The Children of Solaga

Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border

Abstract

In The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border (2024), Dr. Daina Sanchez offers an intimate and innovative ethnography exploring how Zapotec migrants from San Juan Solaga, Oaxaca, maintain Indigenous identity, communal practices, and a relational sense of belonging in diaspora. As the first book-length ethnography authored by a Native woman from the community studied, Sanchez’s work foregrounds Indigenous epistemologies and values such as comunalidad and convivencia, demonstrating how these practices are sustained across settler-state borders and through ongoing colonial violence. Through multisensory acts of refusal, including music, fiestas, and communal governance systems, diasporic Solagueños actively resist erasure and affirm Indigenous belonging beyond geographic and generational divides.