Anglo America/Latin America: An Ontological Expression of Settler Colonilialism

By: Arnold Arnez : arnold.arnez89@myhunter.cuny.edu

Acknowledgments: Professor Roland Greene, Professor Linda Alcoff, Dr. Joseph Brown, Madihah Akhter, Jamie Fine, Jennifer Raab

Map of the Western Hemisphere:
Subdivided amongst its various nation-
states. The US-Mexico border
demarcates the Anglo/Latin American
divide.
BACKGROUND
The question of the Indian’s continual
dispossession from their lands and ways of
being that marks all Anglo and Latino places is
rarely questioned. The Americs now has native
born colonialisms, no longer the work of far-
off Britain, Spain, Portugal, etc., with Natives
who have been faced genocide even after the
wars for Independence. The question of the
Americas as a colonized continent is front and
center.
GOALS
What will be investigated is whether the
models of nationhood and national boundaries
can be legtimate and anti-colonial when
confronted with the questions of Indigenous
sovereignty.
I will also see if liberal multiculturalism offers
a model to recognize the diversity of Indian
Nations, or if Decolonization remains
superfluous to the terms of the modern
American nations-states.
RESULTS
Felipe Quispe and others of the “Aymara
Intelligentsia” lay the groundwork for an
Aymara nation through a radical
reimagination of space in Bolivia, Peru, and
Chile with the idea of Qullasuyu. Quispe’s
conception of Qullasuyu is that of a
homeland for the Aymara people and not a
homogenous ethno-state like the European
national model that Mestizo-Latinos sought to
emulate. Rather, Quispe’s Qullasuyu follow a
plurinational model where state would be a
“Union of Socialist Nations of Qullasuyu”
and Indigenous nations would be recognized
within the territory (i.e. Quechua, Guarani,
Uru, etc.) and have the autonomy to conduct
under their own culture and land. This Third
Space of Sovereignty opens up new
possibilities to avenues for diverity that
acknowledge intra-national differences within
a state.
Qullasuyu is the name given to the Southern
region province of Tawantinsuyu, or the Inka
Empire, and it encompassed territory across
much ancestral land of Aymara peoples in
Bolivia, Peru, and Chile.
CONCLUSION
The current models of Anglo and Latin America hold the same problems of nationhood:
(1) a homogenous polity that cannot recognize Indigenous sovereignty and (2) a
colonial construction of borders that separates Native peoples from their communities.
This opens up a new field fo studying colonialism on a hemispheric level which can
comparatively understand models of national development and see how Indigenous
based policy can be formed in the future.
To this end, Luis Macas’s legal and cultural
understanding of multicultralism lays a way forward:
“Plurinationalism acknowledges the real, undeniable
diversity of life in nations and among peoples, as
historically defined and differentiated economic,
political, cultural, spiritual, and linguistic entities.
Plurinationalism defends fairness, justice, and both
individual and collective freedom. Through this
project we promote our principles of life: reciprocity,
solidarity, mutual respect, redistribution, the
complementarity and unity of all peoples, respect for
The Eagle and the Condor:
Mother Earth, and harmonious cohabitation with her.”
An Indigenous symbolic unity
(Macas 2008, 249-50) between Anglo North America
and Latin America

METHODOLOGY
This Project will use the theorization of
Turtle Island by the Zapotec scholar, Isabel
Altamirano-Jiménez (2008) as an authentic
Indigenous way to conceive of territorial
sovereighty within the Americas and to
question the foundations of nation-state that
live atop Native land. The name Turtle Island
recognizes the wide diversity and specificity
that is inherent across Indigenous Canada,
United States, and Mexico and their unity of
“Hawai’ans with Zapotecs … Mohawks with
Mayan Activists or Inuit with Nahautls and
Mixtecs” which is real from “neither colonial
language nor primordial attachments, but
their long survival and resistance, and their
will to continue to be who they are” (183).
I will also be using Kevin Bruyneel’s idea of
the Third Space of Sovereignty (2007) to
conceive of how national borders are porous
and even illusory concepts as many
of these borders are cut by ancestral Indigenous claims to sovereignty. Two case studies I will
be using are the examples of the Aymara, split between Bolivia, Peru, and Chile, and the
Tohono O’odham, split between the US and Mexico.
These Native continental lenses from Turtle Island crossing Anglo/Latin America redefines
the ways in which diversity is understood within and outside the normal political conceptions
of nationhood.
Map of North America, exemplifying the
diversity of Native America. Altamirano
(2009) characterizes these nations as island
yet, even so, they are divided by the border
between the US and Mexcio; Anglo and
Latin America.
FURTHER RESEARCH
My research can be expanded on by the myths and symbols used by Native peoples
There is a specific antagonism made
to treat the land with intrinsic worth. One such myth is “the Eagle and the Condor.”
between Turtle Island and non-Indian
North America. With Donald Trump’s This myth speaks of a world cataclysm, where the human race will have to choose
calls for the border wall spanning the between the destruction of humanity or salvation through unity. This salvation can
only come when the Eagle of the North and Condor of the South fly together again.
entirety of the US-Mexico border, the
The Eagle is typically depicted as representing North America (US, Canada, Mexico)
Tohono O’odham nation has made calls
and the Condor representing South America. The cataclysm that is experienced today
to resist it and seek to maintain their
is climate change, where the Capitalist model of industrial development has placed
autonomy, with the tribal vice-chairman
Indigenous nations and humanity as a whole in danger. In this case, the prophecy of
claiming the wall will be built ‘over my
the Eagle and the Condor has become pertinent to American Indian peoples all across
dead body’. The building of the wall,
the Americas.
which will cross Tohono O’odham land
in Arizona, becomes a way to consolidate
The territory of Papagueria, the traditional
the United States against the racist
boundaries of the Tohono O’odham people,
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