Advancing documentation and social justice through community-led collaborations in the Mesoamerican diaspora in California

Date: February 16, 2024

Time: 11:00

Location: SH 4430C/ PC Zoom Room

Speakers: Guillem Belmar

The diversity and richness of the language practices of Indigenous migrant populations are often neglected in both public policy and research. In this talk I highlight contributions of two ongoing interrelated research projects carried out in collaboration with Mixtec and P’urhépecha community members in the California diaspora. First, I analyze speakers’ metalinguistic reflections on intelligibility between two different Mixtec varieties (or languages) spoken in the Central Coast of California. I argue that hybridization (Sanchez-Stockhammer 2012) serves as an accommodation strategy to facilitate intercomprehension, expanding on the multilingual repertoires and translanguaging practices (Wei 2018; see also García & Wei 2015). Next, I discuss Justicia Social de Intérpretes de Lenguas Originarias (JSILO), a collective of five Mixtec interpreters and two UCSB researchers whose goals are to create and disseminate multilingual and multimedia resources for interpretation into Indigenous languages (www.glosarioindigena.com) and to provide training for Indigenous interpreters in the diaspora in practical workshops (Ávila et al. 2023). Both projects center the voices and experiences of community members, who have identified a need for a greater understanding of the Indigenous languages spoken in the diaspora to advance language and social justice (Marie Uliasz 2018; Maxwell et al. 2018) and to create more equitable access to resources in domains such as public health while fostering the communities’ traditional linguistic and cultural practices.