I was gonna ask “Are Mestizos settlers?” but I quickly realized that the answer to this question probably isn’t black and white. If the answer to this isn’t just “Yes” or “No” then what determines whether or not a Mestizo person is a settler?
I think that adopting biological definitions of settler/indigenous identities is not just un-Marxist, it has disturbing echoes of race realism. Whether someone is a settler or not shouldn’t be a question of genetics, it should be defined by how they relate to the settler state and settler ideological and cultural values. Ultimately it’s a matter of how someone self-identifies, and whether they see themselves as part of the historical settler project or as outside or opposed to it. It has to do with the community they associate with and grew up in. Indigenous identity can be erased by assimilation but the reverse is also true, that people with settler ancestry can be deprogramed and learn to integrate into an indigenous culture and community (of course, as some comrades have pointed out in their replies below, this can only happen AFTER the stolen land has been returned to indigenous people).
You are wise to avoid the biological essentialism of race realism. But you do not incorporate the actual relation that determines a settler: the relation to land.
Further, a settler does not become Indigenous by integrating into culture. As if I can become Indigenous by going to the local powwow. Likewise, I am a settler regardless of my disposition towards the state because I live on stolen land and continue settler occupation. Settlers are famous for their struggles with the settler state, if that were important in determining their actual relations to Indigenous land, there would be no self identified settlers - a “settler-colonialism with no settlers.”
You make very good points, the relation to land plays a key role.
The Filipino population in Hawai’i are a great example of this. Yes, technically they are settlers if we’re painting them with a broad brush. But they were indentured in near slave-trade like conditions to work on plantations and since then the Filipino community in general has been in fierce solidarity with the Native Hawaiian population when it comes to fighting for native sovereignty and defending the land. It obviously helps that there is shared ancestry and culture, but the point still stands.
But even in other settler states, people can decolonize their consciousness and resist settler ideology. There are jews in occupied Palestine resisting the state and advocating for Palestinian land back. We can speak in general about settler class tendencies, but condemning people just because they are from a settler family background like some ultraleftists tend to do only pushes people to the right.
But even in other settler states, people can decolonize their consciousness and resist settler ideology.
Im afraid this is not true. Decolonization is simply about returning land. Ideology doesn’t make you a settler. There is no “deprograming” that leads to decolonization and there can be no function for such a deprograming, outside of settler justification, without return of land.
By definition, Mestizo people have indigenous blood in their veins. Arguing over their status via genealogy is racial politics and should be rejected. What matters is simple; do the Mestizo people in question side with their indigenous nation against the settler nation? Those who identify with and fight for the indigenous side of their family have chosen their side. As Che argues, all of Latin America is one Mestizo people. The masses are one. The settler state is supported by a vanishingly small minority of people who self-identify as white settlers; these are the compradors with their boot on the peoples’ neck on the behalf of international imperialism.
In a different, but related context, I’ll describe my own heritage.
My father’s ancestry derives from African slaves in the American Southeast. My mother’s ancestry derives from Norwegian settlers in the American PNW. From my father’s side I’m a member of the New African nation of the American Southeast, which through no fault of their own were forcibly settled into that territory. Their existence as a nation cannot be described as “indigenous”, but the Africans there have no other place to call home. Through the contradictions and actions of humans in history, the New African nation was born in the American South East.
Now, that happened in there, but I live in the PNW where my mother was born in a family settled 100 years or so ago. Welcomed into American settler nation already present, for being white, they have participated in the land theft (streets named after my mother’s family) and general expropriation of North West Coast indigenous peoples’ livelihoods. Through this I have inherited the settler status of my ancestors. Further more, my father was brought to this region through the Settler nation’s economy. Since he left his own nation in the South East, he is more of an immigrant to the Settler territories in the North West (Settler territory laws limiting the migration of Black people into the territories were called “Immigration” laws, clues into this reality).
While in some parts of the territory ruled by the USA I do feel is an ancestral “homeland”, in the context of the PNW I’m full settler. This isn’t my homeland and the indigenous peoples don’t need to differentiate me from other settlers. I exist fully within the settler economy here. If I were in the “homeland”, I see this as a very similar history to the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe historically. We are a subjugated people that exists in contradiction (opposed but also bound) with an oppressor people, we have no real homeland and I think it’s better to describe ourselves with the concept of “here-ness”. We as a nation may not have claims to any land, but we as a nation exist in many lands and in many economies alongside many nations. We New Africans are “here” and will remain so.
Perhaps if you really want, you can dig down into the histories of the individual “mestizos” to determine proximity to the indigenous populations. Or you can treat their history as a fluid and living concept and who they are and where they are is defined by the cultural, political, and economic relationships between the settler, indigenous, and enslaved peoples within a territory.
streets named after my mother’s family
Wow, that’s some aristocracy grade stuff.
Yeah my hometown has this very class divide. My mother’s family was among the first Europeans to arrive and settle the island I grew up on in the Salish Sea. We are told lies that no natives lived on the island, yet when remodeling our downtown street we found a Salish grave. Subsequent waves of Dutch settlers arrived and built the settler towns on the island. Later the US Navy turned the island into a base where there’s an imported labor class (like my father, and maternal grandmother) and a class of European settlers who’s ancestors conquered and settled the land and now make millions off of land speculation. There’s a lot of “old money” Dutch folks with last names the same as our streets who all run real estate companies, are doctors, are dentists, are lawyers, their own bougie economy. My mother’s distant cousin was the last of their family name to sell his farm for a few million dollars, which was being turned into a suburban development when the 08 crash happened and sat an unfinished lot for years until the naval base expanded and brought new laborers to buy and rent that property.
