“Our Way of Life is Our Resistance”:

Indigenous Women and Anti-Imperialist

Challenges to Militarization along the U.S.-
Mexico Border
Margo García Támez1

Historically, the area now claimed as the southern polit-

ical land border of the United States has been a place of
Indigenous territories, communities, gatherings, markets,
and cross roads for thousands of years. The Western
Hemisphere, prior to European invasion and settlement,
contained extensive trade routes linking to substantial
trade centers. In the United States-Mexico border area,
many Tribal Nations shared the territory, and co-existed
in community and as market partners. These nations in-
cluded the Acoma, Anasazi, Apache, Aztec, Pima, Ho-
hokam, Pueblo, Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, Papago, and others.
As communities and Indigenous peoples, commonalities
flourished among the peoples. Accounts have been
handed down on the relatedness between the Eagle and
Condor peoples, strengthening alliances within the hemi-
sphere. Indigenous peoples of the hemisphere share a
worldview that includes principles of environmental
stewardship, concepts of balance within an interdepen-
dent universe, kinship and clans as the basis of gover-
nance, and with European invasion and settlement,
resistance to colonization.
—Angelique EagleWoman (Wambdi A. WasteWin)2

Introduction

In this article, I will discuss the activist work of women Indigenous

to the lands within the U.S.-Mexico border region. The Indigenous
women are engaged in collective movements for self-determination,
autonomy, and to disrupt wars and the violations of human rights
against Indigenous peoples. This article presents Indigenous women’s
anti-imperialist and de-colonization activism, informed by their oral
and analytical histories. Western linear histories have distorted, dis-
figured, and effaced Indigenous peoples’ histories of resistance, and
many activists work to correct this in their daily lives. In this discus-
sion, the politics of Indigenous collective continuities and transitions

WORKS AND DAYS 57/58: Vol. 29, 2011

282 WORKS AND DAYS

overlap and intersect, which is a contemporary facet of the resiliency

of historical continuities of kinship and clan-based governance in
the region. The reality of kinship-based economic and political poli-
ties is important for re-thinking Indigenous women’s roles in the for-
mation of transnational, transborder, and hemispheric interactive
movements. It is also within the “traditional” gendered domain of
Indigenous women and their relations across families, nations, states,
and borders where Indigenous women often form oppositional iden-
tities and polities to the state.
Today, the entire U.S.-Mexico border region is considered by the
American Civil Liberties Union to be a “Constitution Free Zone.”3
Critical theorist Rosa Linda Fregoso identifies the Texas-Mexico bor-
der region as a “necropolitical order,” whereby
multiple forms of sovereignty converge and intersect . . .
as “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the
power of death” [resulting in] a heterogeneous network
of deployers of violence: the confluence of state armies,
paramilitary groups, private armies, private security firms
and armies of drug lords and ruling elite—all claiming
the right to exercise sovereignty.4

Fregoso argues that it is the “state of exception,” “produced by an au-

thoritarian government that has cultivated extreme forms of violence,
corruption and, yes, even death, in order to cripple people’s capac-
ity to resist, to smother effective counterdiscourse and overpower
the revitalized democratic opposition.” Drawing from Fregoso’s con-
tribution, this framework is key to understanding a multifaceted dis-
cussion of Indigenous women along the U.S.-Mexico border and
their families who are increasingly the targets of the state. At the
same time, this framework allows me to draw in a multiplicity of in-
stitutional actors, individuals, and organized groups who also take
up an assumed “right” to exercise sovereignty within the U.S.-Mex-
ico border region. This would include nations-within-nations, NGOs,
organization leaders and followers, as well as oligarchical figures
and groups whose power has rested intergenerationally within a priv-
ileged segment of society. The oligarchical structure—notable in pa-
triarchal and highly stratified societies—exists as a dense web of
configurations along the U.S.-Mexico border, spatialized horizon-
tally and vertically across geopolitical fields and across ideologi-
cally-based notions of blood, genealogies, military authority, and
cultural pre-eminence. The transnational social forces from below
and how they contour Indigenous women’s lives, and how women
organize to push back, are often repressed and hidden within the
laws, philosophies, and practices of the state and its multiplicity of
“states” that operate normatively within the “United States” and
“Mexico.” As U.S. corporations and military industrial complexes
increase the use of violence as acts of “sovereignty”—to seize con-
trol over lands, water, oil, ores, and biological resources in the spe-
cific region—the norming of violence saturates state as well as
individual practices of social coercion and control along the U.S.-
Mexico border.
Támez 283

Indigenous women who are from the communities physically bi-

furcated by the international border are uniquely positioned to ana-
lyze the historiographies and long-term impacts of imperialism.
Their current struggles often foreground the Indigenous struggles
which pre-date the state and nation, articulated through their oral
traditions of their foremothers and forefathers who engaged in revo-
lutionary struggles against Spain, Mexico, the Texas Republic, the
Confederate States of America, and the territorial expansion of the
United States. The intergenerational transmission of these struggles
has often occurred through oral histories as well as primary docu-
ments and archival collections maintained by specified members of
families. Indigenous women today in the U.S.-Mexico border region
increasingly direct their on-the-ground activism at the international
and transnational political arenas to be actively engaged in histori-
cal recovery, documentation, and critical interrogation of the past.
I have been situated within Indigenous and tribal communities
from birth through the present, and from my 1994-2005 involvement
as a community organizer and leader of collective actions in south-
ern Arizona with Indigenous women and families committed to
transnational community networks. These communities historically
and currently bind numerous reservations, ejidos, colonias, and bar-
rios in the Sonora-Arizona bordered Indigenous lands. Since 2006,
my focus has shifted to the Texas-Mexico border, following the Se-
cure Fence Act of 2006, and the human rights violations in my
mother’s birth community, El Calaboz Ranchería. My involvement
in my peoples’ and our allies’ anticolonial alliances in Lipan Apache
(South Texas-Tamaulipas), and O’odham and Ópata-Mayo (Sonora-
Arizona) territories is part of a significant history including Indige-
nous women’s efforts to defend situated land-based subsistence,
holdings, relationships, cultures, histories, and epistemologies in the
protection of sacred water, soils, minerals, air, and spirit.
Indigenous women have strongly influenced and shaped my think-
ing about the local and larger structures of power. Histories, con-
texts, and texts of Indigenous peoples’ anti-imperialist and
anticolonial struggles in Mexico’s northern states and the U.S. South-
west are rooted in kinship, trade, and epistemological exchange
based in 10,000 years of transcontinental Indigenous social, eco-
nomic and political mobilities and relationships. Indigenous peoples
of the U.S.-Mexico region are interrelated through the precolonial
histories they share and their centuries-long, coordinated and con-
tinuous alliance-building in anti-imperialist struggles. I cannot do
this history justice in the space of this article, but I will point to those
histories when I can. I will focus on Indigenous women’s experi-
ences, theories, and practices today as a continuation of their peo-
ples’ resistances and activism. I will provide frameworks to
illuminate how those were, and continue to be, connected to and
made invisible by imperialism, militarism, nationalism, and gender
violence. I will focus on key ways in which contemporary Indige-
nous women are educating broad audiences about the importance
of history, and the relationships between Christendom, dominion,
and Western legal thought, and the imperialist wars of destruction,
crimes against humanity, and human rights violations against In-
digenous women, families, and communities.
284 WORKS AND DAYS

Later in the article, I will provide a synopsis of the critical activism

of Teresa Leal (Ópata-Mayo) in transborder and transnational In-
digenous struggles that involve the Guatemala-Mexico, Mexico-U.S.,
and U.S.-Canada militarized zones. I will also analyze the work of
Lori Thomas-Riddle (Akimel O’odham), who is building alliances
within and across Indigenous Arizona’s rural and urban elder and
youth communities, based in her network-building with immigrant-
Indigenous youth in Palo Alto, California, who together organized
the collective community resistance to Romic Environmental Tech-
nologies, Inc., a multinational incineration corporation.5
In solidarity, Leal and Thomas-Riddle have opened up their lives
and political work to me for eight years in our ongoing collective
work. In the transborder and transnational movement, we coordi-
nated Indigenous women, families, and collectives in Arizona,
Sonora, and South Texas-Mexico. Leal and Thomas-Riddle shared
oral histories, documents, and archives of their communities, for
video recording and analysis. In the process, I learned that their an-
cestors and mine had much longer alliance histories in the struggles
against imperialism, militarism, and extermination—going back to
the 16th century. Those history lessons helped connect the larger
structures of imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist, and gendered
violence against Indigenous women and families across communi-
ties. Leal and Thomas-Riddle shed light on the invisible forces of op-
pression showing me my elders’ mobilization to re-fan the coals of
my community’s struggles against armed force and dispossession
when U.S. forces invaded our community in 2007.
The Lipan Apache Women Defense (LAW-Defense)—an organi-
zation which my mother and I co-founded in 2007—has become a
centering and grounding force through which Indigenous women
and families have organized, documented, and deployed legal, dis-
cursive, cultural, and media-based challenges to the Texas-Mexico
border wall. This article will address some of the challenges faced by
LAW-Defense in the daily struggles to sustain a federal case, and the
ongoing processes in international spheres to document and ana-
lyze the militarization and U.S. invasion of the Lower Rio Grande
Valley traditional rural communities. I will attempt to elucidate the
wars that conflate “enemy,” “terrorist,” and “foreigner” with Indige-
nous peoples, and clarify why, how, and when Indigenous women
disrupt the “citizens” and “rights” regimes, which are retrofitting the
liberal discourse of “progress” to conduct wars against them. These
wars are built upon the privileging of violent, masculine identities
and are instilling the dangerous popular concept in settler societies
that the destruction and erasure of Indigenous peoples is power. Fi-
nally, I will provide an update on recent events unfolding in El Cal-
aboz Ranchería, and the responses of LAW-Defense.

Imperialism v. Indigeneity: Dominion v. Autonomy

From Indigenous women’s perspectives, the ongoing violence of

colonialism cannot be disconnected from hierarchies and structures
laid down in the Euro-American empires, nor can Indigenous peo-
ples’ historical experiences be lumped into and aggregated among
Támez 285

“American-Indian,” “Native-American,” “mestizaje,” “pueblos indi-

genas,” “Latinos,” “Hispanics,” “Chicanos,” and “mestiza”/”border-
lands” theorizations of colonization. For the aboriginal women
human rights defenders, repression began with Spanish coloniza-
tion, mass-slaughter, sexual violence, and the radical disruption to
Indigenous institutions.
The 1520 establishment of the two separate Spanish Republic and
Indian Republic spheres of law, and the granting of Indigenous lands
to European colonizers, initiated one of the largest transfers of wealth
from the Indigenous Americas to European Christendom.6 The use
of armed force, rape, and bondage enslaved Indigenous communi-
ties.7 The encomienda system provided for large estates of land and
tributary labor to be distributed among the colonizers. The en-
comienda resulted in the legal valuation of Indigenous people as
commoditized units of energy.8 The encomienda may be the first
truly American “energy” policy, effected through the violent dispos-
session of Indigenous peoples of their rights to control their own
economies, trade systems, transportation systems, subsistence, hold-
ings, bodies, and families. The encomienda signaled the most sig-
nificant and radical restructuring of the Indigenous clan and kinship
economy models. Many Indigenous women who are aboriginal to
the U.S.-Mexico border region often express that they are living
under legal, social, economic, and political structures which were
forged in Spanish- and Euro-American developed sites of oppression
that followed the encomienda: repartimientos, establecimientos, ha-
ciendas, missions, ranchos, obrajes, presidios, colonias, garrisons,
prisons, barrios, reservations and forts.9
Traditionally, and for millennia, the key actors who guided the crit-
ical social relations of economic trade and development of markets
in the Americas were Indigenous women. They influenced and often
controlled kinship, clans, and extended identities in cultural land-
scapes. Indigenous women formed a larger structural organization
which webbed the continent and maintained and improved the
mechanisms, languages, and modes of trade, markets, exchange, and
autonomy.10 Epistemologies of Indigenous women in this particular
geopolitical region, as throughout the world, work to reinforce pro-
ductive reconnections to the historical social activism of their fore-
parents, to inform Indigenous women’s social movements and
empowerment in the present.

