Bancha Lenguas Language Justice Cooperative
This Spring, Maya and I had the opportunity and pleasure to sit with our comrades, Joan and Yudith, both Language Justice workers. We explored the practice of cooperation in our family lineages and the role of interpretation and language justice work in sharing our stories. The act of listening to one another and seeing ourselves in each other’s stories, sharing different words used in our regional spanishes, was a blessed exchange and balm that reminded us how deeply connected we are across our biodiversity.
-Lila Arnaud, Education and Language Justice Coordinator at CNO
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Lila:
We talk about cooperation as a Black & indigenous technology that we remember and reclaim. How did cooperation show up in your family/community in your early life?
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Yudith:
My immigrant story and story of survival plays a major role in how I build community and think about community led economies. One way in my early life this showed up was tandas – community based savings accounts and [loan systems]. My grandmother was a trusted elder in the community and people trusted that she would hold everybody's money. [In a tanda] there's ten or 15 people or however many and everyone puts in the pot every month [and when it’s your turn you get your return]. I was able to purchase a little car when I was 18, on my own. And so things like that have always taught me that there are ways that our community, our immigrant and Black and brown communities find trust in each other to be able to succeed and survive, to be able to thrive and grow together. And it's in deep trust that people are able to cooperate in this way.
The other way was community childcare like, taking turns taking care of other people's children and paying the community elder who's taking care of the children, and taking care of them as well. Creating this intergenerational community and respect. Elders hold the knowledge – the ways to keep the community together. I remember las doñas exchanging plants and seeds, remembering and honoring the natural world and how it gives us what we need.
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​Lila:
And how does cooperation show up in your journey as a language justice worker?​
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Yudith:
The way I grew up shows up in the way I build solidarity with others–exchanging seeds with homies, working through a feminist lens, supporting other women, giving my voice and services to help them be empowered and healed in the process.
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Joan:
Yudith, I echo a lot of the things that you said. My house was a house where you could always come eat (5 cups of rice a day). So like any of my classmates who couldn't go back home or they were going to stay and study, it was just like known that you could come and get a plate of food at my house. And the tandas and the susu–recently my brother called needing me to purchase a mac for him [he couldn’t buy it from Panama because it was being blocked] and asked “Can you please buy it for me?” And that is something that we do a lot where we just like, you know, I can just be like, hey, tell my best friend, like, I really need this to happen. Can you get my sister over there and I'll get you over here? We are very trustful of each other when there is a need. And now that I live in the U.S I have a higher privilege in the sense of capital, it’s not as restricted. Money is so much more accessible over here. And I hold that very dearly and I know that I can trust people there and they can trust me. For us to just kind of pass around this money and make it easier for each other.
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Lila:
And how does cooperation show up for you in your Language Justice work?
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Joan:
Growing up, we developed understandings of the way people talk and move and are different, didn’t hold on to what we saw superficially, but knew we had the same thing we were working towards. Being an LJ worker, we [know that we] all need different things. I might not understand your story or exactly what you need, but I can show up for you. I can present myself in a way that is supportive. I am there to cooperate with you, be in solidarity with you. It allows me to de-center myself.
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Lila:
How does LJ impact and empower storytellers and storytelling; how does it relate to ancestral practices?
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Yudith:
Language can make or break relationships. The quality of the interpretation can make or break the story someone is telling…it could impact whatever relational work is happening; if you are not telling the story correctly or as loyal right to the original language or the language that is being spoken into the space. I see the role that LJ workers play and how important it is, right, when we're bridging that linguistic gap where we're working. And how it relates to ancestral practices, you know we are traditionally people of color, afro-descendant people, immigrant people. We rely on the storytelling tradition. We rely on stories from elders about lineage, our migration story. And like, where, some of us maybe originated from one place, but kept traveling and no longer go back to that original place, but still hold the traditions and the language that evolves with us as we migrate and travel, journey through our immigration. And I hold on to that because that's how I've learned, right in my family. That is how I have learned my background. And I still keep uncovering things. There is a part of my lineage that I'm not super familiar with. I didn't grow up with my biological father, so I don't have a lot of that historic connection to my Afro descendants. Had I grown up with some of my elders, I would have more of a sense of some of my afro-descendancy. I might have a little bit more of a sense of where I come from. But I know that my people are land based. We're foragers. We are people of the _____ and the sugar cane. And so those two identities have also informed the way that I seek knowledge and the way that I seek this sense of belonging through language, through oral histories, and storytelling, because that's how I learn or that's how I've always learned. And I think that's the reality for a lot of us. Our safety relies on going back to those oral histories. To share where we come from, to share the realities that we've had to live without being criminalized or persecuted. In a sense, our survival, our safety relies on going back to those oral histories and oral storytelling practices. And the way that we learn about our natural world, there are so many stories about plants and how plants, offer us the medicines, our food, but also the toxicity. Right? Like the dangers of eating different plants or mixing different plants. The story of the “mala mujer”. Stories about plants kept me safe–not all plants are for touching, not all berries are for eating.
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Lila:
Yudith, this makes me think about how you can't talk about language without talking about people and the land. And how land is so important when talking about Retracing lost connections in our family histories.
Maya:
resonating, thinking about how many of my elders and family members I know so deeply and so closely, but have never met, but feel so connected to and could tell these stories as though I was there because of the ways that they've been told to me.
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Joan:
So rich. Love it, love it, love it. I think language is extremely important. Words are important. And the integrity of the language is very important, especially whenever we are talking about ancestral practices and coming from like Black Afro indigenous stories. A lot of the times the stories in these traditions are told in languages over decades and decades and generations and generations. Like in the African tradition there are griots, families of singers who keep singing these stories who keep these stories alive through song. In Indigenous tradition through Latin America, there are analogies to explain specific things. And there's like the stories that you'll consistently hear growing up, and that maybe whenever I was a kid, I didn’t understand the story, but I had not put two and two together. And then now that I have, like growing and I'm like revising the story, I'm like, oh my God, this story's talking about emotions, this story is talking about forgiveness…But the way that it was communicated to us was through a story, through an analogy, through something that unraveled. And it said over and over again, through generations. And I think that that is a very intrinsic thing that we share as Afro descendants and indigenous people, that there is always these shared stories.
And a lot of times you will hear a story that came from like in Mexico, but then there's a story in Colombia and they're very similar stories. But the message that they both have is the same, and you can tell how they kept the integrity of the stories, maybe changed a bit, [they are different lands, and the stories are changed to localize it, but the idea is the same.
And how I believe that that ties in to the language justice is by keeping the integrity of the language that is being used, keeping the integrity of the story and not telling the story. [Not] telling the story how you interpret it, telling the story as it is told. As an LJ worker, it is important to me to keep the integrity of what is being said and to not change it based on, like, my interpretation of what's being said.
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Lila:
So much here! Maya, anything else you want to speak on?
Maya:
Just calling back what you said, Lila about “You can't talk about language without talking about people and talking about land” and just knowing that this is also where language came from, you know, in like basic relationship between people, the land and each other. We develop language to like, communicate between all of these things. I'm just celebrating in this moment.
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