Abstract
Excerpted From: María Luz García, A Scandalous Presence in the Courtroom: Indigenous Immigrant Interpreters and the Politics of Language Ideologies in US Courts, 47 PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 209 (November, 2024) (7 Footnotes/References) (Full Document Requested)
Speakers of Indigenous languages of Latin America make up a growing portion of immigrants crossing the US southern boarder. As they enter US legal and immigration systems, the question of the role that these languages play becomes urgent. The exclusion or inadequate inclusion of Indigenous languages in US official proceedings was questioned after the 2018 deaths of two Maya children in US custody on the border; it has been central to cases resulting in extended incarceration of speakers; it has been at play in cases of child custody; and it is regularly crucial in determinations about the continued presence in the United States of thousands of immigrants who come before immigration courts. Often Indigenous languages are made invisible, and speakers are classified as ““Hispanic” and are assumed to be Spanish speakers. When Indigenous language interpreters are provided, courtroom norms and regulations require the invisibility of Indigenous languages and the invisibility of the interpreter. In this article, I consider the perspectives and experiences of Indigenous interpreters in dialog with official courtroom positions. This juxtaposition calls into question the idealized notions of the “neutrality” and ““invisibility” of interpreters and instead presents a view of the official position of the interpreter as one that is racialized with consequences both for individual Indigenous participants but also for broader considerations of equity in US legal systems as dominant white English-speaking participants are privileged to the detriment of Indigenous participants.
Previous literature has analyzed the ways that courtroom language ideologies that assume the referential transparency of language disadvantage speakers of non-English languages. This way of viewing language takes meaning to be “what words refer to,” and proposes that this content can be separated from the speaker and transferred to another speaker and another language without loss of meaning. However, this approach leaves no space for other functions of language or for the role that the identity of speakers, their linguistic repertoire, discursive norms, and cultural context play in linguistic meaning-making. Instead, the identities and communication norms of those in power are assumed as an unmarked standard. Within the ideologically rigid space of the courtroom, interpreters must nonetheless attend to pragmatic and interactional dynamics to render the “truest possible interpretation”. They exercise agency both in official capacities during legal proceedings, often acting as gatekeepers, and as they make use of “off-the-record spaces”. As interpreters are active in these realms of social and linguistic meaning-making, even as official frameworks only consider reference, the ways in which the position of the interpreter is racialized become an important part of courtroom communications.
This article is informed by work in sociolinguistics that seeks to reframe discussions to analyze the “hearing practices of white listening subject and to imagine alternatives. Rather than a focus on biases of individual members of the court (Rickford & King, 2016), here I consider how courtroom protocol and practices structure the ways in which Indigenous immigrant languages can be heard or not heard in the court. I highlight the positions of Indigenous interpreters' organizations who contest the premise of “invisibilization” as a route to justice and who offer alternatives that bring the relationships between language, culture, identity, and discrimination into focus.
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Haviland raises questions about his ability as an interpreter of an Indigenous language to do more than “lubricate and legitimize the wheels of bureaucracy itself, including its systemic and structural injustices”. The US “politics of protection” creates a dichotomy of “blameless” Indigenous immigrant children and victims and “morally contaminated” adults, and he finds very little space for change within this system. However, in considering the work of interpreters in UK asylum procedures, Moira Inghilleri notes: “Although interpreters' actions cannot be directly linked to outcomes in public procedures involving questions of justice, they nevertheless help to determine the ethical environment in which communication among relevant participants occurs.” Indigenous immigrant interpreters challenge this dichotomy of blameless children and contaminated adults. The work of the organizations that support them make visible both the presence of Indigenous people outside of this framework and the ways this “politics of protection” operates on a day-to-day basis through courtroom norms assume and privilege whiteness.
The work of CIELO, the International Mayan League, and other organizations that work with Indigenous Latin American immigrants make Indigenous immigrants visible within and outside of the courtroom. Their approaches to interpreting are consistent with mapmaking efforts documenting Indigenous immigrant communities, public information campaigns, and public celebrations of Indigenous immigrant identities that aim to claim public space for Indigenous immigrants. A visible cohesive presence of speakers of Indigenous immigrant languages supports efforts to demand that use of their languages be seen as a right and resource rather than as a barrier and a liability that requires the intervention of non-Indigenous advocates or of the state for redress. Instead, CIELO situates interpreting as part of a transnational movement of Indigenous people that offers a sociolinguistics of mobility, positioning indigeneity and its complex links to language as functioning across national borders so that Indigenous immigrants are visible as a group rather than as individual aberrations.
In contesting courtroom norms for interpreting, organizations of Indigenous interpreters make visible and challenge the ways that these technical specifications function as the mundane tools of sovereignty (Kahn, 2017) by codifying and enforcing the kinds of people to whom justice is available. The language-as-barrier approach reinforces the object of justice as English-speaking and requires the invisibility of differences in language and ethnicity for justice to be administered. CIELO's contestations point to the ““neutral” standard of courtroom language, protocol, and demeanor as explicitly non-Indigenous and demand recognition through their “scandalous” presence in the courtroom. By insisting on the political nature of their presence, they drawattention to the erasure of Indigenous people in official systems of power and challenge the “politics of protection” that privilege white-dominated efforts to “translate” them into dominant models. They instead propose a language-as-right model in which Indigenous people have a right to be fully present as Indigenous in the courtroom rather than being required to be made ““the same as similarly situated English speakers” in order to be the object of justice.
María Luz García, Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology Department, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI, USA. Email:
