ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses ideological battles over language and literacy by comparing two different communities of practice and generations of Quechua speakers in Peru through the study of a Teacher Training Program in Intercultural Bilingual Education. It examines how “Quechua experts”, some of whom work as teachers in the institution, reproduce discursive fields dominated by essentializing and ancestralizing ideologies of language and identity in alignment with normative, purist and monoglossic ideologies. The chapter analyzes and contrast the way the students in Teacher Training program, influenced by a growing movement of young indigenous Quechua activists, adhere to more heteroglossic language ideologies, display sociolinguistic innovation and promote a much more inclusive community of Quechua speakers. It discusses telling case of what Quechua literacy means for different populations of users, focusing on the cultural and institutional locations of such meanings. Quechua experts enact expertise based on notions of authenticity, in the sense that they construct themselves as having knowledge of the “true Quechua culture”.