Abstract
Scholars acknowledge that Indigenous Latinx immigrants’ complex process of adapting to life in the United States, or incorporation, differs from that of their non-Indigenous counterparts. Understanding these differences is especially important as arrivals of Indigenous refugees and asylum seekers from Central America have increased steadily over the past decade and intensified in the last few years. Among them are undocumented, unaccompanied youth, whose migration to the U.S. reached a historic high in 2014 and has persisted into the present (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2020). Guatemalans make up the largest segment of the unaccompanied minor migrant population arriving from Central America today. In 2019, Guatemalans made up about 41% of unaccompanied minors apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border (U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2020). Many come from rural, often predominantly Maya regions such as the Western Highlands (Stinchcomb & Hershberg, 2014). Their migration is due largely to a legacy of political and gang-related violence and economic instability in the aftermath of a civil war in which Indigenous Guatemalans were targets of ethnic cleansing.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Aries, P. (1960). Centuries of childhood: A social history of family life. Pimlico.
Barillas Chón, D. W. (2010). Oaxaqueño/a students’ un/welcoming high school experiences. Journal of Latinos and Education, 9(4), 303–320.
Bishop, L. M., & Kelley, P. (2013). Indigenous Mexican languages and the politics of language shift in the United States. In Language issues in comparative education (pp. 95–113). Brill Sense.
Blackwell, M., Lopez, F. B., & Urrieta, L., Jr. (2017). Introduction: Critical Latinx indigeneities. Latino Studies, 15(2), 126–137.
Calderon, D., & Urrieta, L., Jr. (2019). Studying in relation: Critical Latinx Indigeneities and education. Equity & Excellence in Education, 52, 1–20.
Canizales, S. L. (2015). American individualism and the social incorporation of Guatemalan Maya young adults in Los Angeles. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38(10), 1831–1847.
Canizales, S. L. (2018). Support and setback: The role of religion in the incorporation of unaccompanied indigenous youth in Los Angeles. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45(9), 1613–1630.
Canizales, S. L. (2021). Meaning making and language learning in the educational incorporation of unaccompanied, undocumented Latinx youth workers in the U.S. Sociology of Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038040721996004
Canizales, S. L. (n.d.). Work primacy and the social incorporation of unaccompanied, undocumented Latinx youth in the United States.
Canizales, S. L., & O’Connor, B. H. (n.d.). “‘Maybe not 100%, like people like you who speak English’”: Co-constructing language proficiency in the Maya diaspora.
Casanova, S. (2019). Aprendiendo y sobresaliendo: Resilient Indigeneity & Yucatec-Maya youth. Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, 13(2), 42–65.
Casanova, S., O’Connor, B. H., & Anthony-Stevens, V. (2016). Ecologies of adaptation for Mexican Indigenous im/migrant children and families in the United States: Implications for Latino Studies. Latino Studies, 14(2), 192–213.
Donato, K. M., & Sisk, B. (2015). Children’s migration to the United States from Mexico and Central America: Evidence from the Mexican and Latin American migration projects. Journal of Migration and Human Security, 3(1), 58–79.
DuBord, E. (2018). Bilingual tricksters: Conflicting perceptions of bilingualism in the informal labor economy. Language & Communication, 58, 107–117.
England, N. C. (2003). Mayan language revival and revitalization politics: Linguists and linguistic ideologies. American Anthropologist, 105(4), 733–743.
Garcia, M. C. (2006). Seeking refuge: Central American migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada. University of California Press.
Glottolog. (n.d.). https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/maya1287. Accessed 28 Jan 2020.
Golash-Boza, T., & Valdez, Z. (2018). Nested contexts of reception: Undocumented students at the University of California, Central. Sociological Perspectives, 61(4), 535–552.
Hagan, J. (1994). Deciding to be legal: A Maya Community in Houston. Temple University Press.
Hamilton, N., & Stoltz Chinchilla, N. (2001). Building community in a global city: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Herrera, J. (2016). Racialized Illegality: The regulation of informal labor and space. Latino Studies 4(3), 320–343
Holmes, S. (2013). Fresh fruit, broken bodies: Migrant farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Jawetz, T. & Shuchart, S. (2019). Language access has life-or-death consequences for migrants. Center for American Progress. www.americanprogress.org.
