If the expression “Indian time” means anything, it should signify this history of temporal multiplicity.
Native people in what is now colonially known as North America speak of “Indian time” to refer to the way time moves differently from colonial temporal registers in native spaces, communities, and stories. Indigenous social movements across Abiayala assert the right to self-determination, autonomy, or sovereignty by evoking the “millennial cultures” of Indigenous people. To claim a political logic of origins embedded in phrases like time immemorial is to be involved in time politics. Indigenous politics asserts firstness—as First Nations or original peoples—to challenge colonial and settler forms of recognition that rely on a temporal logic that centers settlers’ arrival while locking Indigenous people in a time trap in which their authenticity—indeed often the definition of who is counted in Indigenous—does not change (Barker 2011). Indigenous rights are evoked in political declarations not only through the millennial cultures of Indigenous peoples but also through their continued presence and the fight for their futurities, which is part of the struggle to dismantle a genocidal trope that renders Indigenous cultures as perpetually fixed in the past. For example, Mexico imagines the temporal emplotment of the nation as starting with the grandeur of Indigenous cultures, which quickly disappears in a linear narrative of conquest, colonization, independence, revolution, and modernity. Indigenous peoples are represented as a point of departure and remain perpetually fixed in the precolonial past in the project of the nation. An extension of this temporal logic is inscribed in the racialized assumptions about Indigenous peoples and cultures in Mexico as fundamentally “backward,” a stubborn block to the nation’s modernity, and bounded in space—in other words, perpetually premodern, uneducated, and rural. Moreover, the temporal arc of the nation enacts a settler logic aimed at eliminating the native, often through ideologies of mestizaje and modernity, as both narratives are bound up in the project of Indigenous disappearance (Blackwell 2017; Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta 2017; Speed 2019; Rifkin 2017).
Maria Josefina Saldaña Portillo (2016) traces the work that the figure of the indio bárbaro has done over time and continues to serve as a foil to the modern national subjects. These hegemonic representations of Indigenous people as ignorant, uneducated, poor, course, barbaric—at worst—premodern, idyllic, and fixed in the rural past—at best—persist. This temporal emplotment (White 1973) is what Mark Rifkin calls compulsory interpellation into the nation that is “never fully accomplished nor fully able to displace Indigenous temporal orientations” (2017, 2). Indigenous temporalities are present in storytelling, fiestas, and ceremonies; plant, medicinal, and scientific knowledges; art and culture; the struggle to maintain Indigenous communal structures, foodways, dress, and textiles; and within continued practices of making relations with the human and nonhuman world. For Indigenous women, this is even more layered, as time—indeed, what it means to be modern—is measured most pointedly through gender in more recent national narratives and neoliberal global development schemes. What has largely been left unexplored is how layered concepts of time and modernity are deeply rooted in racialized gendered assumptions about labor and Indigenous survivance. Indeed, even the temporal registers embodied in the use of a metate, Indigenous foodways, and Indigenous weavings and textiles are deeply gendered. They rely on forms of women’s reproductive labor and culture work, and draw our attention to how the work of Indigenous comunalidad relies on women’s work. Drawing on Gladys Tzul’s work on Indigenous communal governance, I argue elsewhere that the reproduction of communal life is the foundation upon which Indigenous survivance is rooted and possible, and that we foreground the ways in which the reproduction of communal life is gendered (Blackwell, 2023). As a form of social thought and a set of communitarian practices of the Mixes, Zapotecs, and Mixtecs from northern and central Oaxaca, comunalidad is a concept often associated with Mixe thinker Floriberto Díaz Gómez ([2004] 2007; Robles Hernández and Cardoso Jiménez 2007) and Zapotec teacher, musician, and researcher Jaime Martínez Luna (2010, 2013), who theorize the centrality of community in maintaining Indigenous knowledges, practices, and epistemologies in the face of colonial oblivion. If we think of comunalidad as an autonomy project that is practiced first and foremost at the scale of community (Mattiace 2003), then we can also understand the centrality of women’s labor to comunalidad and the ways that the temporality of comunalidad is tied to women’s labor. I posit the notion of gendered comunalidad as a way to name the unrecognized forms of gendered labor and women’s work that make communalidad possible. Ayuujk (Mixe) writer, linguist, and activist Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil (2019) argues that Indigenous women play a central, if sometimes obscured, role in comunalidad, in her analysis of the forms of women’s communal labor that led to Ayutla, in 2007, becoming the first pueblo in the Sierra and in the Ayuujk (Mixe) region to elect a female municipal president through Indigenous normative systems. For those Indigenous communities dislocated by migration and mobility, Indigenous women’s labor has been central to Indigenous continuity, adaptation, and survivance.
While there is not one “Indigenous time,” Indigenous women activists in their home communities and in diaspora navigate a multitude of temporalities and temporal orientations. These temporalities might include pueblo time, ancestral time, ceremonial time, the cycle of the milpa, and the ways migration compresses and mixes up time, as well as communal temporalities that cross borders and are intertwined with life cycles, capitalist-labor logics, dominant temporal frames, and even the racialization of temporalities as Indigenous/past, mestizo/present, and the struggle for Indigenous futures. According to Rifkin, “To speak of temporal orientation suggests the ways that time can be regarded less as a container that holds events than as potentially divergent processes of becoming” (2017, 2). In fact, he theorizes “native being and becoming as non-identical to these imposed frames of reference, even as Indigenous temporalities are affected and shifted by such colonial imperatives” (2) as temporal sovereignty. As Valerie N. Wieskamp and Cortney Smith argue, the temporal imaginary of survivance “disrupts linear constructs of time and opens space for temporal sovereignty. It defies linear time by deconstructing distinctions between past and present” (2020, 77). This thought piece is grounded in the temporalities of Indigenous women’s labor that includes plant, earth, and gastronomical time; the temporalities of weaving, organizing, and community building; and the ways they manage multiple temporalities by navigating the temporal frames of development, migration, and modernity, all while foregrounding their communal Indigenous survivance. This article, then, slows us down to notice the ways in which authenticity in dominant-culture representations is staged and timed by the temporality of Indigenous women’s labor, and how, in turn, Indigenous women create place and roots in and through their labor by enacting and navigating multiple temporalities and using their labor, their time, for Indigenous communal survivance. As Rifken (2017) argues, this pluralization of time facilitates Indigenous peoples’ expressions of self-determination. We can then see how Indigenous women’s labors relate to these temporalities of survival and how these temporalities are negotiated.
