Reweaving our Pepeha

As Latin American academics living in Aotearoa, we have been asked whether we are Indigenous or not. We would answer this question negatively – as common sense – in our home countries. However, in our diasporic location, and interpellated by the Māori concept of whakapapa (genealogy, ancestral ties), what the question revealed is that the fiction of mestizaje had prevented us from thinking about our ancestral connections. This article engages with the affordances of te ao Māori (the Māori world) – for us as Latin American mestizas – to reweave the threads of our whakapapa that have been severed through colonisation and subsequent colonialities, and to reconfigure our relations with Indigenous and Afrodescendant worlds in Abya Yala and Aotearoa. We question the fiction of mestizaje making visible its commitments with the erasure – through forgetfulness – of Black and Indigenous peoples and worlds, and the whitening of Abya Yala. Inspired by te ao Māori (the Māori world), we come together committed to the (re)weaving of memory to articulate a mestizaje of remembering while reconfiguring the sense of (our) ‘belonging’ to Indigeneity

Latin American and Latino Studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology