With a paper titled “Where is the ‘Indian’ in Aztlán?” Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo opens the panel to reflect on how the presence of hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples who since 1994 have migrated from Latin America (mostly from Mexico and Mesoamerica) to the US is challenging definitions indigeneity in the US and the official categories of recognition mobilized here. Zapotec is second only to Navajo as the most-spoken indigenous language in the United States, while Mixtec is taught as part of the bilingual education curriculum in New York City. Saldaña-Portillo thus explores how Latin American indigenous people in US cities and towns not only bring into sharp relief different hemispheric modes of defining indigenous identity, but also challenge the ongoing biopolitical function of mestizaje and indigenismo in Mexico and other places of Latin America. Ultimately, her paper ponders how the mass migration of indigenous peoples that we are witnessing requires a hemispheric rethinking of indigeneity? Of mestizaje? Of who gets to sing the nation-state now, and in what languages?

Similarly, in her presentation “Networks for Migrants with Disabilities: the Creation of a Moral Community”, Claudia Morales explores how the rhetoric of ableism has defined general assumptions about the experience of migration. Foregrounding the fact that thousands of Central American migrants are routinely injured as they make their way through Mexico into the US on the infamous train “La Bestia”, sometimes suffering severe amputations, Morales challenges the tropes that have constituted a normative language and universal idea about the able-bodied migrant. Her paper instead highlights migrants’ experiences of injury, convalescence and recovery as they inhabit non-state networks of care in places far from home were alternate multi-lingual communities and alliances are built.

Magalí Rabasa closes the panel with a paper titled “Feminist Economies of Knowledge in the Americas”. Her presentation explores how the feminist networks of knowledge production and reception sprouting from the recent wave of feminist internationalism that has been particularly vibrant in the Americas challenge the languages and practices of production and exchange sustaining our capitalist system. Rabasa pays attention to how these feminist economies of knowledge are grounded in ethics of collaboration, open inquiry, non-hierarchical organization, solidarity, and mutual aid. She provides a transnational examination of the circulation of alternative media in the Americas and maps the movement of a set of cultural objects that have been produced by recent feminist actors in different parts of Latin America and have been significantly renewed or reimagined by feminist actors in Mexico. In doing so, she examines the conceptual, material, and contextual practices of translation that enable the movement of these cultural objects, as well as their role as agents in the formation and expansion of hemispheric feminist networks.