indian given by maría josefina saldaña-portillo

8/20/2019 Indian Given by María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo

1/44

INDIANGIVENRacial Geographies across

Mexico and the United States

María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo


2/44

INDIAN GIVEN


3/44

Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations

Walter D. Mignolo, Duke University Irene Silverblatt, Duke University

Sonia Saldívar-Hull, University o exas, San Antonio


4/44

-

INDIAN GIVENRacial Geographies across Mexico and the United States

Duke University Press Durham and London 2016


5/44

© 2016 Duke University Press All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper∞

Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker

ypeset in Arno Pro by Westchester

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Saldaña-Portillo, María Josena, [date]

Indian given : racial geographies across Mexico and the United States / María Josena

Saldaña-Portillo.

pages cm(Latin America otherwise)Includes bibliographical reerences and index.

978-0-8223-5988-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-6014-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-7492-3 (e- book)

1. MestizosRace identityHistory. 2. Mexican- American Border RegionRace

relationsPolitical aspectsHistory. 3. Indians, reatment oMexican- American

Border RegionHistory. I. itle. II. Series: Latin America otherwise.

790.4725 2016

305.800972'1dc232015025420

Cover art: Photograph o a mural by Curiot, El Retorno de Akhankutti.


6/44

For María Elena Martínez

your work inspired and challenged my own

For María Elizabeth Macías

and the thousands o Mexicans killed in the drug war

For Juan Flores

camarada, amigo, hermano


7/44


8/44

Acknowledgments ix

. It Remains to Be Seen

Indians in the Landscape o America 1

1 SAVAGES WELCOMEDImputations o Indigenous Humanity in Early Colonialisms 33

2 AFFECT IN THE ARCHIVE Apostates, Proigates, Petty Tieves, and theIndians o the Spanish and U.S. Borderlands 66

3 MAPPING ECONOMIES OF DEATHFrom Mexican Independence to the reatyo Guadalupe Hidalgo 108

4 ADJUDIC ATING EXCEPTIONTe Fate o the Indio Bárbaro in the U.S. Courts (1869–1954) 154

5 LOSING IT!Melancholic Incorporations in Aztlán 195

. Te Aferlives o the Indio Bárbaro 233

Notes 259 Bibliography 299 Index 319


9/44


10/44

It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to thank all the people and placesthat made this book possible. I have enjoyed every minute o researching and

writing this book, and this is in large part because o the many collaborators

who have helped me develop my ideas along the way. I would like to begin bythanking the staff at the Archivo General de Indias () or their assistance with my archival research and or the access they provide to the wealth o in-ormation in the colonial record. I would also like to thank the Benson Latin

American Collection at the University o exas or access to their holdingsand or their extraordinary helpulness.

Several institutions supported me nancially and intellectually in the writ-ing o this book. I thank the Fulbright U.S. Scholars Program or awarding me

a Fulbright García-Robles () ellowship or Mexico City in 2010–2011, as well as the staff who welcomed me to their city. While on the ellowship,I was a visiting scholar with the Programa Universitario de Estudios de Género() at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. I would like tothank Marisa Belausteguigoitia, then director o the , as well as heroutstanding staff. Under her leadership, the provided a rich intellectualenvironment during my year in Mexico and omented collaborative research.Te discussions at the have lef their mark on the book and I am very

grateul. I thank the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Projector their 2010 Research Grant or transcription o the archival manuscriptsretrieved rom the . I want to thank Edith Betancourt or her assistance

with the transcription o some o these eighteenth-century documents. AndI thank Oscar Marquez or his excellent work on compiling the bibliographyor this book.

Many thanks to David Eng, David Kazanjian, eemu Ruskola, and Priscilla Wald or the manuscript workshop they participated in that launched this book project. Tese our brilliant people helped me to realize the project’sull potential, providing key guidance in imagining its contours and continu-ing to challenge me with their insight since then. I am ever in their debt. Over


11/44

x

the course o the last ve years, several centers, programs, and departmentshave invited me to workshop chapters rom this book; I learned so much inthese exchanges and the book is so much better or them. I thank María ElenaMartínez or so many things, among them her early invitation to present my

work at the Department (then Program) o American Studies and Ethnic-ity at the University o Southern Caliornia (). Tanks to Ira Livingstonand Jonathan Beller or inviting me to the Aesthetics and Politics Initiative atPratt University, trailblazing just around the corner rom my house. I thank

Alex Lubin or inviting me to the Center or American Studies and Research() at the American University o Beirut. Debra Castillo invited meto the Counterstories o Greater Mexico Conerence on behal o the Latin

American and Latino Studies programs at Cornell University. I thank her and

the programs or acilitating this vibrant and lasting intellectual exchange. Ithank Lisa Marie Cacho, Jodi Byrd, and Karen Flynn at the University o Il-linois, Urbana-Champaign, or their organization o the “Affi nities and As-semblages” symposium where those two words were made operative. José

Antonio Lucero at the University o Washington invited me to the SimpsonCenter or the Humanities there or a antastic conversation with Adam War-ren and Marisa Duarte as part o their Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series: thanksall around. I also thank Valentina Napoletano or her invitation on behal o

the Latin American Studies Working Group at the University o oronto. Ithank Andrew Friedman and the Faculty Working Group in American Stud-ies at Haverord College. Many thanks to Rodrigo Laguarda or his invitationto the “Historia en Distinctos Registros” colloquium at the Instituto Mora,as well as or the many exciting conversations we shared on borderlands his-tory. ogether, all the participants o these many discussions lef an indelibleimprint on this book.

And now to those riends and allies who are smart and playul and made

this book possible with their intellectual support, but also with those much-needed un breaks in and around New York and Mexico City: RoopaliMukherjee, Ed Cohen, Ardele Lister, Jean Franco, Ira Livingston, Iona Man-Cheong, Rob Miotke, Eric aylor, Gayatri Gopinath, ei Okamoto, ClaudiaUrey, Catherine Zimmer, Jennier Portno, Sara Pursley, Emma Bianchi, ItoRomo, David Eng, eemu Ruskola, Mary Louise Pratt, Renato Rosaldo,Maria Damon, Mayra Guillén, Ana María López Dzib, Frida Gorbach,Rodrigo Laguardia, Guadalupe Avendaño Portillo ( y toda tu familia), LichaPortillo ( y toda tu familia), Mayté Portillo ( y toda tu familia): you rock, youmake me happy, thank you! And always, always Juan Flores and José Muñoz. Imiss you. Ten there are those dear comrades who go one step beyond offer-


12/44

xi

ing deep riendship and intellection and are involved in the book’s produc-tion. Shay Brawn. Where would I be without you? Tank you or your needitorial eye and or making this book a much easier read. Livia enzer, howar we have traveled. Tank you or all your expertise and assistance in pro-curing permissions and in proong the proos. David Sartorius, in your nerdyhistorian voice, always looking out or me and making me giggle, thank you.Madhu Dubey, you will always be my go-to second set o eyes, chapter aferchapter. Tank you and no rest or the weary. Ken Wissoker, you are a gemo an editor. From the rst discussion we had regarding the structure or this

book to the last bit o advice on the title and everything in between, you arealways able to discern the signicance o my project and distill it or me. Ithank you or your patience and guidance but also or your singular vision

on the last book, on this book, and on the next. I am also grateul to JadeBrooks or your hand in producing this nal product.Finally, I would like to thank the epoztlán Institute or ransnational

History o the Americas and my chosen academic amily, the internationalcollective that makes the institute and my brain hum. I am especially grate-ul to Marisa Belausteguigoitia Ruis, Geraldo Cadava, Natti Golubov, NicoleGuidotti-Hernández, Laura Gutiérrez, David Kazanjian, María Elena Mar-tínez, Bethany Moreton, Alexandra Puerto, Yolanda Martínez San Miguel,

Mario Ruer, David Sartorius, Ben Siuentes- Jáuregui, Freddy Vilches, Pa-mela Voekel, Adam Warren, and papi chulo Elliot Young. Lisbeth Haas andReiko Hillyer, honorary collective members, you too are part o this amily.Tis group o riends and intellectual interlocutors is why this book exists. Itis a product o the institute’s yearly conerences, o its vision and care. I loveeverything about our collectiveour joy but also our ghts. Tank you allor your engagement and generosity. We lost our dear riend María Elena last

year. I hope this book lives up to your standard, querida , because I couldn’t

have written it without your shining example, or without your trampolinedream. You will always be the leading lady in my cabaret!

Finally or real this time, once again, I thank David Kazanjian. You’re apretty smart cookie. And a sweet one.


