Abstract
Proposing a Critical Latinx Indigeneities framework to understand Latin American Indigenous migration and the possible relationships and responsibilities arriving to new Indigenous territories entails, the article analyzes how mobility is creating translocal Indigenous social worlds and transregional ways of being by exploring how socio-spatial relations are being reorganized in relation to indigeneity, gender, and migration. Based on long-term collaborative research with the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB), this article examines translocal community formation and political organizing among the Latin American Indigenous diaspora in Los Angeles. It explores the geographies of indigeneity produced through the production of sacred geographies, mobile circuits of labor, and spatial projects created by women’s collective organizing and the emergence of Oaxacan Indigenous culinary and musical landscapes.
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Notes
US 2010 census data still counts New York as the largest American Indian population. If we include the approximately 120,000 indigenous Oaxacans as well as the approximately 50,245 indigenous peoples of Oceania to the cited 54,263 American Indians in the city, LA far surpasses the 111,749 American Indians of New York. For the purposes of this research, I use the United Nations definition of indigenous peoples according to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, UN, 2007.
All interviews were conducted in Spanish except a few with second-generation activists who are English dominant. All translations are mine.
Borrowing from Kamau Braithwaite, Jodi Byrd theorizes arrivant to describe people of color who may have arrived to settler states not by choice but who may still play a structural role in settler colonialism. Aikau (2010) grounds this analysis by examining how indigenous diasporas participate in settler colonialism if they overlook their responsibilities to those native to the lands they are residing in; Morgensen (2011) theorizes the relationship of white supremacy to settler colonialism in his work on the work of allies who offer solidarity; Trask (1993) and Fujikane and Okamura (2008) discuss the role of Asian settler colonialism in Hawai‘i.
FIOB is a community-based organization with local committees during the time of this study in Santa Rosa, Los Angeles, San Diego, Oceanside, Santa Maria and Fresno in California; Tijuana and the San Quintín Valley in Baja California; and Juxtlahuaca, Huajuapan de León, and Zanatepec, Oaxaca, as well as Mexico City. Four offices in Juxtlahuaca, Santa Maria, Fresno, and Los Angeles coordinate a coalition of indigenous organizations, communities, and individuals settled in the states of Oaxaca and Baja California, the Distrito Federal, and in the State of California in the United States.
The FIOB unity statement reads, “FIOB is an indigenous organization of migrant and non-migrants united by a strong desire to help indigenous communities and individuals. We are independent of governments, political organizations, and religious organizations. We are united by the conviction, ideal and necessity of bettering community life unites us.”
The Mid-Wilshire neighborhood became the home of large numbers of South Korean immigrants in the 1960s, following the relaxed federal immigration rules of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, who took advantage of the numerous vacant business fronts and homes in the area. The City of Los Angeles designated the area centering from Eighth Street and Western as the Koreatown district in 2008. While it recognizes this historic ethnic enclave, it is the most densely populated district in the city, and racially and ethnic diverse, with over 50% Latino population. See the Mapping LA Project of the Los Angeles Times: http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/neighborhood/koreatown/ (accessed 11 November 2016).
This process occurs by external forces that tend to Mexicanize and by internal forces of a community responding to racial prejudice and bullying that often lead to people closeting themselves for survival (i.e., not speaking their languages outside of the house, not wearing huaraches or huipiles outside the community context). See Alberto and Urrieta (this issue).
I documented the migration of hometown patron saints with Brenda Nicolás in the Mapping Indigenous LA, Latin American Diaspora Map, which was produced in collaboration with Brenda Nicolás, Floridalma Boj Lopez, Lourdes Alberto, Janet Martinez, Odilia Romero-Hernández, and Gaspar Rivera Salgado. Cruz Manjarrez (2013) documents the migration of patron saint celebrations in her study of Yalálog Zapotec migrants from Oaxaca.
See Lourdes Albertos’s entries on Zapotec Basketball and Normandie Park on the Mapping Indigenous LA’s Latin American Indigenous Diaspora Map: http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapTour/index.html?appid=31d1100e9a454f5c9b905f55b08c0d22.
The FIOB, ORO, the Calenda, and the proclamation that begins Oaxacan Heritage month are among points I created as well for the map. See http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapTour/index.html?appid=31d1100e9a454f5c9b905f55b08c0d22.
