Antonia Carcelén-Estrada
Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar
Antonia Carcelén-Estrada is an activist, translator, and scholar of comparative literature, cultural race studies, oral history, and early-modern and medieval studies. She has worked at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as for the College of the Holy Cross, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, and Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently on a scholarship at the University of New Mexico´s Latin American and Iberian Institute carrying out comparative research on the double Spanish-English colonization of Pueblo nations. Her publications on Indigenous intercultural translation include, Zapatista Stories for Dreaming An-Other World (2022), “Oral Literature” (2018), “Translation and Activism” (2018), “Weaving Abya-Yala” (2017), “What does Sumak Kawsay Mean?” (2016), “Rewriting Memory” (2012), and “Covert and Overt Ideologies in the Translation of the Wycliffe Bible into Huao Terero” (2010). Other decolonial research includes, “Oral Histories in the Black Pacific” (2022), “Decolonizing Oral History” (2021), and “Jewish and Islamic Foundations” (2020).
Title of Research : The Double Colonial Bind of the Pueblo Nations During Spanish and US Imperialism (1598-1905)
At the Latin American and Iberian Institute, Antonia conducted comparative research on the double Spanish-English colonization of Pueblo nations. In this project, she explores the Pueblo comparative colonial experience as registered in the Miguel Antonio Lovato Papers (1790-1849), the New Mexico Documents Collection (1758-1876), and the Indian Affairs Collection (1684-1903). She will present the results from the documents in the latter collection only. The manuscripts in these collections connect Indigeneity in Anglo and Spanish America bridging the gap in a single case study, though the Pueblo are hardly alone in this phenomenon of a double colonial bind, especially in New Mexico, with the most Indigenous people in the entire United States. This story of dispossession perfectly illustrates how colonialism develops legal mechanisms for dispossession of land and waterways, with documentation that even outlines the expanding lands and shrinking pay of stolen farmland and water. Dams and canals make the genocide and the ecocide evident. She believes the archival research and comparative analysis of Spanish and Commonwealth imperialism in dialogue with the double bind colonialism of the Pueblo Nation to the Viceroyalty of Mexico as Indians of New Mexico and to the genocidal advance of the United States from 1848 to 1905, and onward, will flesh out this overlapping history of an early Spanish colonialism and its reconfiguration after the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848). In the context of Wounded Knee, Antonia sets the Pueblo fight for land and water in intercultural dialogue with the Navajo and the Dakota nations in the corridor, as is also apparent in the documentation examined.
