New Educational Practices and Possibilities of the Yucatec Maya Diaspora in San Francisco

• In Event: Roundtable Session 53
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Questions Between Culture and Learning

Abstract

In this paper we draw on our ethnographic research examining the educational experiences and opportunities of immigrant indigenous students from rural communities in Yucatan, Mexico at a dual immersion school in northern California. We review literature on Mexican Indigenous students in schools and we examine pedagogies and practices through which these students enter the school system and are introduced to new epistemologies about their own migration. Although this expanding demographic diversity is not yet identified by the school system, our findings suggest that the politics of representation of the Mayan Diaspora challenge and extend identity categories such as “Latino” and “Indigenous” articulating a new form of consciousness of social and cultural differentiation and inclusion in institutions that serve them.

Authors

• Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, University of California - Berkeley

• Gabriela Borge Janetti, University of California - Berkeley