Introduction Excerpt for The Children of Solaga

Introduction

THE IMAGE IS GRAINY, but I can make out the path that leads to my mother’s childhood home. Around a dozen men holding musical instruments stand next to a water well waiting for my family and our guests to depart for the church. Some women hold a candle and a handful of gladiolas, while men carry large bundles of flowers and candles wrapped in brown paper. The municipal band and our guests start the procession from our family home to the Catholic church, and a five-minute walk turns into a twenty-minute endeavor due to the solemnity and magnitude of the event. The band walks by, slowly playing the music for a canto for La Virgen del Carmen, as the women sing:

Virgen del Carmen

Virgen del Carmelo

Ve ante mis ojos

Y muerame luego

As they come closer, I recognize people I have not seen in years: our next-door neighbor, my grandmother, and my mother’s youngest brother. Then, finally, I see myself in a pink track suit holding my mother’s hand. Her tight grasp both guides my 5-year-old self to the church and ensures that I do not fall as we navigate the mountainous terrain.

My mother comes into the garage remarking that she had been looking for me. I try to wipe away the tears as I contemplate how lively our family home was during the summer of 1995. “It’s the right video, comadre,” Domingo informs my mother in Zapotec. My mother stares at the screen. “There goes the deceased Rodrigo. They’re all there. Look! My brother!” she exclaims as her older brother rushes past her 20-year-old self. “So many people that have passed away come out in this video, comadre,” Domingo replies. “It’s the right video,” he concludes as he takes out the cassette from his VHS player. Domingo, a first-generation Solagueño immigrant¹ in his early sixties, hands my mother the video cassette, which is mislabeled Fiestas Patrias 1995. Domingo had called me into his garage during a family party in Los Angeles, California, to make sure the VHS tape he was going to lend us had footage of the Virgen del Carmen celebrations held in Solaga in 1995, the year my mother sponsored the festivities in honor of our community’s major patron saints.

Thanks to Domingo and his extensive video collection of fiestas, I had just witnessed the first time I visited San Andrés Solaga, the Zapotec town in Oaxaca, Mexico, from which my parents migrated as teenagers in the mid-1980s. As a child, I did not understand the significance of this and the subsequent return trips I eventually made as an unaccompanied minor traveling under the care of flight attendants to participate in patron saint celebrations in my family’s hometown. As an adult, I was flooded with a range of emotions: from sadness at seeing my now-deceased relatives so full of life, to fascination at reflecting upon myself as a child engaging in one of the transborder practices that would eventually serve as the basis for my research on the transborder lives and practices of the children of Indigenous immigrants. Thus, while an ethnography usually begins with an anecdote of the anthropologist entering the field, The Children of Solaga begins with my first experience of home.

Solagueños have been displaced from their Indigenous homeland for several generations. The Solagueño diaspora includes people living in Oaxaca City, Mexico City, and Los Angeles, California.² My parents and I are part of the Los Angeles–based Solagueño diaspora and belong to a transborder community that stretches from our hometown of Solaga to Los Angeles, where Solagueños began settling in the 1970s. Unlike Solagueños living in Mexican territory, the United States–Mexico border separates Los Angeles–based Solagueño immigrants—the majority of whom are in the country without authorization—from their homeland. Lynn Stephen suggests, “A transborder community is full of people accustomed to living in multiple localities and discontinuous social, economic, and cultural spaces.”³ Domingo’s VHS collection demonstrates not only how Solagueños were already accustomed by the mid-1990s to living divided by the state-imposed borders that prevented many of them from returning to their hometown, but also how Solagueños circumvented these borders to remain connected to their homeland.

Fiesta videos comprise a larger set of practices that have allowed undocumented Solagueño immigrants to experience their hometown despite not being able to physically return. While it was becoming increasingly more difficult for people to enter the United States without authorization in the 1990s, globalization facilitated the circulation of videos and other objects. Still, Solagueños held onto the sensorial memories of their hometown and longed to experience what it felt like to be in Solaga during patron saint celebrations. The creation of Banda Juvenil Solaga USA Oaxaca, the first Los Angeles–based brass band composed solely of the children of Oaxacan immigrants, created a means through which diasporic Solagueños⁴ could experience their hometown celebrations, as well as a space where they could model Indigenous practices of belonging rooted in their community’s ways of knowing and being in the world for their children. The establishment of this youth band would transform how Solagueños and their children develop and maintain ties to their ancestral homeland.

The Children of Solaga examines how diasporic Indigenous children and youth form racial, ethnic, community, and national identities away from their ancestral homeland. This book examines the role of Indigenous practices of belonging, including participating in Oaxacan brass bands and danzas in the receiving community and embarking on return trips to the home community for patron saint celebrations, in processes of identity formation among diasporic Solagueño children and youth. A central question undergirding this work explores why the children of Indigenous immigrants, most of whom are born abroad, engage in these practices. Throughout the book, I consider how the racial, ethnic, legal, and cultural exclusion that Indigenous Latinx immigrants and their children experience in the United States influences their continued involvement and investment in their community of origin. Indeed, participating in Solagueño communal life allows children and youth to develop a sense of belonging to their Indigenous homeland as they are being ostracized because of their racial, ethnic, and national background in their new “homes” in the United States. Through their participation in communal life, diasporic Solagueño children and youth are initiated into comunalidad, an Indigenous way of knowing and being in the world through which individuals demonstrate community belonging and are inducted into el goce comunal, or the feeling of communal joy community members reap from their contributions to and participation in communal life.⁵

Good afternoon.

“Buenas tardes,” they reply.

“Bi che da Modest,” one of them, an uncle, says to the other as I walk away.

The child of the deceased Modesto.

“Lebo bia chhelha yowiz?” the other man asks.

She’s the one that comes back every year?

“Lebo,” my uncle responds.

It’s her.

This encounter is exemplary of my encounters with people living in Solaga. There, I am identified in several ways that are not my given name, but through my relational identities. To Solagueños, I am bi che da Modest Yade’ or the child of the deceased Modesto of Yateé, bi che Elica Pio or Elica Arce’s child, bi xhesua da Pach Pio or the grandchild of the deceased Bonifacio Arce, bi xhesua da Din Cansec or the grandchild of the deceased Enedina Canseco, and bia chhelha yowiz or the person that comes back every year.⁶Bia chhelha yowiz highlights my relationship to Solaga as a place and shows the importance Solagueño locals place on a transborder practice that I began as a 5-year-old child. Solagueños’ usage of the word chhelha strikes me because it marks a sense of return. Embedded in this Zapotec verb is the idea that I return to the place in which I belong and from which I have been temporarily absent. If the verb were switched to chhid, Solagueño locals would be signaling a distance between not only Solaga and myself, but between them and myself. Chhid implies foreignness. An individual may come to Solaga but never really belong and thus they come but do not “come back” or “return.”