In addition to the ways temporality and modernity are scripted through race and gender, place and mobility also play a role in how temporality is perceived: as fast or slow, as progressive or backward, as traditional or modern. Time immemorial is a claim that is not just about time but also involves space, being original to a place, Indigenous to a land. It is more than just a rhetorical move; it is a way of thinking that informs how Indigenous people see themselves in the world. Invoking time immemorial is not a concept as much as a way of being. It is ontological. Indigenous ontologies/epistemologies derive much of their power from a sense of place, and yet, even in movement, Indigenous peoples’ cosmology, their relationship and responsibility to the land they are from, often moves with them, as well as, increasingly, a consciousness of their responsibilities as guests on other Indigenous homelands. In this way, time and place have become defining features of being Indigenous. In the study of migration, time and space are deeply intertwined, and for Indigenous women in the diaspora, they are deeply embodied.
Settler logics extend not only to time but also to space—so much so that indigeneity is bounded by, indeed defined, by space in what I call “setter spatial immobilization,” extending Gaye Theresa Johnson’s (2013) notion of spatial immobilization. Indigeneity and place have been so tightly bound in Mexico that historically Indigenous people have often only been considered as Indigenous when they are living in their original pueblo and speaking their original language. Indigenous migration unsettles this logic of containment (Goeman 2015) in multiple ways, perhaps most dramatically in how mobility has had the effect of de-Indianizing Indigenous people, often mestizo-ing them without a single drop of racial mixture. Hence, there is a tightly bound relationship between time and space; indigeneity is unsettled by mobility and unravels in migration (Castellanos 2010; Cruz-Manjarrez 2013; Stephen 2007; Ramirez 2007; Trujano 2008; Velasco Ortiz 2005). I came to think about time and space because the organized Indigenous women I have accompanied for nearly twenty years in transborder organizations navigate multiple temporalities that go beyond the political dichotomy of original/extinct. This article is a theoretical reflection or thought piece that draws on collaborative research I have conducted, accompanying Indigenous migrant women in Los Angeles and Oaxaca in order to explore questions of indigeneity, gender, and mobility, as well as community leadership, cultural revitalization, and gendered labor in relation to temporality. It considers the political uses of temporality, as well as the meaning of the ways in which organized Indigenous women migrants are inscribed by multiple, often shifting, temporalities that move across shifting terrains of power (Blackwell 2015).
Making Time/Making Mole: The metate and the Logic of Servitude
From Oaxaca City, it takes six hours to get to the Mixteca where the town of Juxtlahuaca is the home of the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB; Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations) office in Oaxaca. We arrive late one evening in 2011, so I end up staying in the small pueblo of Santa Rosa Caxtlahuaca with José Gonzalez—the then newly elected binational vice-coordinator from Oceanside, California—and his family. The next morning, we were preparing to go to the FIOB office in Juxtlahuaca, and while I waited, I sat with José’s mom and a female neighbor, getting a lesson on how to make totopos—a large crisp flatbread—as they were making stacks and stacks in the week leading up to Day of the Dead, making enough to send some home to California with José.1 They had already ground the corn (as José’s mom has seven sons who had migrated, she owns a mechanized grinder), so they were pounding the masa out into perfectly round, huge moon-shaped pieces, the size of a pizza, and cooking them on the grill over a wood fire.
Earlier at breakfast, gathered around José’s mom’s table, conversation turned to one of the brothers who had traveled north to Tijuana to cross the border but had not been heard from in three months. This is an increasingly common occurrence, where relatives just seem to disappear in the trek north, never to be heard of again (Stephen 2007; De Leon 2015). Sometimes their bodies are recovered, sometimes not. I talked with José’s mom as tears streamed down her face, and later I slipped out to give the family space to talk. While they talked, I sat with two granddaughters in their abuela’s bedroom, watching a cartoon in which a blond princess finds her true love, the prince. When it is time to make totopos, the girls sit in my lap or stand close to me with their hands on my shoulders, looking over into the video monitor as I tape their grandmother giving me my “how to” lesson. The grandmother asks the granddaughters, “Do you want to learn to make totopos?”2 They both say, emphatically, “No way!” She teases them that they like only to eat totopos but not to make them. The hours of labor, from the grinding to standing for hours at the comal, looms over and punctuates the temporality of girlhood. The meaning of “free” time takes on a whole different meaning in this context of familial and reproductive labor. I recall that, before the cooking lesson, José went out to collect leña—a task his mom or sister would have to do when he is not visiting (not to mention caring for the milpa and harvesting the corn). The girls helped with family chores but still had time for play and to be children. Yet even the increased freedom of girlhood may be due to having so many relatives in migration, thus freeing them to be able to stay in school and not have to work in order to help the family out, as so many migrant Indigenous women of earlier generations I have interviewed had to. The preservation of Indigenous foodways and the recovery of culture are part of Indigenous decolonial work and autonomy, but the immense reproductive labor of women it often relies on looms over the temporality of girlhood. The time or temporality of Indigenous women’s labor harvesting, grinding, collecting wood, and cooking competes even with temporalities of “modern” womanhood, making these tasks old-fashioned and linked to identities anchored in the past for youth exposed to the dominant cultures’ notions of gender, as well for migrant Indigenous women (and men) for whom migration has unsettled gendered labor expectations and masculinities and femininities in diaspora.
