Countering Logics of Indigenous Linguistic and Cultural Excess: Rethinking Erasure in the Maya Diaspora (Yucatan-California

• In Event: Reclaiming Indigenous Knowledge: Decolonial and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies for Language, Art, and Educational Sovereignty

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss some of the ways colonial educational structures continue to restrict the use of Indigenous languages and the expression of Indigeneity. I examine how the coloniality of language (Veronelli, 2015) operates as part of the intrinsic architecture of educational institutions, particularly its bureaucracies to identify, classify, and reduce what is perceived as linguistic and cultural excess. In this context, English dominant educational discourses and curricula produce linguistic vulnerabilities that then need to be managed. Drawing from ethnographic data gathered at a K-5 school, I discuss some of the ways students and parents multilingualism countered practices of Indigenous erasure, it also advanced an aesthetics of language use that affirmed Indigenous experience and knowledge.

Author

• Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, University of California - Berkeley