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conclusion Borders Old and New Vivian Juan-Saunders and Herminia Frías, chairwomen of the Tohono O’odham and Yaqui nations in Arizona, traveled to Sarmiento, Mexico, in November 2004 to participate in the Ninth Annual Assembly of Indigenous Women. There they met up with O’odham and Yaquis from Mexico, along with other indigenous peoples from Arizona, California, Sonora, and Sinaloa, to discuss their future. The meeting was remarkable in a number of ways. First, that both leaders were there to represent their respective indigenous nations reveals how much their political cultures had changed since the nineteenth century, when individual villages were considered autonomous and the idea of a national or tribal leadership elected by a majority was unheard of. Second, the election of women by the Yaqui and Tohono O’odham nations to the highest positions of political power revealed a dramatic cultural shift from a time when all-male village councils made decisions by consensus. Finally, the meetings symbolized an extension of a pan-Indian notion of sovereignty that was no longer confined within the borders of the United States.1 On the other hand, one might see the meeting as a sign of the loss of tradition and cultural integrity, and of unresolved contradictions. The very idea that Juan-Saunders and Frías could claim to speak for the O’odham and Yaqui nations was evidence of a decline in village autonomy. This concept of O’odham and Yaqui nationhood was one among many ways in which indigenous culture in Arizona’s borderlands had changed. Thousands of Yaquis and Tohono O’odham no longer spoke their native languages . The adoption of majoritarian democracy countered a history of government by consensus. The creation of the Yaqui and Tohono O’odham 242 border citizens nations has appeared to confirm rather than challenge the idea that the world is organized into discrete ethnic groups or nations with impermeable boundaries. Indeed, as old borders eroded, new ones emerged. This was true not just metaphorically but also in very concrete terms. Chairwoman JuanSaunders proclaimed that “it is critical that all recognized members of the Tohono O’odham Nation maintain the right to cross the border to see families and friends, to receive services and to participate in religious ceremonies and other events.” At the same time, she initially condoned the idea construction of a fence through traditional O’odham lands along the Sonora border in order to stop, in her words, the “approximately fifteen hundred undocumented immigrants and smugglers [who] cross through the Tohono O’odham Nation daily.”2 The Tohono O’odham thus simultaneously raised the radical prospect of delegitimizing the international border for themselves while reinforcing it for others. Some Yaquis and O’odham worked through the Indigenous Alliance Without Borders (led by Jose Matus , a Yaqui Indian) and the O’odham Voice Against the Wall to challenge the effort.3 They eventually convinced her to change her position. The idea that there are inalienable differences and boundaries between ethnic groups and nations remains largely intact. Yet, this is not simply the natural order of things; it is the product of history. Ever since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase, government officials and economic elites had worked to classify and rank Arizona’s regional population according to its economic value and suitability for American citizenship . In the borderlands, race served to reconcile contradictions between a high demand for labor, regardless of ethnicity or national origin, and cultural demands to foster national homogeneity. Racial classification worked to promote, if not a monocultural nation, at least the homogeneity of the citizenry by withholding full citizenship rights from those deemed worthy to work but unworthy to be full members of the U.S. body politic. Over the course of one hundred years, restrictions on voting, segregation statutes, miscegenation laws, federal Indian policies, and anti-immigration measures ranked and classified the regional population into specific, ethnoracial categories. But in the fluid space of the borderlands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, identification as Indian or Mexican had often occurred on a continuum rather than in binary terms. This was also true for Anglos or whites, since Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, and Poles, among others, had not been fully accepted as white at the turn of the century . Over time, most of these groups managed to secure social acceptance into the circle of whiteness. By midcentury, Mexican, Anglo, or Indian [18.222.163.31] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 14:16...

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