Mesoamerica was a territory occupied by a plethora of bilingual first peoples. Historically, these Indigenous peoples thrived in a context of multilingualism that conditioned powerful political alliances, and sophisticated cultural exchange. Scholars such as Miguel León-Portilla and James Lockhart have proved that, for example, the late Aztecs were a clear example of how diplomacy and fruitful cultural exchange with other peoples was made possible by bilingualism. Then, in 1492, when the Spanish invasion commenced, first peoples used bilingualism as a mode of cultural survival. For Mexico, translation proved to be highly instrumental for Indigenous artists and intellectuals in documenting--and disguising--philosophical knowledge otherwise deemed as heretical and thus prohibited by colonial rule. The work of translators and intellectuals who took on this subversive challenge can be appreciated in works like Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún’s Historia general, and many codex fashioned as religious conversion tools.

In contemporary Mexico, multilingualism and translation continue to be used as tools for linguistic and epistemological revival efforts among Indigenous communities both in Mexico and in migration. This special session brings to the fore efforts in media, writing, and education (across centuries) that center bilingualism in community and scholarly contexts, and from transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives. Participants will examine the nexus of access to community radio, technologies of language in colonial Mexico, and teaching of bilingual literature in U.S. universities around bilingualism and Indigenous languages.

The first paper, titled “Sounds of Resistance: Language Revival and Indigenous Knowledge Production in Community Radio” by Sandra Gutiérrez (Cal State Los Angeles), examines the centrality of Indigenous languages in community radio projects in Mexico and the U.S., and explores the nuances of media production in multilingual contexts. Through an engagement of ethnographic work grounded on direct participatory work in media content creation in Michoacán, Mexico, the author discusses radio production as a site of self-representation that fosters cultural autonomy and critical intercultural dialogue among multilingual audiences (P’urhépecha, Spanish and English). Gutiérrez sustains that the proliferation of Indigenous radios plays a salient role in the revival of community-based knowledges.

In “Indigenous Literature and Translation Exercises in U.S Universities,” Osiris Gómez (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) proposes a method to teaching bilingual literature (Indigenous language-Spanish) that centers translation as a critical analysis tool in L2 learning contexts. Through an analysis that merges literary criticism principles and qualitative methods used in linguistics, this paper examines the potentiality of designing translation exercises that allow university students to engage creatively with bilingual aesthetics. Gómez maintains that translation exercises help students break down poetry to a medular level thus solidifying their interpretation skills, and yield a decolonial perspective on the challenges writers face when translating disenfranchised languages.

The third paper, titled “Indigenous Technologies of Communication in Colonial Mexico: Language, Orality, and Writing” by Kelly McDonough (University of Texas, Austin), centers on Nahua technologies of language as well as pictographic and alphabetic writing in New Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using a broad definition of “Indigenous technologies” as the combined processes, tools/products of Indigenous knowledge practices generated in specific social contexts (Norton), McDonough addresses how Nahuas adapted their communicative technologies for specific purposes, and how these choices were influenced by and received by their various interlocutors. Evidence is drawn from Indigenous historical, and judicial materials. McDonough’s proposes that the Nahua made strategic choices of form and function to best suit their needs at specific times and places.

In the final paper, “Digital Migrants: Textual Strategies of Indigenous Migrant Literatures,” Paul M. Worley examines multilanguaging and the use of multiple graphic systems of communication in works on the experience of immigrating to the US by the Zapotec writer Lamberto Roque and the Q’anjob’al writer Marcos Antil. Situating these works within the broader context of Indigenous multilingualism and understandings of text, Worley argues that these works’ ability to signify relies on longstanding Indigenous literary practices in which a text encourages its readers to perform the act of reading in specific ways. Examples of what Mignolo and Walsh refer to as “decoloniality,” these texts access expanded textual environments as a way of acknowledging this apparent past’s existence in the presence.

Inés Hernández-Ávila (University of California, Davis) will serve as respondent. A renowned Nimipu/Nez Perce and Tejano scholar and writer, Hernández-Ávila is one of the six founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).

Presentations will last 10 minutes, for a total of 40 minutes. Hernández-Ávila will offer a 5-minute comments session for the papers. The remaining 15 minutes will be reserved for open discussion.