Breaking the Language Barrier: Addressing Linguistic Discrimination Against Indigenous Youth

Olivia Wearing | Latin America Fellow

Image sourced from Darya Luganskaya via Unsplash

Indigenous communities across Latin America continue to face significant educational inequalities. These include systemic barriers within education systems, such as curricula that fail to recognise and support Indigenous students’ languages and cultural heritage. When schooling prioritises Spanish or English without adequately supporting Indigenous-language literacy, students may face additional barriers to learning while their mother tongues remain marginalised. Multilingual education that builds on Indigenous-language literacy while supporting Spanish and, where appropriate, English, could help to make education more inclusive, strengthen cultural identity and expand future opportunities for Indigenous students. Changes at the foundational level are therefore essential to improving Indigenous students’ literacy and learning outcomes while ensuring that additional language learning does not come at the expense of their mother tongues.

Language as a means of celebrating cultural identity

In a 2024 TEDx Talk at Hope College, Marco López-Vargas discussed his revelation that he had Indigenous ancestry and his subsequent disappointment as he discovered how few resources were available to learn more about his cultural heritage. In stating that ‘knowing our history helps us know our place in this world’, López-Vargas highlights the importance of the issue of linguistic and cultural inclusion in society. Without adequate recognition and preservation of Indigenous stories and knowledge, entire ways of understanding the world risk being lost.

One key example is Indigenous traditional knowledge of environmental conservation and adaptation to changes within the natural environment. This knowledge is invaluable in responding to the effects of climate change.

As various concepts are differently understood and expressed uniquely across languages, the connection to cultural heritage is strengthened through communicating in one’s mother tongue. Introducing multilingual education at the foundational level, with Indigenous languages explicitly taught and celebrated, creates an opportunity to strengthen personal identity and to recognise the linguistic and cultural diversity that makes up the fabric of Latin America.

In addition to the cultural and socioeconomic improvements that would come with linguistic inclusivity in education, this movement works toward solving another problem: language extinction. With almost all Indigenous languages across North and Central America considered endangered, strengthening Indigenous-language literacy from an early age is more important than ever.

Indigenous migrant rights advocate and CIELO co-founder Odilia Romero has been active in speaking publicly about discrimination against Indigenous people from Latin America. In a 2022 TEDx Talk, she recounts cases in which Indigenous parents with limited Spanish were targeted by child services after being categorised as Spanish-speaking Latino families when seeking medical care for their children. Due to this barrier to effective communication, parents have misunderstood medical advice and incorrectly administered medicine, leading to interference from child services. This misunderstanding highlights the importance of multilingualism and linguistic inclusion in foundational education, as the potential consequences of such neglect can be life-altering at any stage.

Romero also discusses the labels imposed on her after leaving her Indigenous community for Los Angeles. She did not identify with labels such as ‘Mexican’, ‘Latina’, ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Oaxacan’, yet these blanket terms were applied to her. Such generalisations can overlook the distinct linguistic and cultural identities of Indigenous peoples across the continent. If more inclusive cultural and linguistic education were more readily available across Latin America, awareness and opportunities could increase.

Educational Outcomes

An SDG4 progress summary published by UNESCO in 2022 found that, in the Latin American countries for which data were available, an average of only 59 per cent of Indigenous people completed upper secondary education. These figures highlight the persistent educational disadvantages experienced by Indigenous communities across the region.

The World Bank has also highlighted disproportionate levels of poverty experienced by Indigenous communities across Latin America, with 43 per cent of Indigenous populations living in poverty. One of these systemic inequities is the absence of consideration for Indigenous communities in education. Globally, 47 per cent of Indigenous people in employment have no education, compared with 17 per cent of their non-Indigenous counterparts. This disparity highlights the wider educational disadvantages experienced by Indigenous communities. A lack of inclusion in foundational education can contribute to barriers to broader social participation later in life, including involvement in political decision-making processes that shape Indigenous communities.

Rewriting Linguistic Education

Some initiatives seek to create learning environments which bring together Spanish, English and Indigenous languages. One proposed approach is the Additive Trilingual Equity Model (ATEM), which treats English as a third language (L3) while safeguarding Indigenous-language literacy and academic Spanish. In practice, ATEM would require schools to preserve literacy in relevant Indigenous languages as well as academic Spanish, while introducing English as an additional language. This system works to empower culturally and linguistically relevant education in Indigenous regions of Latin America while deconstructing colonial narratives which posit languages like English and Spanish as baselines for education.

The proposal to make foundational education more linguistically inclusive is a promising development and is a tangible step toward a more equitable society for the next generation of Latin Americans. Introducing policies such as ATEM into educational curricula could encourage greater cultural and linguistic respect and continuity for Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities across the region. This is essential to creating more equitable educational opportunities and supporting Indigenous students beyond foundational education.

Olivia Wearing is a student at RMIT University in her final semester of completing a Bachelor of International Studies. She has a strong interest in linguistics, particularly the Spanish language and also Latin American history and culture. Spending a semester studying at Universidad de Carlos III in Madrid deepened her understanding of Latin American contribution to the world with its natural riches and unique cultures.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Young Australians in International Affairs. AI tools were not used by this author. All content is original, and no plagiarism has been used in the preparation of this article.