By David W. Barillas Chón

In the United States, Maya migrant youth from Guatemala confront discrimination from Latinxs students based on their indigenous backgrounds. These are not new experiences; they are a transnational continuation of discrimination they experience in Guatemala.

Photos by James Whitlow Delano, National Geographic.

Schooling experiences in the U.S.

Education scholars, with some exceptions, have ignored Central American migrant youth in their research. In rare cases when Central American youths are centered, the experiences of Indigenous migrants remain overlooked. The invisibilization of Indigenous Central American migrants reflects a broader neglect in education studies of Indigenous migrants in the diaspora.

Some Critical Latinx Indigeneities scholars, however, are disrupting this inattention by noting the ways schools are complicit in the erasure of Indigenous migrant youth’s identities. For instance, English Learning programs, such as bilingual education, are predicated on the premise that Spanish is the “heritage” or first language of all Latinxs in schools. This presumption fails to recognize K’iche, Mam, and other Maya languages spoken by increasing number of Maya migrant youth in schools.

Some scholars also have noted that Indigenous migrant youth from Guatemala and Mexico are discriminated by Latinx[i] students, including non-Indigenous migrants, due to their Indigenous backgrounds. Maya youth are put down, made fun of, and picked on when Latinx students call them the racist epithet “indio”—an historical word used in many countries across Central America to mean someone who is inferior, dirty, and undesirable. Joaquín, a K’iche’ youth I met in my research with Maya youth in a high school in the Pacific Northwest, recounted how a Mexican coworker called his Guatemalan coworkers an “indio.” Asked whether he thought this was an insult or something negative, Joaquín responded, “no de [sic] algo bueno” or “not something good.” I have written elsewhere how so too, Mexican-descent youth use “oaxaquita,” a similar racist epithet as indio, towards Oaxacan youth, contributing to an unwelcome, even hostile, learning environment. These racist and dehumanizing practices are a transnational continuation of longstanding discrimination against Indigenous peoples across Abya Yala (Latin America) and Turtle Island (North America).

Experiences in Guatemala

To understand the treatment that Maya youth receive from Latinx students in the U.S. requires contextualizing their racialized experiences in Guatemala. Weas, another K’iche’ youth I encountered in my research, succinctly depicts the ways the Guatemalan government treats (or fails to treat) Maya peoples:

“Algunos [que hablan k’iche’ fueron] encontraron muerto en la calle y no hacen nada [el gobierno de Guatemala]. No hacen nada porque [los de la comunidad] son indígenos (sic), sólo que hablan k’iche’, y no nos quiere ayudar el gobierno. Ayudan más lo que, lo que hablan español (sic)”

“Some [K’iche’ speakers] were found dead in the streets and they [Guatemalan government] don’t do nothing. They [government] don’t do nothing because they [people in his community] only speak K’iche’. The government helps more those that speak Spanish” (Barillas Chón 2019: 33).

Weas did not specifically refer to race as the reason why the Guatemalan government ignores his K’iche’ community. However, he signals to language as the reason. In this case, language is a proxy for race. (For further discussion of the ascription of race to language, see Flores & Rosa 2015; Salim, Rickford, and Ball 2016). The Guatemalan state has institutionalized neglect and poverty of Maya peoples through the systemic underfunding and under-resourcing of public services, including education and health in largely Indigenous rural Guatemala.

These conditions compel Maya youth to work in order to contribute to household economies, interrupting their schooling, and disrupting Spanish learning of monolingual Indigenous language speakers. As a result, Maya youth do not speak Spanish like monolingual-Spanish speakers. Ladinos (non-Indigenous Guatemalans) then perceive Maya youth as inferior because they lack proper language skills, becoming fodder for making fun of, putting down, and denying Maya peoples jobs and economic opportunities. And so, the structured neglect and poverty continues.

Transnational discrimination

Now I circle back to Maya youth’s experiences in U.S. schools. Maya youth continue to experience discrimination from non-Maya, non-Indigenous Guatemalans, and ladino migrants because the latter bring their ways of thinking into the U.S. Racist epithets and perceptions regarding Maya inferiority travel with them. These youth rely on their previous racial schema to map themselves onto a new context of reception. More specifically, previous racial schema now interact in formidable ways with other racialization processes already present in the U.S. regarding Latinxs. I and other colleagues untangle and make sense of these processes in another essay (Barillas Chón, forthcoming; Barillas Chón, Montes, & Landeros, forthcoming).

In this blog, I provide a brief outline of the discrimination Maya migrant youth experience from migrant and U.S.-born Latinxs. Maya youth and other Indigenous migrants, however, are not exclusively victims. For instance, Oaxacan-descent students and parents have campaigned to make the use of oaxaquita and indio illegal in Oxnard, California. This campaign is an important intervention in the racism that Indigenous migrants experience. Because this racism is transnational and persistent, larger campaigns within and beyond schools are needed in Guatemala and in the U.S. to address it. In the U.S. educational context, our work centers on teaching what is an overwhelming white teaching force the diversity within Latinx experiences. The work within Latinxs consist of unpacking and undoing the entrenched racism perpetuated with the use of indio and other treatments of Maya migrant youth.

David W. Barillas Chón is a Poqomam Maya in the diaspora and Assistant Professor of Education and Indigenous Education at Western University (ON, Canada). His work centers how Maya and other Indigenous youth from Guatemala and southern Mexico in the U.S. make sense of their Indigenous selves. For more on his work regarding Maya migrant youth and issues relating to their labor, language, identity, and navigating colonial codes of power visit Academia or ResearchGate.

[i] I use Latinxs as a gender inclusive term that includes people born across Abya Yala as well as those born in the U.S. who at various historical points have been racialized as Hispanic and/or Latino.