Return To Aztlan

This expanded new edition of the classic 1989 collection of essays about Aztlán weighs its value.

Long before the Spanish colonizers established it in 1598, the “Kingdom of Nuevo México” had existed as an imaginary world—and not the one based on European medieval legend so often said to have driven the Spaniards’ ambitions in the New World. What the conquistadors sought in the 1500s, it seems, was what the native Mesoamerican Indians who took part in north-going conquest expeditions also sought: a return to the Aztecs’ mythic land of origin, Aztlan. Employing long-overlooked historical and anthropological evidence, Danna A. Levin Rojo reveals how ideas these natives held about their own past helped determine where Spanish explorers would go and what they would conquer in the northwest frontier of New Spain—present-day New Mexico and Arizona. Return to Aztlan thus remaps an extraordinary century during which, for the first time, Western minds were seduced by Native American historical memories. Levin Rojo recounts a transformation—of an abstract geographic space, the imaginary world of Aztlan, into a concrete sociopolitical place. Drawing on a wide variety of early maps, colonial chronicles, soldier reports, letters, and native codices, she charts the gradual redefinition of native and Spanish cultural identity—and shows that the Spanish saw in Nahua, or Aztec, civilization an equivalence to their own. A deviation in European colonial naming practices provides the first clue that a transformation of Aztlan from imaginary to concrete world was taking place: Nuevo México is the only place-name from the early colonial period in which Europeans combined the adjective “new” with an American Indian name. With this toponym, Spaniards referenced both Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the indigenous metropolis whose destruction made possible the birth of New Spain itself, and Aztlan, the ancient Mexicans’ place of origin. Levin Rojo collects additional clues as she systematically documents why and how Spaniards would take up native origin stories and make a return to Aztlan their own goal—and in doing so, overturns the traditional understanding of Nuevo México as a concept and as a territory. A book in the Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

"Return to Aztlan" analyzes the social process of international migration through an intensive study of four carefully chosen Mexican communities. The book combines historical, anthropological, and survey data to construct a vivid and comprehensive picture of the social dynamics of contemporary Mexican migration to the United States.

"Creating Aztlâan interrogates the important role of Aztlâan in Chicano and Indigenous art and culture. Using the idea that lowriding is an Indigenous way of being, author Dylan A. T. Miner (Mâetis) discusses the multiple roles that Aztlâan has played atvarious moments in time, engaging pre-colonial indigeneities, alongside colonial, modern, and contemporary Xicano responses to colonization"--

In The Forgotten Diaspora Travis Jeffres explores how Native Mexicans involved in the conquest of the Greater Southwest pursued hidden agendas, deploying a covert agency that enabled them to reconstruct Indigenous communities and retain key components of their identities even as they were technically allied with and subordinate to Spaniards. Resisting, modifying, and even flatly ignoring Spanish directives, Indigenous Mexicans in diaspora co-created the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and laid enduring claims to the region. Jeffres contends that tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of central Mexican Natives were indispensable to Spanish colonial expansion in the Greater Southwest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These vital allies populated frontier settlements, assisted in converting local Indians to Christianity, and provided essential labor in the mining industry that drove frontier expansion and catapulted Spain to global hegemony. However, Nahuatl records reveal that Indigenous migrants were no mere auxiliaries to European colonial causes; they also subverted imperial aims and pursued their own agendas, wresting lands, privileges, and even rights to self-rule from the Spanish Crown. Via Nahuatl-language “hidden transcripts” of Native allies’ motivations and agendas, The Forgotten Diaspora reimagines this critical yet neglected component of the hemispheric colonial-era scattering of the Americas’ Indigenous peoples.

"The first decades of the twentieth century were a crucial era for the development of Mexican circular family migration, a process shaped by family and community networks as much as it was fashioned by labor markets and economic conditions. Even the Women are Leaving explores the bidirectional migration across the U.S.-Mexico border from 1890 to 1965 and centers the experiences of Mexican women and families. Highlighting migrant voices and testimonies, author Larisa L. Veloz depicts the long history of family and female migration across the border and elucidates the personal experiences of early twentieth century border-crossings, family separations, and reunifications. The book offers a fresh analysis of the ways that female migrants navigated evolving immigration restrictions and constructed binational lives through the eras of the Mexican Revolution, the Great Depression, and the Bracero Program"--

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) was amanifestation of widespread public concern over the volume of undocumentedimmigration into the United States. The principal innovationof this legislation-the provision to impose penalties on employers whoknowingly hire undocumented immigrants-was a response to thisconcern.This effort at restriction was tempered in IRCA by other provisionspermitting the legalization of two types of undocumented immigrantsthosewho had resided in the United States since January 1, 1982; andwhat were called special agricultural workers (SAWs), persons who hadworked in perishable crop agriculture for at least 90 days during specifiedperiods from 1983 to 1986. Approximately 3.1 million persons soughtlegalization (what is popularly referred to as amnesty) under these twoprovisions. The breakdown was roughly 1.8 million under the regularprogram and 1.3 million as SAWs. Mexicans made up 75 percent of thecombined legalization requests.