The temporality of the pueblo is tied in part to Indigenous women’s culinary labors, which could include sowing, growing, harvesting, or tending the milpa; grinding corn and spices; going to market to buy what is not grown and sell any extra of what is; collecting wood; expertly shaping and patting the tortillas, totopos, or tamales by hand; cooking them on an outdoor oven; organizing the work with relatives and friends, the care of children while working, and the work of distributing and gathering for food. While this is daily work for many Indigenous women, the extra labor for holidays, patron saints’ days, or days or even weeks of work for special occasions, such as when visiting family members take this food—this gift of time and what it signifies—back with them is part of comunalidad. The temporality of these forms of Indigenous women’s labor is tied intimately to the temporality of the pueblo, what brings people home, and how they enjoy that place together. Yet, this intimately female labor, still collective in many pueblos, is at tension with the temporality of schooling, working, and what is seen as progress for younger generations of girls and women. What José’s female kin show us is that the temporality of survivance is mulitigenerational, but to survive across generations, these practices change and transform. Other culinary labors tied to the temporality of survivance are tied not only to ancestral foodways but also to Indigenous economic survival and women’s empowerment.
For some, the ultimate symbol of Indigenous foodways is the metate (a flat grinding stone where women grind corn, spices, or chocolate, typically on their knees), and for others, it is a symbol of female drudgery. Yet, there is the temporality evoked by the metate that links the past to Indigenous women’s labor. The metate is eminently racialized and gendered as Indigenous and fixed in the past—both by what is represented as the primitive past of ancient Mesoamerica and the logic of servitude that many Indigenous women activists work to overcome (Mora 2021). Yet, the metate symbolizes the ancestral sciences of plant knowledge and gastronomical technologies that blend nutrition, comfort, and pleasure in the always-present past of Indigenous Mexico, or what Guillermo Bonfil Batalla (1987) has called “Mexico profundo” (deep Mexico). It is seen simultaneously as a relic of past times, a utilitarian household item that is used daily in cooking, and part of the folkloric foodways of Indigenous Mexico that have been commercialized through tourism.
About ten years ago, Odilia Romero Hernández, the binational coordinator of FIOB’s women’s affairs at that time, had the idea to produce a cookbook featuring different Indigenous migrant women’s stories and recipes, which was circulated as Recipes for Change, Recipes for Continuity. Part of the project was to have a digital storytelling component with videos to accompany the cookbook. Odilia called me one winter day to help interview women participating in the project. When I arrived at her home in South Los Angeles, I began to talk to the videographer, a man I had not met before, who was setting up to film a Oaxacan woman from Orange County who was making mole. She was grinding the ingredients (chile, peanuts, chocolate, and spices) on the kitchen floor, using her metate. The videographer stood over her, pointing his camera down as, from a high-angle shot, he recorded her working on the kitchen floor with her grinding stone. I told him that the angle did not show the work of the metate and that the angle reinforced a position of submission. He shrugged me off, telling me that he did not have equipment to shoot it any other way. I suggested that the woman sit on top of the table, which would make it look like the floor, but my suggestion went unheeded.
After all the women who shared their recipes were interviewed, Zapotec journalist and FIOB LA leader Bertha Rodríguez Santos interviewed me. I described women’s “traditional” work in the kitchen, cooking Oaxacan Indigenous foods in the United States, as a practice of economic autonomy, one that reinforces ancestral foodways and knowledges. As I wondered if I was conveying this well in Spanish, Bertha asked, “How can women’s work be liberating?” I tried to describe how it gives women their own economic means to earn money, as they often run their own (often very successful) catering and tamales businesses, and many women put their kids through college, support numerous relatives in their hometowns, and even buy homes in the burgeoning Oaxacan neighborhoods of Korea Town and South Los Angeles.3 The FIOB’s development projects on both sides of the border include women who use the casa de ahorro to run a tortilla-making business, a gastronomical Indigenous food collective, and a group that grows mushrooms—all part of their campaign for El Derecho de No Migrar (The Right to Not Migrate) (Bacon 2013; Rivera-Salgado 2014; Blackwell 2015). In Los Angeles, the project to publish a cookbook featuring Oaxacan women was part of the Odilia’s efforts to build projects of economic empowerment for Indigenous women.
Initially, I worked with Odilia on an earlier proposal for a binational Indigenous foodways project that was much broader in scope, including workshops, but our funding proposal was not successful. Yet, planning and developing the proposal allowed us to talk about, in addition to the economic empowerment for Indigenous women, how cooking and sharing foods linked to their cultural roots help Indigenous migrant communities to stay connected to their own foodways and often to stay healthier. Traditional food and medicinal practices are part of what researchers call the “Latino-immigrant health paradox,” which describes the irony that the longer generations of immigrants have been in the United States, the sicker they become (frequently showing up as higher incidences of diabetes and high blood pressure) (Acevedo-Garcia and Bates 2008). Even though many first-generation migrants usually do not have full access to the US medical system, they have better health outcomes. Many use traditional healing knowledge, seek out a large network of traditional healers, and eat more of the foods from their homelands.
