American Amazigh by Heide Castañeda

American Amazigh by Heide Castañeda

How an indigenous group from North Africa challenges dominant narratives of race, migration, and belonging in the United States

American Amazigh examines the complex identity negotiations of Amazigh people – also known as Berbers – as they build community and claim visibility in the American landscape. These distinct ethnic groups, whose histories predate the arrival of Arabs in North Africa, unsettle categories of race and ethnicity in the U.S., challenging dominant assumptions about what it means to be African, Indigenous, and Muslim. Their experiences also disrupt familiar immigration narratives, revealing the complexities and challenges of legal migration processes such as family reunification and the Diversity Immigrant Visa program.

In seeking to make their struggles for recognition legible within the American context, Amazigh communities grapple with conditional belonging while also bearing the legacy of marginalization in their home countries, which is rooted in colonial divisions, postcolonial nationalism, and Arabization policies, fostering systemic discrimination. In the diaspora, Amazigh identity is being actively reshaped as individuals and organizations engage with new ideological frameworks, global Indigenous rights movements, and recent political gains in North Africa, where they have long fought for linguistic, cultural, and legal equality.

The Indigenous perspective has been largely missing from the literature on migration. Drawing on four years of ethnographic research, and framed around the concept of diasporic indigeneity, the book explores how the Amazigh people forge new anchors of belonging and create spaces of social cohesion. By uncovering both the opportunities and challenges presented in the American context, the book moves beyond conventional migration narratives to illuminate how identity and belonging are continually translated and reconfigured within new places.

Heide Castañeda is Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida and author of Borders of Belonging: Struggle and Solidarity in Mixed-Status Immigrant Families (Stanford University Press, 2019).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781479838530
ISBN 10	1479838535
Title	American Amazigh
Author	Heide Castañeda
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	New York University Press
Year published	2026-09-22
Number of pages	336
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.