13/44


14/44

IT REMAINS TO BE SEEN

Indians in the Landscape o America

Ah,” sighed Dean, “the end of Texas, the end of America, we don’t know no more.” . . . Laredowas a sinister town that morning. All kinds of cab-drivers and border rats wandered around,

looking for opportunities. There weren’t many; it was too late. It was the bottom and dregs

of America where all the heavy villains sink, where disoriented people have to be near a

specic elsewhere they can slip into unnoticed. . . . Just beyond, you could feel the enormous

presence of whole great Mexico and almost smell the billion tortillas frying and smoking in

the night. We had no idea what Mexico would really be like. . . . We felt awful and sad. But

everything changed when we crossed the mysterious bridge over the river and our wheels

rolled on offi cial Mexican soil, though it wasn’t anything but a carway for border inspection.

Just across the street Mexico began. We looked with wonder. To our amazement it looked

exactly like Mexico. . . . fellows in straw hats and white pants were lounging by the dozen

against battered pocky storefronts. . . .

Old men sat on chairs in the night and looked like Oriental junkies and oracles. . . .

These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Pan-

chos of silly civilized American lore—they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft

ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they

were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. —Jack Kerouac, On the Road

What enables Jack Kerouac’s protagonist, Sal Paradise, to visualize thesouthwestern landscape o Laredo, exas, as sinister and villainous? Asteeming with rats seeking out criminal opportunities but also anxious to slipaway, undetected, across the border, presumably to a orgiving Mexico? Mean-

while, the “enormous presence” o the Mexican landscape enters through the

senses as well, anticipating the arrival o Sal and his iconic sidekick DeanMoriarty with the smell and feel o its racial difference, the billion ried torti-llas, hovering across the bridge like atmosphere, enticing them to come and

“


15/44

2

partake. Sal and Dean have no idea what Mexico “would really be like,” and yet their eyes discover, to their amazement, that it “looked exactly like Mex-ico.” How do they know, beore they see, what their vision will apprehend: anation o “great, grave Indians”? Te sharp edges o the Indians’ high cheek-

bones and slanted eyes cut and divide Mexico rom the United States justas decisively as the Rio Grande, and just as “naturally” their racial differencegives Mexican geography its meaning: sof, inviting, lounging, ancestral, wise(oracles), and stoned (junkies). Mexico is a “specic elsewhere,” a prearrangedspace o indigenous peasantry, in iconic white garb and sombreros, who sit inand against landscape, becoming one with the environment they inhabit. Teracial character o the United States represented by Laredo is, by contrast,melancholic (“awul,” “sad”) and exhausted by its own civilization, at the

“end” o knowing.

Sal perceives a racial geography, a racial divide along the borderon oneside Indians, on the other side not; on one side Oriental enchantment, on theother western (white) banality. Conventionally, Kerouac overlays an east– westaxis onto a south–north cartography, and even the way in which Kerouacpositions Laredo and Nuevo Laredo connotes a well- worn geographicalimagination mediated by racial difference. Rather than positioning the twincities horizontally, he has one sit atop the other vertically, as villainous dregs

“sink” down to “the bottom” o the United States to seep into a receptiveMexico. Although Kerouac privileges subordinate Mexico as more authenticand good than “America,” moral characteristics wrought rom its indigeneity,the geographically given hierarchy between Mexico and the United Statesremains intact.

Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States isabout the power o racialized “ways o seeing” national geographies as pre-sumably natural, especially as they are visualized along the divide o the

Mexico–U.S. border. As John Berger pithily put it in his paradigm-shapingWays of Seeing , “Te way we see things is affected by what we know or what

we believe” (8). While concerned with how Mexico and the United Statesare visualized and known as nations, across in the title indexes a relationship

between these two geographies rather than an exhaustive account o either,suggesting a process that is ongoing rather than a settled state. Tese visual-ized geographies cross each other, they work at cross-purposes, conictingand constituting each other. Tey are interactional and intermixed. Tey existentre dos países between two countriesand because o each other. Laredoand Nuevo Laredo are ideal cities to oreground this crossingthis entreand the constructed aspect o Kerouac’s emblematic geographic vision o the


16/44

3

border, because historically, economically, ecologically, and socially thesecities orm one cultural landscape. Advertising signs, city slogans, news-papers, cultural events, radio programs, and bumper stickers still today bill thetwin cities as “LareDOS” or “Los Dos Laredos” (gs. I.1–I.4). Architecturally,the two cities mirror each other as well, with each urban center organizedin the traditional Spanish colonial pattern, with a uniorm street grid ema-nating rom a central plaza surrounded by administrative offi ces, hotels, andplaces o commerce.

Te two cities share an architectural heritage because they share a colonialheritage. Te ounding o Laredo, exas, preceded Nuevo Laredo, amauli-pas, but both were effects o colonial intrusions. As part o the viceroyalty oNew Spain, San Agustín de Laredo was ounded on the northern bank o the

Rio Bravo (or Rio Grande) by a handul o amilies in 1755 on a land grantissued by the Spanish Crown to Capítan Don omás Sánchez de Barrera yGallardo. Te city was strategically positioned adjacent to a river crossingrequented by indigenous peoples o the region. An epicenter o indigenouslie along the river long beore 1755, this place was named by the colonistsafer its unction, “paso de los indios” (Indian Pass). Less than one hundred

years later, afer the conclusion o the U.S. expansionist war against Mexico in1848 and the annexation o its northern territory, seventeen Laredo amilies

decamped across the river to establish Nuevo Laredo on the other side othe newly drawn, neocolonial border, anxious as they were to remain underMexican sovereignty. I elaborate on this history here because it underscoresthe power o Kerouac’s constructed vision o the border as a stark divide be-tween two distinct racial geographies (“Just across the street Mexico began”).Situated along corresponding sides o the river, these arid towns are geologi-cally, architecturally, and “racially” ar more similar than dissimilar. oday, asin 1955 when Kerouac published his autobiographical novel, Laredo’s popula-

tion (like its architecture and environs) looks quite similar, i not identical, tothe population o Nuevo Laredo: mestizos, Indian, and light skinned, 90 per-cent o the city’s inhabitants are still o Mexican descent. Nevertheless, Salsaw radically different racial geographies on either side o the “mysterious

bridge” rather than overlapped or crossed ones. Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States elu-

cidates how Kerouac arrived at his rather commonplace representationo the visual landscape o the border region (dangerous/accommodating,reckless/passive, malecent/virtuous: adjoining but distinct nationalspaces), how his conventional iteration o the racial difference between theUnited States and Mexico enters as i naturally through the senses: the United


17/44

. .1. Los 2 Lare-dos boxing gym,Laredo, exas.

. .2. eam logoor the ecolotes deLos Dos Laredos,Nuevo Laredo,amaulipas, baseballteam.


18/44

. .3. Last issue o

Lare: A Journal of the Borderlands , a monthlyperiodical published inLaredo, exas, 1994–2014.

. .4. Storeront,Laredo, exas.


19/44

6

States as nonindigenous space atop Mexico as indigenous space. Contempo-rary perceptions o violence along the border invert the terms o these racial-ized landscapes, underscoring their reiterative orce. Mexico, still indigenous,is now the scene o barbarous crime, while the United States, still nonindig-enous, is the passive recipient o its drugs and immigrants. Tat this is a geo-

graphical rendering o the two nations’ racial character (barbarous Mexico/noble United States) is urther underscored by the prolieration o maps o“drug cartel” territories in Mexico. An internet search brings up maps rep-resenting the boundaries o the Sinaloa cartel, the Gul cartel, the Zeta car-tel, and otherstheir boundaries discretely cut across Mexican geography

but always stop abruptly, reassuringly, but unrealistically, at the border o theUnited States. It is my contention in this book that perceptions like these

o natural landscapes and landscapes o cultural differenceare racially de-rived, the national geographies and the geography o the border region me-ticulously produced through the colonial encounters with indigeneity. Te

way we perceive natural landscape, the way we have mapped national andregional geographies out o itparticularly along the Mexico–U.S. borderare the result o a complex history o encounter with indigeneity. Succinctlyput, the geographies o the United States and Mexico have been produced,materially and representationally, through historical, social, and racial rela-

tion with indigenous subjects.Springboarding off o the last two decades o scholarship in critical ge-

ography, I argue that the ways in which national geographies are perceived,imagined, lived, and mapped are supremely racial, and that these raciallyproduced geographies cannot be understood without a thorough investiga-tion o the colonial modes o governmentality imposed on and engaged by in-digenous people. I our contemporary geographies o the Hispanophone and

Anglophone Americas are racially derived, the only way to understand this

derivation is through a transnational study o the colonial records o Spanishand British colonization. Indian Given is not just or primarily a comparativestudy, though comparison is a necessary component o its endeavor. Rather

Indian Given seeks to move beyond comparison, as recent colonial and post-colonial studies scholars o race have urged. Scholars o comparison havedemonstrated that the method developed in tandem with European imperi-alism, U.S. neocolonial expansion, and Cold War containment. Comparativescholarship ofen used its purported empiricism to demonstrate the supe-riority or greater development o Anglo- American and Northern Europeangeographical areas. Certainly, most contemporary comparative scholarshipno longer plays handmaiden to teleological or developmentalist political


20/44

7

projects. Nevertheless, I consider this work transnational (or all o its ownreighted legacy) because I am less interested in even value-neutral compari-son than in demonstrating the ways in which the racial geographies o Mexicoand the United States were mutually constituted and imbricated in their co-lonial legacies.

