U.S. Latin@ Critical Futurities: Decolonizing Political Ontologies and Praxes Rooted in Settler Logics of Genocide, Slavery, and Sovereignty

Each participant in this roundtable will receive ten minutes to share provocative remarks and questions meant to engage attendees in a dialogue about the predicaments we encounter when we inhabit or assume Latinidad while... [ view full abstract ]

Each participant in this roundtable will receive ten minutes to share provocative remarks and questions meant to engage attendees in a dialogue about the predicaments we encounter when we inhabit or assume Latinidad while simultaneously seeking to dismantle the settler colonial, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal social structure of our Latin@ communities and of the U.S. as a whole.

María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo will ask us to think about how white settler colonialism could be re-imagined through the experience of contemporary immigrants from Latin America. She observes that a growing number of indigenous peoples from Mexico and Central America make the dangerous trek north because of shifting economic and political conditions in their home countries, and will prompt us to discuss how Latin@ studies scholars are in a unique position to rethink what it means to be "settler" and "native" in the era of indigenous migration.

Antonieta Mercado will interrogate the practices of transnational citizenship by indigenous migrants from Mexico in the United States and how they have reinvented community belonging, civic engagement, and identity through their daily activities and their interaction with the policies of two nation-states. Practices of direct democracy by indigenous communities have shaped the way they relate to their sending and receiving communities, transforming them as they go and reinventing cosmopolitanism from the grassroots. Mercado will elaborate on the work of the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations, an organization that has been organizing indigenous migrants for over two decades across borders and has contributed to a broader transcontinental movement of civil rights and indigeneity.

Amrah Salomon J. will propose that we consider the transcolonial region of California as a location that disrupts narratives of Anglo settler colonialism as separate from Spanish and other European colonialisms. She invites us to examine the ontological position of brownness within the debates on settler colonialism and antiblackness as a category of disappearance and as a location of colonial reproduction, yet also as a potential location of radical fugitivity and refusal. Her work weighs the anticolonial possibilities that can emerge from a conversation between radical fugitivities, Indigenous sovereignty, abolition, and decolonial autonomy in political moments such as the current movement against the canonization of Junipero Serra.

Roberto D. Hernández will prompt us to think about how Latinidad has inherited intra-community logics of power and domination. This idea has been largely understood as a category and concept that brings together a diverse array of socio-historical and national-territorial identities and cultures loosely bound by the shared experience of Spanish Colonialism, as well as by modern/colonial and U.S. racial logics of genocide/epistemicide and antiblackness. Hernández will propose a different idea of Latinidad based on Cesaire’s notion of pluriversality as a mediating mechanism for the facilitating of a truly inter-civilizational and inter-epistemic dialogue.

Finally, José I. Fusté provokes us to think about the intrinsically protean nature of Afro-Latinidad as a political rallying banner, particularly in how Afro-Latin@s are simultaneously exhorted to align with contradictory Black (inter)nationalist versus Latin@/Latin American pan-ethnic and colorblind nationalist projects.