This Spotlight comes from Hub member María Luz García, Professor of Anthropology at Eastern Michigan University. In an article recently published in the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (POLAR 2024, 47:209-222), María describes the racialized experience of Indigenous people from Latin America who work as legal interpreters in the U.S. Below, María brings out the primary points of that article while calling our attention to ongoing critical changes in the U.S. immigration landscape that are affecting Maya (and other) immigrant communities in the U.S.
Speaking Mayan Languages in the U.S. in 2025
The political and legal terrain that immigrants encounter in the United States has shifted significantly since I prepared my article, “A Scandalous presence in the courtroom: Indigenous immigrant interpreters and the politics of language ideologies in U.S. courts” (if you are unable to access this article, contact the author at [email protected]). Executive orders by the Trump administration in early 2025 declared English as the official language of the United States and as the precondition for a unified and cohesive nation. Threats of massive and expedited deportations of immigrants are common, and foundational questions about who is eligible for deportation and what deportation looks like have been tested both legally and in public discourse. Two consequences of these changes have been increased anxiety in the communities of mixed immigration-status Maya Guatemalans that I work with and among interpreters who are overextended and pushed into new roles as they respond to the growing needs in their communities.
While some of the context of the article has changed, the underlying questions about the relationships between language, culture, and race in legal settings have become even more salient. In the article, I analyze the ways in which legal processes and norms privilege language use and cultural patterns that typically correspond to white, middle- or upper-class courtroom participants, while treating linguistic and cultural diversity as a barrier and demanding conformity or invisibility from non-dominant groups (here particularly people with Indigenous Latin American backgrounds). By focusing on a series of interpreter training workshops offered by Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (Indigenous Communities in Leadership, CIELO), I consider how idealized notions of neutrality and invisibility change depending on whether the locus of analysis is individuals or groups. That is, while a NAJIT (National Association of Judicial Interpreters and Translators)-certified interpreter trainer argued that individuals must not show favoritism to any individual participant and must not call attention to themselves as individuals through their demeanor or clothing, CIELO leadership added that interpreters positioning themselves as aligned with the state or experts while distancing themselves from their communities of origin violates neutrality. Furthermore, an insistence on conformity to the dominant norms for clothing and demeanor of lawyers and judges as a way to be “invisible” reinscribes dominant white norms. These norms define the subject who can be heard in the courtroom as white, middle class, and English-speaking, leaving Indigenous participants at a disadvantage.
These questions about how the norms of language use relate to race and who can be a subject of the law have drawn media attention recently and gained a sense of urgency as U.S. policies and immigration enforcement practices change, raising questions about the legal protection of categories like visa holder, green card holder, and citizen. In April 2025, Juan Carlos López Gómez, a Tzotzil Maya U.S. citizen from the state of Georgia, was arrested and held for pickup by immigration officials after being detained during a traffic stop of a car in which he had been a passenger. Despite providing an authenticated copy of his birth certificate and social security card proving his citizenship, he was detained for over 30 hours. News sources report that Tzotzil is his native language and that he spoke limited English. Norms that identify U.S. citizens as non-Maya and as English speaking led to his initial arrest and continued detention, and his position as the subject of the law was challenged. After widespread media coverage, López Gómez was released. Although he was detained for a comparably short period of time (relative to others who can spend weeks or months awaiting processing), these detentions cause significant psychological harm to those who experience them. The circumstances of López Gómez’s experience resulted in a high-profile case, but the anxieties and difficulties faced by Maya communities in the United States on a daily basis have increased in recent years in ways that cannot be captured in a news bite.
