Project 1: The Kichwa Project
Click here to visit my project website
I recently was awarded the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship from the US Department of Education to learn the Kichwa language in the Ecuadorian Amazon this Summer of 2023. The program offers 140 contact hours of intensive instruction over six weeks. I will be sharing my experiences on this journey in the Fall of 2023.
Project 2: Rights of Nature
Map of the Indigenous territorios of Ecuador.
My second line of investigation is situated in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where she draws on the ancestral knowledge and Indigenous cosmovision of the Sumak Kawsay (Good Living) and Sacha Kawsay (Living Forest), as well as the Rights of Nature enshrined in the Constitution of Ecuador, to examine the interaction among individuals, Indigenous communities, and the government in order to achieve a consensus that promotes the well-being of local and national ecosystems.
Project 3: The Kichwa Diaspora in the United States
My third research interest centers on the Kichwa diaspora community in Queens, New York, in the United States, where she examines their efforts to revitalize their ancestors’ language and consolidate their Indigenous roots outside of Ecuadorian territory, as well as the crucial role that mobility plays in extending their identity. This complex situation led me to postulate the following questions that guide my research:
- How has mobility contributed to the continuity of Kichwa identity in the diaspora?
- How does the Kichwa diaspora community identify and describe the local environments where current mobility patterns between English, Spanish, and Kichwa occur? To explain the concept of mobility and its effect on the linguistic community, I build my analysis upon Blommaert’s terms of “orders of indexicality” and “polycentrism.” The first term describes how the creation of categories in society generates predetermined perceptions, giving rise to situations of inequity in a globalized world. The second term explains how individuals navigate spaces governed by “norms and constraints” in communication, and sometimes they abide by these rules or create new linguistic patterns. Additionally, in questioning mobility, Blommaert redefines the categories of “locality,” “repertoires,” and “resources” and challenges sociolinguists to look at other perspectives. These three categories of mobility study are the ones I take as a starting point in my analysis of the Kichwa diaspora in New York. Throughout my work, I explain how the new Kichwa generations are destabilizing the traditional “orders of indexicality” because they add another layer to their identity by being born or having arrived in this country at a young age. They are now Kichwa-Ecuadorian-American citizens navigating private and public spaces creating their own “polycentric” world. In an ever-changing world, these new generations are actively revitalizing the language, culture, and traditions to honor their ancestry and claim their identity. Connecting the Kichwa immigration, intergenerational trauma, and the new wave of language revitalization is crucial to understand the diaspora’s efforts to reclaim their identity and language. This analysis aims to promote further studies of the Kichwa language in the United States. I have started a qualitative research method through interviews with the young Kichwa generations, and I plan to continue expanding this project by adding quantitative methods.