Introduction: Settler Colonialism in Latin America

Abstract

While recent forays to bring postcolonial studies in conversation with American Indian studies and to frame indigenous Latinx communities within a settler colonial paradigm gesture toward new engagements with the global South, these efforts remain focused on North America.1 The term itself is difficult to translate.4 We are left with the quandary of debating who is a settler.[...]few scholars in Latin America are familiar with this body of work because of a lack of Spanish and Portuguese translations.Efforts to distinguish regimes of colonialism in the Americas by their method of dispossession, as rooted in either land or labor expropriation, ends up reproducing binaries (land/labor, settler/native, Latinx/Latin American) that mask articulations spanning imperial and colonial regimes.5 The emphasis on binaries risks reproducing a monolithic, self-contained theory of settler colonialism lacking historical and relational specificity, the very project initially challenged by Patrick Wolfe.6 We advance an analytic project that acknowledges the multiple iterations of settler colonial projects that have been instantiated within and beyond postcolonizing societies.7 Scholars of Latin America have relied on theories of “coloniality” to account for the production of racialized power as a hegemonic and historical project.8 Coloniality is a cognitive mode of power based on a “new perspective of knowledge within which non-Europe was the past, and because of that inferior, if not always primitive.”To challenge the “brute binary division” of models of coloniality, scholars like Lisa Lowe and Evelyn Nakano Glenn propose a comparative and relational model that illuminates colonialism’s spatial and temporal projects.12 Cognizant of the diverse experiences and histories that have shaped indigenous communities in the Americas, the essays connect these distinctive geographies, histories, and intimacies by identifying and historicizing settler colonial projects in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and the United States.

Inspired by recent debates over the suitability of extending settler colonialism as a framework for understanding the experiences of indigenous Latinx in the United States and indigenous peoples in Latin America, this forum offers a substantive engagement with settler colonial theory that attends to the specificities of Latin American colonialism(s). Considered a key distinction of Anglophone imperial projects, it is rare to find settler colonialism applied to Latin America. This resistance reflects entrenched divisions precluding North-South dialogues, problems regarding the concept’s translatability to a Latin American context, and an emphasis on binary divisions within settler colonial theory.

Applying settler colonial theory to Latin America is hampered by the nascent relationship between American Indian studies and Latin American studies. Although both fields have been instrumental in advancing indigenous studies, these fields are rarely in conversation with each other. This divide was evident at the 2017 Native American and Indigenous Studies Association meeting. The sessions sponsored by the Abiayala Working Group, which supports indigenous studies in Latin America and the Caribbean, are seldom attended by scholars of American Indian studies. While recent forays to bring postcolonial studies in conversation with American Indian studies and to frame indigenous Latinx communities within a settler colonial paradigm gesture toward new engagements with the global South, these efforts remain focused on North America.¹

The term itself is difficult to translate. In Spanish, settler colonialism translates to colonialismo de asentamiento or colonialismo de colonos.² Shannon Speed points out that the Spanish definition of colonialism implies settlement, making these translations redundant.³ As such, it is a slippery concept to apply to Latin America where nation-building projects have framed criollización/creolization as “an indigenizing process.”⁴ We are left with the quandary of debating who is a settler. Moreover, few scholars in Latin America are familiar with this body of work because of a lack of Spanish and Portuguese translations. In Latin America, scholars are expected to personally pay for translations. In light of these barriers, the Latin American scholars invited to participate in this forum hesitated to take on this project. These constraints make it challenging to promote a hemispheric dialogue that is inclusive of both North and South.

The logics of dispossession and elimination, which are key tenets of a settler colonial model, were not isolated to British imperialism; they were also central to Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects. Efforts to distinguish regimes of colonialism in the Americas by their method of dispossession, as rooted in either land or labor expropriation, ends up reproducing binaries (land/labor, settler/native, Latinx/Latin American) that mask articulations spanning imperial and colonial regimes.⁵ The emphasis on binaries risks reproducing a monolithic, self-contained theory of settler colonialism lacking historical and relational specificity, the very project initially challenged by Patrick Wolfe.⁶ We advance an analytic project that acknowledges the multiple iterations of settler colonial projects that have been instantiated within and beyond postcolonizing societies.⁷ Scholars of Latin America have relied on theories of “coloniality” to account for the production of racialized power as a hegemonic and historical project.⁸ Coloniality is a cognitive mode of power based on a “new perspective of knowledge within which non-Europe was the past, and because of that inferior, if not always primitive.”⁹ This approach understands indigeneity in Latin America today as continually shaped by a colonial legacy rooted in racial mixing, rather than indigenous elimination and white settlement, as is the case in the United States. Conceived as a nationalist whitening project rooted in hierarchical colonial race relations, mestizaje erases indigeneity by absorbing it into the body politic. At the same time, this concept is contingent on remembering, at times memorializing, the Indian. The Indian is continually hailed throughout Latin America as a way to assert national belonging and thus can never be fully absorbed into the nation, even in the Southern Cone, where the push toward racial homogenization led to the mass elimination of indigenous communities.¹⁰ As Wolfe notes in the case of Australia, miscegenation led to a policy of absorption and thus elimination.¹¹ We propose that policies of mestizaje in Latin America have led to a similar outcome, where mestizos become settlers or where indigenous Latinx in the United States become settlers. As a model for theorizing indigeneity, coloniality does not fully capture the racial entanglements and the strategies of elimination and dispossession that began under colonialism and have continued under neoliberal regimes and global capital. To challenge the “brute binary division” of models of coloniality, scholars like Lisa Lowe and Evelyn Nakano Glenn propose a comparative and relational model that illuminates colonialism’s spatial and temporal projects.¹²

