The Yucatec Maya language has a highly complex deictic system with interesting typological differences that in addition to demonstratives and locative adverbs also includes ostensive evidentials and modal adverbs. Given that deictic words are among the first that children produce, the aim of this study is to identify the early acquisition that…

Relatively little research has focused on the experiences of students and families of Yucatec-Maya origin in the U.S., and even less has focused on Yucatec-Maya youth and resilience, a normative process of positive adaptation despite exposure to adversity. Using Critical Latinx Indigeneities, which centers on Indigeneity across multi-national…

One highly significant yet under-investigated source of variation within the Latinx Education scholarship are Indigenous immigrants from Latin America. This study investigates how Maya and other Indigenous recent immigrant youth from Guatemala and Mexico, respectively, understand indigeneity. Using a Critical Latinx Indigeneities analytic, along…

Indicators of academic achievement for bilingual students can be inaccurate due to linguistic heterogeneity. For indigenous populations, language shift (the gradual replacement of one language by another) is a factor that can increase this heterogeneity and poses an additional challenge for valid testing. We investigated whether and how indigenous…

In Mexico almost ten million people speak an indigenous language. Recognizing the pluralistic nature of the nation, the Mexican Constitution mandates bilingual-intercultural education; in reality, however, the school system typically imposes the Spanish language and dominant culture on indigenous children. For these children their academic success…

Many Mayan languages make use of a special dependent verb form (the Agent Focus, or AF verb form), which alternates with the normal transitive verb form (the synthetic verb form) of main clauses when the subject of a transitive verb is focused, questioned or relativized. It has been a centerpiece of research in Mayan morphosyntax over the last…

Indigenous education in Guatemala is currently undergoing a massive overhaul in the depth and breadth of its reach in Maya areas. Although much can be said about the re-evaluation and incorporation of indigenous culture, language and worldview into the schools' curricula, it is still failing to reach the country's adult population. As a result of…

This study investigated how immigrants from Latin America who speak indigenous languages perceive and respond to social, racial, linguistic, and cultural factors in the United States. It examined the multicultural and multilingual experiences of six participants, five of whom speak an indigenous language. There were three interviews conducted with…

In this paper we present our study of the use of Mayan and Spanish in nine groups of pupils in bilingual elementary schools in the Mayan area of the Yucatan State, Mexico. Michael Cole's, as well as Guillermo Bonfil's, perspectives were used for the data analysis, in the sense of considering language as a cultural artifact, and an element of…

Using oral survey methods, this study examined potential language maintenance or loss of Mayan languages among the Guatemalan-Maya communities of Southeast Florida. Among dislocated immigrants and their children, the language of the dominant socio-economic forces often displaces other languages (Fishman, 1967). A Guatemalan community in Los…

In rural Guatemala, long-standing ethnic differences in economic well-being widened during 1988-95 despite rapid national economic growth. Analysis of data from three national surveys found that returns to education were substantially lower for rural indigenous households, especially those where the head of household did not speak Spanish.…