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!

I begin this piece with my disability, not because I want to evoke empathy or because I feel that my disability is the only thing that defines me, but rather because it has shaped my thinking ,who I am, and what I want to do as an academic, which is to find ways to support others who have different ways of thinking or seeing the world.

Being inspired by my bixozebida’s words and how our binnizá culture understands disabilities also gave me the impetus to begin my journey of reclaiming my Zapotec language—diidxazá—and the culture and identity. When I first visited Ranchu Gubiña with my bixozebida,  I recall that my bixozebixozebida (great-grandfather), upon our arrival in the pueblo, said, from what your grandfather told me about you,  I always knew you would find your way back home one day. Then he said to me, tu naya’ ni xquendabiaani’ qué hrusiaanda’ xquidxi ne stiidxa, which translates to “a person of intelligence never forgets their pueblo or their language”.

That same visit I joined the Zapotec media collective, Binni Cubi (New People). I have now been part of it for the last 17 years of my life. Our collective has for the last 19 years created a series of initiatives aimed specifically at youth to revitalize our language and culture. Some of these strategies have included Zapotec classes, recording elders, CDs in our language with bilingual inserts, games such as bingo, documentary films and establishing a community radio station which broadcasts in our language.

It was through that visit that began my lifelong journey of learning our Zapotec language and ancestral lifeways that my grandparents spoke so fondly, thus also commencing my personal process of decolonization. This journey has required patience, humility, and ongoing critical self-reflection, to unlearn my various privileges, but also to accept the fact that I might never be truly or fully culturally competent. I undertook this lifelong journey of learning our language and reconnecting with my binniza culture, not for the pursuit of critical consciousness or to become a better researcher; rather, the goal has always been to be able to ensure that I could learn  my ancestral culture and language, so that one day I would be able to transmit the knowledge of my ancestors to my daughter and ultimately become and feel more Zapotec.

My experience as a biracial Indigenous person with a permanent learning disability, who has been a member of the media collective for many years,  has always helped me engage effectively across different audiences, which has also helped me develop different communication strategies in order to continue to foster a deeper intercultural communication and understanding. Therefore, I see my role as a scholar as a lifelong activist who advocates for building bridges across many worlds. For me, education is a productive tool that allows societies to develop more inclusive methodologies for building bridges. I conceive of the concept of a bridge in the same way as the late Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldua (2002) did:

“It is not just about one set of people crossing to the other side; it’s also about those on the other side crossing to this side. And ultimately, it’s about doing away with demarcations like “ours” and “theirs”. It’s about honoring people’s otherness in ways that allow us to be changed by embracing that otherness rather than punishing others for having a different view.  Diversity of perspective expands and alters the dialogue…”

I believe that this is an integral step in enabling the process of decolonization in hopes of creating a more inclusive university space. That is, in striving to create a safe space where Indigenous values and ways of knowing are respected alongside other ways of knowing, and where key concepts of academic discourse can be questioned and challenged instead of taken for granted.

The idea therefore is both to create a level playing field among different epistemologies as a means of creating understanding across cultures, and to foster a space where Indigenous students feel that their concerns and worldviews are also being honored. Therefore, my hope as a cross-cultural activist and educator is to strive to find ways to incorporate not only Indigenous worldviews, perspectives and ways of being in the world, but also other perspectives, whether they are LGBTQ2+, persons with disabilities, or anyone who has been left on the margins. My aim as a scholar is to make these perspectives and worldviews a more fundamental part of academic curricula. In hopes of fostering a change in mentality and awareness, I hope to make academic spaces more inclusive and respectful of all worldviews. In other words, my role as a scholar is to foster and normalize the notion that there are multiple ways of understanding and being in this world, and that none is more or less valid than the other. And that we continue to strive to achieve the Zapatista adage of “creating a world in which many worlds fit.”