Although I was looking forward to taking a break from Aztlán, I am grateful for the opportunity to converse with María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s ambitious and complex tome, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States. The book is a difficult and unsettling project (and I mean unsettling in a good way), tracing the lines that have been drawn, have intersected, and have conflicted amid the spatio-racial visualizations of both Mexico and the United States. Her work unsettles the settler colonial histories of both nations, troubles those maps we tend to hold in our minds. Given her commitment to unsettling us, this book is unsurprisingly “heterotemporal” (her word) and interdisciplinary, reading historically, reading literarily, reading psychoanalytically, traversing spaces and eras from the 1550 Valladolid debates in Spain to contemporary representations of narcotraficantes in northern Mexico and the US Southwest.

In my response I want to dwell paradoxically in the unsettling effects and affects that she charts, to think about the striking “uncanny persistence” (21) of racial nightmares that we in the United States perhaps better recognize now than when No Country for Old Men debuted (2007), now that these racial geographies have been brought back to the spotlight through the efforts of #BlackLivesMatter, the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, and—perhaps unintentionally—through the myriad terrifying choices of the Donald J. Trump administration (which threatens to end DACA as I write). It is unsurprising then that Saldaña-Portillo does not just craft a history for us. She also draws us into cinema, literature, and Freudian psychoanalysis of horror and melancholy, because navigating the losses of whiteness in the Americas requires a different set of analytical tools and approaches than employed in measuring something more empirical. Although she is concerned with the “wages of whiteness,” she also seeks to understand what these wages cover over and elide.1 She must bridge Freud and social theory, because, as she reveals, our individual nightmares are also bound up with deep structural conflicts between multiple imaginations that co-constitute our individual psyches and the spaces of our nations.

What I find so admirable about Saldaña-Portillo’s book—what makes this book a work you must read carefully and more than once—is her commitment to the complexity of race in the Americas. There are no straight lines to follow in explaining the racial nightmares of our present. Her book is precisely about the way that we must cultivate a “spatial understanding of time” (24) that does not seek neat causes and effects. Indian Given focuses on the figure of the “Indian”; real Native peoples matter to this book, but she mostly examines the unreal, the representations of “Indians” and indigeneity, and the ways that these representations have created the United States and Mexico as nations.

Saldaña-Portillo refuses to constrain our understanding by assuming the neat dominance of only one racial geography; rather she offers us “heterotemporality and racial geography as a theory of the present,” a way of seeing that focuses on “the clash of the multiple racial epistemologies of coloniality and postcoloniality transpiring in one region, one citizen-subject at a time” (25). We have for too long thought that Mexico’s racial geographies are distinct from the United States’; she shows how race is different in different places and times, but race in the Americas is also interrelated, developing in concert, in resonance, and in conflict. She frequently draws both national imaginaries together in each chapter, making every piece of this book a worthwhile and complex read.

The Costs of Whiteness

Saldaña-Portillo’s title, Indian Given, intentionally signifies on a racialized insult in the English-language. Her project reveals how settler colonists and their descendants have created figural Indians and laid them at the foundations of their colonial projects, burying real Indians and trying to violently refute indigenous survivance.2 Thus her book depicts the stagings and restagings of whiteness across US and Mexican histories by examining how whiteness (and mestizaje) has made itself through figuring and representing Indians. She draws on Cheryl Harris’s work on “whiteness as property” in order to explicate the ways that racial regimes have been graphed onto US territories, but also Mexican territories, in order to protect the rights of some at a great cost to others.3

Her work does more than elucidate the makings of whiteness, however. Saldaña-Portillo also helps us to see how even proximity to whiteness is always already a loss. Ethnic Mexicans in the United States were compelled to be “white by law” in order to access the privileges of citizenship, even as they were often refused many of the privileged properties of whiteness in practice.4 This proximity to whiteness (being made almost, but not quite, white)5 exacted great costs, some of which were literal but others were more psychological. Saldaña-Portillo compellingly labels these costs as “the trauma of possibilities foreclosed” (28). I would be fascinated by a sustained conversation between Saldaña-Poritllo and Hector Amaya’s work, Citizenship Excess, which considers the costs that citizenship has exacted on those ethnic Mexicans with access to it as well.6

As a student of the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s, I was sucked in by the complex way Saldaña-Portillo accounts for and critiques Chicanx nationalist imaginaries, particularly the uncanny mobilization of the mythical Aztec homeland, Aztlán, and the racial melancholia coursing through Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972). As she shows, Aztlán, in its 1970s iterations among Chicanxs, too often restricted itself to the US borders, refusing a connection with Mexico even as it erased Native geographies in the United States’ southwestern lands. Although many ethnic Mexicans in the United States were/are also Native peoples, many of whom in the 1960s and 1970s also had ancestral ties to the Native peoples of the southwestern United States in particular, Aztlán awkwardly relied on a particular Aztec imperial imaginary.

