It’s all Quechua to me

In a small classroom on the 10th floor of Bunche Hall, Jaime
Luis Daza speaks to his three graduate students in a language that
is rarely heard in North American universities. In a deep and
sonorous voice, Daza forms phrases from long strings of suffixes
and his students answer him in kind.

The words build outward from basic roots and, as Daza put it,
become “kilometric.”

The root mikhu: to eat, for example, becomes mikhuni: I eat;
mikhusani: I am eating; mikhusarqani: I was eating; and
mikhusarqaniña: I was already eating.

Daza and his students are speaking Quechua, an indigenous
language of the Americas that originated with the Inca empire.

UCLA is one of only a handful of universities in the United
States ““ and the world ““ that offers a Quechua language
program.

Thirteen universities in the United States, including Cornell,
UC Santa Cruz, the University of Wisconsin and the University of
Michigan have Quechua programs, according to a Web site called
CyberQuechua, which lists only 30 university programs
worldwide.

Quechua spread through much of South America as a result of the
Inca conquest in the 14th century. Although Spanish became the
lingua franca when conquistadores colonized much of the Americas in
the 16th century, 9 million to 12 million people in Peru, Equador,
Bolivia, Argentina, Chile and Colombia still speak Quechua.

It is now the second official language of Bolivia and Peru,
though education and business are conducted in Spanish.

But even in Peru it is difficult to find Quechua language
courses, said Robin Cavagnoud, a doctoral student in sociology who
is taking Daza’s class this quarter.

Cavagnoud said most language courses in Peru focus on
international languages ““ such as French, German and,
increasingly, English ““ but Quechua programs are scarce.

UCLA offers two full years of Quechua. Each three-quarter series
begins in the fall.

Daza, a language instructor at the UCLA Latin American Studies
Center who teaches all the Quechua classes, learned the language as
a child in Bolivia. His mother worked when he was young, and the
woman who took care of him spoke Quechua, so he grew up bilingual
in Quechua and Spanish.

Daza developed UCLA’s Quechua language program along with
Roger Anderson, a UCLA professor of applied linguistics. The
program includes a video with interviews with people from Ucuchi,
the rural Bolivian village where Daza did his field work, and
transcripts of scenes from their daily life. The students watch and
interpret the dialogue in the videos, and then use the new
vocabulary on their own.

Daza’s students say the class is both unique and
challenging.

“It’s more authentic ““ it’s not as
manipulated as the commercial sorts of language program that are
usually available,” said Jennifer Guzmán, a first-year
doctorate student in applied linguistics. “Jaime and Roger
put together this program so it is meaningful to them, and they
make it meaningful to us.”

Guzmán said Quechua, which is not part of the Indo-European
language group, is structured in a much different way from the
romance languages she has studied, but it has “restored (my)
belief in the creativity of the human mind.”

The Quechua program is one of the things that attracted
Guzmán to UCLA, and although she calls the class rewarding,
she said it is not easy.

“We don’t have cartoons in the book,”
Guzmán said with a laugh, adding that the class has a heavy
workload, and there are few opportunities to practice Quechua
outside South America.

Cavagnoud, who also speaks French, Spanish, English and
Portuguese, characterized the language as “intellectual
gymnastics.”

But both Daza and his students are confident about the
language’s significance.

“Quechua is important because language is culture,”
Daza said.

And for Cavagnoud, who has spent more than a year in Peru with
UNICEF and is working on his doctoral thesis about working
teenagers and education in Peru, learning Quechua is a way to
communicate on a more intimate level with Peruvians.

“I love Peru, and the best way to know a country very well
is to talk with the natives, to speak the same language as they
do,” he said.

Daza began teaching Quechua shortly after he came to the United
States more than two decades ago.

It is not unusual to be bilingual in Bolivia, where Daza went to
high school and one year of law school before coming to the United
States, but Quechua speakers are rare in the United States., and he
has worked with the language since he was an undergraduate.

While Daza was studying political science and anthropology at
the University of Indiana he worked on the first computerized
English-Quechua dictionary. He left for graduate school before the
project was finished and, after a stint in the UC Berkeley
department of linguistics, came to UCLA. He got a master’s
degree in Latin American Studies and later a doctorate in cultural
and social anthropology.

When Daza arrived at UCLA, he revived the university’s
dormant Quechua program with Anderson’s help, and he has been
teaching the language ever since ““ for more than 20
years.

Some of Daza’s former students, like Tim Wright, a
doctoral student in anthropology, have leveraged their knowledge of
Quechua into careers.

Wright said he became interested in Quechua when he was a peace
corps volunteer in Ecuador during the late 1980s. When he returned
to the United States he enrolled in the Latin American studies
program at UCLA, and he studied Quechua with Daza from
1989-1991.

He went on to get a master’s degree in public health, and,
partially thanks to his knowledge of Quechua, received a Fulbright
grant and a grant from the InterAmerica Foundation to study health
programs in a rural Quechua-speaking part of Bolivia.

Wright said speaking Quechua gave him access to aspects of
Bolivian daily life.

“If you want to be really accepted, for them to understand
that you really care about their lives, to speak their language
makes an incredible difference,” the Los Angeles native
said.

Wright described one instance when he wanted to help with
agricultural work, but it was more difficult and complicated than
he expected. The locals explained the skills to him in Quechua, and
he was able to participate in and discuss the daily routines that
structured their lives.

Blond-haired and light-skinned Cavagnoud said that because few
foreigners speak the language, when people who appear European
speak Quechua it shows they have a real interest in the culture and
it creates an environment of confidence.

“I want to work in the (non-governmental organization)
field in this part of the world and to make a change,”
Cavagnoud said. “If you want to make a change it is in the
roots of this country and the roots of this country are in the
Quechua language.”

Including the desire to communicate with Quechua speakers, UCLA
graduate students have a financial incentive to take the
language.

The U.S. Department of Education recognizes the UCLA Latin
American Studies department as a national resource on Latin America
and gives the center funding for foreign language and area
fellowships. These fellowships are awarded for the study of less
commonly taught languages ““ Quechua and Portuguese ““
and occasionally for advanced Spanish.

Guzmán and Janet Stephens, a doctoral student in art
history, received the foreign language fellowships for this year.
Stephens said her department waives her tuition and fees as part of
the fellowship, and she received a stipend of about $14,000.
Stephens said the fellowship is truly a great help because
“you have to find funding somewhere.”

The art history department does not have enough teaching
assistant positions for all its graduate students, and when
Stephens did not get one last year she had to pay her out-of-state
tuition out-of-pocket.

“It enables us to be here,” Guzmán said of the
fellowship, adding that it is harder to get humanities research
funding because it is not as economically viable as scientific
research.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *