Reframing What It Means to Teach and Learn: Indigenous Maya Families in California

• In Event: 51.058 - Immigration, Culture, Language, and Family Separation for Latinxs

Abstract

In this paper I draw from my linguistic and educational anthropological study at Metropolitan Elementary Shool in northern California with a student body representing regions across Mexico and Central America and where roughly 25% of the student population is from Yucatan. I discuss how families manage public school bureaucracies and influence knowledge production and practices of education at the school. I examine how families also resist processes of “Latinization” and seek to establish pan-ethnic solidarity with other immigrant groups to enact, negotiate, and support pedagogies of migration — lessons that parents consider beneficial for their children to witness and learn and which highlight histories of migration, resistance, violence, and of inequalities at the hemispheric scale.

Author

• Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, University of California - Berkeley