Beasts of the Field

An anthropological linguist leaves home on December 28, 1985, for three months of field work in Barrio Guadalupe, a hillside community on the outskirts of a bustling Mexican town in Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border. Motozintla is home to the handful of Mocho speakers who, in spite of a nearly total transition to the cultural milieu of rural Mexico, still retain their Mayan language. It is Mocho she has come to document, and she intends to do so while living in the household of don Juan Méndez Matías, premier speaker of Mocho. Into a compound of two adobe houses, the Méndez family welcomes dona Laura, whose fluent Spanish and general familiarity with rural Central American lifeways disguise her genuinely alien views about people, animals, and life. Over the several weeks that follow, we discover and rediscover the extent of the resulting conflicts of perception and response. For the linguist, it is the events involving animals that produce an unanticipated epiphany on fieldwork itself.