For many ethnic Mexicans who turned toward Aztlán in the 1960s and 1970s, they found within it some resonance of home, often complexly imagined and negotiated; the tensions of Aztlán as a utopian imagination that appeals to experiences of displacement is something I chart in the second chapter of my book. Like Saldaña-Portillo, I want to avoid the “overly optimistic” readings of Aztlán, ones that always fall into a “Romantic emplotment of anticolonialism” (225). I interviewed Chicanx activists who saw Aztlán as appealing not because they were interested in the specific Aztec past but because it provided a shared language for grounding the United States as indigenous space; some specifically identify with and are affiliated with particular Native peoples in the United States and Mexico. Others, however, are critical of Aztlán now in hindsight, seeing it as too imperial, too limited.7

Of interest, to me, however, is how Saldaña-Portillo examines appeals to Aztlán as a practice borne of loss. Her chapter is titled “Losing It!” for many reasons, but one of them is because she examines how ethnic Mexicans in the United States were forced to sacrifice their indigenous connections on the altar of citizenship in the United States, a citizenship that forced them to choose “whiteness” even when other social circumstances taught them they were not really white. Author and playwright (one who is notably mixed, with an Anglo father and ethnic Mexican mother) Cherríe L. Moraga directly recognizes how Aztlán responds to a melancholic register of loss when she states, “Aztlán gave language to a nameless anhelo [yearning] inside me. To me, it was never a masculine notion. It had nothing to do with the Aztecs and everything to do with the Mexican birds, Mexican beaches, and Mexican babies right here in Califas.”8 Moraga’s Aztlán does not quite sound like the restrictive one Saldaña-Portillo describes, perhaps because Moraga is interested in a “queer Aztlán,” one that defies some of the heteropatriarchal inscriptions of the 1960s and 1970s. Moraga’s Aztlán is about loss that is racial, gendered, and familial, and thus her Aztlán directly connects her to Mexico in ways that the Aztlán found in some 1960s literature does not. She also uses it to express fraught and awkward senses of indigenous solidarity.

Moraga’s Aztlán can be made more pliable precisely because it speaks to an anhelo; her Aztlán is a utopian no place ever in motion. I agree with Saldaña-Portillo’s description of Aztlán’s limits in much movement-era discourse. However, I wonder about Aztlán’s persistent appeal, and I wonder what Saldaña-Portillo might say about some of the other articulations of Aztlán, articulations that are filled with both longing and disgust for Aztlán’s own heterotemporal resonances.

Regardless of the diverse readings of Aztlán, an inscribed proximity to whiteness also yielded, among some ethnic Mexicans, a desire for some of whiteness’s properties. Pursuit of white enfranchisement, however, came at great costs. What I would love to read some day is a dialogue between Saldaña-Portillo’s Indian Given and Allyson Hobbs’s A Chosen Exile (2014).9 Hobbs explores different racial geographies than Saldaña-Portillo because Hobbs focuses more on the interaction of black-white racial dynamics solely within US borders; with a few limited exceptions, Hobbs mostly focuses on African Americans who have passed as white in US history.

Like Saldaña-Portillo, Hobbs draws on Harris’s notion of “whiteness as property” while showing how such a property has great cost. Whereas previous histories of African Americans passing as white emphasized what people gain when they pass as white, Hobbs charts a history of what legal whiteness has cost, and she is particularly interested in the loss of kin, the loss of familial connections, the loss of history, losses for which no white property could compensate. According to Saldaña-Portillo, the demands of US citizenship that forcefully separated ethnic Mexicans from indigeneity, forced them into “an engagement with lost indigenous identity . . . rather than an engagement with contemporary indigenous peoples” (232). As with Hobbs, we find another sort of scrambled kinship, a loss of kin as a cost of proximity to whiteness, with the consequence that Chicanxs such as Acosta approached indigeneity as something they had lost rather than as a connection to living Native communities. It is again a loss that cannot be compensated for; Acosta’s biography tracks the failures of psychological compensation (melancholia).

The Trauma of Foreclosed Possibilities and Religious Imaginaries

My own unsettled affects in reading both Saldaña-Portillo and Hobbs yields a desire to complement their work with an attention to that space where ethnic Mexicans and African Americans have often exorcized racial geographies, for good and for ill. Here I mean that the histories Hobbs and Saldaña-Portillo narrate have been informed by religious rhetorics, and responses to these histories have been staged and restaged in religious practices, however tenuous our definitions of religion here. I do not fault these scholars for not foregrounding something our own field refuses to define. I think they have undertaken work that now requires that we scholars of religion take up the freighted ways that the “religious” might have informed and might transpire as effects of these racial geographies.

