Tosepan Kalnemachtiloyan is an indigenous immersion and bilingual school working to 1) revitalize indigenous language, 2) recover indigenous knowledge, and 3) reframe indigenous identity. Through critical ethnography, I considered the ‘Language Planning (LP) Onion’, and finally adapted a useful LP ‘Pickled onion’ to examine their complex effort and historical dimension.
Tosepan Kalnemachtiloyan is an indigenous immersion and bilingual school whose work challenges an unequal context. The school seems to accomplish these aims: 1) revitalize their indigenous language, 2) reposition indigenous knowledge and culture as central, and 3) advanced local representations of indigenous identity (Shohamy&Gorter, 2008). My initial interest in their local language planning focused on the indigenous language as a medium of instruction, but also as part of a 'reframing' process of the students' indigenous identity. The latter has shifted in this particular space into a positive perspective, as a source of pride and possibility for the Maseual people in the sierra de Puebla, Mexico. I embarked on a critical ethnography to look at the indigenous school and its language planning, as part of their effort to challenge the disappearance of their culture and language, and their political disadvantage. I initially considered what Ricento & Hornberger (1996), and Hornberger & Johnson (2007) proposed for the examination of language planning (LP). Their 'LP Onion', a model and metaphor which could be 'unpeeled' to clarify layers, agents, the role of practitioners, and spaces to advance or resist policies and, therefore, enact or oppose power imbalances. However, the local language planning of this indigenous school, within the indigenous cooperative and community, could not be fully understood without an emphasis in the historical dimension, hence the adapted 'LP Pickled Onion'. Complex historical attempts at language planning had made an impact on the site. Efforts to document the indigenous Nahuat language, promote its use and raise its status initiated forty years ago as a grassroots movement. How this adapted model, and its visualization, contributed to the understanding of this unique context will be discussed, as well as how I am using it to examine other educational contexts of more subtle language tensions.