I share how Solagueños see me in an effort to place myself in my field sites as a diasporic Solagueña turned researcher. This work breaks new ground as the first book-length ethnographic text written by a nhol walhall, or native woman from a community being studied: the children of Indigenous immigrants. The Children of Solaga tells the story of a people with shared origins in a particular place, growing up away from their ancestral homeland. In the Zapotec context, bene walhall translates to paisanos or local people. The adjective walhall places an emphasis on the humble origins of the object or person it describes.⁷ While in the Western context humbleness or humility might have a negative connotation, Chicana feminists have long validated the experiences of poor, working-class peoples and found these worthy of being told and fruitful for the creation of new theory and methods.⁸ Indigenous and Chicana feminists alike have rejected Western paradigms that posit that scholars must disassociate themselves from their lived experience in order to engage in knowledge production.⁹ In writing this text from the subject position of a nhol walhall, I write and theorize from an emic understanding of social, ritual, and affective ties of a displaced Indigenous woman that, like her bi walhall, is oriented toward her ancestral homeland. The Children of Solaga thus interrupts anthropological traditions of studying Indigenous people as the static, “ethnographic other” and sees them as active agents, who can and do speak and theorize for and by themselves.¹⁰

My experiences as a researcher and as a second-generation Solagueña are not mutually exclusive. Like native anthropologists who share a common background with members of the societies they study, the children of Solagueños who visit their parents’ hometown may have to grapple with societal norms and cultural taboos different from those of the United States. In Solaga, the children of Solagueño immigrants, myself included, discover they are not individuals, but extensions of their families. This construction of self and the family differs from the one we are accustomed to in the United States, where “youths are encouraged to be economically and socially independent to make decisions for themselves, and to believe that each individual is the best judge of what he or she wants and should do.”¹¹ In traveling to Solaga, American-reared youth must cope with a collective society where they are expected to comply with needs and values of the group for the sake of social cohesion.¹² As many visiting youth eventually find out, their actions in the town of Solaga become a reflection of their entire family. Thus, they are sometimes reprimanded for what might be considered bad behavior and at times encouraged to modify their behavior to maintain their family’s good social standing, as discussed in Chapter 3. In some cases, as in other immigrant communities, differences in societal expectations could lead to conflict between visiting youth and Solagueño locals, jeopardizing the chances of satisfying and repeated return visits that could build an attachment and loyalty to their parents’ hometown.¹³

My identity as bia chhelha yowiz also highlights various aspects of my privilege. As an American-born Solagueña, my U.S. citizenship allows me to move across the U.S.-Mexico border freely. Thus, I am able to “go back” every year. I do not take my U.S. citizenship for granted. Many first- and 1.5-generation¹⁴ Solagueños are unable to travel to Solaga because of their legal status. As a student and now a university professor, I was and am still able to visit Solaga during the summer for the Virgen del Carmen celebration, the most important of my community’s patron saint celebrations. Further, as a researcher, I have been able to secure funding to travel to Solaga, something that due to work and wage circumstances, many members of the community may be unable to do. Going back every year has also given me the social capital that allowed me to conduct this research. As the daughter of Solagueños residing in Los Angeles and a frequent visitor to Solaga, I was raised in Spanish- and Zapotec-speaking households on both sides of the United States–Mexico border and am a known member of the community. This background informs my worldview and the ways in which I interact with my interlocutors at my research sites, as well as the form this book takes.

In Solaga, the place I traveled to every summer since childhood, my presence was never questioned. Solagueños living in the home community have come to expect my presence during the summer months. During one of my first trips to Oaxaca during graduate school, a cousin asked me if I considered myself a tourist. Since we were in Oaxaca City at the time and he was taking me around because I was unfamiliar with the city, I answered, “Yes.” He responded, “I don’t consider you a tourist. You’ve come back every year since you were a little girl.” It was then that I realized he was not asking if I considered myself a tourist in Oaxaca City, but in Solaga. Despite this misunderstanding, this conversation enlightened me on the way that at least one Solagueño regarded me. Even though I was not born in the community, I was not just another visitor. By virtue of traveling to Solaga every year, I belonged to and in the community in a particular way. This brought up questions for my own research. Are Solagueños who are unable to return to Solaga seen as less Solagueño? How do they navigate this? What happens to the children of immigrants who do return to Solaga but do not have good experiences, particularly children and youth whose artistry is integral to Solagueño community life in Los Angeles?

When I decided to conduct ethnographic research among Solagueños in Los Angeles, I approached Banda Juvenil Solaga USA, the Los Angeles–based Solagueño youth band, with the hope that they would allow me to conduct research with them. Since most band members were minors, this first meant getting approval from their parents. The parents who were part of the band’s steering committee readily accepted. Some of the parents had known me since I was a child, while others simply knew of me. Although I engaged in return trips to Solaga throughout my childhood, my family did not frequent social gatherings and other celebrations in Los Angeles unless they were held by a close family member. We also did not attend these gatherings because when I was growing up, these celebrations were not held frequently. As I discuss in Chapter 2, the formation of the Solagueño youth band served as a catalyst for the Solagueño community, since band-organized fundraisers and patron saint celebrations gave Solagueño immigrants and their children a time and place to come together more regularly.

Since I neither frequented most of these events nor played in the band, the formation of my own identity as a diasporic Solagueña differs from the experience of my interlocutors who were involved in events in Los Angeles as dancers, musicians, and revelers. My positionality also meant that when I first began conducting research at these events in 2014, many people would express their surprise and joy that I was conviviendo, or socializing, with the community more frequently. Indeed, their remarks on the importance of convivencia with the community became integral to my understanding of Solagueño communal life in Los Angeles and Solaga, as I discuss in Chapter 3.

Throughout my time conducting fieldwork, I attended Banda Juvenil Solaga USA’s band practice sessions. I was close in age to some of the remaining original band members, but considerably older than the younger ones. This meant that while we spoke the same languages and grew up in the same community, there were still generational differences between us. Since many band members were minors and could not drive or did not have parents who could drive them to events, I volunteered to take them and their parents to their engagements, giving me more time to build rapport with them on the way to their performances. Many of the children of Solagueños I interviewed outside of the band were around the same age as me during the time I conducted fieldwork. Some I had met at family parties as a child. Others I met during return visits to Solaga. Still others I met during the course of fieldwork through family and friends. While speaking with the children of Solagueños, I realized the similarities and differences in our experiences and how these experiences have shaped our relationship with our parents’ community across the U.S.-Mexico border. Our similarities included having parents from the town of Solaga who work at dry-cleaning businesses throughout the city of Los Angeles. Still, these similarities are shaped by other circumstances, including our parents’ legal statuses, our own fluency in our parents’ Indigenous language, and the neighborhoods in Los Angeles in which we were raised. For example, the ethnic composition of the neighborhoods in which we grew up determined the potential interactions between Solagueños and non-Indigenous Latinxs, which at times resulted in instances of discrimination, as I discuss in Chapter 2.

