This forum on Critical Latinx Indigeneities features scholars whose research on Indigenous Latinx cultural politics pushes the boundaries of Latinx, Latin American, Indigenous, and Black studies to provide innovative analyses of race, gender, capital, and power in the contemporary moment. Their research points to the different ways that this field is challenging settler colonial logics of Native erasure, antiblackness, and migrant precarity while advancing transnational conceptualizations of solidarity, decolonization, and Indigenous continuance.
The event will be moderated by Simón Ventura Trujillo whose new book Land Uprising reframes Indigenous land reclamation as a horizon to decolonize the settler-colonial conditions of literary, intellectual, and activist labor. Trujillo argues that land provides grounding for rethinking the connection between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms.
Simón Ventura Trujillo is an Assistant Professor of Latina/o Studies in the English Department at New York University. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he teaches and researches on Chicana/o and Latina/o literature, Borderland methodologies, de-colonial social movements, and comparative racialization in the Americas.
Co-Sponsored by NYU Center for the Humanities and the Native Studies Forum. To register via EventBrite, click here.
Panelists
Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera is an associate professor of Interdisciplinary and Latinx Studies at Fairhaven College, Western Washington University. She teaches courses Citizenship & Belonging, Borders & Boundaries, Globalization and Migration. Her research over the past twenty years has focused on the ways that Zapotec Indigenous people negotiate exclusionary practices of belonging in both the U.S. and Mexico. Most recently, she has also examined the role of settler colonialism in Latinx Indigenous formation processes in the U.S. Her essays have been published in numerous journals including: American Anthropologist, the Association of Mexican American Educators (AMAE) Journal, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Practicing Anthropology, and American Quarterly. She is also a co-edtior (with M. Bianet Castellanos and Arturo Aldama) of Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach (University of Arizona Press 2012), a collection of essays examining key aspects of Indigeneity relationally across the Américas.
Bianet Castellanos is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is also an affiliated faculty member in the departments of American Indian Studies and Chicano & Latino Studies. For the past three decades, she has collaborated with Maya communities in Mexico and their diasporas in the United States. Her research centers on developing indigeneity as an analytic to interrogate mobility across the Americas. She is the author of A Return to Servitude: Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancún and the forthcoming book Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtedness in Mexico. She edited Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach (with Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera and Arturo Aldama), Detours: Travel and the Ethics of Research in the Global South, and the forum “Settler Colonialism in Latin America” in American Quarterly. She is a member of the Critical Latinx Indigeneities Working Group. She teaches courses on comparative indigeneities, Indigenous urbanism, Indigenous migration, rage and politics, popular culture, immigration, tourism, and the U.S.-Mexico border. She serves on the board of El Colegio High School, a Latinx-serving high school in Minneapolis.
Paul Joseph López Oro is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Smith College. He teaches courses on Black Latin American and U.S. Black Latinx social movements, Black diaspora theories and ethnographies, and Black feminisms/queer theory. His research interests include Black politics in Latin America, the Caribbean and U.S. AfroLatinidades, Black Latinx LGBTQ movements and performances, and Black transnationalism. He is working on his first book manuscript, Hemispheric Black Indigeneity: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York, an ethnographic and oral history study on how gender and sexuality shape the ways in which Garifuna New Yorkers of Central American transgenerational descent negotiate, perform and articulate their multiple subjectivities as Black, indigenous and Latinx.
Professor María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Social & Cultural Analysis Department & the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU. Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Duke UP 2016) received the 2019 Casa de Las Americans Literary Prize Latino Studies; 2017 ASA John Hope Franklin Book Prize for best work in American Studies; and 2017 NACCS Book Award for best work in Chicanx Studies. With over thirty articles on revolution, subaltern politics, indigenous peoples, racial formation, migration, and Latin American and Latino cultural studies, her most recent, "The Violence of Citizenship in the Making of Refugees: The U.S. and Central America" explores the integral role gendered labor and violence play in Mara Salvatrucha economies of value (Social Text 141: 1-22). She is the Chairwoman of the Coalición Mexicana, an immigrants' rights organization, and an expert witness for Central American asylum cases with legal aid agencies internationally.
Simón Ventura Trujillo is an Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies in the English Department at New York University. His book, Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity (University of Arizona Press, 2020), explores Indigenous land reclamation to rethink connections between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms. It centers on the cultural production of the New Mexican land grant reclamation movement, La Alianza Federal de Mercedes. A formative organization of the Chicanx movement known for its armed raid of the Tierra Amarilla courthouse in 1967, La Alianza waged a dynamic and controversial campaign for the recovery of Mexican and Spanish land grants that had been lost in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War in the mid-19th century. This book situates La Alianza’s writings alongside a heterogeneous archive of Indigenous and feminist borderland literature by Leslie Marmon Silko, Ana Castillo, Simon Ortiz, and the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. In doing so, his work explores unexamined intersections between Indigenous, Chicanx, and Latinx cultural politics and contributes to critiques of colonial modernity and settler sovereignty in the Americas. Professor Trujillo teaches courses on Latinx Studies, American ethnic literatures, 20 th century literature and culture, intersectional theories of race, indigeneity, and decolonial social movements. His pedagogy engages the practices of textual analysis, writing, and collaborative research to study how the social construction of identity—including race, gender, sex, class, and nationality— occur as a function of language. His students explore how work on language
generates alternative identities, histories, and spatial imaginaries that resist historic forms of oppression and inequality.
