Indigenous people on the move; still Indigenous: Luis Sánchez-López, ‘Oaxacan Studies: Accompanying Indigenous Oaxacans in Oaxacalifornia’, Latino Studies, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous people on the move; still Indigenous: Luis Sánchez-López, ‘Oaxacan Studies: Accompanying Indigenous Oaxacans in Oaxacalifornia’, Latino Studies, 2026

04Sep26

Excerpt: A new interdisciplinary field, which I am calling “Oaxacan studies,” has emerged and is offering important conceptual tools for thinking about Latinidad in local, transborder, and hemispheric contexts. While most of the Anglophone scholarship on Oaxaca has been produced by historians and anthropologists who are not native to the pueblos they write about, a generation of scholars that is Indigenous to Oaxaca’s pueblos is now writing about Oaxaca from the vantage point of migrants and children of migrants who were forced to grow up in diaspora. While these scholars have been trained in various disciplines, their work builds on the community-engaged scholarship produced by scholars such as Michael Kearney, one of the leading anthropologists in this field, who is credited with coining the term “Oaxacalifornia” (Kearney, 1995), the transborder political, cultural, and economic space where Indigenous Oaxacans live. When Kearney passed away in 2009, I was a new member of the Indigenous Binational Front (FIOB), a primarily Oaxacan transborder organization, and was asked to take three scholars (Devra Weber, Lynn Stephen, and Laura Velasco) from Los Angeles to Kearney’s house in Riverside County. Once there, we joined his family, FIOB activists, friends, and colleagues to mourn his passing. Those attending recounted how they had met him, the things he had done for Oaxacan migrants, and then we all sang “Canción Mixteca,” a song that expresses the deep sadness and longing of being away from one’s homeland. At the time, I was unaware of Kearney’s contributions to the field of anthropology and the study of transnationalism, but the regard that the Oaxacan paisanos had for him and the stories they shared of when he helped them in their organizing efforts taught me about the importance of establishing long and committed relationships with the community. In a recent publication, Leisy Ábrego (2024) noted that scholars who center the experiences and well-being of the people they conduct research with “aim to be in accompaniment,” meaning that there is an ethical and political responsibility to those people who serve as research subjects. While each individual Oaxacan scholar has their own relationship with their pueblo of origin and the communities they conduct research with, at the core of Oaxacan studies is this ethic of accompaniment that is anchored in the various social organizations created by the Indigenous Oaxacan community: hometown associations, cultural organizations, religious organizations, student organizations, autonomous political organizations, and nonprofit organizations. Building on Kearney’s legacy, this new generation of Oaxacan scholars is shaping the future of Latinx studies by offering not only new conceptual tools for thinking about Indigeneity within a larger conversation about Latinx heterogeneity but also providing a model of accompaniment that is responsive to the individuals they conduct research with, their pueblos, and their descendants, both here and there.

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