Cognizant of the diverse experiences and histories that have shaped indigenous communities in the Americas, the essays connect these distinctive geographies, histories, and intimacies by identifying and historicizing settler colonial projects in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and the United States. It is not possible here to attend to the multiplicity of experiences and nations that make up Latin America. To acknowledge this shortcoming, we build on recent scholarship that highlights the complex racial and structural logics that have shaped the idea of Latin America and its relationship to the United States.¹³ We acknowledge the spatial and racial projects that have rendered the Indian and the indio as incommensurable figures, even as they become increasingly entangled through racial capital and neoliberal projects.¹⁴ We further interrogate the relationship between whiteness and settler societies by looking at indigenous Mexican migration to the United States. In their essay, Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera and Korinta Maldonado consider how indigenous migration disrupts recent discussions of migrants as “settlers.” To challenge the settler-native binary, they examine Zapotec migrants who have settled on Tongva land (now present-day Los Angeles) and on Yakama land in the state of Washington.

Following Shona Jackson, we are not concerned with molding settler colonial theory to fit a particular space. Instead, we trace the “technologies of settler belonging and their ability to be refashioned and redeployed” in Latin America.¹⁵ We identify these structures, technologies, and practices to outline the settler colonial logics pervasive in Latin America. In her essay, Shannon Speed (Chickasaw) suggests that indigenous dispossession in the Americas is an outcome of labor expropriation and land dispossession. Speed calls for a reevaluation of this distinctive form of settler colonialism and its relationship to neoliberal capitalism hemispherically. In their essay, Juan Castro (Maya Chalchiteko) and Manuela Picq read the archive in search of the legal tools used to justify indigenous dispossession at four crucial moments in Guatemalan history. Through a historical analysis of indigenous land dispossession in Guatemala, they disclose a process of ongoing occupation. In his essay, Christopher Loperena interrogates the extractivist policies in Honduras that have resulted in the death of indigenous leaders, most recently of Berta Cáceras. He argues that this violence represents a racialized dimension of settler colonial dispossession and frontier making.

We also recognize the limits of settler colonialism in the Latin American context, especially in dealing with the violence engendered by politics and regime changes intended to benefit indigenous peoples. In his essay, Baron Pineda examines how settler colonial structures make it (im)possible to seek redress for injustices committed against indigenous communities in Latin America. Focusing on Pan-American activism at the UN Permanent Forum, Pineda highlights the exclusionary limits of a settler colonial model based on sovereignty that cannot account for Latin American indigenous activists whose claims to self-determination are based on models of autonomy.

The contributors provide alternative ways to read indigenous dispossession and extermination that traces settler colonial logics and its diverse iterations in Latin America. In so doing, we advance a hemispheric approach to indigenous studies that brings indigenous perspectives from Latin America into conversation with critiques of settler colonialism in the Anglophone world.¹⁶

M. Bianet Castellanos

M. Bianet Castellanos teaches American studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of A Return to Servitude: Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancún (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and coeditor with Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera and Arturo Aldama of Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach (University of Arizona Press, 2012). She has spent more than two decades working with Maya communities in Mexico and more recently in Southern California.

Notes

For their comments, I thank Adriana Estill, Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera, Desiree Martin, Yolanda Padilla, and the AQ editorial board.

1. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critique of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Lorenzo Veracini, “Lorenzo Veracini on Settler Colonialism,” www.south-ernperspectives.net/ips-series/lorenzo-veracini-on-settler-colonialism; Maylei Blackwell, Floridalma Boj Lopez, and Luis Urrieta, “Critical Latinx Indigeneities,” Latino Studies 15.2 (2017): 126-37. For an exception, see Richard Gott, “Latin America as White Settler Society,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26.2 (2007): 273.

2. Emilio del Valle Escalante, “A casi dos décadas de los Acuerdos de Paz en Guatemala,” December 27, 2013, commaya2012.blogspot.com/2013_12_01_archive.html.

3. Shannon Speed, pers. comm., “Settler Colonialism in Latin America” panel, Native American and Indigenous Studies meeting, Vancouver, Canada, June 22, 2017.

4. Shona Jackson, Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

5. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1.1 (2015): 54-74; Hokulani K. Aikau, “Indigeneity in the Diaspora: The Case of Native Hawaiians at Iosepa, Utah,” American Quarterly 62.3 (2010): 477-500.

6. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999), 1; Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein, “Introduction: Colonial Unknowing,” Theory & Event 19.4 (2016), muse.jhu.edu/article/633283.

7. Postcolonizing societies are those in which the “colonials did not go home” but remained and continue to be based on whiteness (Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a White Postcolonizing Society,” Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, ed. Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller [Oxford: Berg, 2003], 30).

8. Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla 1.3 (2000): 533-80.

9. Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 552.

10. For a discussion of mestizaje as a white nationalist project, see José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica (1952; repr. Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 2007). For a discussion of mestizaje’s whitening project for Latinos in the United States, see Silvio Torres-Sallaint, “The Indian in the Latino: Genealogies of Ethnicity,”

11. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 30.

12. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 8.

13. Gott, “Latin America as a White Settler Society”; Mignolo, Idea of Latin America; María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); and Ricardo D. Salvatorre, “The Unsettling Location of a Settler Nation: Argentina, from Settler Economy to Failed Developing Nation,” South Atlantic Quarterly 107.4 (2008): 755-89.

14. Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given, 11.

15. Jackson, Creole Indigeneity, 60.

16. M. Bianet Castellanos, Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera, and Arturo J. Aldama, eds., Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012). For a global perspective, see Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native,” American Quarterly 69.2 (2017): 267-76.