"Tienen la diferencia": Geographies of Distinction Among Maya-Mam Youth

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

Abstract

In this paper, I study the ways that Maya-Mam communities in Guatemala and Oakland construct and enact onto-epistemic perspectives on sociocultural and linguistic distinctions between Maya municipalities in the Cuchumatán mountains. I present ethnographic vignettes and analysis based on fieldwork in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, combined with analysis of discourse in an English class at Newcomer Continuation High School in East Oakland. This analysis highlights the ways that Maya geographies are constructed through talk about sociocultural and linguistic distinctions in Maya homelands, and how these distinctions are transposed onto Oakland. The form of ethnoracial distinction that I will present in this article will be largely organized around a geographical logic of sociocultural and sociolinguistic practice (Blackwell, 2017). I will highlight how social practices of language, dress, and relation to natural resources constitute ensembles of meaningful distinction that we can understand as forms of ethnoracial distinction that are not shaped by the hegemonic racial regimes (Robinson, 2007) of Western academic and activist milieus.

I present ethnographic data from observations, interviews, and audiovisual recordings that highlight a set of practices of meaningful ethnoracial and raciolinguistic distinction that build on a nuanced and quotidian framework of municipal identity as the primary framework of distinction among the Maya community members I spent time with and learned from. These municipal distinctions play a role in complicating, nuancing, and problematizing broader labels such as “Latinx,” “Indigenous,” “Central American,” “Guatemalan,” and even “Maya-Mam” itself. All of these labels are regularly used by scholars, educators, activists, and others when referring to Maya-Mam communities and community members (I have done it twice so far in this paragraph), but none of them do justice to the nuanced labels and framework of municipal distinctions that I observed and learned from during my fieldwork in Guatemala and in Oakland.

I argue that the articulation of these distinctions constitutes a core aspect of how Maya-Mam communities in Guatemala and in the US diaspora articulate ethnoracial identities, and that these perspectives constitute a form of Maya ethnoracial identity practice that is distinct from normative ethnoracial ideologies found in Western academic and activist settings. Further, I show how teachers’ orientations towards the perceived geographies of their Maya students can either contribute toward rendering the particularities of their Maya Indigeneity invisible, or potentially highlighting these particularities through inviting students to articulate and analyze these distinctions in pedagogical encounters.

Author

• Alex Mejía, San Francisco State University
  Presenting Author