Latino or Native American?: New Trends in Migration and Identity Formation in Native Americans from South of the Border

This paper deals with a relatively recent phenomenon in American society: the immigration of indigenous peoples from south of the border and their opting for a new identity in the receiving country. That is why the title of our paper is Latino or Native American? Those are two identity options that these new arrivals have and that we will be exploring. Moreover, this phenomenon is also affecting the traditional view of Native American identity in the US, since in the past decades these new arrivals from South America and the Caribbean have been central in the growth both in the numbers of the Native American category and in the broadening of ideological/cultural landscape. We will focus mostly on research done in New Bedford, MA on the Maya K’iche community, which began to arrive in the United States in the late 1980’s, at the height of a violent confrontation in Guatemala between an increasingly militarized state and predominantly Mayan guerrillas and civilians. But we will also touch briefly upon other groups that are arriving in the US from the south, such as Nahuatls, Garifonas, Mixtecos, and Aimaras, among others.