Pueblo Autonomy: Indigenous Communal Practices Across Settler Borders

Brenda Nicolas
Global and International Studies
UC Irvine

Pueblo Autonomy: Indigenous Communal Practices Across Settler Colonial Borders analyzes how Indigenous Oaxacans in California assert their autonomy, self-determination, and survival across the US-Mexico border. Using ethnography and a historical approach, I trace four generations of Indigenous transborder activism—from the 1960s to present—to argue that through their involvement in traditional dances, Oaxacan brass bands, and immigrant hometown associations (HTA), Zapotecs shape their Indigenous identities in ways that disrupt Latinidad and romanticized ideas of Indigeneity. These forms of communal practices of belonging confront settler state notions of Indigenous “authenticity” in the US and Mexico that view Indigeneity as static and dead. Migrant women and US-raised children in particular contest state-based gender roles and diasporic exclusion from pueblo autonomy through practices of being and belonging. I draw on the theoretical framework of transborder comunalidad, an ongoing Indigenous Oaxacan conception of collective community life sustained through practices and beliefs in diaspora that challenges state violence against Indigenous peoples (Martínez Luna 2013).