UC Santa Barbara

There is a significant diaspora of Mixtec people residing along California’s Central Coast, mostly working in the agricultural sector. The new realities in the diaspora have brough Mixtec varieties in contact in new contexts where they co-exist with other Mexican Indigenous languages, as well as with Spanish and English. We urgently need more understanding of the languages to create equitable community access to resources, as well as to foster maintenance of the traditional linguistic and cultural practices of these communities. This dissertation presents two studies that aim to further our understanding of the Mixtec languages spoken in the diaspora community in the Central Coast in California: a) the first grammatical description of Sà'án Sàvǐ ñà ñuù Xnúvíkó (Mixtepec Mixtec), one of the main branches of Mixtec (Josserand 1983) and a widely spoken variety in the Central Coast diaspora ; and b) a study of speakers’ metalinguistic reflections on intelligibility between Sà'án Sàvǐ ñà ñuù Xnúvíkó and Tlahuapa Mixtec. These two studies reflect different levels of community involvement. The community-informed grammatical description was not initiated by community members, but it has been shaped (mostly indirectly) by many projects and discussions with community members. On the other hand, the analysis of metalinguistic reflections on intelligibility exemplifies a community-led participatory research approach in which community members are active participants in the project, initiating it and taking part in the research design. The grammatical description in this dissertation contains a very rich array of examples from unplanned naturalistic speech, capturing how speakers of Sà'án Sàvǐ ñà ñuù Xnúvíkó deploy different grammatical structures to communicate meaning. The bottom-up approach taken in this description helped solidify TAM categories in Mixtec languages such as the prospective aspect, and the deontic mood, and it uncovered a prefix encoding pluractionality, which may have some consequences for the analysis of other related languages. In the second part of the dissertation, I explore accommodation strategies deployed by speakers in inter-variety communication relying on their multilingual repertoires and translanguaging practices (Li 2018; see also García & Li 2015). This study focuses on the deep metalinguistic knowledge that shapes speakers’ decision-making when trying to repair instances of miscommunication (Wadensjö 1998; Schegloff 1992). Systematic documentation of these accommodation strategies and presentation of these findings in accessible formats could improve language access and social justice in the community (Marie Uliasz 2018; Maxwell et al. 2018) and inspire speakers to bridge differences across varieties in lieu of defaulting to Spanish, using receptive multilingual skills to foster language maintenance (Belmar & Pinho 2020) and thereby advance linguistic and social justice in the diaspora community and beyond.