Doctoral Dissertation Research: Indigenous Claims for Recognition in a Transborder Context

土著群体的领土承认主张在一系列领域提出了新的挑战，如提供保健、社区治安、退伍军人事务、环境和商业权利。对这些社区的当代科学研究正在努力解释这些土著群体的成员如何就他们重叠的不同领土、市政、地区和州当局的各种法律和政治框架进行谈判。这个项目培训一名研究生如何进行严谨的、有经验的科学田野工作，探索当这些社区跨越民族国家的边界时，如何参与领土承认，这一复杂程度迄今尚未得到重大调查。罗西奥·吉尔·马丁内斯·德·埃斯科瓦尔在纽约市立大学研究生中心的马克·埃德尔曼博士的指导下，探索了跨越墨西哥和美国边境的吉祥物-塞米诺尔主权的生产和繁殖。该项目使用一系列的人种学数据收集和分析方法，包括参与者观察、口述历史和访谈，考察了吉祥物塞米诺族人与墨西哥和美国为实现双重国籍和自由跨越国际边界而进行的战略谈判。这一案件通过土著、种族和民族的特殊镜头，揭示了墨西哥和美国边境在德克萨斯州-科阿韦拉地区的历史生产。它着眼于由两个截然不同的国家定义的相互竞争的种族和民族分类的方式，通过这些方式在历史上在边境地区产生人民。这项研究揭示了被国际边界分割的人民的斗争，以及超越民族国家的其他主权做法的可能性：跨界政治组织的形式、身份识别、经济资源的流动等。最后，这项研究揭示了种族和土著观念及其附带的权利在边境地区确立的机制，以及这可能如何影响两个民族国家的政治和法律实践。因此，除了为人类学研究生的培训提供资金外，该项目还将为对制定和改革边境政策感兴趣的决策者和规划者提供有用的数据。

Territorial recognition claims by indigenous groups have posed new challenges in a range of areas, such as the delivery of health care, community policing, veteran affairs, environmental and business rights. Contemporary scientific studies of these communities are struggling to explain how the members of these indigenous groups negotiate the various legal and political frameworks of the different territorial, municipal, regional, and state authorities within which they overlap. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous, empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, explores how these communities engage in territorial recognition when it bridges the borders of nation-states, a level of complexity that has hitherto not been significantly investigated. Rocio Gil Martinez de Escobar, under the supervision of Dr. Marc Edelman of the City University of New York Graduate Center, explores the production and reproduction of Mascogo-Seminole sovereignty across the Mexico-United States border. Using a range of ethnographic methods of data collection and analysis including participant observation, oral history, and interviews, the project examines the strategic negotiations of the Mascogo-Seminole people with Mexico and the United States to achieve dual citizenship and to freely cross the international border. This case sheds light on the historical production of the Mexico-US border in the region of Texas-Coahuila through the particular lens of indigeneity, race, and ethnicity. It looks at the ways through which competing forms of racial and ethnic classification, as defined by two very different states, historically produce peoples in the borderlands. It offers a view into struggles of people divided by international borders and the possibilities of alternative practices of sovereignty that transcend nation-states: forms of transborder political organization, identification, flow of economic resources, etc. Finally, this research sheds light on the mechanisms through which ideas about race and indigeneity, and the rights attached to them, are established in the borderlands and how this may influence the political and legal practices of both nation-states. As such, in addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology, the project would provide data useful to policymakers and planners interested into the formulation and reform of border policy.