Unlearning U.S. Migration on Tohono O’odham Lands: Anti-colonial Praxis, Comparative Ethnic Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies

• In Event: Transnational Public Pedagogies of Immigration: Race, Gender, Coloniality, and Media

Abstract

This paper puts forth a dissenting praxis intellectually and politically. First, a comparative ethnic studies methodology grounded within a critical Indigenous studies perspective. Second, a critical migrant activism rooted in Indigenous politics. Tohono O’odham hiphop group, Shining Soul, states: “The immigration struggle is also an Indigenous struggle.” In conjunction, migrant activist Harsha Walia affirms: “Migrant justice will be short lived if gained at the expense of Indigenous” sovereignty. This paper thus highlights the intellectual and political stakes of Indigenous sovereignty at the U.S.-Mexico border in relation to undocumented immigrant and migrant activism. Such political and cultural articulations between Indigenous and immigrant/migrant activism are scarce and rendered unintelligible. However, they define delicate, critical points where political coalitions between Indigenous and migrant activism, and intellectual rapprochement between comparative ethnic studies and critical indigenous studies are possible and necessary for anticolonial praxis. This paper excavates such points of convergence.

In this vein, political activist, Alex Soto, Komkch’ed e Wah ‘osithk, from the Tohono O’odham Nation, in 2014 wrote on the O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective website:
I recognize this is a complex issue. I do not want fellow Indigenous migrants coming from the southern hemisphere to be criminalized by racist laws. I do not want families to be separated, loved ones to be deported, or for them to ever have to walk the hot desert in the first place…But at the same time, I do not want my homeland to be a police state. I do not want our ceremonies to be disrupted. I do not want our jewed (land) destroyed by border security apparatus…Ultimately I do not want…“an O'odham Berlin Wall” built at the border.

Soto’s excerpt calls attention to the contemporary and historically ongoing U.S. settler colonial violence via militarized border patrol, anti-immigration law, surveillance, detention and deportation regimes, including the U.S.-Mexico international boundary line. These U.S. settler projects bisect and dissect Tohono O’odham ancestral lands in the state of Arizona, erode animal and plant life, disrupt traditional cultural practices, and obstruct the sovereign mobility of O’odham people. Moreover, they mistake O’odham for the reified racial and gendered categories of the “illegal,” the “alien,” the “criminal,” the “terrorist,” the “Mexican,” and the “drug trafficker.” Soto thus highlights O’odham indigenous sovereignty, as it remains largely unintelligible and ignored at the U.S.-Mexico border, within U.S.
immigration policy debates, and between undocumented immigrant and migrant activism. He spotlights, together with Shining Soul and Walia, the urgent imperative for a dissenting relational praxis oriented in a critical Indigenous perspective and politic. Ergo, this paper follows this political and cultural trajectory towards a dissenting, anti-colonial, relational methodology via comparative ethnic studies and critical Indigenous studies. For it is imperative to dismantle U.S. settler colonial occupation, dispossession, extermination and erasure of Indigenous sovereignty, logics ultimately used to subject undocumented immigrants and migrants to expulsion and death at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Author

• Raquel Madrigal, University of New Mexico