A Tribute to Language and Love

Right now, some days ago, five hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, fifty years ago, thirty years ago, ten years ago, some days ago, Indigenous people have been killed. it does not matter whether the crisis is political or not, whether the powers that be are right or left. In the end, it is always the Indigenous people who fall on the streets, who are silenced and erased.

This piece is a cry and an ode to those dead, to my dead. It is an attempt to register the pain and to turn it into something that can be shared over time.

I am an Aymara woman who doesn’t speak AymaraI. I feel this pain intensely. And so I turn to poetry, to the healing power of words, to try and make sense of it all or not even, just to allocate the emotional journey in a place where I can go to and distant from when life calls for it. My longing for the language has been placed in this poem, translated from Spanish to English and Aymara:

A Senkata y a mis muertos

I come with my little things to heal you

she sent me, my grandmother

with herbs, with coca leaves, and with her

commandment:

you’re going to chew

with your saliva and with force you are

going to rub her

— With her fingers outlining my neck—

like this like this like this

saying

she has taught me

and here I am

she heals our dead

she feeds them and listens

she listens to them

and since she cannot come, with the dead

she has stayed

but she has taught me

to me

In the poem, I address how throughout history, we navigate different ideologies or political positions and yet still end up dying on the streets. I wanted to create a space where I could share these ideas and feelings in the way my grandmother talked to me. I wrote this piece in Spanish, but it is an Aymarized Spanish. The Aymara structure, the Aymara verbal modes, and the Aymara tone is the leading voice. Yet, the poem is still written in Spanish, as this is my mother tongue.

My grandparents didn’t allow me to listen to them speaking in Aymara. Any time I entered a room where they were having a conversation in Aymara, as soon as my brother or I was there, they switched to Spanish. Negating their language was a survival and a social mobility strategy, having Aymara as primary language would have meant having an accent in Spanish, and therefore being seen and treated as less. This peculiar device to access more opportunities negated their way of seeing the world, and it also negated themselves. By so doing, my grandparents were showing their love, a capital L love. They were willing to erase themselves, not through a gunshot in a political crisis but through an offering, the hope of a better future.

Through this work I am trying to grasp, to touch at least an edge of that grandiose Love. After the racial trauma and the colonial trauma, they loved. My grandparents loved me hard and well. They denied us their language and denied us part of themselves hoping to gift us brighter and lighter days. A love beautiful and painful, a love that is everywhere, certainly in every Indigenous community in the world, as well as in the immigration experience.

And it is this love that I seek to honor with this poem—a tribute to the dead, a tribute to the living, a tribute to the power of language and love to transcend even the darkest moments of history.

I wanted to invoke all this love and life and incarnate them in the book— a book written in an “incorrect” Spanish of its Aymara influence. Although the Spanish may be incorrect in the academic context, it is correct in its presence and vitality, still in our families, enriched with beauty and hidden layers of our real mother tongue, the real vision of the cosmos, the real knowledge. There lies the power of who we are beyond the imposition, the oppression, the hypocrisy, the dehumanization, and the instrumentalization of indigeneity. The undeniable power of this love that turns itself into the shaping of the colonial language and owns it is the force that permeates, still, everything we do, everything we say, everything we are. This is my tribute to my dead and my way of integrating their words, lives, and deads into how I navigate life because of them, the ones that loved us so intensely and gave us a path, and those who will come after us and for whom I live on love.

This journey of reclaiming my language and heritage incarnates the relevance of indigenity: how love can shape and transform even the most oppressive chapters of personal and global history, leaving a lasting legacy of hope and resilience for generations to come.