Emergent Identities and Representations in ELT in Minority Language Contexts in Northern Mexico

In the early 2000s, Mexico experienced a series of changes modelled after UNESCO’s guidelines for intercultural education, which necessitated the establishment of the General Office of Intercultural Bilingual Education. This institution aims to provide indigenous students with education that acknowledges their cultural identity, language, knowledge, and attitudes. Another parallel change occurring in Mexico stemmed from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and the United States. NAFTA impacted Mexican educational policy by incorporating the teaching of English at the state and national levels beginning in public elementary schools. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this dissertation explores the role of English Language Teaching (ELT) in a community in northwestern Mexico where a minority language – Mayo – was taught alongside English. The research also seeks to unfold the discourse(s) embodied in the representation of minority students and languages in Mexico through the analysis of policy documents used in Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) programs, as well as in the attitudes of the teachers and stakeholders involved in them. I also look at representations of indigenous people in two texts designed by IBE for the Mayo community. This dissertation incorporates an ethnographic study that uses participant observations in Mayo and English language classes and semi-structured interviews with teachers and stakeholders attached to a rural school in northwestern Mexico as primary data collection strategies. Policy documents and curricular materials are analyzed using the tools of Critical Discourse Analysis. Through qualitative data analysis, we discover how the nation-state instantiates a particular Mexican identity and perpetuates stereotypes of indigenous minorities through policy documents and curricular texts. At the same time, the data obtained through ethnographic fieldwork indicate that teacher agency was a powerful tool in linguistic and cultural maintenance and in transforming language policy and planning at the local level, such that Mayo and English were positioned equally in the curriculum.