About

José Antonio (Tony) Lucero is an Adjunct Professor and Chair of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Washington. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University, obtained in 2002, and a Bachelor's degree in Political Science from Stanford University. Lucero teaches courses on international political economy, cultural interactions, social movements, Latin American politics, and borderlands. He is the author of 'Struggles of Voice: The Politics of Indigenous Representation in the Andes,' a work that engages with canonical Western theories of political order, including those of Hobbes, Burke, Gramsci, and Foucault, in dialogue with the praxis of indigenous social movements. His research projects focus on the cultural politics of conflicts between Indigenous communities and filmmakers in Peru, as well as human rights activism, religion, and Indigenous politics on the Mexico-US border. Lucero is also a co-editor of the forthcoming 'Oxford Handbook of Indigenous Peoples Politics' and has co-authored works with UW Professor María Elena García.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Computer Science
• Ecology
• Psychology
• Art history
• Geography
• Biology
• Media studies
• Ethnology
• History
• Mathematics education
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera (review)

  Native American and Indigenous Studies · 2024-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera José Antonio Lucero (bio) Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera University of Nebraska Press, 2022 WITH CINEMATIC COMANCHES: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands, Dustin Tahmahkera (Comanche) offers a lively, theoretically engaged, and often humorous exploration of the intersections of Native studies, cinema and media studies, and Comanche history. Tahmahkera's book represents a cinema-centered version of Leanne Howe's (Choctaw) "tribalography," her influential term for the connective work that Native storytelling does in "integrating oral traditions, histories, and experiences into narratives and expanding our identities."1 Working across several genres, texts, and conversations, Tahmahkera offers an expansive consideration of the "media borderlands" that connect "real and reel Comanches" (xi). From the very first word of the text, marʉawe (a greeting in the Comanche language that can be rendered as "tell it"), the book centers Comanche perspectives. Such tribal specificity, however, does not keep the book from offering deep and broad lessons about Native representation relevant far beyond Comanchería: "As a method, marʉawe is a call to report on a media-centric borderlands of Comanche history as representation and of Comanche representation as history" (x). This borderlands account includes plenty of critique and investigations into what is playfully rendered in the Comanche language as isa kwitapʉ , or "bullshit" (xiii). As a history of Hollywood westerns that runs from The Searchers to The Lone Ranger, there is plenty of isa kwitapʉ, for sure. At the same time, that history is full of many moments of Comanche agency and kin-making that will make for many lively classroom conversations. Readers are invited into accessible and informed discussions about "representational jurisdiction" or "who represents whom" (chapter 1), a reconsideration of the casting of Johnny Depp in the role of Tonto as an extension of the history of Comanche captivity and kinship (chapter 2), an analysis of "cinematic justice and injustice" in Disney's The Lone Ranger (chapter 3), and finally a tribally specific discussion of Comanche viewing and criticism of the Disney film (chapter 4). Spoiler alert: The Lone Ranger is a site of meaningful Comanche action and also a story of missed opportunities. Importantly, this book is much more than a consideration of one film; it is also a conversation between the author and [End Page 159] his ancestors and relatives like his great-great-great-grandmother Cynthia Ann Parker ("white-captive-turned Comanche"), great-great-grandfather Quanah Parker ("the last 'chief' of the Comanches"), and high-profile aun-ties like Juanita Pahdopopony and Ladonna Harris. Readers will want to bring some popcorn for the engaging ways that family history become film history, and vice versa. I appreciated (but some readers might take issue with) the way Tahmahkera avoids some of the debates in Comanche studies that have generated more heat than light. I am thinking specifically of the debates over the work of Finnish historian Pekka Hämäläinen and his use of "empire" as an analytic to understand Comanche and other Native peoples' territorial expansion. Tahmahkera uses "Comanche empire" unabashedly and without qualification. While I am curious what Tahmahkera thinks about the critiques of Hämäläinen lodged by historians like Ned Blackhawk and Nick Estes, I can also see how some of those debates have unintentionally centered the European historian more than the Native histories. The most controversial part of this Native history involves, of course, the adoption of actor Johnny Depp into the Comanche Nation by Ladonna Harris. While it is risky to bring Depp so centrally into the story, it remains one of Comanche agency and creativity. Harris suggested "with a grin" that "we made [Depp] a Comanche so he'd learn to act like one" (20). The jury is probably still out on how well that bet has paid off, especially since the defamation trials of Depp and his former partner Amanda Heard. At the same time, such complexities are reminders that not all relations are good and that kinship is not conflict-free. That said, while Depp's behavior should not detract from the book's arguments, one...