Spanish and British colonialism in North America were space-making en-deavors, and I argue that they created space through the careul placing (anddisplacing) o indigenous subjects in landscape. As such, they produced dis-tinct, indeed divergent, racial geographies: colonial places apparently replete

with Indians or beref o them, despite the actual presence or absence oIndians. In moving beyond comparison, Indian Given investigates not onlyhow and why these colonial space-making enterprises produced such dis-

similar racial geographies but also the instances in which these colonial en-terprises conspired in their construction o racialized spaces, in their place-ment and displacement o indigenous subjects. Spanish and British colonialmissions, in other words, were competitive enterprises but they were also attimes complicit in their creation o their racial geographies and the types oIndians therein.

Indian Given investigates these complicities, examining the historical con- junctures during which these distinct racial geographies were mutually con-

stituted. It pays particular attention to the region where these geographiesproductively overlapped, along the border o what would become Mexicoand the United States. Contemporary cultural phenomena like Chicano Aztlánand white vigilantism , like the “Muslim jihadist” and the “narco-terrorist,”are also explored in Indian Given, and I argue that they are the effects o theseoverlapping racial geographies along the Mexico–U.S. border. In act, thesephenomena can only be properly understood as political and cultural orma-tions when considered within the context o colonial space-making enter-

prises, as they are genealogically derived rom the historical juxtaposition othese competing and complicit racial geographies. Te construction o “the

border” itsel as a political demarcation and as an ecology o meaning, as adrug economy and as a source o psychic anxiety and distress (materialized,or example, in Arizona’s passage o 1070, the Support Our Law Enorce-ment and Sae Neighborhoods Act) are effects o these overlapping racialgeographies that engage each other with productive orce. In order to prop-erly understand the contemporary ramications o these racialized geogra-phies, the urgency o the present i you will, it is necessary to reconstruct thegenealogies o our divergent yet shared Mexican and U.S. racial geographies.Tus, Indian Given necessarily spans a vast chronological period in its analysis,


21/44

8

rom the sixteenth to the twenty-rst century, each chapter organized arounda historical ashpoint that illuminates moments o crisis in the mapping ocolonial and national spaces.

I the ways we perceive American landscapes are mediated by “Indian-ness,” i the racial geographies we currently inhabit in the Americas are satu-rated with it, as I contend, then it is equally true that the generic categories o“the Indian” and “el indio” are the result o this colonial production o spaceas well. Te invention o “the Indian” by colonialism is a well-rehearsed idea,especially in Latin American historical and anthropological scholarship.

Indian Given adds to this scholarship by demonstrating the manner in whichIndians and indios were spatially produced (as effects and progenitors oEuropean colonialisms), especially in their generic guises. Te colonial, generic

constructs o Indians and indios , I contend, were derived in part rom theperception o Indians and indios in and as landscape. By approaching thesegeneric categories geographically, as mapped phenomena that appear, dis-appear, and reappear at strategic moments over the long arc o colonial andnational encounter, we see that there is not one singular idea o the Indianor indio operating at any particular historical juncture, much less over thecenturies since 1492. “Indians” and “indios” are not transhistorical phenom-ena, in other words. Te point is not simply that the terms Indian and indio

ail to index the rich heterogeneity o the thousands o indigenous peoplesin the United States and Mexico, but rather, that there were multiple generic “Indians” and “indios” deployed over time, with these generic concepts mor-phing as required by the acquisition o space by Spanish and Anglo- Americancolonialism, especially during moments o colonial or national crisis. Even thetwo terms were and are imperect translations o each other, as “Indian” inthe contours o U.S. racial geography means very different things than “indio”in the contours o Mexican racial geography. Indian Given is an exploration

o the untranslatability o these two terms, the incommensurability o Indianand indio. Te purpose o this book is to trace these generic categories overtime, elucidating how articulations, reiterations, and transormations o In-dians and indios produced racialized space, and in turn, to trace how the exi-gencies o the production o colonial and national spaces gave us Indians andindios. I offer the reader two distinct but complicit genealogies o Indian di-erence as produced in colonial and national geographies.

o say that Indians produced Mexican space, produced its national char-acter, is not a particularly contentious claim. o the contrary, Mexico pridesitsel on its indigenous past and present. “México se olkloriza solo” (Mexicoolklorizes itsel), as a riend and colleague is ond o saying, and it does so


22/44

9

through the deployment o its indigenous cultures. Everywhere in Mexico,the state monumentalizes its indigenous past and present in the ser vice onationalism and as a condition o its revolutionary character. Mexico locatesits mestizo present in its indigenous past. Nevertheless, it is my hope to de-amiliarize the manner in which Mexican nationalism claims its indigeneityand to deamiliarize the place o indigenous peoples in Mexican society bydemonstrating how both New Spain and Mexico were graphed through thepolitical project o plotting indios in space or instrumentalizing and univer-salizing purposes. On the other hand, to suggest that the geography and na-tional character o the United States were produced by a similar process oindigenous emplotment is still a relatively new and contentious claim.

In both popular and academic historiography o the United States, indig-

enous peoples as rst inhabitants are scripted to disappear, either ortuitouslyor tragically, while the physical territory o the United States is scripted asterra nullius in waiting. Indian Given deamiliarizes this historiography as well,

by demonstrating the centrality to the development o a U.S. racial geographyo locating Indians in landscape. Te dominance o the trope o the disappear-ing Indian in open landscape is in part attributable to the “rontier thesis”school o U.S. historiography created by Fredrick Jackson urner at the turno the twentieth century. urner represented the Great Plains and the South-

west as an expanse o “ree land” available or (white) settlement and U.S. development. Te rontier thesis is prooundly Lockian in its construction oland as reely available due to its improper possession by indigenous peoples,

but urner also ollows Kant’s climate determinism and association o moral value with race when he derives Anglo- American character rom the encoun-ter with geography. For urner, the “peculiar institutions” o democraticand egalitarian political lie in the United States are derived rom settlers’compulsory innovation in the ace o an ever-receding rontier as they were

“compelled to adapt themselves to the changes o an expanding peopletothe changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and indeveloping at each area o this progress out o the primitive economic andpolitical conditions o the rontier into the complexity o city lie” (urner1893, 2). Te specicity o the continent’s wilderness gives mimetic shape to“American” character and culture.

Certainly, indigenous peoples appear in urner’s historiography only toeventually cede ground and vanish rom the landscape in the ace o whitesettlement’s superior order. And yet even in this quintessential tale o Amer-ican conquest and character, indigenous peoples do much more than sim-ply disappear. urner locates Indians in landscape so that “Americans” may


23/44

10

acquire their proper “Americanness.” Indians give “American ingenuity” itsunique character:

Te wilderness masters the colonist. It nds him a European in dress,industries, tools, modes o travel, and thought. It takes him rom the

railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments ocivilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It putshim in the log cabin o the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indianpalisade around him. Beore long he has gone to planting Indian cornand plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalpin orthodox Indian ashion. In short, at the rontier the environment isat rst too strong or the man. He must accept the conditions which iturnishes, or perish, and so he ts himsel into the Indian clearings and

ollows the Indian trails. Little by little he transorms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe . . . here is a new product that is American. At rst, the rontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the rontiero Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the rontier becamemore and more American. (4)

It is not only the wilderness that masters the colonist, but the Indian. Te col-onist abandons European industries and adopts indigenous technologies

modes o transportation (birch canoe), agriculture (planting corn), architec-ture (palisades, log cabin) and dress (hunting shirt, moccasin). Indeed, or

Americans to emerge out o the “primitive . . . conditions o the rontier,” theIndian must rst primitivize the effeminate colonist, who becomes Indianrom the inside out, uttering a guttural “war cry” and in an “orthodox ash-ion” opening the Indian’s head to appropriate his knowing ways. It is o keysignicance that the gender o the Indian and colonist alike is masculine, be-cause U.S. (and Mexican) racial geography is a highly gendered space. Te

American wilderness is the condition o possibility or colonial and indige-nous masculinity, as the male Indian teaches the male colonist how to surviveand thrive in the “too strong” environment. Colonial masculinity is achievedthrough indigenous adroitness in landscape, an adroitness that in turn authorscolonial savagery (scalping). Te wilderness and masculinity become one inthe rontier thesis, as American geography embodies a muscular Indianness.