Often neighborhood favorites like the renowned raspado street vendor who makes his own syrups from fresh fruit and other flavors daily become the vehicle for opening a storefront. For example, see Janet Martinez’s project Zapotecs: The Journey to Success, a photo exhibit for the 2015 Oaxacan Heritage Month, that tells several of these stories. See also the Street Vendor Organizing campaign http://streetvendorcampaign.blogspot.com/ (accessed 11 February 2016).
HR 4437 was the Border Protection, Anti-terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, a bill that was passed by the House of Representatives on 16 December 2005, but did not pass the Senate. Its wide-ranging provisions ranged from building a seven-hundred-mile-long fence along the US-Mexico border to increasing the penalties for employing undocumented immigrants to making it a felony to house undocumented immigrants, with a punishment of no less than three years in prison plus fines.
This is also featured on the Mapping Indigenous LA project by Floridalma Boj Lopez: http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapTour/index.html?appid=31d1100e9a454f5c9b905f55b08c0d22.
I find it emotionally difficult to work with this material, and I have regularly checked in with Romero-Hernández about how it felt now to have shared the story and to get her permission to share it in this venue. While she confesses she has never read the interview, she thinks telling her story is part of the healing of her community.
Activists in the FIOB use the word binational to describe their organizing workshops that cross the US and Mexico. Historically, the organization has refused the word “transnational” to describe their work and membership in order to refuse the language of transnational capital, as Former General Coordinator Rufino Dominguez has explained to me on numerous occasions.
In the highlands of Guatemala, the Ajq’ijab’ are spiritual guides who keep the calendar days according to the Mayan sacred calendar for their communities, offering ceremonies, consultations, and cultural teachings.
See the Mapping Indigenous LA Project. See http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=4942348fa8bd427fae02f7e020e98764. Mayavision, established in 1988 by Mayan refugees in Los Angeles, is also an important organization. In addition to Mayan-based spiritual practices, there is a widespread geography of the sacred folded into immigrant Catholic churches of Los Angeles, which is richly illustrated in the migration of the saints from Oaxacan hometowns. For example, St. Anne’s is home to nine patron saints from three towns in Oaxaca. For further information about Mayavision and St. Anne’s, as well as many other organizations, visit the Latin American Diaspora Map of the Mapping Indigenous LA project: http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapTour/index.html?appid=31d1100e9a454f5c9b905f55b08c0d22 (accessed 3 February 2016).
I co-direct this project with Mishuana Goeman and Wendy Teeter in collaboration with our colleague Keith Camacho at UCLA, as well as many indigenous community scholars in Los Angeles.
While beyond the scope of this essay, I am referring to the ways coloniality of power (Quijano 1997, 2000) and settler colonialism (Wolfe 2006) may be incomplete analytical frameworks and yet, even in their incomplete postulations, overlap. While criticized for their unacknowledged intellectual debt to women of color and indigenous scholars (Pérez 2010), (Rivera Cusicanqui 2012), coloniality of power theorists discuss the maintenance of colonial racial hierarchies and logics while they situate the Americas as the birth of the extractive logic of capitalism in terms of labor and natural resources. In my work, I refer to Latin American state projects, such as indigenismo and mestizaje that extend these arrangements of power and continue to eliminate the indigenous presence via incorporation. In the name of modernity, neocolonial relationships of capitalism have continued to displace indigenous peoples from their land via development, megaprojects, land privatization, and biocolonialism (of seeds, and knowledge practices)—all causes of migration. In the displacement and elimination of indigenous peoples in the Americas, these systems generated by Spanish and Portuguese colonialism intersect with settler colonial logics of US capitalism.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Luis Urrieta and Floridalma Boj Lopez for all the intellectual collaboration and community-building we have done together, as well as members of the Critical Latinx Indigeneities working group. Thank you to Gloria Chacon and members of the LOUD collective (specifically Grace Hong, Mishuana Goeman, Shanna Redman, Jodi Kim, and Sara Kaplan) for their comments on earlier versions of this work, and Juan Herrera for accompanying me in writing community. Finally, I thank the readers whose comments helped me to clarify and strengthen the argument and ideas here.
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Blackwell, M. Geographies of indigeneity: Indigenous migrant women’s organizing and translocal politics of place. Lat Stud 15, 156–181 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-017-0060-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-017-0060-4