RESEARCH

My long-term research commitment has been to work with Kaqchikel Mayas and indigenous linguist-activists from the Guatemalan highlands and examine contemporary cultural politics of language and identity in the post-war era. Social and linguistic power asymmetries were manifest in a number of social institutions devoted to language and cultural socialization, from Pan-Mayan linguist-activists’ grassroots literacy courses in the Kaqchikel language to quotidian discursive practices in Spanish that comprise language socialization routines in Mayan families and households from a town undergoing language shift. Much of my writing on this research examines highland Maya family and peer group social practices with special attention to members’ participation in cultural productions.

I have also worked collaboratively with a number of colleagues in linguistics, education, and anthropology. For example, my collaborative work with Paul V. Kroskrity and elder, Rosalie Bethel, was concerned with intervening in the politics of language loss, ethnic identity, and performance in Western Mono communities. During a time when elders and their knowledge of ancestral languages and cultural ways were literally passing-away, the published CD-ROM, Taitahduhaan provides a virtual elder in Rosalie Bethel, who can directly speak, sing, and tell stories to future generations of Western Mono children and youth who might be interested in learning their ancestral language. We also contributed an article on interactive technologies for language revivalist movements to the edited text, The Green Book on Language Revitalization in Practice. Both of these pieces represent scholarship that engages in academic debate and exhibits practical applications for language planning at the community level.

I’ve also worked extensively with Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, a scholar in literacy and childhood studies, in examining social institutions within the U.S. that have a major impact on the socialization of youth – public schools and families. As point of entry into this diverse field, we specifically focused on Mexican immigrant children’s roles as cultural and linguistic brokers in their families’ settlement process. We sampled different sites where children translate and interpret. In these contexts we noted how children assumed different roles in service and surveillance as they interpreted different social “texts” between unequal parties – their families and representatives of mainstream U.S. institutions. We have developed a series of papers on this topic that speak to different disciplinary audiences in education, anthropology, sociology, and sociolinguistics.

My new research involves a longitudinal, multi-sited qualitative study designed to trace transnational circuits of migration connecting sending communities from highland Guatemala to different receiving contexts in the U.S. ( Iowa, New Mexico, California, and Guatemala). One of the primary objectives of this research is to examine what roles indigenous “new immigrant” children and youth play in their families’ settlement process in the United States. December 2007 marked the end of an intensive field stay where I collected observational and interview data in one of the first sites, documenting how immigrant children and their families from the sending Guatemalan communities of San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Calderas, and Patzún are participants in quotidian social and linguistic practices that “restructure” family relationships and social identifications (age, kin, community/regional, gender, and ethno-national) within a rural Iowa town where the local community and economic relationships are tied to the meatpacking industry.

Publications

Presentations

Graduate Advisees

Courses Taught
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
The Human Life Cycle Across Cultures
Educational Anthropology
Latin American Cultures
Language, Culture & Society
Qualitative Research Methodologies
Introduction to Cultural & Linguistic Anthropology for Teachers