Not for Us

by Victoria Richard

“They didn’t do that for us.” 

I am standing with my father on the ninth deck of a cruise ship when it hits me. Maybe the party deck of a cruise ship is an odd place to have a revelation, but I had an empty stomach and an espresso martini in hand. 

“But they should have,” I replied firmly. Never mind who, in fact, who they are. 

I am recounting the day to my parents. I have not seen them since the night before, my boyfriend and I having boarded a ferry at 7:45 that morning to reach the mainland of Mexico. Now that we are back on board, I am telling them what Christmas paid for. 

Asher and I had scrambled that morning, stuffing sunscreen and water into his backpack and shutting the door firmly on the room we had inhabited for the last day. Skipping the elevator and speed walking to breakfast, my head screamed for caffeine. According to my phone, we had thirty minutes to eat, drink, and find our tour group. 

Alas, the buffet was bare, the carafes of coffee unfilled. 

We sat, hands folded, eyes squinting in the early light. Surely breakfast would be ready soon. 

As minutes drug out, Asher checked his phone. 

“It’s 5:30.” 

“My god.” 

“We’re in Mexico.” 

“The time change … ” 

Asher trudged towards the gym, and I listened for the clattering sound of coffee cups. 

When the time came, we scooted into the back seat of a small, bobbing yellow ferry that had pulled in next to our ship. The seats were soaked with rain from the night before, but the moisture seemed to evaporate straight off my skin. As we sped towards the mainland, I mused on the blessings of modern science, specifically the motion sickness pill guarding my stomach. 

When we step off of the ferry, we are greeted by a flock of seagulls and a woman that looks to be in her forties. 

 On the bus, she tells us that her mother’s side of the family is Mayan. Holding up her necklace, we are able to see the vertical silver cartouche that has been partially hidden by her collar. Instead of exchanging rings, she and her husband had exchanged these cartouches with each other’s names inscribed on them in the Mayan language.

“This was the language of our ancestors—what they spoke in their everyday lives. The vertical shape of the cartouche itself is a symbol our journey from birth to death. To have the name of my husband so close to my heart, for me is a symbol of protection.” 

The Mayan language, she explains, is not as widespread as it once was. While more common in rural areas of Mexico, the hubs of commerce tend to speak Spanish. 

I know all too well the correlation of language and the vitality of a culture. For immigrants, to know the tongue of a new country is seen by the native born as an investment in the national culture. My mind darts back to Brian Friel’s play “Translations,” and how the pivotal moment of the play is the renaming of the Irish landscape by British soldiers just a few years before the infamous Potato Famine. 

The Mexican government is aware that they are teetering close to the loss of a fundamental aspect of their culture—the Mayan language that dominated prior to the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadors. With loss of language comes a loss of knowledge—the loss of idioms particular to the landscape, the loss of phrases passed down for generation, words that don’t translate into any other language. In an effort to fight this homogenization, many elementary students in Mexico are now required to learn Mayan as part of their studies. 

This, our tour guide explains, has allowed her to deepen her knowledge of the culture she has longer prized through the eyes of her son. As he learns this new language, she too is able to connect with her community in a way like never before. 

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“They didn’t do that for us,” my father says as I recite this information. 

The indignation doesn’t shock me. I’ve actually been thinking about it all day. About colonization. About how some cultures get saved and others don’t. 

Every few years, my parents discuss the prospect of moving back to Louisiana. There is something about the culture there that we are missing in Mississippi. Namely, a community with a common history. 

If you trace my father’s family in reverse, you will find him in the rice fields of Crowley, Louisiana, his grandfather muttering and spitting tobacco juice before bursting into in a string of swear words in Cajun French.   

In this sense, my father’s “they” is used as a nebulous term for the powers that be. The upper echelons of government. The billionaires who get to run their fingers through national decisions. “They” in Mexico may be different than “they” in the United States. But I know what he means. 

If you continue this backwards journey, this tracing to the source, you will unwind the clock nearly three hundred years, before the purchase of Louisiana by the American government. You will send British ships back into harbor, to what “they” renamed Nova Scotia. 

You see, three hundred years ago my father’s ancestors had something that the British Empire wanted. They had a land, not called Nova Scotia, but Acadia. The stories have been told claim that the settlement’s success was largely due to the French settlers’ (my father’s people) willingness to cooperate with the indigenous people they found residing on that land. In many communities, French Acadians and the Mi’kmaq people married, creating a distinct culture. They coexisted—creating the first inklings of what we know as “Cajun” today.

It’s not lost on me the Mi’kmaq were there first, before the French. But colonization tends to pile up like a snowball until it’s a blur of right and wrong and who started the white washing first.

When the British came, there was no more coexistence. Churches were burned with parishes inside, but you won’t see that on the Canadian government’s website. The Acadians were forced onto boats and deported to the nearest French colony, Louisiana. 

And while it’s entirely plausible that some Victoria Richard three hundred years ago died a martyr’s death, the story doesn’t yet end. In Louisiana, the Acadian people same into contact with the native Atakapa and Chitimacha, along with Spanish settlers and enslaved African people. The Acadians absorbed the cultures and languages of the people around them, creating what we now know, respectively, as Cajun and Cajun French. 

It has been said that the word Cajun was developed as insult, a mark of poverty in best cases—a fact of being “half-bred” at the worst. 

In my own life, I have only heard the word uttered with pride. 

What does this have to do with Mayan language? 

In St. Martinsville, Louisiana there is a memorial to the Cajun settlers of the area who arrived there as victims of deportation. There you will you find the last name “Richard” inscribed on a plaque. 

You will also find a classroom with a chalkboard inscribed “I will not speak French. I will not speak French. I will not speak French. I will not speak French.”

From 1920-1960, teachers in Louisiana were encouraged to punish their students for using the Cajun French language. Proper English should be the goal of civilized state. 

By the time my father began working on the family farm, only his grandparents’ generation were fluent in the language. My brother and I only know the words he remembers. 

This was the state the Mayan language was approaching before the Mexican government intervened.

In his New York Times bestselling book My Grandmother’s Hands, somatic abolitionist Resmaa Menakem posits that legacies of historical trauma embed themselves into our DNA so that what our ancestors faced (be it hunger, slavery, or other violence) has the potential to impact our everyday wellbeing.

Could it be that my father’s “they” has more to do with what has been encoded into his own system than has to do with the Mayan language being used in Mexican schools? I would think so. 

While hate has the potential for many roots, I tend to think (probably simplistically) that most of what we see happening in the world today is hurt disguised. For generations, hurt has laid within the bodies of people like you and me and we don’t even know where it came from. It isn’t even ours. It’s some Victoria Richard who got burned at the stake. It’s some little boy who is punished for using the words he has always now. 

These days I think my concept of self transcends my present iteration. I am my grandmothers, and I am their grandmothers and I am my children all at once. I carry everything the past left unresolved in my body. 

If this sounds like doom and gloom, it’s not. Recognition is the step to understanding. Understanding myself. My father. My brother. The immigrant on my doorstep. 

I view what happened in my past and chose to refuse for it to be someone else’s future. 

And maybe that’s a little more of what the world needs. 

Victoria Richard is a writer and aspiring curator. After spending several years in a high control group, Victoria now writes a weekly column about religious and spiritual abuse called “Angels Over Presley Boulevard.” Whenever she isn’t researching cults and interviewing survivors, she is working to highlight local talent at the Mississippi Museum of Art. She is currently a master’s student at Johns Hopkins University.