Relational Care as a Metric for Fluency: Mam Language Learners and the Mam Diaspora Community

• 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 discuss how nine non-Indigenous learners of Mam Maya from the United States describe their reasons for learning the language and their expectations for their own fluency. In conversation with a burgeoning literature on Indigenous Latinx families in the US, this paper offers an example of how non-Indigenous community members living in Huichin territory (Oakland, California) learn with and in service to the Mam community. This qualitative study offers insight into how these community members understand indigeneity, language, and their own relation to the future wellbeing of the Mam community across diasporic locations.
Specifically, I turn to literature on language as a social practice to interrogate the multiplicitous understandings that the Mam language students articulate about the importance of language and languaging. I also draw on the field of Indigenous Language Revitalization to ground my understanding of pan-Indigenous discussions on the connections and interrelations between language, identity, community and wellbeing (Jacob, 2013; McCarty et al., 2018; Taft et al., 2018) while paying specific attention to how the Mam instructors articulate these connections. Also considering the growing conversation around how neoliberal rationalities drive language learning (Flores, 2019), this paper seeks to unpack the complexities of the positionalities and commitments of the Mam language students.
This qualitative study asks: what factors influence non-Indigenous community members to study Mam? What are the goals of the language students in relation to taking the Mam class? How do their social locations influence their participation in the Mam class and other revitalization activities? How are these students situated in larger movements for the wellbeing of Indigneous peoples and languages?
I draw on an ongoing ethnographic and community-based design collaboration with Maya Mam language teachers in Huichin/Oakland and Guatemala. The collaboration focuses on a Mam language class taught to primarily non-Mam community members who work in public sectors supporting the Maya Mam diaspora community. I discuss findings from two years of collaboration which includes weekly participant observation of the class given over Zoom, a language learning and cultural exchange trip to Guatemala in summer 2022, as well as formal semi-structured interviews and unstructured interviews with nine key student participants as well as the three instructors.
Findings from the study suggest the Mam language students articulate their linguistic fluency and competency goals in ways that challenge the neoliberal citizen (Flores, 2019). Instead, their desires for linguistic competence in Mam is oriented toward community material and emotional support. The students describe both their journeys to begin learning Mam as well as the active process of learning Mam as practices of care for community wellbeing. Thus, they articulate a relational understanding of language and consciously seek to combat the erasure and discrimination present in the lives of the Mam community they work with. In this way, this study not only offers an intervention into language learning studies but also presents an example of building and growing a pro-Indigneous, anti-colonial community and coalition that can support Indigneous movements for linguistic and cultural revitalization across the hemisphere.

Author

• Cristina Mendez, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author