Zapata Lives!: Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico

2. Government Construction and Reappropriation of Emiliano Zapata

This chapter looks primarily at one side of the interaction between the Mexican government and local communities, focusing on how the government mobilized Emiliano Zapata and the Mexican Revolution to consolidate a postrevolutionary state and promote a dominant nationalism , first in the 1920s and 1930s, then from 1990 through the end of agrarian reform as Mexico restructured economically to meet NAFTA guidelines. During the 1930s, the arenas of education, art, peasant organizing , and the granting of land to rural communities as ejidos were primary paths for the diffusion of government claims to Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. In the 1990s, the primary paths were through a government program to map, measure, and encourage privatization of land, the Programa de Certificación de Derechos Ejidales y Titulación de Solares Urbanos (Program for the Certification of Ejidal Land Rights and the Titling of Urban House Lots), or PROCEDE, and a crop-subsidy program, the Programa de Apoyo Directo al Campo (Direct Rural Support Program), or PROCAMPO. Just as rural school teachers promoting socialist education in rural communities in the 1930s were agents of nationalism, PROCEDE personnel who flocked to thousands of Mexico’s ejidos in the 1990s were also peddling a new vision of the nation—one consistent with free trade and the positive value of individual property. This chapter emphasizes what the government has put forward as national ideology linked to the revolution, and how programs to disseminate this ideology functioned in the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca in the chapter 2 Government Construction and Reappropriation of Emiliano Zapata 33 1930s and in the 1990s, while the following chapters focus on the absorption , reworking, reinterpretation, and redeployment of this ideology back to the center by rural communities. The present chapter thus documents and compares the dominant visions of nationalism disseminated by the government in the 1930s and 1990s that provided primary material for counterhegemonic and multiple views of the nation generated at the local level; the chapters that follow make clear that there are large gaps between elite visions of nationalism and their reception and reinterpretation in various population sectors and regions. Another focus in this chapter is the special role of educational institutions and materials (both inside and outside formal efforts by the government ’s department of education). Schooling—both within formal educational institutions and through other efforts to inculcate knowledge into people, such as educational meetings in communities—is an important arena of elite attempts at cultural reproduction (see Bourdieu 1967, 1977; Anderson 1983; Vaughn 1997; Arnove 1993, 1999). Indeed , textbooks and other materials with wide dissemination are important sources of official histories to examine for clues to the origins of raw material for varied nation views. ZAPATA AND THE FIRST POSTREVOLUTIONARY DECADES One key problem of nation-states is how to transcend difference. States claim to transcend individual and local differences by molding citizens into a unitary identity, much as do religious systems such as Christianity (Herzfeld 1992, 6). As stated by Clifford Geertz in an important early essay on nationalism and postcolonialism: The first, formative stage of nationalism consisted essentially of confronting the dense assemblage of cultural, racial, local, and linguistic categories of selfidenti fication and social loyalty that centuries of uninstructed history had produced with a simple, abstract, deliberately constructed, and almost painful self-conscious concept of political ethnicity—a proper “nationality” in the modern manner. . . . The men who raised this challenge, the nationalist intellectuals , were thus launching a revolution as much cultural, even epistemological , as it was political. (Geertz 1973, 239) Key in this unification is the shaping of the individual as a citizen and the promotion of “equality” for all citizens under state power. To create citizens out of differing individuals, a sense of national identity must be created and successfully disseminated through ideological systems and 34 Political and Historical Contexts symbols; the system of symbols disseminated by nationalist intellectuals through education and agrarian reform in the 1930s in Mexico, documented in this chapter, is an example of how nationalism is constructed. While states clearly engage in campaigns to promote national unity and create national identity (i.e., Anderson 1983’s sense of “imagined community”), local nationalisms (imagined communities in the plural) also produce different interpretations of “the nation.” Prasenjit Duara (1996) has referred to such interpretations as “nation views” informed by local identities and histories. The process of nation-building involves dissemination by government institutions and...