Isaura de Los Santos Mendoza

Isaura de Los Santos Mendoza is a first-year Ph.D. student at UMass Amherst focusing on literacy and language revitalization. She is a native speaker of Chatino, an indigenous language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has been documenting and promoting the Chatino languages since 2011. She has taught Chatino reading and writing to children, and has developed pedagogical materials for acquiring literacy in the Chatino language, including children’s books. In her research she compares the two writing systems for this tonal language, evaluating the importance of tonal marking in the literacy process.