Bilingualism
Fall/Winter 2019-2020 | Volume XIX, Number 2
Table of Contents
Editor’s Letter →
by June Carolyn Erlick
Cruzando My Own River: Bilingual Borders
De-encapsulated Bilingual Education in Brazil
One school in São, Paulo, Brazil—with which co-author Susan Clemensha is very involved— is striving to create multilingual and multicultural contexts for learning, distancing itself from the…
After the American Dream
“Migrants have much more to offer a country than they take away from it, right?” exclaimed Leny Álvarez, a young returnee migrant born in Mexico and raised in Florida. This phrase reflects one…
What Two Can Do
English + Español
The majority of the world’s population speaks more than one language. That means, normally, that people communicate through two or more codes to construct complex world views…
Cruzando My Own River
English + Español
Soy hijo de un Indio Chichimeca y una mujer tan blanca que people mistook her for a gringa…
Teaching Spanish to Latinx Youth in the United States
English + Español
Frustration and concern could be heard clearly in my friend Sara’s voice, “María Luisa, please, I need you to tutor Juan Pablo. He just flunked his Spanish test.” To fail a Spanish test—or any test…
Linguistic trajectories of Mexican-American transnational students
Irelda (not her real name) is a twenty-two-year-old Mexican-born college student, who has lived in both the United States and Mexico. Her life has been marked by interruptions, both culturally…
El paisaje lingüístico en Rohnert Park, California
English + Español
Un domingo por la mañana, caminaba de mi casa al gimnasio… y me llamó la atención un misterioso rótulo bilingüe: cambiando tu vida/changing your life…
Crossing Borders
Eleven-year-old Tito was summoned to his school principal’s office in Tepanco de López, Mexico. He was not in trouble, at least not in a disciplining sense. He was summoned because we wanted…
Indigenous Languages: Mexico and Central America
Two Wixaritari Communities
English + Español
I first arrived in the wixárika (huichol) zone north of Jalisco, Mexico, in 1998. The communities didn’t have electricity then, and it was really hard to get there because the roads were simply…
Weaving Lessons
English + Español
Alonso’s mother is hovering over me. Occasionally she takes over, showing by example, counting out each thread, “p’ej” (one), then “cheb… oxeb…” I want to see the whole pattern laid out before…
Bilingualism in Multicultural Classrooms in Puebla, México
Schools in Puebla, Mexico face new and growing challenges. Since 2005, large migratory flows of indigenous people have been arriving in the city, according to the Mexican Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics (INEGI). Many of the children go to public schools…
On Being Bilingual
In urban classrooms throughout Mexico, migrant and resident indigenous students with a heritage of several indigenous languages sit side-by-side with children who speak only Spanish. Multicultural classrooms can include children from different ethnic groups such as…
Indigenous Languages: The Andes
Things I’ve learned about Indigenous education and language revitalization
I will tell you a few stories about things I have learned in my work with Indigenous communities, language activists and educators over the past four decades. Why stories? I’m an ethnographer…
Studying the Languages of the Andes
As a young student, I was quite determined to do research in South America. (I am not sure why, but it may have to do with the fact that I was born in the mining region of Bolivia, where my father…
Quechua-Spanish Bilinguals
English + Español
Quechua, a 1000-year-old indigenous language, is an official language of Peru. One out of every nine Peruvians speaks the language. In the rural areas, the figure soars to six out of every ten…
Indigenous Movements in Ecuador
English + Español
In October of 2019, Ecuador was thrust into the international spotlight. For nearly two weeks, a multitude of protesters in the capital of Quito demanded that President Lenín Moreno repeal…
Crafting Quechua Language Education in an Urban High School
English + Español
English class is super-cool, 15-year-old bilingual student, Ricardo, told me. Not so much Quechua, an indigenous language offered at his public high school in a valley town of Cuzco…
Fuel Price Protests Open Broad Rights Dialogue in Trilingual and Plurinational Ecuador
In mid-October 2019, Ecuador’s indigenous peoples suddenly left home and became the most numerous and visible marchers in a massive national protest, ostensibly against rising gasoline…
Blending English and Traditional Cultures in Colombia
The first time I encountered ancestral Colombian Amazon cultures, I was struck by how people from different ethnic groups used Spanish as their common language, but used their traditional language in family gatherings or in work within their own communities…
The Bilingual Way
Bilingualism in Perú
“What does Gloriosky mean?” Mateo asked me. Gloriosky? How do I explain a term typically used in older vaudeville Broadway shows and movies? How do I contextualize this for a Peruvian student with zero reference to this type of genre? These are the kinds of questions that…
Chinese-Mexicans
Throughout the Americas, people assemble a variety of primary and secondary sources to preserve the experiences of Chinese descendants in Mexico. There’s also abundant information about those who live in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe…
Are you a real bilingual?
In Colombia, it is cool to be bilingual today. However, not all bilinguals are equal. If you are bilingual in English and Spanish, this is considered very positive. But, if you are bilingual in Spanish and an indigenous language, such as Nasa Yuwe, your bilingualism is…
Book Talk
Ghosts of Sheridan Circle
Targeted killing of political enemies—assassinations—is thankfully rare in the United States. The most famous such assassination occurred in Washington, DC. And it was committed by a close ally of the United States. In September 1976, Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship…
Agrobiodiversity: Integrating Knowledge for a Sustainable Future
I initially approached the volume titled Integrating Knowledge for a Sustainable Future as an outside observer. As an archaeologist whose research focus is ancient agriculture, my expertise…
The Youngest Citizens: Children’s Rights in Latin America
The gap between theory and practice is not a promising place to start a book on children’s human rights. We already know that children’s legal entitlements on paper and on-the-ground…
Orlando Patterson Confounding Island Book Discussion
DRCLAS Events and Staff Assistant Gabrielle Patterson, who hails from Jamaica, interviews and films Orlando Patterson (no relation), John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard. Professor…
Bilingualism Colloquium
This is the full recording of the 2020 Bilingualism Colloquium organized by ReVista. The authors’ individual presentations are now available for viewing at the end of their respective articles.