Religious notions and practices around purity and around scriptures as technologies of power have obviously informed racial geographies. Indeed, Saldaña-Portillo’s first chapter shows how particular readings of Christian scriptures were mobilized in creating and debating early modern notions of the “human” in both Spanish and English colonialisms. Religious notions and religious practices have thus always been implicated in racial geographies and the nightmarish violence that inscribing race on the US landscape has effected; so too have religious geographies been used in attempts to broaden our sense of humanity. Saldaña-Portillo’s attention to “geo-graphy” as “earth writing” is also consonant with Vincent L. Wimbush’s attention to scripturalization as a technology of power and to José Rabasa’s work on writing as violence. Wimbush focuses on Olaudah Equiano’s responses to English colonialism and enslavement while Rabasa examines Spanish violence in northern New Spain, but both attend to the relationship between Christian scriptures and the violent practices and effects of settler colonialism and slavery.10

Given Saldaña-Portillo’s careful exegesis of Acosta’s autobiography, I wonder what her Freudian attention to melancholia might reveal about seemingly resistant religious practices and notions in the history of the Americas. In Charles H. Long’s examination of “The Oppressive Elements of Religion and the Religions of the Oppressed,” he elucidates how religious spaces and practices can be places where distinctive actors under the regimes of colonialism and enslavement have negotiated the traumas of these heterotemporal racial geographies. Through an examination of W. E. B. Du Bois’s writings, but also throughout the essays in Significations, Long articulates how oppressed religious practitioners have found their humanity in religion and this experience of humanization is their definition of religion, rather than a turn to oppressive forces, the mysterium tremendum that certain European and Euro-North American religious practitioners lay at the root of what we term the “religious.” Precisely in their engagements with “an-other world” the oppressed can find a world other than the oppressive one of the present.11

Long’s approach redirects our attention to the import of utopian religious practice and vision because the utopian is the terrain of the good and no place, of “an-other world” that responds to and disrupts this one. Thus, for Long, oppressed religious practices are precisely the terrain where worlds beyond the constraints of racial geographies may be encountered. As a scholar of religion, I wonder what happens if we look more closely now at different religious practices in the Americas with an eye particularly to how they manage heterotemporal registers of diverse and conflicting racial geographies (rather than neatly singular registers of racialization). How have religious terrains been spaces for working out conflicting racial traumas and melancholia? Perhaps we might also find glimpses of utopian alternatives that interrupt racial geographies’ “violent effects,” just as Saldaña-Portillo hopes to do in her work (31). I hope that, as future religion scholars chart the workings out of racial geographies within religious imaginaries, they maintain the astounding breadth and complexity Saldaña-Portillo upholds in her work. We must recognize that there are no straight lines, or linear answers as we unfurl racial and religious cartographies; instead there are complicated and conflicted heterotemporal resonances calling for careful analysis but refusing simple answers. One finds neither total hope nor total despair here.

As I complete my book manuscript, Two-Spirit Film Spaces: Trans* Indigenous Media from Seven Directions, I am struck by the transborder indigenous spatiality conversations that my own work could have with the important publication Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States, by Dr. Saldaña-Portillo. I begin this review with a positive evaluation of the Post-Colonial, Chicano, Race, Settler Colonial Studies, anti-NAFTA and anti-war implications of Indian Given. However, my real contributions here are to open discussions about how indigenous borderlands spatiality could be differently situated within methodologies of American Indian Studies, Religious Studies, Gender Studies, Media Studies, Xicana Studies, and California Indian Studies in complementary and contrasting ways. As a major point of spatiality analysis divergence, I mostly use fourth world / decolonial / indigenous methodologies in difference with Dr. Saldaña-Portillo, who centers postmodern third world / post-colonial / post-Chicano Nationalist methods in Indian Given.

To the credit of Indian Given, Saldaña-Portillo’s blending of historical research, contemporary media/literature, and future policy outcomes could assist future researchers interested in cartography, transborder, cultural, and indigeneity issues. Lefebvre is the guiding postmodern theorist who helps deconstruct Indian Given’s post-colonial indigenous mappings of the US/Mexican borderlands. As I understand it, Indian Given traces the settler trope and images of the indio bárbaro within the palimpsest territorial imaginary of the 1700s–present Spanish/Mexican Norte, the 1850–present US Southwest, and the 1970s–present Chicano Nationalist Aztlán. Saldaña-Portillo only rarely considers Southwest American Indian perspectives on their own shifting territories that overlap these settler claims. Indian Given’s nuanced tracing of Spanish and English Renaissance intellectual approaches to defining American land rights are important to understand how the subsequent post-colonial United States and Mexico carried on those intellectual colonial legacies in divergent ways. Dr. Saldaña-Portillo emphasizes how three territories invoke the savage Indian / indio bárbaro across mixed post/colonial time frames, especially within the settler border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California and in overlapping reference to La Comanchería and La Apachería indigenous spaces. She concludes that legal and cultural racialization of Chicanos and Mexicans hinges upon ambivalently embodying this historical frontier savagery. The book succeeds in following settler tropes of indigeneity across historical narratives entwined with contemporary ones. This approach ultimately invigorates colonial and post-colonial Borderlands Studies with historical implications on present-day policy and representations. One politically understated policy implication of the historical section is that the current legal separation of Native American sovereignty from Southwestern Mexican-American/Chicano ethnicity holds up under historical scrutiny although both groups have some shared roots in the same indigenous populations of the Greater Southwest. Indian Given’s emphasis on Apache, Pueblo, and Comanche historical presence and mixing in Chicano populations is the most thorough critique of the Chicano Nationalist mappings of the Southwest as a place of migratory Aztec origin and continued Aztec occupation. The coda that finally links the indio bárbaro with new permutations of drug traders in the Texas film No Place for Old Men (2007) and Mexican/US drug war politics is especially cogent. Here, the ending of the North American Free Trade Agreement and its related transnational War on Drugs is the most direct policy outcome that Saldaña-Portillo advocates.

