CANCELLED: Critical Latino Indigeneities: Transborder Cultures, Mobility, and Movements

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

This panel grapples with conference themes of misery and way of resistance as it relates to indigenous migration in North America. It brings together junior and senior scholars to build a critical theoretical framework to analyze new forms of critical Latino indigeneity emerging from the Latin America indigenous diaspora in the US. As scholars who write about indigenous disapora, our collective work is to create new conceptual frames that critically engage settler colonial logics as well as the overlapping colonialities of Latin America and the US. These critical frameworks take into account the forms of anti-Indian racism that indigenous migrants confront often in relation to mestizo migrant counterparts as the racial hierarchies of Mexico and Guatemala also migrate. These systems then get mapped onto a US racial hegemony forming new forms of hybrid racial hegemonies. These forms of misery have also included police killings, labor exploitation, sexual exploitation, family separation, and racial violence.

Our work makes visible the multiple ways of resistance indigenous migrants and their children critically disrupting how notions of Latino identity have subsumed or erased indigeneity. However, by virtue of being migrants, what it means to be indigenous is both intricately tied to how these identities are embedded in notions of territoriality and formed within the historical context of their sending nations as well as how the experience of dislocation and mobility have produced new forms of indigenous consciousness and transborder cultural, civic, and community practices.

Further, scholars explore what it means for 1.5, second, and third generations who are assumed to be “Latino” while their experiences often teach them to reject those labels. How do young people grapple with what it means to be differently indigenous in the US cities where they sometimes outnumber American Indians? Our panel examines how political, economic and social processes of the Latin American indigenous diaspora are challenging the traditional boundaries of indigeneity and latinidad both through conditions of misery and the ways of resistance.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• To Be Announced, NA

Individual Presentations

• El Oaxaqueño Newspaper: Reading, Translating, and Circulating the Mexican Indigenous Experience - Lourdes Alberto, University of Utah (UT)

• Rethinking Indigeneity and Latinidad: Women’s Activism within the Latin American Indigenous Diaspora in Los Angeles - Maylei Blackwell, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)

• Reclamando lo que es nuestro: Identity Formation among Zapoteco Youth in Los Angeles - Brenda Nicolas, University of California, Los Angeles (CA)