A Review of Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States

Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States by Mneesha Gellman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States by Mneesha Gellman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023)[/caption]In Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom, political scientist Mneesha Gellman aims to show how access to Zapotec and Yurok language classes encourages youth resistance to culturecide—defined as the killing of Indigenous culture. Opportunities to learn these languages, she contends, expand interests and practices of civic, cultural and political engagement by youth of Indigenous and non-Indigenous backgrounds.

Gellman’s study is an ambitious and interdisciplinary one. In the opening chapter, she introduces the four high school case studies, located in the Hoopa Valley Indian reservation and the city of Eureka in northern California, United States, as well as in the city of Oaxaca de Juárez and the town of Teotitlán del Valle, both in the Mexican region of Oaxaca. She also introduces readers to a conceptual framework drawing from Indigenous studies, human rights and democratization literature, as well as the methodological approaches that guide her study, which combine qualitative, quantitative and collaborative orientations.

This first chapter offers a glimpse of the various goals of the book, making it one a diverse scholarly and practitioner audience would be interested in reading, and, as such, a book that will be taken up according to one’s interests. My reading is shaped by my training as an educational linguist and my engagement in Indigenous language education as a non-Indigenous collaborator, teacher educator and ethnographer in the Yucatan region of Mexico and the Peruvian Andes over nearly fifteen years. At the time of my writing of this review, the political crisis in Peru, my home country, made painfully evident the ways in which material and symbolic violence continues to be enforced by the state and society against Indigenous peoples, and the urgent need for crafting educational alternatives supportive of more intercultural futures. Gellman’s introductory discussion of engaging in Indigenous language education research that can explore “potential solutions for more peaceful pluriethnic coexistence” (p. 9) piqued my interest.

In Chapter 2, Gellman dedicates an entire chapter to introduce her approach to collaborative methodologies, a chapter that stands out as one of the most interesting. She convincingly argues that a collaborative methodology is central to ethically engage in research with historically marginalized communities and “entails a theoretical and practical commitment to mutually created and agreed-upon knowledge frameworks, processes, and products that are available for use by various stakeholders” (p. 31). Collaborative methodologies are not homogenous; they vary greatly. Gellman discusses her approach in comparison to the tenets of participatory action research, feminist methodology and traditional methodologies of political science. Though discussed as an influential orientation, Gellman does not engage with the tenets of decolonizing methodologies in a similar way, and questions of whose knowledges, ways of knowing and languages are included, or not, in the research process, are not explicitly discussed though they would be crucial to better understand how these collaborative methodologies contribute to broader decolonizing research agendas.

I greatly appreciated Gellman’s transparency concerning the many decisions and practices of engaging in comparative and mixed methods research across various stages—practices and decisions which range from the ethical to the logistical, and in fact intertwine more often than not (this transparency extends to sharing research instruments in the Appendix). Her positionality account can offer valuable guidance to novel and more experienced researchers who share an interest in, or commitment to, collaborative research; Gellman’s reflexivity is refreshing, all the more as these accounts are not prioritized in most academic publications.

For readers interested in how collaborative methodologies play out with Zapotec stakeholders, I should point out—as Gellman readily acknowledges—the strengths of this methodology apply primarily to her engagement with Yurok educators (I should also note most of the scholarship cited on this chapter is Anglophone). Based on my experience teaching undergraduate and graduate qualitative methodologies courses in different Peruvian higher education institutions, I recognize the importance for wider acknowledgement and critical discussion of the opportunities and challenges of collaborative methodologies. Gellman’s reflexive and stimulating mixed-methods account can certainly contribute to these needed discussions.

Chapter 3 offers a brief and informative overview of language politics and policies across Mexico and the United States, not an easy task to accomplish in a couple dozen pages. The next four chapters (Chapters 4 – 7) introduce the different case studies and present the main data analysis of the book. The chapters share a similar organization—case study context, high school context, obstacles to and support for student educational success, school climate and youth identity, impact of Indigenous language access, intervening variables in student identity formation and participation, student resistance and concluding thoughts—though the richness of the data presented and interpretations vary. The chapters can be read all together or as standalones—in which case, I found Chapter 5 to be the least and Chapter 7 the most compelling for the book’s overall argument.

Among the many strengths of this book, Gellman provides a multidimensional contextualization of Indigenous language education and a multifaceted take on youth’s school trajectories. Her research offers an important reminder that Indigenous (language) education cannot be understood as detached from the ideological and implementational conditions in which it takes place, and all chapters, for example, highlight the different forms of economic precarity schools, teachers and students face, contemporary manifestations of colonial relations of power. A materialist focus on Indigenous language education has also been explored by Mexican ethnographer Aldo Anzures, in his study of Indigenous early childhood in the Yucatan Peninsula and his discussion of the cultures of bureaucratic accountability that Maya educators constantly negotiate. Importantly, Gellman also raises awareness about the effects of mental health on youth educational experiences, though she does not delve deeper into its interplay with Indigenous language learning.

