About This Course

The Cali Chiu course is designed to give you a working command of Valley Zapotec, an indigenous language of Oaxaca, Mexico, also spoken by many immigrants to California. The course presents a new simplified system for writing Valley Zapotec, along with a guide to pronunciation and information on building Valley Zapotec words and sentences. This book provides background material for an instructor’s class lectures, but it can be used for self-study along with the accompanying audiovisual material.

Valley Zapotec has been the object of considerable technical study by linguists for more than 25 years (see the Bibliography). The writing system we present in this course was designed to facilitate easy writing and acceptance by native speakers. Because the language was never formally taught before the development of this course and because there still exists no complete grammatical description, much of the material we present here reflects analysis undertaken specifically for this project. We recognize that there are many things about the grammar that we do not yet understand!

The course consists of ten units (unida). Each unida contains from two to four lessons (lecsyony). In addition, you will find supplementary material, such as cultural background information and supplementary vocabulary, dialogues, readings, and so on. The course also includes Zapotec-English and English-Zapotec vocabularies (rata ra dizh), as well as a grammatical glossary and various charts. In addition, audio recordings are supplied for each lesson.

The lecsyony include grammatical explanations (and, where helpful, diagrams) and a number of exercises. Each unida also includes vocabulary and speaking and reading material. We recognize that each instructor has his or her own style of presentation, and know that most will devise additional exercises and classroom practices, either following our models or using other approaches.

Preparation of the first edition of this course was supported by a Department of Education Title VI grant “San Diego Consortium: NRC and FLAS” to UCSD (Charles L. Briggs, PI), subcontract to UCLA (Pamela Munro). Earlier work on Valley Zapotec at UCLA has been funded by the Chicano Studies Research Center, Department of Linguistics, Institute of American Cultures, and Academic Senate of UCLA; by the UCMexus Foundation; and by NSF.

We are grateful to many people for input about this course. All those who have previously worked on Valley Zapotec have taught us about the structure of this language. In particular, we thank Roberto Antonio Ruiz for additional native speaker judgments; Beatriz Muñoz-Goetz and Xóchitl Flores-Marcial for comments; Peter Lang, Xóchitl Flores-Marcial, Allen Munro, and Gregory Nussbaum for technical assistance; and Christopher Adam, John Foreman, Natalie Operstein, and Aaron Sonnenschein for comparative material on other Zapotec languages. We are also extremely grateful to the people of San Lucas Quiaviní and Tlacolula de Matamoros who have welcomed us to their communities and provided many additional sorts of input.

Most photographs were taken in Oaxaca and Los Angeles by the authors. Other material is acknowledged.

The black and while line drawings in this book are taken from the Arte para la Alfabetización en México (Art for Literacy in Mexico) (Instituto Lingüistico de Verano, A.C., 2004) and are used according to the license agreement therein. We thank the following artists (and various anonymous artists) for their work: Alberto Beltrán, Hans Elwert, Jo Eubank, Pat Kelley, John Landis, Cathy Marlett, Alice Paschal, Alvin and Elaine Schoenhals, Katie Voigtlander, and Debra Williams. All artwork remains the intellectual property of the artist.

The second and third editions (Pressbooks)

The current Pressbooks version is the third edition of this course, further revised from the second edition, which moved the previous print version to an online, open access edition. The third edition is also expanded in various ways; for example, answer keys and video material are provided for every lesson, replacing the audio material referenced in the first edition. Please note that if you are accessing this digital book via a cellphone, some features of the digital book might be easier to view using landscape orientation.

The second edition was created in 2020-2021 with funding from two sources. The main source of funding for the creation of the second edition came from a 2020 Open Educational Resource grant from the Haverford College libraries. Additional funding was provided through a 2021 OER Development grant project through the Pennsylvania Grants for Open and Affordable Learning (PA GOAL) grants program through the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc. (PALCI).

The third edition was created with additional support, including a 2021 Open Educational Resource grant from the Haverford College Libraries and support for undergraduate student research assistants, which was provided by Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship and the Office of the Provost. The creation of this open educational resource would not have been possible without this funding and we gratefully acknowledge the funders for their support.

In addition, we are especially grateful to Mike Zarafonetis and Terry Snyder for their support and guidance in creating this online, open access resources. Brynn Paul and Lillian Leibovich provided extensive technical and editorial support in the creation of this second edition: Xtyozën laad, Brynn cuan Lillian!

We are eager for any comments readers may have about this course. If you have any ideas on how we can improve this book, please email them to munro@ucla.edu or blilleha@haverford.edu.

The current edition can be cited as:

Munro, Pamela, Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, Felipe H. Lopez, Brynn Paul, and Lillian Leibovich. 2022. Cali Chiu? A Course in Valley Zapotec, 3rd edition. Haverford: Haverford College Libraries Open Educational Resources. Online: https://oer.haverford.edu/cali-chiu/.

The citations for previous editions are as follows:

Munro, Pamela, Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, & Felipe H. Lopez, with Brynn Paul. 2021. Cali Chiu? A Course in Valley Zapotec, 2nd edition. Haverford: Haverford College Libraries Open Educational Resources. Online: https://oer.haverford.edu/cali-chiu/.

Munro, Pamela, Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, & Felipe H. Lopez. 2008. Cali Chiu? A Course in Valley Zapotec, Vol. 1–4, first edition. Lulu publishing, www.lulu.com.

The Spanish edition of this textbook can be accessed here: https://oer.haverford.edu/calichiu/