Indigeneity

One of the most contested tendencies within Latino/a literature (and culture more generally) involves the focus on the continuance of the indigenous roots of Latino/a identity. To speak of Latino/a indigenous identity, however, is to immediately get involved in what could be seen as at once a redundant and an oxymoronic gesture: the categorical fusion of latinidad and indigeneity. This fusion, which lies at the heart of conceptualizations of mestizaje, points to the tensions underlying uses of latinidad. Whereas the “Latin” of latinidad points to the imaginative construction of an American (hemispheric) identity starting from its European (Spanish) roots, the indigenous turn often involves a rejection of these European roots. The category of indigeneity begins with but works quite differently from that of mestizaje, primarily because the emphasis on indigeneity (the “Indian” half of mestizo identity – the notion of “half” itself often serving to erase the third African “half” of the equation) works explicitly as an anti-colonial strategy in the face of continuing Anglo-American racism towards and exploitation of peoples of Hispanic descent – where “anticolonial” signals an external strategy of colonized versus colonizer while “decolonial” would refer to internal challenges within a given identity formation (such as an injunction among Chicanos/as to learn Nahuatl). This is especially so when there is a need to counter the Anglo tendency to consider Latinos/as as foreigners within the US, regardless of the citizenship status and/or length of residency of any particular Latino/a. This attention to continuing indigenous roots functions, then, primarily as a sign

of territorial priority. In other words, as a challenge to the “illegal alienization,” so to speak, of Latinos/as in mainstream Anglo culture and politics, the foregrounding of indigeneity highlights the fact that Latinos/as have been on this continent long before Anglo-Americans, not simply as a competing European power but as indigenous peoples. It is Anglo-Americans, according to this anti-colonial logic, who are the newcomers and invaders. Beyond this initial anti-colonial political gesture, as we shall see, the emphasis on indigeneity comes into play as a marker of cultural (versus strictly residential) continuity despite the legacy of genocide, as well as a path to aesthetic and spiritual development and expression (see Pérez 2005). This indigenous turn has not gone unchallenged, however. Among the issues

involved in such challenges are the following: 1) the all-too-easy charges of “nostalgia,” “romanticism,” and “essentialism” used against every ethnic or traditional revival

(charges which in academic settings, I would argue, tend more often to marginalize indigenous knowledges than to challenge potentially racist categories – see ValdésRodríguez (2003) for a fictional version of this challenge); 2) the charge of anti-black racism, wherein the turn to an indigenous identity reputedly masks an attempt to erase blackness; and 3) the charge of illicit cooptation of signs of indigeneity at the expense of “real living” indigenous groups and peoples. The last category involves in part the Latin American tradition of state indigenismo, wherein various criollo (or European descendants born in the Americas) and mestizo (mixed European and indigenous) nationalists, as part of their independence struggles, hold out their indigenous past as a way to claim hemispheric priority in the face of European and Yankee forms of imperialism (Bonfil Batalla 1996; Díaz-Polanco 1997; Alcina Franch, 1990). The Cárdenas administration in 1930s Mexico is often seen, for example, as contributing to an indigenist policy that celebrates indigenous roots (as in Diego Rivera’s mural projects) while ultimately erasing current indigenous peoples through invocations of the progressive nature of mestizaje (building on the theory of José Vasconcelos (1997 [1925])). Cuban writer José Martí’s works, especially “Nuestra América” (1891), remain a

paradigmatic example of the embrace of “Indian” identity as an anti-imperial strategy (Lomas 2008). Martí’s phrase “our America” situates Americans south of the United States (“from the Río Bravo to the Straits of Magellan”) in opposition, on the one hand, to Europeans and their criollo descendants (where the term “America” signals their differences) and to the United States (“our” America versus “their” America) on the other. A new landscape (the Americas) gives rise to a new people (mestizos) whose authentic roots lie with their indigenous ancestors and neighbors. Unlike those who sought simply to ground their indigeneity in images of Indians of the past, Martí expands this heritage to include the living presence of contemporary Indians, such as Guatemala’s Mayan descendants, as well as contemporary Indians of Venezuela, Mexico, and North America. Geography gives rise to a people who, in tune with and shaped by that landscape, can help save mestizos from the debilitating cultural impact of their European roots and practices. Once the colonialist “dams” are taken down and contemporary Indians are granted full cultural self-determination, they can restore themselves after centuries of genocidal oppression and, in the process, revitalize their mestizo children by re-acquainting them with their original cultural practices. (See Fernández Retamar 1989; Bojórquez Urzaiz 2004; Fernández Valledor 1993; Belnap and Fernández 1998; and Mignolo 2005.) I would argue that this Latino/a move to embrace and celebrate indigenous iden-

tity has played out very differently for writers with Caribbean roots than it has for Chicano/a writers. While claims to Chicano/a indigeneity have certainly been severely scrutinized within and without the Chicano/a community – often ending in a situation where people of Mexican ancestry must present yet one more set of identity papers in order to be accepted for who they say they are – peoples of Caribbean ancestry face downright genocidal patterns of refusal and rejection. Critics of indigenous Caribbean writers frame their attacks at best in terms of the seemingly romantic gestures behind such claims; at worst, critics seek to paint Taíno activists as delusional and racist, supposedly complicit in a pattern of whitening Caribbean identity wherein Indians come out decidedly less black than their African

selves. Whether of the “anti-romantic” or “anti-racist” mode, such attacks on claims to indigenous identity, I would argue, risk supporting a 500-year legacy of racist attempts to erase indigenous survival more than they help in countering efforts to erase blackness. Because of the dramatically different nature of the modes of denial of Chicano/a and Caribbean indigenous identity, I will frame this essay in regional rather than topical terms. I wish to assert at the outset, however, that I do not in any way wish to unearth past battles between Chicanos/as and Caribbean-originated Latinos/as when I pose this regional distinction. Such past battles, it seems to me, centered on problems related to Anglo-American definitions of citizenship and belonging rather than on interracial complications arising from Latino/a internalizations of Anglo-American valorizations of whiteness and rejections of blackness. My main point is that the crucial efforts to highlight black identity are not helped through the misguided efforts to erase indigenous identity as they end up serving a divide-and-conquer agenda.