Oaxaca, México. 2018

This book theorizes global Indigenous modernity through a critical ethnography of Mixtec political life, positioning Mixtec communities as modern subjects engaged in the continual reconfiguration of sovereignty, citizenship, and nationalism. In contrast to prevailing narratives that cast Indigenous peoples as outside or prior to modernity, it argues that the Mixtec inhabit and produce modernity on their own terms.

Foregrounding the interplay of queer desire, class formation, and technological innovation, the book dismantles developmentalist frameworks that portray Mixtecs as passive casualties of transnational capitalism. Instead, it demonstrates how Indigenous political formations endure and evolve, articulating alternative modernities that defy neoliberal logics of extraction and dispossession.

Methodologically, the book integrates oral histories, archival sources, and affectively charged ethnographic prose to document the sophisticated strategies through which Mixtec communities have navigated centuries of colonial domination and global capitalist restructuring. These practices constitute a counter-archive that challenges dominant epistemologies, particularly those that reduce Indigenous lives to categories of agrarian labor or cultural loss.

In so doing, the work offers critical interventions across multiple disciplines, including Anthropology, History, Latinx Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Queer Studies. It invites a rethinking of modernity not as a universal telos but as a contested terrain shaped by Indigenous epistemologies, political aspirations, and world-making practices.