YOLANDA’S PORTRAIT: A STORY OF TRIQUI LINGUISTIC RESISTANCE MEDIATED BY ENGLISH AND ETHNOGRAPHIC COEVALNESS IN OAXACA, MEXICO

This ethnographic study provides insights into the social contradictions of everyday language use in the multicultural context of Oaxaca, México. Following a coeval perspective (Fabian, 2007), the researchers, along with the participant, co-construct or co-perform the ethnographic encounter. Based on a larger ethnographic study on how Oaxacan university students perform English with a ‘postcolonial accent,’ the authors explore Yolanda’s use of English, along with Spanish and Triqui, as a series of multilingual social and cultural performances (Clemente and Higgins, 2008). This study takes place within the B.A. program in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at the Language Centre of the state university of Oaxaca. Here, Yolanda becomes the sole focus within the coeval ethnographic perspective; that is, Yolanda is the co-performer of the ethnographic encounter.