Abstract/Summary

Since 1996, intercultural bilingual education (IBE) in México has been implemented in primary schools that belong to the Subsystem of Indigenous Education in an attempt to revitalise indigenous languages. This study investigates the appropriation of IBE in the context of Puebla, México whereby indigenous languages such as Náhuatl are taught together with Spanish. Specifically, it explores how IBE, Spanish, Náhuatl, and English are discursively constructed in official language policy documents and what language ideologies underpin them. It also examines how school authorities’, teachers’, and parents’ language use is shaped by language ideologies and how they orient to discourses that may enhance or exacerbate the implementation of IBE and the value and uses of languages in the classroom, at home, and in the community. To analyse language policy appropriation, this study draws from the Ethnography of Language Policy (ELP) and the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA). Particularly, it capitalises on stakeholders’ appropriation at different layers (ELP) and four levels of context (DHA). By combining the ELP with the DHA, this study triangulates ethnographic data with discursive analyses of language policy texts and discourses. The main data sets of this study consist of official language policy documents and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders. These are triangulated with field note entries. Consistent with previous research, the findings show that official documents have appropriated discourses from transnational institutions (e.g. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)) to compensate for the subordination of indigenous people and language varieties. However, this has resulted in the commodification of language varieties for different purposes. At the school level, discourses bolstered by a neoliberal agenda have also prevailed, albeit some counter discourses are also employed to challenge official documents. As for the home level, the community’s socioeconomic factors (e.g. low socioeconomic level) and school-related features (e.g. convenient location of the school) have contributed to the foregrounding of neoliberal discourses and the backgrounding of others.