Papers by Simón V Trujillo
Critical Ethnic Studies, 2021
Authoritarian political leaders and violent racist nationalism are a resurgent feature of the pre... more Authoritarian political leaders and violent racist nationalism are a resurgent feature of the present historical conjuncture that will not be resolved by electoral politics or bipartisanship. Responding to the urgency of the current moment, this introduction to the "Fascisms" special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies explores what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the twenty-first century authoritarian convergence by centering the material and speculative labor of antifascist, anti-imperialist, and antiracist social movements and coalitions. We emphasize fascism as a geopolitically diverse series of entanglements with (neo)liberalism, racial capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, militarism, carceralism, white supremacy, racist nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and heteropatriarchy. By emphasizing fascisms in the plural, we seek to address two problematics in particular. First, our intention is to highlight the global proliferation of fascist formations within and beyond the United States and Europe in an expanded historical context. Second, we aim to center the historical, political, and epistemological work of antifascist collective organizing undertaken by Black, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples across the planet.
Theory & Event, 2020
Jack D. Forbes was a foundational figure for Native
American and Indigenous studies in the United... more Jack D. Forbes was a foundational figure for Native
American and Indigenous studies in the United States who wrote
extensively on Indian racialization in comparative and hemispheric
frameworks. Across his writings, Forbes challenged how
projects of colonialist racial management mediated mass forms of
ignorance regarding genealogies of cross-racial contact and intimacy
among colonized peoples in the Americas. Drawing from
recent theorizations of “colonial unknowing,” this essay explores
Forbes’s intellectual production, activism, and institutional work
establishing Native American studies. From this work, I trace a
decolonial method of study that I’m calling Indigenous materialism.
I argue that Indigenous materialism comes into focus as a historiographical method that blurs the boundaries between empiricism
and speculation and challenges the intersecting discourses of
anti-Indian and anti-Black racism upon which regimes of modern
knowledge are built.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latina/o Literature, 2019
The question of indigeneity in the study of Latina/o literature and culture points toward conflic... more The question of indigeneity in the study of Latina/o literature and culture points toward conflictive histories of colonization and invigorates a set of global directions for the future of Latina/o studies. The pairing of the two terms--Latina/o and Indigeneity--appears initially counterintuitive. Conventionally understood as an ancestral relation of Latina/o communities that has been vanished or lost over the duration of the European colonization of the Americas, Indigeneity opens a set of insuperable problematics that continue to pattern and shape multiple and incommensurate iterations of Latina/o politics and culture. While "Latina/o" in some instances denotes ancestral relation with Native tribes in the Americas, for many the term has also come to signify decidedly non-indigenous mestiza/o, settler, or migrant identities, imaginaries, and belongings. The literary, cultural, and intellectual production of Latina/o Indigeneity offers a unique window into the ways in which Native politics continue to compete with, accommodate, and challenge multiple regimes of colonial occupation and periods of modern state formation. Indigeneity illuminates places of Latina/o literary and cultural production through which to engage the historic ascendance of a number of fundaments of modern life across the globe, including capitalism, nation-state sovereignty, and the transnational social structures of race, sex, citizenship, and gender.
A formative organization of the Chicana/o movement in the 1960s and 1970s, La Alianza Federal is ... more A formative organization of the Chicana/o movement in the 1960s and 1970s, La Alianza Federal is remembered for the Tierra Amarilla courthouse raid and for the political and religious activism of its president, Reies López Tijerina. Yet little attention has been given to the discourse of Indo-Hispano, La Alianza's deployment of mestizaje that predates and diverges from the dominant icons and tropes of Chicana/o mestizaje. Drawing from archived primary sources, this essay reconsiders Indo-Hispano as a discourse of mestizaje produced at the intersection of Tijerina's research in multiple archives of colonial law and the memories of ejido land grant tenure and loss provided by Alianza members. I situate Indo-Hispano discourse as a rearticulation of the mestiza/o pasts of genízaro Indians, detribalized Plains and Pueblo Indian captives who were resettled into land grants as a buffer to protect the Spanish colonial interior of New Mexico from Indian raids during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By locating Indo-Hispano discourse in a history of tribal and colonial hybridity in the Americas, I rethink La Alianza as an experiment in collective history writing and highlight the indigenous, coalitional, and feminist operations of its textual output.
Books by Simón V Trujillo
University of Arizona Press, 2020
Land Uprising reframes Indigenous land reclamation as a horizon to decolonize the settler colonia... more Land Uprising reframes Indigenous land reclamation as a horizon to decolonize the settler colonial conditions of literary, intellectual, and activist labor. Simón Ventura Trujillo argues that land provides grounding for rethinking the connection between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms.
Trujillo situates his inquiry in the cultural production of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a formative yet understudied organization of the Chicanx movement of the 1960s and 1970s. La Alianza sought to recover Mexican and Spanish land grants in New Mexico that had been dispossessed after the Mexican-American War. During graduate school, Trujillo realized that his grandparents were activists in La Alianza. Written in response to this discovery, Land Uprising bridges La Alianza’s insurgency and New Mexican land grant struggles to the writings of Leslie Marmon Silko, Ana Castillo, Simon Ortiz, and the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. In doing so, the book reveals uncanny connections between Chicanx, Latinx, Latin American, and Native American and Indigenous studies to grapple with Native land reclamation as the future horizon for Chicanx and Latinx indigeneities.
Interviews by Simón V Trujillo
Black Agenda Report, 2022
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s f... more In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Alyosha Goldstein and Simón Ventura Trujillo . Goldstein is Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Trujillo is Assistant Professor in the English Department at New York University. Their co-edited book is, For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis.
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Papers by Simón V Trujillo
American and Indigenous studies in the United States who wrote
extensively on Indian racialization in comparative and hemispheric
frameworks. Across his writings, Forbes challenged how
projects of colonialist racial management mediated mass forms of
ignorance regarding genealogies of cross-racial contact and intimacy
among colonized peoples in the Americas. Drawing from
recent theorizations of “colonial unknowing,” this essay explores
Forbes’s intellectual production, activism, and institutional work
establishing Native American studies. From this work, I trace a
decolonial method of study that I’m calling Indigenous materialism.
I argue that Indigenous materialism comes into focus as a historiographical method that blurs the boundaries between empiricism
and speculation and challenges the intersecting discourses of
anti-Indian and anti-Black racism upon which regimes of modern
knowledge are built.
Books by Simón V Trujillo
Trujillo situates his inquiry in the cultural production of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a formative yet understudied organization of the Chicanx movement of the 1960s and 1970s. La Alianza sought to recover Mexican and Spanish land grants in New Mexico that had been dispossessed after the Mexican-American War. During graduate school, Trujillo realized that his grandparents were activists in La Alianza. Written in response to this discovery, Land Uprising bridges La Alianza’s insurgency and New Mexican land grant struggles to the writings of Leslie Marmon Silko, Ana Castillo, Simon Ortiz, and the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. In doing so, the book reveals uncanny connections between Chicanx, Latinx, Latin American, and Native American and Indigenous studies to grapple with Native land reclamation as the future horizon for Chicanx and Latinx indigeneities.
Interviews by Simón V Trujillo