Histories and Stories from Chiapas: Border Identities in Southern Mexico

CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION The voices of the Mam peasants of Chiapas tell us about the way in which the nation is lived and conceived on the ‘‘other border,’’ the southern border of Mexico and the cultural border of changing and contextual identities that have been constructed in dialogue with official discourses and in a context of global markets.This case study helps us to approach the way in which ‘‘indigenous cultures’’ have been historically produced in a dialectical relation of resistance and domination with the Mexican nationstate . The extreme experiences of rapid change and cultural reinvention help us to reflect on the wider processes of ethnic identity construction that are taking place in contemporary Mexico. As I have been pointing out throughout this book, cultural identities cannot be seen apart from power relations. Assimilationist campaigns in the 1930s imposed a Mexican identity on southern border inhabitants and forbade cultural practices identified as ‘‘backward’’ by a national modernizing project. At the same time, the National Presbyterian church offered Sierra peasants the feeling of belonging to a religious transnational community. The coexistence of multiple identities, recently theorized by postmodern anthropology, is reflected by testimonies of converts, who define themselves as ‘‘Mam, Presbyterian, and Mexican.’’ The historical relations of Mam peasants with coffee plantations, their constant migrations, and their scattered settlements question the existence of a ‘‘closed corporate community’’ that has only recently been ‘‘hit’’ Tseng 2001.4.30 17:41 DST:103 6289 Hernandez / HISTORIES AND STORIES FROM CHIAPAS / sheet 255 of 317 234 Conclusion by capitalist development. It is equally difficult to state that before the development of means of communication and a greater exchange of information , ethnic identities were unified and homogeneous, that is, that there was only one way to imagine themselves as Mam. Only a historical reconstruction of the pre-Hispanic and colonial experience of Sierra and Soconusco inhabitants might provide us with the necessary elements to understand the way in which collective identities were imagined. What we can indeed state is that a greater flow of information and the widening of social, political, and religious links beyond the community, the region, and even the nation has helped Mam indigenous peoples to imagine themselves as part of other collectivities, which does not necessarily mean that they cease to identify themselves as ‘‘Mam.’’ Some nostalgic perspectives on ‘‘peasant community’’ mourn the way economic globalization has ‘‘destroyed’’ indigenous cultures. Independent of my own feeling about the disappearance of ‘‘isolated communities’’ (if they ever existed), the reality is that Mam peasants, the readers of this book, and I share the experience of being inserted into an increasingly globalized economy and are part of what some have called the ‘‘global village .’’ To avoid ahistorical descriptions of Mexico’s indigenous peoples, it is important to acknowledge that ‘‘all of us inhabit an interdependent latetwentieth -century world marked by borrowing and lending across porous national and cultural boundaries that are saturated with inequality, power and domination’’ (Rosaldo 1987:217). Yet, in this historical context, the Mam have not only been the victims of national projects and capitalist development, but also historical subjects who have accepted, negotiated with, or challenged many such forces. During the 1940s, Mam indigenous peoples became ejidatarios who were incorporated by postrevolutionary governments into their peasant organizations. Land distribution and corporative policies contributed to the configuration of a new peasant identity that replaced indigenous identity . Mam identity has not had a linear historic continuity and for decades has been replaced by other identities, to appear again under new historical conditions. In this sense, we might state in relation to Mam peasants what James Clifford (1988:342) pointed out for the New England Mashpee : ‘‘Their history was a series of cultural and political transactions, not all-or-nothing conversions or resistances. Indians in Mashpee lived and acted between cultures in a series of ad hoc engagements.’’ Since the 1980s we find Jehovah’s Witnesses in Las Margaritas rain forest , Presbyterians in the Sierra, and members of Danzas Mames and of organic cooperative societies who in different social contexts have begun Tseng 2001.4.30 17:41 DST:103 6289 Hernandez / HISTORIES AND STORIES FROM CHIAPAS / sheet 256 of 317 Conclusion 235 to identify themselves again as Mam, often parallel to other, broader identi fications. Through the reconstruction of a narrative about a common origin and a past of shared su...