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Gabriela Pérez Báez is an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Oregon, director of the University's Language Revitalization Lab, and co-director of the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages. Her research centers on linguistic diversity and strategies to sustain it, most specifically through her work documenting, analyzing, and revitalizating Zapotec languages in Mexico and her collaborative work on archives-based research for language revitalization.

Diidxazá is a Mesoamerican language belonging to the Zapotec branch of Otomanguean languages and spoken by the Binnizá in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. While it is estimated that there are around 100,000 speakers of the language, Diidxazá is largely not being learned by children. This is the result of a number of factors including discrimination, marginalization, and Spanish-only education.  

In an attempt to contribute to the sustainability of Diidxazá, I have worked on the documentation and analysis of the language since 2003 with the goal of producing an extensive dictionary of the language. This effort, as rigorous and extensive as it has been, has not been a catalyst, in and of itself, for language revitalization. However, a module of the dictionary that centered on the documentation of plants, their names and the knowledge associated with them, quickly engaged children in language revitalization.  

The project was designed to document over two hundred plant names in such a way as to identify the species designated by each name and document the interaction with these plants by the Binnizá living in the town of La Ventosa. The project was designed to be collaborative and included numerous consultations with the Binnizá members of the research team and with other members of the community including authorities. One of the objectives of the project was to make the work as visible to the broader community of La Ventosa as possible. Therefore, much of the work to process the documented plants –that is to collect and dry small samples of the plants in flower and fruit for identification and preservation– was done in the open where community members could see it. The project drew the immediate attention of children who wanted to know the names of the plants in Diidxazá and what they were used for. The project team was always surrounded by children! 

Upon seeing this, one of the community collaborators and the main knowledge bearer in the team, Fernando Sánchez López, proposed that the project find ways to share the documentation with children so that children would become engaged in understanding the many benefits that plants provide to humans, and therefore in learning about them and protecting them. In response the team developed a series of workshops and educational materials centered on the revitalization of Diidxazá through learning about plants. These workshops ran for three years from 2014 to 2017, generally once a month, and sometimes offering week-long camps during school breaks. The workshops were interrupted for a few months and restarted in March 2019 in La Ventosa.  

La Ventosa had never had a language revitalization effort before. However, the interest of children in plants motivated a long-standing effort that over three years offered dozens of children the opportunity to engage with Diidxazá for a significant portion of their childhood. The technical documentation of the Diidxazá dictionary has yet to have a fraction of the impact that the engagement with plants had for the Binnizá of La Ventosa.