Contexts of Indigenous Women and Overlapping

Border-ed Domains

In their commitments to restore historical memory and to reclaim

their foremothers’ histories and strategies of survival under milita-
rization, Indigenous women activists today are recovering repressed
and invisible histories, governing practices, and political formations,
and, in the process, they are exposing the linear and conquering
methods of Euro-American settler histories. Indigenous women are
also analyzing the larger cultural landscape of border-ed lands
marked by settler histories, which developed above the sub-geo-
physical terrain of contiguous ore deposits buried in the belly of
286 WORKS AND DAYS

Earth. These run up and down the continent, followed by the rail-
road tracks above ground. The manufacturing centers are organized
near the railroads, which trace the rich deposits and the distribution
routes across the borders seamlessly. The zones of dispossession and
impoverishment are the industrialized pathways and circuits of
wage-laborers.
Indigenous women are also fundamentally challenging the Euro-
American states’ “legalized” formalizations of military and corpo-
rate transnational expansions through and across Indigenous
communities. Through exploitative and violent uses of technology,
weaponry, ground troops, and the construction of gulag-walls and
detention centers; and by warping and manipulating “democratic
law” vis-à-vis the concentration of “no-constitution zones” with and
through the coordination of politicians and the global private sol-
dier-police industry, the states have constructed wide corridors of
death zones for Indigenous peoples. This is just a facet of the con-
temporary architecture of a death-as power and extraction culture.
We must understand this in order to comprehend how laborers, cor-
porations, and states forge and shape multi-national mega-projects
and how Indigenous women understand their experiences and roles
at the intersections. Extractive mining projects; super-power haz-
ardous waste corporations that use Indigenous lands to conceal illicit
traffic and disposals; and “Mega-Projects” (security walls, virtual
walls and spy technologies, super highways); and the hyper-military
policing of Indigenous bodies are framed by the states of U.S., Mex-
ico, China, and Canada as “security” for the “prosperity” of “freedom
fighters” in the never-ending “war on terror.”
Indigenous women continually challenge the normalization of
warfare along the international border of the U.S. with Mexico and
are active in exercising the authority of families, and in securing nec-
essary food, water, medicine, and manufactured goods, which they
transport back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico on a daily
basis. While male family members are important to the process of
survival, it is the women who are the systems’ most active directors,
managers, and coordinators of resources, and their actions feed back
into their kinship circles and spheres, and this aspect of the transna-
tional work of Indigenous women is often undergrounded in impor-
tant ways. The establishment of checkpoints where there were none
before (Arizona); the reinforcement of older checkpoint infrastruc-
tures and the build-up of riot-style policing (South Texas); and the
upsurge in air-surveillance “killer” systems; and increased weapons
and boots on the ground are all forms of the states’ and the het-
eropatriarchal citizens’ collaboration to quash Indigenous civil re-
sistances and mobilizations. In this nexus, Indigenous women, their
families, and their close social networks are vital actors in human
rights defense within and across their traditional territories. These
communities form a key polity against encroachments of their sov-
ereign territories, and the infiltration of assimilative forces promoted
by the U.S. and Mexican states.11
Támez 287

Resistances in the Border-ed Lands:

Indigenous Women Human Rights Defenders

It is in the sphere of human rights defense work related to forced

relocations and dispossession, exploitation of laborers, extractive
and toxic corporate industries, destruction of food and water sys-
tems, and mega-projects and autonomy, where Indigenous women
are in most dramatic and violent conflict with the states and their
collateral use of coordinated armed force to achieve “progress.” The
current-day U.S.-Mexico border is a region encompassing ten states
from two nation-states that are currently divided by an international
economic-political border and heavily militarized zones. These
zones are especially garrisoned at the largest ports of entry, such as
Tijuana-San Diego, Nogales-Nogales, Juarez-El Paso, and Mata-
moros-Brownsville. There are many more ports which are now being
developed in response to the Security and Prosperity Partnership
(SPP).12 Likewise, there are hundreds of well-documented ancient to
contemporary traditional crossings within the territories of bi-na-
tional Indigenous communities (Arizona-Sonora, and Texas-Chi-
huahua, -Coahuila, -Nuevo Leon, -Tamaulipas, for example).
Militarily enforced ruptures to these crossings by the United States
since 9/11 have been especially fractious and violent for Indigenous
elders and their extended families on either side of the border.13
The U.S.-Mexico border militarization is a violation of numerous
Indigenous laws to sustain life, and it ruptures treaties negotiated to
preserve Indigenous forms of community-building, trade, commerce
and sovereignty. The will to empire has continuously been structured
by the settler states in explicitly racial, ethnic, religious, gendered,
and political terms. The U.S-Mexico border is a de facto 150-year-
old militarized zone against Indigenous sovereignty and collective
identity, organization and autonomy. The border is hotly contested
and is maintained vis-à-vis paramilitaries, border patrols, armies,
checkpoints, spatialities of control over Indigenous peoples, and the
constant whitestream of right-wing and liberal ideological dis-
course.14 Fernando Romero-Lar, economist and theorist, refers to the
U.S.-Mexico border’s extensively militarized-commercial-economic-trade
zone as the “hyperborder.”15 On a global scale, the U.S.-Mexico bor-
der, in comparison to the borders of North Korea-South Korea, Is-
rael-Palestine, Morocco-Spain, U.S.-Canada, South Africa, the
Golden Triangle, is unique according to Romero-Lar, because it is
the world’s longest contiguous international divide be-
tween a superpower and a developing nation. Crime,
corruption, free trade, urbanization, resource scarcity, mi-
gration, border control, death, and environmental degra-
dation are just some of the influences that have come to
define the nature of the hyperborder, making the bound-
ary unique in the contemporary world for the breadth of
issues confronting it.16

Similarly, Indigenous women refer to the U.S.-Mexico border as a

war and murder zone, a nightmare, a prison, and a colony.17 In-
288 WORKS AND DAYS

digenous women’s communities, though dominant in population

numbers, are largely invisible in mainstream media and literacies,
which often aggregate their social identities flatly and erroneously
into state and citizen-centered descriptors largely constructed by the
neoliberal capitalist lens and systems: “Latina,” “Hispanic,” “Mexi-
can-origin,” “Mexican-American,” “Native-American,” “American-
Indian,” “Chicana,” “Asian-American,” and “African-American.”
Since 1848, the border has been a tool for the two states to repress
Indigenous autonomy and social-political organization, and to main-
tain this liberal and capitalist construction as the norm. By 1848, the
border operated to repress Indigenous peoples’ efforts to retake the
region and to re-appropriate the goods, and, in the process, reduced
much of the region’s European settlements to embers.18 When the
U.S. annexed nearly half of Mexico’s territorial claims, the resistant
Indigenous sovereignties were divvied up between the two states
and shrouded in the Western legal language of the dominion and
the infidel, vassal-wards.19
Indigenous relocation, displacement, surveillance, enclosure, seg-
regation, and extermination are broadly referenced in Article XI of
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which assigns to the United States
the full responsibility of the “exclusive control” of “savage tribes”
whose lands and peoples were directly impacted by the TGH and the
establishment of a border. The signatories agreed that all “incursions”
by the Indigenous of the entire 2000 mile long region shall be
forcibly restrained by the Government of the United
States whensoever this may be necessary; and that when
they cannot be prevented, they shall be punished by the
said Government, and satisfaction for the same shall be
exacted all in the same way, and with equal diligence
and energy, as if the same incursions were meditated or
committed within its own territory, against its own citi-
zens.20

From Indigenous peoples’ perspectives, the TGH set forth the col-
lateral legal construction of Indigenous peoples, who resisted geno-
cidal policies as “savages,” and the TGH specified language for the
states’ continuing partnership in their destruction.21 The TGH insti-
tutionalized the legal framework of the modern-industrial version of
dominion and infidel, the two pillars of Christendom and imperial-
ism.22 The state parties constructed the U.S.-Mexico border to con-
strain and segregate lineally related Indigenous peoples from each
other. The use of armed force to construct and control borders, and
designating the United States unilateral authority to manage the op-
erations against “savages” is the modern-industrial historiography of
Indigenous repression and genocides. The “Mexico border” is the
American cognate for a legal killing zone and a constitution-free
zone rooted in capitalism, war, and extermination.23
Támez 289

Indigenous Polities in the Autonomy Struggle and

Violence Against Human Rights Defenders

Indigenous women are retaking strategic spaces in the struggles

for customary women’s principles and law systems, the protection of
children, and human rights litigation both locally and internation-
ally. Indigenous women defend the human rights of oppressed peo-
ple who are under heavy surveillance. Because the oral traditions of
many Indigenous peoples of the bordered regions uphold the his-
torical central role of women governance of the extended clan, In-
digenous women today are restoring the strategic use of original
clan-based governance systems. These are critical moves, because
matrilineal clan law pre-dates the colonialist and capitalist state.
They demonstrate that the border, armies, forts, settlers, and corpo-
rations are fundamental violations of original aboriginal sovereign
title laws. Today, Indigenous women along the U.S.-Mexico border
are working with numerous communities at the international level to
challenge the presumed rights of settler states over Indigenous peo-
ples’ sovereignty and rights to self-determined autonomy. At the in-
ternational level, Indigenous politics provide spaces for community
leaders to forge their local struggles to global revolutionary move-
ments for transformation and radical change. For example, the fol-
lowing two articles from the United Nations Declaration of the Rights
of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) are just a sample of the frameworks
that Indigenous women use along the militarized zone to galvanize
new relationships with each other, international actors, NGOs, rights
regimes, corporations and states.
Article 11, Section 2: States shall provide redress through
effective mechanisms, which may include restitution, de-
veloped in conjunction with Indigenous Peoples, with re-
spect to their cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual
property taken without their free, prior and informed con-
sent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs.
(United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples, the General Assembly, September 7, 2007)

Article 22, Section 2: States shall take measures, in con-

junction with Indigenous Peoples, to ensure that Indige-
nous women and children enjoy the full protection and
guarantees against all forms of violence and discrimina-
tion.24

