We will soon be publishing Culturally Responsive Schooling for Indigenous Mexican Students by William Perez and Rafael Vásquez. In this post the authors set the stage for their book and discuss its importance.
Last June, Griselda Zarate, a young Indigenous Mexican-origin student, spoke to Spanish-language television about the racial discrimination she and her sister faced while attending the Santa Rita Union School District in Central California USA. The racism that students like Griselda face often spreads by other Mexicans and manifests by language-shaming for the way Indigenous Mexicans speak. Popular culture ridicules Indigenous languages as dialects, holding unequal power relationships against Spanish and English. As a result of these aggressions, the school district passed a resolution to prohibit the disparaging terms “Oaxaquita/o” and “Indito” which translate to “little Oaxacan” and “little Indian” referring to the widely held belief that Indigenous people from Mexico’s Guerrero and Oaxaca states are racially inferior. The district will also establish the first Indigenous Mixtec after school program so that children can have access to learning their language.
California is considered the state with the largest concentration of Indigenous Mexicans. By one estimate, about 800,000 Oaxacans have settled in Southern California and are mostly Zapotec peoples. These communities come from diverse cultures and often speak at least one of the 68 Indigenous languages of Mexico. Despite their rich social, cultural, and linguistic practices, they face many challenges in healthcare, the labor force, education, and other institutions due to historically lived discrimination.
After decades of living among and working with Indigenous communities in Los Angeles, we decided to conduct a study in Southern California with over 150 Indigenous youth from three groups: Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and P’urhépechas. We wanted to find out what happens to Indigenous students who attend schools but largely go unnoticed, or when noticed, face scrutinization. In our book, Culturally Responsive Schooling for Indigenous Mexican Students, we ask: how do Indigenous students experience school, given the traumas many have faced in Mexico for being labeled Indigenous, for speaking Spanish ‘with an accent’ due to the ‘inhibiting’ Indigenous ‘dialects’ they speak, or for coming from ‘underdeveloped’ communities and where society regards them as intellectually ‘inferior’? And how can schools be responsive and address the need to leverage Indigenous students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds to make meaningful connections to their schooling experiences so they can achieve equitable educational opportunities?
To answer these questions, we looked at students’ multilingualism from the perspective that languages interact with each other and the places they are spoken. Since many Indigenous youth experience language across and in between borders, we introduce a transcultural and translingual approach to illustrate the dynamic and intersectional processes that Indigenous youth engage to construct their identities and linguistic practices in social and educational settings. We emphasize adolescents’ agency in actively negotiating and constructing their identities and the influence of their non-Indigenous Mexican peers and teachers. Despite the verbal abuse youth face, the development of transcultural practices often serves to reinvigorate a sense of who they are and creates strategies to actively debunk anti-Indigenous beliefs. Therefore, the book intends to inform supportive environments that affirm Indigenous identities and languages, foster critical consciousness, and value the transnational experiences of Indigenous Mexican youth.
Studying Indigenous educational experiences and the critical issues these students face is significant to developing innovative approaches in Latinx cultural and linguistic heterogeneity and intra-group ethnic/racial relations. Educational researchers and policymakers will find the book of tremendous value, as it is the first book to our knowledge that examines the academic pathways and identities of Indigenous Mexican students. The findings of this study have the potential to inform local, state, and national policies affecting Indigenous migrant students. Adolescent development scholars will also find the book useful since few studies have been done examining migrant Indigenous youth identity development. We hope that our book contributes to education justice initiatives so that Indigenous students are invisible no more.
Please let us know your thoughts. We’d like to hear from you.
Rafael Vásquez (rafael.vasquez@cgu.edu) and William Perez (william.perez@lmu.edu)
For more information about this book please see our website.
If you found this interesting, you might also like Overcoming the Gentrification of Dual Language, Bilingual and Immersion Education edited by M. Garrett Delavan, Juan A. Freire and Kate Menken.
Channel View Publications and Multilingual Matters 