Resurgent Indigeneity: Re/Making Indígena and Community Through Education

• In Event: 66.057 - Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: 66.057-2 - Indigenous Wombyn's Cultural Strength Navigating Institutional Power

Abstract

This study centers a mothers’ movement for better educational opportunities for their children in rural Mexico. The mothers protested historical education neglect, which led to them being brutalized, but not deterred from seeking an educational alternative. By re/claiming an indigenous identity in a de-indianized pueblo, they received a new school, which became a symbol of reclaimed indigeneity and opportunity. The mothers’ movement contributes insight into, 1) renewed indigeneities, 2) understanding agency, and 3) sobrevivencia in rural neoliberal agricultural communities. The mothers’ reclaimed indigeneity is an agentic challenge to state officialized definitions who is indígena by creating a third space for indigeneity that contradicts the discourse of the disappearing Indian and disrupts the Indian/non-Indian binary.

Author

• Luis Urrieta, The University of Texas - Austin