Indeed, the act of grinding spices, chocolate, and nuts for mole or grinding corn, forming the masa into tamales wrapped in corn husks and then selling them in the neighborhood, or preparing them for community gatherings and hometown association meetings link together multiple temporalities. In addition to ancestral knowledge practices, foods, and labors, there is a continuous physical relationship to metates, corn, and other foodways that goes back thousands of years, continues in the present, and is kept alive in migration by assembling the range of ingredients that must travel across borders. Then there is the temporality of urban, migrant Indigenous work or hustle, often balancing several jobs—a paid job, a side gig making food, household and reproductive labors—that move Indigenous women from stores, gardens, kitchens, corners, and streets to churches, community festivals and gatherings, and meeting and union halls where they sell their food. These are also temporalities of communal Indigenous survivance that provide for economic well-being in Oaxaca, through remittances and families in California organizing and doing the cultural and culinary work of what Brenda Nicolas (2021) calls “transborder comunalidad” in hometown associations, the many patron-saint celebrations, and community events, from Gueleguetza and Calendas to what now spans a whole Oaxacan Heritage Month.
Yet, when these modern forms of economic empowerment are linked to Indigenous women’s traditional labors, the mixed temporalities sometimes collide. When I teach my Women’s Movements in Latin American and the Caribbean course, my students are inspired by the testimonies I use in class, and they are usually moved by the films I use to illustrate the various women’s movements we study throughout the quarter. They like to hear about these activists’ lives in their own words. Yet, when I screen Las mujeres que se organizan avanzan (Women who organize make progress), a short fifteen-minute documentary—made by Chatina activist and filmmaker Yolanda Cruz (n.d.)—about a group of Mixtec women who start a microbank or community credit union to generate funds to be used for economic projects in their communities, the representation of women’s empowerment seems to present a sense of cognitive dissonance for some of the students. One scene is an interview with a leader of the FIOB’s community credit union, Isabel Ramos Reyes, of Santo Domingo, while she is making tortillas by hand for the market. I interviewed the same leader in 2007 as part of a collaborative project, called Developing Binational Indigenous Leadership: Gender, Generation and Ethnic Diversity within the FIOB, which the FIOB invited me to participate in as a researcher.4 We talked while she was making tortillas, and I remember asking her if my interview was slowing her down or keeping her from her work, and asking her if there was a better time. She laughed and said that work time was the best time to talk. In a small outdoor room, a kitchen that was separate from the living space, I sat on a child’s chair with my recorder perched there close to Isabel’s masa press, next to a huge comal that sat on a U-shaped brick oven that had wood fed into the fire where tortillas were grilled. A turkey walked in and out of the room, with its own song that competed with the calls of chickens and children in the yard, which was heard over the syncopated pounding of masa between quick, expert hands (Isabel Ramos Reyes, interview with author [transcription of digital recording], March 29, 2007). In Cruz’s video, Isabel is being interviewed on camera while another woman from the collective (not identified by name) is making tortillas in the background while carrying a child tied on her back in her rebozo. My students at UCLA, who are 95 percent Chicana/x and Latina/x first-generation college students, largely from working-class and immigrant family backgrounds, could hear the story of empowerment, but the visual overdetermines the field of meaning. Perhaps because they are used to store-bought tortillas, as there are numerous bakeries and tortillerias throughout Los Angeles, what they are surprised to see, rather, is a community leader who carries a baby in her rebozo on her back while doing this traditional woman’s labor. When I ask what they find disturbing about this image, they report, “Well, the child is so big.” It is true: the child is a toddler—perhaps the same son whom I met a few years later, whose chair I realized I was sitting in while we did our interview—the same one in the yard playing. I took Isabel’s picture before we say goodbye in front of her house (Blackwell 2015).
What is missed by the students is that this is a community organizer who helped a community to create a credit union in order to access the funds to have that tortilla-making operation, and that activist work for Indigenous-led development is part of the FIOB’s campaign El Derecho de No Migrar. This cognitive disruption challenges women’s labor expectations and the temporality of women’s liberation, or one entrenched in ideas of what “modern women” do or, at least, the template that has been sold in the incomplete liberation of women in the north. That template includes the idea that freedom is linked to working outside the home and releasing domestic and childcare work to be done by others, rather than the complete democratization of reproductive labor shared by all genders in the home. Some of those who have done that work include my students, working along mothers and aunts to clean houses or take care of others’ children, in addition to the work that is done in the home as daughters and sisters. In the film, the temporality of labor and freedom places economic activities and home and childcare in the same space and time. When my students see Indigenous women conducting their daily work and organizing tasks, there seems to be a dissonance between their ideas of empowerment and the ways in which Indigenous women bear a symbolic burden of the past and the “past-ness” marked by labor and the body. One student calls out, “Isn’t that what we are trying to get beyond?”
Through the discussion, I find that women’s empowerment is not only tied to freedom from the temporalities of reproductive labor but also deeply imbricated in the ways these labors are racialized.5 The definition of modern, middle-class womanhood in Mexico is made possible by Indigenous women’s reproductive labor, and thus these labors are not just deeply gendered but also deeply racialized. This is often true across many parts of the southwestern United States. Noteworthy here is that COVID-19 collapsed the assumption that some US women made about public and private spheres and the gendered division of labor between supposedly productive and reproductive labor. While perhaps more widespread among young women, the temporality of labors their mothers and grandmothers did seems old-fashioned or antiquated. Yet, for many of the Chicana/x and Latina/x college students I teach, their families push them to excel in their education and, in fact, have made huge life sacrifices in hopes that their daughters do not have to take the jobs their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers did—as nannies, maids, or care workers as their only economic choices. There is a temporality to immigrant dreams and notions of generational success that aspires for their children to be spared from the manual labors they did, except for temporarily or seasonally as they work their way to a better economic situation. Many students share their sense of injustice at having had to do reproductive labor, chores, and waiting on their brothers and fathers—who did not—while they were growing up.
