Indian trouble

Abstract

This exploratory essay thinks through late-20th and early 21st century autobiographical novels and storytelling by indigenous migrants from Mexico and Central America. The think-piece examines the idea of “archiving selves” as well as the literary sensibilities of Manuel Olmos, Alma Murrieta, and Lamberto Roque Hernández. Focusing on how these non-professional writers document their border crossings and recount their uprooted lives in California, this essay casts new questions on indigenous Mesoamerican futurities that intersect—and depart from—Latino/a Studies and Native American Studies. It examines how a new social and cultural formation—indigenous-cum-migrant—is unfolding and revealing contemporary configurations on language and ethnic belonging.

Pertenencia Mutua : Indigenous Oaxacans Contesting Settler Colonial Grammars

“…Maya Ch'orti' literary scholar Gloria E. Chacón pushes us to think beyond US understandings of race and consider mestizaje differences in Latin America and the United States to understand how Latinidad, like Chicanidad, romanticizes, consumes, and thereby erases Indigenous diasporas. 58 That is, although many Mexicans in Mexico and the United States may not see themselves or use the term mestizo, they or their families benefit, or have benefited, from (Latinx and Mexican) whiteness for generations. Their long disconnection or absence of having a direct ancestral tie to an Indigenous community has often been used by some mestizos (mostly men) to racially discriminate against those with darker skin tone and those with "Indigenous" features.…”