ABSTRACT
This is a story of English language teachers in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. It is based on collaborative work carried out with the three focal teachers over five years, between 2005 and 2010, as well as many other Oaxacan language educators with whom I worked during the course of the study. These stories are meant to be representative of how it is to teach English in Oaxaca: how teachers relate to English, and how they relate to their work. I have placed these stories within the social and linguistic milieu of Oaxaca, connecting them to the social meanings ofEnglish and the local purposes for EFL teaching. These meanings and purposes, I argued, are not agreed upon by everyone or form a fixed set of references to guide the teachers, but rather are characterized by contradictions and ambiguities as Oaxacans negotiate and renegotiate their relationship with English. The relationship is framed by language ideologies, which constitute common-sense ideas about the value and status of languages and their speakers, and naturalize connections between language and other social categories.
