Stewards of the Language: Liminality and Transnational Sovereignty

• In Event: Language and Liminality in the Schooling of Nondominant and Immigrant Youth

Abstract

We present findings from a study examining the language practices of Indigenous Maya students whose families originate from Yucatan, Mexico, who attend Metropolitan Elementary (pseudonym) in San Francisco, California. We discuss how liminal experience in migration supports ways of becoming and embodying multiple selves and learning multiple languages. We focus on students’ strategies for learning Yucatec Maya and expressing diasporic awareness of their translanguaging practices. We argue that these students’ practices are tied to their roles as stewards of the language, and that in the process of learning their Indigenous language they enact forms of transnational sovereignty. Theoretically, we link liminality as “betwixt and between” expected roles and positions in society (Turner 1995: 5-6) to the extended temporalities and spatialities in migration and living in the borderlands as a space of enduring multiplicity, tension, and possibility. We draw on philosopher Maria Ortega’s work (2016) to examine different types of consciousness as the seedbed of multiplicitous selfhood and the tensions experienced as a result of the cultural and existential uprooting.

From 2013 to 2017, Author 1 led a research team conducting participant observations at the elementary school examining Latinx and Indigenous Maya students’ introduction to academic literacies and multilingualism. (Author 2) joined the research team in the later stages of the project and assisted with final data analysis. The authors’ work supports commitment to elevating the experiences of Indigenous students in schools. As a person of Maya descent, (Author 1) is acutely aware of the racial and class dynamics in Yucatan where (Author’s) own family devalued Indigenous ancestry. (Author 2) has been a teacher in public schools working with Latinx students in the Central Valley and participates in projects of language maintenance and revitalization with Maya Mam-speakers in Guatemala and California. We draw on the project’s ethnographic database of 100 hours of classroom observation and videorecordings of 30 instructional hours. The database also includes 92 language background questionnaires and 25 semi-structured interviews with a range of school stakeholders; of these, 14 were conducted with students. In this paper we highlight interviews with two students identifying three pedagogical considerations that became salient in the students’ responses as insights into how students learn and relate to their Indigenous language: 1) becoming stewards of the language, advancing the Indigenous language, 2) learning and keeping the language, and 3) actively regenerating the language drawing on their multilingualism. Our analysis examines how students learn the Indigenous language at home in pedagogical spaces designed by their mothers (highlighting complex gender and parental roles in migration) and translanguaging experiences as relational and connected to Land.

Authors

• Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, University of California - Berkeley

• Cristina Mendez, University of California - Berkeley