So, there are several layers of temporality at play in what needs getting “beyond.” Does empowerment mean aspiring to having the class mobility not to have to engage in such labors, presumably to have others—like the woman featured in the film—care for children and do cooking? This “pastness” is marked both by the fact that the Indigenous women community leaders in the film labor and how they labor: with children in their rebozos, making tortillas by hand. These instruments and cultural productions of labor are celebrated precisely in tourist campaigns—and often in immigrant nostalgia—as the authentic Mexico, and they are authentic because they are past. In part, what is marked by this pastness is that it is culinary labor carried out by women. Authenticity is a measure of time that is marked on the brown body of Indigenous women and their labor. Female Indigenous subjectivity is represented as past and tied to the laboring brown body fixed in the rural space.6 What is not marked is the way the gendered and racialized embodiment of labor is fixed in time as “unmodern” or traditional. In contrast, in media representations, the modern Mexicana female subject is marked by signifiers of racial embodiment—being taller, white or light skinned, lean, and urban—specifically, not Indigenous. This was signified in the fierce, racist backlash in response to Yalitza Aparicio Martínez—a Mixtec preschool teacher from Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca, and first-time actress and breakout star of the film Roma (Cuarón 2018)—being featured on the January 2019 cover of Vogue México magazine. The cultural debate revealed the depth of the dominant culture’s attachment to the European standard of beauty in Mexico.
Riding the Bus in a huipil: Mobility and Mixed Temporalities of Migration
Not only is indigeneity fixed in the past, but it is also defined through its static relationship to land in ways that deny the mobility of Indigenous people prior to contact and continue settler colonialism’s logic of elimination. While spatial immobilization is a strategy of settler containment, in Mexico, mobility—specifically, labor migration—has been a settler strategy of elimination or de-Indianization. In the colonial era, Indigenous peoples were conscripted as an enslaved labor pool that traveled with soldiers and priests to missions and presidios throughout New Spain (including what is now the United States); they were accepted in the racial hierarchy as gente de razón once they underwent Catholicization. Historically, fincas and haciendas relied on Indigenous labor; much of Mexico’s current and historic agricultural industries, such as sugar cane, also relied on this labor, and now on Indigenous labor migration. In Mexico, Indigenous people are seen to become deindigenized or become mestizo when they leave their pueblo, even if they still speak their languages and have not experienced any racial mixture. Historical processes of displacement and forced migration in the Americas are linked to colonialisms and processes of elimination, but these processes have been fueled by globalization, another name for neoliberal capitalism. The increased movement of people, capital, production, and goods in this stage of capitalist development is part of the compression of space and time, a defining feature of globalization (Harvey 1989). Other features of neoliberal globalization, mobility, migration, and dislocation make this time-space compression a lived reality in which migrants also live between at least two times and spaces. For Indigenous migrants, another twist is layered onto existing in multiple times of here and there, in that to be Indian is to be always already past according to dominant temporal logics. Indigenous people who have relocated to urban centers to work in domestic or manual labor are routinely told they are no longer Indigenous, so much so that this dominant ideology has become common sense and internalized by many. Once they migrate across the US-Mexico border, Indigenous people in diaspora often live between what I call multiple colonialities: the Hispanicization or Latinization that erases their indigeneity within the United States while often simultaneously increasing their exposure to anti-Indian racism by mestizos in migration, labor markets, and schools (Blackwell 2010, 2017; Stephen 2017). For Indigenous women who often bear the symbolic burden of this pastness on/in their bodies, through their labor and through their creation of social worlds that navigate temporality in multiple ways, their racialized gender is yet another layer. They navigate multiple temporalities, some linked to Indigenous continuance that they help to perpetuate, and others, like the settler-colonial logic of time, that they often resist. As perhaps is fitting, then, this is a story told in fragments in time and space.
Deindigenization through migration has been true historically, but I find the opposite among FIOB members. This is a story about those who claim their Indigenous identity through the process of migration and the process of displacement (Blackwell 2015). For example, when Monserrat Bernadino—one of the FIOB members I have worked with—shared her story, she talked about how, even though she is from a Zapotec community and her parents are language speakers, she did not claim her Indigenous identity until she migrated (Interview with author [digital recording], September 17, 2011; see also Velasco Ortiz 2005). In Mexico, even places and regions are racialized, so when you are asked where you are from, it is often so you can be positioned socially or understood within a racial hierarchy. While it was Monserrat’s experience of new forms of anti-Indian prejudice in migration that led her to claim an Indigenous identity, rather than identifying only as Oaxacan or as a member of her pueblo, it was what she learned in the decolonization classes she took with FIOB founding member and Mixtec scholar Gaspar Rivera-Salgado that led her to adopt an Indigenous political consciousness. Other activists I have worked with have multigenerational knowledge that roots them into their indigeneity, such as Odilia, who, in addition to being a long-time activist within the FIOB, went on to become a co-founder—along with her daughter Janet Martinez—of the Indigenous women-led organization CIELO (Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo). Speaking at a binational leadership-development workshop called Construyendo Equidad al Interior del FIOB y Creando un Camino Compartido (Constructing Equity within the FIOB and Creating a Shared Path)—which both male and female leaders and members of FIOB’s base communities attended in 2008—she shared, “My abuela told me, ‘Wherever you go, you will still be Zapotec.’ I learned from my other abuela that you don’t have to depend on a man. The sister of my abuela was the curandera who healed people. She never went to mass in Zoogocho.” She recounts these stories about how Indigenous women’s leadership is learned in the home, with female relatives, and in the communities. Within the FIOB, she described to me how, two years after its formation, “in 1994, women started to participate in the formal leadership and yet, it continues to be a struggle,” even though gender equity is part of the mission of the FIOB (Odilia Romero Hernández, interview with author [transcription of digital recording], January 31, 2009). As Odilia has moved through this mixture of temporal registers, she holds ancestral knowledges of Indigenous women’s strength as she navigates the settler logics of migration, racialized landscapes, and the politics of gender in organizational spaces.
