Teaching Maya Mam: Affirming Sovereignty Through Language, Land, and Relationality

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Desire Within Empire, Land-Based Pedagogies, and "Latinx" Sites of Learning

Abstract

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 given to non-Mam community members who are in service roles to the Mam-speaking diaspora community. I discuss findings from a year of collaboration which includes participant observation, analytic memos, artifact analysis, and formal semi-structured interviews, and unstructured interviews with the instructors. I describe the ways in which the two Maya Mam language teachers articulate Indigenous sovereignty and reaffirm their deep and ongoing connection to Land across national borders. I draw on understandings of hemispheric indigeneity (Castellanos et al., 2012) and Critical Latinx Indigeneities (Blackwell et al., 2017) to situate how overlapping and interrelated empires impact the lives of the Maya Mam diaspora in Oakland, thereby shaping the communicative needs of the diaspora community and exerting pressure on how the Indigenous language is taught. These frameworks illuminate how the Mam language course, which began through a grassroots community initiative, is pressured by empire to conform to settler education systems.

However, even within the constraints of the increasing institutionalization of the course, the Maya Mam teachers generate a locus of enunciation (Mignolo, 2000) that challenges the globalized-Western understandings of space and relationality by centering Maya cosmovision. I unpack the ways Land, from across Mam territory in Guatemala to Huichin/ Oakland, informs language teaching within the constraints of migration and the settler education system. The structure of the language itself, which the instructors ground in their home territories and histories, constantly centers speakers toward Land and place and requires that speakers articulate their relation to each subject (Collins, 2010). The instructors also engage land as pedagogy through explicitly recounting how the language has grown from and remains connected to Land (Tuck et al., 2014; Bang et al., 2014). I argue that teaching in and across diasporic spaces rearticulates a connection to land and life, thereby affirming indigeneity across national boundaries. Further, the instructors’ commitments to teaching about relationality regenerate and reaffirms a unity of language and being that reinforces transnational sovereignty through languaging practices (Author, forthcoming). The class also challenges non-Mam community members to unlearn settler ways of relating to each other and to the land, pushing them to orient themselves in new ways to their surroundings. In this vein, I consider my position as a Mam language learner where I am (re)oriented toward Indigenous communities through this learning, while also continuously interrogating my role as a Chicana ethnographer within the overlapping systems of power and colonialism.

These findings highlight the ongoing need to challenge the erasure of Latinidad, to explore and affirm the diversity, in this instance, the indigeneity subsumed within it. By emphasizing the efforts of Indigenous Latinx communities, this work offers insights into how community desires are constructing educational pathways for a resurgent Indigenous future. While this collaboration highlights the limitations of institutions, it also presents the potential to build relationships between Indigenous and settler/guests that centers Indigenous futurity.

Author

• Cristina Mendez, University of California - Berkeley