Mayan Families Research Articles

Mother-child collaboration in an Indigenous community: Changing and enduring across generations.

Changes in family life related to globalization may include reduction in the collaborativeness observed in many Indigenous American communities. The present study examined longitudinal changes and continuities in collaboration in a Guatemalan Maya community experiencing rapid globalization. Fluid collaboration was widespread 3 decades ago among triads of mothers and 1- to 6-year-olds in 24 Mayan families exploring novel objects during home visits (Dayton etal., 2022). However, in the "same" situation 30 years later, 22 mother-child triads of their relatives spent half as much time in collaboration among all three people. This aligns with globalizing changes and with the pattern of Dayton etal.'s middle-class European American families. Nonetheless, the Mayan families maintained harmonious interactions, in line with preserving important cultural values.

Xoqoneb’: una historia uspanteka de las tierras altas centrales de Guatemala

Uspanteko is one of the smallest (in terms of speakers) and most threatened Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. While Uspanteko belongs to the K’ichean branch of the Mayan family, it bears a striking number of linguistic features not seen in its sister languages across major aspects of the grammar, including phonetics/phonology (e.g., lexical tone) and morphosyntax (e.g., null verbal inflection). After introducing an Uspanteko text about the sacred hill Xoqoneb’ and placing it in its cultural context, including surveying related Uspanteko texts, we use Xoqoneb’ to illustrate those aspects of the Uspanteko language which stand out relative to other K’ichean languages. We also comment on the possible sources of these divergent features, which include both language contact and innovation.

The phonetics and phonology of Uspanteko (Mayan)

Uspanteko is an endangered Mayan language spoken by up to 6000 people in the Guatemalan highlands. We provide an overview of the phonetics and phonology of Uspanteko, focussing on phenomena which are common in Mayan languages and/or typologically interesting. These include glottalised consonants (ejectives, implosives, and glottal stop), uvular consonants, vowel length contrasts, syllable structure, stress, and lexical tone. Tone is unusual among Mayan languages, especially in Guatemala, and the phonetic description here complements the small handful of existing descriptions of tone in Uspanteko and within the Mayan family.

The use of formative research to culturally adapt a psychosocial support program for perinatal Mayan women in Guatemala

Indigenous Mayan women in Guatemala are at increased risk for perinatal psychological distress due to higher base rates of anxiety, depression, and PTSD linked to oppression, poverty, and a legacy of femicide. This paper discusses the process of adapting the Thinking Healthy Program (THP), a task-sharing intervention that targets perinatal depression, for use within a community health organization serving indigenous, Tz'utujil Mayan families in the Sololá region of Guatemala.The cultural adaptation of scalable psychological interventions conceptual framework was used throughout the adaptation process. A formative, mixed-methods approach triangulated findings from 1) qualitative key informant interviews with perinatal community health workers (PCHWs) and local mothers, 2) observational mock-role plays between PCHWs and distressed perinatal women, 3) a self-report questionnaire examining stigma and culturally-sanctioned help-seeking approaches, and 4) consultation with local stakeholders.Results of this study suggest that the THP can be adapted for Tz'utujil Mayan women by centering the adaption on the cultural idiom of Qajnaq ruchojq'aq’ (low force/energy). The explanatory model of Qajnaq ruchojq'aq’ is interpersonal in nature, thus the integration of techniques from a low-intensity interpersonal therapy intervention are indicated. Symptoms of Qajnaq ruchojq'aq’ were largely cognitive and behavioral, thus the primary treatment elements of the THP are well-aligned. Training adaptations were also identified, including addressing safety concerns and mental health stigma in the community. The next step is to pilot the adapted intervention, making iterative changes as necessary to best meet the psychosocial needs of Tz'utujil Mayan women. This model of adaptation, and findings regarding implementation of interpersonal elements and aspects to address safety, should be considered in future psychosocial programming for perinatal women in Latin American indigenous contexts.

Morphosyntactic features of progressive in the K’iche’an languages of the Mayan family

AbstractThe article deals with the morphosyntactic features of the aspectual category of progressive in K’iche’an languages. The analysis is carried out using methods of intragenetic typology. It is proposed to clarify Vinogradov’s classification of progressive in the Mayan languages in relation to the K’iche’an group. Three types of K’iche’an progressive as well as three strategies for the distribution of ergative–absolutive markers in the progressive are proposed. The boundary between the uniclausal and biclausal analyses of complex aspect constructions in Mayan languages is proposed. The application to K’iche’an languages Robert Dixon’s generalization for aspectually based split ergativity is also described. Three strategies of verb argument marking in the progressive constructions are determined. It was found out that all aspectually conditioned splits in the ergative–absolutive strategy of argument marking in K’iche’an languages are observed in progressive (or historically progressive) constructions.

