Empire and Place: Indigenous Longing and the Ethnographic Archive Along the U.S./Mexico Borderlands

• In Event: 54.031 - Ethnographic Evidence and Erasure: What Is Knowable and What Counts as Knowledge

Abstract

I engage this year’s theme, “Knowledge to Action: Achieving the Promise of Equal Educational Opportunity” specifically troubling the question “whether the problems associated with unequal opportunity and the methods used to study them are conceptualized to capture the diversity and complexity of circumstances facing countless children, families, and communities.” In this paper the ethnographic archive is interrogated using land based Indigenous knowledges that center specific tribal stories and Border knowledges derived from the clashing of multiple colonial projects to interrogate what is missing from the ethnographic archive of Indigeneity in the borderlands, particularly the relationship between Mexicans and Pueblos. I argue that these deeply historical assessments must be accounted for if we are to consider land-based inquiry into questions of educational opportunity. This allows us to trace and trouble some of the contemporary longings that frame educational issues, particularly those I explore in the Soutwest region of the United States.

Through a reading of tribal and legal educational archives as story, this paper questions whether “Ethnographic fieldwork is inextricably linked to a particular time, place, and society, making the primary data of ethnographers unique and unrecoverable” (Asher and Jahnke 2013), positioning ethnography as an endeavor that always has the potential of discovery. Making explicit the way colonialist projects influence identity and leave extensive records (both tribal and legal) in the Southwest (Dunbar-Ortiz 2007;Gomez 2008; Menchaca 2010), I argue that ethnographies and research that wish to recuperate Indigenous identities of Mexican settlers in the southwest to achieve educational equity are always known; that is, this desire is shaped by what Stoler (2013) refers to as the “uneven, temporal sedimentations in which imperial formations leave their mark” (p. 2). Indeed, efforts to recuperate Indigeneity are often overlaid with colonialist nostalgia or sentimentality (Behdad 2005; Kazanjian 2003), shaped by the driving settler colonial dialectics of indigenous absence and presence (Vizenor 1999). I make explicit these tracings and sedimentations by reading together tribal and legal stories alongside the archive of Spanish and Mexican colonialism to disrupt these longings (Guidotti-Hernandez 2011) that are at the core of the desire to discover/recuperate indigenous lives caught in the dialectic of absence/presence. If we cannot escape these longing in contemporary social justice educational projects then we fail to properly assess the subtle and intricate structures that specifically shape educational inequity and opportunity in places such as the Southwest.

Author

• Dolores Calderon, Western Washington University