During the course of my fieldwork, I heard different ways that Solagueños across the U.S.-Mexico border imagine Solagueñoness. Some people saw being a Solagueño as merely having origins in the town of Solaga. Others saw it as participation in the community. Yet some believed that being a Solagueño meant one had to speak Zapotec, participate in danzas, or play in a band. I found that not partaking in these activities made some, particularly the children of immigrants, feel like they were not “as Solagueño” as their peers. Their point of reference was the children and youth in bands and dance groups in Los Angeles who have become the face of Oaxaca in Los Angeles. However, returning to Solaga may highlight differences in their lives in Los Angeles and the lives of people currently living in Solaga, as I discuss in Chapter 3. Like Takeyuki Tsuda, who conducted research among interlocutors who shared his origins in Japan, I often found that I was a sounding board for my informants as they reflected on their experiences as the children of immigrants in the sending and receiving community.¹⁵ In the chapters that follow, I delve into the ways in which the children of immigrants are seen and see themselves. In addition to transborder Solagueño community dynamics, settler-imposed racial hierarchies and systems of domination shape the ways in which diasporic children and youth identify and articulate their identities.

As the first book-length anthropological text on the children of Indigenous immigrants written by a member of the community being studied, this work both breaks with and engages with anthropological convention. The Children of Solaga is influenced by my family histories, my experiences as a diasporic Solagueña, and traditional ethnographic methods. My relationship with my pueblo extends beyond my lifetime into relationships fostered by my ancestors alongside those of other Solagueños. My official period of ethnographic fieldwork, however, lasted from November 2014 through November 2016. During this time, I conducted participant observation at three main sites: cultural group rehearsals in Los Angeles, patron saint festivities and community events in Los Angeles, and patron saint celebrations in Solaga. I also interviewed first-generation Solagueño immigrants, 1.5- and second-generation Solagueños, and Solagueño locals. To protect the anonymity of my paisanos, I have changed names and identifying information.

The ancestors of Solagueños migrated from the Valley of Oaxaca shortly before the Spanish invasion in the sixteenth century.²⁰ Solaga and the neighboring communities of Zoochogo and Tabaá were founded by three siblings who were originally from the Zapotec community of Zaachila. Our ancestors settled in Solaga’s current location where they had found water and fertile land, which were lacking in the first two places they attempted to settle. Solaga received its name zoolaga (zoo: fallen or scattered, and laga: leaves) because of the leaves that fell from the trees in what became our home, the same leaves with which our ancestors built their homes. From its founding, Solaga has been a refuge for displaced peoples, including its first inhabitants and my ancestors.

My own ancestry reflects my mother’s observation. To prove her point that los Solagueños vienen de todos lados, she reminds me that my paternal ancestors were not from Solaga but my father was born in the community and thus a Solagueño. Because of this, she assures me, I too am a Solagueña. On my mother’s side, we can only trace our ancestry to Solaga. However, my father’s grandfather and father were orphans from the neighboring Zapotec communities of San Francisco Yateé and Santo Domingo Yojovi. Because they were displaced by poverty and land conflict and orphaned at young ages, the only connections we have to these places are my father’s Zapotec and Spanish surnames: Yade’, Sánchez, and Acevedo. My mother is right. My father and I are no longer considered Yojoveños or Yatenses despite our origins in those communities.²¹ We became Solagueños. This is because to belong and to be recognized as members of Serrano communities, one must partake in communal life. As autonomous Indigenous communities, Yojovi and Yateé have the authority to determine community membership. As much as I consider people from Yojovi and Yateé my paisanos, I concede that I am not a Yojoveña or a Yatense. When I am in Yojovi, which is only a fifteen-minute drive from Solaga, I become hyperaware that I am and feel like a Solagueña. Yojoveños see me and I see myself as a Solagueña because of my sustained connection to Solaga and Solagueños. I am no longer connected to Yojovi or Yateé in the same way.²² Some might ask how I and other diasporic Solagueños can claim membership to this Indigenous community if belonging is premised on physical presence and active participation in the community. By virtue of living outside of our ancestral homeland, these connections should be severed. Nevertheless, diasporic Solagueños have adapted Indigenous practices of belonging to their lives in diaspora, allowing Solagueños and their children to maintain their connection to their homeland.²³

There are approximately six hundred Solagueños residing in Los Angeles, California, including first-generation immigrants, their children, and grandchildren. We are part of an estimated two hundred fifty thousand Oaxacans living in Los Angeles.²⁴ In Los Angeles, it is rare for the children and grandchildren of Solagueños to speak Zapotec. I am one of a few Los Angeles-born Solagueños that can communicate in Zapotec beyond a few words or expressions. The 2020 Mexican census recorded that 80.99 percent of Solaga’s population were Indigenous language speakers.²⁵ Some might say this makes these Solagueños “less Indigenous.” However, in Solaga and in diaspora, language ideologies and processes of assimilation influence parental and individual decisions to learn or engage with Indigenous languages, as I discuss in Chapter 3. Accepting the Mexican state’s criteria for determining Indigenous identity disregards state efforts to eradicate our languages and cultures and the reality that in Indigenous communities identity does not necessarily align with language ability.²⁶The Children of Solaga instead focuses on the practices of belonging through which Solagueños determine and establish community membership, including through their participation in and enjoyment of fiestas. In doing so, diasporic Solagueños model how to build and maintain a relationship to their ancestral homeland for their children. Through community-based understandings of belonging, people who have come from many places and have had to migrate to many places have established and can still establish community membership in their ancestral homeland.

The Children of Solaga reckons with how diasporic Solagueño children and youth understand themselves as Indigenous peoples born or living outside of their homeland, as well as how non-Indigenous peoples respond to Solagueños’ Indigenous background. Importantly, Indigenous people do not stop being Indigenous, become less Indigenous,²⁷ or stop being interpolated as Indigenous once they leave their homeland. In fact, many Latinxs uphold anti-Indigenous settler ideologies from Latin America that portray Indigenous peoples as inherently different and thus inferior to mestizos, who are people of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry. For peoples whose national identities are premised on ideologies of mestizaje, or racial mixing as a defining characteristic of cultural nationalism, Blackness and Indigeneity are relegated “to backwards moves within national imaginaries and nation-building projects that seek to move towards whiteness.”²⁸ However, as Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez points out with Afro-descendant peoples, diasporic peoples “are racialized in divergent ways, depending on their ethnic or national citizenship, location and ability to move or travel, class status, phenotype, and other factors.”²⁹ In the Solagueño case, like their parents, diasporic Indigenous children and youth in Los Angeles are subjected to racial hierarchies instituted during and after colonization but most possess a settler-created status, American citizenship, which grants them privileges unavailable to their parents and ancestors. Still, as I demonstrate in Chapter 2, American citizenship does not guarantee their inclusion in American society.

