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 international systems of capital and governance, and which manifests as a form of settler colonialism. This region, the so called ‘Zona Maya’, is also powerfully shaped by historical narratives of resistance and negotiation with colonial and assimilating forces. 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, including the use of social media, among young people who come from communities of Maya speakers (though they may not consider themselves to be ‘speakers’) serve to produce new multilingual subjectivities, which embody the seemingly distinct, if not contrary, projects of Maya language revitalization and English language promotion and teaching. Theories of the voice, and an attention to the dynamics of and apparent contradictions between embodied and mediatized communication, are critical tools in an understanding of how social inequalities are contested through the lived difference found in being part of a multilingual Indigenous community. Discourses of belonging and ownership - of language, social practices, and cosmopolitan knowledge - express the irreducible subjective and intersubjective experiences of young people in Quintana Roo, as they negotiate the complex situation they find themselves in in creative and resourceful ways. 

(*)El autor o autora no ha asociado ningún archivo a este artículo