Mexican national translates across Alaska cultures, including on our ballots

Translators pull Alaska together like string. A Mexican who can't vote here and only halfway lives here is one of the strongest strands.

Indra Arriaga expects to be buried in the town in eastern Mexico where she came from. Her belongings sit in storage in L.A. Yet she led an extraordinary project to translate election material into Alaska Native languages.

She is also part of a group producing a new Spanish and English newspaper in Anchorage. She is an artist creating big, dramatic works, including a public sculpture in Mountain View about the immigrant experience. She has been an investment banker and a community planner.

She is very small. She is dark-skinned. She is bisexual.

With many identities — many overlapping ways she can be discriminated against — Arriaga has developed a remarkable gift to understand our myriad Alaska voices.

Alaska Natives and the state of Alaska had fought in court for years over ballots that some indigenous language speakers could not understand. When the Native side won, Elections Director Josie Bahnke hired Arriaga to work with panels of elders and language experts assigned by the court settlement to translate complex election questions.

It was touchy at first. Some experts said they would come but reserved the right to leave if they didn't like the first meeting.

"That soon disappeared the first time they got together," Bahnke said. "She's a great listener. She's a consensus builder. Not just her ability to lead. She took care of all of them like they were her family. Our main goal was to build that bridge of trust and faith between the Yupik, of many different dialects, and the Gwich'in — to build that trust between the state and the Alaska Native community, and I think she's just been instrumental about making that happen."

[The painstaking work of translating Alaska's ballot into Native languages]

Arriaga's childhood spanned the states of Veracruz and Texas. Her parents were poorly educated but great cooking ran in the family and kept them going through generations. In their neighborhood restaurant in San Antonio, Arriaga took breakfast orders from day laborers and construction workers speaking Spanish.

In Mexico, she was part of a huge, connected community. But on the American side of her life, she was much alone. Her parents didn't grasp the customs she brought home from school, like sleep-overs or Girl Scouts. When she went out on her own she went far, because she didn't think they understood her American life and didn't always want to tell them about it.

Arriaga worked as an investment analyst in San Francisco and pursued her art. Her first wife, from Anchorage, brought her here to care for an ailing family member. She liked the city and her state job researching and planning for Alaska rural communities.

"There was a lot of room to just branch out into whatever," she said. "The job was really interesting. There was an opportunity to make art. The community is really tight, and really nice, and I've made some really good friends. And being part of this emerging Latin culture has been really fun too."

A monumental work of art she completed in 2008 with Christina Barber, near the McDonald's restaurant in Mountain View, expresses some of the internal conflict in Anchorage's unsettled mix of cultures.

A trio of faceless concrete figures is red, gashed and wrapped loosely with thick rope. The red could be clay or could be blood; the rope could represent bondage or family ties; the cuts could be scars or the marks of experience. The work is titled "We've come so far."

Arriaga said, "No matter where you're from, whether you're from the Bush, or whether you're from one neighborhood or another, or whether you are from Samoa, or the Philippines, or Russia, or Norway, or Mexico, or other parts of Latin America, you're coming from so far, and sometimes the distance is not just physical, it's emotional, it's political, it's social."

Last year Arriaga decided to leave Alaska and move to L.A. but the job translating for the election drew her back. Bahnke said Arriaga's passion, community involvement, sophisticated skills and articulateness made her the obvious choice.

The task required long days and weekends to meet election deadlines. It could take half a day to translate a single technical legal or financial term. But Arriaga felt it had to be done right. In the past, a new school may have been turned down by rural voters because elders did not understand the ballot.

I hope the work continues until voting materials are translated into all our languages. Although the law doesn't require multilingual ballots in Anchorage, Bahnke agreed the state should be reaching into immigrant communities to make sure those voters can understand too.

Even as she worked so hard, Arriaga showed paintings at the Alaska Humanities Forum and helped start the Sol De Medianoche newspaper, now on its fourth issue. Her article on the Day of the Dead celebration — which she also helped start a decade ago — is illustrated with one of her paintings.

Through the busy year, she never had time to bring her belongings back from L.A. In a way, she seems halfway between places, even as she acts as a bridge between people.

But as we ate lunch Tuesday at an international restaurant downtown, Arriaga would not accept my attempt to define her as a translator. She said that when she writes in two languages, what comes out is two different articles. The connectedness she builds isn't about erasing differences.

The Day of the Dead, Nov. 2, is an example, as it reminds Alaskans of Mexican heritage to remember their ancestors and their traditions.

As Arriaga wrote in her article, "It is important for our individual memories to join our collective memory, this year and throughout time; and just as important that the Latino community unites in opening the ceremony's doors to everyone. Every year celebrating the Day of the Dead becomes more important, because our generations are growing and as they grow our identity is shaped by our lives in Alaska."

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