Heyman Center Board Room
Meeting 3
Jorge Alejandro Rodriguez Solorzano, Anthropology, “No nos Doblamos”: Militancy,
Indigeneity, and Gender in an Ayuuk Household in a San Martín Mexicapam, Oaxaca.”
Abstract: This chapter focuses on my friend Eugenia Pizarro, a sixty-nine-year-old Ayuuk woman. It
takes her life history as a prism to understand how one Indigenous family moved between spaces of
party politics, autonomist Indigenous organizing, and teacher union struggles in Oaxaca City and the
ancestral Ayuuk territory. Between the late 1980s through 2006, Eugenia was a political organizer
with the populist-leftist party Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), the party that launched
Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s political career. She did this while participating in anti-statist
organizing with the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN), urban movements of
Indigenous revindication (Union de mujeres indígenas contra la crisis), as well as cultural and
linguistic revitalization projects (Servicios del Pueblo Mixe and the Colegio Mixe). This chapter
draws on oral history, linguistic and spatial analysis. Oral history allows me to describe the
constraints and possibilities that electoral party politics placed on Indigenous political activities in
the decades preceding and following Mexico’s democratic transition. Despite these constraints, I
argue, Indigenous Oaxacans instrumentalized the material, political and social capital with which
leftist-populist political parties furnished them to advance distinctly Indigenous agendas. I argue that
Eugenia’s political activities took place in a situation of contested recognition, namely, an urban,
socioeconomically marginalized context where the state did not recognize the existence of
Indigenous Oaxacans for decades. As such, I turn to an examination of Eugenia’s home and
neighborhood to analyze the spatial constructions of Indigenous militancy and nationhood that
emerged here, arguing they enacted a form of "nested sovereignty" (Simpson 2014).
Arnau Sala Sallent, Latin American and Iberian Cultures, “A Nation at the Strait: The
Colonial War of the Avant-Garde”
Abstract: In my second chapter, “A Nation at the Strait: The Colonial War of the Avant-Garde,”
I argue that military conscription during the Rif War (1921–1927) served as a
foundational generational and ideological event for a cohort of Spanish intellectuals born in 1899. I
contend that the experience of forced service in Morocco catalyzed a complex redefinition
of generational identity, nationalist discourse, and avant-garde aesthetics, producing a spectrum
of responses from anti-colonial solidarity to proto-fascist imperial revival. Through case studies
of Catalan, Galician, and Castilian writers I study the war’s role in fostering both a
“transcolonial” consciousness and a neo-imperialist desire. The chapter charts how peripheral
nationalists forged imaginative solidarities with the Riffian resistance, while metropolitan writers
developed an ironic vitalism and a philologically-driven imperial nostalgia that would become central
to later fascist aesthetics.
