Linguistic interaction includes more than just words; the gestures, gaze, and bodily orientations that accompany speech all help us to understand one another. And just like speech, these ‘multimodal’ aspects of communication differ across cultures. Danziger joins a series of international conversations among specialists in the Indigenous languages of Mesoamerica, to investigate what spontaneous speech-accompanying gestures can tell us about cultural commonalities and differences in unconscious mental models of spatial cognition. The project is housed at Mexico’s Center for Multidisciplinary Investigations on Chiapas and the Southern Border (CIMSUR), and funded by both UC-Mexus (University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States) and CONACYT (Mexican National Counsel for Science and Technology).