Anthropologist Heide Castañeda has released a new book, American Amazigh, that examines how Amazigh (Berber) communities in the United States negotiate identity, build community, and claim visibility within the American landscape.
Amazigh people are distinct ethnic groups whose histories in North Africa predate the arrival of Arabs to the region. In the U.S. context, their presence unsettles conventional categories of race and ethnicity, challenging dominant assumptions about what it means to be African, Indigenous, and Muslim. Their experiences also complicate familiar immigration narratives, shedding light on the realities of legal migration pathways such as family reunification and the Diversity Immigrant Visa program.
The book traces how Amazigh communities seek recognition within the American context while carrying forward the legacy of marginalization from their home countries — a legacy shaped by colonial-era divisions, postcolonial nationalism, and Arabization policies that entrenched systemic discrimination. In the diaspora, Castañeda shows, Amazigh identity is being actively reshaped as individuals and organizations engage with new ideological frameworks, global Indigenous rights movements, and the political gains Amazigh activists have achieved in North Africa after decades of advocacy for linguistic, cultural, and legal equality.
Much of the existing literature on migration has overlooked Indigenous perspectives. American Amazigh addresses that gap directly. Drawing on four years of ethnographic research and organized around the concept of “diasporic indigeneity,” the book explores how Amazigh people in the U.S. forge new anchors of belonging and build spaces of social cohesion. Rather than relying on conventional migration narratives, Castañeda illuminates how identity and belonging are continually translated and reconfigured in a new national context.
About the author
Heide Castañeda is Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. She is also the author of Borders of Belonging: Struggle and Solidarity in Mixed-Status Immigrant Families.
American Amazigh is available now from NYU Press.