The Ideological Construction of Mayan Identities in Guatemala: The Reproduction of Linguistic Prejudice through Code Switching

Mayan identity has been portrayed as an isolated subjectivity that can be either acculturated or made to persist in anthropological studies, while little attention has been paid to how social inequality and racial discrimination are ideologically reproduced. In many studies of Mayan identity, much emphasis is placed on how Mayan tradition has survived, based upon the premise that the ethnic dichotomy is the foundation of Guatemalan social structure. I argue that rather than conceptualizing Maya as a culturally vulnerable or resilient ethnic identity, we develop a way to understand how Maya people perceive themselves. My study is mainly inspired by the recent scholarly discussions on identity politics. Rather than ‘objective’ social categories, this paper pays attention to speakers’ self perception of their own identities. In order to do so, this paper looks at how language ideologies are expressed through and are reflected in language use. Specifically, employing Goffman’s notion of participant structure and Bakhtin’s double-voicing, this paper examines the ideological construction of Mayan identities by looking at the ways in which quoting in code switching incidents is used in narratives. The data are taken from sets of narratives of everyday life told by urban Mayans in Momostenango, Guatemala. The data analysis shows that the distinction between the self and other is reflected in and reproduced through language choice. Discursive strategies such as code switching and paralinguistic resources are used to highlight the differences between the self and other. In conclusion, the distinction between the self and other is not fixed, but changes depending upon specific social contexts. A contribution of this paper is to try to theorize fluid and dynamic processes of Mayan identity formation in Guatemala. More data are needed to broaden understandings of the relationship between language ideology and identity.