Bureaucratizing Maya: The Institutionalization of Non-Speakerhood in Indigenous Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Early childhood education in Mexico is characterized by contrasting messages on the role of Indigenous languages as a medium of instruction. As an ethnography of language policy and planning, this paper examines how a teacher in a multi-grade Indigenous Maya preschool in the Yucatán Peninsula tries to promote the instruction of Maya with 2- to 6-year-olds. However, the burden of administrative and professional development obligations disrupts her teaching practices, eroding her linguistic confidence and shifting her ideologies of what it means to be a Maya speaker. Drawing on fractal recursivity, this paper argues that Maya non-speakerhood is not just a consequence of bureaucratic overload, but a structural outcome reinforced by top-down policies that reproduce linguistic hierarchies. Moreover, it examines how institutional framings erase Maya despite the existence of official bilingual programs, placing Maya in the periphery and, ultimately, accelerating language shift in the region.

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