Terms like “Indigenous” and “native” are relational and retrospective, since “natives” did not exist before their encounter with Europeans.³⁰ “Othering” Indigenous people allowed Europeans to justify expansion and colonization in the so-called New World. The discourse used to subjugate native peoples is similar to the tropes in American anti-immigrant discourse, which characterizes immigrants as “low class, subhuman, dangerous, foreign, morally inferior, and without history.”³¹ The similarities in anti-Indigenous and anti-immigrant tropes are not surprising, since the construction of the nation often relies on notions of inferiority and superiority. Fitzpatrick notes:

The nation must also include what it excludes. It remains connected to the other. The other, in short, becomes the nation’s double. There is a dual projection of identity onto this double. First, those characters which are contrary to the nation’s positive, or posited, being are projected onto the double, with the nation taking on a coherent identity in opposition to them.³²

The nation includes the “double,” only to bolster national identity at the expense of the double. For the Mexican nation, unassimilated Indigenous peoples represent this double. Post-independence Mexican national identity relies on the myth of the mestizo nation, the product of the encounter between two great civilizations, the Spanish and the Aztec.³³ Non-mestizos were consequently deemed “a ‘miscarriage’ of the great prehispanic cultures.”³⁴ The legacy of these negative attitudes toward Indigenous Mexicans manifests in the racism that Indigenous Mexican immigrants and their children continue to deal with at the hands of some mestizo immigrants in the United States.³⁵

While most of the diasporic Solagueño youths I interviewed were born in the United States, their American citizenship did little to shield them from the impact their Indigenous origins had on their daily lives. As the children of Indigenous immigrants and Indigenous people themselves, youth were sometimes picked on at school and ridiculed for being “Oaxaquitas,” a pejorative term used to describe Oaxacan-origin individuals with Indigenous physical features. Solagueño youth and other children of Indigenous immigrants may endure discrimination at the hands of mestizo-origin Latinxs as a result of their Indigenous language use, their lack of proficiency in English and Spanish, and their physical appearance.³⁶ In her work on undocumented Oaxacan youth, for example, Stephen has also found that Indigenous youth are racialized as inferior to their mestizo peers because of their cultural, linguistic, and geographic roots as Indigenous peoples.³⁷ As a result, Stephen argues, Indigenous cultural practices become instrumental for Indigenous immigrant youth to achieve some level of civic integration in their schools and community.

Still, others read diasporic Solagueño children and youth as “Mexicans” or Latinxs, identities that also carry negative connotations in the United States.³⁸ Diasporic Solagueño children and youth may be subject to xenophobia because of what Leo Chavez terms the Latino Threat Narrative. Proponents of this narrative assume all Mexicans, and by association all Latinxs, regardless of generation, are in the United States without authorization.³⁹ Through this narrative, not only are Latinxs portrayed as perpetual foreigners but their supposed “illegal” entry associates them with criminality, casting them as “illegal aliens.”⁴⁰ Prejudice toward Solagueños on the basis of their national origin may stem from the suspicion that Mexicans are incapable or unwilling to integrate into American society.⁴¹ The prevalence of the Latino Threat Narrative when applied to individuals who have been in the United States for several generations, however, demonstrates that racialized non-White individuals will likely always be considered foreign to the United States.

Indigenous Latinx immigrants and their children are uniquely positioned within U.S. and Latin American racial hierarchies. Solagueños’ Indigeneity precludes them from being integrated into both the Mexican and American settler-states. In other words, while Solagueños may assimilate to Mexican and American ways of life by relinquishing aspects of their ethnic and national cultures, their racial background impedes them from being part of the national imaginary. In this way, the experiences of Solagueños are that of a diasporic people—the prejudices they endure are ongoing, structural, and interpersonal, even after endless sacrifices and attempts to merge into a new national community.⁴² This difference, James Clifford argues, is what distinguishes diasporic people from immigrants who will eventually integrate into the national fold. Diasporic Solagueños may never be fully accepted as part of the national Mexican or American imaginary because of their ethnic, racial, and national background. In The Children of Solaga, however, I posit that the rejection diasporic Solagueños perceive from White Americans, Latinxs, and their co-nationals may drive their continued investment in their Indigenous identities and homeland.

Critical Latinx Indigeneities scholars have reflected on formative experiences that inform how they and their interlocutors understand identity and belonging as Indigenous peoples in diaspora.⁴⁶ Their work demonstrates how settler-imposed notions of Indigeneity and community-based understandings of belonging and identity inform millennial and emerging ways of organizing in community and redefine the types of community created in diaspora. A Critical Latinx Indigeneities framework allows scholars to explore the “creative forms of cultural cohesion” through which youth and Indigenous communities at large confront displacement and migration and ensure the survival of their distinct collectives⁴⁷ whether this be organizing around a pueblo⁴⁸ or an Indigenous ethnic identity.⁴⁹The Children of Solaga employs the Critical Latinx Indigeneities framework to understand how Solagueño practices of belonging inform how diasporic Solagueños form their identities away from their homeland and how these practices mediate Indigenous displacement and marginalization.

Settler colonialism has not been applied to a Latin American context, Shannon Speed argues, because colonialism in Latin America has been characterized by resource extraction and the marshaling of Indigenous labor. In her work on Indigenous women migrants from Mexico and Central America, Speed applies settler colonialism to Latin America, demonstrating how labor regimes in these territories facilitated Indigenous land dispossession and how the logic of elimination, a key pillar of settler colonialism, has manifested in Mexico and Central America through ideologies like mestizaje, an assimilationist project that promotes the racial mixing or cultural assimilation of Indigenous peoples as part of Latin American nation-building projects.⁵³ These nation-building projects propose that relinquishing Indigenous language and dress, along with other Indigenous markers, will improve Indigenous peoples’ lot in life. Settler logics of native elimination continue to manifest in the lives of Indigenous migrants from Latin America, Speed argues, when they cross into the United States and are interpolated through their national identities (e.g., “Mexican” or “Guatemalan”) rather than as members of Indigenous communities. For Indigenous migrants who do not speak Spanish, this interpolation can prove deadly as demonstrated by the deaths of Indigenous peoples at the hands of American law and border enforcement.⁵⁴ While the U.S. settler state may refuse or choose to not acknowledge their Indigeneity, once in the United States, Indigenous migrants must also contend with prejudice from some non-Indigenous Latinxs, who recognize their Indigeneity and discriminate against them because of the negative connotations associated with Indigenous peoples in Latin America. In the process of migration, then, U.S. and Latin American structures of class, race, and Indigeneity hybridize and create what Blackwell conceptualizes as hybrid hegemonies.⁵⁵

