Mixco, Mauricio J.

<p>A summer job planted a seed that later lead Mauricio Mixco to devote almost 40 years to documenting American Indian languages in danger of extinction.</p>
<p>Before entering college, Mixco taught Spanish to Peace Corps volunteers in New Mexico; he also went with them to an Apache Indian reservation, teaching them to work with native populations. Along the way, he learned some of the native language. </p>
<p>After those few weeks, Mixco, a native of El Salvador who became a United States citizen when he was 19, headed to the University of California-Berkeley, where he planned to major in French and Spanish literature.</p>
<p>However, after taking a few courses in linguistics at Berkeley, Mixco decided to change his major, even though it meant an extra year of study. His wife, who was expecting their first child, “encouraged me to do what would make me happy, and I did, and never regretted it,” said Mixco, who at times worked three jobs to support his family while he earned first an undergraduate degree and later a doctorate in linguistics.</p>
<p>Mixco, now a professor emeritus of linguistics of the University of Utah, describes the field as “trying to uncover the hidden patterns in daily speech. … There is a systematicity that can be discovered through analysis, but it also has to be discovered through very accurate observation and description of the actual use of the language.”</p>
<p>As a doctoral student, he began to document Kiliwa, a language spoken in Baja California. From 1966 to 1986, he spent his summers documenting Kiliwa and other languages spoken in Baja California. Then, at a colleague’s request, in 1993 he began a study of Mandan, a Siouxan language spoken in North Dakota. </p>
<p>Like Kiliwa, Mandan is in danger of extinction because younger generations aren’t learning it, Mixco said. All of the Kiliwa speakers he worked with now are dead, while there is only one person who speaks fluent Mandan, he said.</p>
<p>In about 2000, he began to work in Utah with the Shoshoni language, arranging to transcribe and translate the work of a colleague, Wick R. Miller, who in the 1960s and 1970s “taped 120 tapes of narratives, of stories, myths and legends and personal recollections of the history of the various communities within that language group,” said Mixco, who retired in 2010.</p>
<p>He and his wife, Teresa, are Saint Catherine of Siena Newman Center parishioners and have been active in the Catholic Hispanic community. </p>
<p>“Whatever work we’ve done here in the diocese ... has always been with Teresa as a partner, and in fact as a leader,” he said. “She has been my inspiration all my life, and the work that we’ve done together was really under her motivation.”</p>
<p>When the couple came to Utah in 1973, the Spanish-speaking community was quite small but growing, “and their needs within the Catholic Church were different from the needs within the general community because of the culture and the language, which kept them from participating fully in religion,” he said.</p>

<p>Small wonder that experts such as Mixco, professor of anthropological linguistics at the U, are scurrying to identify endangered languages before they are lost. A subcommittee of the Linguistic Society of America ranks the degree of danger faced by such languages. Just as triage is used by emergency-room doctors to rank patients, the subcommittee prioritizes languages in order to Mauricio Mixco and the rescue of endangered languages mine those that require the most immediate research. Linguists then go out into the field in an attempt to preserve the language through recordings, documentation, and analysis.</p>
<p>Mixco is well suited to such work. Born in El Salvador, he moved early on to California, where he served as translator for his mother, a garment worker. “I had to go back and forth between two cultures,” he explains, and, as a result, unlike many children of refugees who assimilate into their new culture and disdain their native tongue, Mixco maintained his facility in both English and Spanish. He also developed an ease for learning other languages.</p>
<p>Mixco excelled in school, and after a semester at New Mexico State University, he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley. During those college years, his career path took shape. He taught Spanish to Peace Corps volunteers, spent two weeks at an Apache reservation (where he discovered an ability to imitate the language), and took his first linguistics course. Mixco was hooked. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. at Berkeley, specializing in Native American linguistics, a field in which native languages are described scientifically, their historical roots traced in order to recover knowledge about native prehistory.</p>
<p>While working towards his doctorate, Mixco accepted a summer field-work position for graduate students that entailed documenting endangered languages. It was a defining moment when he drove south to Mexico—the beginning of a professional commitment and a lifetime of adventure.</p>
<p>Short and stocky, Mixco may not be central casting’s Indiana Jones. But for years, from 1965 to 1993, he took off for two or three months at a time for high adventure. He studied the Mandan language in North Dakota for five years, and spent many more years doing field research in the Baja Peninsula of Mexico. At the beginning, he says, it was “naïveté” and a grant from the Survey of California Indian Languages that enticed him to drive over mountain passes (“all dirt, sometimes mud”) to seek the small, isolated villages of hardscrabble existences and little-known languages. But as trust was developed and stories were told, the relationships and the fascination with the culture, as well as the academic thrill of linguistic discovery, deepened Mixco’s commitment.</p>
<p>During this time he met 80-year-old Rufino Ochurte, whom Mixco describes as “one of the most interest ing people I have met in my life.” Ochurte lived in the Arroyo del Leon region, some one hundred miles south of the United States border, and was one of only 12 people who spoke the now-extinct Kiliwa language. Based on extensive interviews conducted over several years, Mixco wrote Kiliwa Texts, with the subtitle, “When I Have Donned My Crest of Stars,” a quote taken from an interview with Ochurte (see side bar).</p>
<p>Kiliwa Texts contains stories that are invaluable both for their thorough linguistic analysis of the language and for their documentation of the beliefs, traditions, and social and practical aspects of the culture. “With Ochurte’s death,” Mixco says, “his world, and the world of his ancestors, died with him, to be preserved only in these pages.” There are myths and legends relating to creation, migration, war, constellations of the stars, and death, as well as ethnographic texts describing such aspects of the culture as the mourning ceremony, dances, games, foods, advice to youth, crime and punishment, and personal narratives.</p>