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This article examines the factors that have led to a shift to Spanish in the Upper Necaxa Totonac communities of east-central Mexico. Despite the fact that Spanish and Totonac have been in contact since before the eighteenth century, the shift to the majority language has only occurred in the past four decades. I will show that this shift resulted from the combination of long-standing negative attitudes towards indigenous cultures with new social and economic conditions, namely the establishment of Spanish-language schooling and a shift to a cash-based economy. The proximate cause of the linguistic “tip” to Spanish was not so much the desire to speak the majority language as the increased opportunities to do so.
