Advocacy For Mexican Sign Language: History, Continuity, and Monaghan’s Contributions

In honoring Leila Monaghan’s contributions to anthropology, I invite readers to recall two of the many things she did well throughout her career and through a variety of research areas. First, Monaghan’s work inspired a sustained focus on advocating for the fundamental rights and dignities of participants, including the right to sign languages. Our 2022 Society for Linguistic Anthropology panel, in honor of Monaghan’s scholarship, remembered her influence as we argued for the need for “access to and access through sign languages.” Second, Monaghan called for an understanding of identities as evolving, pluralistic, and even “experimental,” a word she used to describe the interplay of deaf and Christian identities (Monaghan 1991).