Nations, Nationalisms, and Indígenas: The “Indian” in the Chicano Revolutionary Imaginary

The figure of the “Indian” and indigeneity have been indispensible to the formation of the ethnic, political, and cultural identities of Chicanos and Chicanas. During the Chicano movement, Chicanos harnessed the rhetorical, performative, and historical power of “Indianness” to craft ideologies of resistance and decolonization. As this essay suggests, early Chicano indigenist poetics borrowed the language of “Indianness” from Mexican nationalists writing at the turn of the twentieth century. In doing this, Chicano indigenist poetics and revolutionary imaginaries are always limited by the formulation of Mexican indigenismo, a formulation of “Indian” crafted through a Eurocentric lens. Chicanos rooted their own revolutionary ideologies in such early and fundamentally flawed Mexican revolutionary nationalism. It is this troublesome link where my essay takes root to uncover broader questions about Chicano claims and use of indigeneity.