Content area
Full text
Redbone is one of the most successful Native American bands in the history of rock 'n' roll. They emerged onto the U.S. music scene in 1970 with music that spoke directly to the burgeoning Red Power movement.1 Hits such as "Come and Get Your Love" and "The Witch-Queen of New Orleans" topped the charts in the United States, Canada, and Europe and still receive regular airplay today.2 Brothers Patrick (Pat) and Candido (Lolly) Vegas founded the band and served as its core members. In his memoir, Come and Get Your Love: A Celebratory Ode to Redbone (1939-Present), Pat Vegas traces his and Lolly's ascent to rock stardom. Vegas also reveals something perhaps unexpected in the memoir of a Native American musician: in addition to being Native, Pat Vegas is Mexican American. In fact, several of the band's members are both Native and Mexican American, and Vegas's memoir as well as the band's music, albums, and performances point to continual intimacies between Native Americans and Mexican Americans.3
Pat Vegas's Mexican American heritage as well as that of Redbone's other band members rub against both popular and scholarly notions of "authentic" Native American and Indigenous identity and presents a new vantage point from which to think about Native American-Chicanx relationality. Whereas scholars have examined the numerous overlaps between these groups in the nineteenth century and earlier, work examining the twentieth century often focuses on one group or the other. Further, in the few places where scholars do examine relations between these groups, they focus on analyzing the Chicano Movement's claim of Indigenous status, a claim many scholars, especially those working under the rubric of critical Latinx indigeneities and critical ethnic studies, have problematized as perpetuating the marginalization of Indigenous peoples on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Indeed, in the interest of supporting Indigenous rights in the United States and Mexico, this study agrees with this emerging scholarship that it is important not to conflate Indigenous status- which pertains to a political category designating the first peoples within settler states-and Indigenous descent in the way that the Chicano Movement has done in the past. What this study problematizes, however, is the collapsing of all discussion of Native-Chicanx relationality into the question of the Chicano Movement's (mis)uses of...