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DAIANA SANCHEZ, 2024, The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-

Mexico Border: Stanford University Press, 202pp., ISBN 9781503641389 

Key Words: Auditory Epistemology, Diaspora, Belonging, Resistance, Indigenous Ontologies.  

How does one belong to a community in an epoch of multiple colonialities and highly 

militarized borders, where bodies are highly surveilled, analyzed, and hegemonized? In The 

Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border (2024), Dr. Daina 

Sanchez offers a deeply personal monograph demonstrating how the descendants of Zapotec 

migrants from San Juan Solaga, Oaxaca, transcend borders, lineages, and kinship networks to 

maintain their Indigenous identity, community practices, and relational sense of belonging, while 

navigating life in diaspora. As the first book-length ethnographic text written by a Native woman 

from the community being studied (5), Sanchez explores how Indigenous epistemologies, and 

communal values, such as comunalidad and practices of convivencia are sustained and fortified 

across borders and multiple settler-states. By emphasizing the voices and lived experiences of 

Indigenous migrants, who through creative forms of multisensorial resistance refuse to be erased 

or assimilated by national and colonial structures, this work makes an important contribution to 

Indigenous studies, migration scholarship, and identity politics.  

Chapter one, “The Cargo System and Indigenous Belonging,” challenges conventional 

anthropological interpretations of the cargo system in Mesoamerica by reframing it not as a 

punitive or hierarchical system but one centered on membership and belonging. Sanchez offers 

the Solagueño term comunalidad to describe this dynamic, emphasizing an Indigenous way of 

knowing and being through which individuals demonstrate belonging and are inducted into el 

goce comunal, the feeling of communal joy through collective contribution and participation (4). 

This intervention is significant because it centers Indigenous cosmologies in defining the 

function and importance of communal systems, resisting Eurocentric frameworks that have 



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historically pathologized Indigenous governance structures. Patron Saint Celebrations, or fiestas, 

exemplify this paradigm shift as Solagueños transform Spanish colonization and missionization 

histories into dynamic, embodied spaces where they affirm collective identity and community 

belonging, transcending geographic and generational barriers. Specifically, diasporic Solagueños 

transcend the highly militarized U.S.-Mexico border by capitalizing on modern technology and 

contributing monetarily as mayordomías (fiesta sponsors), granting them the opportunity to 

participate in el goce comunal, affirming their community connection. In doing so, Solagueños 

reject settler-state notions of Indigeneity that seek to invalidate identity claims for Indigenous 

peoples outside their ancestral homelands (42), demonstrating how identity and belonging are 

affirmed through communal participation. 

In chapter 2, “Home of the Oaxacans,” Sanchez examines how hybrid hegemonies, 

formed by the intersecting colonial structures of the U.S. and Mexico, work to exclude diasporic 

Solagueños through practices like enclavisation. These structures confine Indigenous migrants to 

marginalized social and geographic enclaves, marked by limited access to resources and 

heightened exposure to structural violence, including the prevalence of gangs, which further 

complicates notions of collective belonging and safety. This analysis is vital as it challenges 

ideas that promote Los Angeles as a multicultural mecca, and exposes how deeply embedded 

ideas centered around race and place continue to inform racial logics and neighborhood 

demographics. Through the hybrid hegemony framework, ethnic solidarity is also problematized, 

as Solagueño living in Los Angeles confront social exclusion from both Anglo and Latinx 

communities.  

Although this dual exclusion informs how Solagueño youth regard themselves and the 

relationships they have to their ancestral homeland (66), these enclaves become sites of cultural 

production, as adversity produces a desire for many youths to be actively engaged in the 

traditions of their parents’ hometown. Music, in particular, becomes an ontology of care, 

manifesting from its powerful history as a tool of refusal against colonial imposition. Oaxacan 

brass bands have emerged as powerful symbols of identity, belonging, and cultural pride, 

reshaping how Oaxacan communities are imagined within Los Angeles. They serve as an 

auditory affirmation of Solagueño lifeways, sustaining generational knowledge, and fostering 

communal values across geographic and diasporic divides. 



