TITLE:
Indigenous Identity and Mother Tongue: A Linguistic Diagnosis of University Students in Puebla, Mexico
AUTHORS:
Abelardo Romero-Fernández, Fabio Morandín-Ahuerma, Laura Villanueva-Méndez, Yonatan Puón Castro, Verónica Sánchez Hernández, Annel Sapianni Palestina-Aguilar
KEYWORDS:
Indigenous Self-Identification, Mother Tongue, Language Shift, Higher Education, Puebla, Mexico
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Anthropology,
Vol.16 No.4,
September
28,
2026
ABSTRACT: This study aimed to describe the gap between Indigenous self-identification and reported mother tongue among undergraduate students of the Northeastern Regional Complex (CRN) of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico, explore the distribution of this gap across campuses, and make visible the discrimination, institutional ideologies, and perceived language shift surrounding it. A questionnaire was administered online through Microsoft Forms to 747 students across four campuses; 721 gave consent and constituted the sample for analysis, which was conducted using descriptive statistics given the small size of the Indigenous-language-speaking subgroups, focusing on the three campuses with sufficient sample size: Teziutlán, Libres, and Zacapoaxtla. Among students who self-identified as Indigenous (n = 74), 78.4% (58 of 74) reported Spanish, rather than an Indigenous language, as their mother tongue, a gap that varied notably across campuses and coexisted with a linguistic hierarchy positioning English above Indigenous languages in participants’ repertoire, with subtle forms of linguistic discrimination not always recognized as such, and with a perception widely shared among Indigenous-language speakers that Spanish is actively replacing their mother tongues. The findings offer an empirical diagnosis that could guide institutional efforts toward linguistic inclusion at the CRN-BUAP, and represent the first systematic diagnosis of this gap among university students in the Sierra Nororiental of Puebla, a region absent from existing literature on Indigenous higher-education populations in Mexico.