"I Speak Spanish. I Speak K’iche’": Maya Youth's Use of Colonial Codes of Power

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Intersectional and Intercultural Crossroads of Indigenous(ness)

Abstract

This paper examines how six recently arrived Maya migrant youth from Guatemala in a high school in the Pacific Northwest understood and employed Spanish and English to navigate racialized and linguistic interactions. Utilizing a Critical Latinx Indigeneities framework alongside a raciolinguistic perspective, findings from this study show that Spanish is a racial and linguistic system of power that travels with youth. In the U.S., Spanish interacts with English as a new system of power resulting in the diminishing of Indigenous languages. This study provides urban educators understandings of the complex systems of race, language, and power recently arrived Maya migrants navigate.

Author

• David W Barillas Chón, University of Western Ontario