Tirty years afer urner, rontier historian Walter Prescott Webb o-ered a similar analysis o “American character” derived rom a gendered andgendering environment mediated by Indian embodiment in his opus TeGreat Plains. As much a geographical primer as a history, Te Great Plains

begins with an analysis o the topography, climate, plant, and animal lie o


24/44

11

the Plains, all key actors in the development o Native American culture andsubsequently U.S. culture or Webb. In his account, the at landscape andarid climate o the Plains, so different rom the “humid timber region” o theEastern seaboard, determined the differences between the nomadic PlainsIndians and the settled civilized Eastern Indians (Webb 1931, 47). Moreover,as in urner, the landscape-derived characteristics o the Plains Indians weretransmitted to the “white man” through contact:

Te Plains Indians were by nature more erocious, implacable, andcruel than other tribes. . . . Historians in the nineteenth century distin-guished clearly between “civilized” Indians, or the Eastern tribes, and“wild” Indians, or the Plains tribes. . . . the rontiersmen on the Plainssoon learned that one could not surrender to an Indian. Te Indians

rarely, i ever, surrendered themselves, and they had no concept o the white man’s generosity to a vanquished oe. I one cannot surrender,then one must ee or ght, and in the end must die rather than all aliveinto the hands o the enemy. (59)

Leaving aside Webb’s unsustainable assertion o the “white man’s generosity,”the rontiersmen learned to withstand the harsh landscape by learning notto surrender to the erociousness o the Plains Indians. Once again, in other

words, the conquering o environment is accomplished through the Indians, whom the colonists must mime in order to succeed on the Plains. Colonialspace-making is again a gendered and gendering experience, as the graphingo its seemingly inhospitable environment into habitable space is mediated bythe encounter with active, muscular Indians. Indeed, Webb described exten-sively and with great admiration the specic skills o the Apache and Coman-che in battle, skills that were developed due to the nature o the landscapeand climate o the Plains, and were eventually transerred to the white man,

who mimes the Indian in learning to ee or ght rather than to surrender.Troughout Webb’s analysis, as in this passage, American masculine charac-ter, implacable and intrepid, is wrought rom the encounter with implacableand intrepid Plains Indians, like the Apache and Comanche.

Indian Given, then, seeks to deamiliarize this historiography o the Indian who is vanished or reduced to reservation by plumbing the depths o the co-lonial archive or the various types o gendered Indians who were necessarilylocated in space or the constitution o a national geography. In sundry ways,Indians and indios are the condition o possibility or the emergence o theUnited States as well as Mexico. It is in this sense that the racial geographieso these two countries are indeed Indian given, and that the book arrives at its


25/44

12

title. Indian Given is intentionally a play on the derogatory term “Indian giver.” An “Indian giver” is someone who takes back something they have willinglygiven or sold, and the slur derives its meaning rom another popular mytho U.S. history, that the Indians gifed colonists their land, air and square, andnow they unjustly demand its return. By contrast, Mexican historiographyopenly recognizes the violence and injustice o indigenous dispossession atthe hands o Spanish conquistadors. Indeed, public culture memorializes theinjustice in Mexico City, whether in the Diego Rivera murals that adorn the

walls o the National Palace or on the plaque outside latelolco in the Plazade las res Culturas commemorating the armed encounter o the Nahuas andSpaniards as neither a victory nor a deeat (“No ue triuno ni derrota”), butas the “doloroso nacimiento del pueblo mestizo” (the painul birth o the mes-tizo people) (g. I.5). Te violence and suffering o indigenous people in theconquest is constantly, reiteratively affi rmed and projected onto landscape.

Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz most amously nationalized the violenceo indigenous conquest in his chapter “Hijos de La Malinche” rom El laber-

into de la soledad. Mexicans are all the sons o mother-Malinche (Cortés’stranslator), who is characterized by Paz as the victim o a violation, o a raud:

. .5. Plaza de las res Culturas, commemorative stone plaque, latelolco, MexicoCity. Te inscription reads: “August 13, 1521 / Heroically deended by Cuauhtemoc / late-lolco ell under the power o Hernán Cortés / Neither triumph nor deeat / [It] wasthe painul birth o the mestizo people / Tat today is Mexico.”


26/44

13

¿quién es la Chingada? La Chingada es la Madre abierta violada o burladapor la uerza. El “hijo de la Chingada” es el engendro de la violación, delrapto o de la burla. Si se compara esta expresión con la española, “hijode puta”, se advierte inmediatamente la dierencia. Para el español ladeshonra consiste en ser hijo de una mujer que voluntariamente se en-trega, una prostituta; para el mexicano, en ser ruto de una violación.

[Who is the ucked one? Te ucked one is the mother who is opened, violated, or tricked by orce. Te “son o the ucked one” is the producto a rape, o a kidnapping, or a mockery. I we compare this expres-sion with the Spanish “son o a whore” we immediately perceive thedifference. For the Spaniard the dishonor consists o being the son oone who voluntarily offers hersel, a prostitute; or the Mexican, it is in

being the ruit o a violation.] (Paz 1994, 33)

In comparing the Mexican colloquialism “hijo de la chingada” (son o theucked one) with the Spanish colloquialism “hijo de puta” (son o a whore),Paz underscores that the indigenous victims o colonialism ceded nothing“voluntarily” or or a air price. Rather they were the victims o an injuriousraud. As in urner, the terms o becoming Mexican are highly gendered:Malinche, mother-as-territory, is ripped open by the masculine agency o the

Spaniard, and the products o this rape are consequently engendered as hu-miliated, enraged, and brutish male subjects (sons). Paz generalizes the vio-lence against and the derauding o indigenous peoples by colonialismall Mexicans are hijos de la chingada/ sons o the ucked oneand he accom-plishes this through the open emale indigenous body. At the same time,

because all Mexicans are also engendered by the Spaniards who raped andconquered, the hijo de la chingada also contains within himsel the one whorapes, the chingón. Te chingón is “activo, agresivo y cerrado . . . el que abre”

(active, aggressive and closed . . . the one who opens) (32). Te act o colo-nizing is still enabled through the territorial embodiment o the indigenous

woman, but it is paradoxically the offspring o the rape that is now the one who colonizes, as the chingón aggressively opens not only the emale indig-enous body o his mother, but also the territory o the uture nation. Mestizaje contains multitudes: aggression and passivity, culpability and victimage.

For our purposes, what it signicant and suggestive about Paz’s analysisis that it reveals the “pained birth” o Mexico’s racial citizenship (mestizaje)to be Indian given, accomplished by casting the Malinche-mother and thechingón ather (now also part indigenous) as progenitors o the entirety o


27/44

14

Mexican territory, and by situating this original wound in stone at the hearto Mexico’s Plaza de las res Culturas (“meeting place o three cultures”)

within the capital (g. I.5). At rst glance it appears diffi cult to reconcilethe Mexican colloquialism o hijo de la chingada with the U.S. colloquial-ism “Indian giver,” but by juxtaposing these national space-making projects

we deamiliarize both and make visible the relationships between them. Tegeneralization o indigenous injury to the entire Mexican population by thepopular phrase “hijo de la chingada” (indeed as source o the population)paradoxically renders contemporary indigenous grievance impossible, just asthe slur “Indian giver” renders contemporary indigenous redress unnecessary(because U.S. Indians presumably gave up their land voluntarily). I all Mexi-cans are equally injured by/responsible or/born o colonialism, then all were

equally derauded and derauder, and in a manner that is similar though notidentical to Indian giver, hijo de la chingada deects national culpability. Tedispersal o injury, its location in a generalized territory and a distant past,renders contemporary indigenous claims or restitution o governmentalityand respect or territorial integrity more diffi cult to make in Mexico, just asthe term Indian giver makes indigenous claims or ull sovereignty and ter-ritorial integrity appear not only impractical but unjust in the United States.Te slur rom which this book takes its title reveals a deep historical anxi-

ety on both sides o the border: the indigenous peoples rightully demandtheir land back! Evoking this historical anxiety, the title Indian Given indexesthe ongoing, legitimate claims o indigenous peoples to their colonized ter-ritories. Indigenous peoples did not cede their lands willingly, but insoar asthey were constituted as the objects o colonial and then national gazes, they

became unwilling participants in historical, discursive, and geographical con-structions that acilitated the conquest o their territories and continues toacilitate their ongoing dispossession.

