Drawing on oral histories and participant observation fieldwork with Zapotecs in Los Angeles, California and Oaxaca, Mexico, my dissertation, Zapotec Generations Across Settler Colonial Borders: Gendering Belonging and Identity, examines how the experiences of the U.S.-raised generations, and women participation in particular, are central to sustaining transnational immigrant Indigenous communities across borders. I argue that through their involvement in traditional dances, Oaxacan brassbands, and immigrant hometown association (HTA), Zapotecs in the U.S. diaspora, shape their Indigenous identities in ways that challenge their racial categorization as Latina/o and/or Hispanic. These forms of community belonging confront state notions of Indigenous “authenticity” in the U.S. and Mexico, while also contesting gender role expectations that attempt to exclude women and immigrants from community practices of belonging. By incorporating historical and comparative approaches to race and gender, I consider how the United States and Mexico, as settler colonial states, have shaped, maintained, and/or reconfigured Indigenous racialization into a national imaginary that attempts to make invisible, silence, and eliminate Indigenous peoples. I use a critical hemispheric Indigenous framework that bridges Latin American, Latina/o, and American Indian literature to draw on my theoretical framework, transborder comunalidad, an ongoing Indigenous Oaxacan conception of collective community life sustained through practices and beliefs in diaspora that challenges state violence against Indigenous peoples.
