City’s first Mayan officer marks milestone for a people, and a language

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NEW BEDFORD — A group of police recruits gathered in the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores on Acushnet Avenue in a video posted to Facebook on June 18. Dressed in black patrol uniforms, topped off with police hats, they listened intently as acting Chief Derek Belong spoke on why the place should be a frequent visit on the beat.

“We need to build trust,” he told the recruits. “If you work in the North End, knock on the door. Pop in and say hi.”

The camera panned over the scene and, at around 14 seconds, stopped to zoom in on one recruit. He stands tall, hands folded before him, listening intently. 

His name is Edwin Yat Toj, and on June 20 Belong swore him in as the first member of the city’s Mayan community to join the police force.

“A knot formed in my throat,” said Adrian Ventura, executive director of the CCT, in Spanish as he recalled the moment. “He chose this path and for me, it was the fulfillment of a goal of mine.”

Toj, 25, is also the first police officer to speak K’iche’, his first language. His joining the force is a move advocates, officials, and Toj himself all hope will increase ties with the city’s Mayan community. 

“I feel the weight of the moment, but I try not to let it get to me,” Toj said. “If I can help bridge the gap between the Guatemalan community and the police, I would love to do it.”

The move was overdue, in Belong’s estimation.

“I think his representation on the force shows that we are building trust,” he said. “Now we have some representation from the K’iche’ community.”

‘A better life’

Toj said he came to the U.S. when he was 5 years old as an undocumented immigrant in 2005 with his mother, a monolingual K’iche’ speaker. He said she did it for her children.

“I guess she wanted a better life for me,” he said. 

He said his mother normalized his status and her own when he was still a child. He is now a legal permanent resident.

Growing up in New Bedford, he didn’t always have police work on his radar. He said he saw a lot of mistrust of police, stemming from community experiences here and in Guatemala, where authorities often caused harm to Indigenous populations. 

“I was told [growing up] that if you had to interact with the police, it was a bad thing,” he said. “I’ve always really admired the police. But when I was younger, I was afraid to speak with them.”  

His first positive interaction with police was with his school resource officer when he was a student at Roosevelt Middle School.

“When I first started getting the idea [of joining the police] and I told people,” he said, “they said that’s not really a safe job to do and that I’d be going against my community in a way.”

K’iche’ was Toj’s first language. He learned English through his peers and teachers in New Bedford’s public schools and improved it until his graduation from New Bedford Vocational Technical High School.

He said he learned Spanish, the most widely spoken language in his native Guatemala, while working at a fish house as a teenager.

“I learned by speaking Spanish with a couple of friends from the fish house,” he said. “I’ve only been fluent for two or three years.”

Toj entered the police academy on Jan. 6, graduated June 13, and was sworn in on June 20.

Decades and centuries in the making

Toj’s presence on New Bedford’s police force marks a moment of arrival for a people who’ve been increasingly visible in the city for decades. It also signals centuries of resistance to erasure, both here and in the language’s Central American homeland.

Indigenous people make up an estimated 43% to 60% of Guatemala’s population. Of them, the majority consider themselves Maya. This runs contrary to what anthropologists view as the popular narrative of the colonial conquest.

“It has been convenient for Spanish colonizers and subsequent colonial governments to claim the Maya disappeared,” said Erich Fox Tree, an anthropologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.

Throughout the colonial era, Indigenous people, and their languages, were not so much suppressed as they were isolated, according to Lisa Maya Knauer, an anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. 

“The policy was a little bit different than [in the U.S.],” she said. “There was usurpation of land. There was forced labor. But there wasn’t the equivalent of the [Indian] boarding schools. There wasn’t this idea of ‘teach them the way of the Spanish man.’”

Isolation often left Indigenous Guatemalans in poverty, but it also allowed them to keep many of their cultural and social practices.

“There was this policy of people being permitted to a degree to live lives that were somewhat autonomous and independent,” she continued. “Leaving them in isolation in these cultural backwaters is part of what allows these languages to thrive.”

K’iche is the most widely spoken of the Mayan languages — with more than 2 million speakers — and is one of 22 Indigenous languages spoken in Guatemala. 

At one point in the 19th century, non-Indigenous Guatemalan nationalists even set out on a campaign to standardize K’iche’ and make it the nation’s national language, renaming it “Guatemalan.”

“It was a notion of picking the language that was the most-spoken language,” Fox Tree said. “If you could speak it well, you could speak it with a lot of people. The more crucial thing is that Guatemala was trying to set itself up apart from the rest of Central America.” 

