Global and migrant Indigeneity: Quechua, multilingualism, and power in the US
Online lecture by Dr. Américo Mendoza-Mori
Tuesday, April 14, 2026 3:00 PM EDT
Online Location
How do language, migration, and power shape Indigenous identities? This talk examines Quechua language reclamation across the Andes and the U.S. diaspora as a lens to explore the social dimensions of multilingualism. Quechua is the most widely spoken Indigenous language family in Latin America.
Focusing on community initiatives, university programs, and digital spaces, the presentation highlights how Quechua speakers and learners are creating new sites of belonging that challenge dominant ideas about language, race, and Latinidad. These efforts complicate common assumptions about multilingualism by showing that not all languages are valued equally, and that Indigenous languages are often marginalized within Spanish-speaking contexts.
Based on diasporic Quechua initiatives in the United States, the talk argues that these projects are part of broader transnational networks that connect communities across borders, reshaping both language practices and identity formation. In this sense, multilingualism emerges not simply as diversity, but as a field structured by inequality, historical exclusion, and ongoing resistance.
The session will invite the audience to reflect on key questions: How do migration and diaspora reshape Indigenous language practices and identities? What does it mean to reclaim an Indigenous language in racialized and multilingual contexts?
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Dr. Américo Mendoza-Mori is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. His interdisciplinary research examines Indigenous languages, Latin America, public humanities, and cultural production across the Americas. His work has been published in venues such as PMLA, the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, The Cambridge Handbook of Multilingual Education, and Harvard’s ReVista, and has been featured by the United Nations, the Library of Congress, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and BBC. He is a co-founder of The Quechua Alliance and previously founded the Quechua Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Hosted by Prof. Jennifer Leeman.
Sponsored by Modern and Classical Languages.
