The Diablito is in the Details (Mexico City, make_sense - Week 2)
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
Please sign in
If you are a registered user on Laidlaw Scholars Network, please sign in
Sounds like you’re doing amazing stuff! Loved the writing (especially the title) and the linguistics lesson along the way. Let’s go get ‘em.
p.s. Me and Ben are now eagle eyed auditors of ‘AI for good’ projects so watch it!!! (Or if you would like we can send some of the work by our think tank to help guide any AI for public good discussions)
Oh heck yeah, please share with us!!
I hope you're having a lovely day.
Peter, this is an excellent reflection. You capture particularly well what leadership under uncertainty can involve: absorbing disappointing feedback, acknowledging the limits of an initial approach, reorganising as a team and maintaining momentum as the available time contracts. Your observation that fallibility has strengthened both your relationships and your confidence in your capacity to learn is especially thoughtful. It provides a convincing connection between drive and humility.
As the project develops, I would encourage you to reflect on whether the experience represents changing stakeholder expectations, an initial miscommunication, or a process through which the team is gradually discovering the actual needs and constraints of prospective users. What might you do differently at the beginning of a similar project?
The chatbot also raises some important questions about inclusive and responsible design: connectivity, data privacy, financial misinformation, accessibility, user testing and longer-term ownership. I would be interested to hear how local users, and Isabel and Victor in particular, can become co-designers of the intervention rather than only helping the team adapt a product after its design.
I was also delighted to read that you went dancing — and dominated the floor! Alongside the project learning, it sounds as though you are challenging yourself, developing strong friendships and becoming increasingly confident in an unfamiliar environment. Your reflection on using your position to help friends feel safer in public also shows a thoughtful awareness of how leadership and allyship can operate through small, situational actions.
The linguistic interlude was characteristically magnificent. I am mildly disappointed that we were denied the analysis of -hua. Maybe next time :)
Hi!! Thank you so much for reaching out. I think I'd put it in the category of an initial miscommunication due to the fairly inevitable and honestly justifiable wariness of stakeholders introducing outsiders to a vulnerable community. I honestly am not sure I would do anything differently, other than asking more clarifying questions and attempting to make a one-on-one, informal connection first (especially about academic literature on poverty and development) because I am strongest in that environment.
And yeah I'd love to talk about -hua. For clarity, it's pronounced -wa and all of the related suffixes in other Uto-Aztecan languages are spelled that way, Nahuatl is just written with a spelling system closely imitating 1500s colonial Mexican Spanish. We're stuck with it. Basically, the descendants of Proto-Uto-Aztecan **-wa: are found filling two functions throughout the family. First, they are markers of nouns possessed alienably (that is, the possessor could lose or sell them freely, unlike a body part or blood relative) by other nouns in a sentence.
Nahuatl example:
Cihua:-tl = wife
no-cihua:-uh (uh = reduced form of original hua) = my-wife
Eudeve (California) example:
no-chin-wa = my-cotton
(From: https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/stable/3519714?seq=1)
Additionally, they are regularly used to form "derived verbs of possession": when suffixed to a noun, they form verbs with the meaning "having Noun". Usually the descendant of the **-wa: suffix in a particular language that does this job is less likely to be shortened than the descendant used on nouns modified by their possessors.
That these suffixes are etymologically related seems to me pretty unquestionable. The question of whether the suffix originally indicated a possessed noun and then became used for verb formation, or visa versa, is a very intriguing one, because we can find examples of suffixes used in the derivation of nouns being repurposed to produce verbs meaning "have/make/do Noun" (rGyalrongic antipassive prefixes come to mind), and equally we can find examples of suffixes that transform nouns into "have Noun" type verbs becoming the dominant way to talk about nouns being possessed (Wichita, if I recall). I don't have enough evidence to say.
(From: https://www.academia.edu/35118474/Derived_Verbs_of_Possession_in_Uto_Aztecan_Reconstructions_and_Paths_of_Change)