Questa, New Mexico.— When old-timers gather at Cynthia Rael-Vigil’s cafe in Questa, New Mexico, a town nestled in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, they sip lattes and lavender lemonade while gossiping in Spanish.
If a visitor from Madrid or Mexico City were sitting at the next table, they would have difficulty understanding your strange dialect. But Spanish-speakers four centuries ago would have recognized the unusual verb conjugations, though perhaps not the unorthodox pronunciations or words of English and Native American origin.
For more than 400 years, these mountains have welcomed a type of Spanish that today does not exist anywhere else on the planet. Even after its lands were absorbed by the United States in the 19th century, generations of speakers have somehow kept this dialect alive in poetry, song, and everyday conversation on the streets of the Hispanic enclaves that are scattered throughout. the region.
Just a few decades ago, the New Mexican dialect was still at the forefront of Spanish-language media in the United States, featured on television shows like the nationally broadcast variety show Val de la O in the 1960s. Balladeers like Al Hurricane coddled the dialect in their songs. But those elements, as well as the dazzling array of Spanish-language newspapers that once flourished in northern New Mexico, have largely disappeared.
Places where the melodic sounds of the dialect can still occasionally be heard, like Rael-Vigil’s cafeteria, are rare. In places like Alburqueque, New Mexico’s largest city, the dialect is being eclipsed by the Spanish of a new wave of migrants, especially from Chihuahua in northern Mexico.
At the same time, there are questions about whether the rural communities that for centuries nurtured New Mexican Spanish can last much longer in the face of a myriad of economic, cultural, and climatic challenges.
“Our unique Spaniard is at risk of dying,” said Rael-Vigil, 68, who traces his ancestry to a member of the 1598 expedition that claimed New Mexico as one of the outermost domains of the Spanish Empire. “When a treasure like this is lost, I don’t think we realize it’s gone forever.”
New Mexican Spanish speakers in Questa, a town of about 1,700 near the state border with Colorado, tend to be 50 or older. Even in her family, Rael-Vigil sees the language fade: her 11-year-old grandson speaks almost no Spanish at all.
“He has no interest,” he said. “Kids his age are internet masters and that’s all in English. Sometimes I wonder, didn’t my generation do our part to keep the language alive?
I grew up in an adobe house in Ribera, a town near the Pecos River, and we spoke a little New Mexican Spanish, enough to make ourselves understood, though not as splendidly as some of my classmates. Some of my oldest memories are listening to my grandmother conversing in the dialect, while she flipped tortillas with her fingers on a wood stove.
Despite being born in New Mexico and having spent most of her life in the state, my grandmother barely spoke English. Now she is gone and by losing her and her generation, her region also loses a linguistic treasure that has been heard for centuries.
New Mexican Spanish is often described as a sample of the Spanish Golden Age (17th century) language, imported directly from the Old World and somehow protected by isolation. According to linguists, that description may include some truth, but the origins and development of the dialect—which they view as a descendant of northern Mexican Spanish—are far more complex and nuanced than myth.
It is believed to have crystallized around the end of the 16th century, when a linguistically and ethnically mixed colonizing expedition prevailed in this region as part of the European competition for the New World, years before the first settlement was established in the United States. Standing Englishman, at Jameston, Virginia, in 1607.
Among the colonizers were Europeans from Spain, Portugal and Greece but also people born in Mexico of mixed indigenous, European, African and indigenous lineage who are believed to be Tlaxcalans and spoke Nahuatl, the common language in the Aztec Empire.
The settlers relied on supply caravans known as conductas to maintain links with Mexico City. But the small colony would be completely cut off from the outside world for periods of several years, leading to comparisons with places in the Andean highlands or southern Chile, where Spanish evolved in similar isolation.
Damián Vergara Wilson, a University of New Mexico scholar specializing in the state’s unique dialect, said he compares the northern suburban settlement of the Spanish Empire to a space colony. “What if we went to Mars in a spacecraft and lost contact with other speakers?” Wilson said. “That is what happened here. There was very minimal contact.”
While speakers of the dialect can usually hold a conversation with people who speak more common Spanish, those who still preserve New Mexican can sound considerably different. (Linguists often call the traditional New Mexican Spanish dialect or Upper Rio Grande Region Spanish dialect, in contrast to the more Mexican-influenced southern New Mexico Spanish.)
In the places where it took root, in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, speakers use words like flying mouse for bat and sierra chicken to refer to turkey or turkey.
They incorporated indigenous words such as chimal (shield) from Nahuatl, chimayó (obsidian flake) from Tewa and cíbolo (búgalo) from Zuni, as well as bisnes (business or business), crismes (Christmas or Christmas), sanamagón (despicable person, undesirable) and many others from English.
Speakers conjugate creatively, employing peculiar endings on verbs, and tend to aspirate the “s” sound in many words, somewhat similar to the “h” sound in English or the “j” sound in Spanish. For example, they would say “I don’t know where the box is” instead of “I don’t know where the house is”.
Lens Nils Beké, a linguist who completed his doctoral studies at the University of New Mexico this year, was previously at Ghent University in Belgium—known for its strong Spanish linguistics program—and told colleagues about the dialect he had found in New Mexico.
“They seemed stunned by everything,” said Beké, who cycled between remote towns to conduct field research on New Mexican Spanish and often camped out under the stars.
“I was like, ‘Wow, do they do this?’ ‘Wow, do they do that?’”
The dialect has managed to survive almost two centuries since the United States took possession of New Mexico in 1848, making it the oldest variety of Spanish transmitted without interruption. Yet at a time when migration from Latin America has boosted the number of Spanish-speakers in the United States to more than 41 million people, the fate of New Mexican Spanish—and the region where it thrived—has taken a different turn.
Economic forces have fueled an exodus from northern towns made up of crumbling and aging adobe houses. Other threats such as the largest forest fire in New Mexico history, which ripped through the Hispanic homeland a year ago, and the worst drought since before the Spanish settled, have revealed the fragility of these remote traditional places. in the face of extreme weather exacerbated by global warming.
Despite the difficulties, some people in the region try to save the dialect.
Julie Chacón, executive director of Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area, an organization in Alamosa, Colorado, grew up speaking New Mexico Spanish in the nearby town of Capulín, where the dialect came across the state line from southern Colorado in the XIX century. She now collects oral stories from old people and puts together workbooks to teach the dialect. She also runs a children’s camp that focuses on the traditions of the region.
Daniel Lee Gallegos and his band Sangre Joven from Las Vegas, New Mexico, host Facebook jam sessions for the New Mexican diaspora and Carlos Medina, comedian and musician, revels in the playful creativity of the dialect.
“The language will totally survive,” said Larry Torres, a linguist who writes a bilingual column for the Taos News and the Sante Fe New Mexican. “It may not be the same language our ancestors knew, but we are using a 15th-century form of Spanish with 21st-century English.”
Others are not so optimistic about the dialect’s chances of survival, at least not in the form in which it has been recognizable for centuries.
Mark Waltermire, a professor of linguistics at New Mexico State University, said he expects New Mexican Spanish to survive for at least another two decades, if only because there are still people in their 50s who speak it.
But he said that beyond that time, it’s hard to see a future for the dialect. However, that does not mean that Spanish is going to disappear in New Mexico. “It’s just being replaced,” he said, referring to the arrival of new migrants from Mexico, “with another type of Spanish.”
