Studying in Relation: Critical Latinx Indigeneities and Education

ABSTRACT

Guided by critical ethnic studies and critical Indigenous studies, we engage analytical work to tease out how multiple colonial projects have implications for Latinx educational practice. Given the increase of ethnic studies curricula in K–12, we introduce in this article the theoretical framework of Critical Latinx Indigeneities (CLI) to educational debates around Latinx equity. We contemplate what it means to leave behind concepts such as mestizaje and indigenismo as analytical tools because of their “imperial durability” that we argue renders them incommensurable with Indigenous Latinx students. Finally, we explore the implications for Latinx equity agendas and conclude with how CLI might position us to engage ethnic studies approaches that can speak to the diversity of Latinx experiences. We see this as a necessary conversation in education and hope that our work will incite meaningful and robust conversations around the issues we center here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Settler colonialism is a type of colonialism that came about when Europeans settled on Indigenous lands and displaced them, constructing ideologies and structures to maintain settler dominance. Settler Colonial theory has emerged as a powerful critique within Indigenous studies, in part, because it is defined as “a structure not an event” (Wolfe, 1999, p. 2). Indigenous studies scholars have expanded the concept of settler colonialism in the development of structural critiques that are representative of what is now termed CIS (Barker, 2011; Byrd, 2011; Coulthard, 2014; Grande, 2015; Simpson 2014). Although the logic of elimination was initially coined by Wolfe (1999) as a key logic of settler colonialism, scholars like Mark Rifkin (2014) and Jean O’Brien (2010) have done work to explicitly chart its discursive power in becoming widespread and functioning in “the ways the legal and political structures that enable nonnative access to Indigenous territories come to be lived as given, as simply the unmarked, generic conditions of possibility for occupancy, association, history, and personhood” (Rifkin, 2014, p. xvi).

2. Spanish Caste Colonialism was the legal system that placed people by race in different social categories (i.e., Indian, Black, Spanish, Mestizo, and so forth). These categories had power attached to them, defining who could own property, who had no power. Generally, Indians and Blacks were at the bottom of this system while Spanish were at the top (Deans-Smith, 2019).

3. https://theaggie.org/2019/04/19/native-american-studies-department-native-american-elders-express-dismay-with-manetti-shrem-exhibit/.

4. https://theaggie.org/2019/05/31/xicanx-futurity-exhibition-comes-to-an-end-native-american-students-discuss-future-actions/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dolores Calderón

Dolores Calderón is an associate professor at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University. As a researcher who embodies the complicated subjectivities of the U.S./Mexico border—Mexican (settler/arrivant), Indigenous (Pueblo), and U.S. citizen—she is interested in researching and participating in work that untangles and unpacks the complicated way multiple colonialisms impact decolonial thinking and practices in educational curriculum. Her work aims to expose problematics often overlooked in larger educational research.

Luis Urrieta

Luis Urrieta, Jr. is an Indigenous (P’urhépecha)/Latinx interdisciplinary researcher, born in the barrios of Los Angeles, but with family origins in San Miguel Nocutzepo and Tócuaro, Michoacán, Mexico. He is currently the Suzanne B. and John L. Adams Endowed Professor of Education at the University of Texas at Austin. Urrieta is specifically interested in Chicanx, Latinx and Indigenous cultures, Indigenous migrations, Indigenous knowledge systems, learning in family and community context, activism, and oral and narrative methodologies.