Indigenous borders: contesting the nation-state, belonging and racialization

This special issue focuses on Indigenous peoples’ contemporary social, cultural, and political struggles in the context of borderlands. Many Indigenous peoples’ lives span state borders imposed over ancestral lands. They are aiming to re-construct ‘territories’ across state borders as Indigenous ‘cross-border nations’. This is the case, for example, of the Mapuche across the Chile-Argentine border, the Tohono O’odham across the US-Mexico border, and the Maya-Mam across the Guatemala-Mexico border. The nation-state framework itself is a construction that maps the idea of a singular ‘imagined community’ within the bordered limits of the state (Anderson 1991; Wimmer and Schiller 2002), but the nation-state framework elides contemporary struggles of Indigenous peoples seeking recognition as nations within states and across state borders.

Indigenous peoples intersect with state borders in multiple ways. We typologize such intersections as follows:

1. Indigenous peoples with territories that have been divided by state borders.

2. Indigenous peoples who—through dispossession and displacement, historic migrations, state violence, and other reasons—have established or worked toward establishing territories, homelands, or settlements across state borders.

3. Indigenous individuals and families who have crossed state borders away from their Indigenous homelands.

Our focus for this special issue is on the first two categories. The articles focus on various social, cultural, and political struggles within regions where Indigenous territories and homelands intersect with or cross over state borders. The experiences of Indigenous migrants moving locally or internationally provide a particular lens to think about borders (see, e.g. Cruz-Manjarrez 2013; Stephen 2007; Velasco Ortiz 2005); however, this issue aims to highlight how Indigenous peoples navigate the political, social, and cultural realities of intersecting state borders and homelands. This includes Indigenous peoples whose ancestral territories were divided by one or more state border(s) and those who have built communities, settlements, and territory across one or more state border(s).

While there are insightful Latin Americanist publications about particular Indigenous peoples divided by borders (see, e.g. Erickson 2008; Hernández Castillo 2001, 2012; Meeks 2007; Richards 2013; Schulze 2018; Simpson 2014; Warren 2013), very few focus on the specificity of their social, political, and cultural struggles in the context of state borders and borderlands. Scholars have emphasized the ability to be seen as a ‘nation’ with a defined ‘territory’ as a critical feature of many Indigenous peoples’ self-identifications, and as a major focus of their struggles (Gardner and Richards 2017; Maddison 2015). The question of borders sits squarely at the center of this contested terrain (Naples and Mendez 2015). In this special issue, we bring together articles that shed light on the ways different Indigenous peoples navigate the fraught and imposed political topography of ‘nation-states’ and their formal borders inherited from colonial times.

The authors reveal the complex processes cross-border Indigenous communities engage in or are subjected to. These include both trans-border solidarity as well as fragmentation, pushing forth a rethinking of the nation-state. The various articles included uncover similarities, from the way Indigenous people are racialized by multiple Latin American states in their attempts to control Indigenous lands/territories, to the unique contexts and relationships they share, at the intersection of competing ideas about borders and ‘national’ belonging.

The pieces in this special issue ask us to rethink the idea of ‘territory’ and what it might mean in contested areas. They also ask us to consider the idea of ‘nation’ and how Indigenous peoples who cross borders sometimes do and sometimes do not fit into political and often racialized ‘entities’. This points to the challenges anyone faces when attempting to define Indigenous people by traits, such as their historic mobility across borders or their urban or rural locations of residence. These traits have been used by nation-states, in an ethno-normative disposition, to define, contain and manage ‘their’ Indigenous populations. Finally, these pieces point to continuities between colonial perspectives on Indigenous peoples and current state frames of reference, showing the staying power of violence against Indigenous peoples, and the endurance of discourses that paint Indigenous peoples as outsiders and unworthy of being part of the nation-state core. This discursive alterity of indigeneity has both shaped and hampered Indigenous activism for autonomy and dignity.

