The View from Here: An Introduction to Nuevomexicano and Chicanx Theory for Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Chicanx Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper is an introduction to an organized session on Chicanx Archaeology. It argues for the ethical and intellectual imperative of drawing Chicanx Studies scholarship in to archaeological method and theory. Archaeological frameworks for studying culture contact, ethnogenesis, and identity have tended to bypass theory that falls under the umbrella of Chicanx Studies. While archaeology has rightfully moved to incorporate Native Studies and Indigenous ontologies into our method and theory, other traditions and scholarship have been neglected. In approaching Hispanic/ized communities, archaeologists have focused on Spanish colonialism, emphasizing the performance and transmission of a "Spanish" identity in new contexts. This approach has the effect of devaluing or ignoring Hispanic heritage that can only be tangentially related to peninsular Spain. This, in turn, reifies a long-standing stereotype that portrays Hispanic-descent communities in the U.S. as both foreign and lacking a distinct cultural heritage. Thus, archaeologists have been complicit in the writing of historical narratives that have dismissed, devalued, or excluded Chicanx communities. This paper, based on five seasons of fieldwork in the southern Sangre de Cristo Mountains, outlines relevant frameworks from Chicanx Studies for archaeological research, drawing especially on nuevomexicano thought from the northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Chicanx Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24397