El proclítico verbal a: el vínculo entre el Poqomchi’ y los idiomas mayas cholanos

Some missionary texts written during the Colonial period in the Poqomchi’ language (Mayan family, K’ichean subgroup) attest the verbal proclitic a, that is being lost in the modern language. It was added to verb forms in the completive aspect marked by the prefix x- and indicated, roughly speaking, the relevance of a past event at the moment of utterance. The same proclitic with similar meaning is also registered in two Mayan languages of the Cholan subgroup: Chontal of Tabasco and Chontal of Acalán. The Poqomchi’ people, despite their origin in the Guatemalan highlands, were neighbors of the Cholan groups for a considerable period of time. It is probable that the proclitic a was introduced to Poqomchi’ during the Postclassic period thanks to language contacts with some Cholan group, possibly the Acalá, who spoke a variety of Chontal, that is, a western Cholan language.

A Seventeenth Century Poqomchi’ (Mayan) Dictionary and Dominican Evangelizing Tradition in Highland Guatemala

One of the first written sources containing information about the Poqomchi’ language (Mayan family, Guatemala) is the trilingual Poqomchi’-Spanish-Latin dictionary dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Its author was a Dominican missionary, Dionisio de Zúñiga, although his work is based on earlier dictionaries of his predecessors. This paper analyses Zúñiga’s dictionary in the context of Dominican evangelizing tradition. Whereas the descriptions of certain lexical entries prove that the author was familiar with the culture and customs of the Poqomchi’ people, some other terms, specifically those denoting pre-Columbian deities and native religious concepts, seem to be derived from earlier missionary texts including Domingo de Vico’s famous Theologia Indorum. These intertextualities confirm the intellectual continuity among Dominican missionaries in Highland Guatemala during the early colonial period.

Mayan agent focus and the ergative extraction constraint: Facts and fictions revisited

Many languages of the Mayan family restrict the extraction of transitive (ergative) subjects for focus, wh-questions, and relativization (Ā-extraction). We follow Aissen (2017b) in labeling this restriction the ergative extraction constraint (EEC). In this article, we offer a unified account of the EEC within Mayan languages, as well as an analysis of the special construction known as agent focus (AF) used to circumvent it. Specifically, we propose that the EEC has a similar source across the subset of Mayan languages that exhibit it: intervention. The intervention problem is created when an object DP structurally intervenes between the Ā-probe on C0 and the ergative subject. Evidence that intervention by the object is the source of the problem comes from a handful of exceptional contexts that permit transitive subjects to extract in languages which normally ban this extraction, and conversely, a context that exceptionally bans ergative extraction in a language which otherwise allows it. We argue that the problem with Ā-extracting the ergative subject across the intervening object connects to the requirements of the Ā-probe on C0: the probe on C0 is bundled to search simultaneously for [Ā] and [D] features. This relates the Mayan patterns to recent proposals for extraction patterns in Austronesian languages (e.g. Legate 2014, Aldridge 2017b) and elsewhere (van Urk 2015). Specifically, adapting the proposal of Coon & Keine 2020, we argue that in configurations in which a DP object intervenes between the probe on C0 and an Ā-subject, conflicting requirements on movement lead to a derivational crash. While we propose that the EEC has a uniform source across the family, we argue that AF constructions vary Mayaninternally in how they circumvent the EEC, accounting for the variation in behavior of AF across the family. This article contributes both to our understanding of parametric variation internal to the Mayan family and to the discussion of variation in Ā-extraction asymmetries and syntactic ergativity crosslinguistically.

Applied Anthropology, Activism, and Loss: Experiences from highland Guatemala

AbstractIn this essay, I contemplate the ethics of community engagement based on my work as an applied medical anthropologist in Guatemala. During my dissertation fieldwork in a highland community, I lived with a local Mayan family, and our lives together centered on discussing their goals, community organizing, and strategies for improving indigenous rights. I describe how the relationships I built with this family and the social justice work happening in the community gave me a sense of purpose as an applied anthropologist. At the time, it seemed like participatory and collaborative research at its best. A year later, an adult son of the local family was murdered for his community work, calling into question the notions of progress and advocacy. Here, I discuss my struggle with the moral imperative of applied anthropologists to support the human rights of local communities in counterbalance to our ethical obligation to protect research collaborators.