Since the publication of “A Scandalous Presence in the Courtroom,” my research has shifted as part of a Mellon Foundation-funded Humanities Without Walls project entitled “Maya in the Global Midwest,” a collaboration with Korinta Maldonado (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign), Laura Horton (University of Wisconsin – Madison), and the Maya and non-Maya community organizations, Pixan Konob’, Immigrant Worker Project, Ohio, Puentes, and Comunidad Sol. Together we confront questions of what it means to be Maya and what it means to be U.S. American in mixed immigration status, multigenerational communities in the U.S. Midwest. We focus specifically on documenting the strategies that communities have developed and the barriers they encounter in accessing public services, and we seek to build ties among communities, academics, and service providers throughout the region.
Just as the context of the Political and Legal Anthropology article has changed since the time it was prepared, the work of “Maya in the Global Midwest” has changed throughout the course of the three-year project. When the project was first proposed, the design and implementation of a community-based survey about language access and experience with institutions was a primary goal. In a series of community workshops, we developed this tool during the first two years of the project and trained teams of community members on methods for collecting the surveys. This part of the grant has now largely been sidelined in Ohio, as Maya community members formed their own organization, Comunidad Sol, to better advocate for their community and answer immediate needs. Research methods shifted as we trained teams of undergraduate students to conduct participant-observation research. Students traveled to the community and took fieldnotes in public spaces and during the activities of Maya organizations and religious groups. They also developed research questions and carried out extended interviews with Maya and non-Maya participants.
We consider the different roles that Maya organizations, solidarity organizations, and Maya and non-Maya workers in public institutions play in confronting barriers to language access at a timewhen fear and anxiety are high, and the threats facing local families are imminent. The need for community education on how to exercise legal rights and how to prepare the paperwork needed to secure property and guardianship of children in the event of deportation highlight the hurdle that bureaucratic processes pose for families. The processes also place significant responsibility on second-generation U.S.-born children who not only interpret for their parents but are also asked to assume legal responsibilities that non-citizen parents or family members are not eligible to fulfill. Likewise, interviews and participant-observation work with expanding networks of solidarity organizations demonstrate the importance and the depth of personal connections in small, rural communities as young people draw on teachers, church members, nurses, and neighbors to gain access to institutions that would have otherwise remained out of reach.
Community members have described seeking (and receiving) assistance with job or school applications, tutoring, and mentoring, often through informal networks of support. Likewise, expanding services offered by public libraries, YMCAs, churches, and solidarity organizations evidence the hurdles that bureaucratic structures and paperwork present. These processes often demand knowledge of the structures and procedures of organizations and of the expectations for language use and communication practices found in these institutions.
In both my work on “A Scandalous Presence in the Courtroom” and “Maya in the Global Midwest,” I have found that questions around language access are not limited to questions of providing adequate interpreting and being able to respond to a judge’s questions or file a health insurance claim. They are also about who is allowed to exist in public institutions and who can be a subject of healthcare, the law, or education. Children in one rural Ohio school speak K’iche’, Ixil, Awakateko, Spanish, and English. The ability to speak and be heard in their language and to have their parents speak and be heard in their language is what allows them to be students, a part of the school and the community.
“A Scandalous Presence in the Courtroom” concludes by engaging with John Haviland’s (2019) concern that his own efforts as an interpreter can do very little for Indigenous participants in the context of the systemic and structural injustices they face in the courtroom. He notes a U.S. “politics of protection” which constructs a dichotomy of “blameless” Indigenous immigrant children and “morally contaminated adults” that restrict the possibilities for understanding Indigenous courtroom participants. In this constrained space, CIELO interpreters and now networks of Maya interpreters organized by Comunidad Sol and Pixan Konob’, along with Maya professionals who participate in public institutions, contest this dichotomy simply by their existence and their persistence in these spaces of power. As the space for considering such diversity narrows, Indigenous organizations and a new generation of Maya professionals remind us that Midwesterners, the subjects of legal rights, and U.S. citizens speak many different languages and occupy diverse cultural spaces.
References
Haviland, John B. 2019. “‘A Politics of Protection’ Aimed at Mayan Immigrants in the United States.” In Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum, edited Bridget M. Haas and Amy Shuman, 61-102. Athens: Ohio University Press.