I recently heard that casino building projects done by many of the tribes in Washington state require a certain percentage of Native American labor with no restrictions on tribe. I was told that they had a difficulty meeting their quota, so I wondered who counts as a Native American? Why are Mexican-Americans born on both sides of the border not recognized as Native Americans in the same way that the Apache or Blackfoot are? How do Mexicans with indigenous roots feel about this?

—Curious White Seattleite

Dear Gabacho: This is ¡Ask a Mexican!, not ¡Ask Black Elk!, so I’ll leave it to my native hermanos to determine who belongs to their respective tribes and why. The case of borderland tribes like the Yaqui and Apache is especially hard to untangle—not only did their historical homelands not have to cross the border, the border crossed them thrice. But the U.S. Census doesn’t have a box to check for those people born in Mexico who possess or identify with an indigenous Mexican group, because the U.S. Census is a crock of mierda with racial classifications no doubt created by a pencil pusher with too much tequila the night before. That said, there are enough indigenous Mexicans in the United States to begin rethinking this—demographers estimate there are over 100,00 Mixtecs and Zapotecs (Indians from the state of Oaxaca) in the United States, and they freely acknowledge it’s probably a severe undercount due to these people being ostracized by both gabachos and Mexicans. And this isn’t counting the many Chicano yaktivists who think taking on an Aztec name and hanging the calendar stone on their bedroom wall classifies them as a direct descendant of Cuauhtémoc.