CHAPTER 04
Language
Words That Carry Worlds
CHAPTER FOUR LANGUAGE
By Johnson Bryant
In New Mexico...
I noticed the Bloodline of their culture; the native languages have damn near disappeared.
Not naturally.
Not accidentally.
But under pressure.
The American melting pot wasn’t gentle.
It demanded sameness.
The King’s English or silence
Assimilate or be left behind and or erased.
Native languages were punished.
Spanish was corrected, mocked, treated like a disease.
Too Indigenous.
Too foreign.
Not “American” enough for taste.
So, elders were cornered into impossible choices.
Some were forbidden to teach their tongue.
Others became reluctant, not because they didn’t love their language, but because they loved their children and their voices.
They knew what the world was doing to accents.
The brown voices.
To people who sounded “different.”
So, they chose protection over preservation.
Silence over ridicule.
Survival over fluency.
And because of that, whole generations grew up understanding but not speaking.
Hearing the language
but never holding it fully in their mouth.
Too many young ones never became fluent
in the words that named their ancestors,
their prayers,
their way of seeing the world.
Still the language didn’t die.
It hid.
In prayers whispered low.
In kitchen conversations.
In place names that refused to change.
In Spanglish that bent the rules and made its own space.
Language in New Mexico isn’t just communication.
It’s a reminder of what’s loss.
It’s resistance.
It’s memory fighting erasure.
Every word spoken or not spoken
is proof of what could have been, of what was almost taken and what is now.
The edited culture of language.