My investigation into the colonial origins o the racial geographies oMexico and the United States is inormed and indeed inspired by contem-porary indigenous movements or rights and territory on both sides o theMexico–U.S. border. Mexican and U.S. indigenous rights movements ofencoalesce in political endeavors at a global level, but they do not align intheir political aims or models o subjectivity at the national level. Mexicanindigenous movements most ofen express political demands in the guiseo regional or communal autonomy, while U.S. indigenous activists expresspolitical demands in the guise o national sovereignty. hese two politi-cal ormations register very different ideas o nationhood and citizenship.


28/44

15

In Indian Given, I elucidate the similarities and differences between thesemovements and their orms o political subjectivity by suggesting how theyemerged within and correspond to distinct racial geographies. Indian Given does not ocus on autonomy and sovereignty, but it was in part motivated

by a desire to understand the differences between these political orma-tions and the colonial and national histories that engendered them. Overthe course o my career, I have participated in several scholarly and activistmeetings between U.S. and Mexican indigenous peoples, sometimes serv-ing as linguistic (and cultural) translator. I have witnessed U.S. indigenousscholar/activists lecture their Mexican counterparts on the ineffi cacy oautonomy as a vehicle or expressing their political demands, and I have hadto explain to bemused Mexican indigenous scholar/activists that sovereignty

in the United States entitles indigenous peoples to their respective nation’spassport. I have heard U.S. indigenous scholar/activists deride Mexican in-digenous culture as an effect o the “tourist industry” and I have overheardMexican indigenous scholar/activists deride U.S. indigenous peoples as toolight skinned to be authentically Indian. Tis book approaches these hostili-ties and differences as problems o historical as well as linguistic and culturaltranslation. Just as racial geographies produced historical differences in themeanings o Indian and indio , so too they produced different modes o in-

digenous political engagement.By excavating colonial and national pasts, Indian Given seeks to elucidate

the political ormations o autonomy and sovereignty as they developed in re-lationship to these transormative space-making projects. Neither autonomynor sovereignty mirror pre-Colombian lieways though both express modeso political, social, and economic organization that survived, in altered orm,

brutal colonial and national projects. While not the specic ocus o the book, I nevertheless hope that Indian Given claries the ways in which auton-

omy and sovereignty emerged, respectively, out o processes o indigenousnegotiation and struggle with the space-making projects o their conqueringnational and colonial powers. Tis is not to suggest that these political or-mations lack authenticity, but rather to explain the specicity and effi cacyo sovereignty and autonomy within their corresponding racial geographies.

Indian Given is primarily, though not exclusively, an interrogation o therepresentations o Indians in the archives o colonial conquest and nationaldominion. Substantively different racial geographies emerged rom the Span-ish and Anglo- American colonial projects, but in each case these geographies

were consolidated around the repeated and ritualistic location, expulsion, or


29/44

16

inclusion o imaginary Indians. Indigenous subjects did not sit idly by, andtheir engagements, interventions, negotiations, and struggles with and in na-tional and colonial space-making projects are discussed accordingly in IndianGiven, but indigenous protagonism is not the main ocus o this book. Terole o indigenous protagonism in colonial and national history is amply doc-umented in the archival record, ofen by indigenous peoples themselves, andmany worthy historical and anthropological accounts o such protagonismhave emergedespecially over the last twenty yearson the basis o thisrecord. I borrow extensively rom these scholars o Mexican indigenous stud-ies and U.S. Native American studies to provide context or my own supple-mentary history. In addition, chapter 2 o Indian Given uncovers some newarchival material that contributes to the history o the Spanish settlement o

Nuevo Santander and the Provincia de ejas, and as such also contains thetrace o indigenous protagonism. Nevertheless, my ocus is on hegemonicgenealogies o racial difference, and the language and terminology o IndianGiven reect this. I use terms such as the gure of the Indian , imagined Indians ,or indios bárbaros not to reer to actual indigenous peoples, but to index colo-nial and historical constructions o indigenous humanity as graphed on space

by nonindigenous protagonists.

Racial Geographies

Colonial occupation was a matter of seizing, delimiting, and asserting control over a physi-

cal geographical area and of writing on the ground a new set of social and spatial relations.

This was, ultimately, tantamount to the production of boundaries and hierarchies, zones

and enclaves; the subversion of existing property arrangements; the classication of people

according to different categories; resource extraction; and nally the manufacturing of a

large reservoir of cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries gave meaning to the enactment

of differential rights to differing categories of people for different purposes within the same

space. —Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”

[Landscape’s] usage has varied from reference to the tangible, measurable ensemble of ma-

terial forms in a given graphical area, to the representation of those forms in various media

such as paintings, texts, photographs or performances, to the desired, remembered and

somatic spaces of the imagination and the senses. . . . Indeed, the connections between

the morphology of a territorially bounded region, and the identity of a community whose

social reproduction is tied to usufruct rights and obligations over that area, lie at the root

of the German Landschaft and its derivatives. But there is a profound connection, forged

over half a millennium, between the modern usage of landscape to denote a boundedgeographical space and the exercise of sight or vision as a principal means of associating

that space with human concerns. —Denis Cosgrove, “Landscape and the European Sense

of Sight: Eyeing Nature”


30/44

17

It is my contention that Mexican and U.S. national geographies are neithermerely natural nor strictly politically derived. Rather, they are the effect o

visualizing indios and Indians in landscape. I both national boundaries andthe way in which we visualize national geographies are derived rom the ra-cializing o space through the gure o the Indian, then “racial geography” isnot simply a term or describing a given effect in space in racial terms. Racialgeography is a technology o power, and when used as an analytic and the-ory o spatial production, it indexes the series o techniques used to producespace in racial terms. Visualizing spaces as racial geographies is not just aboutdiscussing a manner o seeing, in other words; racial geography theorizes a

way o envisioning, o mapping, o accounting or and representing space asIndian given. Tus racial geography as an analytic necessarily builds on the

recent disciplinary critiques o the role geography played in colonialisms andaugments these critiques.During the era o colonial explorations, the language o geographic in-

quiry became the language o Enlightenment knowledge production itsel:“charting” elds o knowledge; exploring the “terrain” o the human mind;“mapping” the stages o mankind. Modern geography provided the materialknowledge o colonial exploration: the cartographic renderings and the de-tailed descriptions o spectacular peoples and places previously unknown to

Europeans. However, geography also provided the metaphorical representa-tion o the entire world as a spectacle o humankind available or descriptionand knowledge production, or comparison o the principal differences be-tween “the West” and the “non- West” (Gregory 1994, 15–69, cited in Withersand Livingstone 1999, 14).

Spanish and British colonialisms were certainly European, but were theyuniormly “Western”? My study suggests not. Te Spanish and British per-ceived indigenous peoples in landscape differently and settlers interpolated

themselves into landscapes accordingly, producing distinct Enlightenmentsdespite shared European originsa Catholic and a Protestant Enlightenment,i you will. Moreover, both these Enlightenments were ully shaped by theencounter with “non- Western” peoples. Historicizing the relationship be-tween modern geography and these Enlightenments brings to the ore twoaspects o modern geography that will be central to my analysis. First, geo-graphic knowledge production is a visual and visualizing enterprise, onethat in the era o colonial exploration “brought all the world into view” (Liv-ingstone and Withers 1999, 14, italics mine). Second, modern geography isrepresentational in the broadest sense o the word. Geographic knowledgeproduction in these distinct Enlightenments not only offered Europeans


31/44

18

“realistic” descriptions, classications, and comparisons o colonized peo-ple and places; it also was oundational in the metaphorical production o amodern geography o human (racial) difference. Tus I suggest that colonialexploration produced geographies o the “new world” that were undamen-tally ocular experiencesas mediums or seeing landscapes as ull or devoido barbarous lieand that these geographies-as-ocular-experiences werethemselves productive o racial differences through metaphorical and philo-sophical representation. Geography is not only a discipline or mapping the

world to be seen: it is also a way o disciplining what we see, o disciplining usinto seeing (and knowing) mapped space as racialized place.

