Performing a Strategic Transborder Citizenship: Delfina Cuero Remaps Kumeyaay Presence through Storytelling and Place-Naming

In her life story, published as Delfina Cuero: Her Autobiography, an Account of Her Last Years and Her Ethnobotanic Contributions, Delfina Cuero disrupts the erasure and silence of the Kumeyaay by remapping her people’s presence through storytelling and place-naming.¹ In my analysis of the book I would like to both contribute to as well as complicate theories of Native American autobiography and sovereignty by arguing that Cuero’s narrative affirms cultural and traditional practices as she unmaps colonialist notions of belonging and identity by (re)righting Kumeyaay histories. I briefly examine theories of Native American life stories and by so doing contextualize Cuero’s narrative within a Kumeyaay-centered understanding of belonging as explained by the Kumeyaay creation story, which counters Western-centered notions of origin. Additionally, I argue that Cuero performs a strategic transborder citizenship through her use of storytelling and place-naming, thus challenging state-sanctioned Western notions of citizenship that are defined solely by “legal” and legitimate documents.

Although Cuero’s book is defined as an “as told to” narrative, my reading of Cuero’s voice is that she functions not simply as an “ethnographic informant” but rather as an agent of history who strategically subverts the autobiographical form as she negotiates her position between two nation-states. I argue that Cuero is a knowledge keeper and a tradition bearer whose Kumeyaay-centered epistemology negotiates a new model of citizenship and (re)claims territorial sovereignty for Indigenous peoples who have been bifurcated by the US-Mexico border. Cuero affirms an Indigenous identity that is tied to ancestral homelands, landscapes, sacred sites, migratory routes, and most importantly an identity intimately tied to her oral stories.

Kumeyaay/Diegueño/Mission Indians

The Kumeyaay of southern California in the United States and Baja California in Mexico are comprised of multiple clans and linked to other Indian nations as shown through similarities in language. They are also known as Ipai and Tipai, and inhabit(ed) the coastal lands of San Diego County south of the San Luis Rey River, east to the Salton Sea, and approximately fifty miles south of what is now the international US-Mexico border extending to the Mission at Santo Tomas in Baja California (Miskwish 16). According to Michael Connolly Miskwish, the complexity associated with “naming” is complicated by the history of missionization in California. The terms that have been used to designate this tribe, that is, “Mission Indians” and “Diegueño,” are “remnants of colonial classification that designated Native people around the San Diego mission, attaching to them the quality of belonging to the mission site more as property than as citizens” (17). Thus, when reservations were created in the late nineteenth century for “Mission Indians,” some members chose to maintain the name Diegueño for political reasons, that is, in order to distinguish themselves from the Kumeyaay in Mexico and maintain the minimal land rights that were given to them at this time.

As a result of this long and complicated history there is no one distinct and agreed upon name that identifies Indigenous peoples of San Diego County. In fact, as outlined by Miskwish, in the earliest recordings of persons indicating their “name,” they chose not to adhere to any “subservient societal structures higher than their Sh’mulq [clan],” and therefore we now have various recordings or spellings of Kumeyaay such as “Quemaya” and “Quamaya” (Miskwish 18). For example, Miskwish notes that when early Spanish explorers asked persons about their national identity, some Sh’mulqs responded with their word for “people,” which translated to Ipai, Tipaay, Awikipai, and Kawakipai (18). The actual naming of Kumeyaay peoples by “outsiders” and by self-naming is significant as it illustrates cross-cultural contact narratives that must be read through multilayered lenses.

Beyond Genre: Native American Autobiography

There are extensive studies dedicated to defining and characterizing “Native American Autobiography” that problematize generic forms of self life-writing. For example, in his discussion of Native American autobiographies, Arnold Krupat defines narratives written in collaboration with editors, translators, and ethnographers as “Indian autobiographies...