UC Berkeley

In Quintana Roo, Mexico, discourses of cultural loss, linguistic revitalization, and economic opportunity exist within the context of the neoliberal tourism industry, an economic force which necessitates specific engagements with national and transnational systems of capital and governance. This region, the ‘Zona Maya’, is also powerfully shaped by historical narratives and acts of resistance and negotiation with colonial, assimilating forces. I argue that within this complex contemporary social world, trilingualism in Yucatec Maya, Spanish, and English has emerged as an educational and social ideal, which speaks to the political economic and social situation at hand through an embodiment of three distinct voices. Differently mediatized communicative practices, in particular the use of social media, among young people who come from communities of Maya speakers (though they may not consider themselves to be ‘speakers’ per se) serve to produce new political-linguistic subjectivities, intersubjectivities, and collectivities. I demonstrate that these social formations embody the seemingly distinct, if not contrary, projects of Maya language revitalization and English language promotion and teaching. Meanwhile, communicative privilege emerges as an effect of efforts to standardize and evaluate each language; this privilege marginalizes people who use language in a non-standard way, and such usages can also be targeted as illegitimate by Maya or English language education. Finally, I argue that those who embody the trilingual ideal use the voices and mediatized modalities at hand to contest neoliberal educational and political-economic paradigms and fight for new forms of emplaced and cosmopolitan belonging and participation.