As Indigenous communities in the U.S.-Mexico border militarized

zones strain to recover from colonization and exploitation by settler
frontier societies and states, they are increasingly using the UNDRIP
and other mechanisms and rights spheres to increase their commu-
nities’ visibility. This is to apply pressure to states, and forge alliances
on collective projects that raise their communities’ profiles among an
important range of interested and supportive groups, and individu-
als.
As militarization along the U.S.-Mexico border drives local fears,
community endangerment, and state defenses to all-time highs, it is
290 WORKS AND DAYS

women’s local and international activism and networks that continue

to draw legal experts, scholars, funders, and global actors into par-
ticipatory partnerships. These support Indigenous women’s analysis,
documentation, and presentation in prominent spheres of their col-
lected bodies of evidence in the active promotion of an interrogation
of states’ violations of Indigenous peoples’ rights to essential free-
doms: security and autonomy.25
Insisting on Peoplehood (autonomy, independence, and the tradi-
tional and contemporary identities of Indigenous polities in a local,
international and global context), Indigenous women in the bordered
regions destabilize the “Native Woman/Mujer Indigena” aggregate
so often utilized by states as well as nonprofit and citizen-focused
“rights” groups and corrupt community leaders. These aggregate
identifications flatten Indigenous women’s lineal, religious, social,
economic, and political ties to specific lands, histories, sovereignties,
institutions, and activisms beyond borders of the states. Mexico, the
U.S.-Mexico international boundary, and the United States are zones
which are in and on Indigenous territories. This is the dominant view
of Indigenous peoples working in a larger struggle. This perspective
makes Indigenous political leaders the targets of hate- and violence-
focused anti-immigration, white nationalist, nativist, and paramili-
tary groups.26 These groups and others are some of the first to
respond with fear and hostility when Indigenous women are pub-
licly and visibly making waves in sectors typically reserved for white
spokespersons.27
When Indigenous human rights defenders in the bordered region
are stalked, kidnapped, assaulted, raped, and/or murdered by mem-
bers (“citizens”) of “the public,” it is fundamentally an attack on the
“Native women”/“Mujer Indigena” as “the Other” to the white set-
tler and to the state conception of space, race, and rights. Her racial-
ized, sexualized, gendered, and classed body is subjected to mental
and physical warfare in a neocolonialist society where its most con-
servative and extremist members exercise citizenship as power-over-
death, and their constitutional rights to speak, gather, bear arms, and
own property, and wield these in violent repression against Indige-
nous people with impunity.28 The “Native woman”/“Mujer Indigena”
is constructed (objectified) to explicitly dehumanize, subordinate,
and demobilize her because she is Indigenous. At the recesses of the
masculinist settler memory is a fetish for the exotic, enslaved, tor-
tured Indigenous resister. Indigenous women, when challenging this,
are bluntly challenging white male heterosexuality as inherently vio-
lent and destructive to an entire group. Indigenous women’s oral his-
tories are the undergrounded co-authors of the masculinist
militarized landscape. Their mutilated vaginas, sliced breasts, ripped
buttocks and anuses, scalped heads and pubic hair, their tattered
clothing and sacred objects—all are pieces on the “crossroads” of
settlers’ and states’ memory. Their indigeneity is a constant reminder
to the settler that his land is gotten by mass crimes against human-
ity. The settlers’ gender, race, and sexuality exist outside of the law
of the people. Indigenous women and youth, who are most em-
powered when they are at the forefront of resource protection, are
denouncing the violations of the states, and insisting that Indigenous
Támez 291

decolonization is the pathway to restoring aboriginal rights, for the

protection of Mother Earth, future generations, and healthy systems.
Women’s voices and perspectives are often the most censured by
politicians as well as by opposing Indigenous community members
who see the women’s stepping out of the norm as dissidence, dan-
gerous, and criminal. Many agree that the conflation of anticolonial
resistance with dissidence and criminality is internalized racism
among the dominant mainstream against Spanish-speaking Indige-
nous peoples.
The local analysis claws against the scars of a deeper tyranny: the
blood-stained killing fields, death marches, abductions, death
squads, lynchings, burned fields, and detentions that mark the land-
scapes and topographies of war involving Southwest Indigenous peo-
ples29 in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, without cease.30 The
express will to empire could not exist without the explicit racial, gen-
dered, economic, cultural, religious, political, and global allegiances
of powerful and elite members within NGOs, tribal governments,
political, economic, and institutional groups and organizations, and
international legal bodies.31

Transborder and Transnational Networks

The colonizers in Sonora, (Arizona wasn’t a state yet in
the old days you know, but we were all the same then,
before the taking), . . . um . . . well they were compelled
to incorporate the Indian into every aspect of their colo-
nial existence—without the Indian as the hunters, agron-
omists, laborers, herbalists, spiritualists, religious leaders,
healers, maids, nurse maids, cooks, gardeners, farmers,
cowboys, . . . you know . . . all those functions which we
perform that are not acknowledged, yet, as laborers in
service for their wealth. . . . they couldn’t survive or exist
without us. When Indians assert their rights, to be own-
ers, then that’s when the soldiers come. When Indians
fight to be human again and not to surrender to submis-
sion and passivity, then they come and destroy us. The
colonialist society penetrated our Indigenous ways to a
deep extent, you know . . . Indian male leaders get pres-
sured by the state to denounce Indian women, or maybe
not openly work against them, but in other forms, not
support them. The women’s hearts and minds [are] the
ones who have a direct connection to the life forces and
to the memories of the older generations.32

Teresa Leal: Ópata-Mayo, Co-Founder,

Las Co-Madres Ambos Nogales, Sonora-Arizona
Teresa Leal (Ópata-Mayo) is well-known in Indigenous women’s
movements throughout Sonora, Mexico, Guatemala, Arizona, and
in numerous spheres of Indigenous peoples’ coalition organizing in
the U.S., Canada, Taiwan, and South Africa. Born and raised on a
ranch in the highlands of Sonora where her mother was a domestic
worker for a wealthy land-owner, Leal had opportunities to learn
English, and to go to school in Nogales, Arizona. In her twenties she
292 WORKS AND DAYS

left Sonora, Mexico to earn a degree in sociology, and during this

time she joined the people’s resistance movement in Guatemala. She
eventually took a job with the Mexican government as a social
worker and did translation work for Indigenous women seeking so-
cial services. Eventually she left her state job to more effectively avail
herself in the local struggles of Indigenous people, which became
the basis of her advocacies in labor unions, mining communities,
factory workers, women care providers, domestic workers, house-
wives, children, and elders’ health. Familiar with the American In-
dian Movement (AIM) and migrant workers’ organizations and the
systems operations of Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN),
Leal emulates the trilingual versatility of today’s Indigenous women
human rights defenders whose people are from the region. In this
trajectory, she trains and organizes with Indigenous communities,
from the Guatemala-Mexico border to the Mexico-U.S. border, and
throughout Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Sonora, Sinaloa, Durango,
Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guatemala. The founder of prominent and
numerous smaller, local, and inter-webbed “hubs” in the “corri-
dor,”33 today her activism is concentrated across more than fifty-two
urban colonias which flank the factory zones of Nogales near the
U.S.-Mexico border wall and Tucson, Arizona—a well-known con-
vergence site for the numerous tribal groups whose traditional terri-
tories overlap and align in sacred sites both around and within the
urban area of the old imperial presidio-garrison town.34
The autonomous colonias have been in continuous development
by Indigenous women and families, over the last forty to fifty years,
as a direct response to two factors: U.S. wars in Central America and
southern Mexico against Indigenous peoples, and as part of struggles
of resistance by Indigenous women and their families to re-take lands
in the industrialized north, to use the Mexican constitutional right of
Indigenous peoples to take unused lands, and to resist the local and
state efforts to remove them. Nogales’s urban colonias are built upon
the work of Indigenous mothers. Numerous Indigenous communities
who migrated to Sonora from throughout central and southern Mex-
ico collectively organized. Teresa Leal formed alliances of many In-
digenous women with ties to mines, manufacturing zones, street
markets, migration, domestic labor, and dispossessed communities,
and together they organized an Indigenous urban polity. With lead-
ership of Teresa Leal, they collectively reclaimed “waste” lands con-
sidered undesirable by elites and “citizens.” Seeking collective and
community-controlled organization of the local resources, Indige-
nous women structured the social and economic relationships of
thousands of landless families, and negotiated the terms of these with
local politicians and state officials in the process. What may seem an
eyesore for middle-class American tourists visiting Nogales to pur-
chase pharmaceuticals, tequila, and “a day in Mexico” is actually a
huge land reclamation political movement for displaced Indigenous
workers seeking stability for their families. As Leal states, “Empow-
erment is in the eyes of the beholder. Each colonia is semi-au-
tonomous with its own political history, context, and founding
clan-mothers who maintain activism and oral histories of their colo-
nia’s foundation and they recharge the ongoing struggles to main-
Támez 293

tain the peoples’ rights to the land and community.”35 Leal and her
comadres work to bridge the activisms of each colonia’s key leaders,
and at the same time to provide support and strength to women’s
antiviolence struggles within their homes, colonias, and in the nu-
merous struggles against “bad government.” Indigenous women
struggle to gain a voice in local colonia and municipal politics,
which have historically exploited and violated them, while uphold-
ing the patriarchal cult of “la familia” as Indigenous women’s tradi-
tional sphere of honor.
Ópata and Mayo frameworks are important because Leal’s work,
like that of thousands of Indigenous women organizers in the region,
is not isolated, occurring in a vacuum, or an anomaly. Rather, it is
grounded in local Indigenous politics, experiences and histories. Her
work, and the numerous women and men who operate in solidarity
with her, carry forward a much longer historical, intellectual, and
ancestral tradition of anticolonial alliance building in Mexico and
the bordered region that stems from revolutionary 18th century and
19th century precedents. Through the intersecting frameworks of
“labor,” “work-place,” “elder care,” “child care,” “education,”
“water,” “food security,” “collective squatter rights,” “mining,” and
“biological reproduction,” Indigenous women’s experiences and his-
tories crisscross many hubs and nodes of solidarities. Leal’s most re-
cent work in the Indigenous laborers’ uprisings in the mining
communities of Cananea and the human rights monitoring and de-
fense for the hundreds of thousands of “returned ones”36 are crucial
examples of resilience, endurance, and persistence of networked sol-
idarities which mirror the work of Indigenous grandmothers through-
out the construction of the mining industries in the 17th and 18th
centuries.37

Lori Thomas-Riddle: Akimel O’odham, Co-Founder,

Gila River Alliance for a Clean Environment

The state and heteropatriarchally defined frameworks of “environ-

mental racism” have increasingly come under the critical analysis
of Indigenous women whose land-bases are bisected by the U.S.-
Mexico border. Their criticisms tease out the ways in which envi-
ronmental justice—and injustice—is constrained within a normative
“civil rights” and “constitutional rights” platform. In that sphere, “cit-
izens” resist the violence that other “persons”—i.e., corporations,
states, or other private businesses—create that harms them. They may
litigate against those entities if they “choose.” Their “rights” to com-
plain are supposedly enshrined within the democratic principles of
“civil” and “constitutional” rights.
Indigenous women’s challenges to the authority of this framework
inherently contest the state’s legitimacy, authority and sovereignty,
and the social and political identities of citizenship as constraints for
Indigenous peoples bisected by borders. Lori Thomas-Riddle (Akimel
O’odham), co-founder of Gila River Alliance for a Clean Environ-
ment, and its offshoot, O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collec-
tive, demonstrated this challenge to corporate and state power in her
numerous campaigns between 1997-2007. Her organizing counter-
294 WORKS AND DAYS

wars, which she launches regularly on the Web using social net-
working tools, are articulated in both an “environmental justice”
frame, and through a “Peoplehood” discursive resistance to the ho-
mogenous aggregate of “the Native American citizen-hero” within
the U.S. For example,
[a] toxic waste treatment facility called Romic Southwest
sits in the Gila River Indian Community next to Chandler.
The U.S. EPA refuses to fine this company despite seri-
ous and repeat violations and the people who live and
work in the community have little means to do anything
about it. That is why dozens of people came out to de-
mand the toxic waste facility be shut down. People lined
both sides of the street near the facility holding signs and
banners. Speeches were made as the crowd rallied in an
open lot, listening to the stories of ill-health, similar strug-
gles that others are facing around the country, and en-
couragement. A walk to the location where the police
had blocked off the road to the Romic facility was made
twice during that day.38

For Thomas-Riddle, informing O’odham community elders, youth,

allies, and advocates about the destruction to their lands, food sys-
tems, water and air, and de-colonial alliance work on the ground is
a key role to play in shifting the local and international politics of the
illicit transporting and dumping of toxic waste in O’odham reserva-
tion lands. The waste travels from Romic’s multiple international
sites, through Mexico and into the U.S. vis-à-vis the Gila River Indian
Community, the first stop on a toxic railroad route in a transnational
path beginning south of the border.39 Thomas-Riddle is informing
O’odham people of the importance of the dangerous, unlawful, and
unjust use of modern technologies by corporations, and the U.S.
EPA’s knowledge of these violations of federal, constitutional and
treaty law. She is taking huge risks by doing so, as (obviously) not all
Akimel O’odham peoples are the same; in fact, key Indigenous elites
and everyday working people in her nation, across six distinct com-
munity-and-clan-governed districts, belong to related, and often
competing, clans. Many families and younger generations are as-
similating rapidly into consumerism and the ideologies of racism,
tribalism, and indigenism which saturate their existences within a
capitalist and media-focused U.S. constitutionalist society.
Thomas-Riddle is an avid early innovator of text messaging as a
tool to synchronize large numbers of people to concentrate actions
to offset the work of corrupt government and tribal officials. She has
made broadcasting and transparency a top priority in the work she
does in her communities on the Mexico side of the border. Her ef-
forts to disentangle Indigenous facts from the avalanches of disin-
formation passed off as “reports,” by corporations and government
bureaucrats alike, are a crucial part of bridging rural Indigenous prin-
ciples and perspectives from and to rural and urban areas, and Mex-
ico. In Quitovac, Sonora, the women-led O’odham community
leadership work against similar forces of local elites—government
and Indigenous, SEMARNAT, (Mexico’s parallel to the U.S. EPA) and
the corporation CEGIR.40
Támez 295