Even so, Indigenous communities continued to be marginalized economically, politically, and socially. In 1954, a U.S.-backed coup ousted the left-leaning president Jacobo Árbenz and replaced him with a right-leaning military man, Carlos Castillo Armas. The move eventually led to a civil war that would last from 1960 until 1996.

In the 1980s, the military regime launched a genocide against Mayan communities in rural areas, prompting a flood of migration north from Guatemala to the U.S. and Mexico in search of safety and economic security. It also interrupted the education of millions — particularly women. That’s one reason Guatemalan women in New Bedford are more likely than men to speak only K’iche’.

“They were just more isolated than men who may have had to learn Spanish for work,” Knauer said. “You even see it in clothing. Men took on western styles years ago and women still wear more traditional cortes and güipils.” 

New Bedford-bound

The Mayan community first arrived in New Bedford in the 1980s as Reagan-era politics led to the breaking of unions along the waterfront. This opened up hiring and created opportunities for many undocumented in the city’s 45-plus fish houses. 

Since then, the community’s presence in the area has grown. According to the most recent Census estimate, there were 1,500 Guatemalans in the city, though many activists say 6,000 or more is closer to reality.

New Bedford school officials say 258 active students in the school system spoke K’iche at home as of October 2024. That’s about a 62% increase from 2022, when the system entered into a consent agreement with the Department of Justice to improve services for K’iche’ families. It is the fifth most common home language in the district, after English, Spanish, Kriolu (of Cabo Verde), and Portuguese. 

Despite moves in recent years to improve access in K’iche’ in New Bedford, workers say hundreds in the city still struggle. 

“K’iche’ is its own language, but within this language, there are four different branches,” said Manuela Cuin Tzoc, a community health worker at the Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts, speaking in Spanish. “When I have to speak with someone from a different town, it takes a lot of effort sometimes.”

Tzoc, who speaks K’iche’, Spanish, and English, added that K’iche’ was never taught in schools in Guatemala and, as a result, most speakers of the language can’t read it, herself included.

“Sometimes, a family will come to me with a document in K’iche’ from the  schools,” she said. “I understand nothing and it’s my first language.”

Fox Tree said that in the early 1950s, the leftist government led a project to transcribe K’iche’ in the Latin alphabet as part of an effort to increase the reach of Spanish. But the destruction of the war impeded the effort’s success. 

“People who had been trained to read and write their own languages in order to become Spanish speakers said, ’Why don’t we read and write our own languages?’” he said.

Trust

Federal authorities appear to have targeted New Bedford, and other Massachusetts communities, as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which has led to more than 100,000 immigrant arrests. According to the latest data collected by The Light, 41 New Bedford residents have been taken into custody by ICE. The vast majority are Guatemalans of Indigenous descent.

This has strained relations between New Bedford police and the Guatemalan community, despite repeated statements by local officials that they do not cooperate with ICE.

“We meet with a lot of the folks who live in that community regularly,” said Belong, who served as acting chief between Paul Oliveira’s May 3 retirement and new chief Jason Thody’s arrival on July 14. “They seem to think that if they call the police, federal agencies will automatically follow.”

A 2017 decision by the state Supreme Judicial Court prohibits cooperation between state and local law enforcement and ICE for immigration enforcement. Nonetheless, the fear is still there amid the uptick in ICE operations. 

“They’re around and they’re prevalent in the community,” Belong said of ICE agents. “It’s going to raise alarm bells.”

Toj is still assigned to a field training officer, but police expect him to go out on patrol.

“He has a couple more weeks to go and then he’s on his own!” said Holly Huntoon, media relations specialist for New Bedford Police.

Toj said it is a moment he looks forward to.

“I want to bridge that gap,” he said. “To show that, as a police officer, I am here to help. To challenge that narrative and show that, really, we are not ICE agents.”

It is a hope that community members share. 

“The system needs this,” Ventura said. “It helps us to see this inclusion and see that leaders notice the necessity and see us as part of the community.”

Tzoc, the CEDC health worker, called Toj’s hiring a great step forward. “It creates a little bit more trust with the police, because people see someone of their color and culture and say ‘wow!’” she said.

“But we’re still not represented sufficiently,” she continued. She said that one police officer is not enough and that many local health providers still do not provide the necessary level of services to their K’iche’-speaking patients.

Despite the weight of the moment, Toj said he intends to focus on doing his job to the best of his ability. 

“I’m still a police officer, and I try not to let it get to me,” he said. “If I can just project a good image to the younger and juniors in our community that it’s not a bad job,” maybe more will join the force, he said. “It is possible. We just have to be willing to do it.”

Email Kevin G. Andrade at kandrade@newbedfordlight.org