I note four intradisciplinary Chicano Studies-related critiques on the book. First, Dr. Saldaña-Portillo could use more contextualization for Lefebvre, Freud, and others from secondary Chicanx/Latinx theorists before applying their ideas (23, 221). To critique US, Mexican, and Chicano settlerism without critiquing Indian Given’s European male architects of modern and postmodern theory for their cis-heteropatriarchal colonial legacies creates an uneven analysis. Later, I will advocate for more inclusion of American Indian theory at length. Second, the implicit separation of racialized Chicanos from politically sovereign American Indians is the Latino Studies and American Indian Studies disciplinary policy point of the book that needs more emphasis. Many enrolled American Indian scholars will find it a relief that Indian Given does not advocate for a wholesale Chicanx spiritual and political appropriation of American Indian cultures as Chicano 1800s detribalization is an endgame struggle in Indian Given. I appreciate that rather than opting for a Hispanic conclusion of Spanish culture inevitability, assimilation, and superiority, Indian Given returns to post-Revolutionary Mestizaje rhetoric, but in a more critical, non-evolutionary, and regionally-nuanced way.

Third, greater intersectional attention to race/class/gender is needed as well. That a gendered interrogation does not occur marks a deliberate difference with previous Chicana feminist intellectual legacies and Saldaña-Portillo’s earlier gender work. Ending the book with a 1972 cis-heteropatriarchal Chicano Nationalist literary work excludes the subsequent Chicana gendered critiques and differently indigenized subjectivities of the early 1970s. For example, Indian Given does not engage the kinds of Xicana/Indígena reclaimed indigeneity as represented by Facio and Lara’s 2014 Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives and by over three decades (if not centuries) of Chicana/Latina/Indígena women’s writings. Again, I believe Indian Given could have been more forthright in its purpose of critiquing the growing trend of Xicanx and Chicano indigenous identification rather than simply avoiding the topic of post-Nationalist Chicana/o indigeneity and important post-1960s Chicana feminist discourses. The subsequent lack of gendered critique creates noticeable gaps in the analysis.

A fourth area in which Indian Given lacks a critical edge is in its erasure of California Indians, including those not federally recognized. As I teach from Long Beach situated on the unceded Tongva village and ceremonial center of Puvungna, I am reminded of the need to include enrolled and unenrolled California Indian voices in order to talk about indigenous spatiality in California. Since Indian Given’s Westminster legal case situated on Tongva (Gabrielino Mission Indian) land and An Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo California settings in San Francisco/Oakland, Riverbank, Alpine, and Los Angeles, I query, “How might California Indian reclamation of identity of land and identity complicate Indian Given’s discussion of hegemonic Plains/Southwest Indian stereotypes in California?” The prevalence of Plains/Southwest indigenous imagery is obvious cause for Indian Given to primarily address Comanche and Apache Texas-centric representations as indios bárbaros, even in California. However, given that Saldaña-Portillo maps how Cherokee removal impacts local pre-1830 Removal Act Osage and other local indigenous Nations in Oklahoma Territory, (228) it makes sense to investigate further how the image of the savage Plains Indian masks the California Mission Indian / Ranchería / reservation / urban community presence throughout California history. (As an aside, the ambiguous Chicano reading of white Okie migration to California paralleling the Trail of Tears is either unclear or inappropriate, [228] but I suppose that in any book, some areas will always appear more opaque than others.) The 2017 UCLA web-linked Tongva/Gabrielino- and Fernandeño/Tataviam-authored spatial narratives available at https://mila.ss.ucla.edu/story-maps/ could help future scholars who consider indigenous Los Angeles to further decolonize California settler spatiality.

