The Path to Montezuma: The Political Economy of Indianness and Blackness

Abstract

This paper will attempt to identify and discuss the following issues: (1) the concepts of African American and Native American identities as aspects of the mode of production in Euro-American or Western capitalism, specifically as employed by the former North American colonies that now comprise the United States, as well as the United States during the modern era; (2) How these identities in the form of “Blackness” and “Indianness” were utilized to establish Euro-American capitalism in the modern era; (3) The concept of political and economic upheaval in the form of what I have dubbed the “Montezuma Effect”; and finally, (4) how mental and physical maroon spaces within the overlapping realms of Indianness and Blackness present the potentiality of a Montezuma Effect to take hold in modern capitalism.