Almanacs and Uprisings: History Writing and Indigenous Land Reclamation in New Mexico

This paper explores questions of writing, social movements, and the coalitional politics of Chicana/o-Indigenous struggle in New Mexico. The New Mexican land grant reclamation movement, La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, is... [ view full abstract ]

This paper explores questions of writing, social movements, and the coalitional politics of Chicana/o-Indigenous struggle in New Mexico. The New Mexican land grant reclamation movement, La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, is recognized as a seminal organization of the Chicana/o movement known for its controversial president, Reies López Tijerina, and its armed raid of the Tierra Amarilla courthouse in 1967. My paper explores Tijerina’s life-story, Mi lucha por la tierra (1978), a generically hybrid text that mobilizes aspects of memoir, legal critique, historiography, and sacred prophesy. While scholarly treatments of Mi lucha generally reduce its hybrid use of genre into memoir or autobiography, I stake out a distinct approach to the formal politics of Mi lucha by way of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel of Indigenous land reclamation, Almanac of the Dead (1994). I turn to Almanac of the Dead for its theorization of the “almanac” as an analytic for a historiographical practice that estranges colonial languages and mediums into vehicles for Indigenous insurrection against settler colonial sovereignty. I argue that the metaphor of the “Almanac” offers a powerful hermeneutic that enables a reconsideration of Mi lucha not merely as a transparent account of Tijerina’s life but rather as a fragmented and contradictory meditation on the politics of history writing as a fugitive and prophetic labor challenging conditions of occupation by overlaid colonial orders. In this way, I trace an uncanny convergence between the two texts and outline a reading practice that centers writing as a social movement technology for Indigenous land reclamation.