Divided Peoples: Policy, Activism, and Indigenous Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Border

By Christina Leza
The University of Arizona Press (2019)
223 pages

Review by Edison Cassadore

Christina Leza’s Divided Peoples offers a compelling examination of the fraught U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Given recent times and contentious debates about immigration, her thorough examination is much needed and timely, especially from Indigenous perspectives.

As Leza’s subtitle asserts, her discussion relates to policy, activism, and Indigenous identities by focusing primarily on “The Binational Yoeme (Yaqui) Nation” and the Tohono O’odham Nation. However, Leza does this within the broader context of international relations and Indigenous peoples all along the U.S.- Mexico borderlands. Indeed, this contextualizing is illuminating and greatly enriches her engaging analysis. Strong scholarship always contextualizes, and she does this admirably.

Given Leza’s linguistics background, her preface’s title as “The `Native’ Anthropologist” certainly relays an awareness of how touchy this academic discipline is in Indian Country. Truly, however, Leza is no disembodied scholar objectifying Indigenous subjects. She maintains rigorous scholarship by discussing ethnographic approaches to Indigenous activism in the borderlands, data collection, and legal frameworks that have implications for the rights of Indigenous peoples. “This study offers a regionally focused examination of processes of racialization and settler colonialism as they impact Indigenous peoples,” she asserts. “While I do not put forth a hard argument regarding the Indigenous-settler opposition, I hope that this work will contribute to necessary discussions on the dialectical structure of Indigenous-settler relationships.”

Her insightful inclusion of the “Peoplehood Matrix,” as developed by Holm, Pearson, and Chavis, with its focus on identity and interrelationship with land, ceremony, language, and history, adds to that discussion as it speaks to her own hybridity vis-à-vis Yoeme in Mexico and in the United States. Understanding her own experiences compels Leza to wonder why Indigenous peoples “here” in the U.S. are sometimes so averse to fellow Indigenous peoples “there” in Mexico. Leza’s keen observation echoes of bell hooks’ assertion that divisiveness supports supremacist thinking and its resulting dehumanization, othering, and countering of complex synthesis. The book, generally, ponders the larger implications of how all of us within the borderlands can sometimes support and reinforce divisions and, as a result, internalize, colonial oppression.

Leza steadfastly remains embodied in her analyses of the Indigenous borderlands because of her compassion for her family, the Yoeme people, and josé Matus, who was an important Yoeme ceremonial leader, as she asserts poignantly, “Over time, I came to know Matus as an activist, community advocate, mentor, and friend as well as a trusted research consultant.” Again, Leza maintains intellectual rigor, but refrains from an overly detached, disembodied analysis of the real harm caused by being “divided peoples.”

For Leza, sustaining synthetic relationships in her scholarship becomes a form of agency and, thus, a way of countering oppression within divisive, governmental structures and policies in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Edison Cassadore, PhD (San Carlos Apache) is faculty at Tohono O’odham Community College and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Scholar.