Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Latin America Otherwise)

Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Latin America Otherwise)

In Indian Given María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo addresses current racialized violence and resistance in Mexico and the United States with a genealogy that reaches back to the sixteenth century. Saldaña-Portillo formulates the central place of indigenous peoples in the construction of national spaces and racialized notions of citizenship, showing, for instance, how Chicanos/as in the U.S./Mexico borderlands might affirm or reject their indigenous background based on their location.  In this and other ways, she demonstrates how the legacies of colonial Spain's and Britain's differing approaches to encountering indigenous peoples continue to shape perceptions of the natural, racial, and cultural landscapes of the United States and Mexico. Drawing on a mix of archival, historical, literary, and legal texts, Saldaña-Portillo shows how los indios /Indians provided the condition of possibility for the emergence of Mexico and the United States.  "Saldana-Portillo’s monograph makes critical contributions to the fields of indigenous studies, borderlands studies, American studies, Mexican studies, Chicano/a studies, gender studies, transnational studies, western legal studies, and Southwest studies—just to name a few. Indian Given truly has the potential to help set the agenda in multiple disciplines." -- John Gram ― H-Net Reviews "An eclectic, informative, and entertaining work. . . . Saldaña-Portillo’s work will certainly be an eye-opener for anyone who picks it up." -- F. Todd Smith ― American Historical Review “ Indian Given will be of great interest to scholars and university students who explore issues of Indigeneity in Mexico and the United States. Its interdisciplinary inquiry makes an important contribution to the field of Indigenous studies.” -- Emilio del Valle Escalante ― Native American and Indigenous Studies "Saldaña-Portillo illuminates the racial process in which indigenous people have been central to the continuous colonial and national space-making projects of Mexico and the United States." -- Jorge Ramirez ― Radical History Review " Indian Given is a transnational scholarly mural, offering a critical account of North America with both exacting specificity and stunning synthesis, all on one continuous canvas. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s archival skills are formidable across centuries, languages, and geographies. Her archive includes not only Las Casas, La Malinche, and Geronimo, but also Javier Bardem, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and Osama bin Laden. As soon as I finished reading Indian Given , I wanted to start it again." -- Robert Warrior, editor of ― The World of Indigenous North America María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and the author of The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development , also published by Duke University Press.  Indian Given Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States By María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo Duke University Press Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-6014-8 Contents Acknowledgments, INTRODUCTION. It Remains to Be Seen Indians in the Landscape of America, 1 SAVAGES WELCOMED Imputations of Indigenous Humanity in Early Colonialisms, 2 AFFECT IN THE ARCHIVE Apostates, Profligates, Petty Thieves, and the Indians of the Spanish and U.S. Borderlands, 3 MAPPING ECONOMIES OF DEATH From Mexican Independence to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 4 ADJUDICATING EXCEPTION The Fate of the Indio Bárbaro in the U.S. Courts (1869–1954), 5 LOSING IT! Melancholic Incorporations in Aztlán, CONCLUSION. The Afterlives of the Indio Bárbaro, Notes, Bibliography, Index, CHAPTER 1 SAVAGES WELCOMED Imputations of Indigenous Humanity in Early Colonialisms The debate between these two outstanding figures of sixteenth-century Spain was one of the most curious episodes in the history of the Western world. For the first time, and probably for the last, a colonizing nation organized a formal inquiry into the justice of the methods used to extend its empire. For the first time, too, in the modern world, we see an attempt to stigmatize an entire race as inferior, as born slaves according to the theory elaborated by Aristotle. — Lewis Hanke , All Mankind Is One In the chapters that follow, Indian Given considers defining instances in the formation of the racial geographies of the United States and Mexico as recorded in the historical and legislative archive, in literature and film, and in political speech. I trace the emergence of these two representational and material national spaces from their respective colonial mappings of the figure of the Indian from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Before proceeding to these spatial productions of racial nationalism, however, it behooves us to consider the early colonial geo-graphings of the American continent in the face of its original inhabi