Many of the diasporic Solagueño youths I interviewed are, like myself, the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of braceros—men who migrated to the United States as part of the Bracero Program, a guest worker program that brought Mexican nationals to the United States from 1942 to 1964. Thus, for many of us, the first people in our families to migrate to the United States did so with authorization. Such opportunities were not available for our parents, the children and grandchildren of Solagueño braceros. Solagueño braceros worked on farms and eventually returned to Solaga at the end of their contracts. In Mexico, the 1940s and 1950s were marked by the international migration of some Indigenous groups, including the P’urépechas of Michoacán and Mixtecs and Zapotecs from Oaxaca.⁵⁹ Scholars trace this pattern of international migration from Mexico to the United States to contemporaneous changes in these countries, including the economic modernization of Mexico that displaced people from their lands and traditional forms of subsistence at the turn of the twentieth century; the integration of the American Southwest into the national economy, which created a demand for workers; and a labor shortage as a result of World War II.⁶⁰ At that time, American policy geared toward Mexico reflected the countries’ interdependent needs. For instance, the Bracero Program gave landless Mexicans employment and remedied the American labor shortage.

The recruitment of Indigenous men for the Bracero Program, some scholars argue, was another attempt by the Mexican state to assimilate its Indigenous population. Solagueños and other Indigenous immigrants who participated in the Bracero Program diversified the Mexican migrant population, since the majority of men who participated in the program prior to the recruitment of Indigenous men had been mestizos.⁶¹ The Mexican state saw the Bracero Program as an opportunity to integrate the Indigenous population into the Mexican nation.⁶² Indigenous Mexicans who participated in the Bracero Program could return as Spanish-speaking mestizos, having relinquished their Indigenous languages and dress. This logic not only reflects the Mexican state’s nationalist agenda but also how Mexico and its mestizo population imagined Mexico’s Indigenous peoples: as static, monolingual, and in need of modernization. Mestizo braceros stereotyped Solagueño braceros as a result of their Indigenous background. While my great-grandfather was a monolingual Zapotec-speaker, an ideal candidate for the Mexican state’s assimilationist program, this was not the case for all Solagueño braceros. Don Nicolás, a bracero I interviewed, remembered an exchange he had with another bracero who realized he could read when he saw him diligently checking his pay stub. He recalled the mestizo Mexican’s shock that an Indigenous person could read and write. Don Nicolás laughed as he delivered the punchline to his story: in the end, the man asked him to read letters from his family in Mexico and to check his pay stub every week to ensure he was fairly compensated for his labor. Don Nicolás found it humorous that he, who had previously been ridiculed because of his Indigenous background, became integral to this bracero’s migration project. Don Nicolás’s experience demonstrates how the Mexican state and mestizo braceros engaged racial stereotypes and hierarchies about Indigenous peoples and how these have informed Solagueño migrant experiences from the beginning of international migration.

While Don Nicolás, my great-grandfather, and other braceros eventually returned to Solaga, their children and grandchildren would be forced to emigrate from their hometown decades later albeit without the protection of a guestworker program. As Jonathan Xavier Inda observes, the end of the Bracero Program helped spark the flow of unauthorized migrants from Mexico.⁶³ Despite the termination of the program and the backlash from the influx of Mexican immigrants in the United States, there was still a demand for migrant labor.⁶⁴ Furthermore, the transportation, communication, and human infrastructure built to transport braceros to the U.S. facilitated the movement of undocumented migrants. Importantly, the recruitment of Mexican men for the Bracero Program established a relationship between Mexico and the United States, as well as a pattern of circular migration, in which men would work in the U.S. for a short period, make money, and go back to their hometown.⁶⁵ The end of the Bracero Program, however, foreclosed an avenue through which Solagueños and their Mexican compatriots could migrate to the U.S. with authorization.

While Solagueño men participated in the Bracero Program, they were part of the small fraction of transnational Oaxacans migrants since most Oaxacan migrants opted to stay within Mexican territory.⁶⁶ Indigenous Mexican displacement in the twentieth century, researchers argue, is marked by three moments: intraregional movement for seasonal work in the 1940s and 1950s, migration to cities and agro-export zones in the 1960s and 1970s, and migration to northern Mexico and to the United States with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s.⁶⁷ During the 1960s and 1970s, Oaxacans migrated to coastal plantations for seasonal work, to cities for wage labor, or to areas where there was contract work for state projects. Their displacement was driven by the Mexican government’s agrarian policy, which privileged large-scale irrigation projects rather than subsistence farming; the price controls that lowered the market value of maize; and the increasing availability of jobs in Mexico’s urban centers.⁶⁸ Impacted by these crises and finding themselves unable to make ends meet in their hometown as subsistence farmers in the 1960s and 1970s, Solagueños migrated to Oaxaca City and Mexico City in search of employment. Some Solagueños settled in these cities, while others decided to venture to the United States. Don Mauricio shared his experience as one of the first Solagueños to migrate and eventually settle in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Without the social network on which subsequent generations of Solagueño immigrants relied upon arriving in Los Angeles, Don Mauricio struggled to find work. Don Mauricio and his compadre Cristobal, also from Solaga, eventually found work at a restaurant in the Westwood area of Los Angeles where they worked as butchers until the location went out of business. Finding themselves jobless after two years in the U.S., they decided to return to Solaga. While Don Mauricio did not fare too well during his first trip to Los Angeles, he eventually returned to Los Angeles and encouraged others to try their luck in the U.S. In fact, many of Solaga’s first transnational migrants would return to their hometown, assemble a group of Solagueños who wanted to make the journey to the U.S., and depart for the United States. As in other Indigenous communities, migration became a common strategy through which individuals, families, and communities sought economic well-being.⁶⁹

When Don Mauricio made his way to Los Angeles a second time, he found his paisano Lucas relying on work from a temp agency. Lucas first migrated from Solaga to Mexico City and later made his way to Los Angeles. His arrival in Los Angeles was integral to Solagueños’ entry into the dry-cleaning industry. His experience operating a dry-cleaning business in Mexico City gave him the skills necessary to work in this sector in Los Angeles. As a result, dry-cleaning became an immigrant niche occupation, in which Solagueños used their social networks to learn their trade and find employment. Hometown networks facilitated Solagueños’ entry into the dry-cleaning industry and made it easy for potential employers to find workers using these same networks. During his search for work his first time in Los Angeles, Don Mauricio stumbled upon a dry-cleaning business looking for workers. Recalling this and Don Lucas’s experience in this industry, Don Mauricio persuaded Lucas to leave his work at the temp agency to go into dry-cleaning in Los Angeles.

