Are We Not Foreigners Here?

Indigenous Nationalism in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

By Jeffrey M. Schulze

270 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 6 halftones, 1 maps, notes, bibl., index

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-3711-2
    Published: April 2018
  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-3710-5
    Published: April 2018
  • E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-3712-9
    Published: April 2018
  • E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-4969-4
    Published: April 2018

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Since its inception, the U.S.-Mexico border has invited the creation of cultural, economic, and political networks that often function in defiance of surrounding nation-states. It has also produced individual and group identities that are as subversive as they are dynamic. In Are We Not Foreigners Here?, Jeffrey M. Schulze explores how the U.S.-Mexico border shaped the concepts of nationhood and survival strategies of three Indigenous tribes who live in this borderland: the Yaqui, Kickapoo, and Tohono O'odham. These tribes have historically fought against nation-state interference, employing strategies that draw on their transnational orientation to survive and thrive.

Schulze details the complexities of the tribes' claims to nationhood in the context of the border from the nineteenth century to the present. He shows that in spreading themselves across two powerful, omnipresent nation-states, these tribes managed to maintain separation from currents of federal Indian policy in both countries; at the same time, it could also leave them culturally and politically vulnerable, especially as surrounding powers stepped up their efforts to control transborder traffic. Schulze underlines these tribes' efforts to reconcile their commitment to preserving their identities, asserting their nationhood, and creating transnational links of resistance with an increasingly formidable international boundary.

About the Author

Jeffrey M. Schulze is senior lecturer in history at the University of Texas at Dallas.
For more information about Jeffrey M. Schulze, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Schulze's sophisticated and empathetic study shows that Indigenous negotiations of peoplehood are ongoing in the modern period and that Yaquis, Kickapoos, and Tohono O'odham deserve recognition as US-Mexico borderlands nations."—Choice

"Are We Not Foreigners Here? provides a history of indigenous nationalisms in the long twentieth century that encourages scholars of Mexico, the borderlands, and the southwest US to consider indigenous communities, not border debates between the US and Mexico, as the point of departure for borderlands history."—H-Net Reviews

"Focusing upon the Yaqui and Tohono O'odham of Sonora and Arizona and the Kickapoo of Texas, Oklahoma, and Coahuila, the work illuminates tribal specific strategies and more universal experiences of Indigenous communities that straddle international boundaries."—Western Historical Quarterly

"Schulze's well-crafted examples have the virtue of highlighting how the specifics of time and place—not to mention of tribal history and culture—ensured that not all indigenous peoples experienced the border in the same way."—American Historical Review

"A timely contribution to the historiography of transnational peoples straddling the U.S.-Mexico border."—Pacific Historical Review

"Schulze has masterfully woven strands of exhaustive research into a cohesive and fascinating narrative about the experiences of Native Americans who live along the borderlands."—Journal of American History