This article describes the journey I embarked on as a teacher-researcher to better understand the realities of two of my Maya English learners (ELs) in our learning environment. This yearlong (2018-2019) study took the form of a qualitative case study inquiry whose purpose was to explore how two Maya migrant youth from Guatemala experienced and…

This essay explores how stories of Tecum, Maya K'iche' warrior, and the quetzal can serve as creative entry points to contextualize the racialization and ideological positioning in Guatemala of Maya migrant youth who are now in U.S. schools. As we work on radicalizing possibilities and re-imagining liberatory futures, our efforts lie in crafting…

One highly significant yet under-investigated source of variation within the Latinx Education scholarship are Indigenous immigrants from Latin America. This study investigates how Maya and other Indigenous recent immigrant youth from Guatemala and Mexico, respectively, understand indigeneity. Using a Critical Latinx Indigeneities analytic, along…

To do research that really makes a difference--the authors of this book argue--social scientists need questions and methods that reflect the complexity of the world. Bringing together a consortium of voices across a variety of fields, "Methods that Matter" offers compelling and successful examples of mixed methods research that do just…

Students at Tucson High School in Arizona, part of Tucson Unified School District's highly successful Mexican American Studies (MAS) K-12 program, the largest in the nation, are taught Indigenous concepts, including Panche Be (seek the root of the truth), and the Aztec and Maya calendars. The author speaks to the students about the relationship…

Educators in the field of "family literacy" have identified multiple approaches to family literacy programs (FLPs), and have underscored the need to identify and make explicit the philosophical orientations of their own programs. This was the task undertaken in this article, which focused on a FLP in south Florida that served the needs…

This article consists of more than fifty interviews with Spanish and Yucatec-Mayan men from Yucatan, Mexico, to the United States. Based on interview responses, I contend that Yucatec-Mayan immigrants support Jeffrey Cohen's (2004) "household model" and use a ch'i'ibal-centered, or family-centered, decision-making process to frame…

This study investigated how immigrants from Latin America who speak indigenous languages perceive and respond to social, racial, linguistic, and cultural factors in the United States. It examined the multicultural and multilingual experiences of six participants, five of whom speak an indigenous language. There were three interviews conducted with…

Discusses social, economic, and political conditions that influence the growth and health of children of Guatemalan Maya immigrants to the United States. As of 2000, Maya-American children age 6-12 years were, on average, 11 centimeters taller, and also heavier, than their Guatemalan peers. The heaviness is probably due to sedentary lifestyles.…

In December 1996, a peace accord ended 30 years of civil war in Guatemala, during which an estimated 200,000 people were killed and over 1 million were displaced. Most of the war's victims have been indigenous (Maya) Guatemalans--who make up about 65 percent of the population--and other supporters of economic and political reforms. In this book,…