UC San Diego

The U.S./Mexico border is a site of increased state polices for surveillances, hyper-militarization, and state sanctioned violence on Native Americans and Indigenous peoples living on the border. Similarly, public schooling in the U.S. and Mexico is damaging to Native and Indigenous students (Lomawaima & McCarty 2006). Sate surveillance and criminalization on the border and in schools attempt to rupture Indigenous relationships and curtail Indigenous sovereignty across colonial borders—specially tribes separated by colonial borders.

This seven-year multi-site community-based, historical, and critical ethnographic study reveal how tribal nations separated by the U.S./Mexico border practice traditions, defend Indigenous existence and lands, and are (re)connecting and strengthening transborder bonds. Drawing from decolonial theory, Native Feminisms, and Chicana feminists, the border is a site of analysis to examine how overlapped multi-settler colonialisms, state surveillance, hyper-militarization, state policies on the U.S./Mexico border attempt to rupture Indigenous forms of education. Further, this study interrogates how Latinidad subsumes Indigenous peoples and erases Indigenous migrations and Indigenous sovereignty on the U.S/Mexico border. This study reveals how transborder Indigenous migrations, Indigenous knowledge systems, language revitalization, and intertribal and intergenerational bonds are not rupturing, but in fact, strengthening, (re)connecting, and defending Indigenous existence and lands as a form of Indigenous sovereignty on the border and in schools.