The Impact of Community Partnerships on Maya Children's Identity

This paper explores how educational partnerships can support parents and teachers of Maya children as they navigate two worlds: their Maya home culture and the culture of their adopted country. The case presented here is of Q’anjob’al Mayan immigrants to a rural Colorado valley, and their children’s presence in local public schools. Treated as Hispanics because they were brown, indigenous Q’anjob’al speaking Maya students often felt neglected and marginalized by many teachers and staff. As their children adopted local cultural identities and practices, parents felt their children were becoming “unMaya”. In an effort to support Maya parents and families, teachers were given firsthand experiences with Maya culture: parent-school nights, traditional festivals, even travel to the community’s home region in Guatemala. These experiences fostered cultural competence and supported teacher advocacy. Finally, this partnerships among university faculty, school teachers, a local non-profit, and Maya families enabled students to develop and assert their identity in school, while assisting parents in cultivating aspects of Maya identity at home and in the community.


Introduction
In 1979, Maya from the Huehuetenango region of Guatemala began immigrating to Colorado's San Luís Valley to work. Over the course of almost 40 years, a vibrant and powerful Maya community has developed. As is often the case, the original immigrants spent the first few years helping each other acculturate to a new country and community.
With time, families and children arrived. The younger generation, especially those born in the U.S., presented parents the challenge of transmitting and maintaining enduring values endemic to Maya life in a non-traditional community. This challenge was compounded by social institutions, like public schools, that viewed Maya children as "Hispanic" because they were brown. As a result, teachers often considered Maya students Spanish-speakers (which many were, just not as a first language) who shared the stereotypical values and behaviors of other [usually Mexican-origin] Spanish speaking students.
Alamosa, Colorado is the largest town in a sparsely populated alpine desert valley in the southeast part of the state. While Connecticut could fit inside the valley, there are only 46,000 residents scattered across 8,000 square miles, with 9,900 of them in Alamosa (San Luís Valley Development Resources Group, 2018). Depending on the year and criterion, three of the area's six counties are the poorest in the state and had the highest poverty rate (31%) in 2016 (Comen et al., 2018). Agriculture and ranching are the primary occupations, as they have been for several hundred years since early Spanish settlers encountered the Ute Indians who lived in the valley. After the United States took control, many New Mexican settlers arrived; later in the 1880s, a number of Mormon families were sent there as well. As a result, there is a mix of cultures: descendants of early Spanish settlers, descendants of primarily Caucasian immigrants, newer residents who have come to work in government, private, and tourism businesses, and more recent immigrants who have come to labor in agricultural and ranching interests (such as potato farming, sheepherding, and mushroom cultivation).
The San Luís Valley is truly a valley of immigrants.
In spite of this history, Maya parents and elders have struggled to find ways of keeping their traditional culture and values alive through their children while in a foreign land. This has been particularly difficult in the isolated and insular place that is the San Luis Valley. Even so, the Maya were not interested in creating a cultural enclave, "We don't want to assimilate ourselves and we don't want to isolate ourselves in our culture.
We want to share our culture with the cultures that are here so that we can be recognized and have our rights and not be ashamed of our culture" (Maya elder, as quoted in Schensul and LeCompte, 2016). However, the valley has a record of marked discrimination against and mistreatment of Spanishspeaking, "Hispanic" immigrants and residents (Donato, 2007). Since to most residents they look like other Latino or "Mexican" groups, the Maya have been subject to the same treatment and prejudices applied to those ethnic groups. In the 1980s, when Maya immigrants dressed in the unique traje (native dress) of the village of Santa Eulalia, Guatemala, and spoke Qanj'ob'al,

