Bilingual intercultural education and Andean hip hop: Transnational sites for indigenous language and identity

Abstract

Exploring contemporary Aymara and Quechua speakers' engagements with multilingualism, this article examines two transnational sites of Indigenous language use in Bolivia—a master's program in bilingual intercultural education in Cochabamba and a hip hop collective in El Alto. Responding to the call for a sociolinguistics of globalization that describes and interprets mobile linguistic resources, speakers, and markets, we draw on long-term ethnographic fieldwork to explore the transnational nature of these mobile and globalized sites, ideologies of Indigenous language and identity present there, and flexible language practices therein. From our analysis of selected narratives and interactions observed and recorded between 2004 and 2009, we argue that these sites, ideologies, and language practices constitute productive spaces for Indigenous language speakers to intervene in a historically and enduringly unequal, globalizing world. (Indigeneity, mobility, translanguaging, flexible language practices, multilingual repertoire, global hip hop)*

Language as Social Practice: Deconstructing Boundaries in Intercultural Bilingual Education

“…In fact, these people are currently challenging binarisms still reproduced in IBE official discourse, such as tradition and modernity, rural and urban, first and second language, speaker and non-speaker of an indigenous language, indigenous and non-indigenous, local and global, indigenous language and Spanish, authentic and inauthentic, etc. This phenomenon can be framed within the emerging field of indigenous youth and multilingualism, which has recently discussed the role of indigenous youth as policy makers who display agency and sociolinguistic innovation towards reshaping themselves and claiming new indigenous identities (WYMAN et al, 2014;MCCARTY ET AL., 2009;HORNBERGER & SWINEHART, 2012). In this paper, I will show that, after a couple of semesters in the program under study, the students started to align themselves with this Quechua youth.…”

“Until I Became a Professional, I Was Not, Consciously, Indigenous”: One Intercultural Bilingual Educator’s Trajectory in Indigenous Language Revitalization

“…She and her PROEIB peers see the daily use of Quechua and other Indigenous languages for ordinary communication not as dichotomized, diglossic, domain-restricted language use, but as part of a multilingual repertoire of communicative practices in multiple, scaled, polycentric spaces. Their own language and literacy practices call on them to deploy a complex and fluid set of linguistic resources as they move from everyday to academic speaking, listening, reading, and writing, not only in their own Indigenous languages but also in their peers' languages, as well as varieties of Spanish and English (for more discussion of translanguaging practices in PROEIB, see Hornberger & Swinehart 2012;Luykx, Julca, & García, 2005).…”

Embracing plurality through oral language

“…The promotion of codeswitching between school dialect and home dialect is, therefore, a pedagogical approach that enables school knowledge to be brought closer to the Indigenous student's home life. Code-switching, moreover, provides Aboriginal students with a secure sense of identity for they are able to express who they are with ease (Wei 2008;Hornberger and Swinehart 2012). The acceptance and encouragement of Aboriginal code-switching also reduces the threat posed to Aboriginal English users who might have already identified English as their first language (Department of Education and Department of Training and Workforce Development 2012a, 165).…”