Trilingual Dictionary Spells Success for a Native of Oaxaca

Scholar and author of a trilingual dictionary--who would have imagined it?

Certainly not Felipe Lopez, a native of Mexico who did not know how to speak Spanish, let alone English, when he illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexican border 20 years ago.

On that warm September night, Lopez concentrated only on not getting caught by the Border Patrol.

A week earlier, the 16-year-old youth had said goodbye to his family and friends in San Lucas Quiavini, a 400-year-old village of 2,000 inhabitants in Oaxaca state in southeastern Mexico. Zapotec is the village’s everyday language, and few people there speak Spanish.

Today, Lopez is working on a doctorate in urban planning at UCLA. He also is collaborating with Pamela Munro, a linguistics professor there, on writing the first Zapotec-English-Spanish dictionary.

“Me, a scholar? Helping to write the first dictionary of my people? Never! I only wanted to learn how to write my language,” Lopez said.

The estimated 200,000 Oaxacans who live in Southern California should find the dictionary useful, said Rafael Lopez Robles, a Zapotec Indian who is head of the Los Angeles-based Indigenous Oaxacan Binational Front.

“It will help us teach our language to our children who are born here and to show other people our culture,” Robles said.

Thousands of Oaxacans started leaving the state, among Mexico’s poorest, during the 1960s, migrating to neighboring regions and to the United States.

Zapotec is spoken by 16 native ethnic groups in Oaxaca, and almost every group speaks a different variant.

Munro, who has written and published dictionaries for such Native American languages as Chickasaw and Mojave, says Zapotec is one of the most difficult she has tackled.

“It’s not similar to Spanish at all,” Munro said. “Some people think it’s a dialect from Spanish, but it’s completely unrelated.”

For five years, Munro and Lopez have spent an average of 10 hours a week working on the dictionary.

Lopez said the regional variation of Zapotec spoken in San Lucas has never been written down.

“We’re writing it for the first time as we go,” he said.

With more than 8,000 entries, the dictionary is expected to be published by UCLA in-house this fall, Munro said. She then will pursue a commercial version.

Lopez also has set his sights on publishing stories based on accounts of fellow Zapotecs living in Southern California.

During an interview at UCLA, Lopez’s demeanor stiffened when he recalled first taking classes in English as a second language at age 20.

“I was working as a dishwasher,” Lopez said. “While we were waiting for the bus a lady co-worker asked me in English where I lived. I answered ‘Felipe, and you?’ After an uncle told me what she had said, I was so embarrassed that I didn’t return to that job.”

But Lopez, who had only completed elementary school in San Lucas, did return to the classroom. He took classes at Venice Adult Learning Center, where he practically started from scratch.

Working as a dishwasher and later as a chef’s assistant in Westside restaurants, Lopez obtained his high school equivalency diploma in 1984, and then enrolled in Santa Monica College to improve his English. He picked up Spanish through reading and conversations with Latinos.

Because he was a native Zapotec, Lopez said, mainstream Americans saw him as “just another Latino,” while Mexicans considered him an Indian.

Nevertheless, he says English-speaking Americans seemed more tolerant of him speaking in his native tongue than most Mexicans he worked with in restaurants.

“I couldn’t understand why Mexicans mistreated me,” Lopez said. “Whenever I would be speaking in Zapotec with my uncle, other Mexicans would scold us, telling us, ‘Indios, speak in Spanish!’ ”

Lopez said discrimination from his own countrymen made him seek friendships elsewhere, while pushing him to grow academically.

“I would tell myself, ‘I have to show these guys that I can be better,’ ” Lopez said.

He improved far beyond his own expectations, earning a master’s degree in Latin American studies from UCLA in 1996 before taking courses for his urban planning doctorate.

While working in a restaurant, he met a waitress, Emily, a native of Buffalo, N.Y.

“At first we didn’t click,” Lopez said with a smile. “But that changed. She saw me as an individual, as a person.”

The couple married in 1991 and they now live in West Los Angeles with their sons, Ruben, 6, and Julian, 4. The boys speak English and Spanish and know some words in Zapotec.

Lopez, who benefited from the amnesty program of 1986 to become a legal permanent resident, became a U.S. citizen in 1997.

Guillermo Hernandez, director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, who was one of Lopez’s history professors, said the San Lucas native has been his only student of Zapotec origin.

In fact, he said, there are few Mexican students of Indian origin at UCLA or other U.S. campuses. Hernandez recalled that a Mexico City professor had told him that, even there, “he couldn’t remember having students from indigenous groups.” Members of these groups lack the support of Mexico’s educational system, he said.

Along with the dictionary, Lopez said he would like to use his skills in urban planning to help his hometown in Oaxaca. San Lucas, which is made up of huts and dirt roads, still lacks mail and telephone service. Elementary school is taught by state-employed teachers, but middle school is only available through televised courses.

“Because of me going to college, some of the people of my town see me as a role model,” Lopez said. “I tell them that if I did it, they can do it too.”