A Journey Through Kaqchikel Maya Time: Language Classes as a Time Machine for Teachers and Students

In teaching the Kaqchikel (Maya) Language to heritage non-speakers, other Maya of Guatemala, non-Mayan nationals and international students over the past 30-plus years, the Kaqchikel co-authors have touched and been touched by their past in myriad ways. The language itself is a gift from our ancestors. In sixteenth century documents, made available to us as teaching materials and re-translated into modern Kaqchikel, we are explicitly told that qati’t, qamama’ xk’ib’ij kan (our grandmothers (and) our grandfathers) directed to us not to forget our language, our values and our culture. We have also learned to read the Mayan pre-contact hieroglyphic script and to modify it to represent the additional phonemes of our language. As we teach others, we constantly recall the pixa’ (the counsel) of our parents and grandparents. We teach traditional techniques of farming and weaving alongside the cutting-edge technologies of the internet and crop-exporting. We instruct using regional linguistic variants alongside the newly standardized language, replete with neologisms for the national basic curriculum and hard science. Our language is a time shuttle interlacing the warp of our past with the weft of our present and future. We and our students journey along these threads of knowledge discovering and contextualizing our language, history and culture.