Maya K'iche' Food Groups and Implications for Guatemalan Food Guidelines.

The anthropology of linguistics, food, and nutrition sciences has a key role with regard to taking a critical look at the Guatemalan Food Guidelines (GFG). These GFG are communicated to native communities to interpret their eating patterns and the structural cognitive interpretation of these food groups in a cultural context. Our understanding of food is informed by cognitive structure represented by language. Since food is fundamental in human cultural identities, understanding food and food categories from the perspective of Mayan indigenous groups should be a fundamental pillar of health, food, and nutrition. The purpose of this research was to explore the GFG and compare them to K'iche' understandings of food groups in terms of cognitive structural similarities and differences. The research was carried out in the field by way of semi-structured interviews and participant observation among K'iche' Mayan families in Nahualá (Western Guatemala) to compare and contrast data collected on K'iche' food groups and corresponding cognitive structure with previously published findings on the GFG. These findings were confirmed through fieldwork, though some of the nuances of subcategories have changed, and significant stress was placed on 2 food groups: wa (corn-based food) and ri'kil (non-corn-based food). The research concludes that the cognitive structure and understanding of food groups and their uses communicated through K'iche' language differ significantly from the hierarchical, technical description of food groups communicated through the GFG. In order to strengthen public health approaches to food and nutrition, indigenous knowledge must be respected, learned, and integrated into GFG.

Home Literacy Environments in Maya Communities in the Yucatan Peninsula

ABSTRACTThis study provides a broad, macro-analysis of how the home literacy environment (HLE) manifests among Mayan families with preschool-aged children in Yucatan, Mexico. Despite a substantial body of work showing the significant contribution of the HLE to children’s reading achievement in the U.S., little work examines the HLE and children’s learning outside of European American contexts. The aims of the present study were to examine the dimensions of the HLE in Mayan communities in the Yucatan Peninsula and whether the HLE was related to children’s emergent-literacy skills. Mayan caregivers (n = 413) completed questionnaires asking about their literacy practices and beliefs. Children completed direct assessments of their emergent-literacy skills. Research Findings: Results indicated there were two dimensions of the HLE and there was substantial variability in the frequency of home literacy activities reported. Further, aspects of the HLE were related to children’s emergent literacy. Practice or Policy: The variability of the HLE and the associations with children’s emergent literacy has practical implications for the support of literacy development in these communities. For instance, increased parent involvement in children’s education may increase literacy materials and activities in the home.

Fathering Within Transnational and Mixed-Status Mayan Families: An Exploratory Study

This study explores fathering within a small sample of Mayan transnational and mixed-status families divided between the Northeastern United States and the Quiché region of Guatemala. A positive masculinities framework informs this theoretical thematic analysis of semistructured interviews with 7 migrant fathers and 2 sons-as-fathers who were caring for younger siblings in Guatemala. Analyses sought to illuminate how the performances of fathering in the context of migration depart from and sometimes challenge hegemonic conceptions of masculinities evident in much of the migration scholarship. In total, 5 themes capturing varying performances of fathering were identified: (a) staying-at-home, (b) emotionally expressing cross-border relationality, (c) communicating within the family about return and consejos (conventional wisdom), (d) sons-as-fathers caring for family members here and there, and (e) maintaining the household intergenerationally. We discuss how the transnationalizing of these Mayan families has contributed to more diverse gendered roles and relationships, with a focus on some of the potential positive influences of this process on family relationships. Implications for future research about the various ways in which fathers and sons contribute to their transnational families, especially in difficult sociopolitical contexts, are discussed.

The history of the Poqomchi’ language description

ABSTRACT This article presents an overview of linguistic efforts aimed at a description of the Poqomchi’ language (Mayan family, Guatemala). This language remains one of the least documented languages in the Mayan family despite the almost 500-year history of description, which was initiated by Spanish missionaries in the second half of the 16th century. The next attempt at description was associated with European travellers and ethnographers in the second half of the 19th century, followed by the efforts of American and European missionaries in the 20th century. Finally, native Guatemalan linguists who trained under the American descriptive tradition continue to work on Poqomchi’ at present. This paper seeks to describe the variety of approaches and to analyse the possible causes of imperfections in the descriptions. Abbreviations 3: third person; dat: dative; def: definite article; nmlz: nominalization; sg: singular.