This special issue includes five research articles, an Otros Saberes article, and a review essay that discusses books that address Indigenous peoples across state borders. Claudia Briones and Patricio Lepe-Carrion point to troubling trends in the Chilean and Argentinean states’ reactions to Mapuche activism, particularly anti-extractivist activism. In doing so, the authors chart similarities and differences between the two nation-states in the past and now. Their work highlights the increasing militarization of state practices with Indigenous peoples. Both states have conjured Mapuche people as threats to ‘national security’, reproducing a discourse that harkens back to colonialism. Problematically, in both places, para-state agencies and other actors who inflict violence and murder upon Mapuche people face impunity for their crimes. This further ‘justifies’ the violence against Indigenous peoples who defend their territory against state-supported extractive industries. Briones and Lepe-Carrion argue that the most apparent change from the colonial era is the new way Indigenous peoples have now been identified as ‘threats’ to the nation-state and how the ‘Mapuche problem’ has been racialized. They suggest that both states wield structural racism to define the Mapuche activists as an ‘internal enemy’ and, in doing so, attempt to exculpate their violence against Mapuche communities. As Briones and Lepe-Carrion call it, this ‘dangerous racialization’ objectifies Indigenous activists whose otherness ‘threatens’ the economic order.

Indigenous decolonization struggles against the nation-state are further emphasized in Jeffrey Gardner’s analysis of how the Maya-Mam, an Indigenous people divided by the Guatemala-Mexico border, articulate Indigenous understandings of territory that span state borders. While state maps detail borders that circumscribe the Mam within a nation-state framework, the Mam are problematizing such state-centered frames of governmentality as they seek to promote unification as an Indigenous cross-border nation and defend their territory from social, cultural, and environmental harms. Gardner shows that the Mam are engaged in a dual-prong approach to articulate territory through narratives that draw upon a more holistic understanding of territory, and with the making of counter-maps that contest state borders’ preeminence. The article presents a case study that highlights how Indigenous cross-border nations are problematizing state borders and the nation-state through the adoption of strategies that both resist and refuse state-centered frames.

Kenneth Madsen’s article provides another example of an Indigenous cross-border nation problematizing state borders. It addresses how the Tohono O’odham Nation, an Indigenous people divided by the US-Mexico border, has used ‘Indigenous sovereignty’ to impact border policy. While the US federal government waived laws for border barrier construction (even across the Tohono O’odham Nation’s territory), the tribal government has confronted and challenged the efforts to increase border barriers and intensify border restrictions (including the increased militarization of the border by Customs and Border Protection [CBP]). Madsen acknowledges tribal critiques of border barriers that will impact the environment and their concerns about sustaining Indigenous cross-border connections. It also discusses tribal support for security against illicit cross-border traffic impacting the Tohono O’odham. The article highlights that the Tohono O’odham Nation has used its Indigenous sovereignty to exercise political agency in protecting its territory from external encroachment and in providing oversight of the Department of Homeland Security’s implementation of border policy on Tohono O’odham lands. Madsen provides a nuanced discussion of Indigenous sovereignty, which can become a tool for exercising collective political power (even in response to state projects that socially, culturally, and politically divide Indigenous peoples). In a broad sense, the article demonstrates how the exercise of Indigenous sovereignty can play an integral role in shaping conflict and collaboration between states and Indigenous cross-border nations.

Jorge Aponte Motta, Allison Rojas Correal, and Taciana de Carvalho Coutinho focus on the economic and social participation of Indigenous peoples in the transborder urban complex (CUT) of Brazil, Colombia, and Peru’s tri-border region of the Amazon, where several Indigenous peoples are located (e.g. the Tikuna, Tanimuka, Miraña, Andoque, Uioto, Bora, Yucana, Matzes, and Cocama, among others). The authors describe urbanization processes (production, marketing, and consumption) that highlight how cross-border production and flows from primarily Indigenous rural environments are linked to urban environments in the CUT. Their findings challenge understandings of Indigeneity that spatially confine Indigenous peoples to rural areas (e.g. countryside, forests, and jungles) by underscoring the centrality of Indigenous peoples to urban dynamics. As such, their work complicates hegemonic spatial and symbolic boundaries between ‘white-urban’ and ‘Indigenous-rural’ in the Amazon.

