Queering Reindigenization: Grief, Language Nests, and Diasporic Healing in the Salvadoran Diaspora

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 3:45 pm - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Storywork, Healing, and Creative Sovereignties: Indigenous Pedagogies of Resurgence Across Lands, Languages, and Generations

Abstract

This paper introduces Queering Reindigenization, a diasporic framework that centers queer and Two-Spirit Salvadorans reconnecting with Indigeneity through mourning, memory, and language reclamation. Grounded in Indigenous feminist and Two-Spirit epistemologies, the project responds to the structural erasure of Salvadoran Indigeneity and those reconnecting, theorized here as carceral deindigenization. Using autoethnography and a systematic literature review, this proposal presents a diasporic language nest model grounded in land-based pedagogy, ancestral care, and gender-expansive kinship. This model emerges not from continuity, but from rupture, and affirms diaspora as a place for resurgence. This proposal invites conversation on how language, grief, and ceremonial education can sustain Indigenous resurgence across geographies, especially for communities severed from their homeland by colonial violence, migration, and institutional forgetting.

Author

• Claudia Alvarenga, University of California - Los Angeles