Revitalizando Ando: Storytelling and Art-making towards Language Reclamation

Group Submission Type: Visual Art Exhibit

Description of Session

Two mountain ranges, the Sierra Madre Oriental and the Sierra Madre Occidental meet in what is now the state of Oaxaca, painting a rugged landscape that is home to a diverse natural ecosystem and similarly diverse cultural and linguistic landscape: 16 distinct languages are recognized by Mexico’s Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI), and around a third of the population recognizes themselves as a speaker of an Indigenous language (INEGI, 2020). While some languages enjoy large numbers of speakers and vibrant communities, the on-going sociohistorical and sociolinguistic oppression has resulted in a shift to Spanish that has threatened many Indigenous languages (de Leon, 2017; Hinton, Huss & Roche, 2018). Yet along the history of domination, runs a parallel history of resistance and creativity that has opened new spaces for Indigenous languages through bottom-up, collaborative and multidisciplinary projects centered on the arts to recover and revitalize languages and local epistemologies (Flores Farfan, 2013). The arts afford multiple possibilities for reflecting, theorizing and engaging in different ways of knowing and being in the world. Art is both multiperspectival and embodied, helping to create our own voice, personal and collective. It not only gives sense to the world, but can be used to transform the idea of reality (Morales, 2016).
This art exhibition will present the work of a class titled “Language, power and art,” that one of the co-presenters facilitated in the spring of 2020 at a language teacher education program in Oaxaca, Mexico. Students, who come together from different communities from across the state, engaged in the co-exploration of language ideologies and language regimes through storytelling and art-making, reflecting on how these ideologies and power structures influence our lives, education and society.
Forced to transfer to the virtual realm by the COVID-19 pandemic, students created virtual performances based on their own experiences to encourage critical conversations about language and power, made videos in their native or heritage language(s), wrote and illustrated children’s books and poetry, all of which we published through an interactive online gallery called “Revitalizando Ando” as a platform to foster new and existing collaborations.
Through this exhibition (https://lenguapoderarte.wordpress.com/), we will present the art work of class participants within the sociohistorical and sociolinguistic context of Oaxaca and the embodied, arts-based pedagogies that guided our work.

Sub Unit

• Pre-Conference Workshops, Book launches, and Visual Art Exhibits / Visual Art Exhibits

Chair

• Maria Cecilia Schwedhelm, University of Minnesota

Presenter

• Victoria Méndez