The indigenous Maya in the Bay Area are fighting to preserve their Mam language

OAKLAND – Sitting at a table in San Francisco's Mission District, Carlos Jimenez recalls the painful transition he felt when he first arrived in San Francisco.

“Lost. And lonely. And a lot of discrimination,” Jimenez said. “If you move somewhere else and they find out you're not part of that group, they make fun of you. That's what happened to us.”

Jimenez says the difficulty was communication.

They spoke neither English nor Spanish. They spoke an indigenous Mayan language called Mam. Jimenez says his sister was the first from their community of Todos Santos, Guatemala, to immigrate to the Bay Area.

The Bay Area's Mayan community has now grown to include tens of thousands of people from Guatemala and Mexico who speak Mam, K'iche, Yucatel and other Mayan languages.

“Mam, it's my mother tongue. Spanish is my second language,” says Crecencio Ramirez, who immigrated to the Bay Area as a child and co-founded Radio B'alam, which broadcasts programs and news on Mam.

“We felt so isolated, so I decided to start Radio B'alam,” Ramirez said.

In Radio B'alam's small studio in Oakland, language is a lifeline and words have meaning, especially when most of the world can't understand them.

For some, listening to the radio broadcasts in Mam can feel like a miracle, like being at home.

Mam is a Mayan language that is over 3,000 years old and is still spoken by young people today.

“I was born in Guatemala. I came here when I was four years old,” said Catarina Mendoza Ramirez, sitting in front of B'alam radio station in Oakland. “It was very difficult at first because not many of my parishioners were here. When I came here in 1999.”

Mendoza Ramirez says Oakland's predominantly Hispanic Fruitvale neighborhood now has Guatemalan shops and food trucks owned by Mam-speaking people.

The Oakland Unified School District says it has about 1,800 Mam-speaking students and has added a Mam translator to its staff.

The group Voces Maya and other advocacy groups are trying to help many Mam immigrants who do not speak English or Spanish by connecting them with services and interpreters.

Vicente Calmo Bautista of Oakland said through an interpreter: “We need access to resources to learn English.”

The City College of San Francisco hosted a Mayan cultural festival on the Mission campus in September.

The Maya came in traditional hats and clothing and shared their food, culture and beautiful woven textiles.

This celebration of cultural heritage is also a celebration of survival – from the dangerous times of the Spanish conquistadors to surviving the violent civil war in Guatemala in the 1980s, when soldiers attacked the indigenous population.

“There is a lot of violence in Guatemala,” said Damaso Calmo. “I came here without my mother, without my father. I only spoke 'Mam' and a little Spanish.”

Calmo says he was a teenager when he arrived and remembers a class in school when a teacher said the Mayan people no longer existed.

“I went to school here and they said we don't know what will happen to the Mayans in about 1,800 years. Something like that and I just had to laugh, you know,” Calmo said.

Nationwide, there is increasing focus on Maya-Mam speakers, as many Guatemalan immigrants are involved in the political border dispute and are also exposed to discrimination.

“The discrimination that comes with speaking an indigenous language, especially in our own countries, where many of us are not respected or not treated equally with those who speak Spanish, which is the national language,” said Oswaldo Martin, a Mam Maya interpreter from Oakland.

Martin has been featured on national news. He grew up in Oakland and became trilingual. He decided to work as an interpreter in immigration courts to help community members. He also says that many Mayan immigrants at the border were provided Spanish interpreters for immigration cases, even though they spoke little or no Spanish.

But even for interpreters, the challenges can sometimes be daunting. Mam has about fifteen dialects, and due to the remote and mountainous location of some communities, there is no standard Mam language.

Another challenge is that Mam is only one of 22 Mayan languages ​​recognized in Guatemala.

“I speak K'iche. I'm from Guatemala and I'm an interpreter,” said Francisco Icala of San Francisco while helping at a booth selling handmade canvas bags featuring original artwork by members of the local community.

At the San Francisco Maya Festival, Icala said the Mayan language K'iche is spoken by about 20,000 people in the Bay Area.

There is also the Yucatecan language of the Yucatan Peninsula region.

Pedro Parra, a Mayan-Yucatec speaker from Portland, had a booth at the festival where he sold T-shirts with Mayan script and demonstrated musical instruments.

“As a kid, I thought we were all Hispanic and therefore we all got along, and that was fine,” said Felix Munoz-Meza, a student at City College. “But as I got older and moved to different parts of the Bay Area, I learned that it's not a monolith.”

“I am simply part of the community. Latina and also Maya Mam. And I am very proud of that,” said Catarina Mendoza Ramirez.

Calmo and others dream of a better life and of passing on the heritage of the language, the Mam language, to their children.

“It's my dream to have a beautiful family so we can live in peace,” said Calmo. “Hopefully he won't have to go through the same thing I did.”

“Someone paid the price for them to be here, so they should be proud and remember who opened that door for them,” said Carlos Jimenez Sr. “We are so proud of who we are and where we came from, and we didn't want that to be lost.”

Jana Katsuyama is a reporter at KTVU. You can reach Jana by email at [email protected]. You can also call her at 510-326-5529. Or follow her on Twitter @JanaKTVU and rRead her other reports on her bio page.