ABSTRACT
Mestizaje stands as a privileged category in Chicana/o critical discourse. At one level, the term simply represents the mixture of two races. In a Chicana/o context, the word evokes a bloody history of Spanish imperial reach into a world once home to millions of Indigenous inhabitants. It recalls, too, long-standing and long-reaching US governmental intervention in the politics and policies of Mexico. Mestizaje evoked in Chicana/o discourse helps name a critical awareness produced by dislocation. This awareness reveals that the categories of white, heterosexual, and male serve as realms of privilege. While indigeneity has haunted notions of Chicano mestizaje, one area of transformative critical/theoretical work it has yet to engage lies precisely in its unsettled relationship to Indigenous peoples. A potential point of contact centers on differently understood and unequally positioned histories of colonized violence. The damage yet inflicted by colonization, though hardly symmetrical, is central to both Chicana/o and Indigenous peoples and communities.
