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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 890

Part of Session 142: Deconstructing the urban-rural dichotomy (Other abstracts in this session)

“Until I became a professional, I was not consciously Indigenous”: One intercultural bilingual educator’s trajectory in Indigenous language revitalization

Authors: Hornberger, Nancy H
Submitted by: Hornberger, Nancy H (University of Pennsylvania, United States of America)

Drawing from long-term ethnographic research in the Andes, this paper examines one Quechua-speaking indigenous bilingual educator’s trajectory as she traversed – and traverses -- from rural highland communities of southern Peru through development as teacher, teacher educator, researcher, and advocate for Indigenous identity and language revitalization across urban, peri-urban, and rural spaces.  Nery Mamani grew up in highland Peru and at the time I met her in 2005, was a bilingual intercultural education practitioner enrolled in master’s studies at the Program for Professional Development in Bilingual Intercultural Education for the Andean Region (PROEIB-Andes) at the University of San Simón in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Drawing from my ethnographic research at PROEIB that year, situated also within a broader context of my ethnographic research on bilingual education in the Andes across several decades and Nery’s life trajectory across those same decades, this paper analyzes her narrative as it emerged in a four-hour interview with me.

Nery’s narrative recounts how her early pride in her family’s Quechua roots coexisted with a rural/urban Quechua/Spanish dichotomy, but later evolved into recognition and advocacy of the importance of using Quechua in educational, urban, and employment spheres.  As a child she lacked a conscious sense of indigeneity. She grew up in the relatively urban environment of Sicuani, but maintained contact with her parents’ community during school vacations when she and her sisters stayed with their grandparents in her hometown in Callalli, herding sheep and alpacas. They dressed in the colorful hand-embroidered clothing typical of the region, which they would also automatically change out of when they left Callalli to return to their studies in Sicuani.  Thus a sharp distinction between Spanish language, Western dress and urban space on the one hand, and Quechua language, Indigenous dress, the countryside and agricultural work (sheep herding) on the other, existed for Nery as a child.

Through her experiences, mobility, studies and work as bilingual teacher, teacher educator, and researcher, those distinctions have gradually blurred in her practices even as her identity has become more consciously Indigenous.  Now, she assumes a personal language policy of using Quechua in public, urban, and literate spaces in her daily life in order to break down the dichotomies and their attendant language and identity compartmentalizations.  She and her Indigenous peers engage in – and valorize -- translanguaging and transnational literacies, border-crossing communicative practices drawing on more than one language or literacy, and using multiple and dynamic varieties of these different languages and literacies – vernacular, formal, academic, as well as those based on race, ethnicity, affinity or affiliation, etc. – for varying purposes in different contexts.  Recognizing, valorizing, and studying these multiple and mobile linguistic resources are part of what Blommaert (2010) refers to as a critical sociolinguistics of globalization that focuses on language-in-motion rather than language-in-place.

Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. New York: Cambridge University Press.