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Tinujei:
los Triquis de Copala
National Period
Tinujei: los Triquis de Copala. By Agustín García Alcaraz. Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 1997. Photographs. Tables. Figures. Appendixes. Bibliography. 307 pp. Paper. This book is a second-edition reprint of the 1971 classic ethnography of the Triqui people, an indigenous peasant population of some 25,000 who inhabit the Mixteca region in the northwestern part of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The new edition, featuring the addition of a short biography of García Alcaraz, has been produced to honor this well-known Mexican anthropologist, who died in 1995.
García Alcaraz started working as a priest in 1967 in the town of San Juan Copala, in the heart of Triqui territory, and was deeply committed to the defense of the Triqui in their confrontation with the Mexican state and other forces complicit in the group's marginalization. Even today there is a notable dearth of ethnography on the Triqui; this work, though dated, remains one of the most comprehensive accounts. The book attempts, in the customary indigenista ethnographic style of the 1970s, to render a thorough description of the Triqui through careful attention to various domains of their social life, especially in the economic realm. But García Alcaraz goes beyond most ethnographies by providing us with an unusually meticulous account of the Triqui social and political reality at the time, in addition to rare historical records and documents shared with him by Triqui leaders. [End Page 201]
Tinujei, meaning "my brother" (hermano mío) in the Triqui language, refers to a central focus of the book--the ethic of solidarity and communalism among the inhabitants of the town of San Juan Copala. Comprising four distinct communities, including Copala, the Triqui zone is spread over roughly 500 square kilometers in the Mixteca, one of poorest regions of Oaxaca state. The Triqui are small-scale peasant producers, growing corn, coffee, and some fruit and beans. The harsh environment, cool and arid, is limiting, forcing the Triqui to depend for their survival on participation in regional exchange markets and, indirectly, on the sale of their coffee in national and international markets. As one of Mexico's major exports, coffee is both an important source of income for the Triqui and a source of their exploitation. García Alcaraz explains that the purpose of his study is to describe the mechanisms and social relations which operate internally within the group and in their contact with the larger society. The materialist perspective he adopts is heavily influenced by the world-systems theory fashionable at the time the book was written; thus García Alcaraz situates the Triqui in a global context of expropriation and exploitation within the global capitalist system, at same time launching a barbed critique of the models of "development" implemented by the Mexican state.
Like so many indigenous towns in Oaxaca, the Triqui in Copala have been embroiled throughout history in conflicts with neighboring groups--both indigenous Mixtecans and mestizos--over land. The Triqui's struggle to conserve their territory provides a central theme of the ethnography. Land is not only their means of subsistence but the source of family and group identity, and it is endowed with sacred value. The Triqui have a long tradition of closing themselves off to the outside: their indefatigable efforts to defend themselves from external incursion have also meant a violent history, characterized by strong opposition to any type of relation with mestizo society (resistance first to domination by the Spanish and later, in the nineteenth century, to local caciques); in the more contemporary period this opposition has taken the form of armed resistance to assimilation into the dominant national cultural and political project of the Mexican state.
With this struggle in the background, García Alcaraz constructs an account of the central domains of Triqui life. The book is divided into five main chapters. Chapter 1 presents the Triqui as a highly exploited, marginal indigenous people...
Tinujei: los Triquis de Copala (review)
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