Leveraging Critical Latinx Indigeneities (CLI) as an Analytic in Mapping Compounded Hegemonies in Multiple and Overlapping Settler Colonial Contexts

• In Event: Historicizing Los Angeles : Envisioning New Educational Futures in Latinx Radical Imaginations

Abstract

Luis Urrieta draws from settler colonialism as a useful transborder theory to address how Critical Latinx Indigeneities (CLI) as an analytic begins to map the messy, yet necessary, compounded hegemonies present in multiple and overlapping settler colonial contexts such as Los Angeles (Calderon & Urrieta, 2019; Urrieta et al., 2019; Urrieta and Calderón, 2019). CLI calls for all, including migrants and non-migrants, to acknowledge their settler status on Indigenous lands. In the case of Tongvagar, the original territorial name for the Los Angeles Basin, that would be Tongva people in addition to Chumash, Tatviam, and Kizh. The original Tongva village of Yanga, was the original site of what is today downtown Los Angeles. CLI emphasizes respect for the unique political relationship of U.S. Tribal sovereignty and the need to re-integrate race into the analysis of indigeneity in transborder contexts. CLI moves beyond the binary of Indigenous recognition versus settler state, acknowledging the complex interplay of race, indigeneity, and settler colonialism (Calderon & Urrieta, 2019). Further, a pertinent question to ponder is when is someone Indigenous, taking into account the temporality, geographies, and migrations of “when/where people are/cease being Indigenous” from Abiayala (Barillas Chón, Montes, Landeros, 2021, p. 134). Indigenous peoples from Abyayala do not cease to be Indigenous when they migrate to places like Los Angeles, yet their movement through differently racialized geographies poses questions of an indigeneity that is already spatially and temporally situated upon those Lands where they eventually migrate to (Ybarra, 2023). Indigenous migrations are also (re)interpreted through the dual processes of mestizaje and indigenismo which have long been described as political projects that undermine, dispossess, and invisibilize contemporary Indigenous communities (Calderon & Urrieta, 2019; Urrieta & Calderón, 2019). Urrieta will cover how amidst the settler colonial curricular project of replacement and settler grammars (Urrieta and Calderon, 2019), Indigenous Latinx communities, especially in Los Angeles, are vibrant, abundant, and agentic in their diasporic subjectivities (Boj Lopez, 2017). A question that emerges is, how can and do Indigenous Latinx communities embody an ethic of guesthood on already Indigenous Lands (i.e., Tongva territory or Los Angeles)? How can “enacting guest hood” shape the way we understand Indigenous Latinx educational experiences and be mindful of the settler colonial contexts in which they are implicated in? How can Latinx and Chicanx educational studies further unsettle the questions of mestizaje, hybrid hegemonies, and Latinidades through a transhemispheric Indigenous analytic (Barillas Chon, Landeros, Urrieta, 2024).

Author

• Luis Urrieta, University of Texas at Austin