Indian Given

"Indian Given is an important interrogation of racial and knowledge production in the Americas and offers important analyses of how racial geographies figure in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. With Indian Given, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo gives us the most comprehensive study of indigenous Mexican and Mexican American identity formations to date."  - Sonia Saldívar-Hull, author of Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature

"Indian Given is a transnational scholarly mural, offering a critical account of North America with both exacting specificity and stunning synthesis, all on one continuous canvas. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s archival skills are formidable across centuries, languages, and geographies. Her archive includes not only Las Casas, La Malinche, and Geronimo, but also Javier Bardem, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and Osama bin Laden. As soon as I finished reading Indian Given, I wanted to start it again." - Robert Warrior, editor of The World of Indigenous North America

"The author delves into a large amount of theory and challenges readers to think about how region, history, and identity are part of a complex relationship. Recommended." - F. Montoya, Choice

"Saldana-Portillo’s monograph makes critical contributions to the fields of indigenous studies, borderlands studies, American studies, Mexican studies, Chicano/a studies, gender studies, transnational studies, western legal studies, and Southwest studies—just to name a few. Indian Given truly has the potential to help set the agenda in multiple disciplines." - John Gram, H-Net Reviews

"An eclectic, informative, and entertaining work. . . . Saldaña-Portillo’s work will certainly be an eye-opener for anyone who picks it up." - F. Todd Smith, American Historical Review

“Indian Given will be of great interest to scholars and university students who explore issues of Indigeneity in Mexico and the United States. Its interdisciplinary inquiry makes an important contribution to the ?eld of Indigenous studies.” - Emilio del Valle Escalante, Native American and Indigenous Studies

"Indian Given is intriguing and provides a nuanced alternative to some scholars’ lapses into essentialism or the ethnographic present when discussing identity and race." - Eric V. Meeks, Latin American Research Review

"Saldaña-Portillo illuminates the racial process in which indigenous people have been central to the continuous colonial and national space-making projects of Mexico and the United States." - Jorge Ramirez, Radical History Review