Introduction
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Está bien que no perdamos nuestra lengua, para mostrar que somos indígenas y que pensamos diferentes a los que sólo hablan español. Pero tenemos que aprender el español, para que podamos salir a otros lugares, para que no nos dé vergüenza y miedo hablar con otras personas.
--anonymous (Rojas 1994:185)1
Native languages are under assault in Mexico. Education appears to be the "villain," and bilingualism its weapon. Paradoxically, if native languages are to thrive in the next millennium, their salvation likewise will be education and bilingualism their hope. These are the lessons gleaned from an analysis of census microdata on language usage by children and families in the state of Chiapas.
The prospects for native languages in Chiapas would seem to have never been healthier (Table 1). While the population of the state doubled from 1970 to 1990, reaching 3.2 million, the number of Chiapanecos speaking indigenous languages grew even faster, from 288 thousand to 716,000. More troubling is that over the same period as the number of bilinguals more than tripled, monolingual speakers of native languages increased scarcely by one-half, from 147,720 to 228,889. In 1970, speakers of the vernacular were evenly divided between monolinguals and bilinguals. By 1990 there were almost twice as many bilingual speakers of native languages as monolinguals.2
One may quibble over the accuracy of these data, but censuses constitute the best information available for discerning broad patterns of native language usage in Mexico (Peyser and Chackiel 1994). Beyond these aggregate data, information on individuals and families from national one percent samples prepared by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (INEGI) may be used to reveal processes of linguistic and social change at the family level which may not be readily evident from community studies or published census tables. Mexican national census samples, which are nothing less than computerized images of the original enumeration sheets, are widely used by demographers and economists, but other researchers have typically ignored these valuable data. As far as we are aware, ours is the first study to employ national census samples to analyze patterns of language transmission within families in Mexico.3 We are fortunate that the 1970 and 1990 enumerations used similar questions to probe language abilities. Each individual (or household head) declared whether or not an indigenous language was spoken, and, in addition, if Spanish was spoken. The specific native language was also identified. Language ability was defined simply as someone who uses the language for verbal communication.
As a test case, we focus on Chiapas because that state has one of the largest concentrations of native language speakers in Mexico. Then too, according to Alma Guillermoprieto, "nowhere is the native population's situation more unjust than in Chiapas" (1995:34). Our findings point to dramatic changes in the relation between the maintenance of vernacular languages, bilingualism, and the spread of education in the region.
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