Coming to the United States is a spatial dislocation that is a proxy for a temporal shift from communitarian time, or pueblo time, to urban time in Mexican cities and even into the American notions of temporality and work. Yet, migrants are also navigating a set of racialized assumptions about them that are mapped onto their bodies and labors. For example, many Indigenous communities in diaspora hold deeply to their Indigenous foodways and cultural traditions, teaching their second-generation children who grow up dancing the communal dances and playing in the philharmonic bands of their pueblo (Nicolas 2021). For women, wearing their huipiles and traditional dress connects them to their hometowns, lands, mountains, and waters, and creates a continuity in migration (Boj Lopez 2017). This temporality of the ancestors provides protection, love, and a set of relationships woven both in the textiles and by wearing—and learning to wear—the traje. While many girls and women wear their traje to community events, activists have made the move to decolonize their bodies and sense of beauty by wearing huipiles, earrings, rebozos, and bags in everyday life, and especially at political gatherings and presentations.
Yet, Odilia tells me how she stopped wearing her huipil when she had to take the bus or other public transportation. “Yeah,” she starts her story, “people used to stare at me and treat me different every time I wore a huipil on the bus. One day, this mestiza lady comes up to me and touches my huipil [rubbing her fingers together to show me how the lady handled her blouse] and asked me, ‘How much?’ When I told her it wasn’t for sale, she followed me around, asking me where I got it and if I would make her one.” Wearing the huipil links Odilia to the temporality of continuity from where she comes from: her pueblo, her ancestors, and the continuity of women’s weaving. In crossing multiple borders—rural/urban, US/Mexico—the mestiza woman on the bus enacted a temporality of servitude, in which she assumed the position of dominance that allowed her to feel comfortable breaking personal boundaries that are usually observed on public transportation. This encounter re-enacts forms of racial dominance and unconscious privilege that give many mestizas a sense of intimacy that allows them to falsely feel entitled to the bodies and labors of Indigenous women. Staging encounters of servitude in which mestizas who have grown up with domestic servants and live-in nannies—or media representations of them, for those who do not—allows some to feel entitled enough to breach another woman’s boundaries and casually deny another’s right to the bodily autonomy that would normally be respected on public transportation. Other women are accustomed to seeing, buying from, and negotiating with Indigenous artisans in the marketplace, artisans who may travel from their pueblos to bring woven huipils, rugs, bags, and other clothes. The woman on the bus created a market scenario, engaging in consumer behaviors in which she felt entitled to purchase, consume, or possess that which is not for sale—an unconscious but embodied colonial gesture.
Migration causes a shift in space, yet the temporalities are coded in such ways that Indigenous people are perceived, through settler temporality, as ancient or extinct in some cases, or through the temporality of the “past (and present)” of Indigenous servitude. Indigenous cultures are represented through a set of stereotypes: backward, uneducated, free, or cheap for the taking. While there is a temporality at play, what is counted as traditional and modern relies on gendered labor. On the one hand, Indigenous women are often trapped in a set of modern/traditional, urban/rural, educated/uneducated, global/local dichotomies, where the “modern” view of life and living is often measured by gender equality and women’s rights in ways that ignore the widespread gender discrimination and gender-violence epidemic in the mainstream cultures of both the United States and Mexico. On the other hand, Indigenous women are the repositories of the authentic Mexico, deep with tradition and foodways, open to be “discovered” in tourist schemes. Since Indigenous women are seen to be more fixed to the land, spatially immobile, and thus less touched by time/modernity, they are viewed as the lynchpin of both constructed temporalities of the past, antiquated or traditional, and authentic ones, which rely largely on their culinary and artisanal labor; they are viewed as less influenced by time/modernity, not having the same access to schooling, learning colonial languages, or traveling outside of the pueblo. But, as scholars, cultural anthropologists, and Indigenous leaders have pointed out, Indigenous pueblos are no longer closed, bounded communities (Hernández Castillo 1994; Stephen 2007). Indigenous migrant women bear multiple temporalities and navigate those projections of time in both their sending and receiving communities—temporalities they invoke for continuity and Indigenous survivance, and temporalities of coloniality that racialize them and cast them perpetually in the past.
However, Indigenous women leaders blend, negotiate, and negate these temporalities in complex ways, as I learned when I visited with Griselda Inés Sánchez Oriano, who was, at the time, a newly elected leader in Oaxaca, after the Binational General Assembly of the FIOB. She is from a small town in the Mixteca Baja of Oaxaca, called San Pedro Yodoyuxi, in the municipality of Huajuapan de León. At the time of my visit in 2011, she was thirty-five years old. During our afternoon-long visit, she shared her story of migration and, unexpectedly, a story of her own Indigenous identity and mobility. She told me, “Well, because…in fact, I thought, I don’t know, [she pauses and takes a breathe] for a long time I thought I was not Mixtec because I don’t speak Mixtec, because I didn’t speak any [Indigenous] language. Even though five minutes away, in the next town over, so close, they do speak the language” (Griselda Sánchez Oriano, interview with author [transcription of digital recording], 2011). She went on to explain that after the construction of the main highway, no one spoke Mixtec anymore in her pueblo, which is close to the highway, even though there are many Mixtec-language speakers in a small town next to hers called Santiago Ixtaltepec. Indigenous-language rights activists point out that, in Mexico, the common use of the word dialect to refer to Indigenous languages is just one of the myriad ways Indigenous cultures are minimized and reduced (Newdick and Romero 2019).
