Maximilliano

Tu'un Savi (Mixtec) Guerrero, Mexico

Mixtec is a group of closely related languages belonging to the Oto-Manguean family and spoken across the Mexican states of Guerrero, Oaxaca, and parts of Puebla. The Mixtec people refer to themselves as Na Savi (or one of its many variants), "the people of the rain." They refer to their homeland as Ñuu Savi, "the village of the rain," and they refer to their language as Tu'un Savi, "the language of the rain."

The ancient Mixtec were master agriculturalists who employed land terracing and irrigation throughout their mountainous homeland. In recent times, the twin impacts of NAFTA and climate change have forced massive numbers of Mixtec farmers off their land in search of wage labor in the North American cities.

There are estimated to be thousands of Na Savi in New York City who have arrived over the last twenty years. For the most part, they have found employment in restaurants, delis, and food delivery, where they contend with some of the most difficult working conditions in the city.

For many years, Maximilliano Bazan served as New York's primary Mixtec interpreter in the court system. He was often called upon to interpret varieties of his language that were more different from his own than French is from Italian, yet he was the only hope for monolingual speakers of Tu'un Savi to be understood in the halls of justice. Maximilliano collaborated with the Endangered Language Alliance to record several traditional stories and narratives about the transformation of life back home.