  PublisherDOI

• Locating Neoliberalism in Abiayala

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-08-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Evidence from Indigenous organizing in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile offers useful illustrations of the ways in which Indigenous peoples have challenged (and been challenged by) neoliberalism and settler colonial orders. While there are sound reasons to say that Indigenous movements have been “stronger” in Bolivia and Ecuador than in Chile, I make the more modest claim that all three countries provide useful ways to think about the longue durée of colonial entanglements in Latin America. Viewing neoliberalism through the lenses of Settler Colonial Studies and Indigenous Studies offers two different ways of situating the central concern of this volume. First, it provides an alternative timescale, one that situates neoliberalism not only within the twentieth and twenty-first-century swing of statist and market-based development models, but within a longer colonial history of extractivism, state formation, and Indigenous struggles. Second, it considers the politics of neoliberalism as both an enabling condition of Indigenous mobilization and demobilization. Neoliberalism, from the vantage point of Indigenous Studies, is part of an ongoing story of colonial dispossession, anti-colonial resistance, and negotiation.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond borderlines and ‘bordertowns’: political boundaries and indigeneity in the Americas

  Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies · 2023-08-29 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACTBorders are sites of violence and technologies of colonial control. They are also crucibles for the creation of new subjectivities. In this essay, I provide three glances on border violence and the challenges and perhaps unexpected opportunities they represent for Indigenous agency. The first glance is autoethnographic and focuses on my early life in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. The second one considers some episodes from the history of Amazonian borderlands, and the third reflects on a long-term collaboration with Mike Wilson, a Tohono O'odham activist. Juxtaposing the violence of bordertowns with the dialectic possibilities of borderlands, I make a case for understanding the destruction and productive power of boundaries. Following scholars in Indigenous and Borderlands Studies, I bring an autoethnographic sensibility to this analytical reflection on borders as zones of death and ethnogenesis.KEYWORDS: BordersbordertownsAmazonsettler colonialismTohono O'odhamIndigenous politics AcknowledgementsThis essay was written on Coast Salish lands. Mike Wilson (Tohono O'odham) and Ampam Karakras (Shuar) provided guidance into O'odham and Amazonian borderlands, respectively. María Elena García, Sarah Warren, and two anonymous reviewers provided helpful feedback on previous versions of this essay. The Garage Band Writing Group provide more support than most should expect from humans at 7 am.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. The 2019 Walmart massacre gave this 'safe' Texas town its own connection to death.2. Psicopsi Diccionario de psicología, s.v. 'estado fronterizo,' accessed May 14, 2012, http://psicopsi.com/Diccionario_de_Psicologia_letra_E_Estado-fronterizo.asp.3. A borderland methodology requires an openness to various forms of knowledge-production inside and outside the academy. For more see Shorter (Citation2020).4. I learned of Barker's observation in the work of J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Citation2018).5. This trans-border, trans-Indigenous dynamic is not unique to these Amazonian borderlands. For an excellent discussion of Mapuche nation-building across the Argentine-Chilean boundary, see Warren (Citation2013).6. This context is essential for situating Mike Wilson's work, which is the primary focus of this reflection. For a more in-depth analysis of Indigenous activism in these borderlands, see Leza Citation2019, Citation2020) and the work of the Aliana Indígena Sin Fronteras/Indigenous Alliance Without Borders, https://www.indigenousalliance.org, and the Triple Border Alliance, https://www.tribalborderalliance.org/news/. (I thank an anonymous reviewer for these references and for the clarification that this section of the argument focuses on an individual case of Indigenous activism [Mike Wilson's] and not on the experience of the broader Tohono O'odham Nation).7. Humane Border, 'Migrants Deaths, Rescue Beacons, Water Stations 2000–2019,' https://humaneborders.org/printable-maps-and-posters/ Accessed Sept. 1, 2020. The traditional homelands of the O'odham are much greater. The Tohono O'odham Hemajkam Rights Network notes that ancestral O'odham lands 'span East to the San Pedro River, West to the Baja of Mexico, North to Phoenix and South to Hermosillo, Mexico. We are comprised of Five O'odham Sister Tribes, the Tohono O'odham to the South, the Akimel and Onk Akimel O'odham to the North (Phoenix/Casa Grande Area), Ak Chin O'odham to the Northwest and the Hia Ced O'odham to the West.' https://tohrn383.wordpress.com.8. See Todd Miller (Citation2019a, Citation2019b), Hennessy-Fisk (Citation2019), and Rivas (Citation2020). For the Tohono O'odham government's official response to the border wall, see the Nation's website, http://www.tonation-nsn.gov/nowall/.9. Krawec's (Citation2022) call has become a guiding part of many Indigenous Studies conversations. I have learned similar lessons from my friends, colleagues, and relatives in American Indian Studies at UW, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and the Summer Institute on Global Indigeneities (SIGI) consortium, especially Hokulani Aikau, Chad Allen, Jean Dennison, Vince Diaz, Marisa Duarte, Mishuana Goeman, Lydia Heberling, Dian Million, Shannon Speed, Angela Robinson, Simón Trujillo, and Lani Teves.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJosé Antonio LuceroJosé Antonio Lucero is Chair and Professor in the Comparative History of Ideas Department, with a joint appointment in International Studies and courtesy appointments in American Indian Studies and Geography. He is co-author with Mike Wilson of What Side Are You On? A Tohono O'odham Life Across Borders, forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press.

