Mexico's Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500-2010

4: Defending Land: Indian Pueblos’ Contemporary Quest for the Origins of Local Community History

211 PUEBLOS THAT HOLD PRIMORDIAL TITLES: PRESENT-DAY CASES As we have seen repeatedly, the primacy of land for the Indian pueblos and its interweaving with ancient documents, primordial titles, and local history form part of a complex process of negotiation the pueblos undertook in the face of state power as a way of defending their lands. Such negotiation implies that the Indians understood the official legal landscape, enabling them to interpret from their own cultural vantage point documents, programmatic statements, and agrarian legislation emanating from the state. In this process, moreover, the legalization of land claims, the stamp of official certification, and the primordial titles themselves constitute a kind of contemporary mythology elaborated by the pueblos .1 The Indians’ ability to incorporate—sometimes successfully—elements of their native culture into the most adverse legal contexts stems from their capacity for negotiation, which, in turn, is a function of their ideological flexibility. The case of Ixcamilpa, a pueblo located in the state of Puebla, is instructive in this regard. In 1912, members of the pueblo went before the revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata to request the restitution of their lands, which they asserted had been wrested from them long ago by local hacendados. In support of their Defending Land Indian Pueblos’ Contemporary Quest for the Origins of Local Community History 4 Defending Land 212 claim, they produced the pueblo’s colonial-era primordial titles. On this basis and within the framework of the Plan of Ayala, they achieved their objective. On April 30, 1912, Zapata granted the pueblo its lands through a specific decree of restitution. Nonetheless, six decades later many of the pueblo’s campesinos still found themselves without land. Around 1976 they decided to band together and litigate their case in Mexico City, citing the lands affected by the “restitution” and—as documentary evidence—using the decree Zapata had issued in their favor in 1912. The Indians also directly confronted and fought against the local landlords, who reacted with force by having them jailed, using the judicial police and army to pursue and capture them. Undeterred, the Indian campesinos—in keeping with the substance of the 1912 decision—persevered and began to achieve the distribution of the lands that had been controlled by the hacendados, or “the rich,” as the Indians liked to call them.2 In retaliation, the landlords threatened one of the elders of the pueblo, Don Joaquín Sánchez González, with death. Sánchez González kept the pueblo’s primordial titles (Figure 4.1) in his personal care, titles the “rich” now also threatened todestroy.Topreventtheseoutcomes,theIxcamilpansmaintainedanarmedguard in front of Sánchez González’s house throughout the night for fifteen days. As a result of their militant stance and the notoriety of the case, these essentially humble Indians succeeded in gaining the support of both campesinos across the state of Puebla and the Socialist Workers Party. In addition, they mounted a campaign to win national recognition for their movement and secured an audience with the state’s governor on April 20, 1982, so that the pueblo’s lands could be handed back to them before April 30, which they planned to set aside to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of Zapata’s official restitution of the lands to them.3 As we have seen, developments since the early 1980s have placed the interests of campesinos at great risk. As a result of Mexico’s incorporation into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, the Mexican countryside fell into a deep recession, from which there are no signs of improvement. Unlike similar treaties or conventions (such as the one on which the European Union operates), NAFTA is purely a commercial mechanism, setting up a free trade zone among Canada, the United States, and Mexico. It lacks any central body for effecting social and political coordination; its only institutional face is a secretariat that exists to execute and fulfill the resolutions and mandates that derive from the treaty itself. Consequently, the 1992 reforms to Article 27 of the constitution , erasing the supports the government had long provided to the country’s campesino population, exposed Mexico’s countryside to the harsh vicissitudes of the market. Thus, U.S. agribusiness, strongly protected by Washington, has been able—without the burden of paying tariffs—to introduce numerous agricultural and livestock products into the Mexican market.4 As a result, Mexico has lost its 4...