Thomas-Riddle’s contemporary advocacies continue to shape In-

digenous environmental politics through an environmental
racism/environmental justice legal framework which has been, to
varying degrees, somewhat successful at different times on the reser-
vation. However, after the construction of the border wall, enabled
through the Department of Homeland Security’s 2008 waiver of
thirty-five federal laws41 to erect the 18-foot steel and concrete bar-
rier, there is lingering skepticism whether the environmental justice
framework is still capable of deterring the nation-state in its use of
sovereignty, “security,” and “democracy” as key frameworks to sus-
pend citizen-based civil rights. This force effectively pushes Native
American environmental justice activists in Southern Arizona to pick
up the international law frameworks of human rights and interna-
tional Indigenous rights to address environmental injustices on the
U.S. side of the border as an issue of the state’s violation of consti-
tutional law. At the same time, the movement towards international
rights’ spheres is an area of great interest to Thomas-Riddle as she en-
gages in transnational O’odham and diverse Indigenous social net-
works which amplify the transnational flows of toxics, from Mexico
to the reservation, and the implications of a single-focus strategy,
(environmental justice/civil rights) which is radically modified by
current eradication of environmental protection laws, vis-à-vis the
border wall and the rise of the “Constitution Free Zone.”
The important transnational Indigenous human rights and auton-
omy work she and her clans are accomplishing demands the atten-
tion of international legal spheres, NGOs and U.N. bodies. The
effects of her work on Indigenous people in a hemispheric and
global context rupture the traditional lenses of the “citizen-hero” of
U.S. environmental justice movement practices. The Indigenous
framework focuses the battlegrounds firmly within the Indigenous
peoples’ traditional and customary terrains, and challenges the le-
gitimacy of the perpetrator’s legal domain, which protects “person-
hood” rights to commerce and progress. Thus, in normative spheres
of environmental justice praxis, Indigenous peoples are merely as-
signed “minority” status along with other state-defined “minorities”:
“African-,” “Asian-,” “poor white,” and “Latino-” Americans. These
also deny the fact that Indigenous political actors are a heteroge-
neous population that vehemently resists the colonialist categories of
“mixed-blood” and “mestiza,” which serve to stratify, divide and dis-
band their collective organizing as Indigenous people.42 In the po-
litical spheres of the state, human rights are repressed—by both the
state and Indigenous tribal elites—through the normative discourse
of citizens’ civil rights and the state (allegedly) as the protector of
citizens’ civil rights to speech, religion, property, and safety.
The lethal costs of environmental destruction, displacement and
gender violence to women and girls have increasingly forced In-
digenous families to seek alternative paths to justice. They are con-
sistently in the lead in reframing Indigenous rights in the international
definitions of states’ and corporations’ criminality and their collec-
tive rights to human and Indigenous rights. Indigenous women’s ac-
tivisms in the U.S.-Mexico bordered region resist the pressure to
296 WORKS AND DAYS

conform and to “fit” inside the delimiting frames of the state and its
“citizens.” Rather, they invoke radically different collective narra-
tives, systems and processes that challenge imperialist, and fictive-
histories which legitimated state and citizens’ destruction as the
mitigating domain over Indigenous families. After a successful 10-
year, women-led grassroots battle against Romic Environmental
Technologies Corporation, Lori Thomas-Riddle remarked on the In-
digenous peoples’ de-colonial struggles:
Romic Environmental Technologies Corporation operates
a commercial hazardous waste “treatment” facility at
Lone Butte Industrial Park on the Gila River Indian Com-
munity, and they are authorized to store and “treat” hun-
dreds of highly dangerous toxic chemicals and toxic
metals. Romic accepts hazardous waste shipped from
around the world! Romic wants to expand the amount of
hazardous waste they store on site by about 50%! Romic
wants to add 15 new tanks to store additional hazardous
waste. This plant has existed since 1975 and has a terri-
ble history of violations including: hazardous waste
leaks, hazardous waste barrels stored in flooded areas,
missing inspection and monitoring reports, missing haz-
ardous waste labels, incomplete inspection logs, open
containers of hazardous waste. According to U.S. Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency inspection reports, the dan-
gerous practices have continued at the facility for
decades. U.S. EPA refuses to fine this company despite
serious and repeat violations. U.S. EPA never told the
community the truth about this hazardous waste com-
pany, its problems or risks, or the proposed big expan-
sion. EPA has allowed this company to operate for
decades without full permits or any environmental im-
pact report. In December 2002 Romic applied to U.S.
EPA for a permit to expand and continue operating, but
the EPA has failed to hold a public hearing where tribal
members could voice concerns.43

Thomas-Riddle’s denouncement connects the grassroots move-

ment to her detection of U.S. abuse of power both within and on
O’odham traditional homelands—an implicit reminder to her peo-
ple of their sovereignty and rights as a nation in the spheres of in-
ternational law. International law, if not explicitly invoked, is
nonetheless understood by Indigenous transnationals, who are ad-
vocating for similar corporate shut-downs on the Mexico side of the
O’odham community in Sonora.44 Thomas-Riddle’s work is paying
off, as an offshoot group of O’odham youth are taking up the strug-
gle in the arena of international Indigenous rights. In the group’s
statement, “Who We Are,” the youth assert a human rights and In-
digenous rights framework:
O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective is made
up of Akimel O’odham and Tohono O’odham youth who
are pressing the attack against the ongoing colonization
of our traditional lands (i.e., U.S./Mexico Border poli-
cies), environmental racism from transnational corpora-
tions and the state, and all colonial polices aimed at
Támez 297

destroying our O’odham Him’dag (Traditional Way of

Life). We fight for self-determination, and true sovereignty
of our lands. We advocate for the traditional elders in
Mexico and the United States. We provide an au-
tonomous space for O’odham to educate themselves on
the issues that affect our land and people (our future). We
encourage and support all O’odham, especially the
youth, in carrying on our traditional practices, just as our
ancestors did before us. Our projects of solidarity are our
politics. You dig?45

Eloisa García Támez and the Lipan Apache Legal Challenges to

the U.S./Texas-Mexico Border Wall
By permitting and prescribing only certain forms of vio-
lence—those that advanced projects of territorial con-
quest and consolidation—both the Spanish and the
Mexican states retained the power to regulate the
colonists’ use of force. To this end, they fostered the mil-
itarization of frontier subjects—particularly members of
subaltern groups and classes. Not only did the state le-
gitimate the use of violence against indigenes, it made
warfare against the Apache a source of personal prestige
and status honor for the peasants [in Chihuahua] and
other military colonies.46

The above statement is useful in the larger historiography of em-

pires’ and states’ uses of militarization—of the lands, systems, insti-
tutions, and other Indigenous peoples—in the wars against
“enemies” and “infidels.”
In 2007, Eloisa García Támez, a Lipan Apache elder with a lifetime
of activism against the settler constitutionalist state, emerged from
the shadows of Texas and U.S. history and into Indigenous light when
she took a firm stance against the U.S.-Mexico border wall mega-
project situated across her traditional village-like ranchería of El Cal-
aboz, located on the southern tip of the Texas-Mexico border. The
focus of international attention, her legal case centers on her class-
action lawsuit against the U.S./Texas-Mexico border wall. It is an im-
portant case study of an Indigenous community from El Calaboz
Ranchería, who in late 2007 refused to grant entry to the U.S. Army,
U.S. Customs Border Patrol, and the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security to survey their lands for construction.47 In doing so, Támez
and community elders and relatives set off a political firestorm in
which Congress, the U.S. President, the Director of Homeland Se-
curity, a morass of bureaucrats, media pundits and white nationalist
groups pounced upon the small ranchería society of independent
Lipan Apaches. Since 2007, Támez and her clan elders have stood
firm, won numerous crucial steps in their case against the United
States by disrupting and dismantling the use of eminent domain, con-
demnation, and the Declaration of Taking, all tactics tied to milita-
rization of the border. With each win, the community’s popularity
grew nationally and internationally, and was largely defined as a
women-led grass-roots social movement that incorporated crucial
themes in the continent’s Indigenous Peoplehood movements against
298 WORKS AND DAYS

imperialist government and corporate corruption.48

Lipan Apaches are a community with Spanish Crown title, treaty
rights, and other legal mechanisms to hold and maintain their lands
as individuals and as a collective. Their aboriginal title predates
1767, when Spain began its encroachments. Crown Land Grants are
recognized in South Texas, as well as in New Mexico, and have pro-
vided legal measures for Indigenous peoples to maintain aspects of
traditional autonomy in land-tenure throughout the last four cen-
turies. Since Texas does not recognize the treaty, collective, and Peo-
plehood rights of Lipan Apaches, the few surviving members who
still have land grants must protect them diligently against develop-
ment, greed and exploitation by settler organizations and develop-
ers.49
Since 2006, when the Border Fence Act went into effect, Támez’s
legal case was the first class-action suit against the United States,
from which all others followed. Between 2007 to 2009, Támez v.
U.S. et al. was the dominant case against the U.S. border wall and
successfully halted the construction of the border wall for two years
in the community of El Calaboz, Cameron County, Texas. Támez v.
U.S. et al. is especially notable for advancing the Indigenous princi-
ples and perspectives within a U.S. and international human rights
framework, and introduced innovative new strategies and collective
forms of political, social and economic organization in the con-
struction of the case. Throughout the process, the El Calaboz com-
munity exerted rules, norms and practices through which Indigenous
people operated and governed transnationally, transhemispherically,
and autonomously, outside of the formal, non-profit and community
organizations. The Támez case drew in Indigenous polities from
throughout international Indigenous alliance and solidarity move-
ments, and drew upon the activism of Indigenous migrants’ human
rights experts, with the leading support and coordinating efforts by
Arnoldo García, Indigenous to Matamoros, Tamaulipas, México and
a project director of the National Network for Immigrants and
Refugee Rights. The legal cases raised by the municipalities that fol-
lowed the Támez case benefitted tremendously from the analysis of
the Támez community of support: a large network of grass-roots or-
ganizers and activists, labor rights leaders, migrant rights experts,
border history and justice scholars, indy-media technicians, and Web
2.0 and communications consultants. The legal team comprised the
LAW-Defense Working Group, co-led by Peter Schey and the Cen-
ter for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. By 2008, this alliance
of leaders eventually included the University of Texas Law Working
Group, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and numerous private legal
consultants spanning the Americas.50 In addition to pursuit of land
rights based on Crown Land grants, the decisive battle to foreground
Indigenous peoples’ human rights has been fought predominantly
through Indigenous and Ndé clan-based matrilineal customary in-
stitutions, traditional belief and land-tenure law systems and prac-
tices using contemporary and traditional technologies.
Recognizing that the U.S. considers the Texas-Mexico border and
border people a “no-constitution zone,” Támez strategically pursued
international law in order to apply Indigenous principles and per-
Támez 299

spectives to the case. The Inter-American Commission on Human

Rights, which operates under the Organization of American States,
heard the case in its 133rd Session, and commented on my testi-
mony and that of a team of legal experts, attorneys and scholars:
The Commission received troubling information about
the impact that the construction of a wall in Texas, along
the U.S.-Mexico border, has on the human rights of area
residents, in particular its discriminatory effects. The in-
formation received indicates that its construction would
disproportionally affect people who are poor, with a low
level of education, and generally of Mexican descent, as
well as Indigenous communities on both sides of the bor-
der. On another U.S.-related issue, the IACHR continued
to receive troubling information during these sessions
about the situation of detainees in Guantánamo. As it did
on July 28, 2006, through its Resolution 02/06, and on
subsequent occasions, the Commission again urges the
government to shut down the detention center.51

