Changing ideological and implementational spaces for minoritised languages in higher education: Zapotequización of language education in Mexico

ABSTRACT

Indigenous languages of Mexico have largely been excluded from formal education spaces. This ethnographic action research study highlights a context where Diidxazá/ Isthmus Zapotec, an Indigenous language of Oaxaca, has recently begun to be taught in higher education. We examine the ways that administrators, the teacher, and students in these classes have collaborated to create a new space within the institution. By tracing the power dynamics behind the implementational and ideological efforts that have made this possible, we aim to provide insight into the social change underway in this setting, as well as the concrete steps that were taken in the creation of this pluralist space for Indigenous language learning. We conclude with a discussion of the collective engagement that has been necessary in order to foster and develop a community of Indigenous-language learners, and the challenge of going beyond tokenistic inclusion of minoritised languages in education.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous languages
• Mexico
• higher education
• language ideologies

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge and thank the students and members of the UABJO Faculty of Languages who have participated in and supported the Zapotec program. De Korne would like to acknowledge that the work of this article was partly supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265, and through a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian Institute Department of Anthropology. Colleagues at the Smithsonian Institute, the Educational Linguistics department at the University of Pennsylvania, the MultiLing Center at the University of Oslo, and three anonymous reviewers provided helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Haley De Korne http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2522-0400

Notes

1. Zapoteco del Istmo (Isthmus Zapotec), Zapoteco (Zapotec) and Diidxazá are all common names for this language. This is one of roughly 62 variants of Zapotec spoken in Oaxaca (INALI 2008). Within the university environment the term Zapoteco is most commonly used, however in this paper we use the terms Diidxazá or Isthmus Zapotec in order to avoid confusion and over-generalization in regards to other varieties of Zapotec.

2. There are three campuses of the Faculty of Languages of the UABJO. Diidxazá has been taught at two of these campuses, the main campus in Oaxaca City, and the satellite campus of Tehuantepec, since 2013. This article focuses on the process and experiences of participants in the Diidxazá program at the Oaxaca City campus specifically. For further discussion of the program at the Tehuantepec campus see De Korne (2016).

3. Interviews were conducted in Spanish, all translations are ours. We do not use students’ names in order to maintain confidentiality. Transcription conventions:

• /slashes/ are used to indicate overlapping speech between interviewer and interviewee.

• … Three dots are used to indicate a pause.

• ---Dashes are used to indicate interrupted speech.

• […] Brackets with three dots are used to indicate an omission of the original transcript.

• [brackets] are used to indicate an editorial or translation insertion, such as a word that is implied but not actually present in the transcript.