Kanno, Y., & Norton, B. (2003). Imagined communities and educational possibilities: Introduction. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 2(4), 241–249.
Kovats Sánchez, G. (2018). Reaffirming indigenous identity: Understanding experiences of stigmatization and marginalization among Mexican Indigenous college students. Journal of Latinos and Education, 19, 1–14.
Kramsch, C., & Whiteside, A. (2008). Language ecology in multilingual settings: Towards a theory of symbolic competence. Applied Linguistics, 29(4), 645–671.
López, J., & Irizarry, J. G. (2019). Somos pero no somos iguales/we are but we are not the same: unpacking Latinx indigeneity and the implications for urban schools. Urban Education, 1–26.
Machado-Casas, M. (2009). The politics of organic phylogeny: The art of parenting and surviving as transnational multilingual Latino indigenous immigrants in the U.S. The High School Journal, 92(4), 82–99.
Martínez, R. A., & Mesinas, M. (2019). Linguistic motherwork in the Zapotec diaspora: Zapoteca mothers’ perspectives on indigenous language maintenance. Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, 13(2), 122–144.
Menjívar, C. (2000). Fragmented ties. University of California Press.
Messing, J. (2013). “I Didn’t Know You Knew Mexicano!”: Shifting ideologies, identities, and ambivalence among former youth in Tlaxcala, Mexico. In L. Wyman, T. McCarty, & S. Nicholas (eds.), Indigenous youth and multilingualism (pp. 137–155). New York: Routledge.
Morales, P. Z., Saravia, L. A., & Pérez-Iribe, M. F. (2019). Multilingual Mexican-origin students’ perspectives on their indigenous heritage language. Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, 13(2), 91–121.
Obinna, D. N., & Field, L. M. (2019). Geographic and spatial assimilation of immigrants from central America’s North triangle. International Migration, 57(3).
Perez, W., Vasquez, R., & Buriel, R. (2016). Zapotec, mixtec, and purepecha youth. In Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race (pp. 255–272).
Portes, A., & Rumbaut, R. (2006). Immigrant America: A portrait. UC Press.
Portes, A., & Zhou, M. (1993). The new second generation: Segmented assimilation and its variants. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 500, 74–96.
Richards, M. (2003). Atlas Lingüístico de Guatemala. Editorial Serviprensa.
Romero, S. (2018). Ethnicity, history and standard Ixhil (Ixil) Mayan. Language & Communication, 61, 102–112.
Ruiz, R. (1984). Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal, 8(2), 15–34.
Stephen, L. (2007). Transborder lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon. Duke University Press.
Stinchcomb, D., & E. Hershberg. (2014). “Unaccompanied migrant children from Central America: Context, causes, and responses.” CLALS Working Paper Series No. 7.
U.S. Census Bureau. (2016). Hispanic or Latino origin by specific origin. Washington, DC: American Community Survey 1-year estimates. www.census.gov
U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (2020). Southwest border unaccompanied alien children apprehensions by country. Accessed via: www.cbp.gov
Warriner, D. (2007). Language learning and the politics of belonging: Sudanese women refugees becoming and being ‘American’. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 38(4), 343–359.
Whiteside, A. (2009). ‘We don’t speak Maya, Spanish or English’: Yucatec Maya speaking transnationals in California and the social construction of competence. In N. Doerr (Ed.), The native speaker concept: Ethnographic investigations of native speaker effects (pp. 209–232). Mouton de Gruyter.
Whiteside, A. (2013). Research on transnational Yucatec Maya-speakers negotiating multilingual California. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice, 1(1), 103–112.
Zelizer, V. (1985). Pricing the priceless child: Changing social values of children. Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Canizales, S.L., O’Connor, B.H. (2021). From Preparación to Adaptación: Language and the Imagined Futures of Maya-Speaking Guatemalan Youth in Los Angeles. In: Warriner, D.S. (eds) Refugee Education across the Lifespan. Educational Linguistics, vol 50. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79470-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79470-5_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-79469-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-79470-5
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)