In nahui ollin, a cycle of four indigenous movements: Mexican Indian rights, oral traditions, sexualities, and new media

Abstract

Pre-existing more hegemonic theories of Cultural Studies, Hispanic Studies, Media Arts, and Queer Studies, Nahuatl cosmologies offers an evolving political grounding for Native scholars. A Nahuatl cosmology of four directions represents a circle of masculinity, elders, femininity, and youth and forms the epistemology by which one can view Nahuatl and Xicana/o culture. In the east, Indigenous Rights directly relate to the hegemonic oppressions such as war, prison, and heterosexism that many Indigenous men face. Indigenous peoples fight those hegemonies with international legal concepts and through expressing their different epistemologies. In the north, the Caxcan oral tradition of my family contrasts with the homophobic and genocidal narratives more common in Chicano histories. I show how contemporary writers can rely more upon oral traditions and revisions to colonial records for their historical treatments of Indigenous peoples. To the west, postmodernism and feminism offer partial but incomplete analysis of Nahuatl cultures that Nahuatl women articulate in their own literatures and cosmological relations. In particular, Leslie Silko's stories are more than capable of critiquing postmodernism and ethnography, including those that describe Raramuri peoples. To the south, I demonstrate that gay Nahuatl and Xicano men can embody the social Malinche in keeping with Nahuatl beliefs. I use the idea of the gay social Malinche to critique Troyano's film, Latin Boys Go to Hell. Alternative internet sources tend to facilitate the ideas of the Social Malinche more. Together, all four movements comprise ollin, a social and cosmic movement that embraces different sexualities and generational changes in evolving aspects of dynamic social movements. Interweaving Western thought into the basic cosmology of Indigenous peoples, two-spirit social Malinches can open a path to political and social movement to improve their various relations.