Veneto

This paper suggests an explanation to the phenomenon of language preservation in the central Mexican community of Chipilo, in the state of Puebla, whose inhabitants have kept the Italian dialect Veneto as their mother tongue even 130 years after their arrival from Europe, by noting that a series of periodic milestones have served to remind this immigrant community of its origins, to keep the mother language as a socially cohesive element, to renew its ethnic pride, and to reconstruct its identity every time it seemed to be getting lost. A revision of the history of how this community came to exist in Mexico and the consequences the events that have forged it have had in the preservation of its language and ethnicity will help understand the prevalence of the Veneto linguistic and social identity in Chipilo as an oddity in the context of other immigrant communities.