Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity

by Simón Ventura Trujillo

Land Uprising reframes Indigenous land reclamation as a horizon to decolonize the settler colonial conditions of literary, intellectual, and activist labor. Simón Ventura Trujillo argues that land provides grounding for rethinking the connection between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms.

Trujillo situates his inquiry in the cultural production of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a formative yet understudied organization of the Chicanx movement of the 1960s and 1970s. La Alianza sought to recover Mexican and Spanish land grants in New Mexico that had been dispossessed after the Mexican-American War. During graduate school, Trujillo realized that his grandparents were activists in La Alianza. Written in response to this discovery, Land Uprising bridges La Alianza’s insurgency and New Mexican land grant struggles to the writings of Leslie Marmon Silko, Ana Castillo, Simon Ortiz, and the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. In doing so, the book reveals uncanny connections between Chicanx, Latinx, Latin American, and Native American and Indigenous studies to grapple with Native land reclamation as the future horizon for Chicanx and Latinx indigeneities.
 

272 pages, Hardcover

Published March 31, 2020

Reviews

[Marisa Duarte · Rating 5 out of 5]

A visitation of the cosmology animating Indo-Hispano struggle in New Mexico from the Pueblo Revolt to the death and rebirth of Subcomandante Marcos, told through a deciphering of the refractive pluriverse of texts and ways of knowing that make New Mexico a forever unconquerable unsettled landscape at the crossroads of many empires. An important text for Indigenous scholars, Latinx studies, and for those with roots in the territories that unfolded in the wake of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

[Nic · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s just too much to say about this book as there is a lot that’s going on. I had the opportunity to take a class with Dr. Trujillo which largely covered the contents of this work. The introduction and chapters 3 & 4 were the strongest and most clear. The 5th chapter makes use of the quantum theory of light to interface the Zapatista uprising with the New Mexican land grant struggle from around the 50s. I became somewhat confused in this chapter once he moved away from the material specificity of the ejido land grant system, but I think this is where Trujillo tries to be the most ambitious as a theorist and I intend to reread (and the rest of the book, really) it a few times more.