Colores Mexicanos: Racial Alterity and the Right to the Mexican City

While the population of indigenous peoples living in Mexico's cities has steadily increased over the past four decades, both public policy and popular representations have failed to recognize this geographic heterogeneity. As a result, indigenous peoples are largely expected to reside in romanticized rural landscapes considered anathema to a modern Mexico. The present work examines the discursive and material legacy of the racial imaginary in Mexico with a specific focus on popular and governmental representations of the Wixárika (Huichol) indigenous peoples. I subsequently explore how Wixárika university students and professionals living in the western cities of Tepic and Guadalajara experience and negotiate these racial and spatial representations. I draw on over five years of collaborative ethnographic research with Wixárika students, professionals, and their respective organizations. During the 2011-2012 Academic Year, I received the Bancroft Library Award which allowed me to extensively explore documents, photographs, maps and manuscripts pertaining to the historical development of the cities of Tepic and Guadalajara. This work engages with the extensive scholarship on indigenismo and state representations and policies geared toward indigenous peoples in Latin America. As a geographer, I take this analysis a step further by arguing that racialized landscapes are part and parcel of Mexico's historical understanding of indigenous peoples and carry significant implications for the livelihoods of native peoples and for interracial relations more generally. Most significantly, this research takes a close look at the individual and organizational experiences of young indigenous professionals in Mexico's cities and offers new insight for understanding how race and place inform contemporary struggles over citizenship and the right to the city. Portions of my research have been published in cross-disciplinary peer-reviewed journals and in a chapter of an edited anthology, Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach (University of Arizona Press, 2012). My dissertation is divided into three parts in order to examine the trajectory of Mexico's racial discourses and practices as they become manifest and contested within the urban landscape. The first part examines the origins of perceptions regarding indigenous peoples' spatial and temporal belonging within the Mexican nation-state. From the colonial period onward, I examine the contradictory indigenist discourses that celebrate the country's indigenous heritage while foreclosing living aboriginal peoples from being part of a modern Mexico. The second part analyzes the political, economic and cultural development of Guadalajara and Tepic as two western cities that currently hold an important Wixárika population. By examining the historical development of these two cities, I draw crucial analytical links for understanding the ways in which each city has crafted a particular ethnic identity. While Guadalajara has long prided itself as a city with a rich European heritage, Tepic strongly identifies with a folkloric indigenous past and present. As such, both cities offer distinct forms of inclusion and exclusion. This analysis is then used as a platform for understanding the social, political and economic conditions that Wixárika residents currently face in each place. The third and final part directly draws on my ethnographic research with Wixárika university students, professionals, and their respective organizations. This last segment demonstrates the implications of enduring racial stereotypes, but most importantly illustrates how contemporary indigenous peoples are making claims to a more heterogeneous citizenship that crosses deep-rooted spatial boundaries. I argue that indigenous claims to the city carry fundamental material implications for the livelihoods of urban indigenous residents who often are deemed to be transient and "out of place." Ultimately, I argue for the centrality of place as a site of articulation in shaping distinct forms of social belonging and political activism in contemporary Mexico