Indian Time: Temporality, Gender, Mobility

Abstract

If the expression “Indian time” means anything, it should signify this history of temporal multiplicity.—Scott Richard Lyons (Lyons 2010, 13)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).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 (C