Critical Latinx Indigeneities: Unpacking Indigeneity from Within and Outside of Latinized Entanglements

Abstract

This article engages an important, but difficult conversation about the erasure of indigeneity in narratives, curriculum, identities, and racial projects that uphold settler colonial logics that fall under the rubric of Hispanic, Latina/o/x, and Chicana/o/x. These settler colonial logics include violence by these groupings against Indigenous people, or indios, that has been part of Mexican and U.S. history in the Southwest. We examine Hispanic, Latina/o/x, and Chicana/o/x settlers’ complicity with myths that support white settler futurity, including through social studies curricula and contemporary discourses of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants. The problematics of Hispanidad and Latinidad are also engaged as part of officialized U.S. state regulation and as an expression of mestizaje based on indigenism (indigenismo). Indigenismo worked hand-in-hand with mestizaje and functioned not so much as a celebration of racial mixture, but as state eugenicist programs of Indigenous erasure throughout Latin America, and by extension in Latino communities in the U.S. Finally, we provide diverse examples of how this process works to advance a theory and praxis of Critical Latinx Indigeneities to decolonize Latinidad and mestizaje in order to envision Indigenous futurities within and outside of the Latinized entanglements of the present.