Bla, Bla, Bla: Understanding Inaccessibility through Mexican Sign Language Expressions

A sparsely furnished conference room on the ground floor of a semi-private deaf school served as one of my unofficial office spaces during my 2012-13 fieldwork in Mexico City, Mexico. The room was adjacent to the cement courtyard where students at Instituto Pedagógico para Problemas del Lenguaje (IPPLIAP), my primary research site, ate lunch and enjoyed recess. The conference room was not temperature-controlled and was seldom quiet or fully private. The glass-paneled doors freely admitted the boisterous sounds of schoolchildren unabashed by innocent and auditory movement between the countless emotions of primary school social life. The stark porcelain of the shady corners seemed to preserve the crisp morning air, even as dry afternoon sun and haze replaced the city’s chilly, high-altitude dawn. This room quickly became warm and intimate when I was accompanied by participants from the IPPLIAP community, including students, parents, teachers, administrators and acquaintances. I conducted interviews around the large, round wooden table to allow visual access for signing and outside sounds and sensations soon faded.

My investigation aims to understand the experience of deafness from the perspectives of deaf people and their (mostly hearing) families in Mexico City, Mexico. Communication was a particularly salient issue facing the majority of families I worked with. Among the participants in this study, language use and modality varied, suggesting a perceived spectrum between pure signing (in Lengua de Señas Mexicana, Mexican Sign Language or LSM) and oralización (oralization, or the regular use of speech reading and oral Spanish). IPPLIAP created an educational and social climate they referred to as bi-cultural and bilingual (LSM and Spanish). IPPLIAP is a cherished anchor of the Mexico City deaf community and national leader in deaf education. I recruited participants through convenience and snowball sampling radiating from IPPLIAP and my personal networks from over 13 years of collaboration with signers, deaf educators and families in Mexico City.

Deaf participants navigated between predominantly-hearing and more-inclusive signing experiences, each with particular characteristics and language ideologies that impacted their language socialization. The everyday language use and practice among participants reflects and describes their lived experiences within this ideological landscape. This chapter highlights particular LSM expressions –and related descriptive concepts– to illustrate the collective understandings they reveal among Mexican deaf people.