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  • Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States by Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo
  • Emilio Del Valle Escalante (bio)
Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States by Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo Duke University Press, 2016

MARIA JOSEFINA SALDAÑA-PORTILLO'S Indian Given examines the racial geography formations that have taken place in what is today Mexico and the United States since Spanish and British colonialist incursions. It interrogates the representations of Indians by settlers and their descendants in the archives of colonial conquest and other textualities that have contributed to formation of national identities in Mexico and the United States. The representations of the "Indio" and "Indian," it is argued, served to secure white/criollo-mestizo supremacy by justifying and facilitating the conquest of Indigenous territories. In turn, these representations have created new perceptions of the landscape and its people, especially on the border. The title of the book plays on the derogatory term "Indian giver"—someone who takes back something they have willingly given or sold—in order to challenge how and why the Spanish and the British colonial enterprises produced dissimilar racial geographies that led to "two distinct but complicit genealogies of Indian difference as produced in colonial and national geographies" (8).

The book is divided into an introduction, five chapters, and a coda. In chapter 1 Saldaña-Portillo concentrates on the Spanish and British invaders' juridical encounters with Indigeneity. She first discusses the question of Indigenous humanity and the "just" methods of "New World" conquest as these emerge in the debates between Fray Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda between 1550 and 1552. In the second part of the chapter she focuses on the British Crown's Proclamation of 1763, which consequently positioned the elites from the thirteen colonies as authorities on Indigenous character and a remapping of the "new" territories. Chapter 2 analyzes documents from the Spanish colonial archive on settlement and war in Texas, and compares them to the film No Country for Old Men to distinguish the hetero-temporal function of the "Indio Bárbaro" from early conquest to the war on terror. The first section focuses on Antonio Ladrón de Guevara's 1738 petition to the Spanish Crown to settle and populate what is today Texas. Saldaña-Portillo then analyzes a set of letters that discuss the 1758–59 Comanche attacks on the San Sabá presidio and mission in Texas. The chapter closes with No Country for Old Men to show "the transnational legacy of Spanish and Anglo-American racial graphing of the Southwest" (69). Chapter 3 examines the "nationalist transformations of the geography of the [End Page 111] 'frontier'" (109) by discussing the ideas of the "Indio Bárbaro" employed to differentiate Apaches and Comanches who refused to embrace "mestizaje" (racial mixing) or were pushed to reservations in the newly annexed territories of the U.S. Southwest. The chapter compares and contrasts the Treaty of Guadalupe de Hidalgo and nineteenth-century Mexican scalping laws with Américo Paredes's novel George Washington Gomez. Chapter 4 examines the early civil rights campaigns of Mexican and Mexican Americans in the Southwest to end segregation in schools between 1896 and 1954. Saldaña-Portillo analyzes, among other legal cases, Mendez v. Westminster, United States v. Lucero, and Hernandez v. Texas and compares them to personal letters and public speeches of the Mexican American activists who participated in debates about U.S. naturalization. Chapter 5 unravels the "problematic racial coordinates of Aztlan" (197) through an analysis of the works of the Chicano activist, journalist and lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta. Saldaña-Portillo is interested in showing how Chicanas/os articulate the idea of Aztlan through a melancholic and frenzied representation that incorporates a "lost Indigeneity" while at the same time justifies its Chicana/o presence in Indigenous territories. The first section of the chapter focuses on Acosta's journalism and legal trials, and the second on The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo.

Indian Given closes with "The Afterlives of the Indio Bárbaro," which invokes this racial identity construction to signal its contemporary relevance in Mexico and the United...

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