Despite these four critical points, I still believe the book logically succeeds within its own Chicana/Latino-related discourse. I would definitely recommend Indian Given as a Mexican/US Borderlands resource for Chicanx/Latinx Studies as an introduction to identifying the settler narratives of the indigenous people of New Mexico and Texas. I would also urge American Indian, Settler Studies, and Indigenous Studies scholars to take stock of the ways in which Indian Given deconstructs transnational US/Mexican transborder settlerism and anti-Indian racism from 1492 through the 1800s in the first half of the book. Having traced the considerable strengths and evolutions of Indian Given within the field of Chicanx/Latinx, Borderlands/Geography, and Literary/Film Studies, I move on to consider larger conversations within transborder Indigenous Studies.

The first major conversation I open is that Indian Given leaves a lot of room to discuss contemporary, tribally-specific, non-Chicano indigenous self-representations that resist the settler Indian stereotypes. Because the book only intends to discuss American Indian representations in order to establish the legal and cultural difference between Southwestern/Plains American Indians and Chicanos, it too follows a trajectory of leaving Plains/Southwest American Indians status for Mexican/Chicano status across the centuries. In fact, the latter twentieth- and post-millennial-century part of the book focuses on Chicano and Mexican representations to the exclusion of contemporary American Indians. In documenting the evolution of hegemonic Spanish/English/US/Chicano/Mexican Indian tropes, the book does not attempt to relate historical and contemporary Comanche and Apache senses of spatiality, resistance, literature, film, sovereignty, spirituality. The continued existence of transborder indigenous nations such as the Yaqui, Tohono O’odham and more newly migrated Maya/Southern Mexican Indians across US/Mexican territorial claims is also mostly absented from the book.

Toward a more comparative Chicano and American Indian methodological approach, I would advocate for future researchers to complicate Indian Given’s arguments with the incredible work of American Indian Movement activists, subsequent Native American scholars, filmmakers, and indigenous methodologies. Indian Given is predicated upon Eurocentric postmodernism and geography, although I appreciate key footnoted nods to Philip Deloria and other Native scholars and the key Chicano complications to landscaped indigeneity. Moreover, indigenous voices are largely absent in all epochs that Indian Given considers. Although inclusive of some American Indian law and policy history, Indian Given is mostly limited to using first and third world post-colonial racialized theory to look at fourth world indigenous representations. I miss the Maya and Zapatista testimonio methodology of Saldaña-Portillo’s 2003 The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development that was more successful in expressing contemporary decolonial Maya political voices of Rigoberta Menchu and Zapatistas in contradistinction with post-colonial Latino Marxist perspectives of Mario Payeras and Che Guevara. After finishing the book, I am left wondering, “Where is the visual, spatial, and theological sovereignty of existing US/Mexico borderlands area indigenous peoples that resists the historical and contemporary settler tropes of savagery?” This is an interesting question given that Saldaña-Portillo seems to initially promise to address both “American Indian” as well as “indio” representations equally. (18) In many newer American Indian/indigenous writings, widely cited journals, and intellectual movements, resistant indigenous methodologies are often cited to ground analysis; purely non-Native theory is no longer inherently preferable. More comparative work is needed to bridge the settler and Native gazes, methodologies, and narratives in the future.

The second conversation I invite is in regards to gender and spirituality analysis. Implicitly, Indian Given is a book about the Borderlands Plains male warrior stereotype as imagined within the male settler imaginary. This implicitly gendered masculinity of the “male Indian warrior” has more often provoked stronger gendered framing, feminist commentary, and even two-spirit/transgender interrogation. For example, Ford’s classic Western The Searchers (1956) foregrounds the captivity narrative of the white settler female as motivation for hypermasculine white settler retaliations against Comanche “raiders.” From a gendered Religious Studies and Inés Talamantez-inflected view, I would add, “How is space/land envisioned by indigenous people as a ceremonial place of origin and renewal within directional and kinship (Mother Earth) frameworks and how do indigenous women, men and other-gendered people see their own land and relationships to land?” In fact, a discussion of earth as creatrix or as a living being would open up a foundational reason to explore complex indigenous genders, kinships and cosmologies that Indian Given leaves simplistically defined by male settlers. This conversation would easily become more accessible by considering the first conversation about including Native voices and methodologies in reimagining transborder indigenous geographies. A more geocentric cosmology would also critique the settler Enlightenment narratives of Christian land tenure in interesting ways.