While the discipline o geography played a decisive role in colonialism, itis the deconstructive turn in social geography over the last thirty years that

enables Indian Given’s critique o Mexican and U.S. racial geographies. Howdid shared “cultural imaginaries” o race get “manuactured,” as Mbembesuggests, in the American context? How did they specically get dispersedthrough space and on geographical landscapes through the “classication” o

America’s Indians and indios? How did the “production o boundaries andhierarchies” along the Mexico–U.S. border take shape not only through the“subversion o existing property arrangements,” but through the establish-ment o new spatial relationships between indigenous and nonindigenous

peoples? Feminist and critical imperial geographers help me to take up thesequestions or the United States and Mexico as matters o spatial practice andnot simply o historiography. Teir engagement with “the spatiality o colo-nialism and empire” over the last thirty years enables a visioning o colonialoccupation as a physical “writing on the ground,” as a practice o power thatgave meaning and materiality to colonized spaces through indigeneity andnot in spite o indigenous presence (Clayton 2003, 354). Colonialisms pro-duced not only large reservoirs o cultural meaning attached to race but also

new spaces and modes o apprehending landscapes.Te terms o analysis offered by eminist and critical imperial geographers

make it possible or us to discern how Spanish and British colonialism etcheda new set o spatial and racial relations onto the landscape o the “New World”and onto the “morphology o a territorially bounded region” (Cosgrove 2003,249). British and Spanish colonists were economically motivated in usurp-ing the “usuruct rights and obligations” o indigenous peoples in particularlandscapes in the ser vice o orming new communities o identity, but thisusurpation was never merely economic. Dispossession was also an ocular ex-perience that created shared space, as Cosgrove underscores; it was an “exer-cise o sight or vision” that reassembled the association o particular human


32/44

19

concerns with particular spaces. In Indian Given I trace how Spanish and Anglo- American colonial concerns re-placed or removed indigenous concerns in/rom certain places. Eventually, colonial concerns became national ones, andan ensemble o tangible and measurable geographical orms became “nationallandscapes,” those “desired, remembered and somatic spaces” that imagina-tively relied on the visioning and emplotment o Indians and indios. I use “vi-sion” in both its hallucinatory (“having a vision”) and entrepreneurial guises(“to have vision”), rather than simply as the act o seeing. In both guises, vi-sion implies a movement rom interiority to exteriority. As suggested byCosgrove’s language (and Kerouac’s), apprehending landscape visually is aninteriorized experience projected onto space. Te eye anticipates what thepsyche desires, recursively turning landscapes into remembered (represen-

tational) and somatic (physical) spaces o becoming “American” or Mexican.o say that envisioning landscapes is an interiorized experience does not,however, imply that the apprehension o landscape is an individual and in-dividuating experience. o the contrary, “While it is obvious that much olearned seeing is personal, much too is social, governed by conventions about

what may be seen, by whom, when and in what context, about associationsand meanings attributed to a given scene, and about its orm and compo-sitional properties” (Cosgrove 2003, 252). Te racial geographies o Mexico

and the United States are shared perceptions o space, governed by learnedconventions that have developed over more than ve hundred years o lo-cating and imagining indigenous peoples, and that continue to produce andreproduce space. Because they developed palimpsestically over centuries,through learned, shared conventions, racial geographies have what HenriLeebvre has called the “illusion o transparency . . . a view o space as inno-cent, as ree o traps or secrets” (1991, 28). Racial geographies are anything butinnocent, though they do masquerade, as Leebvre suggests, as the “as it really

is” o visual landscape (Blunt and Rose 1994, 4).In his study o the changes wrought by on the physical environ-

ment o the Canadian-U.S. border, Matthew Sparke reminds us that the term geography is derived rom the Greek words or “earth- writing” ( geo and gra- phein). Geography, then, implies a process“the inherently unnished andmultilayered ‘graphing o the geo’ ”rather than a given representation o acartographically xed place (Sparke 2005, xii). Understanding racial geog-raphy as an unnished geo-graphing deamiliarizes the maps o Mexico andthe United States as well, allowing us to see these maps not as the given car-tography o closed and settled nations, but as ongoing palimpsests o spatialnegotiation amongst colonial, national, and indigenous populations. I


33/44

20

geography is the “graphing o the geo,” a more precise way o phrasing thequestions driving this book might be to ask how the geo o northern Mexicoand southwestern U.S. has been graphed and re-graphed in racial terms overtime. Indian Given charts the writing and re- writing o these particular earth-spaces as the “visible scene/seen” o Indians and indios. I borrow this concepto the “visible scene/seen” o race rom Richard H. Schein’s work elucidat-ing cultural landscape as built racial environment. Any cultural landscape, orSchein, encompasses both the material scene and the perceptual seen o ahistory o racial relations: “Because o its qualities as tangible, visible scene/seen, it ollows that not only can we interrogate the historical and geograph-ical dimensions o the landscape as an object in and o itsel (as a materialthing, or set o things), we can also read and interpret cultural landscapes or

what they might tell us more broadly about social worlds o the past” (Schein2006, 5). Indian Given interprets the racial geographies o the United Statesand Mexico as both material and perceptual scenes/seens o social worldspast.

In the introduction to their Handbook of Cultural Geography , Kay Anderson et al. insist on the necessity o “uniting the historical and geographicimagination” in any “serious study o ‘taken or granted’ ethnogeographicalterms,” and Indian Given answers this call in its historical and spatial discern-

ment o the ways in which ethnogeographical terms such as Indians and indios ,mestizos and whites , gained meaning along the Mexico–U.S. border (2003a,302). Racial geographies are not only representational practices, as iteratedand reiterated by urner, Webb, Paz, and Kerouac; they are also spatial prac-tices that must be decoded and interpreted. Allison Blunt and Gillian Rosehave argued that the gendering o geography was less an effect o imposedpatriarchal structures and more the result o a “social process o symbolic en-coding and decoding that produces . . . some spaces as women’s and others

as men’s” (1994, 3). In a similar vein, Indian Given analyzes the racial geogra-phies o Mexico and the United States less as the effects o imposed unitarystructures o colonial or neocolonial powero pillaging, extermination,and dispossession; o Black Legend and Maniest Destiny (as colonialismand neocolonialism are requently narrated)and more as social processesthat unolded and enolded over time. With their discrete origins in Spanishand British colonialisms, these racial geographies are an encoding and decod-ing o national, regional, and local spaces as symbolically indigenous and non-indigenous, as symbolically mestizo and white.

It is this symbolic encoding and decoding o spaces as indigenous andnonindigenous, as mestizo and white, as Mexican and “American,” that en-


34/44

21

ables us, or example, to envision the United States as a pristine and expansivelandscape rom “sea to shining sea,” devoid o habitation or wide swaths, de-spite its intense urbanization and pollution. On the other hand, such codingand decoding o space is also what enables us to envision Mexico as a land-scape crowded with Indians and tropical vegetation, littered with the ruins opyramids, despite its intense urbanization and pollution. In both countriesand in both cases, a handul o Europeans encountered multitudes o indig-enous peoples, and millions o indigenous people continue to live in theirown modern territories, and yet it is the encoding and decoding o spacesthrough time that produced such distinct “ethnogeographical” imaginationso these contiguous countries as indigenous and nonindigenous, as mestizoand white.

Linda Peake has insisted that “space and identities are co-produced; theplaces people occupy . . . are constitutive o identities, and spaces are givenmeaning through the social practices o groups that repeatedly occupy them”(2010, 65). Racial geography as an analytical category ocuses our attentionon the spatial practices that produced Mexico and the United States as trans-parent spaces occupied by primarily mestizo and white identities respec-tively, but it also enables us to discern how indigenous places and people were“co-produced” by colonialism and nationalism. Racial geography enables

us to decode how Indians and indios were coproduced as human bodies incontradistinction to colonists as human bodies, all within the landscapes o“encounter,” and to deduce how indigenous peoples were subsequently copro-duced in and by the conned spaces o the ejido and the reservation withinlandscapes o nationalism. I racial geography as an analytical category enablesus to “recognize congurations o power that have situated indigenous peoplesspatially in specic ways” (Kobayashi and Leeuw 2010, 123), it also enables usto see how it is that the generic categories o Indians and indios are reitera-

tively deployed or the purposes o producing space elsewhere.Tere is an uncanny persistence o the conventional racial graphings o

Indians and indios in the neoliberal present o an increasingly unied and mili-tarized economic geography o northern Mexico and southwestern UnitedStates, but the graphing o the gure o the Indian exceeds this regional spaceas well. As Sparke suggests, “Every geography, whether assumed or explic-itly elaborated as such, every mapping, picturing, visualization, landscaping,theorization, and metaphorization o space becomes rereadable in this sensenot just or what it includes, but also or what it overwrites and covers up inthe moment o representing spatially the always already unnished historical-geographical process and power relations o its spatial production” (Sparke


