This makes the suppression of Zoque language all the more painful. Sánchez’ mother did not speak Spanish at all, and her father, who she says “was less timid about speaking poorly,” spoke only a little. But Sánchez started to pick it up at home from older siblings, then to study it when she started school. She grew up amid institutional and cultural pressures that discouraged the use of Indigenous languages, and her poems often address the forces exerted against her language and identity. In “Jesus Never Understood My Grandmother’s Prayers” she writes:
The Archangel Michael never listened to her
my grandmother’s prayers were sometimes blasphemies
jukis’tyt she said and the pain stopped
patsoke she yelled and time passed beneath her bed
Sánchez’ first attempts at written poetry were in Spanish. While studying education at a university in the nearby state of Tabasco, she joined a writing group by accident, thinking it was a reading circle. Poetry turned out to be a natural fit, perhaps because it was part of her heritage. In a 2021 essay for World Literature Today Sánchez notes how poetry is part of the Zoque people’s “most solemn rituals, such as the call for rain, dances to ask for abundant harvests, prayers to the mountains and to heal the sick.” As a child she occasionally memorized verses she overheard from her grandfather, a healer.
She has since dedicated much of her energy to promoting the use of Zoque, working as a bilingual radio host and developing Zoque-language elementary school curriculums. But her writing is a significant contribution in itself. Zoque is an ancient language, but does not contain a surviving written tradition as such. A standardized Zoque orthography is even now being defined by linguists and solidified as writers, such as Sánchez, put it into use. Many of the poems in “How to Be a Good Savage” have been significantly updated from previous iterations, largely because written Zoque itself continues to be updated. This is no mean feat, as differences between variations of the language spoken from one Zoque community to another can be more drastic than the differences, for example, between Spanish spoken in Mexico and Argentina.
“How to Be a Good Savage” is thus a significant work in more ways than one. It is the first Zoque entry in Milkweed’s Seedbank series, a collection of writing mostly from Indigenous authors intended to protect the diversity of human language. The goal of the project is to “publish books that preserve or introduce different and in some cases disappearing ways of being in the world,” said Daniel Slager, the publisher at Milkweed who conceived of the series.
In “Mokaya,” Sánchez writes: “I had my own gods who taught me to curse/in a gagged and wounded tongue.” Despite the harm done to her language by centuries of suppression, Sánchez’ poetry can clearly stand on its own. But by putting writing in the Zoque language on equal footing — literally and figuratively — with English and Spanish, “How to Be a Good Savage” may be one small step toward repairing the damage.