A Theoretical Framework
In contrast to the more rigid dichotomy of assimilation or acculturation, recent work has exposed a more nuanced perspective on immigration. For example, one prevailing thought was that immigrants who held on to their native cultural norms and practices hindered or prevented successful adaptation to their new situation. However, careful observation has shown that immigrants with a firm grounding in their original identity and language often transition more effectively than those who simply abandon their previous selves (Spindler & Spindler, 2000). Further study suggests that immigration provokes a comparison of one's "enduring self", or natal identity, to a "situated self", or one's new circumstances. The extent to which the values, norms, and funds of knowledge comprising the enduring self will offer a basis for succeeding in the new circumstance determines in large measure whether the immigrant will adapt and thrive or become alienated and isolated (Moll & Greenberg, 1990).
Along with a strong sense of enduring self, Maya culture includes the notion of kaxlan, or the ability to adapt. For hundreds of years Maya have integrated cultural and technological aspects of other cultures into their own, without diminishing a strong sense of being "Maya." In this way, for example, it is perfectly congruent for a Maya woman to dress in traditional, handmade clothing yet carry a cell phone for communication (cf. Ludwig & LeCompte, 2012).
Finally, the fact is that when two or more cultures come into contact through immigration neither remains static. In the same way that a bilingual realizes that knowing two languages is more than simply adding Language A to Language B, over time immigrants often feel they are neither their original self nor entirely part of their new community. To the extent that they then forge a "new" identity and place for themselves, immigrants 1 Hidden populations are groups that are difficult to identify and understand because they have strong privacy concerns, often resulting from illegal activity (e.g., drug use) or residency status (e.g., undocumented immigrants) (Singer, 2010). may create a "third space" (Bhabha, 1994). As with a bilingual's two languages, this space is not simply some combination of old and new cultural components, but a new, hybrid identity that allows the immigrant to successfully adapt to new circumstances while maintaining a core sense of self.
Together, these notions of a strong self-identity (enduring self), adaptability (kaxlan), and the third space, provide useful tools for examining the changes that took place in the Alamosa Maya community over the course of just a few years.

Community Collaborations -Beginnings
Adams State University (originally a state Teacher's College) is located in Alamosa.
It is considered a "Hispanic-serving institution" due to the percentage of students attending who identify themselves as Hispanic. In 2007, one of the authors (Ludwig) joined the Teacher Education faculty. Having studied a Maya women's weaving co-op for her dissertation (Ludwig, 2006), she was intrigued with the Maya community in Alamosa. As an educator, she was curious to know how Maya children fared in local schools: to what extent were the normative practices of school (the "hidden curriculum"; Anyon, 1980) affecting children's relationships with their families? How could schools be more culturally responsive? At the same time, the other author (Judd) was Principal Investigator on a teacher development grant designed to support schooling for English learners ("ESL" students).
Since the grant's main goals were improving teachers' abilities to work with diverse students, along with increasing parental participation in school, both authors collaborated to accomplish these goals in ways that would benefit both the local Maya and teacher communities.

Community Collaborations -Initial Partnerships
Starting with the grant's teacher development initiative, the authors sought local partnerships. Our view of educational "partnership" is student-focused, but includes partnerships in the home and community as well (Epstein, 2018). Ignoring students' perspectives on and contributions to all three contexts leads to many of the most common teacher frustrations, including "disinterested" parents and disengaged pupils.
One of our first connections involved the Immigrant Resource Center, a non-profit that had been serving San Luis Valley immigrants for more than 20 years [http://www.slvirc. org]. Because the Center was already serving Maya immigrants, they had gained the Volume One, Issue One trust of the Maya community. This partnership allowed access to the most influential members of the community-the elders. It also facilitated communication with families of school-age children, which led to a study of community -family relationships .
In the public schools, we sought teachers who were acquainted with Maya children and were looking for better ways to reach them. When recruiting for the grant's teacher "cohorts", one criterion was the applicant's interest in collaborating with colleagues to create more culturally responsive schools. The university's working relationship with the Alamosa school district facilitated the identification of key teachers and principals who were supportive of the grant's goals and in particular improving the academic experience for Maya children.
Around this same time (2007), The Colorado Trust, a health equity foundation, facilitated an Immigrant Integration initiative in the San Luis Valley. For the first six months of the grant, the Spring Institute for Intercultural Learning brought various constituent groups from Alamosa together to identify and address challenges unique to the local community. An integrated plan emerged that focused on educational, social, and immigrant services, businesses and employers, faith-based organizations, and the immigrants themselves. At the end of the four-year grant, one of the Trust's key findings was that it was "easier" to integrate Mexican immigrants than other groups (Lee et al., 2008, p.7). This no doubt stemmed from the historical presence of Mexican-American residents in Colorado and their long-term dealings with the Anglo population.