Consejos as a Family Process in Transnational and Mixed‐Status Mayan Families

This article describes a constructivist grounded theory study about cross‐border relationships within Mayan families divided between the United States and Guatemala. Nine families participated, and each included a U.S.‐based undocumented migrant parent and a Guatemala‐based adolescent and caregiver. Findings pertaining to the family process of consejos—defined as a communication practice in Latino families wherein older family members pass on conventional wisdom to younger family members—are discussed. Although consejos has been identified as an important cultural practice in Latino families, it has rarely been examined in Mayan families or explored as an important aspect of transnational family relationships. Findings suggest that for some transnational and mixed‐status Mayan families, consejos has become an important family process and a way in which migrant parents maintain a presence in their children's lives despite being physically separated. Implications for future research with transnational migrant families, and Mayan families in particular, are discussed.

The division of labor between syntax and morphology in the Kichean agent-focus construction

This paper demonstrates that the person-number hierarchy effects in the Agent-Focus construction in Kichean languages of the Mayan family such as Kaqchikel, K’iche’, and Tz’utujil can be attributed to the general mechanism governing morphological realization of person and number features, once an appropriate characterization of relevant agreement markers is given. In other words, this account only relies on the minimal theoretical machinery needed for a description of individual languages, unlike previous analyses. The binary nature of person and number features plays a crucial role in the proposed account. It is also suggested that the impossibility of pairing a non-3rd person subject with a non-3rd person object in the Agent-Focus construction is due to the [+participant]-targeting application of the Obligatory Contour Principle. Furthermore, a novel pan-Mayan characterization of Agent-Focus is proposed to capture variation concerning the alternation between Agent-Focus and the plain transitive marking in the context of the Obligatory Contour Principle violation. The new characterization of AF also enables us to capture the rather exceptional form of the Agent-Focus construction in Yucatec. The overall framework is thus shown to have validity that extends beyond the Kichean group.

Emerging learning ecologies: Mayan children's initiative and correctional directives in their everyday enskilment practices

Directives are a central resource for the organization of attention in everyday family activities. Studies in middle class families reveal that they are patterned and repeated in the everyday routines of children's lives, providing the basis for their learning of skills, accountability, and moral discernment (M. Goodwin, 2006; M. Goodwin & Cekaite, 2013, 2014).Scholars studying indigenous children's learning from a cross-cultural perspective have underscored children's agency and self-motivation in learning through observation and participation in everyday activities (Gaskins & Paradise, 2010; Lancy, 2010, 2012; Paradise & Rogoff, 2009; Rogoff, 2003, 2014; Rogoff et al., 2007; Rogoff, Mejía-Arauz, & Correa-Chávez, 2015). Children's establishment of common orientational perspectives in such settings need not rely on high dosages of parental directives to frame activities and to structure and micromanage attention.The ethnographic and talk-in-interaction analysis of two everyday goal-oriented activities of a Mayan family presented here illustrates how enskilment (Ingold, 2000) practices depend in important ways on the child's own initiative to explore new tasks independently of an expert's explicit guidance. The learning event emerges when experts occasionally monitor the novice's actions and identify problems that require correction. Expert and novice thus engage in a process of fine-tuning perception and attention through a correctional directive trajectory that leads to a “professional vision” (C. Goodwin, 1994) of particular fields of activities (e.g., knitting and gardening activity).

“But you said ‘four sheep’ …!”: (sign) language, ideology, and self (esteem) across generations in a Mayan family

A first generation family sign language, dubbed Z, emerging in a single extended household in an otherwise Tzotzil-speaking community of indigenous peasants in highland Chiapas, Mexico, provides an example of both rapid language creation and change and of the evolution of ideologies of appropriate language form and use in even such a minimal speech/sign community. Adding the new sign language to (the bottom end of) an existing inventory of differentially evaluated language varieties, including Tzotzil and Spanish, positions the signers with respect not only to hearing speakers, but to one another. The most striking contrast presented is between the oldest fluent signer—the first deaf person in her community—trapped by her sign language, and the youngest—her hearing son—propelled beyond it.

