Choreographing Diasporic Pedagogies: Indigenous Dance as Language Learning

• In Event: Embodied Knowledge and Performances of Radical Relationality

Abstract

This paper examines how diasporic Indigenous dance is an expression of embodied and visual knowledge. By analyzing an annual dance performance called La Danza de Los Plumudos, I explore how a diasporic Mixteco community enacts embodied teachings that reveal a complex, deep symbolic system transcending physical, historical, and cultural borders. Drawing from the tradition of critical Indigenous scholarship, I critically and dialectically engage Simpson’s positive refusal and Smith’s celebrating survivance to understand how diasporic Indigenous peoples engage in creative performance as a site where youth and their families read and write themselves into the world as a pedagogical act. This exploration illustrates how diasporic Indigenous communities retain their cultural and spiritual practices as a pedagogical act of survivance.

Author

• Maria J. Ruiz-Martinez, University of Colorado - Boulder