Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Latin America Otherwise: Language, Empires, Nations) - Softcover

Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822360144 ISBN 13: 9780822360148

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In Indian Given María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo addresses current racialized violence and resistance in Mexico and the United States with a genealogy that reaches back to the sixteenth century. Saldaña-Portillo formulates the central place of indigenous peoples in the construction of national spaces and racialized notions of citizenship, showing, for instance, how Chicanos/as in the U.S./Mexico borderlands might affirm or reject their indigenous background based on their location. In this and other ways, she demonstrates how the legacies of colonial Spain's and Britain's differing approaches to encountering indigenous peoples continue to shape perceptions of the natural, racial, and cultural landscapes of the United States and Mexico. Drawing on a mix of archival, historical, literary, and legal texts, Saldaña-Portillo shows how los indios/Indians provided the condition of possibility for the emergence of Mexico and the United States.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MarÍa Josefina SaldaÑa-Portillo is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and the author of The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development, also published by Duke University Press.

 

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Indian Given

Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States

By María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-6014-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
INTRODUCTION. It Remains to Be Seen Indians in the Landscape of America, 
1 SAVAGES WELCOMED Imputations of Indigenous Humanity in Early Colonialisms, 
2 AFFECT IN THE ARCHIVE Apostates, Profligates, Petty Thieves, and the Indians of the Spanish and U.S. Borderlands, 
3 MAPPING ECONOMIES OF DEATH From Mexican Independence to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 
4 ADJUDICATING EXCEPTION The Fate of the Indio Bárbaro in the U.S. Courts (1869–1954), 
5 LOSING IT! Melancholic Incorporations in Aztlán, 
CONCLUSION. The Afterlives of the Indio Bárbaro, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

SAVAGES WELCOMED

Imputations of Indigenous Humanity in Early Colonialisms

The debate between these two outstanding figures of sixteenth-century Spain was one of the most curious episodes in the history of the Western world. For the first time, and probably for the last, a colonizing nation organized a formal inquiry into the justice of the methods used to extend its empire. For the first time, too, in the modern world, we see an attempt to stigmatize an entire race as inferior, as born slaves according to the theory elaborated by Aristotle. — Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One

In the chapters that follow, Indian Given considers defining instances in the formation of the racial geographies of the United States and Mexico as recorded in the historical and legislative archive, in literature and film, and in political speech. I trace the emergence of these two representational and material national spaces from their respective colonial mappings of the figure of the Indian from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Before proceeding to these spatial productions of racial nationalism, however, it behooves us to consider the early colonial geo-graphings of the American continent in the face of its original inhabitants, as these mappings are constitutive of modern humanism in both its liberatory and brutal guises. Too often the birth of humanism is narrated as a northern European development of the Enlightenment. By revisiting these early colonial mappings through the critical eye of racial geography, we see not only that the origins of humanism are to be found much earlier in southern Europe, but that the encounter with the native inhabitants of the Americas itself determined humanism's form. By revisiting these early iterations of indigenous absence/presence, we can not merely tell a different origin story but more importantly understand the ongoing political ramifications and spatial consequences of these early humanist imaginings for both indigenous and nonindigenous Americans.

Specifically, two flashpoints of the early colonial period illuminate the question of the Indian-as-property in the case of New Spain, and of Indian property in the case of New England and the thirteen colonies; I will analyze both in this chapter. The first flashpoint is the historically unprecedented debate between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the just methods of conquest in the "New World," referred to by colonial historian Lewis Hanke in the opening epigraph. Convened by the Holy Roman Emperor Carlos V in 1550, the Junta de Valladolid, a specially appointed panel of fourteen learned jurists charged with adjudicating the proper method of colonial conquest, listened to these two men present their scholarly evaluations of indigenous humanity. Acts of Spanish conquest were clearly space-making enterprises, often accomplished by the grafting of Spanish colonial cities over indigenous ones. Underscoring the importance of the Valladolid proceedings in determining the racial coordinates of these space-making enterprises, all expeditions of conquests were officially suspended pending its outcome. Though this was an exceptional event in the history of European empire, as suggested by Hanke, the Junta de Valladolid was only the apogee of a debate amongst Spanish friars, jurists, scholars, colonists, administrators, and royal advisors on the nature of indigenous humanity that began in the fifteenth century with Columbus's letters to Queen Isabel after initial contact and continued through the eighteenth century with the "settlement" of New Mexico, Texas, and Alta California. If the self-reflection and autocritique of the Spanish empire at Valladolid is remarkable and noteworthy, Hanke reminds us that it was the freedom of Spanish colonists to turn Indians into property as a race that was at stake.

The second colonial flashpoint transpired more than two centuries later, but was no less foundational for the British colonies along the mid-Atlantic seaboard. With the Proclamation of 1763, the British Crown declared the Indian territories west of the Appalachian and Allegany mountain ranges closed to new settlement in the interest of protecting indigenous territories from further colonial encroachment. As in the case of the Junta de Valladolid, this proclamation was in the interest of implementing a more just means of conquest, in this case an effort to recognize and respect indigenous domains. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 unleashed a torrent of political speech by elites like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin on the impropriety of the British Crown placing indigenous property out of reach of the colonists. As in the Valladolid debate, this elite political speech contained its own assessment of indigenous humanity, which was subsequently instrumental in the construction of U.S. revolutionary identity and the drafting of the constitution in 1787. Like Sepúlveda and Las Casas, revolutionary elites positioned themselves as authorities on indigenous character, and their speech had material consequences for the racial geography of the Americas. The proclamation and the revolutionary feud that ensued represented less the endpoint of political debate on the nature of indigenous humanity than a pivotal moment in a process of mapping the continent that would continue well into the period of nineteenth-century expansion into the Great Plains and the Southwest.

Once again, we should not discount these efforts to revisit and revise policy toward indigenous populations by Spanish and British imperial powers as merely cynical and duplicitous justifications for rapacious conquest. The story of European colonialism in the American theater is most often narrated as such, but to do so misses an important avenue of critique. These juridical encounters with indigeneity prodigiously produced new terms for interpreting all of humanity, and by examining them with a critical eye we glean the absence/presence of the Indian at the heart of the human.

These preliminary debates in New Spain and the thirteen colonies produced colonial and national space by establishing the racial coordinates in the landscape of what Jodi Byrd (2011) has called "Indianness." In The Transit of Empire Byrd proposes the idea of Indianness as the "ontological ground" of U.S. settler colonialism, as the site "through which U.S. empire orients and replicates itself by transforming those to be colonized into 'Indians' through continual reiterations of pioneer logics" (xiii). In her deconstructive analysis, Byrd demonstrates how "Indianness" — its...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822360144
• ISBN 13: 9780822360148
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 350
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland