UCLA

Mixtecs are indigenous peoples from the southern Mexican states of the western portion of Oaxaca and small adjacent parts of Puebla and Guerrero. Mixtecs have been coming to the United States since the late 1970s as migrant workers. Michael Kearney became for the Mixtec migrant community in diaspora and in Oaxaca a solid ally and a critical thinker who contributed with his intellect and sometimes plain hard physical labor to the efforts of the Mixtec community to promote the fundamental human rights of all indigenous Mexicans. He played an important role in advancing the struggle of indigenous migrants by forging innovative theoretical concepts that indigenous activists appropriated to focus and advance their struggle, among them transnational indigenous community, Oaxacalifornia, and Mixtec political consciousness. In the late 1980s and early 1990s these concepts appeared strange and abstract to indigenous activists, but eventually they became cornerstones of the discourse of many activists and indigenous organizers both in the United States and Mexico and are now common coin.