New Mexico Is Losing a Form of Spanish Spoken Nowhere Else on Earth

Simon Romero

When the old regulars gather at Cynthia Rael-Vigil’s coffee shop in Questa, a village nestled in the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains, they sip lattes and lavender lemonade and gossip in Spanish.

Someone from Mexico City or Madrid sitting at the next table could be hard-pressed to follow their rare dialect. But Spanish speakers from four centuries ago might have recognized the unusual verb conjugations — if not the unorthodox pronunciations and words drawn from English and languages indigenous to North America. 

For more than 400 years, these mountains have cradled a form of Spanish that today exists nowhere else on Earth. Even after the absorption of their lands into the United States in the 19th century, generations of speakers somehow kept the dialect alive, through poetry and song and the everyday exchanges on the streets of Hispanic enclaves scattered throughout the region.

...New Mexican Spanish is often described as a sampling of 17th century Golden Age Spanish imported directly from the Old World, and somehow meticulously safeguarded in isolation. That depiction may include kernels of truth, linguists say, but the origins and development of the dialect, which they consider an offshoot of the Spanish of northern Mexico, are far more nuanced and complex than the myth.

It is thought to have crystallized around the late 16th century, when a linguistically and ethnically mixed colonizing expedition put down stakes here as part of the European competition for the New World — years before the first permanent English settlement in North America was established in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia.

...The dialect has managed to survive for the nearly two centuries since the United States took possession of New Mexico in 1848, making it the oldest continuously transmitted variety of Spanish in the country. Still, in an era when immigration from Latin America has boosted the number of hispanohablantes in the United States to more than 41 million, the fortunes of New Mexican Spanish — and the region where it once flourished — have been going in another direction...more

                                 

Economic forces have fueled an exodus from the aging northern villages made up of crumbling adobe homes. Other threats — such as the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history,

What never seems to be told is, one of the "economic forces" that has "fueled an exodus" is the federal government itself.

The feds have taken away their land and water, and disrupted centuries of tradition.

It is not just their language that is being lost. Through federal ownership or control of the land and water, the entire history and culture of this area is on the chopping block. Communities have been crippled, families torn asunder, and small businesses destroyed. It is a shameful blight upon the federal enterprise.