intersectionality – Indigenous Rights in Latin America

Intersectionality: Why Aren’t Indigenous Peoples of African Descent Discussed in Conversations Regarding Indigeneity?

When most think of indigenous people (especially those in Latin America), indigenous people who also have African heritage are not a part of the conversation. Specifically, in our class where we discussed a variety of different indigenous rights and issues, Afro-Indigeneity was not a topic we discussed until a few students voiced their thoughts on the lack of such content. And even then, the discussion was brief and only a limited amount of sources were provided as course materials (at no fault of the professor). While indigenous people in Latin America are a marginalized and oppressed group, the Afro-Latinx/Indigenous community is marginalized within the already marginalized group– much like how African American or Black people are oppressed and marginalized in the United States and queer Black people are marginalized within the Black community.
What Afro-Indigenous people are deprived of is their ability to be indigenous. As Avi Chomsky and Cindy Forster express in their 2006 article “Who Is Indigenous? Who Is Afro-Colombian? Who Decides?”, people who claim both African and indigenous heritage are not recognized as both African and indigenous because they are considered “peasants” and are “defined . . . as “a group of families of African descent that possesses its own culture, shares a history, and has its own traditions and customs . . . who demonstrate and conserve a consciousness of their identity that distinguishes them from other ethnic groups”. In other words, Afro-Colombian people are their own separate group/ethnicity and are thus excluded from indigenous communities. They must pick one identity over the other and many times that identity is chosen for them; fore, Afro-Indigenous people are not indigenous to many people because of their African heritage– they are Afro-whatever (whatever referring to the Latin American country in which African-descended people live/populate).
Afro-Indigenous peoples are excluded from indigenous conversations just as it is difficult for indigenous women to be a part of the same discussions. They have to prove themselves in ways that other indigenous people do not; and yet, Afro-Indigenous people are still not considered members of indigenous communities. They are not allowed to have more than one identity. They must be what their country and society dictate they are.
This is to say that not all Afro-Latinx American people are of indigenous descent and are shunned or excluded from the communities, but the fact remains that there is a lack of scholarship on Afro-Indigenous people and their inclusion in indigenous communities.

Works Cited

Chomsky, Avi, and Cindy Forster. “Who Is Indigenous? Who Is Afro-Colombian? Who Decides?”

Cultural Survival. December 2006. Accessed June 2019. https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/who-indigenous-who-afro-colombian-who-decides.

McGrath, Elena. “The Indian Question.” Indigenous Rights in Latin America, Carleton College,

Northfield, MN, April 5, 2019

Postero, Nancy Grey, and Leon Zamosc. “Introduction: Indigenous Movements and the Indian

Question in Latin America.” In The Struggle for Indigenous Rights in Latin America, 1-31. Sussex Academic Press, 2012.

In the Western world, discussions on the struggles produced by colonialism tend to be myopic. For example, the application of western feminists theories in non-western societies falls shorts of fully demonstrating the complexities of the subjugation of people based on gender within the colonial state. In general, western feminist thought lacks an understanding of how gender became a tool to oppress people. Maria Lugones writes “The Coloniality of Gender” to offer more insight on the confluence of gender and colonialism. She critiques the discussion on the coloniality of power concept by Anibal Quijano with the help of feminist theoretical frameworks by Women of Color feminists. Her essay explores her interest in the intersection of “race, class, gender, and sexuality” within the colonial power structure to highlight the shortsighted discussions of liberation and struggle by men, and in particular, men of color.
The coloniality of power describes the concept of how modernity resulted from the legacies of colonialism through the domination, exploitation, and oppression of people under the Eurocentric capitalism and from racialization in the Americas [1]. Lugones criticized this model for being too narrow because it “veil[s] the ways in which non-’white’ colonized women were subjected and disempowered. She explains that she understands how Quijano sees the subjugation of people through the “axis of the coloniality of power,” and how he sees gender within this restrictive framework. However, his shortcomings demonstrate how women of color are overlooked even in academic discussions. Lugones then lists examples of the coloniality of gender.
Lugones describes the inconsistencies within gender assignation and its relation to understanding biological sex. For example, intersex people are 1 in 4 globally, and depending on which genitalia they were born with, they would be assigned a sex identity. However, even within this assignation, Lugones explains, notions of subordination based on gender are imposed. This ties with what Oyéronké Oyewùmí explains about the implementation of gender in the colonization of the Yoruba people. With colonization, gender subordination and race inferiorization were imposed on the Yoruba thus stripping their social structures. Paula Gunn Allen also explains how many North American indigenous communities were gynocratic and their belief systems revolved around female deities, yet that changed with colonization. Subordination of women came through the “the decimation of populations through starvation, disease, and disruption of all social, spiritual, and economic structures,” Gunn Allen adds that indigenous men were complicit in the restructuring of their social order especially after many were taken to England to learn the “way of the English.” This demonstrates the extent which sex, gender, and sexuality were colonized by the Euro-centric capitalist power. Lugones then describes how the feminist movements of the twentieth century were not designed for the use of women of color. The feminism of white women, bourgeois white women, only focused on their subordination and did not so because they did not see themselves in the “intersection of race, gender and other forceful marks of subjection or domination.” Stereotypes about women and men of color emphasize the importance of seeing this because it manifested how the norm for gender expectations and relations were centered around white men and women, first the bourgeois and later middle class. Likewise, heterosexuality is a construction that arose and marked the appropriate relations between people as they aligned with the colonial/modern gender system.
These examples demonstrate how gender is also a tool for establishing domination over colonized places. Because gender is not always investigated separately, it can be missed in conversations about the struggles of decolonization. In this article, Lugones demonstrated how colonization created a new gender system, and how it affected the social structures that people and made them more susceptible to exploitation from Europeans. Within these examples, Women of Color feminists demonstrated the depth of change necessary to leave societies vulnerable to oppression and how these become overlooked.
These insights are helpful within our Latin American context because we have read on examples of how gender affects Indigenous Peoples. We read on about the Muxe of Oaxaca, and how indigenous women are seen as more indigenous than men, to list some examples. Colonization profoundly transformed people and societies. It is easy however to dismiss the impacts of it when discussions about it are dominated by men, and men of color, who do not perceive gender to be influential topics. Within our class, it was helpful to read about women’s experiences because they launched conversations on the role gender plays in history the indigenous people of Latin America.

Lugones, Maria. “The Coloniality of Gender.” Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise 2, no. 2 (2008): 1–17. https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/projects/wko-gender.
[1] Quijano, Anibal, and Michael Ennis. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (November 1, 2000): 533–80. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/23906.