Understanding How Indigenous Latinx Children Express Gender Identities

Using the concept of nepantla (Anzaldúa, 2002), an in-between space where dichotomies are negated, this chapter examines how middle school students negotiated emerging indigenous identities with their Westernized identities. This chapter focuses on the children’s gendered or gender stereotypical identity expressions vis-à-vis their understandings of indigenous literacies that privilege duality, multiplicity, and balance and describes how children presented their gender identities in the texts they created. Indigenous feminist theory is used to understand how the children expressed and understood gender beyond gender binaries and focused on the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, and gender in doing so.