While Don Mauricio did not have the skills necessary to work in the dry-cleaning industry, Lucas’s arrival in Los Angeles provided Don Mauricio and other Solagueño immigrants with a niche industry in which they could work. With an established network of Solagueños at dry-cleaning businesses, future waves of Solagueño immigrants had an easier time finding jobs. Solagueños working at dry cleaners across Los Angeles taught new Solagueño arrivals how to use industrial machines to iron clothing, which they called “yendo a la práctica,” or going to practice. Once they learned their trade, Solagueños would start working at other dry-cleaning businesses. While the promise of a higher wage persuaded Don Lucas and other Solagueño immigrants to work in dry-cleaning, their wages were and are still relatively low. The pay rate among dry-cleaning workers within the Solagueño community still varies according to legal status, with undocumented workers often making less than documented workers, as in most industries. Research has shown that working conditions are worse for undocumented workers vis-à-vis their documented counterparts.⁷⁰ In addition, the jobs available to undocumented workers are less likely to give them access to sick days, overtime, and health benefits.⁷¹ Dry-cleaning also has little room for promotion. For instance, if individuals enter the industry as pressers, as most Solagueños do, they likely remain in that position. Solagueños’ work as pressers in dry-cleaning businesses is also physically grueling. Many Solagueños began working in these positions as teenagers or young adults. As they grow older, they are less likely to be hired as pressers or are given only part-time work. Still, many strive to own their own dry-cleaning businesses, but few are able to so.⁷² Importantly, although working in this physically demanding sector may structure Solagueño lives, it does not define or consume Solagueño existence. Indeed, Solagueños’ ancestral way of life connects them to a world where they are more than commodified labor. For this reason, The Children of Solaga focuses on el goce comunal, or the communal joy Solagueños engage in through the spaces they have created to celebrate their hometown and communal identities in diaspora.

My work extends this rich body of work by focusing on the transborder lives and practices of the children of Indigenous immigrants, paying particular attention to how youth have become central to diasporic Solagueño community life. Rather than framing Indigenous experiences in terms of binaries (e.g., Solagueño or Mexican identities and Indigenous or modern) and reinscribing ideas about Indigenous people as static that occlude Mexican efforts to assimilate them, The Children of Solaga recognizes the fluidity of Oaxacans’ identities. Contrary to scholars’ supposition that Oaxacan immigrants would be unsuccessful in their efforts to transmit their cultural practices to their children,⁷⁴ this book demonstrates that they have been so successful in these endeavors that their children have become indispensable to the reproduction of Indigenous Oaxacan community life in the United States.

The extensive literature on Oaxacan migration reflect a history of displacement of Indigenous peoples from Oaxaca. More recent work on Indigenous Oaxacan migration demonstrates that Indigenous migrants’ experiences continue to be shaped by racial inequalities. Seth Holmes’s Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies discusses the structural and racial inequality Triqui immigrants experience in agricultural farms and how these inequalities become normalized. Holmes describes his work as an “ethnography of suffering” and suggests that Triquis are forced to migrate to escape slow, communal death in their communities of origin.⁷⁵ Indeed, recent works on Indigenous migration detail the increasingly difficult conditions Indigenous peoples endure in their countries of origin, including state and police violence, economic exploitation, and racial discrimination, and how these lead them to migrate to the United States in increasing numbers.⁷⁶ Lauren Heidbrink’s Migranthood discusses the effects of U.S. and foreign intervention on Indigenous Guatemalans, who have resorted to migration as a collective and historically rooted survival strategy against racism, historical violence, and intergenerational structural inequality in Guatemala. Migranthood complicates the narrative that the arrival of 70,000 Central American children at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2014 was an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Instead, Heidbrink argues, it was in fact a policy crisis long in the making and largely a result of U.S. economic and political intervention in Central America.⁷⁷ Shannon Speed’s Incarcerated Stories delves into the interpersonal and state violence that Indigenous women from Mexico and Central America endure before, during, and after their migration to the United States. Speed argues that neoliberal economic and political policies make Indigenous women vulnerable to violence. This violence is continuously reinforced by settler-imposed racial and gender ideologies.⁷⁸

The aforementioned texts study Indigenous migrants in transit. Speed notes that this focus distinguishes her own work from previous work on Indigenous immigrants, which tend to center immigrants who settled in the U.S. These texts, however, focus on the experiences of first-generation Indigenous immigrants and take their informants’ Indigenous identity as a given. The children of Indigenous immigrants differ from their parents’ generation because, for the most part, they no longer possess the traditional markers by which people are labeled as Indigenous, including living in an Indigenous town or speaking an Indigenous language. Thus, The Children of Solaga shows how children and youth construct and negotiate their Indigenous identities with their racial, ethnic, community, and national identities away from their ancestral homeland. Written by a member of the community being studied, The Children of Solaga delivers a nuanced take on the lives of Indigenous immigrants and their children with attention toward Indigenous resistance and resurgence. While we undoubtedly experience pain, we are still capable of joy.

The Children of Solaga focuses on joy for two reasons. First and foremost, a focus on joy is a nod toward Indigenous futurity and a shift from a focus on the pain we experience as Indigenous peoples.⁷⁹ Despite multiple and continuous attempts to eradicate our cultures, our communities and identities persist. The fact that Solagueños have reappropriated practices rooted in colonization and transformed them into joyous ways to transmit their cultural and community values across generations and borders is not to be dismissed. Second, such a reclamation of joy is part of “the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.”⁸⁰ While The Children of Solaga focuses on joy, the marginalization Indigenous Latinxs and other marginalized peoples experience in their homelands and abroad undoubtedly shape how they navigate the world. When our Indigenous identities are stigmatized across space, time, and generation to rejoice in who we are and where we come from is the most revolutionary and transformative act of all.

During the course of my fieldwork, I often found myself in tears. These tears, however, were tears of joy. I was in awe that despite Mexican and American assimilationist projects and the anti-Indigenous discrimination Solagueños have encountered for multiple generations, Solagueños remained undeterred. Diasporic Solagueño children and youth’s participation in the band and traditional danzas, as well as their incorporation of Solagueño culture into rites of passage like quinceañeras, demonstrated their connection to and pride in their Indigenous culture. The Children of Solaga strives to capture the joy and fulfillment Solagueños experience across generations through their participation in communal life.

The Children of Solaga reflects el goce comunal, or the communal joy diasporic Solagueños experience through their communal practices, particularly from celebrations in honor of their community’s patron saints. Following Mixe and Zapotec thinkers, I understand fiestas and the communal enjoyment of fiestas as acts of resistance.⁸¹ While scholars have reduced fiestas to social and economic leveling mechanisms in Indigenous communities,⁸² Indigenous Oaxacans emphasize the role of fiestas in bringing a pueblo together to stage celebrations, share in the fruits of their collective labor, renew their collective hopes, and reaffirm the collective.⁸³Fiestas can only occur through an engagement in communal practices of belonging through which Solagueños claim belonging across generations and borders. Importantly, an emphasis on engagement in communal practices highlights that for Indigenous scholars and community members, belonging is not predicated on residing in an Indigenous community, speaking an Indigenous language, or wearing traditional attire.