A third conversation for future transborder indigeneity writers to consider is to complicate the manner in which Indian Given mutes or critiques the reclaimed indigeneity of Ch/Xicanxs. I would suggest that Xicana-Indígenas and Mexica cite and respond to Indian Given since its legal arguments regarding who is an American Indian in the United States are hegemonic. In addition, Indian Given cannot account for shifts some make from presumably Hispanic/Chicano communities to tribally-specific identities and vice versa. To make this point clear, the 2009 Texas state recognition of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas as well as the 2017 state recognition of the Texas Cherokees and Associate Bands-Mount Tabor Indian Community complicate Indian Given’s rather static 1800s recognition sense of who is and is not an American Indian in Texas. These dynamic trends of federal/state and even community recognitions and ongoing cultural activism without these recognitions needs more careful, dynamic, and contextual considerations in future work. It is not a simple ethical binary matter of exposing the “not so innocent” Chicano in contradistinction from the supposedly “innocent” American Indian as Saldaña-Portillo rhetorically concludes. (153) Rather, the political value of federal recognition sparks heated academic and shifting community debates that reflect violent fluctuations in both federal law and policy over the decades.

Here, I take space to explain how Indian Given can inform aspects of my own manuscript, Two-Spirit Film Spaces: Trans* Indigenous Media from Seven Directions. I can certainly utilize Indian Given’s emphasis on the settler gaze that includes Mestizo settlerism in my own work. For example, Indian Given’s settler gaze commentary can inform my Afro-Red-Polynesian transracial sci-fi chapter that critiques viewing transraciality as the post-utopic solution to millennia of racial oppression in the Wachowski Trans*Sisters’ Cloud Atlas (2012). I also consider the transracial Dos Almas (2013) by L. Danielle Villegas as it conjuncts settler Mestizaje with Red-Black Northwest indigeneity through problematic two-spirit/Dos Almas transman eroticism. Here, Indian Given can assist in politically differentiating between Dos Almas’ queer/two-spirit Mestiza and Native two-spirit aesthetics and visualities. However, Indian Given’s hegemonic reading of federally recognized indigeneity cannot explain why a Hopi-identified urban Native director chose to feature a diasporic Mexica-identified artist as part of an all-Native two-spirit online animation called Two-Spirit: Injunuity (2013), a film I consider in my Mexican American Indian two-spirit/trans* chapter. In addition, Indian Given cannot account for the increased Tongva activism that arose from superficially Californio/Mexican communities that includes federal recognition attempts and cultural production. My two-spirit/trans* Tongva chapter begins the book and is essential in unsettling Hollywood usurpation of Tongva and other California Indian geographies and narratives. In this light, Indian Given’s historical identity rigidity and Plains/Southwest-centrism causes it to sometimes lose relevance in shifting contemporary, California Indian, and urban American Indian cultural activism contexts.

In conclusion, Indian Given offers important evolutions that balance out Chicano indigeneity discourses. I also envision a time when Chicano Studies scholarship can draw upon more comparatively indigenous theories and methodologies as a key part of creating new knowledge. I urge American Indian Studies scholars to take notes from Chicano and transborder Indigenous Studies by rethinking the colonial construct of the US/Mexico border and critiquing the transnational nature of US and Mexican settler colonialism. My intention here is to let readers appreciate Indian Given’s strengths and to understand the indigenous methodology, gender, federal recognition, and Californian Indian implications of its choices. Finally, I trace where future scholarly conversations on transborder indigeneity may likely lead in terms of indigenous methodologies, spiritualities, genders, and political recognitions now that one reading of historical Chicano racialization is well established through Saldaña-Portillo’s ambitious work.

Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States is a book that traces a history of ways of seeing racialized geographies along the Mexico-US border. In response to a book that is about what is seen, this essay wonders about what is unseen, or rendered invisible. I want to begin by homing in on just two of the many achievements of the book. The first central achievement is that María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo shows that geographies are produced, and that colonial and national concerns have had a substantial (though not uncontested) influence upon the ways in which people and spaces have been perceived in Mexico and the United States. The text demonstrates to readers that the apparent given—the objects and characteristics of the world we grasp through perception—is to a large extent constituted by particular constructing gazes. Descriptions of the geographies of Mexico and the United States are not unmediated renderings of a world that simply is. Rather, they are “meticulously produced” representations that reflect the sensibilities, prejudices, and political interests of various agents/interpreters in colonial encounters with indigeneity (6). Saldaña-Portillo points to key articulations and interventions in the construction of racial geographies. For example, she shows how the 1738 petition of Antonio Ladrón de Guevara to the Spanish Crown both revealed and actively mapped ways of seeing indigenous peoples and lands as the Spanish sought to populate the US Borderlands. Nearly two centuries later, following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, we find identities and spaces contested and reconstructed in a series of court cases in which Mexican Americans attempted to claim their rights in the recently expanded United States.

