Hello everyone.
This week has been a challenge. Just hours after I posted last week's debrief, I met with members of the Genera Territorios leadership team who told us our entire strategy needed to be reworked from ground zero. Videos and WhatsApp communities were too high connectivity for rural, technologically isolated areas, and there needed to be more participatory exercises that could be integrated into a daily routine. An app prototype, similar to a Duolingo for financial awareness and capacity building, would be able to be used offline and would require consistent user input. Due to a miscommunication, we believed that they wanted a detailed demonstration of the structure and function of the app, which could then be coded later by a full-time staff member (none of us have the requisite experience). However, as we found out in another meeting on Wednesday, this was not a feasible approach, so we shifted to developing a chatbot which our partners could use to discuss financial issues. At times, the miscommunications and changing expectations have become frustrating to manage, but my team really bonded and united over strategizing to meet the challenge, and we have an emerging clear division of labor that will allow us to navigate the looming challenge of high pressure product design and refinement. We have also recruited two lovely local volunteers, Isabel and Victor, who are deeply committed and excellent communicators. They will assist us with translation, cultural sensitivity, and regionally specific IT issues. We will train them in the use of AI and chatbots. After a productive meeting with the Genera Territorios staff today, I am very proud of my team and hopeful that we will be able to produce a high-quality product.
Last Sunday, we went to Teotihuacan, an indigenous urban site from the first few centuries CE. Teōtīhuacān is a Nahuatl (Aztec imperial language formerly dominant in this area) name from a millennium later, meaning "place of the owners of the elder gods." There's a lot interesting to say about this name (and a lot of the other Aztec place names around here) from a linguistics perspective, so I'm going to have to ask you to indulge me. If you have absolutely no awe and wonder in your heart (sad for you), you can skip to the bottom of the next paragraph to avoid the yap. But I will be sad forever.
If you've ever been to Mexico City or the Valley of Mexico more broadly, or studied the area's precolonial history, you've probably noticed a lot of places ending in -pan (Tlacopan), -can (Teotihuacan), or -tlan (Tenochtitlan, Amatlan). These suffixes mean "place of (preceding noun)" or "at the (preceding noun)". They are, from the perspective of indigenous people today and even a valiant Eagle Warrior at the ancient Aztec Empire's height, unitary entities that cannot be decomposed any further, but they reveal something deep about the prehistory of the Uto-Aztecan language family, a fascinating collection of related languages ranging from Nahuatl in the south to the traditional languages of the Hopi and Shoshone communities in the United States. Nearly all of the languages share one thing in common--a set of inherited suffixes that appeared between the basic stems of nouns and any further endings that they took to indicate their grammatical role. One could say that they served to indicate that a noun was a noun, though they did a bit more than that which I won't get into. In Nahuatl, we find only one such suffix, the "absolutive" suffix -tl or -tli (found in famous words like Quetzalcoatl). However, in many of the northern languages, we find not only absolutive suffixes that look like that, but also ones that look like -k, -ki, or -pi. Are these old forms that happened to be lost in Nahuatl, or innovations confined to the northern branches? The place names in -tlan/-pan/-can help us settle this mystery. -tlan is (and we can find similar elsewhere in the family) a combination of the original full form of the absolutive suffix -tl (namely -tla-) with a locational suffix -n added to it. Could it be that -pa-n and -ca-n may once have been exactly the same thing, combining the locational -n with alternative absolutive suffixes that can no longer can appear outside this specific construction? If so, perhaps, the -p- and -k- forms are original to the Uto-Aztecan common ancestor, rather than being an innovation of those newfangled northerners. God that was long. I wanted to talk about the -hua in Teotihuacan too, because that's very revealing about the history too, but I'll restrain myself. Fine.
Anyway, about my trip there, I got to climb stunning step pyramids, learn about the sacrifices to the elder gods and their role in underpinning a dualist cosmology balancing the feminine, nurturing power of the rainy season with the adversarial, masculine, survivalist life-force of the dry season, and watch my friends try disgusting-looking agave liquor. A fun time, but boy was I sunburned.
I went dancing with my friends and absolutely dominated the floor. I made a ton of progress on collating shadow education data for my other economics research project. I had multiple fascinating discussions about political strategy, systemic injustice, and deliberative democratic values with my fellow Americans abroad, as we walked from the co-living to the Impact Hub under the shadow of knotted diablitos (abandoned wires illegally connected to the central power supply. Stay far away on a rainy day). I learned how to use my own male position in public to identify and distract creepy men. I've grown so much and I'm so happy to be here.
In terms of changemaker values, I probably most channeled Ambitious and Determined this week, as the demands of my project scaled up and the time I had to do it contracted. In terms of virtues from the Crossan framework, I would say I've really leaned into Drive and Humility as I navigate this enormous landscape that awaits me. In a way, the fallibility and failures I have experienced have strengthened my sense of connection to my peers and faith in my own capacity to learn. Now let's go get 'em.
Until next time,
Peter Tarson