Nahuatl Nations: Language Revitalization and Semiotic Sovereignty in Indigenous Mexico

Nahuatl Nations is a linguistic ethnography that explores the political relations between those Indigenous communities of Mexico that speak the Nahuatl language and the Mexican Nation that claims it as an important national symbol. Author Magnus Pharao Hansen studies how this relation has been shaped by history and how it plays out today in Indigenous Nahua towns, regions, and educational institutions, and in the Mexican diaspora.

Based on long-term fieldwork in several Nahuatl speaking communities in Central Mexico, Hansen uses a combination of methods from ethnohistory, sociolinguistics, anthropology and ethnography to study the political importance of Nahuatl in different periods and places, and for different persons. He suggests that the complicated political relations between State, Nation and Nahua communities can be understood through the concept of 'semiotic sovereignty', which refers to a community's ability to manage its own semiotic resources, including its own language, and the cultural practices that constitute it as a political community. He argues that Indigenous languages are likely to remain vital as long as they used as languages of political community, and they also protect the community's sovereignty by functioning as a barrier that restricts access to the participation for outsiders. Semiotic sovereignty therefore becomes a key concept for understanding how Indigenous communities can maintain both their political and linguistic vitality. While the Mexican Nation seeks to expropriate Indigenous semiotic resources in order to improve its brand on an international marketplace, Indigenous communities may employ them in resistance to state domination.