Abstract This ethnographic, discourse analytic study elucidates a poorly understood area of applied linguistics: identity issues in Indigenous language education. Multi-year data – from large Yucatec Maya language programs that enrolled over 200 learners, including schoolteachers and Yucatec Maya-speaking university students – reveal a new stage of Indigenous ethnogenesis in the Yucatan, Mexico. European colonization has decimated countless Indigenous languages, and language revitalization represents a global movement for linguistic decolonization. I use postcolonial theory to explain how involvement in revitalization programs led students to form new self-understandings and representations of “Mayanness.” Specifically, participants deployed three processes of Indigenous identification: strategic essentialization, appropriation, and articulation. While anthropologists have previously asserted that Yucatec Maya speakers do not self-identify as “ethnic” Mayas, this research reveals that some now do. Additionally, this study advances theorization of Indigenous language revitalization, the postcolonial turn in applied linguistics, and the field more broadly by centering on “identification” – which conceptualizes identity-as-process.

中文翻译：

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“我们是玛雅人”：墨西哥尤卡坦半岛的土著语言复兴、认同和后殖民主义

摘要 这项民族志、话语分析研究阐明了应用语言学中一个鲜为人知的领域：土著语言教育中的身份问题。多年数据——来自大型 Yucatec Maya 语言项目，该项目招收了 200 多名学习者，包括学校教师和说 Yucatec Maya 的大学生——揭示了墨西哥尤卡坦州土著民族发生的新阶段。欧洲殖民化摧毁了无数土著语言，而语言复兴代表了一场全球性的语言非殖民化运动。我使用后殖民理论来解释参与振兴计划如何引导学生形成新的自我理解和“玛雅”的表征。具体而言，参与者部署了三个土著识别过程：战略本质化、挪用和表达。虽然人类学家此前曾断言尤卡坦玛雅人不会自我认同为“种族”玛雅人，但这项研究表明，现在有些人确实如此。此外，本研究以“身份认同”为中心，推动了土著语言复兴、应用语言学的后殖民转向以及更广泛的领域的理论化——身份认同是过程的概念化。