The Latin American Indigenous Diaspora: Mapping Indigenous LA

Our round table brings together scholars and community activists who are collaborating in the Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles Project (MILA) co-directed by Maylei Blackwell, Mishuana Goeman, and Wendy Teeter at UCLA. ... [ view full abstract ]

Our round table brings together scholars and community activists who are collaborating in the Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles Project (MILA) co-directed by Maylei Blackwell, Mishuana Goeman, and Wendy Teeter at UCLA. Participants will share their research in collaboratively creating a digital storytelling map for the Latin American Indigenous Diaspora in Los Angeles that includes an estimated 200,000 Zapotec and Mayan indigenous people in the city. As scholars who write about indigenous disapora, our collective work is to create new conceptual frames that critically engage settler colonial logics as well as the overlapping colonialities of Latin America and the US. These critical frameworks take into account the forms of anti-Indian racism that indigenous migrants confront often in relation to mestizo migrant counterparts as the racial hierarchies of Mexico and Guatemala also migrate. These systems then get mapped onto a US racial hegemony forming new forms of hybrid racial hegemonies. These forms of misery have also included police killings, labor exploitation, sexual exploitation, family separation, and racial violence.

Our work makes visible the multiple ways of resistance indigenous migrants and their children critically disrupting how notions of Latino identity have subsumed or erased indigeneity. However, by virtue of being migrants, what it means to be indigenous is both intricately tied to how these identities are embedded in notions of territoriality and formed within the historical context of their sending nations as well as how the experience of dislocation and mobility have produced new forms of indigenous consciousness and transborder cultural, civic, and community practices. Indigenous migrants from Latin America mobilize particular forms of activism and scholarship that pushes the boundaries of U.S. Latino Studies. This increasingly indigenous diaspora from Latin America continues to shift and complicate the categories of indigeneitity and latinidad.

The MILA project brings together the layered geography of indigenous Los Angeles includes Tongva/Gabrilenos who struggle for recognition of their sacred spaces, American Indians who were removed from their lands and displaced through governmental policies of relocation and termination, and indigenous diasporas from Latin America and Oceania which have been displaced by militarism, neoliberal economic policies, and overlapping colonial histories. While many would argue that there is not one Los Angeles but multiple LAs, what is less known is that there are multiple indigenous LAs, whose histories are layered into the fabric of the city and are often folded into other racial formations such as Latino or Asian Pacific Islander. Our roundtable explores how the original peoples of the Los Angeles- basin (and islands) relate specifically to this land and how subsequent relocations and migrations of indigenous peoples have reworked space, place and meaning.