Transnational practices and language maintenance: Spanish and Zapoteco in California

Abstract

The theoretical framework of transnationalism has become more prominent within migration studies, examining how (im)migrants maintain connections with communities in their homeland (Sánchez, P. 2007a. “Cultural Authenticity and Transnational Latina Youth: Constructing a Meta-narrative Across Borders.” Linguistics and Education 18: 258–282). Children's identities are also affected by maintaining ties to their parents’ homeland through language. In California, a group of (im)migrants from Mexico, of Zapotec-speaking backgrounds, were among the families who wanted their children to maintain their Spanish language by enrolling in a dual immersion school. Although California has exhibited anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislated against bilingual education, some programs supporting heritage language maintenance continue to exist. This article presents interview data from 10 students who attended this school and their parents. Students maintained transnational and intergenerational ties to their families and communities in both Mexico and southern California through the maintenance of Spanish, but a subset of students who spoke Zapoteco as a heritage language also valued this language and used it as social capital.

Keywords:

• transnational
• identity
• interviews
• dual immersion
• bilingual education
• indigenous language

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the students and parents at Carver Language School, who talked to me about their lives and experiences both inside and outside of school and across national borders. I have sought to present their voices and represent their beliefs accurately and articulately. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers and Pamela Quiroz for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I follow Pacheco's (2009) use of the word (im)migrant because of the problematic nature of the term ‘Latin American immigrants' which alludes to these populations as immigrants in their own land of origin. In addition, the term fails to consider long-time migration patterns before the political Mexico-US border separated families. Pacheco asserts that without problematizing the term ‘immigrant', it may serve to reify the legal and geopolitical processes that produce notions about who belongs in the USA.

2. The difference of opinion on the number comes about because some of the languages are considered to be dialects of one of the others by some people, and considered to be distinct Zapotecan languages by others.

3. For detailed description of the history of migration of some Zapotec (im)migrant communities to the Los Angeles area, see Klaver (1997) and Stephen (2007).

4. The names of the school, the city in which it is located, and the participants have been changed to provide anonymity.

5. I did not witness other students diminishing the Zapoteco language or indigenous identities, and students did not mention this in the interviews.

6. While I realize that the issue of undocumented status is a real concern for many (im)migrants, I recognized it as a sensitive subject and decided not to ask any of the parents questions regarding their immigration status, and none of them volunteered any information in this regard.

7. Quotes in italics have been translated from Spanish to English.

8. Both of Jeannie's parents were from El Salvador, and she had never traveled there, although she had visited Mexico on a vacation with her mother to one of the beaches; Kevin was the other student who had never been to his parents’ home country of Mexico.

9. Some scholars have noted that school officials often look down upon long amounts of time when students are taken out of school (Sánchez 2007a) that often go along with notions of the need for assimilation or Americanization. However, I found this dual immersion school to be supportive of students preserving their home languages and ties to home countries.