  PublisherDOI

• Indigenous Revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, 1990–2005 by Jeffery M. Paige

  Native American and Indigenous Studies · 2022-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Indigenous Revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, 1990–2005 by Jeffery M. Paige José Antonio Lucero (bio) Indigenous Revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, 1990–2005 by Jeffery M. Paige University of Arizona Press, 2020 WITH THE PUBLICATION OF Indigenous Revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, 1990–2005, Jeffery M. Paige delivers a rich exploration of Native politics in Bolivia and Ecuador. One might immediately notice the timing of a book that comes at a moment when Bolivia is still recovering from a reactionary coup that ousted Indigenous president Evo Morales and Ecuador is governed by a conservative regime that enjoys better relations with the International Monetary Fund than with Indigenous communities. We seem to be living in times of reaction, not revolution. Nevertheless, Indigenous peoples remain engaged and active in both countries so a deep understanding of the revolutionary energies that may seem depleted but remain important is especially urgent now. Paige's work has numerous strengths. First, the work is an outstanding survey of the varied views of Aymara, Quechua, Kichwa, Shuar, and other Indigenous leaders and intellectuals who shaped the very changes at the heart of the book. Although Paige takes the lead in framing the key arguments of the book, most of its three hundred or so pages are devoted to twenty-one edited interviews Paige conducted with key thinkers, leaders, and activists (most of them Indigenous). The interviews illustrate many of the complexities and commonalities of Indigenous thought and struggle. A minor drawback in the presentation of the interview materials is that Paige does not use quotation marks or other distinctive ways of marking off the interviewees' words, so it is sometimes difficult to know who is speaking. Second, Paige provides a useful revision of the concept of revolution. Sociologists and political scientists have tended to view revolutions as large-scale transformations in political, economic, and social structures. Paige puts the work of Pierre Bourdieu in conversation with Native notions of transformation to provide a view of revolution that includes structural change and ontological and epistemological reordering. For Paige, a revolution is "a rapid and fundamental change in the categories that order social life and consciousness, the metaphysical assumptions on which the [End Page 174] categories are based, and the power relations in which they are expressed as a result of widespread popular acceptance of a utopian alternative to the current social order" (29). There is great value in this capacious conceptualization given just how much Indigenous struggles have broadened the bounds of democracy, well-being, and politics. If there is a drawback in this comparison of two revolutionary situations it is that the focus on movement leaders makes it hard to know just how "fundamental" or "widespread" changes have been. For Paige, Bolivia is clearly "more" revolutionary because of the unquestionably important fourteen-year rule of Evo Morales. He may be right, but it would take deeper and more sustained ethnographic or survey-based work to find out just what changes in metaphysical or power relations have taken place. Simultaneously a sociological study and an assemblage of Native voices, the work is unquestionably valuable. However, there are some ways in which the project falls just a bit short. The book's innovative and hybrid form (part social science work, part oral history) leaves us wanting more from both the social science and the oral history aspects. Most crucially, the description of incredible Bolivian success leaves us somewhat unprepared for understanding the dramatic reversal of fortune that forced President Morales out of the country (granted, the interviews took place long before the coup). It is true, however, that the interview with Aymara sociologist Pablo Mamani provides a prophetic warning: "[I]f this process goes more or less in this direction, the Right will interrupt the government of Evo Morales" (179). More seriously, many voices are notably missing. Paige himself laments that there were not more Indigenous women who agreed to be part of his study (regrettably and repeatedly, Paige also shortens the name of one of his few women interlocutors, María Eugenia Choque Quispe, whom he calls "Eugenia Choque"). Additionally, Paige notes but is unbothered by the fact that Amazonian voices are present only in...

