Sibilo de Francisco Javier Mina: A Mexican Town Preserving the Language and Culture of Veneto

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In the center of Mexico there is a city transplanted from Italy.

Here Mexican restaurants and grocery stores give way to trattorias, pizzerias and Italian cuisine.

Many of its 4,500 inhabitants are “light-eyed gerritos” and speak Veneto, the language of the region of the same name in northeastern Italy.

But here in Sibilo de Francisco Javier Mina, a town 15 kilometers from Puebla, Veneto sounds different. It is “unique” because it is mixed with Nahuatl and Spanish.

They nicknamed him “Sibilino Veneto,” Sibyl anthropologist and historian Miguel Esteban Godvrit Dosetti tells BBC Mundo.

Dozetti’s ancestors emigrated to Mexico with dozens of Venetian families and founded Sibilo in 1882.

Today, more than 140 years after its founding, the Sibillinos proudly claim to keep their heritage almost intact and speak it in the country with the largest number of Spanish speakers in the world.

Although this Chipile Veneto is not recognized as an official variant of Veneto, linguists who have studied it recognize its authenticity and argue that its history is not sufficiently understood.

House of Italy It is one of the city’s landmarks, a cultural reference in the square next to the church.

Chipilo welcomes the traveler surrounded by magnificent views of the Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl volcanoes, which do not stop spewing smoke and ashes.

The city center is dominated by a small church and an adjacent square that houses the Casa d’Italia cultural center and the Museum of Italian Settlements.

The main avenue has several Italian restaurants (always with some Mexican classic on the menu) where locals have breakfast.

Being a small town, most people here know each other.

And while others enjoy risotto, the classic short and strong Italian coffee, they are gia mano, status arrived (hello, how are you?).

The language used by the first inhabitants of Sibili was difficult to understand, and to this day they use it as the primary language to communicate with each other.

But after a while the ear gets used to it and begins to perceive the words.

“Of the 4,500 people, 3,800 are direct descendants of the founders who emigrated from Italy. 90% learn Veneto from home,” Arturo Berra Simoni, whose grandparents were part of the dozens of Italian families that founded Sibilo in 1882, tells BBC Mundo.

“Today it happens less, but in my time, when we started school as children, we knew very little Spanish and we didn’t understand the teacher,” he laughs.

“After the reunification of Italy in 1871, Veneto was in conflict with many neighboring regions and an important river, the Piave, suffered serious flooding that affected many people,” says Berra, who founded the Museum of Italian Migrations in Sibilo .

“In Mexico, the government of Porfirio Díaz wanted to modernize the country, attracting European immigration who brought modern manufacturing techniques,” says Godwright Dosetti.

Between 1881 and 1882, approximately 3,000 Italians arrived at the port of Veracruz, settling in the different colonies of the country after signing land purchase agreements granted by the Mexican government.

Sibilo was founded on October 7, 1882 by dozens of families.

Berra, Tocetti, Colombo, Cornelli and dozens of other Italian surnames live in the city.

For Venetians, moving to Mexico meant seeking a new future and escaping the effects of conflict and natural disasters.
Now Sybil was a practically empty and arid expanse.

Promised fertile lands in exchange for promoting European crops, the founders were disappointed upon their arrival.

The land was not fertile or suitable enough to plant Mediterranean vines or olive trees.

But they reinvented themselves, bought livestock and started a business exporting cheese and other dairy products that sustained the economy for decades.

Today, dairy production is oriented toward local consumption and the country relies on the production of antique furniture, which is mainly exported to Canada, the United States, Europe and Saudi Arabia.

“Sibillino Veneto”
Veneto is a Romance language with many varieties threatened with minority status. In addition to Mexico, in Latin America it is still spoken among descendants of Italians in countries such as Argentina, Venezuela or Brazil. But Sibilo is an incomparable example of how Nahuatl and Spanish words for foods, plants and technologies that were absent in Italy at the time of migration were preserved throughout an entire community.

The anthropologist Miguel Esteban Godwright Dosetti explains that the name “Sibillino Veneto” is due to the evolution that the Veneto experienced in Sibilo for more than a century.
“In Sibilo a variety of Belluneese bass is spoken. It is so unusual that economic and social forces force immigrants to abandon their linguistic heritage after a generation or two,” explains Caroline Mackay, a linguist who has studied Veneto at Sibilo.

“In other parts of Latin America where the Venetians settled, they did not find a unified and homogeneous society that could preserve their identity and their language in the majority culture.”

The strange thing is that, despite this evolution towards the Venetian sibylline, current Venetians in Italy remember the way their grandparents talked about sibyls when they met them.

“This is because Sibilo still uses grammatical forms and words common in Italy,” explains Mackay.

The linguist attributes this protection to the “relative isolation” in which Sibilo lived for decades, reinforced by his economic independence and commercial success.

Sibilo, between his past and his future
Monte Grappa is a small hill in Sibilo. Here the Sibyllines took up arms and defended their city during the Mexican Revolution.

From above you can see the unstoppable growth of the city of Puebla, which threatens to swallow its surroundings, a pattern that is repeated in large Mexican cities.

The Sibilo people have had a complicated relationship with their neighbors for decades.

“For years we were outsiders, ‘thieves’, even though our ancestors bought these lands,” says Berra Simoni as he walks towards the cemetery.

A lot has changed since then. Many people come from all over to work at Sibilo and marriages with foreigners are increasing. Even if it comes at a cost. “In recent years, the number of children who stop speaking the Venetian language is very high, because many of their parents are not originally from the country,” acknowledges Godwit Dosetti.

“I am worried that Sibilo’s revenge will affect our way of life, our culture and our language,” says Dosetti Masocco.

These are some of the future challenges of this unique culture in a country as diverse as Mexico.

But the people of Sibili resisted for 140 years. It’s in your blood.

Taken from BBC World

2023-09-17 03:25:55
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