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 (1901) 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 (the Chiapas state capital), 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 (the San Cristóbal
Indian Boarding School), 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
numerary member of the
Academia Mexicana de la Historia 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. ==See also==