The Issue
The experience of Maya families in Alamosa is part of a longer history of uneasy relations among the peoples of the San Luis Valley. Valley schools in particular have a history of unequal treatment of Hispanic students (Donato, 1999). As was the case in many southwest schools, Spanish-speaking students were sometimes punished for speaking their home language. They were frequently tracked into classes that did not prepare them for post-secondary education. For most of the 20th century, schools in Alamosa were effectively segregated. Children of Mexican descent were forced to attend a Prep School, better known as the "Mexican School." Notably, the first known desegregation lawsuit in the U.S. was filed in 1914 in Alamosa by Mexican parents so that their children could attend the school closest to where they lived. The District Court ruled in the parents' favor, but allowed that English language proficiency could be used as justification to send some children to the separate school. (Lobato, 2018;Donato et al., 2016).
That verdict was quickly forgotten and had little impact on the long-standing, pervasive sentiment among Anglo families that "Mexican" children did not have the language skills or academic preparation to succeed in a regular school setting. Spanish-speaking "Hispanos" 2 often lived in enclaves and segregated housing apart from the more well to do Anglo parts of town. They were treated as second-class citizens by the schools and the community at large. Teachers used racial epithets and corporal punishment with students. It wasn't until mid-century that more Hispano students attended and graduated from school, and Hispano parents began to gain some political clout by serving on school boards. Even in 1960, however, there was no Hispano teacher in a neighboring school district, in spite of the presence of Adams State College in Alamosa and at least one qualified Hispano teacher graduate (Donato, 2007).
Although conditions slowly improved from the 1950's on, Alamosa continued de facto school segregation practices for another 30 years. Not until the "Alamosa Plan" for desegregating schools did the district take definitive steps to ensure all same-age students attended classes together. The district's solution was to house two grades in each elementary building (K-1; 2-3; 4-5), then have all students attend a single middle and high school. While this changed the demographics of the schools, it did not necessarily improve the academic experience for children of color. Hispano dropout rates were higher and high school graduate rates still lower than the Anglo population. Fewer Hispano students went on to post-secondary education.

Maya 'Hispanos'
With this history, it is not surprising that when Maya children began enrolling in schools in the 1980s, the initial response from educators was to treat them as Hispano children. After all, they looked and in many cases talked like children from Spanishspeaking families. When it became apparent that many of these children only spoke a Mayan language, the schools did not know how to respond. The default solution was to put them in ESL classes (when available), enroll them in "easier" academic courses and, if native language communication was attempted, to communicate in Spanish. As a result, for roughly 20 years Maya families experienced a school culture that viewed their children as Spanish-speaking Hispanos of Mexican heritage. In this milieu, the children often responded in kind: adopting the speech, dress, and mannerisms of the local Hispanic 2 Whereas Hispanic or Latino broadly refer to peoples of Spanish language heritage, the term Hispano refers specifically to descendants of colonial Spanish families who were living in the southwest when the U.S. incorporated that region after 1848. Residents of the San Luis Valley were part of the largest Hispano group, the nuevomexicanos. Hispanos typically do not consider themselves "Mexican-Americans", as they did not cross any border to live in the U.S.-the border "crossed them". The term is not currently used by schools or the community. Volume One, Issue One population. As time went on some even married outside of the Guatemalan community.
Parents of Maya children realized what was happening but were in a difficult position.
Many of them immigrated without documentation, entering the U.S. from Mexico. They sometimes obtained work with false documents. Speaking up and becoming visible was risky, even if they had the political acumen to do so. Many families had mixed immigration status-children who originally came with their parents were undocumented, while children born in the U.S. were citizens. These children could grow up and enjoy all the privileges of citizenship: legal work status, driver's licenses, financial aid and resident status for college. Some of these privileges, however, required disclosing family information that could put siblings and parents at risk of discovery and deportation.
In sum, a fundamental issue for the Maya community in Alamosa became the challenge of maintaining and transmitting traditional cultural values and beliefs to the children. In their own words, parents felt their children were becoming "un-Maya". Because the Maya community was effectively a hidden community, children faced the challenge of somehow remaining "Maya" when almost every other influence-school, the wider community, peers-pressured them to fit in. What follows describes how ongoing collaboration among local community institutions and individuals served to support Maya children in developing and asserting their identity in school while assisting parents in cultivating aspects of Maya identity at home.

