I’m addressing these shallow critiques of Chicanx Indigeneity because too many of our Indigenous youth are searching for grounding, healing, and belonging in the face of colonial erasure. In a society built on white supremacy, where our spirit and identity are constantly under attack, the last thing they need is to be shamed by our own. We can’t afford to let distorted narratives confuse those reclaiming what was stolen.
Two recent pieces sparked this reflection: “How the Chican@ Discourse Silences Indigenous Peoples from Mexico + Central Americans “and ” My Thoughts on Indigeneity, as an Indigenous Person”. I’ve seen this kind of critique before—often coming from non-Mexican or non-Chicanx voices, some of whom carry legitimate grievances about how Mexican or Chicanx individuals or spaces have treated them. But what begins as personal hurt can sometimes spiral into generalized resentment—fueling rhetoric that targets anything Chicanx or Mexican as inherently extractive or oppressive.
I understand—grievances exist, and not everyone knows how to process them in a way that builds rather than harms. But some of these Native critics, who carry a stronger sense of Indigenous identity or academic legitimacy, are promoting a damaging idea: that there’s a hard line between an “Indigenous Person” and a “Person of Indigenous Descent.”
This framing erases those of us—Indigenous Mexicans—who are actively healing, remembering, and reclaiming our identity after generations of forced assimilation. When voices with institutional credibility repeat that binary, it reinforces colonial erasure instead of dismantling it.
This concept is dangerous because those still building confidence in their Indigenous identity might internalize these critics’ condescending claims and flawed binaries. I won’t respond to every point, but the arguments are riddled with generalizations, ambiguity, and elitist tone.
For example, they throw around phrases like “taking up Indigenous spaces” without defining what that actually means; they conflate Latinx, Chicanx, and Mexica as if these terms are interchangeable; and they talk down to people reclaiming identity, as if we’re outside appropriators. Worse, they act as if we so-called “descendants” aren’t fighting for survival daily—in our neighborhoods, in our schools, in our own families. As if Mexican people in the U.S. haven’t been taught to hate our own faces, tongues, and ways of being. That shame is a product of colonization—and reclaiming our Indigeneity is how we resist it.
You can read the articles yourself—they’re not long. I also responded to the first one by the sister Jessica Hernandez, which earned me a Twitter bashing and a bunch of unearned labels I won’t even bother getting into. I’m trying to be fair here—maybe these are young folks in college, probably dealing with other Mexicans or Central Americans just starting to come into awareness of their Indigeneity. I can imagine that might feel frustrating to someone who’s carried that awareness their whole life.
I really am trying to listen, even through the mostly immature behavior. But let’s keep it 100: they’re adults. They know what they’re doing. This isn’t just random venting—it’s coordinated, bold, and they’re pressing buttons on purpose. So if we’re gonna have this conversation, let’s at least be honest about that.
The core grief I’m hearing is that Chicanx/Mexicas who these more-Ndgns-than-thou critics are united in labeling as “indigenous descendants” shouldn’t take up spaces for “Indigenous people.” I take their term “indigenous descendants” to be their pejorative way of referring to Chicanx who are just coming back into awareness of their Indigeneity, because that is probably who they’re dealing with in their social environment. I take their “indigenous person” label to mean anyone from Mexico who has had awareness of their Indigeneity all their life and can claim citizenship to a native community that still maintains a form of traditional social structure— basically conflating indigeneity with tribal citizenship.
They do have some merit in their issues with people “taking up spaces,” but they don’t differentiate what type of Chicanx they’re referring to or exactly what that looks like. We all know there are those White Mexican (true Latinos) who usurp PoC identity just because they are Mexican by nationality that take up spaces for Brown people, and yes there are still plenty of “Mexicas” who forget to acknowledge and give proper dues to the caretakers of the Native territory in which they reside. But, while barely brushing on some valid issues their points get lost in pushing their condescending concept of us not being indigenous people and competing in oppression Olympics. Chican@s in the United States get killed, incarcerated, and deal with ongoing intensities of ethnocide every day. Are we not truly indigenous because we dont all face the exact same experiences and types of white supremacy assaults?
I think there’s an honest discussion to be had, but their condescending and immature approach doesn’t encourage dialogue. It helps even less when one of your main champions and concept promoters is a Salvi dude who likes to draw caricatures of himself a lot lighter than he actually is and has made hating on anything Mexican/Chicanx one of his trademarks. Too much projecting and not enough logic.
The Chican@ community is by no means beyond reproach, and being such a large group of people, it is understandable that other groups of Native people who might not have a coherent understanding of who we are will exhibit impatience with us as we collectively come back in tune with our Indigeneity. We must protect our people and future generations from these assaults on our identity. “Kill the Indian. Save the Man” was the colonizer’s job. How other Indigenous people claiming to be about Indigenous empowerment and unity become the ones doing the colonizers’ work is both baffling and disturbing.
Yes. Let’s have a conversation about how to better respect and understand each other as Indigenous people in different experiences. Ndgns to Ndgns, just don’t come with that belittling colonizer hater bullshit.