This statement by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission,

to which the U.S. is a signatory member, fuses the Texas-Mexico bor-
der wall and Guantanamo Bay as interlocking international human
rights issues related to the U.S. In doing so, the IAC/OAS welded the
two into connected themes: U.S. human rights obstructions, state
and global terrorism, detention, gulag prisons, torture, and human
rights violations.
Prior to and after the passing of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, most
citizens of the U.S. and Mexico had undergone a radical restructur-
ing of their constitution-based rights as citizens of states, yet for the
most part, it was predominantly the Indigenous peoples of Mexico
whose reactions received the strongest media coverage in a global
context. The Zapatistas are the most visible community symbolizing
this radical reclaiming of the tools and means of production through
Indigenous and contemporary thought and systems. However, In-
digenous women in the north argue that these processes are misun-
derstood if forced through the linear frames and periodization of
Western wars. Rather, the Zapatista revolutions have been the prod-
uct of diverse and multiple processes occurring throughout the
Americas of counter-cultural, economic and political battles that
have re-shaped the terrains of Indigenous v. imperialist warfare.52
Militarization, border enforcements, and state violence on the
Texas-Mexico border have long been under-theorized and repressed
from the mainstream by corporate-owned media. It was not until the
global attention that the Zapatistas brought to Mexico and the United
States in 1994, that militarization and low-intensity conflict were
taken up as a critical framework by academics situated in the United
States—a critical framework that had already been theorized by In-
digenous people for numerous centuries. Scholars José Palafox and
Timothy Dunn supported that work and analyzed the connections
among the U.S.-backed overthrow of governments in Central Amer-
ica, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the illicit drug and arms
trade involving prominent U.S. elites, and the exploitation of dis-
300 WORKS AND DAYS

placed Indigenous peoples as connected to key operations on the

U.S.-Mexico border to manage and warehouse commodified In-
digenous workers in the mining, agriculture, and development proj-
ects throughout Mexico, the U.S. and Canada.53 The militarization of
the U.S.-Mexico border is an ongoing part of a set of failed policies
by which feudalist-capitalism engages in race wars that are legit-
imized as “law” and “rule” of dominion over Indigenous sovereigns.
These policies should be explicitly defined as issues of state crimi-
nality, international law, Indigenous peoples and crimes against hu-
manity.
Although the Lipan Apache community has also pursued a col-
lective class-action suit against the U.S. and continues to pursue
legal appeals in U.S. courts to the U.S./Texas-Mexico border wall
mega-project, it is with the explicit understanding that the legal
remedies of the state involved must be exhausted before further ac-
tion can be admitted at the international legal level of the Inter-Amer-
ican Commission/Organization of American States. Through the
activisms of Indigenous women from El Calaboz Ranchería, working
with Indigenous organizations, communities, scholars, governments
and individuals, the Secure Fence Act of 2006, with its colonization
and militarization, is being explicitly challenged by Indigenous
women’s contextualization of Ndé histories, resilience and cultural
landscapes in the centuries-long logics of “just war” emanating from
Western legal thought, Christendom and imperialist figure-heads,
such as the Bush or Obama regimes. Both regimes pursue these as
legal, psychological and symbolic wars to enslave and to exploit the
biological holdings and reserves of Indigenous peoples on a global
scale. Eloisa García Támez, always anchoring this movement in the
traditional values and inherited legacies of her ancestors, argues,
“We have been doing this ‘movement’ for hundreds of years. You cit-
izens may refer to this as ‘civil disobedience,’ [but] for the Indigenous
Peoples we ‘resist’ by living our lives as in the ways of our grand-
parents. Our way of life is our resistance.”54
Eloisa García Támez emphasizes that a Lipan Apache matrilineal
“power/strength,” “poder” or “nalwodí,” has been alive and well for
generations, and “never vanished.”55 Strength comes from knowing
that the ancestors defended, protected, and prayed for the lands, and
that their elements are buried in the lands for continuity of the gen-
erations. This continuous message emanating from El Calaboz dis-
rupted and contradicted the militarized historical construction of
“Apache enemies,” which flattens and distorts Ndé males’ gender
roles as savage destroyers and killers, while relegating Ndé women
to the margins as an invisible and silent “influence.”56
In separate published papers, court briefs, and articles forthcom-
ing, I have analyzed the specific violence—extra-legal and inter-gen-
erational—experienced in the family of Eloisa García Támez, and
more than nineteen generations of her ancestors, and her commu-
nities from El Calaboz, La Encantada, Las Milpas, Los Indios, La
Paloma and Las Rusias.57 Mass killings, executions, killing fields and
armed removals are haunting fixtures in El Calaboz’s history of set-
tler violence and resistance. From 1910-1919, the genocidal and
mob-killings in Cameron County Texas led to the deaths of over
Támez 301

5,000 human beings.58 The possibility of extra-legal, paramilitary vi-

olence repeating in the Lower Rio Grande is a grave concern of
LAW-Defense. In the clan histories of El Calaboz Ranchería, women
have taken lead roles in reconstructing the community’s history
within the contexts and texts of their legal challenges to the settler
states of the United States, Mexico and Texas.59 For example, in
1935, Andrea Cavazos García (Tlaxcalteca-Ndé) and several
clanswomen challenged the U.S. Army in the illegal taking of their
collective farm lands for the purpose of constructing a levee to ma-
nipulate the waters of the Rio Grande River and to appropriate the
water rights from Indigenous rural agrarian societies and re-route
those rights to the state and private industry leaders. In 1946, Fran-
cisca Reyes Esparza (Nahua-Tlaxcalteca-Bizkaian) had a leading role
in traditional rural peoples’ land rights struggles, displacement, and
dispossession. She won her land rights case, as Irene Blea argued:
“While attempting to gather evidence to file a Land grant lawsuit for
titles to a quarter of a million acres of oil and ranch land, Esparza
successfully developed communication between the United States
and Mexico. She became an expert on the historical aspects of old
land titles guaranteed to [Indigenous peoples] under Article VIII of
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.”60
The Esparza women (Támez’s maternal foremothers) have an ex-
tensive history of Indigenous land and autonomy defense and of-
fense, originating from the mid 16th century. Utilizing the Spanish
colonial law institutions to challenge imperialism and colonial rule,
their 13th Great-Grandmother, Mariana Leonor de Moctezuma, a
daughter of Moctezuma II, was one of the first Indigenous women to
litigate successfully against the Spanish Crown on issues related to
Indigenous women’s rights to land, inheritance, and autonomous
control over their property.61 Thus, when we examine Indigenous
women’s histories as political actors in a five-centuries-long chal-
lenge to imperialist norms, we are better situated to comprehend
why Lipan Apache women, from a small ranchería along the Lower
Rio Grande, in the poorest county in the United States, emerged to
challenge the legal grounds of U.S. imperialist dispossession of their
lands.62

“Enemy” Evil-doers, the U.S. Empire’s Border Wall,

and the Secure Fence Act of 2006

The hierocratic conflation of the “enemy” with the “Apache” is the

American-made “infidel” in the dominion-ward relationship that
structures settler constitutionalism. The dominion is considered to
be the entire Earth that the Holy Roman Emperor galvanized and in-
corporated into a legal conception of Christendom. Dominion is the
concept driving the modes in which empires are forged, and govern
the “circumstances [whereby] . . . Christians . . . dispossess pagan
peoples of their lordship and property.”63 The linear history of the
“Apache” is constructed inside Mexico’s and the United States’ de-
partments of war. The Ndé people’s social identities as “non-white”
(enemy Apaches) or “white” (peaceful Apaches) in Texas, the U.S.
and Mexico war games were constructed in the laboratory of West-
302 WORKS AND DAYS

ern military science, law, religion, anthropology and development.

The context of dominion is important to comprehend the meaning of
the 2006 legal structures that allowed the wall’s construction.
The U.S. Senate and House enacted the Secure Fence Act of 2006
(Pub. L 109-367) on October 26, 2006. This legislation was passed
as “an Act to establish operational control over the international land
and maritime borders of the United States.”64 The Act provides for
systematic surveillance technologies, physical infrastructure, check-
points, and barriers to control U.S. borders against “terrorists,” “ille-
gal aliens” and “drug traffickers.” Under “Section 3, Construction of
Fencing and Security Improvements in Border Area from Pacific
Coast to Gulf of Mexico,” the Act provides for the construction of
700 miles of a barrier wall built in specific sectors along the U.S.-
Mexico border. Seventy miles of 18-foot steel and concrete slab wall
is scheduled for deployment in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas.
In its execution of the “war on terror,” the Bush Administration le-
galized the demonization of the world’s and the U.S.-Mexico bor-
der’s populations of poor, brown, displaced peoples, homogenizing
the brown peoples into a global policing racial dictum of “not white,
no English, not American, potential terrorist.” The Bush Administra-
tion set the stage for “vigilant American citizens” to deploy highly or-
ganized and sanctioned systems of “homegrown security” in the U.S.
war against immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border. He rationalized
his actions with a call: “To better secure our homeland, America will
continue to depend on the eyes and ears of alert citizens.”65 Archi-
tected, the President’s “axis of evil” speech fueled and fanned a fer-
vent, radical, and retaliatory U.S.-based nativist movement.66
On June 27, 2003, “Endgame: Office of Detention and Removal
Strategic Plan, 2003-2012, Detention and Removal Strategy for a Se-
cure Homeland,” was released by Anthony S. Tangeman, Director,
Office of Detention and Removal.67 In 2005-2006, Southern Com-
mand was removed from Vieques, Puerto Rico, and re-established
in San Antonio, Texas. In 2006, the Secure Fence Act was fully op-
erational. After wide-scale civil uprisings, massive protests, and
transnational advocacy, Congress enacted Section 102 of the Real
ID Act. Section 102, also referred to as the “mega-waiver,” conferred
on the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael
Chertoff, the unilateral authority “to waive all legal requirements
such Secretary, in such Secretary’s sole discretion, determines nec-
essary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads
under this section.”68 In doing so, the Bush Administration and the
U.S. Congress authorized Chertoff to void and freeze, in effect, the
following federal laws, which the Obama administration has re-
moved from the official policy agenda, and will not review, nor re-
instate:
1. National Env ironmental Policy Act (Pub. L. 9 1-190, 83 Stat.
852 (Jan. 1, 1970) (42 U.S.C. 4321 et seq.))
2. Endangered Species Act (Pub. L. 93-205, 87 Stat. 884
(Dec. 28, 1973) (1 6 U.S.C. 153 1 et seq.))
3. Federal Water Pollution Control Act (commonly re
ferred to as the Clean Water Act) (Act of June 30, 1948,
c. 758, 62 Stat. 1155 (33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq.))
4. National Historic Preservation Act (Pub. L. 89-665, 80
Stat. 91 5 (Oct. 15, 1966) (16 U.S.C. 470 et seq.))
Támez 303

5. Migratory Bird Treaty Act (1 6 U.S.C. 703 et seq.)

6. Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. 7401 et seq.)
7. Archeological Resources Protection Act (Pub. L. 96-
95, 16 U.S.C. 470aa et seq.)
8. Safe Drinking Water Act (42 U.S.C. 300f et seq.)
9. Noise Control Act (42 U.S.C. 4901 et seq.)
10. Solid Waste Disposal Act, as amended by the Re
source Conservation and Recovery Act (42 U.S.C.
6901 et seq.)
11. Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compen
sation, and Liability Act (42 U.S.C. 9601 et seq.)
12. Federal Land Policy and Management Act (Pub. L.
94-579, 43 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)
13. Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act (Pub. L. 73-121,
48 Stat. 401, 16 U.S.C. 661 et seq.)
14. Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act (Pub. L.
86-523, 16 U.S.C. 469 et seq.)
15. Antiquities Act (16 U.S.C. 431 et seq.)
16. Historic Sites, Buildings, and Antiquities Act (16
U.S.C. 461 et seq.)
17. Arizona- Idaho Conservation Act of 1988 (Pub. L.
100-696, 16 U.S.C. 460xx et seq.)
18. Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (Pub. L. 90-542, 16
U.S.C. 1281 et seq.)
19. Farmland Protection Policy Act (7 U.S.C. 4201 et
seq.)
20. Administrative Procedure Act (5 U.S.C. 551 et seq.).