The effects of these mappings, or ways of seeing, are far-reaching: To the extent that these constructions reflect colonial interests, they facilitated the conquest of indigenous territories, as well as facilitating their ongoing dispossession (15). Furthermore, Saldaña-Portillo proposes that contemporary cultural phenomena like the “Muslim jihadist” and the “narco-terrorist” can only be properly understood within the context of racial geographies that are shaped by colonial legacies. What makes Saldaña-Portillo’s project so important, on my view, is that by revealing the ways in which these geographies are racialized and constructed, Saldaña-Portillo does the critical work of denaturalizing taken-for-granted representations of people and spaces along the Mexico-US border, revealing their production in the context of colonial enterprises. That is, Saldaña-Portillo is practicing decolonial geography insofar as she identifies how our ways of seeing people and spaces are shaped through colonial legacies. This critical work of bringing into sight the very narratives and tropes that frame our vision of the borderlands resists and paves the way for future resistances of these colonial legacies. It gives us leeway to imagine and to envision what we have not yet been able to see.

In addition to showing how geographical representations are constructed in ways that reflect colonial concerns, a second major achievement of Indian Given is the way in which it challenges historical narratives that portray indigenous groups as mere resistors to colonial expansion. Indeed, we find that indigenous groups were actively engaged in working towards their own political interests, which sometimes undermined and sometimes aligned with those of various colonizing actors. Furthermore, the identities of various indigenous groups were not merely produced by Spanish colonizers. Rather, the historical scene was one in which “everyone is busily emplotting others and themselves on the basis of where perceived interests and advantages may lie” (92). Saldaña-Portillo describes, for instance, the way in which “el Indio Sanchez,” an Indian spy for the Spanish, seems to betray his own ambivalence over his allegiance by repeatedly reporting to the Spaniards his observations about the military strength of various indigenous nations, presumably in order to dissuade the Spanish from going to battle with them. Elsewhere, Saldaña-Portillo describes how Comanche attacks on Spanish settlements were not merely acts of resisting the Spanish colonial order but rather a blow directed to the Spanish because of their support of the Comanche’s traditional enemy, the Apache (84). Readers also learn that “U.S. expansionists worked in concert with Apache and Comanche political interests” in order to take northern Mexican territories (126). While highlighting these histories does not fully decenter the colonial perspective, it challenges overly simplistic narratives about colonial expansion as simply involving the progressive force of Europeans against the impotent, resisting Indians. Instead, the contravening interests of the various indigenous and colonial groups “attest to a lived heterotemporality” that challenges that progressivist narrative (85). On my view, Saldaña-Portillo’s accounts of different indigenous groups’ various political interests, their complex and shifting alliances, their acts of revenge and betrayal, and even their participation in the brutal violence that was a part of political or military strategy have the important effect of illuminating the agency of indigenous peoples in ways that simpler resistance narratives do not.

The two achievements I have described here are significant because they bring into awareness that the unseen is often eclipsed by that which is visible. More specifically, they hint at the possibility of centering the worlds of indigenous peoples that are all-too-often rendered peripheral by colonial geographies and narratives, and by the transmutable and dehumanizing figure of the indio bárbaro. In light of this gesture, I turn now to a group of people who are also covered over by the idea of the indio bárbaro and whose invisibility is sometimes, even in this revelatory book, itself invisible. In the remainder of this response essay, I briefly recall some of the key themes of Indian Given and raise a series of questions about how these themes may have related to the lives of women, in particular. Although Indian Given is about racial geographies, I wonder what insights the additional lens of gender might reveal.

El indio bárbaro

We learn that the figure of the indio bárbaro does not refer to any particular historical actor, yet has stood in for many, as a way of demarcating “the boundary between the ‘good people’ of a nation worth defending and the barbarous inhumanity of those who must be excluded, excised, eliminated at all costs” (235). The word indio is ambiguously gender-neutral or masculine, and the word Indian is nondescriptive with regard to gender. The figure of the indio bárbaro, however, seems to evoke images of dangerous men, such as when it is used to characterize Apache or Comanche warriors, Muslim jihadists, or narcos. Is the indio bárbaro gendered, or has it included men and women indiscriminately? Is there or has there ever been a feminine analog to the indio bárbaro?

In a different vein, in what way have gender norms and values been used to substantiate the elicitation of the figure of the indio bárbaro at different points in time? For instance, the way women of a given culture are treated is sometimes used as evidence of a group or culture’s inhumanity. Sometimes fear of a group’s barbarity is couched in terms of the threat the group poses to the wellbeing, purity, and security of “good” women. In these cases, it seems, the figure of woman is being used to as a basis for the deployment of the figure of the indio bárbaro.

Assimilation

Another theme that arises in the book is the differing practices of assimilation carried out by Spain, Mexico, and the United States. Miscegenation was a key component of Spanish conquest. Saldaña-Portillo explains that “the Spanish administration officially promoted intermarriage and childbearing as a form of governmentality” and “as a form of physically transforming the landscape, from one of indigenous territorial control to one of Spanish dominion” (116). This approach was not central to US governmentality, where a “shifting and shifty” notion of whiteness has been a condition of political belonging (171). This ethic of purity and exclusion of the non-white other stands in contrast with what Saldaña-Portillo describes as the Spanish enthrallment by the other. More than a mere strategy of conquest, Spanish engagement with the other was driven by a “desire to know the other intimately, in a manner akin to love” (93).

