Snapshots of Yucatec Maya Language Practices: Language Policy and Planning Activities in the Yucatán Peninsula

Metaphors, although many times more poetic than political, have been instrumental in understanding the complexity of language policy and planning (LPP). In this paper, I refer to and compare photographic processing to current LPP activities in Quintana Roo, the newest Mexican state. Based on corpus analyses of policy texts and ethnographic snapshots, this paper investigates how sectors such as health, social development, human rights, and justice employ Indigenous languages in ways that complement but also contradict LPP activities at the national, regional, and state levels. Overall, this research widens the LPP lens by inviting educational researchers to tell more stories behind the pictures, bring the blurred and missing people into the main frame, and redistribute the lighting in more just ways.