front cover of The Motions Beneath
The Motions Beneath
Indigenous Migrants on the Urban Frontier of New Spain
Laurent Corbeil
University of Arizona Press, 2018
As Mexico entered the last decade of the sixteenth century, immigration became an important phenomenon in the mining town of San Luis Potosí. New silver mines sparked the need for labor in a region previously lacking a settled population. Drawn by new jobs, thousands of men, women, and children poured into the valley between 1591 and 1630, coming from more than 130 communities across northern Mesoamerica.

The Motions Beneath is a social history of the encounter of these thousands of indigenous peoples representing ten linguistic groups. Using baptism and marriage records, Laurent Corbeil creates a demographic image of the town’s population. He studies two generations of highly mobile individuals, revealing their agency and subjectivity when facing colonial structures of exploitation on a daily basis.

Corbeil’s study depicts the variety of paths on which indigenous peoples migrated north to build this diverse urban society. Breaking new ground by bridging stories of migration, labor relations, sexuality, legal culture, and identity construction, Corbeil challenges the assumption that urban indigenous communities were organized along ethnic lines. He posits instead that indigenous peoples developed extensive networks and organized themselves according to labor, trade, and social connections.
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front cover of Sanctuary
Sanctuary
Exclusion, Violence, and Indigenous Migrants in the East Bay
Cruz Medina
The Ohio State University Press, 2024
In Sanctuary, Cruz Medina presents a powerful counterstory to dominant narratives surrounding Latin American and Global South im/migration by bringing attention to the displacement of Indigenous Guatemalan Maya people who seek refuge in the United States. These migrants have exchanged gang and narcotrafficker violence for the dehumanizing and exclusionary rhetoric of US political leaders, militarized immigration enforcement, false promises of empowerment through literacy, and further displacement from gentrification. Medina combines decolonial critical race theory with autoethnography to examine white supremacist policies that impact US and transnational Indigenous populations who have been displaced by neocolonial projects of capitalism. 

Taking a Northern California community of migrants from Guatemala as a case study, Medina demonstrates the ways in which immigration policy and educational barriers exclude Indigenous migrant populations. He follows the community at the “Sanctuary”—a Spanish-speaking church in the East Bay Area that serves as a place of worship, English language instruction, and refuge for migrants. Medina assembles participant observations, interviews, surveys, and other data to provide points of entry into intersecting issues of immigration, violence, language, and property and to untangle aspects of citizenship, exclusion, and assumptions about literacy.
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