“Hi friends, today we are going to learn how to say fried fish”: from the mythical Yucatan Peninsula, cradle of Mayan culture in southeastern Mexico, Santos Tuz uses TikTok to pass on to young people the language of his ancestors which has survived the centuries.
“It’s said: Tsajbil kay. Ma’alob kanáantabáa! (take good care of yourself!),” the very friendly 21-year-old teacher explains in one of his one-minute videos on @Tuzsantos322, 343,600 subscribers on counter.
As often, the story began during the pandemic.
“I wondered why I couldn’t teach the Mayan language, which is my mother tongue,” he explains in Spanish.
He claims to have learned from contact with his grandmother the language of a civilization which reached its peak between 300 and 900 AD, in Mexico (Chichen Itza), Guatemala (Ikal), Belize and as far as El Salvador and in Honduras.
Her two sisters, aged 15 and 17, have only a rudimentary knowledge of the language.
“That’s one of the reasons why I started,” he told AFP in his locality of Oxkutzcab, one of the stations on the route of the Mayan tourist train, the controversial mega-construction site that President Lopez Obrador absolutely wants to inaugurate in December.
“I realized that many young people stop speaking the Mayan language, or only speak it at home. Why? Because they are afraid of being discriminated against,” he said, wearing a ” guayabera” (traditional white shirt in cotton or linen, with trimmings).
“Parents have stopped teaching Maya to their children for fear that they will be rejected,” he says.
At the same time, things are moving. In 2017, three states on the peninsula – Campeche, Yucatan and Quintana Roo – pledged to translate school books distributed by the Secretariat (Ministry) of Public Education into Maya.
According to official figures, Maya is spoken by 860,000 speakers, most of them in the Yucatan Peninsula, the second indigenous language after Nahuatl, in the Valley of Mexico and surrounding areas.
About 7.3 million Mexicans (6.1% of the population) speak an indigenous language.
“I learned it from my parents and from the places where I worked. We went to many small towns where people only speak Maya and we had to learn it in order to be able to interact with them”, explains Wilber Rosendo Diaz, 35, worker in the extraction of drinking water.
To record his videos, Santos uses his mobile phone, a camera and a tripod given to him by an American producer of digital content.
His videos, playful and powerful, are recorded in the middle of nature, at home, on a historic site or when he tastes a typical dish.
Santos was invited to the program Going native, a Canadian series that humorously explores different aspects of contemporary indigenous cultures, on behalf of a public television channel.
Child of a modest family, he says he is just starting to earn money with his videos. In his community, people are starting to ask him for selfies, but he refuses the title of full-time influencer…”Ma’alob kanáantabáa!”.
14/04/2023 13:44:57 – Oxkutzkab (Mexico) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