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The third chapter, “Returning to the Land of the Fallen Leaves,” addresses how 

Solagueño families, with mixed citizenship status mobilize settler-created legal identities to 

maintain relations with Sagara, their pueblos, and affirm convivencia, or the practice of living 

and engaging with community, fortifying communal belonging (83). Increasingly restrictive 

immigration policies combined with racial, social, and economic marginalization force many 

Indigenous peoples to migrate to the United States without authorization. This reality manifests 

as legal violence, where the responsibility to maintain kinship, or convivir, across borders falls to 

diasporic children whose citizenship status allow them to traverse transnationally without 

contestation. 

This legal maneuvering resists the settler state’s attempts to limit Indigenous movement, 

addressing larger structures of colonial erasure. Solagueño being is rooted in experiential, 

embodied knowledge where place, community, and collective responsibility are integral to 

identity. Although language and gender expectations occasionally create tensions between locals 

and returnees, the moral ethos of convivencia transcends these differences, fostering a shared 

appreciation for their pueblo and culture. By leveraging the legal status of U.S.-born individuals 

to sustain kinships and collectives across borders, Solagueños transgress state control and 

practice convivencia in diaspora, strengthening ties to their homeland, Indigenous identity, and 

the vitality of their community. 

In chapter four, “Music Follows Serranos,” autochthonous modalities of communication, 

such as voice, music, and dance, allow Solagueños living in Los Angeles to transcend 

geographic and generation lines and form webs of relations the facilitate Indigenous place-

making practices connecting those living in diaspora to their pueblos. These sonic spaces 

cultivate an auditory culture through which Solagueños affirm their Indigenous distinctiveness 

and strengthen communal belonging, transforming any place where community and music 

converge into a site of home-making and cultural continuity. 

Bands composed of diaspora youth leverage their unique lived experiences, family 

histories, and collective cultural affiliations to create an amalgamation of audio histories, 

eliciting memories and feelings of being in Solaga, connecting generations regardless of 

linguistic ability. As not all Solagueños can return to their homeland, music becomes an 



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embodied experience that allows individuals to feel life in Solaga again. These bands operate as 

auditory sites of decolonial praxis, offering a culturally embedded modality to sustain communal 

lifeways and enact belonging. By contributing to an auditory epistemology that transmits 

memory and identity, Oaxacan brass bands facilitate intergenerational relations and produce 

counter-hegemonic spaces where Indigenous presence endures across colonial borders and 

temporalities. 

Drawing on work by Chicana feminists, Critical Latinx Indigenous frameworks, and 

scholars like Shannon Speed, Maylei Blackwell, and Patrick Wolfe, Sanchez extends 

conversations on the transborder lives and practices of Indigenous migrants. Yet by emphasizing 

joy, or el goce comunal, she illustrates how youth are active agents in fortifying and cultivating 

diasporic Solagueño personhood and community life. For these youth, music represents a 

powerful tool of refusal as they reclaim a colonial method of evangelization to affirm communal 

futurities through continued marginalization. These sensorial spaces are dynamic, vibrant, and 

unapologetically Oaxaqueña forms of resistance against colonial erasure (121). 

Circling back to the posed question, in an era of colonial borders and surveillance, The 

Children of Solaga shows that belonging endures through embodied practices of comunalidad, 

multisensory resistance, and the relational care of convivencia. Sanchez demonstrates what it 

means to conduct engaged, relational research. She acknowledges her positionality and leverages 

her embodied memory to create lush sensorial descriptions, inviting readers to experience 

convivencia and Solagueño ontologies of care. Sanchez illustrates that decolonization is an 

embodied, relational practice transcending settler-imposed borders, socioeconomic barriers, and 

generational divides. By refusing static conceptions of identity and rejecting the treatment of 

Indigenous peoples as passive “ethnographic others,” Sanchez instead centers them as theorists, 

speakers, and agents of their own experience. This monograph offers an insightful lens for those 

interested in decolonizing ethnography, illuminating the possibilities of community-rooted 

scholarship and Indigenous epistemologies in unpacking transnational and intergenerational 

identity formation. 

 
 
 



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Authors Biography: 
Zoe Caple studies cultural anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research 
interests center around Indigenous epistemologies, food sovereignty, ontologies of care, and 
multi-sensory anthropology.  

 
 

© 2025 Zoe Caple 

 


