Dr. Christina Leza, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colorado College, will be joining OSU's Department of Spanish and Portuguese live via Zoom for her talk, "Racial Discourses on U.S.-Mexico Border Region Indigenous Identities and Rights"
Abstract:
In the United States, U.S. citizenship and a high degree of “Indian blood” are significant aspects of the mainstream schema for conceptualizing Indigenous or “Native American” identity. This talk addresses how common and widely circulating discourses on Indigenous peoples and Latin American immigrants in the U.S. shape perceptions about and lived realities of Indigenous peoples whose homelands are divided by the U.S.-Mexico border. It is argued that conflations of race, nationality and (in)authentic indigeneity in such discourses undermine the ancestral connections and territorial rights of Indigenous peoples at the border. The talk further addresses how popular beliefs about the nature of racism that frame non-Indigenous interpretations of Indigenous issues results in condemnation and erasure of intra- Indigenous racism in ways that reproduce White racism towards Indigenous peoples.