We talk more about how her participation in the organization changed the way she saw herself. Griselda went on to unpack how language loss is part de-Indianization in Mexico, in how Indigenous people come to internalize governmental ways of classification:
I did not even know I was Indigenous. It is like not having an identity, even though behind you is all your history, all your customs, all your roots, and if you are not aware of all this, you are lost. I thought…I had another concept of Indigenous but…I thought that Indigenous meant just a person who dressed a certain way and spoke some dialect.…So that made me say, “I am not an Indigenous,” but now with all that I have lived in the FIOB and all that has happened, I am aware that I am Indigenous. I am not Spanish either, because of the color of my skin, because I belong to a[n Indigenous] community, because I have customs and traditions [usos y costumbres, or Indigenous normative systems]. I have a whole history that is right from me and yet [from the dominant perspective] I am not Indigenous. And the irony is that the government says…they put that very confusing question to determine whether you consider yourself Indigenous in the censuses; they don’t define you that way, even if you are. So logically, five or six years ago had I been asked if I consider myself Indigenous, I would have said no, because I had that [governmental] concept of being Indigenous. Many people are confused by this governmental classification [of] who are being defined as not Indigenous when they really are. (Sánchez Oriano, interview, 2011)
Griselda’s family has been involved since the early days of the FIOB. Her father, Aurelio Sánchez Cor, and her mother, Guadalupe Soriano, were among the first to join when the organization came to the community assembly to make a presentation about the work. They participated in marches when their rights were violated, and the FIOB provided a tractor for the community because they did not have one to work the land where the community—along with her parents—grew mostly corn and beans. She told me that both her mom and dad “work in the fields to grow the food, [that her mom does] not work exclusively in the home but also brings firewood from the mountain, sows and plants, goes to the land, and supports it in all the work of the field” (Sánchez Oriano, interview, 2011). Griselda described her participation in the FIOB, which has included creating “workshops on gender equity, women’s leadership, and work with municipal authorities.” She went on to tell me that, although she has legal training, has been a participant in her pueblo’s community assembly, and is active in the Indigenous rights movement, she is not allowed to put her name forward to serve on the community council or as municipal president because she is a woman, although laws governing women’s participation have changed since this interview. “I participate in [the community life of] my pueblo. I would like be able to be the municipal agent, but because I am a woman, I have not been allowed.” When I asked her, “Why do you have this dream to get this done?” she said, “I would like this to do something for my pueblo, because even though it is close to the city, it is very abandoned; it seems like it is a remote pueblo because the streets do not have all the services, there is no park or a sports field for the children or the youth to play” (Sánchez Oriano, interview, 2011).
Griselda shared that she was moved to tears to see all the newly elected officers of the binational leadership in the last General Assembly in October 2011, when they all accepted their new positions in their ancesteral languages of Zapotec or Mixtec. Even more powerful for her was that the new slate of leaders was half women, and all the women who were elected were migrants from California. She told me she felt proud to see that all three are relatively young women, two are pursuing their educations, and yet all spoke Indigenous languages. She was inspired that they were all both “modern” and Indigenous. When I asked her to tell me more, she shared that women from her generation are encouraged to shed Indigenous culture and language, and she talked about the contradictions that are set up for Indigenous women. Griselda reflected,
Yes, I think it is because they are misinformed because of the media, and the globalized world makes you lose your true identity. It’s like you get dazzled by a materialist culture. It [Indigenous identity among women of my generation] is not [normally] fought for. But, with the leaders of the FIOB, it is not only [because they] have they studied in the university or because they cut their hair a bit more modern, but they speak their language and are fully aware of their true identity. They share customs [normative legal and governance systems], share traditions, and share so many things about their pueblos. (Sánchez Oriano, interview, 2011)
In her description, receiving education or cutting one’s hair puts Indigenous and modern temporalities at odds. Yet, Griselda goes on to tell me how the ways Indigenous women are seen as “unmodern and traditional” can be refused, and how education and Indigenous languages and cultures are part of temporalities that can be blended:
I think that it [Indigenous cultures and languages] is not often fought for but can be combined. It can be combined because it does not mean that just because a woman is more educated…or the more cultured she is, the less Indigenous she will be. When I saw Sylvia [Ventura Luna] and Sarait [Martínez] speaking Mixtec and Zapotec to accept their new positions [in the leadership of the FIOB], I felt a lot of admiration because even though they have spent most of their lives in the United States, where you supposedly go and become distant from your community, they are prepared [educated]…they did not lose it [their Indigenous languages/cultures], and they continue to cultivate it. It is challenging for these women because not only are they in another country, but they have also succeeded in excelling, coming back [to be of service] to their people and feeling proud of their roots, their language, and everything. They are an example for many young people in those lands who have not learned to value their language. (Sánchez Oriano, interview, 2011)
Griselda had a pretty awful experience migrating to the United States. She tells me she grew up at a time when all the youth from her small town migrated. She migrated, and after working in the fast-food industry for little pay and working long hours, she returned home to complete her law degree.
For me, there are many lessons about migration as well, that we keep preparing ourselves and growing. Not forgetting our roots. Without forgetting to be humble. When you are there, I think that only by being there [in the United States] do you realize how valuable your land is and how being there, speaking [your language] or sharing your traditions or customs [Indigenous normative systems of law and governance], diminishes the sadness that they feel to be away from their pueblo. We are here and here; it is very common for us to be sharing customs every day, traditions, but you don’t see the value until you are not far away. It was not until I was in the United States that I really understood [the power of] the fiestas of my pueblo. I missed the people, my friends, and the village, and all the things you can only practice being there. There you can try to get together and that makes you feel, at least, less bad. But we here have everything at hand; I tell you, we do not value it [until we have to leave].