In his Otros Saberes article, Jose Antonio Lucero asks us to consider the productive nature of borders. He notes that borders are places of violence through both the historic and continued violence of colonialism. As such, they are imbued with power. Arbitrary nation-state borders may have been imposed on Indigenous peoples in ways that constrained their movement and shaped their realities (imposing national-level laws and schooling and language), but they have also had unintended consequences. For example, in the borderlands of Ecuador and Peru in the Amazonian lowlands, tensions between the nation-states of Ecuador and Peru helped create a unified cross-border Indigenous organization. In describing the life story and work of his Tohono O’odham collaborator, Mike Wilson, Lucero builds on his idea that borders, despite being places of violence, are also spaces of creative production. In bringing together his experiences in the Juarez/El Paso border, his research in the Amazonian lowlands, and Tohono O’odham borderland, Lucero argues that borders shape our sense of self. For Indigenous people, this means that borders profoundly disrupt and creatively reshape Indigenous identities, leading to a new constellation of practices, alliances, and knowledges.

David Shorter’s article conceptualizes ‘a borderland methodology’ that also addresses the potential for production across borders. Shorter provides a framework for learning with (rather than about) Indigenous peoples and others across boundaries (e.g. cultural, disciplinary, racial, and geographic). A borderland methodology provides a means for producing knowledge about us as part of our research. Informed by Anzaldúa’s (2007) Borderlands/La Frontera and an autoethnographic project with his great grandmother (supported by Dr. Christine Marin), Shorter draws from intimate autobiographical reflections and research with Yoeme collaborators – the Yoeme (Yaqui) are an Indigenous people who live on both sides of the US-Mexico border – to articulate several characteristics of a borderland methodology. A borderland methodology includes particularly beneficial considerations for those conducting research with Indigenous peoples across state borders, as it pushes us to develop a complete understanding of knowledge production across various symbolic and spatial boundaries.

Finally, Kellen DeAlba’s review essay covers three books on Indigenous peoples divided by state borders: Sur profundo (Hernández Castillo 2012), Cartografía cultural del Wallmapu (Pehuen, Quiñones, and Letelier 2019), and Are We Not Foreigners Here? (Schulze 2018). The books reviewed highlight histories of Indigenous peoples who have established homelands across border regions (e.g. the Q’anjob’al, Chuj, Yaqui, and Kickapoo), as well as those with ancestral territories that have been divided by contemporary borders (e.g. the Tohono O’odham, Mam, and Mapuche). The essay comments on varying socio-political conflicts between settler nation-states and Indigenous peoples across borderlands.

For Indigenous peoples divided by state borders, efforts to engage in cross-border social, cultural, and environmental projects align with Article 36 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples:

Indigenous peoples, in particular those divided by international borders, have the right to maintain and develop contacts, relations and cooperation, including activities for spiritual, cultural, political, economic and social purposes, with their own members as well as other peoples across borders. (United Nations 2007, 10)

Additionally, Article 36 notes that states should work in consultation and cooperation with Indigenous peoples to ensure the implementation of this right. While governments throughout Latin America have adopted the declaration, the realization of such rights remains in question (Maddison 2015). Within this context, the contributions in this special issue demonstrate that nation-state borders and borderlands are both sites for articulating Indigenous demands as well as ‘targets of action’ (Naples and Mendez 2015, 357–58). Moreover, the special issue points to the complex character of Indigenous struggles across symbolic and spatial borders by highlighting constraints and opportunities for social, cultural, and political production. These contributions speak to how Indigenous projects may seek to problematize – while simultaneously being shaped by – borders and borderlands.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeffrey A. Gardner

Jeffrey A. Gardner is an assistant professor of sociology at Sam Houston State University. His research interests include social movements, racial and ethnic inequality, and political sociology. His work centers on border politics in Latin America, with a focus on the collective rights struggles and collective identification of Indigenous peoples divided by contemporary state borders.

Sarah D. Warren

Sarah D. Warren is associate professor of sociology at Lewis & Clark College. She has conducted research on indigenous peoples, racialization and cross-border politics in Chile and Argentina. Her work has looked at how indigenous people construct a shared identity across nation-state borders through map-making and shared political goals. She is currently working on a project about housing policies and their impact on accessible, affordable housing.