Postcolonial Indigenous Performances (Coyote Musings on Genízaros, Hybridity, Education, and Slavery)

The essays in this volume contain a symphony of carefully orchestrated narratives that engage a wide-ranging assemblage of topics including immigration, indigenous identity, Genízaros, hybridity, education, religious syncretism, and United States and Spanish imperialism. Utilizing excavated memory, archival history, and employing the work of performance and postcolonial theorists, the author examines Native American slavery and captivity in the Spanish Colonial Southwest, with emphasis on Coyotes (indigenous mixed-bloods) of Pueblo/Spanish ancestry as well as descendants of Indigenous servants. The essays engage the cultural politics of education within the context of hybrid religious practices such as pilgrimages to el Cerro de Tepeyac, the site of veneration of the pre-Columbian Goddess Tonanztin and her contemporary, la Señora de Guadalupe; el Santuario de Chimayo, the pre-Hispanic Tewa religious site that continues to serve as the destination for pilgrims, albeit now draped in Catholic ritual; and the Comanche dance ceremony of the Saracino sisters of Atrisco. The essays emerge in part from the author’s childhood in the Barelas and Atrisco neighborhoods of Albuquerque, two of several mixed-blood indigenous communities of New Mexico plagued by a devastating heroin epidemic in the 1950s and 60s.