Griselda’s reflections remind me that indigeneity is deeply imbricated in not only time but also place and mobility shifts that relationship. In this case, mobility is marked by modernity and gender, and notions of time are produced by spatial dislocation. Her comments juxtapose female Oaxacan migrant political leaders (who are labor leaders, doctoral students, or translators) as mujeres modernas with Indigenous-language speakers. Modernity (enacted through mobility) is contraposed with indigeneity (through language) for Griselda, who comes from a town just north of Huajuapan de León, which is en route back down to Oaxaca City, back from Juxtlahuaca where we visited on the way back from the FIOB office. This observation is heightened by the fact that there are not many Indigenous-language speakers left in her community, while in the next pueblo over (the one farther away from the highway), they still speak their language. This fact is not isolated from mobility and modernity either. Modernity/mobility has come to be equated with an increased loss in indigeneity/language. In fact, it was the building of that modern highway, which links Juxtlahuaca with Oaxaca City, that has given people in the pueblo more mobility, but observers have shared with me that many pueblos closest to the highway are the ones with the highest language loss. This juxtaposition that Griselda points to is ironic, given that many Oaxacans identify primarily with their pueblo or hometowns and develop a political consciousness based on Indigenous identity when they migrate and face discrimination by mestizos and dominant racial attitudes in the United States. Indigenous women activists negotiate multiple temporalities in ways that illustrate the complexities of their efforts for Indigenous continuance and their refusal of colonial modes of time, or their braiding and blending as Griselda observes.
Conclusion
This essay reflects on how Indigenous women activists navigate multiple temporalities in ways that illustrate their individual and collective labors of Indigenous continuance and their refusal of colonial modes of time. They challenge the ways the temporal emplotment of nation relies on fixing them in the past and how the tourist industry deploys cultural narratives of authenticity based not only on their labor but also on racial scripts that re-enact their subjugation. When Indigenous women activists take their labor/time into their own hands in Indigenous-led development schemes, they enact Indigenous survivance. Yet, representations of their economic empowerment are overdetermined by the way their bodies are racialized through their labor, registering the pastness of women’s work associated with drudgery and as the antithesis of the “modern” or “liberated” woman.
On the one hand, Indigenous women who make totopos spend time with their migrant kin, and yet the temporality of their labors—planting, seeding, harvesting, grinding, mixing; the staccato of patting, shaping, and grilling—represents temporalities of womanhood in Indigenous pueblos that some girls may be reluctant to step into. On the other hand, migrant Indigenous women enact ancestral time through their cooking and foodways, and through selling products in order to gain economic independence and attain other coveted markers of “modern womanhood.” In turn, they reconnect their families and communities to the rhythms of ceremony, ritual, communal gatherings, dance, and the temporality of Oaxacan brass bands, thereby insisting on Indigenous survivance and communal continuity while resisting the colonial imposition of modernity and interpretations of womanhood/women’s work as racialized and unmodern.
While other interactions illustrated how mobility equates modernity or a temporal shift for Indigenous women, there are many stories of how the temporal frame that fixes Indigenous people in time fixes them in space. This is apparent in the unfortunate and repeated incidents during air travel, when Mexican airlines asked Indigenous people to get off the plane, which illustrate the incongruence in seeing Indigenous people on modern transportation (e.g., Garza 2022). For Indigenous women, these temporal shifts are lived and negotiated in embodied and often painful ways. Activists like Odilia tell of how they grew wary of wearing a huipil on public transportation, as their bodies donning Indigenous weaving, even those that were not traditional for them to wear, seem to signal the mercantilization of their labor/time and racial scripts of domination, as mestizas would touch them, their clothing, and ask, How much?
While mobility signals a temporal shift to modernity, transportation and movement are often fraught with negotiating multiple temporalities—those in which mestizos/as re-enact gestures of racial dominance and the temporality of being connected to Indigenous place and symbols that have survived for generations. Mobility and migration are accessible markers of modernity produced by spatial dislocation and are comparable to Indigenous-language loss and the loss of indigeneity. Yet, as Griselda’s reflections illustrated, she was moved by Indigenous women migrants who received their education and have stepped into leadership positions—both markers of being a modern woman—and yet are Indigenous-language speakers. Latin American–Indigenous social movements are a study in time politics. Observing and preserving Indigenous women’s labors ideally resist racializing time, agency, and colonization of womanhood as a dichotomy of “modern” and “traditional.” It is the millennial culture of Indigenous women that this dichotomy implodes, and the reclamation of Indigenous languages and women’s labor coexist in making mole, literally and metaphorically.
Notes
According to Wikipedia, “Totopos are best known as originating from Zapotec peoples of the isthmus of Tehuantepec region of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. There, the Zapotec women bake totopos in a clay oven known as a comixcal” (“Totopo,” accessed May 28, 2014, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totopo).
All field interviews and conversations were in Spanish, and English translations of any content of the interviews presented here are my own.
For a similar argument about curanderas, see Espin 1988.
I began my collaboration with FIOB in 2005 and served as a binational advisor to the organization for six years. The project was funded through the auspices of the Otros Saberes Initiative of the Latin American Studies Association, which funded Indigenous and Afrodescendant organizations and communities to partner with academics to design and carry out collaborative research projects. Our research team included Rufino Domínguez-Santos, then the general coordinator of FIOB; Centolia Maldonado, the coordinator of the Juxtlahuaca region of Oaxaca at the time; Odilia Romero Hernández, then the binational coordinator of women’s affairs; Laura Velasco Ortiz, a scholar of Mixtec migration from the Colegio de Frontera Norte; and myself. Throughout the next year and a half, we designed and implemented three statewide workshops and a binational encuentro addressing gender, generation, and ethnic diversity. We worked with sixty-three activists who participated in the workshops in Tijuana, Baja California; Los Angeles, California; and Huajuapan de León, Oaxaca. The results of this research were published collaboratively (Romero Hernández et al. 2014).
For an important discussion of racialized gender and reproduction and reproductive labor, see Kaplan 2021.
For a reclamation by Indigenous women as the true face of Oaxaca, see Stephen 2013.
University of California Press