Border Identity and the Rural Midwest: An Indigenous Mexican Transborder Migrant Community Between San Antón, Oaxaca and Fackler, Indiana
Responding to systemic pressures and state policies impacting Mexican indigenous populations, the Midwest is experiencing increasing indigenous settlement and the subsequent organization of indigenous migrant communities. This research undertakes an exploration of community identity in the context of a Mixtec community organization between the town of San Antón, located in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, México, and Fackler, Indiana. Previous ethnographies have presented indigenous migration as promoting both cohesion and division regarding ethnicity and community identity. Through field notes, demographic and conceptual analysis, this research explores indigenous organization of a migrant community organization as existing within a border space. A border perspective serves as the analytical foundation and is understood as the dialectical intersection of two cultural spaces, both geographically and symbolically. In the case of Mixtec migration, the border space is characterized by a discourse between migration as causing cohesion of a community ethnic identity and as the source of social division caused by a divided population. Indigenous migrant community organization seen as a border space transcends the contradictory discourses in order to form a transborder ethnic identity and cultural citizenship, considered the synthesis of ethnicity and political action. Considering the impact that transnational processes have on indigenous communities, border theory presents a solution to the competing discourses of cohesion and division. With increased permanent settlement dispersed throughout the United States, indigenous migration approached through a border perspective serves as a useful analytical framework for future research.