Multilingual design
Dialogue with Tajëëw Díaz Robles
Mixe from Tlahuitoltepec (Oaxaca), she is part of Colmix and holds a master's degree in social anthropology. Her research has focused mainly on the indigenous normative systems of communities in Oaxaca, communal textile identity, and digital activism processes of indigenous languages.
Q: Why designing from other lexicons?
In all areas we can think of, whether it's design, language, or forms of organization, diversity enriches. However, the dominant system imposes languages, states, and consumption patterns, and that system undermines diversity.
Colmix is a collective that arises from the concern of having a space to conduct research on our communities. The joke was that hopefully there would be a "College of Mexico" (Colmex) to study issues of the region and the Mixe language; and Colmix is the exercise of actively designing these spaces. Through these 12 years of this interdisciplinary and interregional articulation, we have worked on many of our areas of interest. Julio César Gallardo Vásquez is a biologist and cartographer; and his maps invite us to other ways of reading and seeing our own territory. With a background in linguistics, Tonantzin Díaz and Yásnaya A. Gil conduct research on the Mixe language, and are also involved in training more people interested in grammar and didactics of teaching the language.
One of the problems we have identified in the work we do, is the rapid loss of the language. Therefore we have worked a lot on creating materials for teaching and learning Mixe. There is an important exercise of designing, in the most basic sense of the word, didactic materials and illustrations to make them appealing to new generations.
We are pushing for nanoky, our own publishing seal; and exploring other logics of technological collaboration, for example, with StoryWeaver, an Indian platform that has a translation interface so that children can have illustrated stories in their own languages.
Translation in this sense has been a key tool for Colmix's work. Not only do we want to share our traditional stories, but in Mixe you can also tell stories from other peoples and territories, and you can create them in all possible genres.
When we think of design, we think of designing tools and technologies. Of course we would like to have technological infrastructure localized to Mixe, but right now, we are at a point where we must take advantage and adapt what already exists; and privilege spaces for exchange and self-training to imagine and create our own technologies in the near future. We've gained valuable insights from global experiences, particularly in recent years, we have learned from the Maori perspective on technological and data sovereignty, which has been very important for our own reflection on the use of technologies1 and for talking about common licenses2.
We must have the ability to imagine, and that is what we do at Colmix, and suddenly, in that exercise of imagination, ideas and projects are materialized. It is a constant process of designing and creating what we want, how we want it, and with whom we collaborate. As a collective, we recognize ourselves as part of the result of a fairly broad process in the region, and we hope to continue strengthening a process of territorial, communal, and epistemic autonomy.
1 Robles Díaz, Tajëëw (2023). Alexa, amënyï*. Some considerations about the inclusion of indigenous languages in speech technologies. Feminist Artificial Intelligence: towards a research agenda for Latin America and the Caribbean.
2 Robles Díaz, Tajëëw and Gallardo Vásquez Julio César (2024). Some reflections on creation, authorship and ownership from a mixe experience. Evil that lasts a hundred years: Seven essays on collective creation against copyright in Mexico”.
Figure A: Map of Oaxaca, a state composed of 18 nations. Elaboration: Colmix, 2019.
Figure B: Map of the Mixe region in Oaxaca, shows the percentage of the population over 5 years old that speaks Mixe. Elaboration: Colmix 2019.
Q: What is the role of communities in these design processes?
First of all, the mere existence of the community is relevant, the sum of these biological, demographic, social, economic and cultural processes that lead to the existence of a society. And the fact that we were born in that specific community, and that in that community we learned our language, we enjoyed the festivities and we grew in that spirituality; it makes us think all the time about our work in relation to the community. We always think that what we do is so that children in the community can have books to read, or so that teachers have a choice of other teaching materials.
We position ourselves in the community, but we have no community authority. In some communities or regions, you can say "this is community-based," but in reality, your community power is not because you go and consult the assembly —as a governing body— for every activity you do. Belonging to the community marks your practice and makes your positioning, or the point of enunciation of what you do, community-based. I think it is important not to lose sight of this when we talk about community, because suddenly there is an idealization that everything is done through assemblies. But these processes are extremely complex, the assemblies are prepared, and it is not only the people's time, but also the material conditions that their organization implies. However, at the same time, these decision-making processes educate those of us who are part of these communities, which means that ultimately we always think about how our work will be received by the community.
Q: How to design a multilingual world and what technologies do we have for it?
The world is already multilingual, but that this is visible to everyone, that is another matter. We have always had diversity, although there have always been systems that seek to make diversity disappear. Now we seem to be at a moment when the more capitalist the world is, the easier it is to administer a uniform humanity that speaks a single language and consumes the same.
When we think about technologies at Colmix, we first think about writing as a technology. Mixe has been written for thousands of years, we can draw a line between the Epi-Olmec writing and our contemporary writing. Some Mayan collectives are now taking up glyph writing to write the language as it is spoken now, but I think writing as a technology adapts to the present. In Mixe, specifically, there is a record of writing the Mixe language with the alphabetical system since the colonial period. And in the late 70s, an organized group of mixe people decided to appropriate and reframe the writing of Mixe, as a tool to enhance autonomies and self-education. They had advice from scholars of phonology to decide how to write the language with the alphabet, and made practical decisions about representing certain sounds using umlauts, for example.
Our approach is that we need all languages to have all the tools to continue enjoying them. We need more programmers, typographers, pedagogues and linguists to continue with our work. Yásnaya A. Gil has mentioned in some texts, talking about indigenous languages, or the speakers of these languages; that it is not that we like to resist, that hopefully we could just enjoy and stop talking in terms of resistance, because that would mean that the systems of oppression of this diversity no longer exist. We're not there yet, but let's imagine it. And by imagining it, we also focus on what we want to build, a moment when there will be generations literate in Mixe, who will learn Spanish as a second language, or who will be balanced bilinguals because no language will be excluded, discriminated against, or considered less useful.