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Using a multilayered, ethnographic and critical approach to language policy and planning, this article examines a language policy favoring Quechua in Apurímac in the Southern Peruvian Andes, which is being imagined as an integrated community unified by the local language. This study presents a case in which top-down policies open up ideological spaces, while other layers of the policy process obstruct them due to particular interpretations of official declarations. In fact, although official documents indicate a repertoire of Quechua as "our" language for regional integration, Quechua-speaking civil servants and teachers present another, very extended repertoire that portrays Quechua as an ancestral language, important to use only when interacting with the "Other" or with the "pure" Quechua speaker from high-altitude communities. The data analyzed here not only confirms, once more, that various layers of the language policy process can contradict each other, but also that dilemmas exist within the individuals themselves due to the ambivalent colonial structure of Apurimenian society. Thus, while Quechua is associated with subordinated and disdained peasants, officials and teachers also value it as part of "our culture," and in that sense they identify with it.

In the Andes, a phonological transference known as "motoseo" has acquired ideological weight. People think that bilingual speakers of Quechua and Spanish "confuse" the vowels when speaking Spanish and that they are inferior to the ones who do not. In this article, I analyze the ideological agenda of the racialized verbal hygiene practice based on this phenomenon in two universities of the Peruvian Quechua-speaking context. I look at how students have internalized the ideology associated with the phenomenon and constantly discipline themselves to control it while speaking. In addition, I discuss how professors (most of whom are also speakers of Quechua) use this trait to "otherize" rural students and construct them as "they" as opposed to "us". This ideology is so widespread in the area that it works to reproduce a profoundly unequal social order that is not questioned by most university professors nor by the students who are victims of it. In turn, it leads to low academic performance and a university experience that is often traumatic for students coming from rural areas.

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Based on an ethnography of a language policy in the region of Apurímac in the Peruvian Andes, I analyze the boundaries that are constructed by a community of practice of Quechua "experts" in a context where resources in the indigenous language become more valuable. Although the declared wish is to build a regional "us," Quechua experts end up establishing identity divisions between "us" and "them" through tactics of intersubjectivity based on ethnic difference, authority and authenticity. This work follows earlier studies about language ideological battles in relation to Quechua and shows that, after several decades, the former top-down language policies coming from the capital city are now being recursively reproduced within the Quechua-speaking social actors themselves, and the conflict has diversified into new dilemmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]