Indigenous Maya people in Bay Area fight to preserve their Mam language

OAKLAND - Sitting at a table in San Francisco's Mission District, Carlos Jimenez remembers the painful transition he felt when he first arrived in San Francisco.

"Lost. And lonely. And a lot of discrimination," Jimenez said. "When you move to another place, and they find out you're not belonging to that group, they make fun of you. That's what happened to us."

Jimenez says the difficulty was communication.

They did not speak English or Spanish. They spoke an indigenous Maya language called Mam. Jimenez says his sister was the first from their community of Todos Santos in Guatemala to migrate to the Bay Area.

Now, the Maya community in the Bay Area has grown to tens of thousands of people from Guatemala and Mexico who speak Mam, K'iche, Yucatel, and other Maya languages.

"Mam, it's my first language. Spanish is my second language," said Crecencio Ramirez, who immigrated to the Bay Area as a child and has become a co-founder of Radio B'alam, which broadcasts programs and news in Mam.

"We were feeling so isolated, so I decided to create Radio B'alam," Ramirez said.

In Radio B'alam's small studio in Oakland, language is a lifeline and words matter, especially when most of the world can't understand.

For some, hearing the radio broadcasts in Mam can feel like a miracle, like being home.

Mam is a Maya language more than 3,000 years old, still living on the tongues of young people now.

"I was born in Guatemala. I came here when I was four," Catarina Mendoza Ramirez said, as she sat outside the Radio B'alam station in Oakland. "It was very difficult in the beginning because there was not too much of my community here. When I came in 1999."

Now, Mendoza Ramirez says Oakland's largely Hispanic Fruitvale neighborhood has Guatemalan shops and food trucks owned by Mam-speaking people.

The Oakland Unified School District says they have about 1,800 Mam-speaking students and have added a Mam translator to their staff.

The group Voces Maya and other advocates are trying to help many Mam immigrants who can't speak English or Spanish, by connecting them with services and interpreters.  

Vicente Calmo Bautista of Oakland said through an interpreter, "We need access to resources to learn English."

San Francisco's City College held a Maya cultural festival at the Mission campus in September.

Maya people came wearing traditional hats and clothes, sharing their food, culture, and beautiful woven textiles.

This celebration of heritage is also a celebration of survival, through the perilous times of the Spanish Conquerers, to surviving Guatemala's violent civil war in the 1980's when soldiers targeted indigenous people.

"In Guatemala, there's a lot of violence," said Damaso Calmo, "I came here without my mom, without my father. I spoke just Mam, a little bit of Spanish."

Calmo says he was a teenager when he arrived. He remembers one class in school when a teacher suggested Maya people no longer existed.

"I went to school here and they were saying, we don't know what happens to the Mayans about 1800 years. Something like that and I just laughed, you know," Calmo said.

Nationwide, there has been a new focus on Maya Mam-speakers, as many Guatemalan immigrants have been suffering, caught in the political battle over the border and also finding themselves facing discrimination.

"The discrimination that comes with speaking an indigenous language, especially in our own countries, where, you know, a lot of us are not respected or not treated as equals to those who spoke Spanish, which is the national language," said Oswaldo Martin, a Mam Maya language interpreter from Oakland.

Martin has been featured in national news. He grew up in Oakland and became trilingual. He decided to work as an interpreter in immigration courts to help community members. He also says many Maya immigrants at the border were given Spanish interpreters for immigration cases, though they spoke little or no Spanish.

Even for interpreters, however, the challenges can sometimes be daunting. Mam has some fifteen dialects, and the remote and mountainous locations of some communities have meant there is no standard Mam language.

Another challenge is that Mam is just one of 22 Maya languages recognized in Guatemala.

"I speak K'iche. I'm from Guatemala, and I am an interpreter," Francisco Icala of San Francisco said, as he helped staff a booth that was selling handmade canvas bags with original art designed by local community members.

At the San Francisco Maya Festival, Icala said the Maya language K'iche is spoken by about 20,000 people in the Bay Area.

There is also the Yucatec language of the Yucatan Peninsula region.

Pedro Parra, a Portland Maya Yucatec speaker, had a table at the festival, selling t-shirts with Mayan writing and showcasing musical instruments. 

"When I was a kid, I thought we were all Hispanic so we all understand each other, it's fine," Felix Munoz-Meza, a City College student said. "But as I grew older and started to move out to different parts of Bay Area, I learned that no, it's not a monolith," 

"I'm just part of the community. Latina and also Maya Mam. And be very proud of that," Catarina Mendoza Ramirez said.

Calmo and others dream of having a better life, and passing on the legacy of language, the Mam language, to their children.

"It's my dream, to have a beautiful family so we can live in peace," Calmo said. "Hopefully him, he doesn't have to go through the same thing as I'm going through."

"Somebody paid the price for them to be here, so they should be proud and remember who opened that door for them," Carlos Jimenez, Sr. said. "We are so proud of who we are, where we come from, and we didn't want that one to get lost.

Jana Katsuyama is a reporter for KTVU. Email Jana at jana.katsuyama@fox.com. Call her at 510-326-5529. Or follow her on Twitter @JanaKTVU and read her other reports on her bio page.