Amidst battles against these suspensions of legal rights, Eloisa Gar-

cía Támez challenged the construction of the Berlin-style wall in the
Lipan Apache traditional lands of the Ranchería of El Calaboz. Her
arguments to protect ancestral lands, elders’ lands, and collective
rights extended to any other similarly impacted traditional and rural
peoples along the path of the border wall. Támez argued on four key
rights: culture, environment, economic livelihood, and way of life.
In her testimonies she consistently made reference to the loss of re-
ligious and traditional knowledge related to the flora and fauna of
her lands, through the historic uses of eminent domain by Euro-
American settler states. Today, in what was originally a 12,000 acre
land-grant to three of her matrilineal ancestors, numerous species
are at risk of destruction by the U.S. border wall: peyote, anacua,
mesquite, huisache, golondrina, wolf berry, and the chacalaca and
other relative species, which are all considered critical medicines
important to the knowledge systems of Ndé Peoplehood.69 These are
combined with sacred elements such as lightning, water, prayers,
songs and rituals—and knowledge of these are handed down tradi-
tionally from mothers to daughters through the Ndé coming-of-age
ceremony.70
In late April 2009, the U.S. government gained access to the
Támez lands and finished construction on the final section of the
Texas-Mexico border wall. On the day she received the news, she
was sitting in a conference presentation on the militarization of U.S.
universities, presented by faculty of the University of Texas system,
in Albuquerque, New Mexico.71 A severe blow to the 72-year-old
304 WORKS AND DAYS

career nurse and Lt. Colonel in the Army Corps of Nurses, Támez re-
gained her strength through the community of scholar-activists
around her, who immediately surrounded her in a blanket of pro-
tection, and held an emergency press conference. True to the strate-
gies of Indigenous women, Támez worked directly with activists and
the media as her “organization.” By keeping control over the mes-
sage and the tools, Indigenous women along the U.S.-Mexico bor-
der stay focused on the local-global struggles as defined by women,
family and community-focused collectives.
Támez is quick to point out that the movement to stop the U.S.
border wall, with the Lipan Apaches of El Calaboz Ranchería, began
with the spiritual, mental, and physical focus of Támez’s prayers to
a deity, the Sacred Mother. One night, when we were discussing
strategies to unite small groups of allies with our movement, I asked
why she was going to ask the parish priest of St. Ignatius in El Ran-
chito for help. She stated:
I had a vision, from a prayer I made to our Mother.72 She
told me I needed to stand up and fight now and to go to
the parish priest, who is from Africa, and to tell him what
she told me. I did exactly that, and I was so happy to do
so. She was very direct to me. I knew I had to. She would
be there with us. I felt her.

Numerous media sources have asked her why she took a stand
against the government’s taking of their lands and construction of
the border wall, when so many people could not. She stated:
The reason I speak out about hanging onto our land is
because. . .the people here. . .we are humble people, we
respect [. . .] and we’re facing quite a challenge, and it is
important that my people know. . .it is important that we
stand up for our rights. Here are the remnants of the land
grant73 awarded to my people in San Pedro de Carricitos
back in 1767. I remember my father and grandfather used
to farm this side of the levee as well as land grandmother
had that went all the way to the river’s edge. There is no
dollar value for this land in comparison to those memo-
ries of how hard it was for my father, my grandfather to
carve life out for their families. We’ve always been here,
just here, always. We serve, we pay taxes, my father was
in military, I also served 17 years. . .I’m proud of it. No
thought was given to who will be harmed by [the gov-
ernment, the border wall]. Why do our people have to
sacrifice our land and lives for them?74

Támez mapped the landscapes from a different understanding of

law, security, and community—one based in ancient, community
law systems, and rooted in matrilineal oral history and knowledge.
She theorizes these understandings as she is followed daily by armed
U.S. Border Patrol soldiers, while she walks her lands to “keep an eye
on and take pictures of” the invasion occurring. Cherokee scholar
Andrea Smith describes these on-the-ground theorizations and meth-
ods as “native feminism without apology.” Smith says:
Támez 305

[…] if we were to recognize the agency of Indigenous

women in an account of feminist history, we might begin
with 1492 when Native women collectively resisted col-
onization. This would allow us to see that there are mul-
tiple feminist histories emerging from multiple
communities of colour which intersect at points and di-
verge in others. This would not negate the contributions
made by white feminists, but would de-center them from
our historicizing and analysis. [. . .] Indigenous feminism
thus centers anti-colonial practice within its organizing.
This is critical today when you have mainstream feminist
groups supporting, for example, the US bombing of
Afghanistan with the claim that this bombing will free
women from the Taliban (apparently bombing women
somehow liberates them). Indigenous feminists are [. . .]
challenging how we conceptualize Indigenous sover-
eignty—it is not an add-on to the heteronormative and
patriarchal nationstate. Rather it challenges the nation-
state system itself.75

In this nexus, Támez is continuing to fight colonial and imperial-

ist violence and threats against her people. Her concern for the eld-
ers and the future generations of her grandchildren is always at the
forefront of her work. Since the wall was constructed through her
peoples’ lands, the elders have not accessed their lands on the south
side—which is dangerous due to the high traffic by U.S. Border Pa-
trol and helicopters when they attempt to be on their lands. Even
though all the officers know who the plaintiffs are, and why they try
to use their lands, they are treated like criminals, suspects and threats
first. The walk to get on the south side of the gate takes over 45 min-
utes for a healthy, active person to walk. For elders, this is doubled.
This is problematic for cattle and goat herders. The loss of livelihood
has extreme consequences for peoples who have no other source of
income and whose traditional herding customs are being severed.
When the elders are prevented from their way of life, they are dis-
rupted from passing along those knowledges to future generations.

Update: Lipan Apaches, Támez-Benavidez Stronghold on Texas-

Mexico Border Singled Out for New Round of Federal Condemnations

In mid-December 2009, the United States sent Eloisa García

Támez and her elders a notification that due to the need to “cure ac-
cess” for “property owners” (developers) the government is de-
manding a 12-month right of entry to survey more of the
community’s lands, and if the elders refuse to sign another waiver to
their rights, then the U.S. may proceed with condemnation. In other
words, the U.S. is threatening a second-round of forced removals,
displacements and dispossessions, only in the El Calaboz commu-
nity. At present, the Támez case is awaiting a jury trial to determine
the amount of “damage” the community has thus far experienced
and “compensation” that the U.S. citizen-taxpayers owe to this com-
munity. The compensation hearing has been postponed three times
already. In the meantime, Támez continues to document the inces-
sant harassment and daily threats the community experiences by vig-
306 WORKS AND DAYS

ilant U.S. Border Patrol officers, newly recruited from midwestern

and other inland states, white Anglos and Hispanic whites, with no
cultural competencies in the local histories of Indigenous peoples.
Támez states, “to them, where we live, the way they see the world
. . . Indians are all ‘Meskins’ and that means ‘the enemies.’” She
walks along the wall frequently and makes plans for the future.
“We’re going to plant food gardens, and continue to direct the com-
munity through the construction of an Indigenous institute for law,
environment, economics, and customary ways of life—an institute to
be named after my father and my great-grandmother. In this new
place, we will continue the legal battles, and to raise our voices,
which will educate the people, build a library, nurture traditional
cultural programs, protect ceremonial practices, encourage scholars
who develop papers here while in residence, and continue to work
at all levels to knock down this wall of death.”76
Indigenous women at the U.S.-Mexico militarized zone are fight-
ing “wars” against the physical enslavement, detention, and removal
of our parents, children, sisters, mothers, aunts, uncles, brothers and
extended families—behind bars, 18-foot walls, detention centers and
gulags.77 Human rights defenders are threatened daily by police, Bor-
der Patrol, politicians, paramilitary groups, corporate defenders and
employees, and operatives of the Department of Homeland Secu-
rity. Largely, Indigenous women are assaulted through cultural, so-
cial, economic, and political frameworks which too often deny the
on-going colonization of the Indigenous Americas. This important
baseline is disconnected from normative discourse of “the border,”
“Latin American,” “borderlands,” “Mexico,” “U.S.” and heteropatri-
archal “Aztlan” understandings which efface Indigenous homelands,
people and contemporary struggles by diverse polities—from and of
the lands bisected.
Indigenous women’s human rights defense work is deeply in-
formed by and with support and authority from the communities
across the Indigenous networks locally and throughout the milita-
rized bordered territories, or what I call the U.S.-Mexico Zone of
Militarized Occupation & Conflict (U.S.-Mexico ZMOC). I utilize
this phrase to emphasize and to illustrate the ways that current mil-
itarization along the border operates as physical, economic, histor-
ical, and political erasure of so-called “refusing” dissident identities
and collective rights of Indigenous women as a unique category in
the protection of human rights.78 The U.S.-Mexico ZMOC exists
through normalized violence against the Indigenous peoples as ex-
terminable and the Earth as commodified. The Indigenous women
challenge the invisibility of multiply-oppressed communities spe-
cific to the U.S.-Mexico International Boundary region. They disag-
gregate complex ways in which they are situated in the interstices of
“human rights,” “Indigenous rights,” “citizenship,” “nation,” “bor-
ders,” “gender,” “status,” and “ethnicity” in Western legal thought.

Conclusion

Indigenous women human rights defenders promote the critical

dissemination of education, support, and the integration at the state-
Támez 307

level of the Indigenous peoples’ and human rights as ratified by the

United Nations General Assembly, 2007, United Nations Declara-
tion on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.79 The states’ use of armed
force, coercion, and exploitation to disrupt Indigenous peoples’
transborder and transcontinental security, and their control and de-
cision-making over their children’s futures are fundamental concerns
widely expressed across communities.80
Through the lenses and testimonies of three Indigenous women,
this essay provided local understandings and theorizations from im-
pacted Indigenous communities and human rights defenders from
three transnational and transborder communities.81 Working with
numerous collectives, these women are shaping contemporary
frameworks of resistance to forced dispossession, and calling atten-
tion to many ways that imperialist and capitalist systems generate
destructive impacts for Indigenous peoples. At the same time, these
processes work to the benefit of elites and specifically socialized
“citizens” who promote the advancement of industrial and military
systems through increasingly masculine terrains of armed force,
threat, and destruction. From Indigenous women’s perspectives, all
of the above worked hand-in-glove to implant structures tactically
maneuvered to infiltrate, overthrow, and expropriate Indigenous
lands, governing systems, critical Indigenous interrelationships, epis-
temologies, and autonomy from tyrannical and violent forms of re-
lationships with Earth and life. Indigenous women have been explicit
within their families, intimate circles, and religious societies. Civi-
cally engaged projects restore Indigenous self-determination, au-
tonomy, and self-rule beyond the constraining definitions of
constitutionalist settler and tribal governments, and they are on-
going priorities in the recovery of Indigenous clan and band-based
customary governance, histories, intelligence and properties.
The international legal spheres are important sites for the recovery
and accomplishment of that work, to which Indigenous women sig-
nify “rebirth” for Indigenous self-rule. The advancing of the disrup-
tion of imperialist violence, exploitation, militarism as weapons of
anti-Indigeneity, and militarization as the machine through which it
operates at its most destructive level, are key tenets of current work
along the U.S.-Mexico border. The critical rebuilding and healing
processes in the recovery of intergenerational memory, education,
and transmission, help to fasten the self-determination process to the
documentation of human rights violations. Ongoing challenges by
individuals, groups, and states to Indigenous peoplehood are key
frameworks for transborder Indigenous women’s anti-imperialist and
human rights defense work with the U.S.-Mexico boundary.

