WHP has recently been honored with a grant from the Center for Latin@ and Latin American Studies for the support of a pilot project, “Culture, Exchange, Education, and Diversity” (CEED) / “Cultura, Intercambio, Educación, y Diversidad” (CIED). CEED/CIED represents an interdisciplinary and international collaboration between the Alfredo Harp Helú Foundation (FAHH) in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the Wired Humanities Projects (WHP) at the University of Oregon. Stephanie Wood of WHP and Richard Hanson of El Proyecto Trilingüe (underwritten by FAHH) are teaming up to connect native speakers of indigenous languages in Oaxaca with their counterparts in Woodburn, Oregon, including either immigrants from Oaxaca or their descendants. We aim to stimulate conversations among targeted youth around selected themes and employing social media, in part to foster language use and build indigenous-language literacy (with an inclusive, open orthography) and in part to accumulate a corpus of research materials. With the permission of participants, conversations will be made available to researchers wishing to study migration issues by utilizing first-hand accounts and to researchers wanting to document endangered languages, building open-source, open-access dictionaries that will bolster language preservation and fuel revitalization. We also hope to recruit school teachers who might wish to join us in the project or draw from the corpus for developing relevant curricula for language instruction. Central to this project are collaborators Alina Padilla-Miller, a graduate student in the School of Journalism and Communications, who will assist with the social media dimension; Diana Salazar, a UO undergraduate with a double major in Ethnic Studies and Planning and Public Policy major who is an Oregonian with Oaxacan heritage, and who will help recruit participants in Woodburn; and, Daniel Ramírez, whose parents are also Mixtec speakers and who is developing a related senior project at Woodburn High School.
