the duplex nature of indigeneity: navigating identity in the ahuehuepan diaspora

The Duplex Nature of Indigeneity is a detailed ethnography centered on Ahuehuepan, a Mexican town in the Alto Balsas region of the state of Guerrero, where an exodus of more than half the population to the United States and other parts of Mexico has altered both livelihoods and social identities. Frans Schryer traces the people, including families and descendants, who locate their identity in the Alto Balsas--a place some of them may never have seen.

Using a variety of sources, perspectives, and methods, Schryer takes a duplexity approach, which allows understanding the complexity of social reality and its complementary nature--it identifies fields, clusters, and layers as interconnected components of social life. The innovative methods consist of the combination of ethnographic description and an ethnohistorical census that provides information on every person going back to approximately 1850. That census is further examined with the use of inferential and non-inferential statistical techniques, archival research in locations not normally accessible to scholars, Facebook, phone interviews conducted over several years, and help from Nahuatl-speaking people whose perspectives on the findings generate additional information and insights.

Unique in this presentation, which dips into the lives of generations of people to draw insight on those who lay claim to transnational Indigeneity, Schryer’s work contributes to research and theoretical discussion in the field of migration and globalization studies through a close examination of one Indigenous community over the course of many years, utilizing a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods in anthropology.

Frans J. Schryer is professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Guelph. He is the author of four books, including Ethnicity and Class Conflict in Rural Mexico, winner of the Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Award from the American Society for Ethnohistory.