This essay argues that if “decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of (Native) land”(p. 7), then autoethnography committed to decolonization should first and foremost center Native struggles over land and life. For this task and given my own position as a postcolonial immigrant on Native lands, I elaborate an immigrant of color autoethnography to demystify the discourses that privilege select postcolonial immigrants such as myself over Indigenous people and render me as a desirable minority and settler. I start this project unpacking my journey as an international student through the higher education apparatus in the United States as I narrate how the material structures and academic knowledge that circulate within the university (re)produce the devaluation of indigeneity. Then I shift my attention to my time in Albuquerque, a border city that excludes Indigenous people through a host of policies even as international students are welcomed to make home in the city. Against these two sites, I turn to (un)Occupy Albuquerque to map coalition possibilities between postcolonial immigrants and Indigenous people. Together, these three sites allow for an understanding of the ideological and material structures that rationalize (and disrupt) settler colonialism and Native dispossession.
Through an analysis of the indie movie For Here or To Go? this essay argues that the rhetoric of “unfairness” articulated by Indian tech workers not only elides privileges, but also increasingly relies on the figure of the illegal immigrant to perform injury and to shore up claims of desirability and inclusion. Although constructed using juridical-legal logics of legality/illegality, the illegal immigrant mirrors racial, gender, and other anxieties that are mobilized to constitute migrant illegality. By examining how economically-privileged immigrants produce the dehumanization of less-privileged groups, this essay hopes to demystify the unequal position of groups within contemporary migration.
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