Liminal Strategies of Guatemalan Maya Youth Workers in Los Angeles

• In Event: Language and Liminality in the Schooling of Nondominant and Immigrant Youth

Abstract

In this paper, we draw on six years’ worth (2012-18) of participant observation and interviews with L1 Maya (primarily K’iche) speaking Guatemalan youth workers (n = 36) in Los Angeles who arrived as unaccompanied minors between 2003 and 2013. The analysis explores immigrant youth incorporation as a dynamic process that can occur outside of schools and through social interactions in everyday life.

With reference to Turner’s (1967) seminal work on the ritual process, we theorize the transformations that characterize urban immigrant life for Indigenous Latinxs in the contemporary United States as a passage through the liminal state from “separation” to “consummation.” In the separation phase following migration, Maya youth were acutely aware of the stigma attached to Indigenous identity and Maya languages in Guatemala and the way this stigma “traveled” to Latinx immigrant communities in the United States. Time in the U.S. allowed some of Maya youth participants to move toward the other threshold of liminality: consummation, where they reflected on renewed possibilities for ethnic and linguistic pride. Central to this process were opportunities to reframe stigmatizing ideologies about K’iche and other Maya languages. Thus, the analysis also engages work from sociology on the racialization of illegality (Gomez-Cervantes, 2021) and from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology on racializing discourse and embodiment (Dick & Wirtz, 2011; Roth-Gordon, 2017).

We first analyze participants’ language behavior during the separation phase, which is typified by “detachment of [the] individual or group ... from an earlier … set of cultural conditions” (Turner, 1967, p. 94). Youth initially sought to defend themselves from anti-indio harm and discrimination through discourse practices oriented to the “listening subjects” (Flores & Rosa, 2015) of non-Indigenous Latinxs, such as cloaking or denying Maya proficiency, claiming to be Mexican or non-Indigenous Guatemalan, or avoiding speaking Spanish or K’iche in public. In tandem with their discourse practices, participants employed techniques of bodily concealment that were believed to make them less racially identifiable in physical terms.

However, as youth established themselves in the U.S., they felt less of a need to defend themselves from stigmas attached to Indigeneity and Guatemalan identity and began to reflect on possibilities for ethnic and linguistic pride in communal settings. This reflection was enabled by youth’s growing embeddedness in Los Angeles’s multicultural society and coethnic small group settings that valorized Indigeneity and invited youth to compare their trajectories to those of other immigrant groups.

The paper brings contemporary scholarship on youth migration, indigeneity, race, and language use into conversation with formative work on liminality and rites of passage in traditional societies. With others (Blackwell et al., 2017; Urrieta et al., 2019), we acknowledge the distinctive challenges that Indigenous youth encounter as immigrants to the U.S. However, our paper joins a small, but growing body of work (e.g., Baquedano-López, 2021; Barillas-Chón, 2021; Casanova, 2019; Martínez & Mesinas, 2019) that points beyond Indigenous Latinxs’ post-migration experiences of shame, fear, and discrimination to illuminate possibilities for language maintenance and cultural pride in the context of long-term sobrevivencia, or survival, in diaspora.

Authors

• Brendan Harold O'Connor, Arizona State University

• Stephanie Canizales, University of California Merced