In Tutunakú: Language, power, and youth in Central México, Lucia Brandi analyzes the perceptions of sixteen to twenty-five-year-old bilingual Totonac–Spanish speakers regarding the impact of individual behaviors and institutional policies on Totonac speech in the municipality of Huehuetla, Puebla, Mexico. Through elicited qualitative data, Brandi examines the processes underlying ‘language management’ as both overtly and tacitly performed across education, healthcare, and policing. The monograph rests on a twofold principle: asymmetrical power relations can pervade language ideologies, and language ideologies affect an agent’s use or disuse of a particular language. It is organized into five chapters. This review begins with overviews of each chapter before moving to a critical assessment of its content.
Chapter 1 elaborates on the study’s focus and conceptual tools. The study examines how language ideologies and policies affect speakers of Mexican Indigenous Languages (MIL)—specifically, how ‘language management’ is experienced or perceived across important social domains: education, healthcare, and policing. Brandi defines some terms clearly but is imprecise with others. She defines language ideologies as beliefs and attitudes about a language linked to beliefs about identity; language policies as ‘government legislation or formal language planning’ and agent-level patterns modulating speech; and minoritization as processual, patterned action that reproduces a minority’s subordinate position of a ‘linguistic identity’ in a social hierarchy. Brandi’s handling of other notions, however, limits analytic precision. She refers to ‘deconstruction’ without describing its analytic scope or work. Brandi describes language management as processual patterns of actions and tacit planning without clarifying the aspect of language being planned or acted upon. Other undefined terms, such as ‘linguistic cultures’ and ‘linguistic identity’, recur throughout the monograph.
Chapter 2 elaborates on the historical contingencies of state policies, language ideologies, and subject positions before discussing concepts relevant to the study. One of the monograph’s strongest contributions is its diachronic perspective on sociopolitical factors impacting MIL language use and identity. Brandi charts the shifting relationship between three variables—identity, language ideology, and language policy—across the colonial, post-independence, and revolutionary periods of Mexican history. Following this elaborate breakdown, Brandi introduces several concepts without clearly demonstrating their relevance to the study. For instance, she states that a ‘(de)constructivist’ approach elucidates the fluidity of identity, but does not explicate its form, functions, or implications in the preceding or present chapter. Likewise, the monograph invokes notions of embodied speakers and situated theory without sufficient explication.
Chapter 3 outlines the study’s methods. Another noteworthy contribution is the monograph’s emphasis on, and demonstration of, the efficacy of researcher–stakeholder collaboration. Brandi adopts a decolonizing praxis that attempts to mitigate historic and ongoing systems of inequality tied to extractive research. This non-extractive, decolonizing praxis has two key components: (i) participatory action research, in which the researcher trains informants in research skills and includes them as colleagues—thus moving from informant to interlocutor; and (ii) collaborating with stakeholders through their cultural norms to provide tangible services or products for the community. This is not ‘virtue signaling’, but an efficient process of identifying problems, applying solutions, and producing outcomes—all predicated on treating people with respect and dignity. Brandi relies primarily on questionnaires and interviews to gauge perceptions among sixteen to twenty-five-year-old bilingual Totonac–Spanish speakers, as they will become the next generation of parents. She also reflects on the potential pitfalls of ethnography, which I address in greater detail below.
Chapter 4 provides an analytic synthesis of the study’s data as a means of explaining how perceptions shape behavior. Brandi analyzes qualitative data through (i) language ideologies (attitudes and beliefs) and (ii) language policies (practices). She argues that, through actions and inactions, individual behaviors and state policies minoritize a ‘linguistic culture’. While young, bilingual informants perceive discriminatory ideologies in practices across services and evaluate them as unjust, they differ regarding the potential for real-world change.
Chapter 5 describes a few implications of the study for policy recommendations. Brandi makes a powerful point: MIL-speaking youth must have an active role in forming language policies directed at bilingual speakers in ways conducive to genuine bilingual competency. Brandi further strengthens the monograph by highlighting the efficacy of collaborative research through her work with interlocutors on a trilingual book. This effort—worthy of further discussion—serves as a means of combating the minoritizing ideologies perceived by her interlocutors in Puebla.
While the monograph offers three key strengths, it is also affected by interrelated theoretical and methodological problems. On the theoretical end, Brandi omits relevant scholarship on language ideology in linguistic anthropology. Much of Brandi’s treatment of the concept resonates with that tradition but does not exhaust it. The study could have benefited from further building on those insights rather than redeveloping points already established in the discipline. As Brandi reflects on her methods, she charges ethnographic participant-observation with susceptibility to the observer’s paradox. The claim is striking, given that it applies more aptly to her qualitative baseline—questionnaires and interviews—than to ethnographic participant-observation. Questionnaires and interviews are useful, but if not triangulated, they carry certain risks. First, these methods elicit texts above the threshold of awareness that amount to the Boasian ‘secondary rationalization’, masking rather than elucidating the phenomenon under study. Second, participants might seek to please the researcher by providing responses they perceive as desirable—a form of the observer’s paradox. These dialogically emergent textual artifacts, on their own, may lead the researcher away from examining and explaining the mechanisms underlying ‘language management’ as overtly and tacitly performed across education, healthcare, and policing.
Brandi’s methodological and theoretical issues are interrelated: an exclusive focus on responses to elicited questions overlooks tacit, mental, and behavioral patterning that shapes demeanor and experience. These tacit patterns are socially learned across multiple ‘fields’ in which subjects take positions relative to others. Anthropological ethnography—through long-term cohabitation, rapport, and focus on all forms of practice, not only overt ideological positions or public performances—enables scholars to analytically distinguish between secondary rationalizations (as performative stances emerging dialogically for a researcher) and native exegesis (as dialogically emergent interactions and replicators shaping interactions between ‘natives’ in situ).
Overall, Brandi’s Tutunakú: Language, power, and youth in Central México is strongest in its treatment of the relationship between shifting language policies, identities, and MIL endangerment, its advocacy for MIL speakers’ role in forging communicative competence in bilingual pedagogy, and its demonstration of the form and function of reciprocal, collaborative research. Despite its theoretical and methodological shortcomings, the monograph provides insights for scholars working in language endangerment settings. It will interest those studying language ideologies, the lived experience of endangered language speakers, and collaborative language revitalization or reclamation.