Mexico, we learn, comes to identify itself as the “pueblo mestizo,” the result of the violence and suffering of indigenous people at the hands of Spanish conquistadors (12). Saldaña-Portillo notes that in Octavio Paz’s famous chapter “Hijos de La Malinche,” the terms of becoming Mexican are portrayed in a gendered way. She writes, “Malinche, mother-as-territory, is ripped open by the masculine agency of the Spaniard, and the products of this rape are consequently engendered as humiliated, enraged, and brutish male subjects (sons)” (14). Saldaña-Portillo argues that this narrative has the effect of generalizing indigenous injury to all Mexicans, so that “all Mexicans are equally injured by / responsible for / born of colonialism” (14). The dispersal of injury renders contemporary indigenous claims more difficult to make in Mexico.

I find that the narrative also has the effect of centering the male perspective as both the past perpetrator (father) and the current victim (son) of colonization. If being an “hijo de la chingada” has a profound psychological impact, worthy of our healing attention, what about being la chingada, or la que chinga? In the critically revelatory spirit of Indian Given, I ask: How are we able to tell the stories of mass miscegenation and of the birth of a nation without telling the stories of actual women who were mothers, lovers, victims, contributors, and resistors to colonialism? To what extent are our accounts of colonial miscegenation obfuscating the agency and decentering the experiences of indigenous women? Just as the figure of the indio bárbaro covers over the subjectivity of flesh and blood people, the figure La Malinche—the indigenous mother—and the metaphor of rape cover over the profoundly complex and historically crucial stories of agency and victimhood of women (including that of the actual Malinche, or Malinzin).

Immigration

Finally, I want to consider one of the “afterlives of the indio bárbaro”—Mexican and Central American immigrants to the United States. In a profound passage, Saldaña-Portillo describes the “specific if unconscious fear of the Mexican as the indio bárbaro, of the indio bárbaro as indigenous foreign terrorist” (239). In addition to violating borders, taking jobs, and trafficking drugs, Mexicans are an “uncomfortable reminder” of “the terrorizing truth of a racial geography made through violent dispossession and repression: the Indians did not die, they did not willingly cede their sovereignty to more capable white sovereignty” (242). It strikes me that this fear of the indio bárbaro illicitly among us, lurking in the shadows, helps to explain the fervor with which many white US citizens insist on immigrants’ cultural and linguistic assimilation: that dark-skinned foreignness is a reminder of the Indian, a blatant refusal to disappear or to become white, a rejection of US superiority, and a denial of total US sovereignty. This foreignness is also the threat of the returning dispossessed to the white world in which many US citizens feel at home.

How does the figure of the Indian manifest in the experience of women migrants? Contrary to the Mexican context in which racial mixedness became central to national identity, in the US context, one of the reasons that the Latina immigrant is a threat is because she might give birth, anchoring her and her family’s presence through her US citizen child. Some people in the United States are angry at the Latina immigrant because she might claim resources for her family—resources that they feel should belong to other kinds of members of the community. The latest “immigration crisis” began in the Spring of 2014, when tens of thousands of women and unaccompanied children from Central America came to the United States to seek asylum. Most of these women and children were put into unsanitary detention centers where many have received inhumane treatment and inadequate medical care.1 Three years later, the Trump administration has asked Congress to allocate $2.7 billion dollars to put a daily average of 51,279 immigrants into for-profit detention facilities.2 Could we frame the massive locking up of women immigrants as the United States’ efforts to fashion them into the figure of the disappeared Indian?

In Indian Given, Saldaña-Portillo weaves together archival research and literary analysis to trace the history of the production of racial geographies in Mexico and the United States. In this response essay, I have wondered what we might discover if we were to pursue Saldaña-Portillo’s line of analysis while also focusing on the lives of women. I am not proposing that making women more central to the inquiry would challenge any of Saldaña-Portillo’s central claims. Rather, I think that focusing on women would contribute to the two central achievements I highlighted at the start of this response. First, I noted that Indian Given reveals how the ways of seeing people in the borderlands are largely produced by colonial interests, hinting at the promise that there is more than meets the eye. Focusing on the lives of women in the borderlands may reveal the intersecting features of colonial conceptions of race and gender, as well as indicate how the figure of woman and the absence of women in colonial narratives is produced through colonial concerns. Second, I argued that Indian Given begins to decenter colonial perspectives by challenging a simplistic resistance narrative and highlighting indigenous peoples’ agency throughout the history of colonialism. Attending to women would no doubt reveal that, like other racialized subjects in the borderlands, they were more than mere victims of colonial violence or a mere means to colonial expansion. Illuminating this obscure history would be a way of carrying forward Saldaña-Portillo’s important project of interrogating what is seen and unseen in the construction of national spaces.