OAKLAND – Carlos Jimenez sits at a table in San Francisco’s Mission District, recalling the painful transition he felt when he first arrived in San Francisco. 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 part of that group, they make fun of you. That’s what happened to us.”
According to Jimenez, the problem was in communication.
They didn’t speak English or Spanish. They spoke an indigenous Mayan language called Mam. Jimenez says his sister was the first from their community of Todos Santos in Guatemala to migrate to the Bay Area.
Today, the Bay Area’s Maya community has grown to tens of thousands of people from Guatemala and Mexico who speak Mam, K’iche, Yucatel and other Mayan languages.
“Mom, it’s my first language. Spanish is my second language,” said Crecencio Ramirez, who immigrated to the Bay Area as a child and co-founded Radio B’alam, which broadcasts programming and news in Mom.
“We felt so isolated, so I decided to start Radio B’alam,” Ramirez said.
In Radio B’alam’s small studio in Oakland, Language is a lifeline and words matter, especially when most people in the world can’t understand you.
For some, hearing the radio broadcasts in Mam feels like a miracle, like coming home.
Mam is a Mayan language that is over 3,000 years old and still spoken by young people.
“I was born in Guatemala. I came here when I was four,” said Catarina Mendoza Ramirez, as she sat outside the Radio B’alam station in Oakland. “It was very difficult in the beginning because there wasn’t much of my community here when I came in 1999.”
Mendoza Ramirez says that in the predominantly Spanish-speaking Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland, there are Guatemalan shops and food trucks run by people who speak Mam.
The Oakland Unified School District says they have about 1,800 students who speak Mam language and have added a Mam translator to their team.
The group Voces Maya and other activists try to help many Mam immigrants who do not 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.”
In September, City College San Francisco hosted a Mayan cultural festival on its Mission campus.
The Mayans came to the festival wearing traditional hats and clothing and shared their food, culture and beautiful woven textiles.
This celebration of heritage is also a celebration of survival, from the perilous times of the Spanish conquistadors to surviving the violent civil war in Guatemala in the 1980s, when soldiers attacked the indigenous population.
“In Guatemala there is a lot of violence,” said Damaso Calmo, “I came here without my mother, without my father. I only spoke Mam, a little Spanish.”
Calmo says he was a teenager when he arrived. He remembers a class in school where a teacher suggested that the Mayans no longer existed.
“I went to school here and they said, we don’t know what’s going to happen to the Mayans in 1,800 years. Something like that and I just laughed, you know,” Calmo said.
Across the country, there is a new focus on Maya Mam speakers as many Guatemalan immigrants struggle, caught up in political struggles at the border and facing discrimination.
“The discrimination that comes with speaking an indigenous language, especially in our own countries, where many of us are not respected or treated as equals compared to people who speak Spanish, the national language,” said Oswaldo Martin, a Mam Maya interpreter from Oakland.
Martin has been in the national news. He grew up in Oakland and became trilingual. He decided to work as an interpreter in immigration courts to help members of the community. He also says that many Mayan immigrants at the border were given Spanish interpreters for immigration matters, even though they spoke little or no Spanish.
Even for interpreters, the challenges can be daunting. Mam has some fifteen dialects, and the remote and mountainous locations of some communities mean that there is no standard Mam language.
Another challenge is that Mam is only one of 22 recognized Mayan languages in Guatemala.
“I speak K’iche. I’m from Guatemala and I’m an interpreter,” said Francisco Icala of San Francisco, as he helped man a stand selling handmade canvas bags featuring original art designed by members of the local community.
Icala told the Mayan festival in San Francisco that the Mayan language K’iche is spoken by about 20,000 people in the Bay Area.
There is also the Yucatec language spoken in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Pedro Parra, a Mayan-Yucatec speaker from Portland, had a table at the festival selling T-shirts with Mayan inscriptions and displaying musical instruments.
“When I was a kid, I thought we were all Hispanic, so we all understand each other, and that’s fine,” said Felix Munoz-Meza, a student at City College. “But as I got older and moved to different parts of the Bay Area, I learned that no, it’s not a monolith,”
“I’m just part of the community. Latina and also Maya Mom. And I’m very proud of that,” said Catarina Mendoza Ramirez.
Calmo and others dream of having a better life and passing on the heritage of the language, the Mam language, to their children.
“My dream is to have a beautiful family so we can live in peace,” Calmo said. “Hopefully he won’t have to go through what I did.”
“Someone paid the price to be here, so they should be proud and remember who opened that door for them,” said Carlos Jimenez, Sr. “We are so proud of who we are, where we come from, and we didn’t want that to go to waste.
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 rRead her other stories on her bio page.