Special issue: Critical Latinx indigeneities

Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”

“…What might animate the anti‐Black logics of the one‐drop rule dissolves except in a synthetic analysis that would collapse both “the racializations of Indigenous people and Black people in the US settler colonial nation‐state” as “geared to ensure the ascendancy of white settlers as the true and rightful owners and occupiers of the land” (Tuck and Yang :12), which is to say both Indigenous and Black peoples are structured by a common settler‐colonial project, even as Black people (insofar as “the US government promised 40 acres of Indian land as reparations for plantation slavery” [Tuck and Yang :29]) are also figured as proto‐settlers . The grounding “settler” concept frays further when considering that (1) the “Indian Removal Act” also rendered native peoples unwilling settlers by relocating them to already Indigenous populated territories (Smithers :117–128); (2) Indigenous peoples remain Indigenous when they move or are forcibly moved, because indigeneity expresses relationality, not possession (Blackwell et al :127; Radcliffe ); (3) in Latin America, creolisation has, complexly, been referred to as an “indigenizing process” (Castellanos :777; Jackson :42–44); and (4) African indigeneity meant a unique intensification of structures of slavery on the African continent through settler colonialism (Kelley ) . The last two points also serve to underscore the Anglo‐centrism of Tuck and Yang’s argument, as Canada and the United States remain their point of departure for understanding of the relation between Blackness and Indigeneity, rather than the Western hemisphere as a whole.…”

Indigenous Immigrant Youth’s Understandings of Power: Race, Labor, and Language

“…I point out that the ways youth make sense of indigeneity is through their experiences with and understanding of asymmetrical relationships of power based on the dynamics of race, labor, and language in Guatemala, Mexico, and the U.S. I rely on a "Critical Latinx Indigeneities" (CLI) analytic developed by Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta (2017) Empirically, findings from this study provide cultural, linguistic, and historical contexts of recent Maya immigrant youth's lived experiences to educators and other stakeholders in public schools. Additionally, this study highlights the importance of utilizing analytics that foreground power and overlapping colonialities.…”

“…Critical Latinx Indigeneities has taken on this task. Blackwell et al (2017) developed CLI to understand the multiple contexts of power and multiple colonialities present, sometimes as overlapping structures, in the experiences of Indigenous immigrants from Latin America. Critical Latinx Indigeneities' interdisciplinary approach allows the use of distinct frames developed in Latin America and the U.S. to address racial constructions, power dynamics, and colonialities that overlap in the lived experiences of Indigenous immigrants.…”

“…For a more flushed out conversation on gender and Indigenous migration seeBlackwell (2010Blackwell ( , 2017.…”

Multilingual Mexican-Origin Students' Perspectives on Their Indigenous Heritage Language

“…The above quote is from a mother describing how important it was for her children to continue being able to speak Zapoteco, in addition to Spanish, while also becoming fluent English speakers. This paper looks at the educational experiences, linguistic use, and perspectives of three multilingual Mexican-origin students with either one or two parents of We use the framework of Critical Latinx Indigeneities (Blackwell, Lopez, & Urrieta, 2017) to explore the idea of Indigeneity within the context of the lives of students who speak Zapoteco as a heritage language but receive schooling in the US in English and Spanish. We also explore the idea of language use, development, and maintenance from the lens of investment (Norton Peirce, 1995;Norton, 2000), which is a poststructuralist approach to language learning.…”