Liderazgo & Languaging: Maya Mam Women’s Practices of Survivance in Diaspora

• In Event: Linguistic M(other)work as Pedagogy, Resistance, and Disruption: Language and Immigrant Futurity in Education Research

Abstract

Purpose
This paper centers Maya Mam mothers in the diaspora in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. The Mam community is an Indigenous pueblo of about 600,000 people from Guatemala’s highlands who have been forcibly displaced over time. I build on nascent conversations that focus on “Indigenous Latinx” families and their erasure within Latinidad (Urrieta & Calderon, 2019). Scholars have illuminated how Indigenous Latinx mothers guide their family to sobrevivencia (Machado-Casas, 2009) and to cultural and linguistic maintenance by making strategic decisions to honor indigeneity (de los Ríos, 2024; Baquedano-López, 2021). I add to these discussions by considering how Mam mothers theorize their multilingualism, including colonial codes of power (Barillas Chon, 2024) for leadership to care for their communities and future generations.

Theoretical frameworks
I interweave Indigenous and decolonial feminist notions of leadership and language to consider how women leverage multilingualism as leaders. I underscore the role of language as an integral part of Indigenous survivance (Vizenor, 2008; Jacob, 2013) and as identity (Cojtí Cuxil, 1996). I center Hortencia Jimenez’s (2012) theorization that Chicanas and Latinas are “doing leadership” as an everyday practice and process of relational and non-hierarchical organizing. Thus, I consider how Maya Mam women “do leadership” relationally and multilingually for Indigenous survivance in diaspora.

Knowledge Gathered
This paper draws from a larger study that includes over 5 years of research and collaborations with Maya Mam women across Guatemala and the US. I focus on a subset of 7 Maya Mam mothers living in the San Francisco Bay Area, California and their testimonios, which are individual narratives of collective experiences to contest power (Latina Feminist Group, 2001). Testimonios are also an Indigenous methodology (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). Testimonios were conducted, audio-recorded, and transcribed in Spanish. Additionally, I include analysis from participant observations of informal learning spaces such as public cultural celebrations, a museum exhibit on tejidos, and a grassroots Mam language class. I utilized thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) and poetic inquiry (Faulkner, 2009) to understand how the Mam women interweave their roles as mothers, leaders, and migrants through language and story.

Lessons from Mam Mother-Leaders
I focus on how the Maya Mam women narratively link mothering as an extension of leadership and community care, while emphasizing their visions for multilingualism as tools for communal well-being. Building from Anishinaabe scholar Vizenor (2008), I detail how the Maya Mam mothers actively built more dignified worlds through their leadership and language practices of survivance. These practices of survivance 1) position Indigenous language use as a pillar of Indigenous survival, resistance, and relationality, and 2) highlight opportunities to create dignified lives through community care from multilingual (Mam, Spanish, and English) connections.

Significance
This paper emphasizes the agency of Indigenous Latinx mothers in diaspora by theorizing leadership, mothering, and multilingualism as tools for Indigenous well-being and migrant resistance. Their leadership highlights Indigenous identity across borders, provides roadmaps for enacting solutions that promote Indigenous futurity, and emphasize relational modes of learning and leading across Indigenous colonial languages.

Author

• Cristina Selena Mendez, University of California - Berkeley