My dissertation investigates the semiotics and politics of contemporary (Yucatec) Maya-language media in the Mexican Yucatán.* Page 99 appears in chapter two, which examines how announcers at a popular radio station in southern Yucatán employ their medium as a means for encouraging ethnic awareness and solidarity among the station’s Maya listeners. In the chapter, I survey programming content, analyze broadcast speech, and interpret the identity work of radio announcers in light of the perspectives of local Maya listeners. The chapter develops a portrait of the current state of Maya identity politics in Yucatán. It also reveals the state in Maya identity politics. That is to say, the chapter clarifies the role of the Mexican government as principal mediator of Maya ethnolinguistic advocacy in Yucatán. On page 99, having just summarized the missions of three national institutes that endorse and administer Indigenous culture and language within Mexico, I offer a claim about the governmental mediation:

The institutes and their organizational affiliates present their activities as fostering the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversidad (diversity) of Mexico. Yet, the work has consequential homogenizing effects in the domains of ethnicity, culture, and language. The cultivation of different archives—of language, history, material culture, and so on—renders distinct ethnolinguistic groups as tokens of the same Indigenous type. (99)

I then provide some relevant historical context, citing Ben Fallaw’s (1997) work on indigenismo ideology and national politics in Mexico in the 1930s. I believe that the empirical claim and historical contextualization illustrate the quality of the dissertation, and I was glad to see both elements when I revisited the page for this test! But my ethnographic and linguistic evidence for the claim (in other words, the homogenizing effects evident at my field site) does not appear until the following page, and for this reason I think that page 99 does not quite encapsulate the quality of the dissertation as a whole.

Predictably, certain other pages are more representative of the value of the dissertation as a linguistic-anthropological study. In chapter five, for example, I offer a variety of linguistic examples that demonstrate that the emerging Maya standard, despite its marked lexical purism, adheres to certain Spanish syntactic and pragmatic conventions (for example, see pages 183, 190–3, 199­–204). And throughout the dissertation, I provide ethnographic descriptions, interview data, and analyses of mediatized texts that reveal and clarify ongoing changes in the social meanings of maaya ‘Maya’ and máasewal ‘Indian, Indigenous’ in Yucatán (for examples, see pages 60–4, 85–7, 155–7). Those pages shed more light on the basic tension or problem that I explored in the dissertation, namely, that while Maya advocates aim to maintain their language and culture, their work actually transforms both in different and important ways.

*Yucatec Maya speakers refer to their language as ‘Maya’ (maaya). I follow that convention here.

Bloechl, Christopher. 2023. Voicing the Maya: Media Technologies & Politics of Ethnolinguistic           

     Identity in Yucatán. PhD dissertation, University of Chicago.

Fallaw, Ben. 1997. Cárdenas and the Caste War That Wasn’t: State Power and Indigenismo in

     Post-Revolutionary Yucatán. In The Americas 53(4):551-577.