Dr. David Barillas Chon
Assistant Professor - Critical Policy, Equity and Leadership Studies
Dr. David Barillas Chon
Assistant Professor - Critical Policy, Equity and Leadership Studies
David Barillas Chón is a Poqomam Maya migrant and Assistant Professor of Education and Indigenous Education in the Faculty of Education. His work centers the racialized and linguistic experiences of Maya and Indigenous youth from Guatemala and southern Mexico across Turtle Island. His current focus is on the impact that Maya from Guatemala and Indigenous youth from Southern Mexico migrating to the United States and the rest of North America have on schooling, education, and conceptions of Indigeneity. He received a doctorate in education from the University of Washington.
Recent Publications
Barillas Chón, D.W. and Mejía, A.F. (2022), Learning Colonial Languages: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”. Language Learning. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12537
The authors comment on how recently arrived Maya youth from Guatemala navigating Spanish and English colonial codes of power (Barillas Chón, 2022) speak to the importance of new frameworks that we are asked to imagine for understanding colonial relations of power present in the learning of colonial languages
