Violences, displacements, and responses: exploring settler colonialism in North and Central America

The essays in this special issue engage with the multiple enduring and contemporary violences that Indigenous communities–and in particular Indigenous women–experience within and across states in North and Central America. The special issue incorporates a hemispheric and transborder focus, situating accounts of violence, dispossession, and migration experienced by Indigenous communities in Guatemala and Mexico, next to, or side-by-side with accounts of multiple violence that Native communities face in the US. Indigenous peoples and cultures in the Americas have collectively endured some of the most violent and lethal acts of colonization, elimination, and erasure in the world, and the essays here directly address shared aspects of this historic and ongoing legacy. Summarizing the major themes addressed in articles in this special issue, this Introduction reflects on the content with special attention in the ways in which settler colonialism, and a focus on gender in relation to settler colonialism (Simpson 2014; Speed 2019; Theidon 2022) forces neo-Marxian Latin American studies perspectives such as coloniality to reevaluate foundational assumptions including historical periodizations and theoretical positionalities.