Joshua Schwab Cartas, our guest blogger this week, uses video as an educational tool to explore Indigenous language revitalization strategies in the Isthmus Zapotec community of his maternal grandfather in Ranchu Gubiña, Oaxaca, Mexico. For many years he has worked with a Diidxazá (Zapotec) media collective, combining his familiarity with contemporary oral histories of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, his background in ancient and colonial Zapotec visual culture, and the use of cellphones and other new media in the creation of participatory video. Joshua completed his Ph.D. at McGill University in 2019 and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia.

All my life I was perceived as an underachiever and told I was not destined to go to university, much less be considered for a position in academia. I was perceived this way because of an undiagnosed learning disability, which was only “discovered” in the last year of my undergraduate degree. I recall that once my official diagnosis came in, confirming I had dyslexia and dyscalculia, I was disheartened, and thought of all the times well-intentioned instructors, perhaps not understanding how to recognize and support a person with an undiagnosed disability, asked me to reconsider other courses, or the times I was flatly told not to come back because I would fail the course.

However, when I told my bixozebida (grandfather) about my official diagnosis, he sensed my worry and said to me, it is a gift (which is the same thing that was said to me by Elder-in-residence at UBC, Larry Grant), not a curse, but something that makes you, uniquely Joshua! My grandfather’s message was therefore to embrace it, use it to your advantage, just as he told me to embrace our Zapotec way of being in the world. And that is exactly what I did!

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