This dissertation explores the recent appearance of indigenous Spanish American bilingual poetry written in an Amerindian tongue and in Spanish. Part of a wider indigenous movement of ethnic affirmation and activism, this poetry started to circulate in the 1980s and uses written literature to foreground indigenous cultures and languages, thus contradicting established notions of Spanish American nationality as homogenous and monolingual. It focuses on five important authors of four different ethnic groups: Víctor de la Cruz (Zapotec), Natalio Hernández (Nahuatl) and Juan Gregorio Regino (Mazatec) from Mexico, and two Chilean Mapuche poets: Elicura Chihuailaf and Leonel Lienlaf. The different indigenous contexts of Mexico and Chile provide an understanding of the poetic productions of each country. I analyze this emerging poetry from three different perspectives.

First, I examine the link between traditional indigenous orality and recent writing as interacting and conflicting social practices. To create a truly local poetry, Amerindian poetic writing draws on indigenous oral traditions for contents, rhetoric and phonetic resources. Mapuche poets downplay writing, emphasizing its oral aspects; Mexican writers, however, claim writing as the continuation of a pre-Columbian practice that was interrupted by conquest and colonization. Whereas Mapuches conceive writing as orality, Mexican indigenous writers represent orality as writing.

Second, I investigate the way indigenist (non-indigenous) discourse has represented Native Americans and their literatures throughout the 20^th century. I focus on different literary categories in order to establish adequate categories for today’s poetries. I argue that contemporary indigenous authors have benefited from some of these categories, such as the reclassification of ethnographic material as literature. Furthermore, current indigenist research benefits from indigenous critiques and insights on their own cultures and writing.

Finally, I explore the linguistic politics of recent bilingual poetry. The role language plays in ethnic identity determines linguistic and stylistic choices in poetry. In Mexico, where ethnicity is strongly linked to the ethnic tongue, poets prefer separate bilingual versions of their poems written in “pure” varieties. As Mapuche poets have a more fluid concept of ethnicity, linguistic responses range from separate bilingual versions to experimental code-switching that explores hybrid ethnic and linguistic identities.