore, it is also a possible point for collaboration between community members of both generations, if the aim is to preserve and revitalize what is valuable to them all.

The question is how such collaboration could happen in practice. A suitable model could be drawn from those community-based participatory projects, in which Indigenous elders are reunited with those representatives of Indigenous youth who are interested in learning from them and work together for the maintenance of traditional cultural practices and sustainable future of their communities (Kahn et al., 2016; Pace & Gabel, 2018; Saba, 2017; Wexler, 2011). In Contla there are probably no “Indigenous elders” in the ordinary sense of this word, but there are many knowledge holders of Indigenous origin and Nahuatl speakers who would like to pass their knowledge to the next generations. Thus, a space may be established where these knowledge holders could communicate with curious and sympathetic young people, who would not necessarily be relatives of the elderly participants, on a regular basis. It could function as a sort of workshop, or a meeting space, where any young person who would like to learn Nahuatl, could receive lessons from a Native speaker. As for the environmental knowledge, it could represent a platform, where the elderly could share the knowledge that has fallen out of use, which could help younger activists to plan and conduct ecological projects as the one described in the end of the previous section. But of course, such a platform can be created only if the initiative comes from community members themselves, and if there are enough representatives of both generations who would like to participate and support it.

The interviews recorded in Contla presented me with a multifaceted discourse about well-being to show different ways in which the residents of different age and gender viewed the better life for themselves and their communities. Two principles arose in the discourse of elderly and young persons alike, when our conversations focused on the well-being of the local society and what was needed to achieve it—unity and education. They expressed a common discontent about the adherence of community members to their personal material interests, which prevented them from joining efforts for the common good, even in such minor cases as the maintenance of a piece of road. Education in this context was understood not as the instruction of school subjects, but the communication of values—moral and cultural, and not exclusively to children but also to adults.

In this context, both old and young residents sometimes look towards a more traditional way of life, where the society is more knitted together, Indigenous language is still spoken and natural environment is greener and more diverse. While admitting the benefits for material well-being brought by industrialization, the majority of interlocutors share a feeling that some of the essential components of well-being have been lost or are hard to achieve. A model that can show that things could be different is not necessarily sought in the past, as an inspiration can be found in a contemporary and not so distant community, which has been less acculturated than Contla communities, even if the economic sustainability there remains at a lower level. Such was the case of the young interlocutor who had worked in San Isidro Buensuceso and was helped there by people who were poorer than he, which he later revealed during our interview:

EB (m, 28): But the teaching of that place gave me a lot to understand life. That is, you come and do something not in order to earn money, not because you want something from the people, no. The teaching that it gave me is that all of us are humble and all of us are on the same road, which is well-being. And if we don’t understand it well, we may fall, we may panhandle, we can ask someone for food, and we’ll be given it, there will be always people who will give us and those who won’t give you. And with them [residents of San Isidro Buensuceso—GH] I learned it all. (17.09.2017)

Thus, the language, ecology, and traditional values become associated with well-being when they are associated with live people around you—people who are inclined to share that knowledge and give you a helping hand. Although not explicitly expressed by other interlocutors, this view, which places knowledge-sharing and mutual help in the center of well-being, it can characterize their distinct narratives, of the old and young alike.

Conclusions

The considerations of Contla residents about language and ecology, past and present, should be viewed in light of profound social and economic changes that took place in Mexico since the mid-twentieth century. The narratives cited in this chapter show the individual dimension of these changes, including the reflections of both the generation that witnessed them directly and the generation that grew up with their results. While most of research on the process of urbanization and industrialization in Tlaxcala and Mexico focuses on broad social, economic, and environmental implications, these individual narratives reveal an additional, esthetic aspect of the change—nostalgia for the lost beauty and colorfulness of the landscape that featured Contla communities half a century ago. This nostalgia can be shared not only by the elderly residents but also by the young ones, who took to heart stories about the past.

This study aims to demonstrate that an intergenerational gap, which becomes especially significant in ethnic minority societies that experience intense assimilation, should not be considered merely a given and unchangeable fact. An inquiry into the human experience and discourse that form but at the same time bridge that gap is essential. The example of Contla shows that the need in what Mead called “postfigurativeness” can be found even among disadvantaged and acculturated Indigenous youth, who need to concentrate their efforts on finding better economic opportunities than their community can offer. We can see that while the dividing factors of the generational gap in the historically Indigenous community are clear and familiar to both sides of the gap, the factors that still unite or are able to unite the old and young generations remain covert but present nonetheless. In order to reveal them, it is necessary to analyze comparatively the discourses of representatives from both generations.

Thus, in studying the views of community members on subjects related to local Indigenous identity it is essential to include the perspectives of different age groups. The exclusive reliance on the perspective of the elders, or knowledge holders, however productive it could be in terms of ethnographic data, does not take into consideration the future directions of community’s development, which will take place after the current generation of knowledge holders passes away. Suggesting the bridging elements of different community discourses, as is made here for the language and the natural environment, is one step. Another one is to make these elements known to community members themselves, so that they could reflect on the findings and use them for their own benefit, such as enhancing the dialog and collaboration between the two allegedly opposite age groups. From the ethnographic perspective, such a dialog can test the statements expressed by community members in individual interviews and the assumptions that can be made on their basis. In the social dimension, it can help the elderly generation to deal with their sense of loss and can open a new opportunity for the younger generation to acquire knowledge has been difficult to learn in other settings.