Notes
1
Margo García Támez (Lipan Apache, Jumano-Apache) received her
Ph.D. in the American Studies Program at Washington State University in
May 2010. Gratitude and acknowledgement is given to Eloisa García Támez,
Teresa Leal, and Lori Riddle for their contributions to this article, and sacri-
fices made. I wish to acknowledge Ayano Ginoza, Carmen Lugo-Lugo, Linda
Heidenreich and Judy Meuth for their incisive comments on earlier drafts of
308 WORKS AND DAYS

this paper. Their suggestions added critical dimensions and insights. I also
acknowledge deep gratitude to Jenn Weldy, whose critical lenses and edi-
torial skills empowered this project. Any errors and faults in the article are
my own.
2
Angelique EagleWoman, “The Eagle and the Condor of the Western
Hemisphere: Application of International Indigenous Principles to Halt the
United States Border Wall,” Idaho Law Review, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2009, 1-18,
at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1440831, (accessed December 27, 2009).
3
American Civil Liberties Union. “Fact Sheet on U.S. ‘Constitution Free
Zone,’” ACLU.org. http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/fact-sheet-
us-constitution-free-zone.
4
Rosa Linda Fregoso, “‘We Want Them Alive!’: The Politics and Culture
of Human Rights,” Social Identities, Vol. 12, No. 2, March 2006, 114.
5
For more information about the work of Teresa Leal, see http://native-
women372.blogspot.com/2008/12/teresa-leal-binational-Indigenous.html,
(accessed December 27, 2009); for Lori Thomas-Riddle see O’odham Sol-
idarity Across Borders Collective, at http://oodhamsolidarity.blogspot.com/,
(accessed December 27, 2009); for Lori Thomas-Riddle’s work with Youth
United for Community Action (Palo Alto, CA) against Romic Environmental
Technologies, Inc., see http://www.youthunited.net/hl/index.php?content=
hl_highlights, (accessed December 27, 2009).
6
Robert A. Williams, Jr. The American in Western Legal Thought: The Dis-
courses of Conquest, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
7
See generally, Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A His-
tory of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810, (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1964); Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Has-
kett, Eds., Indian Women in Early Mexico, (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1997).
8
Williams, Ibid.
9
Gibson, Ibid; James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social
and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through
Eighteenth Centuries, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
10
See generally, Schroeder, et al.
11
Many more than twelve Indigenous peoples’ communities are aborigi-
nal to the lands currently bisected by the U.S.-Mexico International Bound-
ary region, a 2,000-mile long militarized zone that has a North-South/
South-North girth of approximately 100 miles. The nation-states of the
United States and Mexico have, since the late colonial period (1752-1821),
worked perniciously to repress the resistances, histories, and knowledges of
many Indigenous communities.
12
Security and Prosperity Partnership, see generally, “SPP.GOV: A North
American Partnership: SPP Myths vs. Facts,” at http://www.spp.gov/
myths_vs_facts.asp, (accessed December 27, 2009); and Judicial Watch Inc.,
“Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,” at http://www.judi-
cialwatch.org/SPP.shtml, (accessed December 27, 2009). “On March 23,
2005, heads of government Vincente Fox, George W. Bush, and Paul Mar-
tin launched the North American partnership at a meeting in Waco, Texas,
with the expressed goal of ‘a safer, more prosperous North America.’”
13
April Cotte and Enrique Madrid, “Overview of Border Patrol Activity in
Redford, Texas, 2007-2009.” Available upon request from the authors. “The
Redford River crossing was part of a prehistoric trade route for thousands of
years through the Indigenous pueblo, Tapalcolmes, later renamed El Polvo
then Redford. We will use El Polvo here to denote the part of Redford where
dirt roads dead end at the river crossing and there is the highest concentra-
tion of houses. Indigenous agricultural communities occupied this area con-
tinuously for 2000 years with artifacts dating 8 to 10,000 years line both
sides of the river for a 20 mile stretch around the crossing. People on both
sides of the river are related to each other and interdependent.”
Támez 309

14
The U.S.-Mexico Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and subsequent
treaties and covenants firmly established the international boundary cutting
across 2,000 miles of North America, thus militarizing and bifurcating thou-
sands of tribal, clan-based communities which were then forcibly re-orga-
nized through both U.S. and Mexico’s legal systems into a handful of “tribes”
and “nations.”
15
Romero-Lar, Fernando, Hyper-border: The Contemporary U.S.-Mexico
Border and Its Future, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).
16
Romero-Lar, Ibid.
17
Interviews of Teresa Leal, Lori Thomas-Riddle and Eloisa García Támez,
August 2007.
18
Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-
Mexican War, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
19
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (hereinafter “TGH”) is an agreement
between the two States regulating, controlling and restructuring the com-
merce, currency, taxes, and the people between Mexico and the U.S. as ex-
pressed in Articles III, VI, VII, XVII, XIX, and XX.
20
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_cen-
tury/guadhida.asp, (accessed December 23, 2009).
21
See also TGH, Article X, at http://www.southwest-books.org/treaty-
htm#articlex, (accessed December 23, 2009). It should be noted as well
that Article X, protecting land grants awarded to Indigenous and Hispani-
cized settler groups in lands previously in Mexico’s domain, was stricken
out, due to the contestation of the Republic of Texas. The TGH set forth that
land grants within the jurisdiction of Texas “shall not be obligatory upon the
State of Texas, in virtue of the stipulations contained in this Article.” “The
foregoing stipulation in regard to grantees of land in Texas, is extended to all
grantees of land in the territories aforesaid, elsewhere than in Texas, put in
possession under such grants; and, in default of the fulfillment of the con-
ditions of any such grant, within the new period, which, as is above stipu-
lated, begins with the day of the exchange of ratifications of this treaty, the
same shall be null and void.”
22
Williams, Ibid., 13-58.
23
EagleWoman, Ibid.
24
United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, at http://www.un.org/esa/
socdev/unpfii/en/declaration.html, (accessed December 27, 2009).
25
The Texas-Mexico border, above all other corridors, consistently ranks
#1 for deprived living conditions imposed by capitalism, militarism, racism,
and structural violence socializing racial and ethnic stratification. Both State-
normed patriarchy and transnational oligarchical business and political ties
entangle the bonds of kinship and inter-marriages informing the complex In-
digenous, Hispanic, Anglo South Texas border “machine.”
26
Groups such as American Immigration Control Foundation, California
Coalition for Immigration Reform, Federation for American Immigration Re-
form, National Organization for European American Rights, NumbersUSA,
ProjectUSA, The Social Contract Press, Voices of Citizens Together/American
Patrol, and the Minute Men.
27
Southern Poverty Law Center, “Anti-Immigration Groups,” at
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?sid=175, (accessed De-
cember 23, 2009); Ibid., Heidi Beirich, “The Teflon Nativists: FAIR Marked
by Ties to White Supremacy,” at http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/ar-
ticle.jsp?aid=846, (accessed December 23, 2009).
28
See Cynthia Bejarano and Rosalinda Fregoso, Terrorizing Women: Fem-
inicide in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Also see
December 10, 2009 opinion of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
in the “Campo Algodonero vs. Mexico” case, accessible at Center for Jus-
tice and Accountability, at http://www.cja.org/article.php?id=724, (accessed
310 WORKS AND DAYS

December 27, 2009). General content of opinion, at http://www.cja.org/ar-

ticle.php?id=724. Ariel Dulitzky’s comments on decision of the IAC/OAS, at
http://www.utexas.edu/law/news/2009/121109_dulitzky_advises_his-
toric_case.html. “This is the first case in which an international tribunal has
found Mexico guilty for the murders of women that have occurred in Ciu-
dad Juárez in northern Mexico. The Court decided in favor of the murdered
women, Claudia Ivette González, Esmeralda Herrera Monreal, and Laura
Berenice Ramos Monárrez, whose bodies were found in an area known as
“Campo Algodonero” (Cotton Field) together with five other victims.”
29
Yaqui, Apache, Mayo, Raramuri, Lipan Apache, Mescalero Apache, Ju-
mano-Apache, Chiricahua, Ópata, and O’odham peoples.
30
See Silvio Zavala, Ibid.
31
Not only is the Indigenous land-base along the Ndé-Texas-Mexico bor-
derlands not Aztlan, nor the “Native-American” borderlands, nor the “His-
panic” Southwest, these cultural domains are also not a zone of hybridity,
cyborgs, and “bodies in production.” The symbolic and cultural role that
“borderlands” has played in the obfuscation of Indigenous peoples’ contin-
uous anti-colonial struggles, destruction of biodiversity, and the obsession
with organizing the U.S.-Mexico borders as militarized zones is a perverse
commitment by constitutionalist societies to vanishing specific Indigenous
communities through depopulation, denationalization, and displacement.
32
Leal, Teresa. Interview. June 14, 2008. Nogales, Sonora, México. I was
visiting Teresa at this time on the matter of gaining counsel from her for my
daughter Milpa, who was in the Seri village of Sonora, and for whom I was
preparing and sponsoring the traditional Na’ii’ees Isdzanleshe ceremony,
(the Apache Puberty Ceremony/White Painted Woman ceremony). After
Teresa and I reunited with Milpa, I asked Teresa to tell us the story of the fa-
mous Yaqui healer, Teresita de Urrea, after whom Teresa is named in her
honor. At times, and for different purposes, stories from the “present” are
enmeshed with the history lessons from “the past.”
33
In Nogales, Sonora, Leal and her comadres are renowned for their two
year occupation of the garbage dumping site on the outskirts of the munici-
pio, known informally as the “Squatters Rebellion,” where a collective used
Constitutional Article 27 to take and to occupy public lands for raising sub-
sistence food crops, and to build themselves appropriate housing according
to the traditions of Indigenous peoples.
34
For more information about Teresa Leal, see http://nativewomen372.
blogspot.com/, (accessed March 22, 2010).
35
Each colonia maintains its own identity and through kinship and reci-
procity is also networked with numerous others in challenges to the forces
of assimilation, poverty, poor education systems, forced removals, lack of
food and water security, and the government’s and private sector’s racism
and neglect towards the common peoples.
36
The deported workers from the U.S. since the implementation of the
2006 Secure Fence Act.
37
Margo Tamez, “Nádasi’né’ nde’ isdzáné begoz’aahi’ shimaa shini’ gokal
Gowa goshjaa ha’áná’idiłí texas-nakaiyé godesdzog,” [Translation: Returning
Lipan Apache Women’s Laws, Lands, & Strength in El Calaboz Ranchería,
Texas-Mexico Border], (PhD diss., Washington State University, 2010).
38
Censored News, at http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_ archive.
html, (accessed October 30, 2009).
39
Report available upon request.
40
See “No Toxic Waste Dump or Border Wall on O’odham Lands,” at
http://www.solidarity-project.org/, (accessed December 27, 2009). See also,
O’odham Solidarity Project, at http://www.solidarity-project.org/, (accessed
December 27, 2009).
41
I elaborate on this further in the “‘Enemy’ Evil Doers, the U.S. Empire’s
Border Wall, and the Secure Fence Act 2006” section.
Támez 311

