Land Uprising

Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity

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Land Uprising reframes Indigenous land reclamation as a horizon to decolonize the settler colonial conditions of literary, intellectual, and activist labor. Simón Ventura Trujillo argues that land provides grounding for rethinking the connection between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms.

Trujillo situates his inquiry in the cultural production of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a formative yet understudied organization of the Chicanx movement of the 1960s and 1970s. La Alianza sought to recover Mexican and Spanish land grants in New Mexico that had been dispossessed after the Mexican-American War. During graduate school, Trujillo realized that his grandparents were activists in La Alianza. Written in response to this discovery, Land Uprising bridges La Alianza’s insurgency and New Mexican land grant struggles to the writings of Leslie Marmon Silko, Ana Castillo, Simon Ortiz, and the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. In doing so, the book reveals uncanny connections between Chicanx, Latinx, Latin American, and Native American and Indigenous studies to grapple with Native land reclamation as the future horizon for Chicanx and Latinx indigeneities.

"Trujillo explores the ongoing process of insurgent history making by examining an ever-widening array of relevant texts that in their origin and topic spiral out from the New Mexican heartland of the Alianza to encompass kindred indigenous insurgencies as far afield as the Zapatistas of Chiapas in southern Mexico. This is an insightful, complex, and sometimes whimsical musing on land, race, indigeneity, and storytelling."—P. R. Sullivan, Choice

“Land Uprising is a pathbreaking interrogation of struggles for reclamation of Indigenous lands from Chiapas to New Mexico that importantly grounds and recenters ‘mestizaje’ debates in the land itself. Through a focus on the intersections of Pueblo, Indohispano, Chicana, and Zapatista story power, Land Uprising unsettles existing scholarship on race and indigeneity across different (settler) colonial and modern nation-state formations and provides a fresh perspective that counters epistemologies of Indigenous erasure.”—Roberto D. Hernández, author of Coloniality of the U-S///Mexico Border: Power, Violence, and the Decolonial Imperative

“Trujillo provides an insightful analysis of the importance of land in Chicano movement politics and decolonial activism.”—Yvette J. Saavedra, author of Pasadena Before the Roses: Race, Identity, and Land Use in Southern California, 1771–1890

The University of Arizona Press

Land Uprising

Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity

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