The great majority of Mexicans and Mexican Americans reside in a challenging environment. Despite having some Native ancestry, we live in a region known as “Nepantla” by Chicana philosopher Gloria Anzaldua, a liminal region between European and Native cultures that were forced to mix to create us.

The name “Nepantla” originates from the Nahuatl language, which was utilized as an Indigenous lingua franca for roughly a century after the Conquest by the Catholic Church and the government of New Spain. Nahuatl is currently widely spoken throughout what is now Mexico and Mesoamerica. Many Chicanx people, who are Mexican Americans, consider themselves to be the heirs of the pre-colonial Nahua heritage, and we have studied the language of one of our predecessors as we have done this.

I have followed Yásnaya Aguilar’s counsel as a researcher of Classical Nahuatl and used that language to better grasp the goals of my fellow Mexican American writers of speculative fiction.

Time was relative to the Nahuas (associated peoples include the Mexica/”Aztec” and Tlaxcalteca) prior to the Spanish invasion. Although there are past and future tenses in Nahuatl, there was no single word for past or future in the original dialect. It was distance that was important.

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Futurism in Mexico and America

The great majority of Mexicans and Mexican Americans reside in a challenging environment. Despite having some Native ancestry, we live in a region known as “Nepantla” by Chicana philosopher Gloria Anzaldua, a liminal region between European and Native cultures that were forced to mix to create us.

The name “Nepantla” originates from the Nahuatl language, which was utilized as an Indigenous lingua franca for roughly a century after the Conquest by the Catholic Church and the government of New Spain. Nahuatl is currently widely spoken throughout what is now Mexico and Mesoamerica. Many Chicanx people, who are Mexican Americans, consider themselves to be the heirs of the pre-colonial Nahua heritage, and we have studied the language of one of our predecessors as we have done this.

I have followed Yásnaya Aguilar’s counsel as a researcher of Classical Nahuatl and used that language to better grasp the goals of my fellow Mexican American writers of speculative fiction.

Time was relative to the Nahuas (associated peoples include the Mexica/”Aztec” and Tlaxcalteca) prior to the Spanish invasion. Although there are past and future tenses in Nahuatl, there was no single word for past or future in the original dialect. It was distance that was important.

Written by: Name Style