"Who in this room is in love?"

Silence.

"Come on, don’t be shy!"

Finally, some trembling hands rise and Mexican poet Mardonio Carballo one of the most respected voices in indigenous culture clears his throat and recites one of his best-known poems before an excited audience that has come to listen to his conference in Barcelona. At first, he does it in Nahuatl, at full speed, and then in Spanish, without losing the fast pace:

Se cayó mi corazón

Se quebró

Cayó mi corazón-sol

y no puede amanecer.

Mi corazón partió

Por ahí se fue

Te fue a buscar

Y la tierra no se ve.

No amanece en esta tierra

Esta noche eterna se vuelve vino para las estrellas

Y muchas caen

Y yo ya quiero que amanezca

Que el agua toque la tierra

Quiero ver un arcoíris

Quiero ver el sol

Quiero arrancarle su luz para ponerla en mi corazón

Quiero amanecer mi corazón

Se cayó mi corazón

Se quebró

Cayó mi corazón-sol

y no puede amanecer.

"Are you still in love?"

No one raises a hand and Mardonio laughs. With his natural sympathy and a permanent smile on his face, the well-known indigenous journalist and poet knows how to get the public’s attention.

"We must be proud not only of our past, of the stones, but of whom we are," says Mardonio, who besides being a writer, is a deputy of the Constituent Assembly of Mexico City and is in charge of the Commission in charge of defending indigenous issues in this chamber. And "what we are and can be", according to Mardonio, is largely the words we speak. Our language.

"Nahuatl is the language of my brothers, that of my parents. It is the second most spoken language in Mexico after Spanish; about a million and a half people speak it. But there are many people who can’t even understand it," explains Mardonio, recently landed from his country, which has just been hit by three strong earthquakes.

"Earthquakes not only rearrange peoples and territories, they also rearrange political powers," he predicts. He is convinced that in the coming months the first fruits of the struggle for indigenous rights will be harvested, a struggle that began in 1994 with the armed uprising of the Zapatist guerrillas in Chiapas, where most of the population is of "Maya" origin.

"The Zapatista revolution helped many people get out of the closet, to recognize their identity," explains the poet. That is why, he adds, at the end of the 90's the census revealed a rise of indigenous citizens enrolled.

The year 1994 coincided with the signing of the free trade agreement between Mexico and the US (the so-called NAFTA, which the US has now asked to renegotiate), "which showed that a large part of the people was not benefiting from the treaty. They told us that NAFTA was going to take us to the first world, but not the natives," says Mardonio.

Twenty years after the signing of NAFTA, the Zapatista Liberation Army (EZLN) announced with the National Indigenous Congress its intention to participate in the 2018 presidential elections with an indigenous woman as an independent candidate. The news shacked Mexican public opinion and immediately triggered an avalanche of criticism from the most diverse sectors.

"They told us that we were dividing the left," recalls the journalist, remembering the moment they announced that the spokeswoman for the Indigenous Council of Government will be María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, Marichuy, a Nahua woman and expert in traditional medicine. "The truth is that the left in Mexico speaks of poverty without nuances, and they have never taken us into account," he adds.

The media have also ignored indigenous communities to this day. Mardonio, a collaborator of the news media Aristegui en Vivo with the section The Feathers of the Serpent and conductor of the television program La Raíz Doble, is one of the few that does it. His journalistic work has earned him several awards, including the National Journalism Prize awarded by the Mexican Journalists Club (2009 and 2015).

However, Mardonio likes languages more than anything. "In Mexico, there are 68 languages apart from Spanish, which until now have been defenestrated, placed in the basket of oblivion," he says. But the future is changing: "the word took the ornaments of the wind," he says, repeating one of his verses.

"The original peoples will be the spearhead of a change, an earthquake. We are going to end the exacerbated racism of the middle class," he says. And he adds, joking: "we are told, how beautiful, how exotic, how poetic, how ancestral your tongue sounds. But languages do not sound poetic. They sound like they sound because they are alive."