The Cracking of Concrete Jungles: Practicing Indigenous Kinship in Diaspora

Abstract

In this thesis, I ask what does it mean to be an Indigenous person, but not to these lands? How might a Native Lenca community displaced from Honduras make intentional kinship with the Paayme Paxaayt (West River in Tongva language) also known as the Los Angeles River? While popular understandings of immigration center on labor and Latinidades, many immigrants are Indigenous and bring with them different languages and relationships to land (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2014; Stephen, 2007). Understanding mobility as a strategy for survival is tied to Indigenous ontologies of kinships and lessons learned from nonhuman worlds like lands and rivers. This relational understanding recenters land as pedagogy where nonhuman beings like rivers serve as teachers by working with Indigenous peoples against the settler-state. Indigenous peoples in diaspora then employ migration as a form of mobility that highlights sovereignty over their own bodies by refusing settler rule through the crossing of multitudes of borders. Urban geographies like Los Angeles serve as settler borders by uplifting white supremacy through geographical imaginaries and discourses that deny Indigenous presence within urban cities undermining Indigenous futurities through the encasing of land within concrete.Through migration, Los Angeles has become a hub for Indigenous peoples in diaspora who challenge settler imaginaries by focusing on their rights to self-determination and transforming urban spaces through intentional nonhuman kinships. They intentionally form new commitments to new lands by engaging in new alliances with other Indigenous communities and nonhuman worlds. Through storytelling I’ll explain how Indigenous peoples in diaspora from Abia Yala carry land within themselves, transforming public spaces, front/backyards, balconies, and alleys into community spaces of care that chip away and crack the concrete bringing forth Indigenous existence and futurity within urban spaces through kinships.