35/44

22

2005, xvi, emphasis mine). Tus, or example, we can reread the indio bár- baro in the pervasive picturing o northern Mexico as the space o barbarousnarcos, or in the academic theorizing o Mexico as ungovernable. Similarly,the picturing o landscapes in Aghanistan and Iraq as liberated by U.S.intervention overwrites the landscapes o maniest destiny on the GreatPlains; “nation building” in desert climes rereads U.S. exceptionalism, araway rom the geographical origins o the U.S. “rontier” but still derived romit. Furthermore, all o this metaphorization is made possible by the image oIslamic jihadists covering up images o implacable Comanche and Apacheoes. All these contemporary visualizations draw on rich colonial and post-colonial inscriptions o indigeneity in the landscapes o the border region.Tey register the persistent heterotemporality o the region, revealing, even

as they overwrite, the traces o barbarous Indians in “historical-geographicalprocess[es]” o intimate spatial production and relation. Indian Given offersa historical-geographical comparison o the heterotemporal spatial produc-tion o Indians, Mexicans, whites, and mestizos in intimate relation along,across, and beyond national borders. Tese racialized geographies are “In-dian given” not because indigenous people have themselves graphed the geothusly (though indigenous peoples have intervened in these processes), but

because the U.S. and Mexican geos-as-nation were and are graphed around

the troublesome trace o the Indian.o arrive at the multilayered and uctuating history o the production o

the racialized geographies condensed along the border o the United Statesand Mexico, the chapters assembled in Indian Given consider a series o spa-tial practices that graphed the geo o the Mexico–U.S. border: the sixteenth-century colonial emplotment o indigenous humanity in the “New World”

by the Spanish and British; the eighteenth-century practice o Spanish settle-ment among the indigenous populations o exas, with its encomiendas , mis-

sions, and presidios; the nineteenth-century scalping posses commissioned by Mexico’s northern states but ormed by U.S. citizens; the nineteenth-century negotiation o the reaty o Guadalupe Hidalgo, with its creation onew national borders and orms o citizenship; the early twentieth-centurylegal cases that redrew the boundaries o U.S. (white) citizenship; the latetwentieth-century emergence o Chicano nationalism and the geographicallyimagined ormation o Aztlán as homeland in the afermath o the civil rightsera; and nally, the drug trade and the drug war in northern Mexico, as thelatest reiteration o racial space.

As Leebvre reminds us in his oundational theory o the production ospace, spatial practicesthose concerned with production and reproduc-


36/44

23

tion o lie (and death) and o social relationdo not by themselves pro-duce space. Rather, the production o space also entails the representationof space by scientists, urban planners, social engineers, and artists, amongothers, who “identiy what is lived and what is perceived [in spatial practice]

with what is conceived.” Tus, Indian Given also takes up the representations o space that go hand-in-hand with spatial practices in geo-graphing: by thosesocial engineers o the place o Indian humanity within colonialisms; bythe vecinos, settlers , priests, and soldiers o the colonial archive; by the civilrights activists in the U.S. Southwest who envisioned utopic alternatives totheir segregated landscapes; by the authors o literary chronicles o travel,

borders, and crossings; by the directors o lms about dystopic cultural land-scapes in both Mexico and the United States. Tese spatial practices and

representations o space together produce ever-uctuating racial cartogra-phies o the Mexico–U.S. border: o the Indian as denizen, o the Mexican asmestizo, o the Mexican American as white, o the Anglo- American as citi-zen, o the Mexican Indian as exceptional, o the U.S. Indian as anachronism.Even beyond these shifing racial categories, however, spatial practices andthe representations o space produce racial geographies as representationalspace; together producing the borderlands as that “dominatedand hencepassively experiencedspace which the imagination seeks to change and

appropriate. [Representational space] overlays physical space, making symbolic use o its objects” (Leebvre 1991, 39). Te borderlands were and con-tinue to be representational space in the colonial and national imaginaries o

both Mexico and the United States. Te “symbolic use” o the vast expanseso the border, o its heterotemporal cities and towns, today creates our sharedimaginary o its lived racial relations. ogether, the spatial practices o earlycolonial settlement and o U.S. expansionism conjoined with the representa-tion o space in historiography, literature, and lm to produce a shared set o

conventions or envisioning o the border region and its racial geographies.

emporal, Legal, and Psychic Mappings

Rights were for those who had the capacity to exercise them, a capacity denoted by racial

identity. This conception of rights was contingent on race—on whether one could claim

whiteness—as a form of property. —Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property”

Colonialism is not simply an application of particular notions of law and territory; it is the

active positioning of people on a massive scale. —Audrey Kobayashi and Sarah de Leeuw,

“Colonialism and the Tensioned Landscapes of Indigeneity”


37/44

24

Racial geography as a theory o the production o space enables us to arriveat a different way o graphing history as well, a graphing that is not contingenton causal or derivative relationships through time. Tus my analysis in IndianGiven o the multiple layers o racial ormation mapped onto a given cartog-raphy o the border is not an argument or the ways in which the Spanish and

Anglo- American colonization o Indians and mestizos in the region led in-evitably or directly to the drug war or the militarization o the border; nor isit an argument about how complicities o racial geographies may have led tothe inevitable integration o the region through the drug economy and reetrade. Dipesh Chakrabarty has described this orm o historicist thinking asa “one way ow o time” (Chakrabarty 2000, 243). Te reader will not nd inthese pages an argument about how representations o narcos, undocumented

immigrants, and terrorists are derived rom Spanish and Anglo- American co-lonial representations o Indians and Mexicans, respectively or together. Suchexplanations o the relationship between “past” and “present” would reducethe colonial reverberations in the present to mere anachronisms. Rather, theuncanny persistence o the barbarous Indian o the colonial record is em-

blematic o the persistence o racial geographies through time, emblematic othe “timeknot” o history, o the heterotemporality described by Chakrabartyas “the plurality that inheres in the ‘now,’ the lack o totality, the constant rag-

mentariness, that constitutes one’s present” (Chakrabarty 2000, 243). An investigation into the spatial production o the racial geographies o

the region allows us to see how colonial and contemporary geographies arerelated palimpsestically, as a plurality that exists in the heterotemporality othe present. Te gure o the Indian produced in colonialism persists notas anachronism but as an ongoing historical-geographical process in the(b)ordering o space. Put another way, the gure o the Indian constituted bycolonial spatial practices and representations o space continues to affect our

contemporary production o racial geographies, although not in direct casualrelation. Te (Spanish or Anglo- American) gure o the Indian is recursivelyavailable or the continual (re)production o racially bordered spaces beyondthe connes o the physical border that divides Mexico and the United States.Moreover, our paranoid apprehension o the racialized geography o the bor-der today dependshowever unwittinglyon these colonially given gureso the Indian. Tis palimpsestic relationship then is not exactly historicist,although it is temporal and historical; it requires a spatialized understandingo time, rather than a developmentalist or teleological notion o history.

Te heterotemporality o the present in both Mexico and the United Statesis expressed in the multiple racial geographies that are overlain in this “multi-


38/44

25

cultural” border region, inorming subject ormation and models o citizen-ship. On one hand, there is the Mexican racial geography o mestizaje that,in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, privileged admixture even whilemaintaining mestizo and indigenous racial categories in hierarchical rela-tion. On the other, there is the polarized geography o race in the UnitedStates that, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, privileged racial sepa-ration and a stark white/black binary o racial relation. Both o these racialgeographies, however distinct rom each other, were produced through settle-ment, war, genocide, custom, negotiation, representation, and jurisprudence.

As such, Indian Given does not advance an argument or the heterotemporal-ity o mestizaje against the singular temporality o binarism. Rather I am ar-guing that heterotemporality is an effect o the racial geographies o mestizaje

and binary white/black relations colliding in the same vexed space.Each o these geographies, in turn, is traced over the previous temporali-ties o colonial racial orders with their erasures and/or inscriptions o thegure o the Indian and over indigenous temporalities o social relation. Ithe Spanish summoned the Indian to appear beore the Crown as grist orthe mill o their colonial project, Anglo- American colonists also required thepresence o Indians to secure their own expansionist enterprises and to con-solidate their “exceptionalist” white character. In both racial geographies, in

other words, the gure o the Indian was/is sometimes rallied and sometimes banished. Te ate o the Spanish colonial missioneven along the distantnorthern rontier o New Spain was intimately tied to the ate o the Indi-ans’ souls, and as such the bellicose apostates were as essential to the colonialproduction o space as the most docile o converts, i not more so. It is notuntil the nineteenth century that the ate o Anglo- American immigrants tothe rontier was tied to the disappearance o the Indian, literally and gura-tively, to the dispossession o the indigenous inhabitants o their claim to the

land and to their banishment rom the historical scene o proprietary claim. Racial geography as a theory o space and heterotemporality as a theory ohistory allow us to graph the various scenes/seens at once: the legal/cultural/psychic landscape o the border is ull o Indians; the legal/cultural/psychiclandscape o the border is devoid o Indians. Heterotemporality and racialgeography as a theory o the present offer a model or understanding the clasho the multiple racial epistemologies o coloniality and postcoloniality trans-piring in one region, one citizen-subject at a time.

For a crucial dimension o this vexed scene o heterotemporality is thelegal ormation o citizen-subjects in the distinct yet interlinked racial geog-raphies o the United States and Mexico. Critical race scholars and U.S.