My mother’s father abandoned my grandmother, my mother, and uncle, and the distant family “disowned” her when she married a black person, so the family wealth has been guarded through racism. They send their sons to be officers in the military. This is precisely why these people were let into America in the first place. As their home countries were being enclosed and the middle classes losing their land to wealthier landlords, the sons of the middle classes were sent to America to regain the family’s place on street signs. They were loyal to the Settler nation and remain loyal to it. Even when reduced to workers they have privileges over other workers (the Indigenous, Asian, Black, and Latino workers) for their proximity to the Settler nation.
These patterns explain much of the development of the American West.
Q: Do they live on stolen land?
A: Yes
Conclusion: They are a settler
Define “stolen”, please. I am a Russian jew, living in an area that was conquered back when the Rus as an entity was young. My ancestors moved here after the Socialist Revolution, when jews were given full rights. Technically this isn’t my land. Technically it is stolen. Does it make me a settler? Does that mean I must pay reparations and atone for my sins?
This comment is made more specifically as an answer to the OP, not to Russian Jews. I simply cannot answer your questions but I would encourage you to look deeper into this yourself.
Does that mean I must pay reparations and atone for my sins?
I think you conflate being a settler with sinister intentions or immorality. I don’t think this will help you understand. In fact settler-colonialism is usually justified with good intentions. And interestingly enough, reperations in some contexts do more to justify theft and violence than anything. Some colonized/semi colonized places have rejected reperations from colonizers entirely, including China.
I would suggest getting to know more about the land you live on and the people of that place and then look into what the USSR (and now the RF) did or did not do in terms of anti colonialism or decolonization. It must be stressed that only you and your community can get to know your situation in a way that answers your questions through engagement.
As you do this it will be more clear what your place is and what obligations you may have.
Also it is very important to note that land as a concept in North American Indigenous philosophy is usually not what you think. It is an intergenerational, “international” (as in other creatures and agents are also part of nations as well as other peoples are- not nation-states), system of relations that is built on obligations and reciprocity. This is still a heavily watered down definition frankly
So when Indigenous scholars talk about land in their books (sometimes capitalized as Land) they are talking about more than just dirt, but an infrastructure, a “mode of life” as Marx says in The German Ideology, that is also inherently opposed to capitalist accumulation.
Give me an example of land that hasn’t been ‘stolen’ a single time in human history. Better yet, divide the world into settlers and non-settlers. Haiti? Jamaica? It’s a made up distinction. Yes, imperialist empires have and will commit terrible atrocities, but the only thing that matters for us is the dictatorship of the proletariat and how it will steer our lands towards common worker prosperity. No amount of cultural, racial or historical connection to the soil could change that. Instead, we need to focus on the one characteristic we all share; class position.
Yes, imperialist empires have and will commit terrible atrocities, but the only thing that matters for us is the dictatorship of the proletariat and how it will steer our lands towards common worker prosperity.
So basically it’s too complicated for you to understand how to fix so you ally yourself with genocidal states to ease your mind and keep revolution the simple process you want it to be. Speak for yourself. Proletarians have never been the only class that struggles against capital. The proletariat risks failure by misrecognizing the conditions of the world. More disturbingly, it risks advancing capital’s empire by disregarding Indigenous peoples and peasants as it has absolutely done throughout its history in the US.
Your fixation on class is false because it is a vulgar understanding of class that was watered down by western, bourgeois, settler academics that have no engagement with the actual conditions of the world and instead favor the simulations of the liberal state.
Class is determined by your relation to the capitalist mode of reproduction. Hence only two classes. The exploiters, and the exploted. I’d still like you to tell me a piece of land on earth that hasn’t been stolen, and your plan on how to feasibly migrate billions of people into their own little ethnostates without killing loads of people like when the greek and turkish populations swapped in 1923. Maybe class struggle is just easier?
Projection
Why is Rye assuming that decolonization automatically means deporting the settlers? You know Vaush literally made that same error too, right?
Well my guess is that it is actually quite intuitive from a settler point of view. If we cant have a settler state in this place, then we will obviously have to disposses someone else to fix it. There is no imaginable way forward when you refuse to accept land theft is a defining feature of America so one might through their hands up in disgust, or justify it. It is not entirely different from the logic that goes into the occupation of Palestine. To question it is practically an atrocity with colonial logic. To be sure there is a marxist flavor to this that we must be on guard for.
Of course it is not Indigenous people saying all this rather but reactionaries that oppose decolonization. Likewise, it is typically white settlers, and other colonial accomplices, saying it would be genocide to return land and dismantle settler institutions. There is always a move to center white settler subjectivity and claim innocence. This should always be a red flag. It is bigger than individual failings, it is also a community problem as well. We have to hold each other accountable.
With time people can hopefully learn more. Just as we how when we learn more about how capitalism functions we are better able to combat it. Same for the idiosyncrasies of colonialism and the sensibilities it fosters. It is unfortunately common for people to lash out like this when faced with this. I think we should show patience for our comrades while we still do our best to explain. We simultaneously can’t let ignorant, potentially dangerous, comrades compromise those that we should be championing. We risk putting people in danger and discrediting ourselves.
