"De Donde Vengo": Indigenous Youth in the Diaspora Grounding Their Indigeneity

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: Across Diasporas: Indigenous Latinx Youth and Allies Learning, Languaging, and Place-Making (Table 11)

Abstract

I discuss in this qualitative study how six recently arrived Maya youth from Guatemala and two self-identified Indigenous youth from Mexico, ages 15-20 years, in a high school in the Pacific Northwest, made sense of how ladinos and mestizos in their pueblos of origin and in the U.S. linked place, space, and language to indigeneity. Indigenous and Latine scholars are currently contributing to an emerging scholarship on Indigenous youth from Central America and Mexico in U.S. schools. This research is important because it broadens our collective understanding of Latines and Indigeneities by illuminating the experiences of Indigenous-identified youth and how they re-formulate indigeneity in the U.S. To my knowledge, however, this scholarship does not investigate how recently arrived Indigenous youth ground their Indigenous identities to their places of origin and language associated to these locations as they navigate their racialized and languaged interactions in the U.S. This study contributes to this scholarship by describing how a group of eight male recently arrived Indigenous youth from Guatemala and Mexico understood the relationships between Indigeneity, place, space, and language.

I turn to a Critical Latinx Indigeneities (CLI) analytic frame (Blackwell et al., 2017) to understand how the youth reformulated their Indigenous selves in the U.S. while referencing their pueblos of origin and the Indigenous language associated to these locations. CLI expands the usual frames for understanding the experiences of Indigenous youth by noting that racialized and languaged processes are not regionally and political confined but travel with Indigenous peoples, ladinos, and mestizos across political borders. I also adapt Molina’s (2010, 2014) “racial scripts” to understand the practice of defining a racialized group with reference to what is attributed to place and space in Guatemala and Mexico. Colonizers since the advent of their invasion of Abiayala racially codified Indigenous peoples by the place and space they inhabited. I refer to the racial codification of place and space as Indian as “place/space racial scripts.” I show in this study how place/space racial scripts travel with Indigenous youth, their peers, and classmates to the U.S.

Findings from this study are based on semi-structured interviews with the Indigenous youth during the 2015-16 school year. One of these findings show that Indigenous youth have a multilayered understanding of Indigeneity that includes links to place/space and language. When I asked Edward, for instance, how he can tell if someone is Indigenous replied, “it depends where they are from, for example, from other countries, I imagine that they only speak Spanish. Like El Salvador, Mexico. I imagine that Oaxaca does have other languages.” Edward provides a complex understanding of relationships between place, space, language, and indigeneity by activating his prior place/space racial script from Guatemala to identify Oaxaca as an Indigenous region.

This study contributes to the understanding the complex ways Indigeneity is reshaped by recently arrived youth as they cross and navigate racialized and languaged borders.

Author

• David W. Barillas Chón, Western University
  Presenting Author