39/44

26

ethnic studies scholars have demonstrated that the racial composition o theUnited States is neither accidental nor preordained; rather it is the effect oa programmatic colonial and postcolonial effort to use the law to calculate

whiteness as the principal property o ull citizenship and to enhance perpet-ually the lie chances o this racial category against all others (Acuña 1972, Pa-dilla 1980, Williams 1990, akaki 1990, Harris 1993, Haney López 1996, Foley1997, Delgado and Steancic 2001, Gómez 2007, Gross 2008). Te UnitedStates’ long legal history o distributing and withholding the ull rights ocitizenship according to race (including the rights to sel-determination, toproperty, to liberty, to mobility, and to suffrage) is a history o the produc-tion o a racialized national space: o a “white” majority population liv-ing, predominantly, in exclusive spaces on the one hand (suburbs, gentried

urban areas, rural retreats) and o a series o minoritized populations limited,predominantly, to marginalized spaces on the other (bedroom communi-ties, “ghettos,” work camps, reservations). Tis legal engineering producedthe patterns o rural and urban settlement we occupy in the United Statestoday, still largely divided along racial lines. Racial legislation engineered notsimply a white propertied class but a racial majority with an investment intheir whiteness as a orm o property that protects them against the kind odiscrimination, segregation, immiseration, and death reserved or peoples

o color (Harris 1993). Tis production o racialized national spaces throughdiscriminatory practices paradoxically produced the U.S. nation as the repre-sentational space or normative republicanism and or unrestricted individualreedom, acilitated in large part by associating whiteness, as a orm o exclu-sive property, with meritorious good character.

In contradistinction to the United States’ history o segregation and dis-crimination in the guise o republicanism and liberty, Mexico’s history olegislation privileged racial inclusiveness through assimilation, producing the

nation as the representational space o mestizaje and o presumptive racialdemocracy. Te eradication o New Spain’s caste system, with its gradation oprivileges and obligations, and the abolition o slavery gured prominently inthe Mexican independence movement. Articles abolishing castes and slavery,and explicitly declaring the equality o all Mexicans regardless o race, ap-peared in several iterations o Mexico’s nineteenth-century constitutions anddeclarations o independence (the 1812 Elementos Constitucionales, arts. 24and 25; the 1813 Sentimientos de la Nación, arts. 12, 15, and 22; the 1821 Plan deIguala, art. 11; the 1857 Constitución Política, arts. 2 and 5). While Mexicohas no legal or paralegal history o limiting suffrage, intermarriage, settlement,or access to employment according to race, this equality beore the law does


40/44

27

not imply that Mexico’s indigenous and afromestizo populations have beenhistorically ree o racial discrimination. However, the orm o this racial dis-crimination in Mexico is signicantly different rom that in the United States.Nineteenth-century liberal leaders made a concerted legal effort to deracinatethe indigenous population through assimilation policies. Tough these policieslargely ailed and many were reversed afer the 1910 revolution, the presump-tive logic o mestizaje persists, especially with regard to indigenous peoplesand aromestizos. Nevertheless, the representation o the space o the nation asinclusive o racial difference is not merely symbolic. Indigenous peoples andaromestizos participated actively in the wars o independence (1810) and revo-lution (1910), and in the social, political, and economic lie o the nation inthe postrevolutionary period. Indigenous peoples especially gure promi-

nently in the historiography o these iconic events. In other words, the repre-sentation o the Indian as the oundation o the country is a key element inthe graphing o the national geo. At the same time, the rhetoric o admixturemaking the nation strongero orging nationhood out o the mixture oSpanish and Indian cultureshas been the dominant mythos since the 1910revolution. As a consequence o these seemingly contradictory ideals in theracial geography o Mexican nationalism, the Indian is at once summoned toappear everywhere as the foundation o Mexican character and instructed to

disappear into the more perect union o mestizaje. Indian Given does not seek to adjudicate which o these legal mappings o

racialized citizen-subjects, the Mexican or the United States, is more “mod-ern” or “democratic.” It is not, in other words, an account o Mexican mestizajeas a more “user riendly” racial geography than the U.S. white/black binarism, as a“third space” o more capacious psychic inclusion. Rather, the heterotempo-rality o this region is vexing or the inhabitants therein because o the com-plex and incongruent demands o racial ormation and allegiance issued by

both o these geographies at once. And as such, Indian Given offers an accounto subjects orged in the competing temporalities o U.S. and Mexican racialgeographies. Te citizen-subject inhabits heterotemporal racial geographies,

but these heterotemporal demands also inhabit the psyche. Mexican Ameri-can and Chicana/o subject ormation offers a particularly ruitul site or theanalysis o the psyche constituted in the time and space o competing racial de-mands. However, all subjects orged in this space are vexed by its racial hetero-temporality, whether white, black, aromestizo, mestizo , Native American, orindigena. Because Indian Given offers us an analysis o the transnational produc-tion o these racial geographies, it enables us to see these vexed psychic spacesas mutually produced in the overlapping, heterotemporal space o the border.


41/44

28

Indian Given stages heterotemporality in each chapter as well, placing co-lonial and postcolonial documents in dialogue with each other in order totrace the gure o the Indian as it appears and disappears rom sight. I stagethese conversations between colonial and postcolonial texts to interrupt the tel-eological progression o history that sweeps us ever orward rom colonialsubjection to anticolonial revolution to postcolonial nationhood to neolib-eral postnationalism (Scott 2004). I we reuse to respect this progressivetemporalityi each chapter o time does not hinge on the passing away othe previous orderwe can not only ask different kinds o questions o co-lonial and postcolonial texts, we can also imagine the possibility o differentuturities. By exploring the relationship between colonial and postcolonialtexts, Indian Given demonstrates how the past is enjoined with the present

and theorizes the psychic consequences o these articulations between pastand present.Te Indians given in the Spanish and Anglo- American colonial archives,

I contend, respectively enabled the postcolonial orms o mestizo and whitesubjectivity in Mexico and the United States today, but Indian Given also o-ers an account o the trauma o possibilities oreclosed or repressed by theselayered racial ormations. What were the costs, I ask, o a ctive whitenessand a ctive mestizaje in the psychic lie o U.S. and Mexican citizen-subjects,

indigenous and nonindigenous alike? What was the psychic toll o banish-ing given Indians rom the scene o white subjectivity and citizenship, as inthe case o the United States? Or o summoning her orth as the mothero a mestizo subjectivity and citizenship, as in the case o Mexico? And inthe borderlands, where U.S. and Mexican racial geographies overlap, inter-sect, and collide, what were/are the psychic costs to Mexican American andChicana/o subjects who were/are multiply hailed by ctive orms o racialcitizenship, raught with the oreclosure and repression o indigenous pasts?

What was/is the psychic toll, in other words, o being “white by law”? O being orced to denounce rst one’s indigenous ancestry and then the nation-alist and masculinist identity associated with mestizaje in order to claim therights o (white) U.S. citizenship?

I the Indians imagined in the Spanish and Anglo- American colonial ar-chives indexed the repression or oreclosure o indigenous particularity, thenthey also indexed a history o violence denied or deemed necessary by con-temporary nationalisms. Qualities and virtues were propped onto these imag-ined Indians, engaged in ctive scenes o ushering in the nation; and whenmoments o national crisis threatened the loss o these given Indians, thenthese national qualities and virtues were also threatened. Or, more precisely


42/44

29

put, when moments o national crisis revealed the indigenous particularitythat was repressed and/or oreclosed in the oundation o the nation, the

violence o oundational origins disrupted the seemingly transparent and in-nocent racial geographies o the United States, Mexico, and Aztlán. Nationalimaginaries o oundational justice, airness, and democracy (in the U.S. case),or o inclusion, anti-imperialism, and sovereignty (in the Mexican case) areinterrupted, disturbed. Indian Given theorizes these disturbances in the na-tional imaginary as psychic effects on particular citizen-subjects who are/ wereparticularly affected by these seismic shifs in racial geographies colliding andcolluding along the border.

Literature and lm are vital to this project o theorizing the effects o racialoreclosure and repression on the psyche, offering insight into the racial un-

conscious o history by concerning themselves precisely with the inevitablesilences in the historical record, with the necessary exclusions o the law. Lit-erature and lm enable us to take account o the psychic toll o racial geogra-phies on the citizens o the national imaginaries considered here, by affordingus theoretical speculation and ctive accounts o the silences in the archive.Moreover, the method o literary analysis when applied to the archive offersus a glimpse into the racial unconscious o history. Indian Given advances theargument that the historical and geographical archives also have an uncon-

scious and seeks to elaborate its contours. Psychoanalytic theory, and particu-larly the recent contributions o psychoanalytic scholars o race, also allowsme to elaborate a theory o the ormation o a racial unconscious o historythat is heterotemporal, rather than universal or eternal. I the historical andlegal archive has

indian given by maría josefina saldaña-portillo

Documents