Ancient Mayan languages are creating problems for today’s immigration courts

*Aside from the backlog of 500,000 cases in immigration courts, there’s this. VL


los_angeles_times_logoBy Cindy Carcamo, Los Angeles Times

The day Vinicio Nicolas found out whether he would be allowed to stay in the United States, and hopefully far from the gang trying to recruit him in Guatemala, he brought along an interpreter.

With the stakes so high, he wanted someone who spoke his native tongue. He had arrived in the U.S. just eight months before, and his English wasn’t good. But neither was his Spanish.

The language the 15-year-old needed an interpreter to wrestle with — for the sake of his future — was an ancient Mayan one called Q’anjob’al, or Kanjobal.

Successive waves in recent years of more than 100,000 immigrants from Central America — many of them boys and girls who came without their parents — have created a shortage of people who can translate Mayan languages  . . . READ MORE



[Photo by mtphrames/Flickr]

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