42
As members of sovereign, political entities their activism within State
legal spheres is complicated by the fact that their tribal nations are often the
strongest advocates for those definitions to remain in place, and reveals the
degree to which Indigenous populations are precariously and violently en-
tangled in capitalist and hierarchical institutions which work in multiplici-
ties to dispossess and violate numerous vulnerable Indigenous peoples.
43
See http://oodhamsolidarity.blogspot.com/, (accessed December 27,
2009).
44
See Ofelia Rivas’s interview at http://www.solidarity-project.org/, (ac-
cessed December 27, 2009). “Imperialism is not limited to lands across the
oceans, and the United States Government is currently engaged in the oc-
cupation of lands much closer to home.”
45
http://oodhamsolidarity.blogspot.com/ (accessed October 31, 2009).
46
Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gen-
der on Mexico’s Northern Frontier. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1997), 46.
47
Eloisa García Támez, et al., Plaintiffs v. Michael Chertoff, Secretary, U.S.
Department of Homeland Security, et al., Defendants, Civil Action No.: B-
08-044, The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Jus-
tice, The Texas-Mexico Border Wall, Lawsuits Filed Challenging
Government’s Actions, Affirmative Class Action Litigation—Tamez Family,
at http://www.utexas.edu/law/academics/centers/humanrights/border-
wall/law/lawsuits-government.html, (accessed December 27, 2009); See
also “Tamez Family Defensive Litigation,” The Bernard and Audre Rapoport
Center for Human Rights and Justice, The Texas-Mexico Border Wall, Legal
Action Against Property Owners Seeking Condemnation of Land, at
http://www.utexas.edu/law/academics/centers/humanrights/borderwall/law/l
awsuits-property.html, (accessed December 27, 2009). The Támez case has,
by far, generated a large amount of defense litigation, and is best understood
in careful study through the case history, as well as through the sites pro-
duced by community members who work in alliance with the impacted
communities. See the Lipan Apache Women Defense at http://lipana-
pachecommunitydefense.blogspot.com/, (accessed December 27, 2009).
48
See Lipan Apache Women Defense, at http://lipanapachecommunity-
defense.blogspot.com/, (accessed December 27, 2009).
49
Enrique Gilbert-Michael Maestas and Daniel Castro Romero, Ndé: An-
thropological Report on the Cuelcahen Ndé: Lipan Apache of Texas, ©2004.
Treaty of Mission Valero de Bexar, August 19, 1749 (Spain); Land Grant of
San Pedro de Carricitos 1761 (Spain), Confirmed as #336, Texas Land Office;
Colonial del Nuevo Santander, March 15, 1791 (Spain); Agreement of the Al-
caldes de las Villas de la Provincia Laredo, August 17, 1882 (Spain); Live
Oak Point Treaty, January 8, 1838 (Republic of Texas); Tehuacama Creek
Treaty, October 9, 1844 (Republic of Texas; U.S. Government); San Saba
Treaty, October 28, 1851 (U.S. Government).
50
See National Network for Immigrant & Refugee Rights, at
http://www.nnirr.org/, (accessed December 27, 2009); The Center for Human
Rights and Constitutional Law at http://www.centerforhumanrights.org/, (ac-
cessed December 27, 2009); See The University of Texas at Austin, School
of Law, The Texas-Mexico Border Wall at http://www.utexas.edu/law/acad-
emics/centers/humanrights/borderwall/, (accessed December 27, 2009); See
The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, at
http://www.utexas.edu/law/academics/centers/humanrights/, (accessed De-
cember 27, 2009); Texas Civil Rights Project, at http://www.texascivilright-
sproject.org/, (accessed December 27, 2009).
51
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights/Organization of Ameri-
can States, at http://www.cidh.org/Comunicados/ English/ 2008/ 46.08eng.
htm, (accessed November 4, 2008).
312 WORKS AND DAYS

52
See generally, David Ronfeldt, John Arquilla, Graham E. Fuller, and
Melissa Fuller, The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico, (Santa Monica:
RAND, 1998); Michael Dartnell, Insurgency Online: Web Activism and
Global Conflict, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Inc., 2006); Margaret
E. Keck and Kathryn Kikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks
in International Politics, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Rob Kroes,
Them and Us: Questions of Citizenship in a Globalizing World, (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2000); Jonathan Alexander, Digital Youth: Emerg-
ing Literacies on the World Wide Web, (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc.,
2006); Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the In-
ternet, (New York: Routledge, 2002).
53
José Palafox, “Opening Up Borderland Studies: A Review of U.S.-Mex-
ico Border Militarization Discourse,” in History is a Weapon, at http://
www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/palafox.html, (accessed December 27,
2009); Timothy Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978-
1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home, (Austin: CMAS Books,
1996).
54
Eloisa García Támez, conversation with author while being followed
by two Customs Border Patrol squad cars, while en route to El Calaboz
Ranchería to monitor the U.S. DHS challenges to local Indigenous women’s
customary sovereignty, Brownsville, Texas, August 2008.
55
Eloisa García Támez, interview on file.
56
Margo Tamez, “Nádasi’né’ nde’ isdzáné begoz’aahi’ shimaa shini’ gokal
Gowa goshjaa ha’áná’idiłí texas-nakaiyé godesdzog.” [Translation: Returning
Lipan Apache Women’s Laws, Lands, & Strength in El Calaboz Ranchería,
Texas-Mexico Border], unpublished dissertation.
57
Margo Támez, Ibid.
58
See Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten
Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans,
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
59
Támez, Ibid.
60
Irene Blea, U.S. Chicanas & Latinas within a Global Context: Women of
Color at the Fourth World Women’s Conference, (London: Praeger, 1997),
123-124. At the same time, Blea argues that women such as Esparza were
often eclipsed by the patriarchal-driven politics of the Indigenous peoples”
social movements, such as the Chicano movement, and that Indigenous
women’s work was rendered invisible through those structures. Community
member Margie Esparza noted to me that the traditional peoples of the
rancherías did not agree with Blea’s assignation of Francisca Reyes Esparza
as a “Chicana.”
61
Donald L. Chipman, Moctezuma’s Children: Aztec Royalty Under Span-
ish Rule, 1520-1700, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).
62
These lands were granted to them by the sovereign agreement between
their ancestors and Spain. This agreement was later ratified by Mexico, the
State. This grant was confirmed by the Republic, and later the state of Texas.
63
Williams, Ibid., “The basic idea of the Church as a universal body, unit-
ing all peoples in Christ and hierarchically directed by the pope, God’s ap-
pointed representative on earth, can be traced to the earliest history of
Western Christianity” (15). The will to empire expressed in this central vision
of a universal order established through law and lawgiving is a distinctive
feature of the West’s colonizing discourse of conquest (17).
64
One Hundred Ninth Congress of the United States of America, At the
Second Session, “HR6061, Secure Fence Act 2006,” January 3, 2006, Li-
brary of Congress, Thomas, Bills & Resolutions, at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-
bin/query/D?c109:4:./temp/~c109F8Du9W, (accessed April 9, 2009).
65
Bush, Ibid.
66
See Southern Poverty Law Center, Intelligence Report, “Anti-Immigra-
tion Groups” at http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/ article.jsp?sid=
Támez 313

175 (accessed April 10, 2009); Heidi Beirich, “New SPLC Report: Three
Leading anti-immigration groups share extremist roots,” February 3, 2009,
Southern Poverty Law Center, Hatewatch: Keeping an Eye on the Radical
Right, http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2009/02/03/new-splc-report-three-
leading-anti-immigration-groups-share-extremist-roots/. The Minute Men,
American Immigration Control Foundation, California Coalition for Immi-
gration Reform, Federation for American Immigration Reform, National Or-
ganization for European American Rights, NumbersUSA, ProjectUSA, The
Social Contract Press, The Stein Report, V-DARE, Voices of Citizens To-
gether/American Patrol, and the “independent” scholarly think tank, Center
for Immigration Studies are key ideological “centers” in this deployment.
67
Anthony S. Tangeman, Office of Detention and Removal, “Memoran-
dum for Deputy Assistant Director, Field Operations Division, Field Office
Directors, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Cus-
toms Enforcement, June 27, 2003.” Memorandum and full report on file with
author.
68
Section 102 of the REAL ID Act of 2005, Public Law 109–13, Div. B,
119 Stat. 231, 302, 306 (May 11, 2005) (REAL ID Act) 8 U.S.C. 1103 note.
69
Margo Tamez and Daniel Castro Romero, Jr., “Lipan Apache History,
Culture, Sacred Sites, Archaeological Resources, and Ecological Rights in
the Lower Rio Grande, with respect to Cameron County and Titled Lands
Held by Lipan Apache Lineal Descendents, in the case of Eloisa Garcia
Tamez,” Reply for Interrogatories, 5th District, United States Federal Court,
January 21, 2009.
70
Ines Talamantez, “In the Space between Earth and Sky: Contemporary
Mescalero Apache Ceremonialism,” in Native Religions and Cultures of
North America: Anthropology of the Sacred, Lawrence E. Sullivan, Ed. (New
York: Continuum, 2003).
71
Western Social Science Association, 2009 Annual Conference, program
at http://wssa.asu.edu/conferences/WSSAPROGRAM2009.pdf, (accessed
December 27, 2009).
72
Sacred mother of many Indigenous people with histories of coloniza-
tion under Spanish Catholic Mission systems; she is a deity which paralleled
the disapproved devotion to the Lipan Apaches’ original, ancestral cultural
holy mother, Na’ii’ees Isdzanleshe, or White Painted Woman.
73
“Texas” has only been “Texas” for a very short period of Ndé (Apache)
people’s histories in land tenure in the region, in contrast to Ndé people’s
land tenure in the much larger Southern Athapaskan territory which today
includes: Texas, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora,
New Mexico and Arizona. The “American Colonies” and the “Declaration
of Independence” were still kernels in the imagination of (undocumented
and illegal) immigrants in New England at the time the King of Spain au-
thorized “charters” such as “Tejas” and imposed a “porcion” (fractionated
lands) upon the Lipan Apache. This land tenure formation with colonials
and pre-state entities in Southern Athapaskan territory, predates both asen-
tamientos de indios and “Indian Reservations” as some of the earliest forms
of Indigenous containment in North America.
74
Eloisa García Támez, interviewed by Melissa del Bosque. “Why I Speak
Out,” The Texas Observer. March 7, 2008. At http://www.texasobserver.-
org/web_features/border_interviews/?page=brownsville-1, (accessed Sep-
tember 8, 2008).
75
Smith, Andrea. Excerpted from “Indigenous Feminism,” 10/30/2006. At
http://www.un-instraw.org/revista/hypermail/alltickers/en/0821.html, (ac-
cessed September 8, 2008).
76
In a recent press release dated January 5, 2010, LAW-Defense re-
sponded to the use of force by the United States, at http://lipanapachecom-
munitydefense.blogspot.com/2010/01/Indigenous-elders-singled-out-for-ne
w.html, (accessed March 22, 2010).
314 WORKS AND DAYS

77
See Daniel Ibsen Morales, “In Democracy’s Shadow: Fences, Raids, and
the Production of Migrant Illegality,” Legal Studies Research Paper Series,
Paper No. 1068, January 2009, University of Wisconsin Law School, at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1301598, (accessed De-
cember 27, 2009).
78
Ken Ellingwood, “Court Cites Failure by Mexico in Juarez Killings of
Women,” Los Angeles Times, December 11, 2009, at
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-mexico-ruling11-
2009dec11,0,7865590.story, (accessed December 27, 2009).
79
UNPFII, Ibid. See “Intervention Documents, Global Indigenous
Women’s Caucus—8th Session, UNPFII,” at http://lipanapachecommunity-
defense.blogspot.com/2009/06/global-Indigenous-womens-caucus-
8th.html, (accessed December 27, 2009).
80
Ibid.
81
It is beyond the scope and focus of this paper to illuminate the many
complex ways that Indigenous peoples of the region are impacted by the
militarized U.S.-Mexico border. My hope is that this discussion will stimu-
late and prioritize productive research, collaboration and publication which
support this concern.

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