Tim Tai, Senior Photographer

Nahuatl, the language that was spoken by the Aztecs, is now part of the Whitney Humanities Center’s “Working Group” programs. 

Nahuatl being part of the Whitney Humanities Center means that both faculty and staff now have a space where they can explore and learn Modern Nahuatl. The News spoke with the coordinators of the program and an expert of Nahuatl, who all expressed their excitement for the expansion of indigenous language programs at Yale. 

“I was learning Nahuatl at Brown for two years, and once I was accepted into the PhD program here after taking some time off, I wanted to  have the dedicated time to learn Nahuatl again,” wrote Alexa De La Fuente GRD ’30, a Graduate student at the Department of American Studies, who along with Ilianna Vásquez ’28, a Graduate student at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, serves as the coordinator of the program. 

Since Yale does not have a designated Nahuatl course, the first and only indigenous language offered being Cherokee, De la Fuente was connected with Vásquez who helped her navigate Yal’’s linguistic resources and obtain the necessary funds to pursue her study in Nahuatl. Soon after, Vásquez and De La Fuente decided to create a sustained space for the collaborative learning and interdisciplinary engagement with Nahuatl and Nahua culture. This initiative evolved into the Nahuatl Working Group program, which held its first official meeting on Oct. 25.

The Whitney Humanities Center provides funding for an interdisciplinary, discipline-based Working Group that brings together faculty, researchers and students from across the humanities.

Yale has previously offered a summer Nahuatl program. From 2009 to 2017, Yale, in collaboration with the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, IDIEZ, a Mexican non-profit organization that focuses on the teaching, research and revitalization of Nahuatl, offered a six week summer program that provided pedagogical training for indigenous instructors. 

“Pretty much every university in the United States that teaches Nahuatl, they’re actually contracting with us [IDIEZ] one way or another to do it, and the program is owned by that university, and we supply the teachers” explained Professor John Sullivan, the co-founder of IDIEZ and the current director of its summer program.

Vásquez explained that both De La Fuente and herself have taken IDIEZ courses in the past and noted that working with their instructors “was incredibly inspiring.” 

De La Fuente and Vásquez also noted that they draw from IDIEZ’s instructional resources, which bridges the linguistic and cultural components of learning Nahuatl and which includes the pedagogical strategy of full emergence. 

The program’s main objective is to learn and advocate for Nahuatl instruction as a group. Thus, a typical session might include reviewing vocabulary and grammar, reading excerpts in Nahuatl, discussing cultural contexts and discussing the group’s “concerted effort advocating for Nahuatl sources and building connections beyond Yale,” explained De La Fuente and Vásquez. 

De La Fuente and Vásquez also pointed to the Departments of Spanish & Portuguese, History of Art, American Studies, Classics and History of Art — which includes Dr. Allison Caplan, a History of Art scholar and a former IDIEZ student — as being instrumental in the development of the Nahuatl Working Group in addition to the support of the Native American Cultural Center, RITM, WGSS and the Whitney Humanities Center itself. 

“Learning Nahuatl deepens students’ connection to Indigenous perspectives, offering insight into worldviews that are often marginalized in mainstream narrative,” wrote Vásquez and De La Fuente in a joint statement. “It also fosters empathy and respect for the cultural complexity and resilience of Indigenous communities.” 

De La Fuente and Vásquez also noted that there is no formal syllabus and that the group aims to operate on “collaborative learning.” They further explained that the curriculum they have been taught cannot be separated from the culture, traditions and beliefs of the Nahuatl people they are learning from and that the Working Group was created with that in mind. 

Vásquez and De La Fuente also expressed their hope to expand the program and possibly make it into a structured class.

Sullivan further noted that Nahuatl’s survival and flourishing requires its expansion “beyond the family, the cornfield and the market,” and into new avenues such as Higher Education. Sullivan explains that in both Mexico and the US, universities typically do not employ indigenous people to teach their languages and cultures, let alone to offer content courses in their languages or carry out research on indigenous languages and cultures and publish their findings in those languages.

“Each language provides its speakers with a unique set of tools for apprehending, organizing,

interpreting and critiquing the problems that we all face as human beings.” said Sullivan. When a University like Yale hires professors who have gone through the same Western Education, and who teach, conduct research and publish in a single language, it creates what we could term ‘academic incest.’ This situation seriously limits Yale’s ability to solve human problems.” 

Any interested Yale student, faculty or community member of any level can join by filling out the form found at the Nahuatl Working Group page. 

ELSHADAY TEKESTE