Santo Domingo de Guzmán (El Salvador)

Santo Domingo de Guzmán
Coordinates: 13 ° 43 ′ N , 89 ° 48 ′ W Santo Domingo de Guzmán on the map of El Salvador	Santo Domingo de Guzmán
	Santo Domingo de Guzmán
Basic data
Country	El Salvador
Department	Sonata
Residents	7055 (2007)
Detailed data
surface	27.92
height	180 m
City structure	4 cantons
Time zone	UTC −6
City Presidency	Gerardo Cuellar Sigüenza ( FMLN ), 2009–2012
	; Image wanted

Santo Domingo de Guzmán ( Nawat : Witzapan , in classic Nahuatl spelling Huitzapan ) is a municipality in El Salvador in the Sonsonate department . It is 69 kilometers west of San Salvador , near the border with Ahuachapán .

Surname

The Nawat name Witzapan means "river of thorns". The root word witz means "thorn" and apan "river", but the latter can also mean "in abundance" in a figurative sense.

history

The old Huitzapan was founded by Pipil north of today's town. Around 1200 it came under the rule of Cuzcatlan .

After the conquest by the Spanish in 1528, the place was subordinated to the Dominicans of Sonsonate in 1572 , who gave the place the name Santo Domingo . Around 1770 Santo Domingo was assigned to the Parroquia Nahuizalco . The village had 146 inhabitants at that time. From 1821 to 1823 Santo Domingo belonged to Guatemala and from 1824 to the Salvadoran Department of Sonsonate. In 1890 it had 1,026 inhabitants.

In 1932 Santo Domingo was in the insurrectionary area, in which peasants rose against the large landowners and the military rule of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez . Santo Domingo de Guzmán, in which there was practically only Pipil, i.e. no Ladinos and no coffee cultivation , was not directly involved in this uprising, but it was affected by the subsequent suppression of indigenous culture. After the suppression of the uprising, there was the matanza , a massacre that killed around 30,000 people across El Salvador in early 1932. The nawat (pipil) , which until then had been the language of the entire population of Santo Domingo, was banned. Those who spoke Nawat or wore traditional clothing were at risk of death because people were killed because of these distinguishing features.

Pipil culture today

According to the last census of El Salvador in 2007, Santo Domingo has the highest proportion of native speakers of the Pipil language Nawat , the last remaining indigenous language in El Salvador, but even this is only 35 speakers out of 97 nationwide, half a percent of the local population out of a total of 7055 inhabitants Population. The Nawat teacher Genaro Ramírez Vázquez counted 133 speakers in the municipality at the same time . This would correspond to a share of almost two percent. In 2010, the linguist Jorge Lemus from the University of Don Bosco in San Salvador estimated that of the approximately 200 native speakers in El Salvador, over 80% were residents of Witzapan . He explains the longer preservation of the Nawat with the isolation of Witzapans , which has only had access to traffic via a paved road for a few years.

Witzapan is a center of efforts to save the Pipil language and culture. Genaro Ramírez Vázquez (* 1933), chairman of the initiative to regain the Nawat language (Iniciativa para la Recuperación del Idioma Náhuat) IRIN and director of the House of Culture, lives here. Due to the efforts of the indigenous organization Asociación Coordinadora de Comunidades Indígenas de El Salvador (ACCIES), the IRIN initiative and the University of Don Bosco in San Salvador , despite the lack of state programs, some schools in the department of Sonsonate Nawat are taught, financed by the Fundación Círculo Solidario . In 2008, 166 pupils at the primary school in Witzapan studied with a teacher Nawat. The project has been running since 2003. In August 2010, in cooperation with the University of Don Bosco and the Ministry of Education, a monolingual nawat-speaking kindergarten was set up, the “Nawat-cradle” ( Cuna náhuat or Xuchikisa nawat , “where nawat blossoms”). Here four native speakers look after 35 children (beginning of 2011) and speak to them exclusively in Nawat.

Not everyone in Santo Domingo de Guzmán likes the Nawat revitalization programs; many continue to deny their indigenous origins or reject “backward-looking” Indian culture. Some call for English instead of Nawat lessons or mock people who speak Nawat on the street.