UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation focuses on the children of Indigenous Oaxacan migrants, specifically women and queer youth, and their participation in building diasporic Indigenous Latinx communities. I employ an intersectional and Indigenous feminist approach to frame my central research questions: What are the different spaces, networks, and strategies that new generations of Indigenous Latinx women and queer youth build outside hometown associations and transnational organizations? How are different forms of indigenous governance challenging heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism in contemporary Oaxacalifornia, particularly in the California Central Valley and Central Coast areas that have strong Indigenous diasporic communities? I anchor my project through a case study of Oaxaqueñx Youth Encuentro (OYE), founded in 2014, an annual gathering for Mixtec, Zapotec, and Triqui youth living that reside statewide. This study is based on data from 24 semi-structured interviews and participant observations in two complementary sites: Oaxaqueñx Youth Encuentro (OYE), and a social media platform where they connect. I found that OYE is a space rooted in building the pride of Indigenous people by providing decolonizing workshops. OYE’s main goal is to build a network of new and future Indigenous youth leaders to address the ongoing forms of Indigenous erasure.