Initial Community Support
The first local entity to reach out to the Alamosa Maya was the Catholic diocese.
This church offered shelter and assistance to newcomers. In addition, the local school district hired a "Maya community liaison". This person mainly functioned as a help to parents getting their children enrolled in school (e.g., filling out forms). As for helping Maya families learn about U.S. school culture, or district teachers developing culturally responsive practices, there was little progress. As one Maya adult stated, "in spite of the liaison, there was no change in the interaction between (Maya) students and their teachers and counselors" (cited in Ludwig & LeCompte, 2012).
As already mentioned, another local entity with early Maya contacts was the Immigrant Resource Center (IRC). From its beginnings in 1987, the IRC evolved into a valley-wide resource for all immigrants as well as migrant and seasonal workers. Since 2003, it has functioned as an independent non-profit assisting with immigration status, victims of abuse, homeless crime victims, and English language classes.
While these two organizations helped Maya newcomers with basic necessities, neither focused on educational issues. The school district, except for the early effort mentioned above, generally neglected Maya children and their families. Maya students became less and less distinguishable from Hispanic students. Over time, the Maya began to be viewed as Mexicans who did not speak "good" Spanish. Such was the situation in 2006, when the efforts described below commenced.

Collaborative Efforts
Looking back, it is apparent that the Maya community's transition from hidden to observable was not the result of one or two major events or the work of just one or

A Baseline -Community Interviews
One of the early activities provided a "baseline" for home-school interactions. In the early months of the Colorado Trust grant, Antonio Sandoval, a former principal, and Ren Carbutt, a student at Adams State, were hired to implement some of the grant activities.
While planning those activities, Ludwig and Judd taught both bilingual employees to write interview questions and conduct interviews with 10 sets of immigrant parents and 15 Guatemalan students. Analysis of this qualitative data revealed that immigrant students felt marginalized, disconnected from and voiceless in their educational experience ). An eleven year-old student said, "Our parents always tell us to stay in school. My dad told us that when he was a little kid he had to work for himself to buy what he needs. Sometimes he ended up stealing." The same boy later said that teachers needed to "hear what the students have to say because their opinions aren't being heard.
The dropout rates would not increase more because the school is listening to them and most of the time they don't." A high school student talked of being in a British literature class. "I was the only one in there who was Hispanic and . . . I felt like they misplaced me because I didn't feel included. The English teacher was only speaking to her white students and she left me out of the conversation and she forgot all about me as if I didn't exist." Interviews with immigrant parents revealed that they were frustrated by divisions occurring in the home as their children increasingly identified with English and American culture and failed to practice the respect so rooted in Maya cosmology and social relations.
A local priest who had worked with the Maya immigrants since their arrival in the late 1970s shared that although the parents wanted their children to have an education, they were upset by the "loss of the old ways". As he put it, the parents wanted children to "keep the old values, especially respect for parents, for the family, and for the church. The families that functioned the best were the ones where the children maintained respect." In addition, most parents talked of having lost their rights as parents. "According to my children, if you hit a child, they'll take you to jail and lock you up. You will lose your children." For many parents who spoke no English or who could not read or write, children lied about their attendance and their grades. "My children know more than I do" lamented many parents in families where the children's education had caused tension within the family. However, many parents confided, "it is the vision of every parent that our children educate themselves. How we would love to have a child that is a lawyer, a doctor, or a judge, a highranking person. We have to give more time to our children."

Project EXCELL Activities
After reading and coding the surveys and interview findings, Ludwig approached Judd regarding the needs of Maya schoolchildren. Although many teachers were well meaning and pedagogically adept, they lacked understanding of the Maya culture in order to become more culturally responsive to Maya students. With Ludwig's Guatemalan contacts, the authors arranged for select teachers to travel to Guatemala. One of the conditions of the trip was that upon their return, the teachers would agree to participate in PLCs (Professional Learning Communities). The PLCs would use these teachers' experiences and insights to develop strategies to improve the educational experience for Maya children and their families school wide, and to determine ways to involve their parents in school. Several of these teachers subsequently participated in additional cultural sensitivity training. They then served as mentors to their district colleagues.
The teachers' insights and improved cultural responsiveness (Gay, 2002) made them eager to foster partnerships with parents. One initial effort built on an existing elementary Family Literacy Night held each spring. These nights included mini-classes on different topics for parents and literacy materials-primarily free books-for students.  educated professionals who worked to make a difference for the community. Seeing other influential Maya became part of the impetus for students to take pride in their heritage and make themselves more "visible" at school.

