Rewriting the Mexican immigrant narrative: Situating indigeneity in Maya women’s stories

This article traces and maps out Indigenous narratives of migration and their relationship to dominant narratives of Latino immigration. It considers the mythic dimensions of Latino immigrant stories and how they shape and silence particular narrative threads. Through a focus on two Yucatec Maya women’s immigration stories, this study pushes beyond an ethnicity approach to immigration. The rise of Indigenous migration and the establishment of thriving transnational Indigenous communities urges us to think through “indigeneity” as a category of analysis that disrupts the homogenizing tendencies to collapse racial and ethnic experiences within Mexican migration studies. In so doing, this article makes room for overlapping histories of Indigenous peoples in Los Angeles and underscores the ties between the settler colonial and colonial logics that underpin these histories.