Marcos E. Becerra


Marcos E. Becerra was a prolific Mexican writer, poet, and politician. He produced pioneering historical, linguistic, philological, and ethnographic studies relating to his country's pre-Columbian and early colonial past. He held important posts in the Mexican Federal Government as well as in the state governments of Tabasco and Chiapas. He was a distinguished member of the Mexican Academy of History.

Biography

Marcos Enrique Becerra was born in Teapa, Tabasco, to Camilo Becerra y Ballinas, a native of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, and Luisa Sánchez Formento. Becerra completed his early schooling in his hometown. In 1900, by way of independent study, he received a teaching degree from the Instituto Juárez of San Juan Bautista. During his youth he worked as a bookbinder, scribe, store clerk, theatre prompter, and, eventually, teacher. One of his very first published works, Guia del lenguaje usual para hablar con propiedad, pureza y corrección, dates from this period and is based on his autodidactic studies of the Spanish language.
Fame of his remarkable erudition spread quickly and he was encouraged to run in forthcoming elections for Federal Deputy for the State of Tabasco, succeeding in his first attempt. During the final years of the Porfiriato he held the federal post of Director General of Secondary Education of the Secretariat of Public Education. At the XVII International Congress of Americanists, celebrated in Mexico City in September 1910, Becerra presented an important historical paper on Hernán Cortés's 1524-25 expedition to Las Hibueras. The next year, he returned to Tabasco to serve in Governor Manuel Mestre Ghigliazza's administration as Secretary General of Government and as Director of Public Education; consequent to the assassination of President Francisco I. Madero in February 1913 both Ghigliazza and Becerra resigned their posts in protest.
In 1914, Becerra moved to Tuxtla Gutiérrez, where he would labor as an educator and occupy the same post of Director of Public Education for ten years; during which time he successfully reorganized the state's educational system, founded a school of commerce as well as the Internado Indígena de San Cristóbal, which was a model of its kind. In 1921, while still in Tuxtla, he published an important lexicographical work titled La nueva gramática castellana, which, like all his published writings, was the fruit of autodidactic erudition. In 1932, appeared what remains one of his best known scholarly works, Nombres geográficos indígenas de Chiapas, a study of Mayan place names. To these followed sundry studies, published as monographs or articles, on the languages and traditions of the Ch'ol, Mangue, Nahua, Yucatec Maya, and Zoque.
In 1954, occurred the posthumous publication of Becerra's monumental 800 page Rectificaciones y adiciones al Diccionario de la Real Academia Española: a work which encompasses thousands of words and definitions, is rich in indigenous etymologies and grounded in lexicographical authorities.
Marcos E. Becerra, during the last ten years of his life, was a member of the Mexican Academy of History and held seat 21. He was married twice and was twice a widower, He died, following a long illness, in Mexico City on January 7, 1940.

Published works