While written in a romantic context, Mixe songwriter and musician Honorio Cano’s song, “Soy de un pueblo alegre,” articulates the fallacy in thinking that Indigenous peoples’ lives are enveloped by suffering when we have so much to celebrate, including our provenance in pueblos alegres, or joyous communities. Cano’s song has become part of a vast musical repertoire in Oaxaca’s Sierra Juarez and its diaspora. This repertoire includes sones and jarabes, classical or orchestral pieces, religious cantos, and popular Mexican cumbias, boleros, and norteño music. Most of the music Serrano bands perform does not have lyrics. With the contemporary rise of songs penned in Spanish or Indigenous languages spoken in the region, including Cano’s songs, some bands now also sing when they perform these songs. Solagueño musicians, or wekuell, are renowned for their musicianship among Serranos. Over generations, they have developed a distinct sound that memorializes the maestros that have influenced what diasporic wekuell call the “Solaga style,” a style of playing that has become associated with their homeland. Solagueño wekuell maintain this unique sound across borders, and in doing so allow us as Solagueños to rejoice and take pride in our distinct communal and sonic identities.

To experience el goce comunal is to “await the fiesta anxiously, to experience it how you want to experience it, and to reminisce about it when it’s over,” one community member, Isaac, told me. For Isaac, communal joy is ephemeral and idiosyncratic, yet annual patron saint celebrations set the stage for Solagueños who now live in different places to come together in celebration of their communal identity across time, generation, and, as a result of displacement, across borders. Settler states not only have constructed a world where Indigenous peoples must migrate for their own and their collective survival, but also have instituted systems of domination in which Indigenous identities are stigmatized. Through their sonic practices, young musicians create a space and a means through which their diasporic community can mediate the alienation these systems of domination engender. Fiestas and Indigenous practices of belonging through which fiestas are organized provide a haven for Solagueños and their children to be connected with their ancestors, their paisanos, and with their ancestral homeland.

Notes

1. As Rubén Rumbaut (“Immigration, Incorporation, and Generational Cohorts in Historical Contexts”) notes, “International migration is a powerful and transformative force, producing profound social changes not only in the sending and receiving societies, but, above all, among the immigrants themselves and their descendants” (53). Thus, I employ migration scholars’ use of immigrant generations, including first, 1.5, and second. I do this not to indicate how far removed Solagueños are from original migrations or the conditions that produced these migrations, as scholars originally intended, but because they are indicative of more than nascency. For a community whose first-generation immigrant population likely migrated without authorization, immigrant generation is linked to citizenship and the ability to move freely across borders.

2. The Children of Solaga employs the concept of diaspora to stress the diasporic nature of Solagueño life. Diaspora has been defined as “a transnational community whose members (or their ancestors) emigrated or were dispersed from their original homeland but remain oriented to it and preserve a group identity” (Grossman, “Toward a Definition of Diaspora,” 1267). In referring to the Solagueño diaspora, I acknowledge that some Solagueños, their children, and their grandchildren have lived outside of their Indigenous homeland for several generations. Solagueños live in Oaxaca City, Mexico City, and Los Angeles, California, yet remain oriented to their homeland. Having community members who live in diaspora informs how the community has come to determine belonging and how diasporic Solagueños attempt to build and maintain ties to their homeland. Importantly, this orientation to homeland is grounded in Serrano ways of being and knowing the world, and the preservation of communal identities that are re-created and created in diaspora.

3. Stephen, “Indigenous Transborder Citizenship,” 134.

4. I use diasporic Solagueños to identify Solagueños living away of their homeland regardless of immigrant generation. I use diasporic Solagueño children and youth to identify the children of Solagueño immigrants who grow up or are born away from their ancestral homeland.

5. Martínez Luna, Comunalidad y desarrollo.

6. Solagueños’ Zapotec last names may recognize the ancestral origins of a family (like my father’s), may be the Zapotec surname of a Solagueño family (like my maternal grandfather’s and my mother’s), reflect the Zapotec version of a Spanish surname (like my maternal grandmother’s), or may be based on one’s or an ancestor’s nickname.

7. When I was a child, relatives and community members often gifted me with fruit and eggs that were da walhall, or grown or produced in Solaga. In emphasizing that they were da walhall, gift givers stressed that their gifts were humble, yet precious because they were local to the community.

8. Hurtado, Intersectional Chicana Feminisms.

9. Archuleta, “I Give You Back.”

10. Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras; Hurtado, Intersectional Chicana Feminisms; Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus.

11. Shkodriani and Gibbons, “Individualism and Collectivism among University Students in Mexico and the United States,” 766.

12. Diaz-Loving and Draguns, “Culture, Meaning, and Personality in Mexico and in the United States.” These different understandings of the self reflect Western and Indigenous ways of understand the world, including thinking of the world from the perspective of the individual and thinking about the world from a collective perspective (Martínez Luna, “Conocimiento y comunalidad”).

13. Huang et al., “Transnational Leisure Experience of Second-generation Immigrants.”

14. Individuals born abroad and brought to the United States as children.

15. Tsuda, “Is Native Anthropology Really Possible?”

16. Solagueños and people from neighboring communities use Zoolaga to refer to Solaga when conversing with Zapotec speakers. However, Solagueños and Serranos usually refer to the community and community members as Solaga and Solagueños, respectively. As a result, I use Solaga throughout this text.

17. “San Andrés Solaga,” n.d., Gobierno de Mexico, https://www.economia.gob.mx/datamexico/es/profile/geo/san-andres-solaga#population-and-housing.

18. United States Census Bureau, Los Angeles city, California, Data.Census. Gov, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/losangelescitycalifornia/PST045222 (February 23, 2024).

19. Kummels, Indigeneity in Real Time.

20. Celis et al. San Andrés Solaga: Lugar de hojas regadas.

21. Sánchez and Martínez, my grandfather’s surnames, are common among Yojoveños. I often try to bond with Yojoveños who share my last name and suggest we might be related because my grandfather was born there. Their response is always the same: they did not know my grandfather and we are not related. Instead, they stress my connection to my mother’s sister, a Solagueña who married a Yojoveño, and to Solaga.

22. If I formed a sustained relationship with Yojovi and actively participated in Yojoveño communal life, I could be reincorporated into Yojovi just like my ancestors were incorporated into Solaga through their participation in communal institutions.

23. I would even argue my involvement in Solagueño communal life began during my first trip to Solaga as my mother modeled what it is like to participate in communal life through participation in patron saint celebrations.

24. Kresge, “Indigenous Oaxacan Communities in California: An Overview.”

25. While Solaga is a Zapotec community, people from Zapotec and Mixes communities have settled in the town.

26. Saldívar and Walsh, “Racial and Ethnic Identities in Mexican Statistics.”

27. Welchman Gegeo, “Cultural Rupture and Indigeneity”; Aikau, “Indigeneity in the Diaspora”; Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta, “Critical Latinx Indigeneities.”

