Racial Alterity, Wixarika Youth Activism, and the Right to the Mexican City by Diana Negrín

Abstract

Reviewed by: Racial Alterity, Wixarika Youth Activism, and the Right to the Mexican City by Diana Negrín Luis Urrieta (bio) and Judith Landeros (bio) Racial Alterity, Wixarika Youth Activism, and the Right to the Mexican City by Diana Negrín University of Arizona Press, 2019 IN RACIAL ALTERITY, WIXARIK A YOUTH ACTIVISM, and the Right to the Mexican City, Diana Negrín powerfully transcends the racial stereotypes that confine Indigenous people to the past, to specific notions of authenticity, or to particular landscapes, namely rural areas. Centering the lives of Wixarika youth activists, she richly illustrates how Wixaritari urban youth in the Mexican cities of Guadalajara and Tepic contest and negotiate in multiple ways the stereotypes of Indigenous peoples, ascribed notions of cultural authenticity, racial alterity, and spatial belonging (6). Negrín troubles historically paternalistic and essentialized indigenista racial imaginaries tied to narrow notions of indigeneity and the politics of authenticity by spatially grounding her work in conversation within urban studies, critical race studies, and critical Indigenous studies. Negrín begins by foregrounding indigenismo as the state ideology that at different historical moments has framed the Mexican nation's racial imaginary and tried to contain its racial alterity by addressing Indigenous peoples as a "problem." She particularly situates how indigenismo frames Indigenous peoples in deficit ways, as culturally and geographically homogeneous, belonging to specific places, and limited to a physical and temporal space (25, 39, 49). Continuing her analysis of indigenismo, in chapter 2 she examines Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) "development" programs that emerged from acción indigenista national projects to solve the "Indian problem" in Mexico. Specifically, in Wixarika territory (53) starting in the 1960s, such projects caused displacement and migration for wage labor and the commercialization of Wixarika art but enhanced access to higher education in urban centers such as Tepic and Guadalajara (83). In chapter 3, Negrín restories through a historical geography of the city of Tepic, Nayarit, how the Wixarika and Náayeri have been simultaneously included within and excluded from the city (86). In chapter 4, she describes two projects led by Wikaritari university students in Guadalajara [End Page 206] that promote the diversity of Indigenous presences and spatial and civic belonging in the city, projects that simultaneously disrupt the Euro-mestizo Tapatío narrative rooted in Guadalajara's colonial foundation and enduring characterization (143, 149). In chapters 3 and 4, Negrín articulates the historical development of Guadalajara and Tepic to trace from the colonial to current era how the geography of race and race relations in Latin America, mestizaje, multiculturalism, and indigenismo has shaped the social imaginaries of Indigenous people in Mexico. Lastly, in chapter 5, Negrín centers makuyeika (individual who walks in many places) to show how Wixaritari urban youth embody "the importance of geography in the formation of individual and collective identities, in a way that disrupts entrenched narratives of indigenous mobility" (16). Makuyeika illuminates the ways Wixaritari university students and professionals express their activism to shift Mexico's racial and spatial imaginary and call for a heterogenous citizenship that recognizes Indigenous peoples in Mexico (182). Racial Alterity, Wixarika Youth Activism, and the Right to the Mexican City's unique contribution is Negrín's focus on Indigenous youth, their agency and activism for recognition and reterritorialization in urban spaces. Her five-year ethnographic collaborative work with the Wixaritari university students and professionals highlights how Wixaritari youth assert their political, geographic, and cultural identities. She counters deficit perspectives of Indigenous people, highlighting generations of Indigenous activists and professionals, especially Wixarika educators, who have demanded cultural rights, navigated school institutions, and advocated for their children in the educational system. Negrín highlights how these professionals and university students have become truly pluricultural and plurilingual and continue to challenge the enduring and denigrating societal scripts and racial maps that attempt to universalize Indigenous peoples' experiences in Mexico. Such professional Wixaritari and also multigeneration family friends facilitated Diana Negrín's access and entry into the relational commitments to the Wixarika communities that are the focus of this book. These lifelong ties and enduring relations make Negrín's work in and beyond this book a beautiful exemplar of community-centered...