As an Irish immigrant, living with my multilingual family in a culturally diverse Southeast neighborhood, I am constantly aware of the daily tangle of languages surrounding us. Historically some 25-35 native languages were spoken in Oregon prior to European settlers, of which nine are still spoken fluently today. Portland’s official website lists a further fifteen dominant non-English languages of local immigrants in which the city is committed to communicate, when necessary, to support community members. Unfortunately, the endangered 90% of the world’s 7,000+ languages are not helped by such well-meaning efforts. Among the 715+ indigenous languages spoken in South and Central America, many of which are present among Portland’s immigrant communities, only Spanish makes the city’s list. 

Minority immigrant languages often disappear after one generation, according to artist Patricia Vázquez Gómez, whose new immersive video installation at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) explores the relationship between a group of Mayan youth in her home neighborhood in NE Portland with their mother tongue, maayat’aan. This Maya Peninsular/Yucatec Mayan spoken by the preteens – but not fluently– is one of sixty-eight Indigenous living languages in present-day Mexico.

At PICA, viewers are offered beanbags to sit or lie on (if they are able), immersing themselves in the unfolding sounds and images of five surrounding and overhead cinematic screens that collectively make up ja’/buuts’/t’aan: Agua/Humo/Palabra (Water/Smoke/Word). The film begins quietly with an overhead projection of a nocturnal water surface, a glimmer of light bringing the landscape into visibility. The movements of a small, winged insect send out ripples. As the light increases, rocks can be seen at the bottom of a ts’ono’ot– a rocky sinkhole filled with groundwater, that is a common natural phenomenon in the Yucatán municipalities of Maní and Dzan, where Gómez traveled to film source locations of the language.

The near silence of the opening video sequence is broken by the whispered chanting of young voices repeating the word ja’, ja’, ja’ (the maayat’aan for water). The vocal layering and repetition of words form a cacophony that overlays a background sound of water drops as the overhead film projection shows the caverns surrounding the stony rock pools. A valuable source of water in a region with no lakes or rivers, the ts’ono’ot pools hold sacred significance, representing an entrance to the underworld. 

Lying on my back, I watch the filmic play of light on the water and listen as the language is chanted and becomes prayer-like, as if it’s speaking to or emerging from the landscape. No translation is given beyond the work’s title and the meaning of many words is unintelligible to those who do not understand maayat’aan. But the experience of listening to the sounds of the language allows it to go deeper under the skin than words used as mere codes for communication.

This is the opening of a three-part 35-minute video sequence that engages in turn with ja’ (water), buuts’ (smoke) and t’aan (words). In the second sequence, we hear a loud wind-like whispering as the surrounding four screens show images of smoke rising from stony, blackened land. Trees and rocks are panned over, and one word is being repeated so many times that I start to sing along to it too. The camera shows a fire burning in a yard, the literal source of some of the smoke, and a new word is repeated more slowly, the sound of individual youth’s voices becoming intelligible. Each child chants in their own singular pitch, reciting a longer text against a vista of burning ash. 

The exhibition text notes that one of the historical anchors for this sequence was the knowledge that many of the youths’ families came from the Yucatán town of Manì, the site of an Inquisition-led burning of 5,000 Mayan idols, sacred objects, and library archive of precious texts. This culminated in a period of torture and killing of local Mayans who refused to convert to Catholicism. Vázquez Gómez was struck by the uncanny presence of fires in everyday life in the region, often a mere burning of garbage but her painterly film vignettes evocatively bridge this time gap. 

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Against these fire scenes, the repeated whispering of a word gets louder and louder like a protest chant or a school language learning exercise. The rhythm lends a sense of urgency and the screens black out momentarily before a close-up scene of burning, as the children whisper buuts’, buuts’, buuts’, the Yucatan Mayan word for smoke. The language being spoken is clearly not English or any European language. The clicking sound in some tones brings to my mind Indigenous Oregonian languages like Chinuk Wawa but there are many sounds that exceed recognition or comparison. According to Vázquez Gómez, the maayat’aan language contains 25 vowel sounds alone, five times as many as the English language.  

In the third video sequence, the nine young people are seen from overhead, lying on the stubbled dried-out summer grass. The scene appears at first to be filmed in a field but as the camera zooms out, one can see the metal fences and red brick building of a typical Portland schoolyard. This scene is overlaid with the sound of bees buzzing in their hive. There is a glimpse of their busy labor before the camera cuts to close-ups of two preteens, whispering into the ear of each other in Telephone game-like fashion. Watching this scene, it is poetically tangible that language transfer is a person-to-person act, a labor of love, carried by friends and families as much or more than any school or institutional system. This is certainly the case for these youth whose only social source of this language is their families and neighbors.

This reality of a neighborhood acting as a container for a language partly inspired Vázquez Gómez’s new work, along with her personal life experience as a Spanish speaker from Mexico, whose ancestors likely spoke an indigenous language to which she has no access. Growing up, and feeling this lack, she later gravitated toward language as material for artistic research and social engagement. Her recent attempts to learn maayat’aan reflects her long-term wish to learn an indigenous language, yet she acknowledges that she is far from fluent. 

Vázquez Gómez is neither a linguist or an anthropologist with skills associated with language revival, nor is this her primary interest. Rather, her background includes working with immigrant and labor rights movements and coming in contact with many indigenous speakers from Mexico and Guatemala. It was her maayat’aan-speaking neighbors and subsequent awareness that alerted her to how many indigenous speakers there were in her locale in NE Portland which led Vázquez Gómez to foreground the predicament of this Mayan language. 

Watching the young people in ja’/buuts’/t’aan, it is palpable that the weight of responsibility for the survival of their language rests on their small shoulders. Most have never learned to read or write in the language, a situation addressed in “Tene’kin Tanik Maaya: I speak Mayan” (2022), a previous iteration of this long-term project by Vázquez Gómez, in which she created graphic works, T-shirts, and totes with the young people who wanted to visualize their language. 

The PICA installation is the artist’s first video and audio-based work. She chose to approach the language as sound in this work so that any viewer or listener can relate to it and feel it in their body, an intuitive and potentially emotional encounter. It is wonderful to see Portland Institute for Contemporary Art providing the necessary resources for a local artist to understand this scale of work in a new medium. This investment has paid off in the form of a memorable exhibition that will leave viewers with food for thought about other lived realities among Portland’s inhabitants, about family and ancestors, future descendants, and what is at stake in the global disappearance of languages worldwide. 

In a closing video vignette, the youths crouch on the earth with their eyes closed, ear to the ground, as if listening for it to speak back. They may be far from the Yucatán town of Manì but their keen sense of listening also invokes the unheard and untold stories of the stewards of this land. Oregon’s ceded and unceded territories hold the Indigenous languages of the Multnomah, Oregon City Tumwater, Watlala, Wasco, Kathlamet, Cowlitz, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other Indigenous peoples in this region. Their histories of displacement, genocide, cultural, linguistic and spiritual suppression resonate with the questions of survival and resilience evoked by Vázquez Gómez’s work. There is pride and joy in the young faces of these Mayan descendants, as they share the language, one by one, reciting texts by contemporary maayat’aan author Wildernain Villegas-Carrillo.

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While viewers may not understand the words, the beauty of the language itself and the youths’ commitment to its survival is communicated in ways that do not need translation. This poignant and evocative film closes with the sound of breathing, reminding us that bodies keep languages alive.

Patricia Vázquez Gómez, ja’/buuts’/t’aan: Agua/Humo/Palabra (Water/Smoke/Word) is open at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) through May 31st. PICA is located at 15 NE Hancock Street. Viewing times and opening hours are available at www.pica.org