Paper Short Abstract:

Mexico’s urban indigenous populations are often migrants who travel back and forth to/from their hometowns. My project seeks to give indigenous youth a platform to express a decolonial political humour through which they can make sense of, and shed public light on, their difficulties.

Paper Abstract:

Most of Mexico’s large urban areas host considerable populations of indigenous peoples from elsewhere in the country. And although internal rural-urban migration has been a characteristic of Mexico, its indigenous iteration is more circular because some communities rely on members taking charge of certain roles for a time. Ironically, now that the federal government has announced more support for indigenous peoples, such help is usually earmarked for the original rural communities. This excludes thousands who already live in or are planning to move to cities. But even with odds against them, many indigenous youth have finished university studies and now have professional jobs. Some of these highly educated individuals seek to use their acquired skills and networks to help new indigenous migrants navigate the urban world. With my project, I aim at providing a platform for indigenous youth to express their ideas and experiences on racism and discrimination through humour. This has two purposes: to help new indigenous migrants understand what awaits them in cities and how to deal with it; and to share their experience with the wider urban populations. My hope is that the collected pieces worked by indigenous youth in workshops and meetings, and published in social media by some of them, provide not only an unprecedented use of vernacular humour to deal with painful realities, but does so trying to avoid colonial categories (classism and racism). This project is therefore an experiment, trying to tease out a decolonial political humour from an indigenous perspective.