“Richin man nkäm ta qach’ab’äl: So that our language doesn’t die” What does it mean to say that a language is dead? Or that a language is dying? According to linguist David Crystal, “to say that a language is dead is like saying that a person is dead. It could be no other way—for languages…
Author: tiffanycreeganmiller
Book Review: Incurables: Relatos de dolencias y males, edited by Oswaldo Estrada
Estrada, Oswaldo, editor. Incurables: Relatos de dolencia y males. Ars Communis Editorial, 2020. 228 pages. ¿En qué país estamos, Agripina? [What country are we in, Agripina?] In his introduction to Incurables: Relatos de dolencias y males, Oswaldo Estrada reminds readers that “las dolencias y males siempre han producido prejuicios, miedos, pánico. Hay males visibles e…
Book Review: Sergio Loo, Operación al Cuerpo Enfermo / Operation on a Malignant Body. Translated by Will Stockton (2019)
Tiffany D. Creegan Miller // No one deserves cancer. In his translator’s note of Operación al Cuerpo Enfermo / Operation on a Malignant Body (2019), Will Stockton references Susan Sontag’s critiques of the tendency to conceptualize illness as a metaphor. In Illness as a Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), Sontag poignantly challenges…
Ixcanul (2015) and the Precarity of Health Care in Iximulew (Guatemala)
Tiffany D. Creegan Miller, PhD // Ixcanul (Jayro Bustamante, 2015) is a film about a young Kaqchikel girl who lives with her parents in a humble shack on the edge of a coffee plantation on the slopes of a volcano where she and her father work during harvest seasons. The film was made in close…
Ri k’ak’a tzij: Kaqchikel Maya Neologisms in Response to COVID-19
Tiffany D. Creegan Miller, PhD // Though Guatemala is a relatively small country in northern Central America, it boasts of a robust multilingual and multicultural diversity. In addition to Spanish (the official language), Guatemala is also the home to 22 Maya languages, and two other Indigenous languages: Garífuna and Xinca. Within this ethnolinguistic landscape, Kaqchikel…