Book dossier

New languages of the state

by Bret Darin Gustafson

"During the mid-1990s, a bilingual intercultural education initiative was launched to promote the introduction of indigenous languages alongside Spanish in public elementary schools in Bolivia's indigenous regions. Bret Gustafson spent fourteen years studying and working in south-eastern Bolivia with the Guarani, who were at the vanguard of the movement for bilingual education. Drawing on his collaborative work with indigenous organizations and bilingual-education activists as well as more traditional ethnographic research, Gustafson traces two decades of indigenous resurgence and education politics in Bolivia, from the 1980s and through the election of Evo Morales in 2005. Gustafson shows that bilingual education is about more than what goes on in classrooms. Public schools are at the centre of a broader battle over territory, power, and knowledge as indigenous movements across Latin America actively defend their languages and knowledge systems."--Book cover.