Novel missense mutation in the EDA1 gene identified in a family with hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia.

Hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia (HED) is a human genetic disorder that affects structures of ectodermal origin such as hair, teeth, and sweat glands. Although there are autosomal recessive and dominant forms, X-linked (XL) is the most frequent form of the disease. This XL-HED phenotype is associated with mutations in the gene encoding the transmembrane protein ectodysplasin-1 (EDA1). We report the clinical and molecular analysis of a novel mutation in exon 1 affecting the transmembrane domain of the protein. We have screened 20 members of a family from Yucatán, México, nine men and 11 women, searching clinical and histopathological signs of HED. We searched mutations in EDA1 gene from patients with XL-HED, carriers, and controls. We identified seven men with clinical characteristics of HED showing short toes and plantar hyperkeratosis not reported previously in patients with HED. A mutational study of the EDA1 gene showed that all seven patients with HED carry a novel missense mutation of the nucleotide 409 (c.409T>C) in exon 1, which changes p.Leu56-Pro in the protein amino acid sequence; five women are heterozygous compatible with carrier status. We found a novel missense mutation in exon 1 of the EDA1 gene in a putative Mayan family from México with XL-HED. We identified in this population some novel clinical signs of HED.

The role of case in A-bar extraction asymmetries

Many morphologically ergative languages display asymmetries in the extraction of core arguments: while absolutive arguments (transitive objects and intransitive subjects) extract freely, ergative arguments (transitive subjects) cannot. This falls under the label “syntactic ergativity” (see, e.g. Dixon 1972, 1994; Manning 1996; Polinsky to appear(b)). These extraction asymmetries are found in many languages of the Mayan family, where in order to extract transitive subjects (for focus, questions, or relativization), a special construction known as the “Agent Focus” (AF) must be used. These AF constructions have been described as syntactically and semantically transitive because they contain two non-oblique DP arguments, but morphologically intransitive because the verb appears with only a single agreement marker and takes an intransitive status suffix (Aissen 1999; Stiebels 2006). In this paper we offer a proposal for (i) why some morphologically ergative languages exhibit extraction asymmetries, while others do not; and (ii) how the AF construction in Q’anjob’al circumvents this problem. We adopt recent accounts which argue that ergative languages vary in the locus of absolutive case assignment (Aldridge 2004, 2008a; Legate 2002, 2008), and propose that this variation is present within the Mayan family. Based primarily on comparative data from Q’anjob’al and Chol, we argue that the inability to extract ergative arguments does not reflect a problem with properties of the ergative subject itself, but rather reflects locality properties of absolutive case assignment in the clause. We show how the AF morpheme -oncircumvents this problem in Q’anjob’al by assigning case to internal arguments.

Human urinary mutagenicity after wood smoke exposure during traditional temazcal use.

In Central America, the traditional temazcales or wood-fired steam baths, commonly used by many Native American populations, are often heated by wood fires with little ventilation, and this use results in high wood smoke exposure. Urinary mutagenicity has been previously employed as a non-invasive biomarker of human exposure to combustion emissions. This study examined the urinary mutagenicity in 19 indigenous Mayan families from the highlands of Guatemala who regularly use temazcales (N = 32), as well as control (unexposed) individuals from the same population (N = 9). Urine samples collected before and after temazcal exposure were enzymatically deconjugated and extracted using solid-phase extraction. The creatinine-adjusted mutagenic potency of urine extracts was assessed using the plate-incorporation version of the Salmonella mutagenicity assay with strain YG1041 in the presence of exogenous metabolic activation. The post-exposure mutagenic potency of urine extracts were, on average, 1.7-fold higher than pre-exposure samples (P < 0.005) and also significantly more mutagenic than the control samples (P < 0.05). Exhaled carbon monoxide (CO) was ~10 times higher following temazcal use (P < 0.0001), and both CO level and time spent in temazcal were positively associated with urinary mutagenic potency (i.e. P < 0.0001 and P = 0.01, respectively). Thus, the wood smoke exposure associated with temazcal use contributes to increased excretion of conjugated mutagenic metabolites. Moreover, urinary mutagenic potency is correlated with other metrics of exposure (i.e. exhaled CO, duration of exposure). Since urinary mutagenicity is a biomarker associated with genetic damage, temazcal use may therefore be expected to contribute to an increased risk of DNA damage and mutation, effects associated with the initiation of cancer.