TAíNO WARRIORS?: STRATEGIES FOR RECOVERING INDIGENOUS VOICES IN COLONIAL AND CONTEMPORARY HISPANIC CARIBBEAN DISCOURSES

This essay explores how to study and recover Caribbean indigenous voices by discussing two cases as a possible example of "strategic essentialism", contemporary neo-Taíno movements and the study of indigeneity in colonial texts of the Hispanic Caribbean. After reviewing several approaches to study indiano textualities in the Hispanic Caribbean, the essay concludes by criticizing indigenous revivals in the Caribbean as an essentialist reappropriation of Latin American indigenismo that reduces the translocal and diasporic dimension of the Caribbean.