28. Figueroa-Vásquez, Decolonizing Diasporas, 9. The word indio continues to be used as a derogatory slur, since it carries connotations of backwardness, anti-progress, and retrogradation (Friedlander, “The Secularization of the Cargo System”; Kearney, “Transnational Oaxacan Indigenous Identity”; Wilson, “Cultural Politics of Race and Ethnicity”). Along with previous research, I found that negative connotations associated with people of Indigenous origin carry over to the United States, where some mestizo immigrants and their children continue to discriminate against other immigrants because of their Indigenous origin (Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta, “Critical Latinx Indigeneities”; Kearney, “Transnational Oaxacan Indigenous Identity”; Ortiz and Pombo, “Indigenous Migration in Mexico and Central America Interethnic Relations and Identity Transformations”; Stephen, Transborder Lives).

29. Figueroa-Vásquez, Decolonizing Diasporas, 9.

30. Tuhiwai Smith, “The Native and the Neoliberal Down Under.”

31. Leo Chavez, Covering Immigration, 295.

32. Fitzpatrick, “We know what it is when you do not ask us,” 10.

33. Gamio, Forjando Patria.

34. Ortiz Elizondo and Hernández Castillo, “Constitutional Amendments and New Imaginings of the Nation,” 60.

35. Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies; Kearney, “Transnational Oaxacan Indigenous Identity.”

36. Barillas-Chón, “Oaxaqueño/a Students’ (Un)Welcoming High School Experiences”; Ruiz and Barajas, “Multiple Perspectives on the Schooling of Mexican Indigenous Students in the US”; Urrieta, “Las identidades también lloran/Identities Also Cry.”

37. Stephen, Transborder Lives.

38. Dolores Inés Casillas, Sounds of Belonging.

39. Leo Chavez, The Latino Threat.

40. Importantly, scholars and activists have challenged the use of “illegal” in public discourse by pointing toward the role of the U.S. state in the production of illegality. Revisions to immigration law, for example, have diminished the possibilities for Mexicans to migrate to the U.S. legally “and thus played an instrumental role in the production of a legally vulnerable undocumented workforce of ‘illegal aliens’” (De Genova, “The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant ‘Illegality,’” 161).

41. Chavez, The Latino Threat.

42. Clifford, “Diasporas”; Sanchez, “Racial and Structural Discrimination toward the Children of Indigenous Mexican Immigrants.”

43. Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta, “Critical Latinx Indigeneities.”

44. Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta, “Critical Latinx Indigeneities”; Boj Lopez, “Mobile Archives of Indigeneity”; Speed, “States of Violence: Indigenous Women Migrants in the Era of Neoliberal Multicriminalism.”

45. Urrieta, Mesinas, and Martínez, “Critical Latinx Indigeneities and Education,” 7; see also Urrieta, “Diasporic Community Smartness.”

46. Alberto, “Coming Out as Indian”; Boj Lopez, “Mobile Archives of Indigeneity”; Nicolas, “Soy de Zoochina: Zapotecs across Generations”; Sánchez-López, “Learning from the paisanos”; Urrieta, “Identity, Violence, and Authenticity.”

47. Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta, “Critical Latinx Indigeneities,” 130.

48. Nicolas, “Soy de Zoochina: Zapotecs across Generations.”

49. Boj Lopez, “Mobile Archives of Indigeneity.”

50. Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta, “Critical Latinx Indigeneities”; Speed, Incarcerated Stories.

51. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”; Smithers, “What Is an Indian?”; Calderón, “Uncovering Settler Grammars in Curriculum”; O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting.

52. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 388.

53. Speed, Incarcerated Stories.

54. Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta, “Critical Latinx Indigeneities”; Speed, Incarcerated Stories.

55. Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta, “Critical Latinx Indigeneities.”

56. Heidbrink, Migranthood; Speed, Incarcerated Stories.

57. Speed, Incarcerated Stories.

58. Fox and Rivera-Salgado, “Building Civil Society among Indigenous Migrants”; Blackwell et al., “Critical Latinx Indigeneities”; Gegeo, “Cultural Rupture and Indigeneity.”

59. Rivera-Salgado, “Transnational Indigenous Communities: The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Kearney.”

60. Massey et al., Return to Aztlan.

61. Cardoso, Mexican Emigration to the United States 1897–1931; Rivera-Salgado, “Transnational Indigenous Communities: The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Kearney.”

62. Loza, Defiant Braceros.

63. Inda, Targeting Immigrants.

64. Massey et al., Return to Aztlan.

65. Massey, Durand, and Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors.

66. Cohen, “Transnational Migration in Rural Oaxaca, Mexico: Dependency, Development, and the Household.”

67. Ortiz and Pombo, “Indigenous Migration in Mexico and Central America Interethnic Relations and Identity Transformations.”

68. Cohen, “Transnational Migration in Rural Oaxaca, Mexico: Dependency, Development, and the Household.”

69. Cohen, The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico.

70. Passel and Cohn, Mexican Immigrants.

71. Yoshikawa, Suárez-Orozco, and Gonzales, “Unauthorized Status and Youth Development in the United States.”

72. The majority of Solagueño immigrants, male and female, work as dry cleaners. Some Solagueño immigrants work as janitors and some Solagueñas work as housekeepers or nannies.

73. Michael Kearney’s “Transnational Oaxacan Indigenous Identity: The Case of Mixtecs and Zapotecs” and Lynn Stephen’s Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon; Leo Chavez’s Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society and Seth Holmes’s Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States; Fox and Rivera-Salgado, Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States.

74. Fox and Rivera-Salgado, Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States; Cruz-Manjarrez, Zapotecs on the Move.

75. Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies.

76. Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta, “Critical Latinx Indigeneities”; Speed, “States of Violence: Indigenous Women Migrants in the Era of Neoliberal Multicriminalism.”

77. Heidbrink, Migranthood.

78. Speed, Incarcerated Stories; Speed, “States of Violence: Indigenous Women Migrants in the Era of Neoliberal Multicriminalism.”

79. Boj Lopez, “Discovering Dominga: Indigenous Migration and the Logics of Indigenous Displacement.”

80. brown, Pleasure Activism, 13. Angeliza Sanchez, then an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, first introduced me to the concept of pleasure activism through a grant for her research on Zapotec wedding practices from San Bartolomé Quialana. Leisy Abrego has also pointed to the connections between my conceptualization of el goce comunal and pleasure activism.

81. Gil, “Mujeres indígenas, fiesta y participación política.”

82. Friedlander, “The Secularization of the Cargo System”; Kummels, Indigeneity in Real Time.

83. Gil, “Mujeres indígenas, fiesta y participación política”; Ramos Morales, “La propiedad comunal y el acceso a los recursos naturales.”