Lost Language - An Exploration of Trafficking in Indigenous Populations

If you asked Faith Robles, a member of ECPAT-USA’s Survivors’ Council, today how many languages she speaks, she would tell you three - English, Spanish, and Cho/l, a Mayan dialect that she grew up speaking with her family. But for 10 years, Faith hid that part of her identity, first, after school bullies mocked her accent as she learned Spanish for the first time, and then later when her trafficker told her she wasn’t allowed to speak the language. 

“At one point, I said, ‘I’m not going to talk about my culture,’” she says. “I’m not going to tell anyone that I speak this Mayan dialect. I didn’t want anyone else to make fun of me.”

Faith grew up in Chiapas, Mexico, a state in the southern part of the country, home to mountainous highlands and Mayan archaeological sites. When she was five, her family moved to a larger city where people didn’t speak Cho/l and she started attending school, where she was teased for not knowing the language and had classmates tell others that she had lice from living on a farm. At the same time, she was going through some hard things at home and felt like there was no way she could trust her family. 

“I feel like I was very vulnerable,” she says of the situation. “I wanted to run away from home, and I did. And I had a boyfriend who took advantage of me.”

She says that her parents didn’t realize trafficking was an issue that they should be concerned about. “This was something that no one thought could happen to me,” she says. 

Faith’s story is one of the hundreds that illustrates the ways in which trafficking and exploitation affect Indigenous populations in this country, as well as across the globe. In the United States, Native American women are 2.5 times more likely to experience sexual violence than other populations. A study in New Mexico found that while Native Americans make up 11% of the population, they account for nearly a quarter of sex trafficking victims. According to the National Congress of American Indians, factors including historical trauma and cultural loss, high rates of exposure to violence, and significant poverty or economic isolation, contribute to Indigenous populations becoming more vulnerable to trafficking. 

Faith believes that part of the issue when she was growing up was a lack of resources about human trafficking and exploitation, especially any information about these issues in Cho/l. She says that she met other survivors who spoke Native languages as well and thinks that being able to educate kids, parents, and teachers in their first language about the signs of trafficking would help protect more Indigenous children from exploitation. 

“Language can really make a big difference,” she says. When her trafficker smuggled her to New York, he further exploited Faith’s vulnerabilities by taking away her legal documents so she had no way of proving her identity, telling her that if she tried to go to the police they wouldn’t believe her because she didn’t speak English. It wasn’t until she met others who spoke Spanish that she realized that she could get help. 

A few years ago, Faith started reconnecting with her Mayan culture. She’s been reading articles and watching documentaries, and is working on relearning the Cho/l that her traffickers had suppressed. And when asked about her ability to speak English while testifying in court against her traffickers, she proudly shared that English was, in fact, her third language. 

“I felt the power to say, ‘No one will take that away from me,’” she says. “I feel like I have this treasure of gold, and I’ll take care of it, try to save my language...Now that no one controls me, I can choose which language to speak. If I can relearn my own language again, I can help my community.” 

Hear more from our Survivors’ Council in ECPAT-USA’s Survivor Perspectives blog series here.