Speaking Like Liberal Multicultural Citizens: The Politics of Schooling and Illustrating Indigeneity for Quichua Youth in Ecuador

• In Event: The Citizens’ Revolution in the City: Governing Subaltern Subjects in Quito’s Historic Center

Abstract

This paper considers how the teaching of speech practices in indigenous languages encourages a particular way of being indigenous across social spaces: that of liberal multicultural citizens. Through linguistic anthropological and ethnographic analysis, I argue that indigenous teachers frequently teach children to speak in Quichua in ways that project notions of orderly, countable, and multicultural languages. This occurs primarily through the use of short greetings and songs. Through the students’ demonstrations of such speaking patterns across public spaces, these linguistic forms begin to create the idea that students of intercultural bilingual education are also orderly, multicultural subjects. These ways of speaking are used to temporarily mask subalternity as indigenous youth pass across public spaces, such as inside the President of Ecuador’s offices in Quito’s Historic Center. After all, the students’ parents include Quito’s most marginalized migrant subjects. Such practices generate a politics of recognition for intercultural bilingual schools at an institutional level. These ways of speaking frequently lead to increased institutional attention, as particular registers of Quichua articulate with Ecuador’s multicultural Constitutional recognition and with the benign multiculturalism of public officials across various levels of government.

Author

• Nicholas Limerick, University of Pennsylvania