Entering Nepantla: Potentialities of a Mam Language Course

• In Event: Reenvisioning Educational Experiences: Lessons From (Im)migrant Communities

Abstract

While Indigenous communities have actively worked to maintain their language and culture for centuries, the field of Indigenous language revitalization has garnered increased attention in recent years. The vast majority of research in the field of Indigenous language revitalization has focused on communities who live on or near their regional land base, whether focused on the US, Canada, Australia or across the region of Latin America (see, for example, Hinton et al., 2018 ;Coronel-Marina & McCarty, 2016). Recently, scholars have begun to focus on Indigenous communities in diaspora, especially Latinx Indigenous communities in the US (see, for example, Baquedano-López, 2019; Barillas-Chón, 2010; Machado-Casas, 2009). While this is a growing area in the literature, Indigenous Latinx community efforts at revitalization in the US remains undertheorized. Also, while Indigenous language revitalization has often featured a collaborative effort between researchers and Indigenous communities, there remains a need to deeply analyze how the host community is involved in these efforts and what their roles can be. Addressing these gaps, the current project draws on Critical Latinx Indigeneities (Blackwell, Lopez, & Urrieta, 2017) and conceptualizations of new speakers (O’Rourke & Pujolar, 2013; Soler & Zabrodskaja, 2017) to begin to understand the possibilities and considerations of Latinx Indigenenous revitalization efforts in the US.

The study focuses on a Mam community, a Maya ethnoracial and linguistic group from Guatemala and Southern Mexico, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Specifically, the study examines how a Mam community activist and an Anglo-American linguist came together to form a Mam language course for non-Mam community members. This project asks: How do the instructors’ experiences shape the envisioning, design, and future of the Mam course? How is the Mam course situated in relation to the Mam community and to the host community?

This paper draws on data collected through a four-month ethnographic case study of the Mam course. Through semi-structured and informal interviews with the instructors and analysis of course material, this paper presents a discussion of the ideologies that shaped the course and how it is situated in relation to the host community, with implications for the role of new speakers. Findings suggest that new Mam speakers may promote and expand the non-Indigenous communities’ support for language revitalization to press for Indigneous language use as a regional commitment as a decolonial practice of intercultural communication (Quijano, 2007).

Author

• Cristina Mendez, University of California - Berkeley