Immigration and Indigenization in the Mexican Diaspora in the Southwestern United States

Abstract

Many observers of globalization have commented on the impact that global processes appear to be having on group identities. The changing loci of capital accumulation and power, the greater global flows of goods, labor, culture, and information, and the new global political and rhetorical conventions accompanying these changes, are having significant repercussions for forms of social organization, including identity. This should come as no surprise, given our current understanding of ethnic, national, and other identities as products of social relationships and not s imply of cultural inheritance. The anthropologist Jonathan Friedman, one observer of these matters, has explained how globalization should be expected to affect identity (Friedman 1999a, 1999b, 2000). Friedman has focused on two primary tendencies relating to identity: a hybridization and cosmopoli-tanization of identity among class and cultural elites, and an indigenization of identity among lower and middle classes. I have engaged briefly with Friedman’s ideas on the indigenization of identity (Haley and Wilcoxon 2005) to support his contention that people not considered indigenous by standard definitions are now asserting indigenous identities, and to suggest that their reason for doing so may not be to seek territory and autonomy from a weakened state, as Friedman proposes. Here I wish to expand my engagement with Friedman’s ideas on the indigenization of identity by once again taking a look at the Mexican diaspora in the southwestern United States, but widening the discussion this time to address three distinct waves of migration rather than just one.