however, we come together on the belief that, with neither land base nor enrollment card––like so many urban Indians in the North, and so many displaced and undocumented migrants coming from the South, we have the right to “right” ourselves.65

define themselves as a network actively involved in political, educational, and cultural work that serves to raise indigenous consciousness among our communities and supports the social justice struggles of people of indigenous American origins North and South.

Early deployments of the term Xicana include Ana Castillo’s critical text Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994) and La Red Xicana Indígena, an organization founded in 1997.

She accounts for the Arab and North African racial mixing that shaped Iberian culture and the subsequent racial mixture with Indigenous peoples of the Americas during the Spanish conquest.

She argues these multiple sites of sexism across time and space have led to the subordination of Indigenous womanhood and are a result of spiritual imbalance due to the omission of the “feminine principle.”

Contemporary Xicana feminist sonic, lexical, and political replacements of the Ch with an X are meant to point to Indigenous uprisings within and throughout Chicana, Chicano, and Chicanx identities. Today, the spoken and written grapheme X acts as a mobile signifier that points to identities-in-redefinition."60

Chicana feminists continued to intervene in Chicano nationalist constructions of Indigeneity by unsettling myths and binaries that were delineated during El Movimiento through Xicanisma, an embodied feminist philosophy and praxis.

To do this, she writes, would restore spiritual balance. This restorative act challenges U.S. white supremacy, Chicano heteropatriarchy, and the Catholic Church––all rely on stringent dichotomies that repress women’s spirituality and sexuality.

Cherríe Moraga explains her use of the X indicates “a reemerging política, especially among young people, grounded in Indigenous American belief systems and identities... [that] reflects the Indian identity that has been robbed from us through colonization

an innovative expansion of previous biologically based definitions of mestizaje.

Mestiza consciousness is a cognitive decolonization process of racialized, gendered, and sexed subjects wherein la mestiza becomes aware of the Borderlands and makes conscious decisions regarding the construction of her multiple and often contradictory identities.