Nahuatl communities nearby TX?

[anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk]

On 24 Apr 2003, at 21:51, zorrah at att.net wrote:
> ... that a Virginia (U.S.) contractor recruits Nahuatl speakers for
>  three months out of the year to work the tobacco fields.
> Another Mexihcayotl student tells me that he knows of Nahuatl speakers in the
> Phoenix, Arizona area that recently migrated to South Carolina for more work.

How likely is this to result in them or their descendants losing their
language? How much are they literate in their own language?

I don't know how far within topic this is, but recently on the email
group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/alternate-history
there has been discussion about what might have happened if the
USA had annexed more of, or even all of, Mexico after the last big
war between the two. Mexico was expecting to lose Coahuila and
Chihuahua and Sonora etc and preparing to lose everything up to
Mexico City. At the time the population of Mexico had not built up
again very far from the post-Conquest population crash which was
caused largely by white man's diseases, and Mexicans both
Spanish-speaking and Nahuatl / Mayan / etc speaking would likely
have been swamped by Anglos fron the north.

Or, what would have happened if Cortez's army had been wiped out
on the Noche Triste and the Aztec Empire managed to arm itself
European fashion in time to stave off the next attack. It might have
been, nowadays USA schoolboys routinely being taught high-
school Nahuatl instead of high-school Spanish.

Citlalyani