Amerindian and translingual literacies across time and space.

Recent studies have examined Indigenous and mestizo communities that engage in social practices of transculturated, Amerindian and translingual literacies, often to resist efforts by powerful groups to oppress them. By drawing on data from studies conducted in Peru and the United States, we trace the trajectories of Amerindian and translingual literacies from the early modern/colonial period to the postmodern/postcolonial present. We trace the domination of alphabetic-text literacy driven by the ideology of its superiority and the coexistence of Amerindian and translingual literacies driven by the ideology of border gnoseology. We merge metaculture with colonial semiosis and literacy as translingual practice to account for continuities and discontinuities among semiotic systems in Amerindian literacies. Metaculture, colonial semiosis, and the existing data enable us to recognise previously overlooked texts and the social and literacy practices that produced them as products of border gnoseology and translingualism, and to apprehend Indigenous and mestizo material in autoethnographic texts studied primarily from the perspective of the subaltern appropriation of dominant paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]