Listening closely to youth experiences about school climate, Gellman sheds light on the continued presence of (linguistic) racism and discrimination in Oaxacan and Californian school hallways, cafeterias and classrooms. Her focus on student experiences outside Indigenous language education classrooms is crucial to arrive to this finding. In reading the various testimonies on linguistic “teasing” and “name calling,” I was reminded of the powerful contributions that scholars of language and race have made to understand the role of language in processes of racialization (recently evidenced, for example, in the volume Raciolinguistics and in Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa’s raciolinguistic perspective). In my dissertation research on youth bilingualism and identity in urban high schools of Cusco, Perú, I also observed that youth playful language—be it stylization or mock language practices—abounded in schools where Quechua was taught as a subject area. Such language often served to reproduce the racialization of many migrant and Quechua language speaking students and carried negative influences for the prospects of Quechua language education as a whole, especially as it was often left unaddressed by educators. The fact Gellman observed these findings across four different school sites serves as an important call for more research and practice to address resistance to (linguistic) racism, as manifested in each particular context, and as part of the wider project of Indigenous flourishing.

Despite the frequent use of the term “language access” across the book, Gellman’s research illuminates the complex and holistic project that is the teaching Indigenous languages and cultures in high schools, and how this project influences, or at least supports, how educators and students resist various manifestations of culturecide. To my view, the most interesting analysis of what school-based Indigenous language education means, and how teachers and youth experience it, is found in the discussion of Yurok education.

Weaving together the scholarship of Native scholars, testimonies of Yurok educators, as well as diverse student data, Chapters 6 and 7 show that culturally responsive curriculum is embedded within critiques of settler colonialism as well as acts of Native presence and survivance. These chapters also address how Indigenous language education benefits both Indigenous youth and those with non-Indigenous or multiple backgrounds. This attention to the diversity of student profiles is illuminating, given that nowadays, at least in Latin America, a greater proportion of high schools are located in urban areas serving students with different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds.

Gellman finds that Native students often find experiences of Indigenous language education strengthen their Yurok identities and classrooms can act as arenas where resistance to culturecide is encouraged. For non-Native students, more than Indigenous language abilities, Indigenous language education experiences can help them dispel myths about Native absence and develop critical awareness of Native culturecide and genocide, powerful lessons which give us hope for more intercultural futures. The richness I found in my reading of these chapters is likely an outcome of the close collaboration Gellman developed with Yurok stakeholders across the different stages of research (Chapter 2), which included stakeholders’ vetting of data analysis and the writing of these chapters.

Chapter 4 is the only one addressing Zapotec language teaching. To my liking, and possibly to that of some ReVista readers, Chapter 4 left me wanting to learn more about what Zapotec classes actually looked like, wishing to hear the voices of Zapotec language educators, and read more testimonies centering student voices (and also, for this to be done in the original language of data). It was not clear how students’ participation in Zapotec classes influenced the many forms of communal participation youth engaged in, which many times seemed to emerge from communal ways of participating, and not necessarily reflective of school experiences (this reflection also accompanied my reading of the Yurok chapters).

The causality of access to Indigenous language classes, positive youth identity formation and civic, cultural, and political participation, which is used to craft the book’s central argument, is not fully shown – and one could argue demonstrating causality is not the most relevant task to show the complexity of Indigenous language education experiences — which the book does indeed show. At times, more discussion of what the author understands as “identity formation” and how apparently etic terms of “civic, cultural and political participation” relate, or not, to more local categories would help clarify and strengthen discussion of findings in relation to the central argument and hypothesis.

Because of the study’s comparative design and given the skilled incorporation of Native voices and scholarship in Chapters 6 and 7, I would have appreciated more in-depth engagement with Mexican and Latin American scholarship (here and also in the conceptual framework) pertaining to the themes addressed in this chapter. Finally, the diversity of Mexican youth’s linguistic and cultural identities is not ignored by the author, and in Chapter 5, Gellman describes some of this diversity in an urban high school. However, because it is a control site which does not offer Zapotec classes, it is not possible to explore how access to Indigenous language education by students with different backgrounds compares to the benefits identified in Californian schools, though this would have certainly been an important topic to take up.

Mneesha Gellman’s book is stimulating; one can appreciate how the collaborative methodology serves to benefit stakeholders she works with and also offers interesting accounts for scholars and practitioners of Indigenous (language) education who seek to resist the erasure of Indigenous languages and cultures, contributions particularly brought across in Chapters 6 and 7. The chapters focused on Mexican Indigenous education experiences invite readers to consider some of the challenges a comparative and mixed method approach might face. Perhaps what is gained in terms of breadth across sites might not simultaneously be available in terms of descriptive and interpretative depth across sites, especially when the nature of researcher-stakeholder relationships differs, or when the research design and instruments originate in one site and are then transported to another site following a spirit of comparability (this is not overlooked by Gellman, and is discussed on Chapter 2).

Altogether, readers can make their own evaluations of what might be most beneficial in learning about Indigenous language educative comparatively. As an educational linguist, I was surprised not to find more meaningful engagement with the vast literature of Indigenous language education, especially that focused on formal education settings, and high schools, across the Americas. Though one book cannot focus on all topics, and interdisciplinary projects also need to set boundaries, this seems an important body of literature that would have enriched the study and made it even more relevant for practitioners and scholars of Indigenous language education.

Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom is an accessible book that shares valuable insights learned from comparative and collaborative research engagement with Zapotec and Yurok educators across several years, including pandemic years, which attest to the commitment of the researcher to Indigenous education. Engaging with this book can inspire readers to consider how we can engage in Indigenous education research and practice to benefit its diverse actors and how we can do so by drawing on a wide range of knowledges and ways of knowing—across cultures, across disciplines and across methodological paradigms.