Critical Latinx Indigeneities: A Paradigm Drift

This essay analyzes the multilayered causes for the recent migration from Honduras of Garífuna mothers and their children in search of political asylum in the United States, including tourist development, dispossession, and drug-related violence. Their migration patterns challenge the presumptions and boundaries of three booming research areas in ethnic studies: prison studies, settler colonial studies, and migration studies. Garífuna mothers and children are members of an internationally recognized group of Afro-indigenous peoples, and their detention in the US prison system challenges the identitarian boundaries of each of these research fields in productive ways that help us, as scholars and activists, analyze and confront the multilayered and devastating violence in Central America and expand the basis for the claims for asylum by these most recent immigrants arriving in the United States. Rather than offer yet another new area of study, this essay seeks to integrate ethnic studies in necessary ways.