Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Huehuetla Tepehua (HT), which is a member of the Totonacan language family. HT is spoken by fewer than 1500 people in and around the town of Huehuetla, Hidalgo, in the Eastern Sierra Madre mountains of the Central Gulf Coast region of Mexico. This grammar begins with an introduction to the language, its language family, and its setting, as well as a brief history of my contact with the language. The grammar continues with a description of the phonology of HT, followed by morphosyntactic and syntactic description of all of the major parts of speech, including verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and numbers; the grammar concludes with a description of the sentence-level syntax. A compilation of interlinearized texts appears in the appendix. HT is a polysynthetic, head-marking language with complex verbal morphology. Inflectional affixes include both prefixes and suffixes for which a templatic pattern is difficult to model. In addition to inflectional and derivational morphology, HT verbs are also host to a large number of aspectual derivational morphemes, each of which alters the meaning of the verb in a very specific way. Plural marking on both nouns and verbs for any third person argument is optional and determined by an animacy hierarchy, which is also used to determine verbal argument marking in various morphosyntactic constructions. HT nouns are completely unmarked for case, and certain nouns, including kinship terms and parts of a whole, are obligatorily possessed. The order of the major constituents is pragmatically determined, with a tendency towards VSO order in the absence of pragmatic or contextual clues and SVO order in context-rich textual examples. HT is an under-documented moribund language that is at imminent risk of extinction within the next two-to-three generations. Thus, this dissertation is a major contribution not only to the field of linguistics, but also to the Tepehua people who might one day be interested in the language of their grandparents. / text

This dissertation investigates the pernicious effects of neoliberalism in postcolonial, ostensibly post-racial Mexico. I analyze and thickly describe the daily negotiations of race in neoliberal Mexico, as they play out between indigenous Totonacs and Mestizos, or dominant, non-indigenous, non-Black identity, in a small town in central Mexico. I focus specifically on the discursive and material life of indigenous “traditions and customs,” or usos y costumbres that reverberate within and around an Indigenous Court in Huehuetla, Puebla. Usos y costumbres is the core concept around which indigenous rights revolve and the legal justification of the indigenous courts. As such it becomes the arena of struggle and a key site to investigate power relations and social transformations. First, I analyze and chart how Mestizo authorities, Indigenous Court officials, and Totonac community members struggle to fix, define, and redefine the meaning of usos y costumbres, and consequently shift local racial sensibilities and perceptions of self and others. Second, I analyze how the success of indigenous mobilizations, crystallized in this case in the courthouse, incites potent decolonial imaginaries, knowledge productions, and practices that in previous moments were likely unimaginable. The central aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate how the multicultural logics of governance and related languages of rights and cultural difference are lived through, incorporated in, and complexly contested in Huehuetlan social life. I will argue that the formative effects of state-sponsored multiculturalism in Huehuetla repositioned the Totonacs as subjects with power, crystallized in the institutionalization of “cultural knowledge” as jurisprudence in the Indigenous Court, that reverberates in daily confrontations with the legacy of hegemonic Mestizaje. / text

The present research describes the sociolinguistic situation in the minority indigenous community of San Juan Ozelonacaxtla in the state of Puebla, Mexico. Both Ozelonacaxtla Totonac and Spanish are spoken in the speech community. However, some bilingual parents use only Spanish in the home, ceasing the transmission of their native language to their children and placing the community in the early stages of language shift. Spanish is seen as the language of opportunity in the context of recent and significant social, political, educational, and economic changes in San Juan Ozelonacaxtla. Parents claim they teach their children Spanish because it is more useful than Ozelonacaxtla Totonac, it enables their children to avoid discrimination associated with speaking an indigenous language, it is necessary for their children to do well in school, and it allows for more economic mobility. These factors are accelerating the integration of the community into majority Mexican society. / Applied Linguistics

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 2287-298). Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alberta, 2009. / "A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics, Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies." At head of title screen: University of Alberta. Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on October 6, 2009). Includes bibliographical references.