DAINA SANCHEZ, 2024, The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border: Stanford University Press, 202pp., ISBN 9781503641389

Key Words: Auditory Epistemology, Diaspora, Belonging, Resistance, Indigenous Ontologies.

How does one belong to a community in an epoch of multiple colonialities and highly militarized borders, where bodies are highly surveilled, analyzed, and hegemonized? In The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border (2024), Dr. Daina Sanchez offers a deeply personal monograph demonstrating how the descendants of Zapotec migrants from San Andrés Solaga, Oaxaca, transcend borders, lineages, and kinship networks to maintain their Indigenous identity, community practices, and relational sense of belonging, while navigating life in diaspora. As the first book-length ethnographic text written by a Native woman from the community being studied (5), Sanchez explores how Indigenous epistemologies, and communal values, such as comunalidad and practices of convivencia are sustained and fortified across borders and multiple settler-states. By emphasizing the voices and lived experiences of Indigenous migrants, who through creative forms of multisensorial resistance refuse to be erased or assimilated by national and colonial structures, this work makes an important contribution to Indigenous studies, migration scholarship, and identity politics.

Chapter one, “The Cargo System and Indigenous Belonging,” challenges conventional anthropological interpretations of the cargo system in Mesoamerica by reframing it not as a punitive or hierarchical system but one centered on membership and belonging. Sanchez offers the Indigenous concept of comunalidad to describe this dynamic, emphasizing an Indigenous way of knowing and being through which individuals demonstrate belonging and are inducted into el goce comunal, the feeling of communal joy through collective contribution and participation (4). This intervention is significant because it centers Indigenous cosmologies in defining the function and importance of communal systems, resisting Eurocentric frameworks that have historically pathologized Indigenous governance structures. Patron Saint Celebrations, or fiestas, exemplify this paradigm shift as Solagueños transform Spanish colonization and missionization histories into dynamic, embodied spaces where they affirm collective identity and community belonging, transcending geographic and generational barriers. Specifically, diasporic Solagueños transcend the highly militarized U.S.-Mexico border by capitalizing on modern technology and contributing monetarily as mayordomías (fiesta sponsors), granting them the opportunity to participate in el goce comunal, affirming their community connection. In doing so, Solagueños reject settler-state notions of Indigeneity that seek to invalidate identity claims for Indigenous peoples outside their ancestral homelands (42), demonstrating how identity and belonging are affirmed through communal participation.

In chapter 2, “Home of the Oaxacans,” Sanchez examines how hybrid hegemonies, formed by the intersecting colonial structures of the U.S. and Mexico, work to exclude diasporic Solagueños through practices like enclavisation. These structures confine Indigenous migrants to marginalized social and geographic enclaves, marked by limited access to resources and heightened exposure to structural violence, including the prevalence of gangs, which further complicates notions of collective belonging and safety. This analysis is vital as it challenges ideas that promote Los Angeles as a multicultural mecca, and exposes how deeply