The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border

by Daina Sanchez

In this book, Daina Sanchez examines how Indigenous Oaxacan youth form racial, ethnic, community, and national identities away from their ancestral homeland. Assumptions that Indigenous peoples have disappeared altogether, or that Indigenous identities are fixed, persist in the popular imagination. This is far from the truth. Sanchez demonstrates how Indigenous immigrants continually remake their identities and ties to their homelands while navigating racial and social institutions in the U.S. and Latin America, and, in doing so, transform notions of Indigeneity and push the boundaries of Latinidad.



Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork between Los Angeles, California and San Andrés Solaga, a Zapotec town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, The Children of Solaga centers Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world, and adds a much-needed transnational dimension to the study of Indigenous immigrant adaptation and assimilation. Sanchez, herself a diasporic Solagueña, argues that the lived experiences of Indigenous immigrants offer a unique vantage point from which to see how migration across settler-borders transforms processes of self-making among displaced Indigenous people. Rather than accept attempts by both Mexico and the U.S. to erase their Indigenous identities or give in to anti-Indigenous and anti-immigrant prejudice, Oaxacan immigrants and their children defiantly celebrate their Indigenous identities through practices of el goce comunal ("communal joy") in their new homes.

202 pages, Hardcover

Published December 3, 2024

Reviews

[alexis nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this! I'm reminded of all of the ways that ethnographies can be auto-ethnographic and the academic (often positivist/post-positivist) desire to be separate from your subject is not necessarily a source of strength. Daina proves how aspects of auto-ethnography strengthen explorations of human experiences. I also aim to write in the way this author does! The voice and prose transported me to a different time and place in her descriptions of memories and made me feel the amount of care and consideration likely put into this work. I'd really encourage my friends and peers to read this.

[Maria O'Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daina Sanchez has a wonderful way of weaving the story to portray the communal joy and belonging that drives the Solagueños

[Luke Massongill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for a class but enjoyed it! It was a quick read and I learned a lot !