Maya Project, Pastoral Maya and the Alamosa Maya Community (Espiritu Maya)
Ludwig's initial attendance at Pastoral Maya in 2007 led to additional influential They, along with their parents and teachers, travelled nearly four hours to meet and spend time with Alamosa students. The Maya children's marimba tunes entertained and impressed the visitors, as well as the other students and teachers in their own school (Chavez, 2012).
As Alamosa teachers became more aware of their students were asked to share their stories with community groups in Alamosa as well as elsewhere in Colorado. The sponsoring teacher developed such a relationship with students that they and their families came to her for help in matters such as applying to college and trying to prevent a father's deportation. In her words it "was a pleasure…to meet their families and get to know their gentle ways" (Kruse, personal communication).

Conclusions
This essay began with a question: How can a Maya immigrant community-and the families that comprise it-maintain their cultural identity in the face of isolation and pressure to acculturate? More specifically, how can parents ensure that their children learn and carry on what it means to be "Maya"? 4 'Chapín' is a term Guatemalans often use to refer to themselves, as opposed to the more generic 'Guatemalteco'; sort of like saying one is a 'Yankee' instead of a 'New Englander.' The students chose the club name themselves. Their objective was to raise the visibility and awareness of Maya students to school personnel and their peers. We have presented some ways various resources helped answer that question. While it would be nice to conclude that as a result of these partnerships things have permanently changed for the better, that is rarely the case with social change. Zuber-Skerritt et al.
(2015) reiterate Adorno's (1973) warning about oversimplifying complicated problems: The complex, messy, and wicked nature of the social world, including injustice in society and education, should not be simplified into neat classifications and categories, but be explored by a variety of perspectives and methods of research. (p. 25) In addition to improving school visibility and teachers' cultural competence, one other community initiative continues to bear fruit-literally. In 2012, the K-1 elementary school was closed and the buildings razed. Initially, the land, adjacent to the Río Grande, was purchased for an RV park. After some public protest and political wrangling, funds were raised to purchase the area for a community garden. Members of the Maya community in particular were encouraged to plant crops that were part of their traditional diet. Now, six years later, the Rio Grande Farm Park is a permanent 38-acre site owned by the San Luis Valley Foods Coalition (Trust for Public Land, 2016). In addition to community farming, the property contains trails, fruit trees, and space for groups to gather for celebrations. Francisco Lucas and his wife Lucía are both on the Park Committee.
The authors' work with sectors of the Alamosa community, especially the Maya students and their families, demonstrates the importance of one's culture when facing adversity and its value in building an enduring identity. As one Alamosa Maya elder explained, "Our culture is not the base, it is the root." Partnering also highlighted the power of collaborating with likeminded individuals to form community supports for the changes we sought. We found, as a contributor to the Foxfire Interviews put it, We all need community-and since community is hard to come by in this society, we need to find ways of gathering it unto ourselves…Part of our task is to search out folks who are on this journey with us and gather them in various ways, creating communities that can help us…do the best work we can (Palmer, as cited in Hatton, 2005, p. 133). We believe the work we carried out beyond the university and situated in the domain of community participatory engagement, is critical to understanding how to provide equitable opportunities for marginalized as well as mainstream populations of learners. Witnessing the results of making Maya culture visible to the community of Alamosa and its positive impact on the Maya as well as on the community at large has made that need clear to us. While this story has a beginning, it has no end as long as Maya live in the San Luis Valley.
Perhaps the words of one of the original Maya immigrants sums it up best. Francisco Lucas has seen the ups and downs of his family and community over the past 40 years: Something that makes us proud as Maya within our cultural and spiritual activities is that we have integrated our culture. We have brought it and shared it with many people. Perhaps not everybody knows about us as people, but the schools, the churches, the various organizations -they know and have shared it with us. We want to have our rights and be known in this country and in this valley because if we hide ourselves it is like saying when I go out into the street they could say "that dirty Indian," and that is how they would treat us. Because we don't let them get to know us, a lot of times people discriminate against us, but allowing them to get to know us so that they can identify us as we are is the most beautiful thing. Summa Cum Laude with a major in Sociology. She completed her degree in 3 ½ years and with no student loan debt. She works for Alamosa County and plans to stay in the Valley and serve the community (Relyea, 2018).

Coda
As is true of immigrants nationwide, the last couple of years have been characterized by increased uncertainty for the Alamosa Maya who are undocumented. The IRC receives several calls each day from individuals concerned about the threats to DACA. The Director, Flora Archuleta, says that since the last Presidential election she has fielded double the requests for Power of Attorney on the part of parents fearful that they will be deported and separated from their citizen children (Archuleta, personal communication).