Date of Award

Fall 2025

Document Type

Thesis

Terms of Use

© 2025 Esénia Bañuelos. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. For all other uses, please contact the copyright holder.

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Linguistics Department

First Advisor

Brook Danielle Lillehaugen

Abstract

Within the Indigenous communities of the United States and Mexico, combating language loss in a moment of exponential language loss is one of working in conjunction with contemporary tools – or creating the future of language preservation itself from them. Technological advances of the 21st century– including the expansion of instant messaging, video streaming, and photography sharing platforms– have sometimes been considered antithetical to language reclamation practices and Indigenous cultural maintenance more generally (Chibrow and Meighan-Chibrow, 2021; Warschauer, 1998). One example of this is made visible in concerns expressed by First Nations Elders in that technology may be depended upon as authority within the community before Elders (Bishop, 2022), In other cases, the use of technology may be considered an invitation for inequitable knowledge exchange, as rural communities are often facing a dearth of technological resources in comparison to diasporic communities and therefore cannot achieve an equivalent stake in knowledge production (Kaleimamoowahinekapu, 2018; Chibrow and Meighan-Chibrow, 2021; Warschauer, 1998). Therefore, technologies have sometimes been considered manifestations of colonial experimentations.

In this thesis I document how Zapotec educators and language experts grapple with the limitation of acquiring technological skills and constantly reinventing their uses as interests evolve in their communities, through the creation of a small corpus of interviews. The corpus is comprised of interviews with three Zapotec educators from pueblos throughout the Tlacolula Valley: Felipe H. Lopez (San Lucas Quiaviní), Janet Chávez Santiago (Teotitlán del Valle), and Moisés García Guzmán (San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya). These pueblos, both in Oaxaca and in diaspora, face disparate circumstances of language endangerment and in the manifestation of overlapping? educational language policy informed by a linguistic ideology enforcing Spanish monolingualism. My analysis of the interview corpus, informed by participant-observer data as a research assistant on the project, finds that all three Zapotec educators specify the use of technology as the foundation for original didactic materials, textbooks, social media pages, and comprehensive lexicographic material. Moreover, complicating the conversation that Chibrow and Meighan-Chibrow (2021) and Warschauer (1998) have created, Lopez, Chavez Santiago, and García Guzmán frame their use of technology as part of their work as Zapotec educators, connecting it to other parts of their Zapotec identity and ancestry. Finally, I find significant evidence that use of technology has positive implications for Zapotec L1 language acquisition and heritage learning across the primary, secondary, and collegiate levels of education and the strengthening of transnational communities through the connection of linguistic and cultural meaning-making processes.

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