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• Speaking for Nature and Natives? Understanding Indigenous and Environmental Politics in Abiayala

  Latin American Politics and Society · 2021

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

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• Picq, Manuela Lavinas (2018) Vernacular Sovereignties: Indigenous Women Challenging World Politics, University of Arizona Press (Tucson), xx + 235 pp. $35.00 pbk. $25.95 ebk.

  Bulletin of Latin American Research · 2021-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Flipped Classroom o cómo darle la vuelta a la clase

  2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Mathematics education
  Publisher

• The Fight for Human Rights Begins at Home

  NACLA Report on the Americas · 2020-01-02

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• “To Articulate Ourselves”: Trans-Indigenous Reflections on Film and Politics in Amazonia

  Native American and Indigenous Studies · 2020 · 15 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Ethnology

  In 1979 German filmmaker Werner Herzog needed access to Native lands and labor in the Amazon to make <i>Fitzcarraldo</i>, his (in)famous film about a rubber baron who hauls a steamboat over a mountain in order to realize his dream of bringing opera to the jungle. The Awajún people burned down Herzog’s camp and forced him out of their lands. The Ashéninka people, however, agreed to work with Herzog. As Awajún authorities resisted Herzog and Ashéninka leaders found ways to work with him, Indigenous political actors drew on resources and networks provided by nongovernmental organizations, churches, the military, and the media. Through a trans-Indigenous exploration of contrasting Native experiences, one of open conflict, the other of collaboration, I ask how “imperial eyes” can be useful to local projects of resistance and resurgence. This trans-Indigenous view of two Indigenous encounters illustrates how Native peoples can creatively use the “same” opportunity in different ways. Moreover, this juxtaposition of Native experiences reveals that Herzog is best understood as a minor character in a crucial period of trans-Indigenous organizing in Abiayala in the 1970s and 1980s.

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• Wallmapu Rising: New Paths in Mapuche Studies

  Latin American Research Review · 2018-09-28 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This essay reviews the following works:Awükan ka kuxankan zugu Wajmapu mew: Violencias coloniales en Wajmapu. Edited by Enrique Antileo Baeza and others. Temuco: Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, 2015. Pp. 331. 14.60 paperback. ISBN: 9789563533330.

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Frequent coauthors

• María Elena García

  5 shared

• Sebastián López Vergara

  1 shared

• Anthony W. Marx

  1 shared

• Arturo Escobar

  Centro Nacional de Sanidad Agropecuaria

  1 shared

• Sonia E. Álvarez

  1 shared

• Evelina Dagnino

  Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)

  1 shared

• Doug McAdam

  University of Arizona

  1 shared

• Kelsey Gilman

  Western Washington University

  1 shared

Labs

• Latin American and Caribbean StudiesPI

Education

• B.A., Political Science

  Stanford

• M.A., Politics

  Princeton

• Ph.D., Politics

  Princeton