Snapshots of Sabinillo

Sabinillo is the town where we spent 2 weeks conducting research.  It's a small indigenous Mixteca puebla.  The older people speak Mixteca fluently and it is their primary language.  Most people 40 and up taught themselves Spanish.  Erica interviewed a man who was the first person to learn spanish in the town - he learned it at a factory in the 1940's, and the factory was located a few states away.   Although they teach Mixteca in the primary school, the kids don't speak it fluently.  

As I walked around, you could hear all the older people, 30 years old and up, conversing in Mixteca while all the younger kids speaking spanish.  It was very hard for me to speak spanish with some of the really old people, because my spanish comprehension isn't advanced and on top of that their spanish was spoken with a thick mixteca accent.  So I just nodded my head a lot and said bien, bien.

Most people lived in wood or concrete houses. It's a subsistence based lifestyle - so most people owned a few animals and a little land to grow vegetables.   The Casa de Salud was our basecamp.  The picture below is of our amazing research team standing in front of the Agencia - the Townhall.