For the past six years, Patricia Váz-quez Gómez has worked closely with youth and families in Oregon’s Mayan Indigenous diaspora. A multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Portland and Mexico City, she collaborated on cultural events, art workshops, and Mayan language classes. Neither she nor the children were fluent in Yucatec Mayan, an Indigenous language spoken on the Yucatan peninsula, but the kids had the sound of it, which Vázquez Gómez wanted to better understand.
Considered a threatened language, the loss of Yucatec Mayan is exacerbated by migration into countries and municipalities that do not typically recognize particularities within immigrant populations (like Spanish speaking Mexican immigrants and Indigenous Mayans immigrants).
Vázquez Gómez’s latest exhibit ja’ / buuts’ / t’aan (Water / Smoke / Word) at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art pairs video recorded on the Yucatan peninsula and audio recordings of Mayan children in Oregon practicing their mother tongue.
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
PORTLAND MERCURY: This project seems interested in the idea of the preservation of the Mayan language. What got you interested in this?
PATRICIA VÁZQUEZ GÓMEZ: I don’t think that the project is addressing the preservation of languages. It’s a huge thing that I don’t have the skills or capacity to tackle. I see it more about testing the idea of small, localized remedies when there’s a lack of cultural and social support for Indigenous languages.
When I organized with the immigrant and labor rights movement, I worked with a lot of Indigenous languages speakers from Mexico and Guatemala. And I observed that migration further pushes the languages towards extinction, because when folks migrate, the languages disappear within one generation. It has a personal dimension too: I was born and raised in Mexico, speaking Spanish. For a long time I have wanted to learn an Indigenous language, and it has been difficult.
Can you tell me more about the part migration plays in the process of losing language?
In the places of origin, there’s a cultural context for Indigenous languages. They are also tied to the geography in which they exist. If you have a name for a plant or an animal, you can see them. But when people migrate that link is broken. There are also almost no incentives for people to continue using the language, particularly in the field of cultural production: literature, songwriting, filmmaking, etc.
The kids of the Mayan residents in Portland, do not speak their mother language. They know words or phrases. Indigenous folks from south of the border are also lumped into this category of Latinx or Hispanic, which doesn’t serve them, because it makes them ineligible for resources that exist to preserve native cultures.
How do you approach language preservation as an artist, that might be different than an anthropologist or linguist?
I am not an anthropologist or a linguist, and I couldn’t speak about what those disciplines do or don’t do. But art as a method allows for experimentation. It allows for taking from a diversity of tools, disciplines, methods, strategies, and putting them together into something that we call art.
Sometimes what I do looks like participatory action research. It is something that is used in other disciplines, where instead of relying on observation for gathering information, you engage with folks in actions that produce knowledge. That is how the research for this project has emerged: through the public events, prints, murals, and workshops we have organized.
For this project you have these sound recordings of Mayan speakers in the United States, but also videos that you took in communities on the Yucatan Peninsula. Can you tell me more about the significance there?
I’ve been working on this for about six years. I produced the sound recording with a group of Mayan youth who live here in Portland. They are not fluent in Yucatec Mayan, but they have been hearing the language their whole lives and can generate the diversity of tones and sounds of the language—something I have struggled with. From that observation came the idea of addressing the language as sound.
The video came from trips I did to the places of origin of the families I have worked with, mostly two towns in the Yucatan Peninsula. The three themes of water, smoke, and word came out from the history and geography of those places.
Your work can be perceived as taking on a social justice lens, what role do you see the process of creating and collaborating in art play in liberation movements?
There’s a conventional association that when we put together art and social change, the art becomes about creating visual manifestations of political statements. Sometimes organizations have been like, “Oh, you are an artist. Great. We need a poster, or we need a mural,” and that’s great. I have done that, and I believe that images that make people imagine and dream of better things play an important role.
But I also believe that can be limiting, there are other things artists can do. I’m personally interested in creating spaces where relationships are strengthened, where creativity is seen as something that we own collectively, where people feel valued, and where we learn to practice solidarity and care. I am interested in changing culture, one relationship at a time, one project at a time.
What should someone new to your work expect?
This is the first time I worked on a video and audio installation. I don’t consider myself an expert in these mediums, but I’ve gotten a lot of support. I’m very grateful, and lucky, to be part of a community of artists that support me in every way they can. It’s very exciting to see this finally coming out into the world.
ja’ / buuts’ / t’aan (Water / Smoke / Word) shows at Portland Institute of Art, 15 NE Hancock, Thurs March 13–Sat May 31, reception Sat March 22, noon-4 pm, all ages, FREE, pica.org
