Insurgent Veins: Indigenismo, Indigenous Literatures, and Decolonial Cracks

Insurgent Veins examines the decolonial ideological bridge between the early twentieth-century indigenista literary tradition and its influence on the consolidation of Indigenous literature, which emerged alongside social mobilizations in Mesoamerica and the Andean corridor. Traditionally, Indigenous and indigenista studies have been treated as separate fields of inquiry; Insurgent Veins challenges this dichotomy by exploring the thematic and political commonalities between the two subfields. Through a contrapuntal analysis of literary texts and social movements, José Carlos Díaz-Zanelli demonstrates that indigenista proposals have continued to shape the ideological formations of Indigenous literature in recent decades across Latin America. Díaz-Zanelli argues that Indigenous and indigenista studies are not mutually exclusive but overlap in significant ways, including their direct critique of capitalist modernity, their incorporation of race as a framework for struggle, and their engagement with decolonization.

José Carlos Díaz-Zanelli is visiting assitant professor of Hispanic Studies at Hamilton College. He is co-editor of Worlding Latin America: Corpus, Praxis, and Global Networks. His scholarship focuses on Indigenous literatures in Latin America and Environmental Humanities. His work has been published in journals such as Comparative Literature Studies, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, América Crítica, and MLN-Hispanic Issue.