Gabriela Salas, the Indigenous scientist who brought Nahuatl to Google: ‘It is important that girls study to be freer’

Gabriela Salas is a 28-year-old Mexican scientist, originally from Puerto del Caballo, Hidalgo, a small locality of some 20 inhabitants. Her story is not only an example of dedication and effort, it is also proof of the importance of the right to education for women and their need to train in scientific careers. “It is important that girls study so that they continue learning, continue fighting, and become freer,” she says from Madrid, where she is now studying a master’s in data science at the Polytechnic University. Two years ago, Salas was recognized nationally for incorporating the Nahuatl language, spoken by 1.6 million people in Mexico, into Google Translate.

The young scientist emphasizes the importance of including Indigenous languages in digital tools, a milestone that can change the future of native cultures, condemned to disappear as their speakers die. In her village, for example, there are only two Nahuatl speakers left: her and her mother. “With this technology we can rescue our history,” she says. “There are a lot of compendiums, poems, and recipes of ancestral medicine that exist in other languages and that we do not know,” she adds. These recipes are the ones she learned from her grandmothers and her mother, passed down orally from generation to generation.

Salas admits that she was going to be a gynecologist. In reality, what she always wanted to be was a midwife, “like one of my grandmothers,” she says, but life and the resources her family had led her to study information technology engineering at the Technological University of Tula-Tepeji, in Hidalgo. “That’s where I began to fall in love with science,” she says. Thanks to a scholarship, she continued her studies in Mexico City with a master’s degree in artificial intelligence from the Open and Distance University of Mexico. “I was one of the few women in my class who came from a rural background,” she says. The support of her family was decisive in continuing her career. “As my father used to say: ‘The day you finish your studies, you will know how to defend yourself,’” she says.

In 2024, she participated in a Google call to collaborate on the inclusion of Indigenous languages in the company’s online translator. Salas contributed a database that she had compiled over the years with keywords. Her work was essential to now being able to translate into this language digitally. After that, the BBC named her one of the 100 most inspiring and influential women of 2024. She was also recognized as the first Indigenous woman in the technological fields by the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science program.

Aware of the reality she had to live through, Salas now fights to pave the way for other women who are following in her footsteps and who see her as a role model. “I want people who speak Nahuatl to have the same opportunities to access information and communicate in the digital world,” she says. Her next project is to create a center for the recovery of Indigenous languages where Mayan, Zapotec, Mixtec, and native languages from anywhere in the world can also be recovered. “That is my dream,” she says.

Like Salas, girls and women face obstacles in many parts of the region that prevent them from accessing education and careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, known collectively as STEM. Only 30% of researchers in the world are women, according to UNESCO. In Latin America and the Caribbean, this figure is even lower, highlighting the urgent need for policies and programs that promote the inclusion of women in these fields. In Mexico, of the 3.6 million jobs related to STEM careers, only 12.9% are occupied by women, according to data from the Center for Economic and Budgetary Research.

Among her role models, Salas often mentions the mathematician and writer Ada Lovelace, considered the first computer programmer in history, or Grace Hopper, inventor of the COBOL programming language. “If they did that, imagine what we can achieve in the future,” she says enthusiastically. “Women can do many things if we want to, so I would like to be an inspiration for girls and women to get into technology.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition